“Am I in trouble?”she asked.
“Not at all,” Gardner said.His smile crinkled the skin around his eyes into a spray of sun-worked squint lines that looked genuine.“Deputy Witte and his pretty dog just need to get to work.Boyd.”
If Boyd resented being lumbered with babysitting duty, she didn’t show it as she offered Madison a hand to pull her back to her feet.They disappeared back inside, and Gardner looked at Cloister.
“What do you think?”he asked.“Did she really see someone?”
Cloister stood up and dusted his hands off absently.“You have any reason to doubt her?”he asked.
That got him a world-weary huff of exasperation.
“A few,” Gardner said.He paused, checked over his shoulder, and lowered his voice as he stepped off the porch.“The last month or so, we’ve had a dozen unfounded calls to this side of town.Suspicious vehicles, prowlers, a woman over on Chamise who thinks someone is living in her walls.”
“Did you check?”Cloister asked.He patted his leg to call Bourneville back to heel.She sighed, stood up, and gave herself a quick shake to get back into game mode before she trotted over.A cold nose bumped his fingers as she leaned against his leg.
Gardner snorted.“I checked,” he said.“There wasn’t.Look, the reason me and Boyd got here so quickly is because there was a wellness check a few streets over.Twenty-two Cuyamaca Way.Some woman was concerned about her home-alone adult son not answering the phone or emails.We gave the lesbians who live there a real scare.They were fine, by the way.”
“That’s good,” Cloister said mildly as he unclipped the long line from his belt and shook it out.
Gardner snorted.“Yeah, I get it,” he said.“You’re the hotshot that got the Crime Scene Killer and the Hippy High Kidnapper, right?”
The statement made Cloister itch under his skin.It wasn’t the fact that he didn’t like the spotlight, or the resentful relish in how Gardner dropped the names.It was…what made those two cases special?A lot of people went missing in Plenty.It was the perfect melting pot of wealthy but transient upper classes and an underemployed, rural underclass for people to just…vanish.Cloister had found some of them.Not enough, but he could list them if anyone asked.
No one ever did.They were just gone…and sad.No one wanted to think about how easy that was.It was the killers who were the draw, at least as long as someone could come up with a headline-ready moniker for them.
The Crime Scene Killer—embarrassed as whoever coined the nickname should be—got a podcast.Cloister’s brother, no matter how blond, six, or his mom’s little cowboy he’d been, did not.
But that wasn’t the sort of thing people wanted to hear from Cloister.He was too big, blond, and broken-nosed to come out with stuff like that.
“The dog does most of the work,” he deadpanned instead as he bent over to snap the clasp onto the metal loop in the harness.
Gardner just snorted.“Right,” he said.
The distinct click of metal catching on metal made Bourneville quiver with excitement under his hand.Her weight shifted, planted on her front feet, and her ears flicked back as she waited for the “go” word.
It was her first shift back in the traces, and she was eager to get back to work.Cloisterhadworked with her while they were benched—reinforced her training, took her on SAR gigs out in the desert—but it wasn’t the same.
Bourneville was a dog with a job.She knew that, and she was happiest when she could get her teeth into it.
Literally.
“I’m just saying,” Gardner persisted as he hooked his thumbs into his belt.“It’s like they say, look for horses, not zebras.We don’t have a crime wave on our hands out here, just some hoax calls, a bunch of middle-class commuters clutching their pearls over a coyote, and a kid who spooked herself watching horror movies in the dark.”
Cloister straightened up and scratched his jaw with his thumb.He’d missed a bit when he’d shaved before shift; he could feel the scrape of it against his pad.
“I get your point,” he admitted.The length of the long line unwound as he relaxed his fingers and puddled on the patchy grass next to him.Cloister shrugged.“But that’s the job.”
Gardner scowled, but Cloister’s deadpan reaction didn’t give him much to bluster against.He deflated, rolled his eyes, and muttered something along the lines of “just filling you in since you’ve been out,” and stepped back out of the way.An exaggerated wave of his arm gave Cloister the permission to get to work…that he hadn’t actually needed.
First shift back, Cloister reminded himself as he reached down to give Bon’s shoulder a slap, maybe he should pace himself on being difficult.
The patwasn’tone of Bon’s training cues, but it was habit enough that Bon had picked up on it.The minute his hand left her, she darted a couple of steps forward, stopped as she realized she didn’t know where to go, and paused to look around at him like that was his fault.
It was.Cloister rubbed dog hair off his hand onto the leg of his buff unpressed trousers and made a mental note to work on fixing that in future training sessions.He called her back to heel with a firm “Hier”and headed for the porch where Madison had perched.Bon paced along next to him, the bounce in her step all barely contained energy.
The back door of the house was muted green, probably from a HOA-mandated list of colors, with a glossy black key-code-enabled smart-handle.Cloister tapped the air next to it with the back of his wrist.
This time, Bourneville waited for her command, her eyes fixed on him.
