“See?”she said as she unhooked the latch.“Some days it won’t open at all, and I have to call for the company to do a remote override.Which is fine, except the only person able to do that is supposed to be the owner.But if you’re annoying enough, everyone from the receptionist to the security guard seems to be able to pull it off.And I am annoying enough.”
She stepped inside and paused, giving Cloister and Bon a once-over.
“Wipe your feet,” she told him.“And she has to wait outside.Sorry.But the wife owns the cameras, and if she sees a dog in here…”
She trailed off with a grimace of glossy red lips.
“It’s fine,” Cloister said.“She doesn’t like tiled floors much anyhow.”
He glanced at Bon.“Go play.”
She gave him a skeptical twitch of her ears.That wasn’t a command she heard often while she was geared up.When Cloister didn’t correct himself, she gave a quick tension-relieving sneeze and shook herself before she trotted off into the garden.
While she sniffed along the picket fence, which apparently meant nothing to the owner, Cloister carefully scraped his feet on the WELCOME mat before he stepped inside.
“Are they the only security firm that offers those locks?”he asked.“The biometric ones?”
“The only ones in town,” Elise said as she pulled open the top drawer in the dresser by the door.Despite how nice the house was—and what Cloister assumed was an eye-watering price tag for said house—the drawer was just as overstuffed as the one that served the same purpose in Cloister’s kitchen.Elise pulled out a screwdriver, a novelty condom keyring, and a crumpled pizza leaflet as she hunted through it.“Like I said, I never use them.Most of us don’t.Mind that vase, would you?It’s expensive.”
Cloister glanced at the vase Elise had indicated.It was shaped like a greyhound, with a scooped-out dish in its forehead.He folded his arms to keep them out of trouble, feeling awkward about his size in a way he hadn’t since he was a kid and his elbows were in a different place every time he took a nap.
“I saw one on a house earlier today,” Cloister said.
Elise made a pleased sound as she pulled a flat beige envelope from the bottom of the drawer.“Where?”she asked as she turned around.
“Estrella Parks,” he said.“Near Buckthorn Road.”
Elise pursed her lips and sniffed.“That makes sense,” she said.“Was it a foreclosure?”
“Looked like it,” Cloister confirmed.
“No surprise there,” Elise said.“Green Pastures.They’re a mortgage servicing group and…casting no aspersions…I don’t work with them.No one I’d work with does.I’m not saying they’re shady, but I wouldn’t argue if someone else did.I know they have been foreclosing on a lot of houses in that area recently, and next thing you see them up for sale at a nice markup.I do know they work with State of Mind.They were one of the testimonials in the company’s pitch packet.These are all the contact details I got when I signed up for my package.I had to pay for five houses, just to make this one look like it was seized from drug dealers in a raid.”
Cloister took the envelope with an absent “Thanks.”He didn’t claim to be a detective, but it was hard to miss this connection.He couldn’t exactly get all the pieces to fall into place neatly, but it was something.“I owe you one.”
Elise rolled her eyes and waved that away with a dismissive swipe of a manicured hand.
“Darling, you saved my daughter’s life,” she said.“If you wanted this house, I would screw the owner harder than his wife is going to in the divorce.”
StateofMindSecurityclosed early on Thursdays.
There hadn’t even been a cleaner there that Cloister could make awkward eye contact with.So he’d given in to the inevitable and gone home.He had to eventually.It happened in every case when you hit the wall and had to step out of the worst day of someone’s life to buy gas or order some Chinese food.It never felt good, but it was the only way to do the job.
Somehow, though, Cloister’s running-on-dregs autopilot had dropped him off at Javi’s door instead of his own.
He sat on the doorstep, head tilted back against the sleek door, and rubbed Bourneville’s ears as she rested her chin on his knee.Her eyes were soulful as she looked up at him with the unspoken assumption that he was maybe an idiot who’d lost his key.
“I gave it back,” Cloister told her.“Because we don’t live here.”
She pressed her chin harder against his knee and heaved a huge, rib-swelling sigh that Cloister translated as “idiot.”To be fair, in hindsight, he regretted making a big deal out of giving the key back.The heat of the day had already dissipated, and the chill made his wrist ache.
He idly rotated it, grimacing to himself as the joint protested by stabbing pain down into the heel of his hand.It was hard to explain how something could hurtandgo dead at once.His little finger managed it.
There was a pack of painkillers in Javi’s kitchen.Cloister could practically feel the blister-pack pop in his fingers…ifhe’d only just hung onto the key one more day.
He had just started to wonder if he had enough gas left in the tank to get up and head back to his trailer.Before he had to decide, a black cruiser with smoked windows pulled up to the curb.There was a pause, and then the door opened to let Javi out.Behind him, in the driver’s seat, Kincaid leaned over to make eye contact with Cloister.
“Deputy Witte.”He glanced down.“Bourneville.”
