“Bourneville,” he yelled, and his voice bounced off the walls. “Gib Laut. Make a noise, Bon.”
She sounded in response with a gruff series of snarled barks from the left.
Cloister held his gun low against his thigh and jogged after her. The walls were painted a cold industrial gray, and the walls were cracked and scabbed with blown plaster. Cloister’s footsteps sounded so loud that he doubted he’d sneak up on anyone.
He caught up with Bon at another set of fire doors. She paced back and forth in front of them as she growled and grumbled under her breath in frustration. When she saw Cloister, she stood up on her back legs and pawed at the heavy, metal handle. Her weight was enough to rattle it but not budge it.
Sex and a fight—two occasions when it would be nice to have both hands.
Cloister used his knees to crowd Bourneville away from the door and slammed his cast clumsily against the handle to push it down enough to open. Once it did, he kicked it the rest of the way open, and Bourneville shot through the gap with a wet, rattling snarl that rumbled all the way up from her gut.
“Call the fucking dog off,” Hewitt rasped.
It was the same parking lot that Macintosh had killed himself in, Cloister realized as he shouldered his way through the door. The police tape still hung lax and still from the pillars, and a scrubbed patch of suspiciously clean concrete betrayed where the dead had been.
Hewitt stood in the middle of it with his gun pressed to Janet’s temple as she slumped unconscious in the hospital chair. Her plastered arms were folded into her lap and gave her an oddly demure appearance.
“Call the dog off,” he repeated as he turned, Janet’s lax body a moving shield between him and Bon’s bared teeth. “Or I’ll blow another Macintosh’s brains all over the floor.”
Cloister whistled between his teeth, a short, sharp noise that made Bourneville crouch down and back off Hewitt three short steps before she decided enough was enough.
“She didn’t do anything to you,” Cloister said as he skirted the edge of the imaginary perimeter he’d put around Hewitt. “Poor kid just wanted to know the truth.”
Hewitt laughed a harsh, joyless bark of noise. “Since when does a Macintosh care about the truth?” he demanded. His mouth twisted down in an exhausted scowl. Cloister couldn’t tell if it was regret or just fear. “Her dad was a liar. Her mom was a liar. Her brother was liar. Corrupt bastards, all of them.”
Cloister took another step to the side. The bumper of a parked Merc caught against the backs of his knees, and the thought briefly skated through his head that the impatient doctor would be furious he’d lost his car for another day. On the other side of the mental line Cloister had drawn, Bourneville mirrored his movements. Now Hewitt had to split his attention, with Janet positioned to block the dog while Hewitt kept his watery attention on Cloister.
“You helped Jessie and Andrew get away,” Cloister pointed out. He’d been filled in on the affair Stokes had withheld from his employer. “They were in love. They—”
Hewitt snorted. “They weren’t in love,” he said. Despite the harsh note to his voice, Hewitt’s anger was cold and controlled. He shifted the gun to aim at Cloister and then back at Janet’s head. “It was lust. It was pathetic. They weren’t afraid of him. They just didn’t want to give up his money.”
“So why help?” Cloister asked. He slid his foot along the concrete, but before he could put his weight on it, Hewitt snapped the gun around to point steadily at him. Despite the wet, nervous sheen to Hewitt’s eyes, the muzzle of the gun was steady. “It was your idea, wasn’t it?”
It had been ten years since Hewitt had done it, ten years of not being able to talk about the most audacious, brilliant thing he’d ever done.
Cloister was fairly confident that Hewitt would walk over coals to be able to boast about what he’d done, and he was right.
“The minute I saw them,” Hewitt said. A sharp, painful smile twisted his mouth as he took his hand off the wheelchair and rapped his finger hard against his temple. He returned the gun to the back of Janet’s head. “It just came to me. Macintosh ruined my life. Two years in and out of the hospital. The pills. The shakes. And even though the brass knew that story he spun in court was crap, they still shuffled me around on desk duty. No one trusted me on the street anymore.”
“Frome did.”
Hewitt opened and closed his mouth with a wet click as he tried to swerve the guilt of that statement. In the end he pretended he hadn’t heard it and pushed on.
“It was only what I was due,” Hewitt said calmly. “Revenge and compensation. It wasn’t enough, mind you, but it was the least I was owed.”
“And the plan?”
“That took longer,” Hewitt admitted. “We had to wait until there were three approximate corpses in the morgue, make sure that Macintosh had the money in his bank to pay the ransom. He didn’t even try to haggle. He paid up right away. He was supposed to go down for murder, you know, but he snaked out from under that too. I thought someone would come forward about the affair, but they were all cowards. No one even looked at me… until she came back.”
He shook the wheelchair, and Janet slumped to the side. She groaned as her body folded awkwardly over the padded arm. Her bare foot slipped off the padded rest and dragged along the ground.
“She blamed me, you know, for all this. Like I made anyone do anything, like I told them to lie to her that her dad was going to send her to some sort of prison camp. That was on them. They told her that. I didn’t make them.” There was a note of genuine offense in Hewitt’s voice, as though he were the wronged party. “She called me that night from Macintosh’s old office on the emergency number I’d given Jessie, drunk and raging because she’d run across her dad under a bridge. Blamed me for what he’d turned into, called me all the names in the book, threatened to tell everyone the truth. She didn’t even care that she’d ruin her own life and her mom’s life by doing it.”
“That’s when you decided to kill her, cover your tracks.”
Hewitt laughed, a harsh crack of sound. “No! That’s the funny fucking thing, Deputy, I didn’t want to hurt her. I only ever wanted to hurthim. I just wanted to tell her the truth, because they never needed to lie about what a monster Macintosh was. Hewasa monster. But she wouldn’t listen to me. She said Macintosh was a better man than me. Him! As if what I did hadn’t made everyone’s life better. I’ll tell you something, Witte, the corruption in Plenty would never have been cleared out if Macintosh had still been around. Yet she said he was better than me? I didn’t mean to hurt her, but I grabbed her, and we struggled, and… she finally shut up.”
“And then what?” Cloister asked. “You were just going to leave her there to die?”