Final orders, p.23
Final Orders, page 23
part #5 of Hazard and Somerset: Arrows in the Hand Series
“He was going with someone,” he managed to say. “Who?”
“Can I have my phone?”
“You can talk to your parents or your lawyer or whoever you want later, but right now—”
“No, I have a video. I had my phone recording all night because it was epic. I’m sure I recorded it.”
Engels glanced at Somers. The sheriff left and came back and passed the phone to the boy. A moment later, a video was playing that showed two figures walking toward the crumbling bulk of the hotel. One of them wore a blue snapback hat, but Somers recognized the boy’s build and jeans and John Deere t-shirt as belonging to Ashley. The other man had a hand wrapped around Ashley’s arm, half-supporting him and half-steering him into the ocean of shadow. It was a man in a ball cap pulled low, and Somers recognized him too: it was the same man he’d chased through the Arcadia the day before.
Then the man turned, looking over his shoulder, and in the knife’s edge exposure of the halogen lights, his face was perfectly clear, no longer hidden behind sunglasses as it had been the first time Somers had seen him. Somers couldn’t place the face, but it struck him as familiar.
“I need that video,” Somers said, and he waited only long enough for Evan to send it to him. Then he threw open the door.
Hazard was already waiting in the corridor. “What—”
“They switched hats.”
“John—” Hazard trotted after him as Somers strode toward the parking lot.
“Those dumbasses switched hats. Someone was trying to take Colt.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
MAY 17
SUNDAY
5:58 AM
THE ARCADIA WAS SILENT this early, and the only sounds as Somers hurried down the hallway were his footsteps and the heavier echo of Hazard’s tread.
They had lost the rest of the sleepless night searching the Okashka development, first the hotel—the parts, anyway, that a structural engineer had examined after Loretta’s death, which were the only parts Engels would allow them to explore. Then the search had moved outward. They had found used needles, old condoms, foam cups, fast food wrappers, and enough cans and bottles that some future archaeologist would probably think there had been a brewery at that location. They’d found no sign of Ashley, and when dawn opened the side of the world, Engels had reluctantly announced that he was going to inform Ashley’s parents and then issue an AMBER alert, as well notify the FBI, the NCIC, the local media, and regional law enforcement agencies.
After posting bail and getting Colt home, Somers had checked to make sure that the boy was sobering up to a satisfyingly head-splitting hangover, and then he had left him in bed with ibuprofen, water, and instructions not to open the door for anyone until he and Hazard returned. Throughout all of it, Hazard had followed and watched silently, and when Somers had shut the door to Colt’s bedroom, Hazard had dry-washed his face once and looked, for a moment, blind.
When Somers knocked on Ayelet’s door, he went big: huge, hammering blows that ran up and down the hall. From the other side of the door came a crash—something heavy, and then glass breaking. A woman made a groggy, disoriented noise. Footsteps moved. A door slammed shut. Then prolific swearing came toward them.
Ayelet had lost the blue eyeshadow, and she looked younger and surprisingly plain without it. Her face was sallow except where a red crease marked it—a souvenir from whatever she’d been sleeping on. Eyes bloodshot, she wavered, clutching the door for support. If Somers had rolled the wheel on a Bic, he wouldn’t have been surprised to see her breathe fire.
“What time is it? What’s going on?” Then she put her other hand on the jamb. “Is it Mom?”
“Ms. Ames, we need to talk,” Somers said, and he stepped forward.
She fell back; people usually did. After a moment of waffling, she gestured and headed back into the room. It was in an even worse state than the day before. The bathroom door was shut, and the air was closed-up, smelling of sweat and cigarettes. To judge by the number of cellophane wrappers on the desk, she’d gone through several packs; the plastic crinkled and stirred in the draft from the air conditioner. Someone had knocked over the trash can, which explained the sound of breaking glass—the bottles of Grey Goose had, at least, already been empty. A marked-up copy of Katabasis was face-up next to the cellophane, and a now-empty bottle of Maybelline liquid foundation (matte) lay on its side, a single drop already dry on the wood veneer.
Somers looked at her again, and when she touched her hair this time, pulling it in front of her face, he could see the bruise on her temple, the one she was trying to cover up. He glanced at Hazard, and Hazard grunted.
“Who is this man?” Somers asked, displaying the still that he’d taken from Evan’s video. It showed the man looking back over his shoulder, his face fully exposed to the camera.
“What? Who?” She touched her hair some more and looked at the window. Outside, the Grand Rivere looked like dinged-up pewter in the early morning light. “I don’t know.”
“It’s more convincing if you actually look at the image first,” Somers told her.
“Why don’t you have him come out of the bathroom?” Hazard asked. He pushed back his windbreaker to reveal the ridiculously big revolver strapped there. “Before I get jumpy.”
The remaining color, what little was left, drained from Ayelet’s face. She opened her mouth, her eyes glued to the revolver, and it looked like she had to try twice before she said, “Ruff?”
When the handle on the bathroom door turned, Hazard said, “You’ll want to do everything very slowly from this point.”
As the door creaked open, a man emerged, his hands held above his head. He was tall, and now that Somers got a better look at him, he realized the man was older than he’d first realized: cadaverously thin, strands of too-dark hair combed with the hopefulness of a bad cover-up and then bushy on the sides and back. But it was the man from the video, and it was the man who had come to Ayelet’s door in a hat and sunglasses.
“Gentlemen,” he said, flashing a smile that exposed a gold tooth. “Let’s not do anything hasty. My name is Rufus Cardarelli, but I go by Ruff—”
He took another step, one hand coming down as though to shake. Hazard barely moved. His hand slid to the butt of the Blackhawk. Ruff’s hand shot back toward the ceiling, and his smile took on a sickly earnestness.
“All right, all right, no need to shake hands. I’ll just say howdy-do—”
“You’re Loretta Ames’s literary agent,” Hazard said.
Then it clicked; Somers had seen this man’s photograph before, although always in a background capacity, someone in Loretta’s shadow. He studied him closer: the jeans worn at the hem and crotch, the stretched-out polo, the absence of rings and watches. A guy like Ruff Cardarelli should have been wearing more necklaces than a Sigma Delta Tau pledge at her first Mardi Gras, but his neck was bare.
“Were,” Hazard corrected himself.
Somers nodded. “Past tense.”
“Yes, well, gentlemen, if I could—” Ruff made a motion, as though to lower his hands. This time Hazard didn’t do anything, but whatever Ruff read in his face, he thrust his hands back up into the air and chuckled nervously. “We can explain—”
“There’s nothing to explain,” Ayelet said. “I want you to leave my hotel room.”
“This man is wanted in the abduction of a local teenager,” Hazard said. “He’s also a suspect in your mother’s murder. Since you allowed us into the room, anything we see at this point is fair game. And since it seems like you’re an accessory, I think John will just go ahead and arrest both of you.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Ruff said, his voice sharpening enough to lose the oozing charm. “We don’t need to do that! If you’d let me explain for one goddamn minute!”
“How about this?” Somers said. “How about you get down on the floor, hands behind your head, both of you? Because right now, as far as I can tell, I’m dealing with murderers and kidnappers, and the next stop is the station.”
Indicating with a tilt of his head for Ayelet to comply, Ruff lowered himself onto the hotel room floor. “There’s no reason to be so worked up, Officer.”
“Chief,” Hazard snapped.
“Chief, yes, well, as I was saying—” The words became muffled as his face came to rest against the carpet and he laced his hands behind his head. “—this is all a misunderstanding that we can work out here, privately, without any bad publicity for either of us.”
“This is his fault,” Ayelet said as she lay prone. “He did this, he—”
“Will you stop talking?” Fury twisted the words under the veneer of slimy charm. “Officers—Chief, we can explain everything.”
“A lot of fucking talking,” Hazard said as he let his windbreaker fall into place, “for a guy who hasn’t explained one fucking thing yet.”
Somers covered them while Hazard searched them. Then Hazard dragged two chairs into the center of the room, away from anything their suspects might grab. Ruff and Ayelet moved to the chairs, and as soon as they sat, Ayelet angled her body away from him, her arms folded tightly under her breasts, her chin down. Ruff lounged, legs spread, and shook his head once. The affectation almost made Somers smile; it was a Fabio gesture, tossing your long locks back to clear your vision, which lost some of its grace when your sparse hair was pasted to your scalp.
“All right,” Somers said. “Explain.”
“It was me,” Ruff said with an expansive smile. “All the nonsense leading up to this. Bleach in her water bottle. The hit-and-run.” He wiggled his fingers and made a mockingly scary sound. “The masked man in the trench coat.” He laughed and dropped his hands.
“What about the guy who stabbed Loretta Ames to death?” Hazard asked. “Were you him too?”
“God, of course not.” Ruff sat forward, the humor sloughing off him. “It was a stunt, get it? A…a PR campaign.”
“A PR campaign,” Somers repeated.
“Yes, exactly!”
“For Loretta,” Hazard said.
Somers saw the calculation in Ruff’s eyes, the lightning-fast decision to lie, his smile reeled in and then spread wide again.
“Exactly.”
“That’s interesting,” Hazard said. “Because, in the first fucking place, you’re not Loretta’s agent anymore, so I can’t see how it would be of any interest to you. And in the second place, you told my assistant that Loretta’s career was over; she was a has-been.”
“You little weasel!” Ayelet said, turning in the chair. “Mom fired you because you couldn’t land a book deal to save your life!”
“I couldn’t sell her books because her books were shit,” Ruff said. “The same old tired thing over and over again; talk about a one-trick pony.”
“She was not! My mother was one of the most brilliant writers of her generation, and—”
Somers held up a hand. “Both of you be quiet.”
Ayelet set her jaw. Ruff absently touched his hair, checking the glued-down strands, and smiled.
“Mr. Cardarelli—”
“Ruff’s fine.”
“—I don’t think it’s in anyone’s best interest to continue this conversation here. So, we’re going to head down to the station—”
“Now wait one minute!”
“—and see if you can give some honest answers—”
“I’m not going anywhere. I don’t have to go anywhere with you!”
Ayelet launched herself up from the seat and took two huge steps toward the window. She spun, pointing at Ruff, and screamed, “He did it! It was all him! He said it was for me, but I never asked him to do it, and I’ll tell you everything!”
“You dumb bitch, I’m handling this!”
“Shut up!” Hazard roared.
Silence bore down on the room. Ayelet wiped her eyes, refusing to look at anyone. Ruff slouched deeper in the chair, picking at the stitching on the arm.
“Ayelet, what do you mean?” Somers asked. “Calmly.”
“I didn’t know it was him.” She wiped her eyes. “That’s why I came to you. That’s why I asked you to help. That stuff, what he did back home, I didn’t know it was him.”
“You sure didn’t have any complaints when I showed up and told you how we were going to make you a star,” Ruff said. “You didn’t have any complaints when I told you I had a seven-figure book deal lined up for the murder story and a spot on the Today show and another on Good Morning America. You sure as fuck didn’t have any problems with getting behind the wheel of my car.”
Ayelet flushed, looking away again as she touched the poorly concealed bruise on her temple.
“That was you?” Hazard asked. “You tried to run me down?”
She hesitated a moment too long. “I was only trying to scare you. It was part of the story.”
Hazard stared at her and then shook his head. “God fucking spare me from motherfucking writers and their fucking stories.”
“You made those attempts on Loretta in Manhattan?” Somers asked Ruff.
“Attempts.” He rolled his eyes. “She was in more danger at Pilates.”
“And you followed her here?”
“Sure. That was going to sell it, see? It’s one thing to have a crazy person in New York. Half the people there are shit-house-rat crazy. But somebody who follows you across the country? That’s a headline.”
“That was you,” Hazard asked, “the night of Loretta’s talk?”
Ruff nodded. “I thought I’d stand in the doorway. Honest to God, I thought she might piss herself standing up at the mic. That would have been something, right? Only you were there.”
“Why did you come to see Ayelet the morning after her mother’s death?”
“Well, I sure as hell didn’t do it to meet the two of you. It’s a small town; people were talking about that author getting herself killed, and I heard it over breakfast. I decided the game was up. I needed to talk to Ayelet, figure out how we were going to move forward.”
“You son of a bitch,” Ayelet said. She was crying now, wadding tissues against her cheek. “You greedy son of a bitch.”
“You can see why I’m having a hard time believing your story, though,” Somers said. “You told me your plan was to launch Ayelet’s career with a sensational story about someone trying to kill her mom. And then Loretta happens to be murdered. And, as you predicted, Ayelet now has her moment in the sun.”
“I didn’t kill her,” Ruff said. “I had to scratch an itch Friday night, so I went to the Avalon Island Casino Hotel. You know they build them on the water here so they can call them a riverboat? Jesus Christ. Right smack dab on the river in Zelda, Missouri. Craps, in case you’re wondering, and I lost my shirt. But they’ve got cameras all over the pit. You can’t miss me.”
“We’ll check that out,” Somers said.
“He said if I told anyone, he’d say I was in on it,” Ayelet burst out. She white-knuckled the tissues. “He said if I didn’t help him, he’d tell everyone.”
“You could have told the police what was happening,” Hazard said. “Instead, you chose to get behind the wheel of a car and try to kill me.”
“No.” Ayelet barely breathed the word. It was little more than a moan, repeated over and over again as she started to cry once more. “No, no, no, no, no.”
“You were at the party last night,” Hazard said, his words clipped. “You’re on camera holding on to a boy, leading him away from the party. That boy is now missing.”
Ruff shook his head. “I wasn’t at the party. Fuck me, watching the local yokels roll around in the mud? Pass. I went out to that shithole because that’s where Loretta died. To pay my respects.”
Somers couldn’t help it: the combination of the words, the pious tone, the eyes raised to heaven—it made him laugh. “Bullshit.”
Rolling his eyes again, Ruff shrugged. “There are a lot of crazies out there, a lot of sick, morbid fucks, and some of them will pay a lot of money, you know, for the real thing.”
“I see,” Hazard said. “It’s supposed to be marginally better that you went out there to violate a crime scene in order to steal, what would you call it? True crime memorabilia?”
“It’s a nasty fucking world,” Ruff said with a shrug and a grin. “I didn’t make it.”
“You’re not going to see much of it if you did something to Ashley Boone,” Somers said.
“The kid? He was blacking out; that’s why I grabbed his arm, to keep him from face-planting. He said something, I have no idea what, but I got the idea that he was trying to get to the hotel. Then the twerp couldn’t stay upright anymore, so I sat him down on the curb. I left him there. And don’t read me the riot act; I didn’t abandon the tyke. When I looked back, one of his friends was helping him into a truck.”
“What?” Hazard asked, leaning forward.
“You saw someone putting Ashley in a truck?”
“The kid in the Blues hat? The one who kept falling over?” When Somers jerked out a nod, Ruff said, “Yeah, I looked back, and somebody was helping him stand up. They put him in the back of the truck, and they drove off. I didn’t get a good look at the guy—boots, jeans, sweatshirt, even though it was warm.”
“What color sweatshirt?”
“Blue, I think. It’s hard to tell at night. Why—”
“Anything else? Size? Build?”
“I don’t know. He was bending over.” Ruff picked at the chair’s stitching and then his eyebrows shot up. “Hey, I’m doing you a solid, right? This is valuable information? So, you could think about, you know, looking the other way—”
Somers drew out his phone; he needed to call the sheriff and then Dulac and Palomo.
“Oh-so-fucking useful information,” Hazard said. “A man of indeterminate size and build in unremarkable clothes driving a truck in a place where two-thirds of the asswipes drive trucks. Yes, you’ve cracked the case.”
“Jesus, who shat in your drawers? And for your information, it wasn’t a truck, you know, like a pickup. It was one of those food trucks.”
