Reasonable doubt, p.24
Reasonable Doubt, page 24
part #5 of Hazard and Somerset Series
The call disconnected, and Somers scooped up his phone. “I guess we go back home,” he said.
Hazard opened his mouth, but a rap on the glass stopped him. Edwards stood there, the breeze raking his mustache, his face a wax mask that he probably meant to look like commiseration.
When Somers rolled down the window, Edwards said, “Sorry about your morning.”
Somers had that good-old-boy smile on his face, and he had a hint of that good-old-boy in his voice. They were subtle things, but Hazard had been around him long enough, had loved him long enough, that he noticed them. This was frat-boy Somers, football Somers, party Somers. “The whole thing’s been a real fuckup, right? We should be apologizing to you.”
“Apologizing to that fat—” Hazard began, but Somers clipped his elbow, and Hazard cut off, frowning and rubbing his arm.
Edwards must not have heard, though, because he laughed. “No need to apologize. You were just doing your job. Hell of a job, really, to bring both of you down here, have you asking the right questions. God only knows what would have happened if you hadn’t come. That poor girl might have been there twenty years.”
“Luck,” Somers said, but he said it like the guy who scores the winning touchdown, like he and Edwards both knew luck was for everybody else.
“No, no. I know good police work when I see it. You two, you’re damn good at this. If you’re ready to go, you go right ahead. We’ve got this place locked down. We’ll go over it real carefully. You don’t have to worry about that.”
“So you’re taking her?” Hazard said, ignoring Somers’s flash of irritation.
“What? Oh, yeah, the coroner will be along. He was on the back nine and wanted to finish up. But we’ll take her. We’ll look over the place really carefully and send you anything we find.”
“Hell,” Somers said, “you’re shitting me.”
“No, sir. That’s what I meant about your morning. Sorry about that. Sorry for the extra work this is going to cause you.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“You mean you’re kicking her to us?” Hazard said. This time Somers glared at him.
“I mean she’s yours,” Edwards said, blowing at one feathery corner of his mustache. “We’re not kicking anybody anywhere. She’s yours, that’s for goddamn certain.”
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Somers said. “Man, do you know how this messes up my life? I’m already in hot water with my girl because I’ve been catching so many bodies. She’s on me about all the overtime. She’s on me about everything, God’s truth. It’s always talking. God damn she loves to talk.”
It was an act. Hazard knew it was an act. One part of his mind processed all of it: Somers’s frat-boy slouch, his shift in tone and articulation, the shorthand complaints that all straight men everywhere seemed to indulge in. It was an act, and it was a way of luring Edwards into confidence, most likely for Somers to draw information out of him. Information that might otherwise take weeks to percolate through bureaucratic strata.
Hazard understood all of that with the same lightning reflex that he understood most things. But another part of his brain was red, panting, and hurling itself at the cage. And Hazard didn’t like the way his fingers pinched the armrest until the plastic creaked and whitened.
“Trouble at home?” Edwards laughed. “Boy, you’re driving the same road we’re all on. She wants to talk?”
“God. She won’t keep her mouth shut sometimes. Sometimes she’s going on and on about these documentaries she watches—”
Hazard told himself: breathe in, breathe out. It’s just an act.
“—when all I want to do is just flip on the game and have some peace and quiet.”
That did it. That last part, that last little dig, that was it. The end of Hazard’s patience. As if Somers were the one who wanted peace and quiet. As if Hazard were the one who couldn’t stop talking. As if all the times Hazard had just wanted to watch a documentary, all the times he’d been minding his own business and Somers had wormed his way onto the sofa, talking, touching, kissing, as if all of that had been the reverse. And to say it now, like this, to this insufferably self-satisfied bastard. Hazard gritted his teeth, and then there was a pop as the plastic armrest cracked and came loose.
“Good God, son,” Edwards said, laughter tickling his mustache. “What’d that thing ever do to you?”
Somers must have seen something in Hazard’s face because he blanched and said, “You’ve got to give me something. Why are you dropping this on our plate? What’d you guys find?”
“You saw her,” Edwards said.
“I saw a dead girl and I called it in,” Somers said. “You and Markle have kept the whole thing locked up ever since. You’ve got to tell me something. You’ve got to tell me something so my girl doesn’t take my balls.”
With a smirk, Edwards said, “No way that girl was killed in the cave. Not a chance. The blood.”
“What about it?”
“There wasn’t any. No splatter on the walls, nothing on the ground.”
“I saw her. She was covered in blood.”
“Yeah. She was. But not the rest of that place. And then you’ve got the car.”
“What about it? I found it, didn’t I?”
Edwards laughed. “Sure you did. But you were probably too busy thinking about how your girlfriend’s going to nip off your balls to realize that the passenger seat is soaked with it. Blood, I mean.”
“So she was killed in the car?”
“Christ, I don’t think so.” Edwards frowned. “Don’t they teach you anything?”
“He’s a slow learner,” Hazard said through gritted teeth.
“I’ll say. City cops.” Shaking his head, as though to emphasize the ignorance of any law enforcement outside Taney County, Edwards said, “It looks like it was just leaking out of her—she was stabbed, you know. Several times. If I stab a girl in a car, what’s she going to do?”
“Try to get out of the car,” Hazard said.
“Maybe. If she can think clearly, maybe she’s trying to escape. But no matter what, she’s trying to get away from the knife, and she’s moving her arms, trying to cover her body. None of that in the Chevy. Just blood soaking the seat, and a little more on the window.”
Hazard let out a frustrated breath. Somers had played his stupid game—his very, very stupid game—to get extra information out of Edwards, but the deputy had given them nothing new. Somers had noticed the lack of blood in the cave, and Hazard and Somers both had seen the bloodstains in the Chevy. Edwards wasn’t going to give them anything good.
At that moment, Markle sauntered up to the car, hands in her pockets, her frame sinuous like she wanted to line up a shot on the pool table and give everybody a look. She eyed Somers, and Hazard had to focus on keeping his hands in place instead of reaching out and—
—marking his property—
—grabbing hold of his partner.
“You tell them about the blood?” Markle asked.
“Yeah. Don’t know how they missed it in the Chevy,” Edwards said.
“Not that. In the cave. That gate.”
Edwards whistled. “Pretty nasty. Pretty nasty stuff. Another reason to bump this up the road. We cater to families around here; something like that, God, no need to spread something like that around.”
“Like what?” Somers said, still the frat-boy, batting blond lashes at Markle like he wouldn’t mind seeing her bent over a pool table.
Hazard didn’t know whether to punch him or kiss him.
“We found a gate. That’s not really the right word, but it’s as close as I can come. A piece of chain-link fence, reinforced with rebar, the damn thing hidden at the back of that smaller cave.”
“With the girl?” Somers said, and the frat-boy dropped out of his voice, replaced with sharp interest. “I didn’t see that.”
“Not much chance you would. They’d wedged it in the back pretty deep, but the flashlight caught the metal, and I pulled it out to see what it was.” Markle shivered. “It fits right in that passage. Blocks the damn thing pretty good. I even found where they ran the chains.”
Somers shook his head. “That doesn’t make any sense. She was dead before they brought her here. Why would they make a gate, chain it in place, and then try to hide it later?”
Hazard knew, though. He knew because he was in the sanctuary at Elah, that cramped space, that shatteringly-white space, too small to stand or sit, where he could only kneel with the sun igniting his world, the incandescence smothering him.
“I don’t think it was for her,” Markle was saying, and Hazard heard her, but at the same time he could hear himself in the sanctuary, hear the way the tiny box gave back his panting, could feel the heat as the sun hammered through the window and ricocheted off the white walls. “But it was for somebody.”
“Somebody else? You think Walden and his group held someone captive?”
“I don’t know who did what,” Markle said. “But whoever was in that cave didn’t want to be there. There’s blood on the links, and an old, torn fingernail caught in one. Whoever they had in there, she was trying like hell to get out.”
SOMERS EASED OFF THE BRAKE, and the Interceptor rolled away from Herney’s property and the limestone caves where they had found the dead girl. Edwards and Markle had corroborated what Somers had suspected; now all they could do was wait until the Taney County coroner did his job and the deputies determined the victim’s ID. If, Somers amended, they didn’t just bounce her back to Wahredua as a Jane Doe. At some point, the Taney County Sheriff’s Department would send over whatever evidence they’d collected at the scene, but Somers knew that bureaucracy and ineptitude might stretch out the time it required. And while the wheels of justice spun slowly, John Walden’s killer might escape.
The thought didn’t trouble Somers too much. Walden, by all accounts, had been a bastard even before he’d realized that he was the incarnate Son of God. Being divine had only made him worse. What he’d done to the girls under his care was enough that Somers didn’t particularly want justice for the man. This most recent revelation, though—Somers pictured in his mind the metal grate, the blood on iron, the torn fingernails; he imagined the terror and hopelessness that Walden’s prisoner had felt—left Somers glad that Walden was dead. If someone else hadn’t killed Walden, Somers might have been tempted to do it himself.
“What now?” Somers asked.
Hazard didn’t answer, and when Somers looked at him, he was shocked by the transformation in his partner. Hazard was fair-skinned—pale, almost translucent, and delicately beautiful in a way that belied the man’s essential resilience. That pallor contrasted perfectly with the dark, wavy hair, and with Hazard’s eyes like straw at the harvest.
Now, though, Hazard was almost corpse-like in his pallor, and blue shadows hollowed his eyes. He stared out the windshield, his face empty, as though someone had scraped away everything except an analgesic terror.
“Ree? Hey. What’s going on? Talk to me.”
The Interceptor’s vents hissed warm air, and below that hiss, Emmylou Harris murmured about an orphan girl. Hazard hated that music. It was a dumb thought. An idiotic thought, and it came with the perfect clarity all idiots feel, and Somers punched the stereo. And without Emmylou singing, the steady thump of the tires kept time.
“Ree, are you—”
Somers’s phone rang. He fumbled at it in his pockets, trying to dismiss the call; whoever it was, he needed to take care of Hazard right then.
But Hazard noticed and said, “What if it’s about Evie?”
And Somers cursed and dragged out the phone and didn’t recognize the number.
“Hello?”
“I hope you’re happy. I hope you’re perfectly happy that you’ve put your father back in the hospital.”
Somers’s thumb wandered towards the end call button. “Mother, I don’t have time—”
“You’re lucky he’s all right, John-Henry. This time, he’s all right. Next time? God only knows. And God only knows what will happen to the two of us if something happens to him. We’ll be out on the street, John-Henry. Is that what you want? To die homeless in the cold?”
“I have a job, Mother. Maybe you should get down to the park and see if you can claim a nice bench.”
Her sharp intake of breath was a childhood sound. “I think you’d have the consideration not to make jokes at a time like this. I think you’d have some decency. Ever since you left Cora, you’ve been absolutely impossible.”
“He’s not dead.”
“Excuse me?”
“Father. He’s not dead.”
“Of course he’s not. But you know how much this deal means to him, and you insist on mucking it up. He had chest pains, John-Henry. Chest pains. Do you know what that means?”
“He got shot there a few months ago. Did they get all the bullets?”
Hazard grunted, and Somers was surprised to realize the sound was a laugh. The dark-haired man brooded at the window—brooded so hard that Somers waited for the window to crack just from all that damn brooding. But he had laughed. A little. And hell, that was miles better than how he’d looked a few minutes before.
“You think you’re so very funny. I suppose that detective tells you how funny you are. I suppose he’s laughing right now, that he thinks this is all just a wonderful joke.”
“You know Emery, Mother. He’s a bag of laughs.”
“He has it in for this family. For you, even though you can’t see it. He’s just getting close to you so that he can—”
“All right. That’s enough of the conspiracy theories. What’s this deal? What got Father so worked up?”
From the other end of the line, silence. Somers imagined his mother settling herself in a hospital chair, adjusting her coat or her scarf or her rings. Grace Elaine Somerset always looked perfect. She’d stop in the middle of a burning orphanage, fix her hair, and then hurry on to the next luncheon or afternoon tea or charity auction. Hell, Somers thought, if she stopped to fix her hair, she’d probably spend the rest of the night complaining about how bad those burning orphans smelled.
“You know perfectly well. That partner of yours put you up to this, didn’t he? Poking around? Flashing it all over the news? You could have kept it quiet, John-Henry. Couldn’t you have done that? For your own family, couldn’t you have kept it quiet?”
“Good Lord. What are you talking about?”
“The Walden farm.” She spoke each word as though spelling it out, picking out the syllables with chilly precision. “You know perfectly well that your father doesn’t get paid if the sale falls through.”
“Get paid for what? You mean he actually did something?”
“I’m not amused, John-Henry. You always had the most twisted sense of humor, and now—”
“Yes, I know, Emery’s such a bad influence and so forth.”
“I was going to say, and now really isn’t the time for it.”
“Who’s trying to buy Walden’s land, Mother?”
“I don’t know, John-Henry. I’ve got to go. The doctor’s coming out. He’s really quite handsome.”
“Perfect. Make sure you don’t show him your claws.”
“I mean for you, John-Henry. If you have to be gay,” and her tone made it clear she thought it was the equivalent of shopping at Macy’s: optional and very middle-class, “why does it have to be him? I mean, for God’s sake, John-Henry, doesn’t he have any dignity? After what those boys did to him in high school, couldn’t he have just stayed away? And anyway, there have to be a hundred men who are better looking and more appropriate for you than that horrible—”
“Goodbye, Mother.”
He disconnected and tossed the phone into the center console. Outside, the hills of southern Missouri streamed past them. Already green broke out in swaths, a rich, vibrant green full of life that marked new wheat and sugar gums and the cottonwoods drinking from the river. A lone car whipped past them, and then they were alone again, and Somers found himself thinking. Thinking about Emery Hazard, and the past, and how the past never, ever went away. Those boys. What those boys did to him, Somers’s mother had said. But Somers had been one of those boys. He had called Hazard a faggot, a queer, a cocksucker. He had held Hazard’s arm while Mikey Grames sliced up his stomach. He had pushed Hazard down a flight of stairs. And his mother was right; at least about one thing, she was right: there were a hundred better guys out there, a thousand, ten thousand, and none of them had done shit to Emery Hazard. And one day Hazard would realize that, and he’d find one of those other guys—in Somers’s mind, the guy had a mohawk and biceps like the Brawny Paper Towels guy and he looked a hell of a lot like that paramedic—and then that would be it, game over, the end, because Emery Hazard deserved the best. He was just too stupid to realize it most days.
“A doctor,” Hazard said.
Somers groaned. “My mother’s crazy. And how the hell did you hear that anyway?”
“No, she’s right. A doctor. That might be a good choice.”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“They make good money.”
“Will you stop it already?”
“It’s a high-stress job, but I think you could make it work. You’ll both have demanding schedules. He won’t complain when you have to work.”
“Ok. It’s not funny anymore.”
“Everybody wants to end up with a doctor. There’s a lot of social prestige in being with a doctor. That’s one of the reasons so many people want to date them. And you’re a very attractive man. You come from old money. You’ve got a certain degree of standing in the town.”
