Final orders, p.33
Final Orders, page 33
part #5 of Hazard and Somerset: Arrows in the Hand Series
“I said be quiet!” Joyce kicked him, and Hazard rolled, so that it was a glancing blow instead of a rib-breaker. “Don’t talk to her.”
“You think if you do what she wants, if you try hard enough to be like her, she’ll accept you and love you and give you what you’ve always wanted. But that’s not how people like her are, and that’s not how life works. Parents are supposed to help you be the best version of yourself you can be, not break you down and rebuild you as their clone—”
“Stop it!”
This time, Hazard wasn’t fast enough, and the blow connected. He let out a whooshing gasp, and for a paralyzed moment, he couldn’t get any air.
“Don’t talk to her,” Joyce shouted down at him.
“You weren’t a person to her,” Hazard said. “You were a tool. A weapon. She doesn’t care—”
Joyce kicked him again, and the pain had a crackle like fireworks—or like someone snapping kindling with both hands. Hazard tried to breathe in, and the pain was so sharp that he arched his back, heels scraping along wet cement.
“I will not allow—” Joyce began.
Kirsta swung like she was going for a grand slam, and the rifle stock connected with the back of Joyce’s head. Joyce made a garbled noise, took a half-step to the side, and then went down. Kirsta took savage, gasping breaths for a moment, staring wide eyed at her mother. Then she dropped the rifle. “I surrender! We surrender!”
Somers appeared on the stairs a moment later, the Glock covering first Joyce and then Kirsta, his face drawn with a fear that laid bare everything. He only relaxed slightly when he met Hazard’s eyes.
Then Hazard curled up on his side and tried to breathe again as he listened to Kirsta sob.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
MAY 22
FRIDAY
9:38 PM
IN THE HOSPITAL, Emery Hazard pressed an ice pack to his face and counted down from ten. “I’m going home,” he said when he trusted his voice. “What do you not understand about that?”
The nurse, a formidable-looking woman with a pompadour of champagne-colored hair, opened her mouth, but Hazard’s voice must not have been quite so under control as he had thought, because then her mouth snapped shut and she nodded in agreement. She backed out of the treatment room, the curtain falling into place behind her. The squeak of her soles suggested she was, to put it mildly, beating feet.
Colt, who sat in one of the chairs against the wall of the cramped cubicle, looked up from his phone long enough to offer a withering look.
Hazard refused, on principles of general adulthood and maturity, to engage.
“You know you’re kind of a bully.”
He tried to scowl at his son, but the combination of a broken nose and the ice pack made it less effective than usual, to judge by how Colt rolled his eyes and went back to his phone.
Not only a broken nose. Bruised ribs. Stitches in his arm, although the gunshot had been the least of it, barely more than a graze. Questions and tests and shots and being stuck in a machine. If someone asked him one more time what day it was, he was going to roll up a calendar and shove it up their ass. He had a vague recollection of making the proposal to one of the doctors, a wormy little white guy with no-slip nose pads on his glasses. There had been something in there about so you’ll never have to ask anyone again.
After Kirsta and Joyce had been taken away—first to the hospital, under heavy police security, and then, presumably, to the county jail—Hazard had made his statement to Palomo and answered the same questions approximately a dozen times. Then an ambulance had brought him to Wahredua General, where Colt had met him. Aside from offering unsolicited evaluations of Hazard’s moral character, his son had, to be fair, stepped up admirably. He had arrived at the hospital pale and fidgeting with the paper bag of clothes he had brought, but after about fifteen minutes of watching Hazard bawl out the nurses, he had calmed down, and he’d spent the rest of his day there, offering an ear for Hazard’s complaints (to be fair, bitchings might have been a more accurate word) and, when Hazard needed silence, doing an excellent impersonation of a teenager hooked up to his phone for life support. All in all, Hazard was unbearably proud of him.
“It’s not bullying,” Hazard said, adjusting the ice pack again, “when they’re the ones with all the institutional power. I’m simply asserting my independence as a free citizen and my Constitutional rights. Habeas corpus—”
Colt snorted without looking up from his phone.
It was kind of hard to continue after that, but Hazard muddled through somehow. He was tangled up in the Judiciary Act of 1789 when the curtain rattled on its rings and Somers, his eyes bruised with exhaustion, stepped into the cubicle.
“Thank God,” Colt said, and standing turned into a stretch. “Tag, you’re it.” Somers wore a ridiculous grin when Colt slapped his shoulder in passing, and then the boy was gone. His voice floated back to them, fading down the hallway. “No, bruh, I’m still here. No, you don’t have to come. Yes, he’s fine. I don’t know, something about the Federalist Papers.”
Somers was still grinning as he sat on the edge of the examination table next to Hazard.
“I am not an invalid,” Hazard said.
Somers nodded.
“I can breathe, albeit with some discomfort. I don’t have a concussion. They’ve given me antibiotics for my arm. I am exhausted, and I have a headache the size of a battleship, and I would like to go home, soak in a warm bath, and take the recommended adult dosage of Tylenol before sleeping for a year.”
More nodding. “I understand,” Somers said like a man playing hot potato with a live grenade, “there was something about a calendar.”
The broken nose and the ice pack were definitely having an impact because when Hazard glared at his husband, Somers only grinned harder, and he didn’t look quite so tired. He looked alive, bright with that light he carried everywhere with him, beautiful with his crow’s feet and the hint of silver starting in the golden hair at his temples.
“You had damn well better kiss me,” Hazard told him.
And Somers obliged, which made Hazard think maybe things weren’t as bad as they seemed, although the kiss involved a fair bit of maneuvering and accidental bumping and wincing. It was a soft kiss, tender. It didn’t feel quite so soft or tender, though, when Somers put on a little tongue at the end.
“Enough,” Hazard said, pushing him away while his husband laughed. “Have some goddamn decency.”
Somers’s smile faded, and he brushed back some of Hazard’s hair. “Are you all right?”
“Fine.” But Hazard had to close his eyes; the darkness, the water, the taint of the insecticide coating the inside of his mouth. “I’ll be fine.” He opened his eyes and caught the shimmer in his husband’s eye before Somers blinked. “How bad was it?”
From the hallway came the intercom, paging Dr. Singh.
“Bad,” Somers said. His jaw tightened. The paper on the exam table rustled, and when Hazard glanced down, he saw that it had torn where Somers’s hand clutched it. “Christ, Ree, I was so scared. Colt was out of his mind when he called me. I honestly couldn’t understand him; Theo finally had to get on the phone and tell me what you did. And then I had no idea what to do. I didn’t know where she had taken you or what was happening. Thank God you managed to set off the fire alarm.”
“You would have searched any properties belonging to the Sturgis family.”
“Yeah, but in time, Ree?” When Hazard opened his mouth, Somers said, “No, that was not a real question.”
Hazard understood that sometimes, questions were real regardless of whether they were hypothetical. He eased Somers’s hand from around the crumpled paper liner, and then he laced their fingers together. Somers stared at the floor, blinking. After what might have been twenty seconds, he squeezed Hazard’s hand hard.
“What’s going on with Kirsta and Joyce?”
“Well, Joyce is currently trying to pretend she’s in a coma, which is working about as well as you’d expect. I don’t think she’ll be able to keep it up for long, and we’ll question her when she’s ready to talk. Based on what you told me and on what Kirsta said, I don’t think she was directly involved in any of it until the end. She didn’t know what Kirsta had done until Kirsta called her from the Ace and begged her to come help; she honestly didn’t know what to do with you.”
“I’m sorry I was an inconvenience.”
“Tell that to the nurse. I think she’s getting a shot of ketamine ready for the next time she has to come in here.”
“Maybe it’s stress.”
“No, she’s upset because, in her words, that big bastard—”
“Stress damages the prefrontal cortex, which in turn affects the executive function, which is about self-control, planning, decision-making, etcetera. My new theory is that this little fantasy you have of being funny emerges when you’re under stress, which is not coincidentally also when your brain is less effective at modulating what you do and say.”
A weary—but genuine—smile lit up Somers’s face. “That’s your new theory, huh?”
“I’m still fine-tuning it.” He took a deep breath. “How’s Kirsta?”
“Jesus.” Somers’s face darkened. “She’s a mess. Not just about, well, everything she’s done. That girl is going to need some serious lifelong therapy to cope with all the ways Joyce messed her up. Let’s see. She claims she didn’t mean to kill Loretta; I guess we should start there. What’s your read on Kirsta’s relationship with her mother?”
“Fucked up. Joyce obviously withholds affection and approval to manipulate Kirsta, and Kirsta’s so desperate for any kind of attention that she was literally trying to make herself into her mother—the makeup, the hair, the clothes.”
“Right, and add to that a girl whose sexuality isn’t exactly compatible with her mother’s traditional family values, and—” Somers cut off, a hard stop, and color entered his face. “Well, it seems like what we’ve been seeing is the most recent stage of what’s been going on for a long time. According to Kirsta, their relationship has always been bad, but it got much worse after Evan’s experiment. When Joyce found out about that, she basically cut Kirsta out of her life—Joyce blamed Kirsta almost as much as Evan, although she wasn’t going to let anybody else know that her daughter was reading the same books, watching the same shows, and encouraging her boyfriend to dabble in cock-sucking.”
“Someone mentioned the change. Gwen, I think. Kirsta used to have blue hair, something like that.”
“After Evan, though, Joyce—well, for lack of a better word, shunned Kirsta.”
“And Kirsta responded by turning herself into a mini-Joyce. That makes sense.”
Somers’s eyebrows went up. “It does? Because it seems pretty messed up to me.”
“It’s both. She’s trying to win her mother’s approval. That means adopting her mother’s beliefs, practices, appearance, language.”
“Well, according to Kirsta, Loretta was part of all that. Kirsta wanted to scare Loretta. Threaten her. And, of course, make her mother proud in the process. So, she sent that anonymous email to lure Loretta out to Okashka Heights. Then she went to the hotel.”
“And, what? Decided while she waited to hook up with Ayelet?”
“It’s not clear,” Somers said. “She won’t talk about that. She acts like it didn’t happen, even when I show her those pictures Evan took. My best guess is that she’s been burying that part of herself for so long, she literally doesn’t have a way of verbalizing it anymore.”
Hazard considered this for a moment. “We know that Loretta and Ayelet argued about Loretta responding to that email. There was a delay before Loretta eventually left. It doesn’t seem unreasonable that Kirsta would have been passing the time somehow, using her phone to keep herself entertained while she waited for Loretta to leave. I wouldn’t be surprised if she had several dating apps on her phone. If she was convinced that Loretta wasn’t going to respond to the lure, maybe she decided to take advantage of her night out and hook up with someone. Then, when she’s in the hotel, she sees Loretta leaving, and she realizes that her plan is going to work after all, so she goes after Loretta.”
“That’s one possibility,” Somers said. “It’s also possible she was working another angle, hoping to use Ayelet to get to Loretta. Until she tells us, all we can do is guess.”
“So, she followed Loretta?”
“And confronted her at the development. She brought Evan’s copy of Katabasis, and she burned it while Loretta watched. You met Loretta; you know how she was. She wasn’t going to back down from that.”
“Let me guess: they struggled, and Kirsta claims she killed her on accident.”
“You’re not far off. Kirsta claims that she was only trying to threaten Loretta, scare her, but she got startled.”
Then a piece clicked. “The feral hog.”
“The feral hog,” Somers said with a tight smile. “She claims that the hog made a noise, and she looked away. Loretta jumped her. They struggled, and Loretta ended up dead. It was an accident.”
“Kidnapping Ashley wasn’t an accident. Staging her father’s suicide wasn’t an accident. Setting those traps in the Ace wasn’t an accident. She went to meet Loretta wearing her father’s old clothes, John, and carrying a knife, and she carved those words into Loretta’s chest to make us think Evan had done it. She shot a police officer, for fuck’s sake. She’s full of shit.”
Nodding slowly, Somers said, “I agree. About all of it. But the weird thing is I also believe her. I think part of her knew exactly what might happen. And I think part of her was convinced she was only trying to scare Loretta. We’re talking about a girl who’s been living a double life probably since she hit puberty.”
“What a wonderfully convenient fucking excuse: I’m closeted, and therefore, I’m not responsible for murder.”
Color, wine dark, stained Somers’s cheeks.
“John, that’s not what I meant—”
“I know, love.” Somers shook his head when Hazard might have said more. “She admitted to kidnapping Ashley. She intended to take Colt because she got scared after you called her directly; she thought somehow you might be on to her, and she claims she only intended to use Colt as a way of scaring you off the case. Instead, because Colt and Ashley switched, hats, she got Ashley. It’s pitch black out there, away from the lights, and she was panicking. It wasn’t hard to get Ashley into the truck. He was blacked out; I don’t think he knew what was happening. Then, when she got him back to the Ace, she realized she’d made a mistake.”
“Then she really panicked.”
Somers nodded. “She won’t talk about this part either, not in detail, but I think we can assume what happened. She called her father, and he came over, and she held him at gunpoint and made him change into the old clothes, the ones she had worn to kill Loretta. Then she sat him down at that desk and killed him. The man had been browbeaten by Joyce for twenty years; I imagine by the time he realized he was genuinely in danger, it was too late. She left Ash alive because, I think, she hoped that if Ash were unharmed and if Derrick took the fall, the investigation would come to a close. She did tell us about the traps, though. She tried to make it sound like they were her father’s work. According to her—”
“Keller and Carmichael.”
“God damn it. How do you do that?”
“Gwen told us about the police officer friend who was teaching that group of concerned parents about improvised explosives and home security. Joyce had Carmichael and Keller on a string. It’s not exactly a deductive leap.”
Somers made a face. “Yes, Keller and Carmichael. Norman and Gross picked them up, and Palomo is going to take a run at them after she finishes with Kirsta. That’s also how Kirsta knew how to make those mailbox bombs that went off today; she called in the school shooting to pull most of the officers away from Wahredua, and then she used the explosions to keep everyone else busy while she went to the school. After Evan sent those pictures to Joyce, Kirsta had to prove to her mother that she was—I don’t know, worthy of being loved. So, she picked up on Joyce’s current crusade: the pedophile teachers corrupting children. It’s not a stretch to see how she might use that story to explain her own situation, that she’d been corrupted, defiled, turned into something she didn’t want to be.” Somers was quiet for a painfully long heartbeat, and his voice was a little too normal when he added, “At least, that’s the picture I put together.”
Hazard thought for a moment. “You’re getting low on detectives; Dulac is injured, and I assume Moraes has recused himself because Carmichael is still technically his partner. Palomo won’t be able to handle all of this herself.”
“I’ll be pulling double duty for a while; Moraes tried to resign. I told him to think about it, but he’s beating himself up about Carmichael. I’ll try to talk him out of it, but I think he’s headed to law school no matter what I say. The department is a mess.”
Squeezing Somers’s fingers, Hazard said, “It’s an opportunity.”
“It’s a train wreck.”
“It’s a train wreck that is also an opportunity.”
That made Somers laugh a little, and he kissed Hazard again, with minimal jostling and wincing this time.
“Can you please not?” Colt asked as he dropped into a chair. “For, like, five minutes? In public?”
“Go away,” Hazard told him.
Colt rolled his eyes and pulled up his phone as a screen between them.
Laughing, Somers hopped down from the exam table. “I’ll go see if the hospital pharmacy has your prescription ready, and then I’ll pull the car around.”
When he was gone, the curtain’s jangling falling silent, Hazard studied the torn paper liner on the exam table, examining where his husband’s hand—the hand he knew so well—had ripped it. He thought about the long days and nights ahead. He closed his eyes, and the darkness was there, and the water on the nape of his neck, and the chemical taste oiling the inside of his mouth—
