by Gregory Ashe
“Thanks for coming in today, Emery,” Moraes said. “I know we all want to clear this up as quickly as possible. How are you feeling today? Can I get you some coffee?”
“We’re not here for small talk, Detective,” Thompson said. “Let’s move this along, please.”
“Look, Emery, I know this is an awkward situation, but I really don’t think you need a lawyer—”
“Detective,” Thompson said. “Right now, please.”
Hazard met Moraes’s look and kept his face expressionless.
With a sigh, Moraes led them to interview room one. When Thompson and Hazard were settled at the table, Moraes excused himself. Hazard had been in this interview room a lot of times. He’d even been on this side of the table before, and he remembered it being a horrible, disorienting experience. That had been a while ago, though, when he’d still been trying to find his footing after leaving the force. This time was going to be different, especially because this time, Somers was the one in danger.
The door opened again, but instead of Moraes and Carmichael, Chief Riggle stepped into the room. The first time Hazard had seen him, Riggle had looked thin and hard, wearing a cop’s authority like he’d had it since birth. Today, he looked too thin, his coloring gray from exhaustion, and his eyes were a little too wide. Punch drunk, Hazard thought. Riggle was followed a moment later by Special Agent Park, and Hazard’s first impression of her was slightly more favorable: the dark hair heavy with gray, the simple, well-tailored suit, the composure. They both sat at the table. Park had her hands in her lap, and she was watching Hazard. Riggle leaned forward, drilling a finger into the tabletop.
“The games end right fucking now, Mr. Hazard. Do you hear me? Right fucking now. I understand you have some kind of history with this force, so I’m going to put all my cards on the table: we’ve got your boyfriend with possession and intent to distribute. Cocaine and heroin. Those are felony charges, all right? Whatever else happens, he’s going down for those two. We’ve got everything we need. That’s what you’ve got to understand right now; there’s nothing you can do about it. What you can do, though, is save yourself. You want to raise that little girl? This is your chance to get your ass on the right side of the line. You help yourself, right now, and you’ve still got a shot at that.”
“Not boyfriend,” Hazard said.
“My client has no knowledge of any criminal activity on Mr. Somerset’s part,” Thompson said. “There’s nothing he can do to help with your investigation.”
“No knowledge?” Riggle waved a hand in disgust. “Wahredua’s best fucking detective, and he has no knowledge that his boyfriend is sneaking around, doing coke and blow, selling it to hookers and dumbass college kids and whoever else he can get to buy it? Give me a fucking break.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” Hazard said, gripping the edge of the table so hard that his knuckles turned white. “He’s my fiancé.”
“Big fucking difference,” Riggle said. “If you think you can sit here and blow smoke up my ass, you’re in for a surprise. You think I haven’t heard the rumors about you? You think I didn’t hear all the stories when I took this job? The brilliant fucking detective who scored drugs while he was on the force, had his fucking orgies right here in the station while he was on the force. Everybody knows the stories. Cravens might have been a dirty little cunt willing to make a deal, but not me. You fight me on this, you do anything less than say yes fucking sir right now, and I will tear your life apart. You think I can’t go back and find what I need? You think I can’t dig up dirt from when you were a cop, an embarrassment to this fucking force, and bury you with it? If that’s what you think, you’ve got another thing coming.”
“This conversation is over,” Thompson said, touching Hazard’s arm as she stood. “My client is cooperating fully with this investigation, but he has no knowledge about any alleged criminal activity by Mr. Somerset and he has no knowledge of Mr. Somerset’s whereabouts.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Riggle roared, shooting out of his seat. “Sit your nigger ass down before I slap you back into that seat. This faggot isn’t going anywhere until I say so.”
Thompson’s braids clicked as she swiveled toward Park. “Special Agent Park, as a federal law enforcement officer, you are now a witness to Chief Riggle’s hate speech. You’re also witness to his attempts to unlawfully imprison me and Mr. Hazard in this interview room. We will be filing an official complaint with the mayor, the civilian review board, the state attorney general’s office, and federal law—”
“That’s it,” Riggle shouted, coming around the table. “You are both under arrest. Get your asses over to the wall and—”
“For the love of God, Riggle,” Park said. “Get the fuck out of my interview room.”
The silence that followed Riggle’s bellowing was sharp and sudden. He swiveled slowly to face Park.
“I’ve put up with a lot of shit from you over the last few days,” Riggle said, “letting you come in here, letting you push people around, my people, letting you push them around. I’ve nodded and smiled and played nice at all these asshat meetings you’ve made me attend. I’ve gone along; I understand you’re going to work this case, and I’ve done what I could to make that easy on you. But let me remind you that I’m the chief of police, and this might be a flyspeck city in the middle of nowhere, but I’m still chief. You’re in here as a courtesy. If the feds decide they want this corruption case, they can handle it through the proper channels.”
Park didn’t move. Hazard wasn’t even sure she blinked. The seconds dragged into a minute. When the door to the interview room flew open, Riggle flinched; Park didn’t.
Glennworth Somerset didn’t normally look much like his son—the same eyes were all, tropically blue and clear. But today, as Wahredua’s recently elected mayor stormed into the interview room, Hazard could see the resemblance: the way he carried himself, the coloring in his face, the tightness in his jaw. Even the voice, when Glenn began to speak.
“Just exactly when was someone going to inform me that there is an arrest warrant out for my son?” Glenn said. His gaze touched on Park before shifting to Riggle. “What the fuck is going on?”
Riggle straightened, raised his chin, and glanced at Park before saying, “It’s not good, Mr. Mayor. I was hoping to have more information before I brought this to you.”
“More information? You’re damn right there better be more information. My son has been a respected member of this police force for over ten years. You were still picking lint out of your ass in that shithole I dragged you out of. If you think I put you in this job so you could harass my family—”
“Mr. Mayor,” Riggle managed to get in, “if we could talk in my office—”
Again, his gaze moved to Park.
“I want every fucking detail,” Glenn said, turning and marching out of the room. “And keep Emery here; I want to talk to him too.”
Riggle slunk out of the interview room, pulling the door shut behind him.
“Christ,” Park said, arching her back. “He’s going to be even more of a nightmare to work with after this.” She gestured at the door. “Everybody heard that whole train wreck. He’s going to spend the rest of my time here proving to everyone that he’s still in charge.
“This town is a snake pit.” Park was studying Hazard openly now. “Here’s the conversation I wanted to have: I understand that you don’t believe your fiancé is connected to drugs. I’m sorry about that, I really am. I met him, and he’s got charm. But the closer I look, the less I like what I see. Something hasn’t been right about this little corner of the world for a long time. Dirty cops. Impossible cases. And, of course, the evidence is what it is: we’ve got his prints all over those drugs, and until somebody has a better explanation, I’ve got to go with what the evidence tells you. Right now, the evidence tells me that he and his partner had a lot of drugs.”
“He’s been framed.”
> “I should have said, until somebody can offer a better explanation with evidence,” Park said with a small smile.
“It wouldn’t have been hard. Dulac spent a lot of time with him. Were some of the drugs in plastic baggies? It would have been easy to collect ones that John discarded, save them, and later fill them with cocaine and heroin.”
“With evidence,” Park repeated. “At this point, we don’t have any reason to believe you were involved. I know small towns; I know rumors float around. Something doesn’t smell right about how you left the force, but I’m not going to jump in with Riggle and believe all those stories are true. But as Ms. Thompson will remind you later, anything you do at this point to help your fiancé or Detective Dulac makes you an accessory after the fact.”
“You don’t have Dulac in custody?”
“The more important consideration right now, Mr. Hazard, and the reason I wanted to talk to you, is certain items were also found at Detective Dulac’s apartment. Not just the drugs. Men’s underwear. Soaked in blood. They were hidden in the freezer, carefully vacuum packed. Three pairs. We’re still getting samples analyzed, but I’m pretty sure they’ll match Phil Camerata, Rory Engels, and Mitchell Martin.”
Hazard tried to clear his throat and couldn’t. Thompson must have noticed because she passed him a bottle of water, and Hazard drank and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.
“If you think John had something to do with the Keeper killings, that’s impossible. I know him. It’s impossible; there’s no other way to say it.”
“Sometimes the people we’re closest to are the ones we see the least clearly.”
“He was with me the night Susan Morrison was killed. He didn’t leave the bed.”
“You were awake the whole time?”
“No, but I would have heard him leave.”
Park’s cool, pitying gaze made Hazard’s face heat.
“We’re currently working with several theories,” Park said.
“Why do you need theories? You’ve already got Wesley. Christ, I still cannot believe Riggle convinced the county attorney to file charges. Was Daley drunk when she agreed to prosecute a man without having any evidence?”
Park seemed to ignore this; she said, “One of our theories is that the Keeper killings are actually the work of two individuals.”
That had been one of Hazard’s theories too. He tried to take another drink, thought he might puke if he did, and fumbled with the cap for a few seconds. He couldn’t get it in place, so he thumped the bottle onto the table; his other hand had curled so tightly around the cap that he could feel it biting into his palm.
“I have reason to believe Detective Dulac is the Keeper,” Hazard said. “And reason to believe that he’s framing John because he has a sick obsession with him.”
For the first time since entering the room, Park shifted in her seat. She looked like she was being pulled up on string, her whole body upright and taut and aimed at Hazard.
He told her: Dulac’s obsession with Somers, his unexplained disappearance, the PIN on the computer, the search results, and finding Kleinheider dead, with Dulac’s business card on the ground next to him. Thompson interjected from time to time, weaving a web of protective allegedly and might have and it is possible that around Hazard’s statements.
Hazard had barely finished when Park shot out of her seat, moving toward the door. She was already pulling out her phone, tapping at the screen.
“That clears John, right?” Hazard said. “He didn’t have anything to do with that stuff.”
“The best thing you can do for your fiancé right now, Mr. Hazard, is convince him to surrender himself. If he comes in, we can protect him, and we can get to the bottom of this. If he stays out there—well, there are a lot of ways things can go wrong.” She held the phone to her ear as she left the interview room, already speaking quietly into it: “I want everything Golden City has on the murder of a man named Kleinheider . . .”
After a moment, Hazard looked at Thompson, who was packing up her notes.
“I know you won’t like to hear it,” Thompson said, “but I think that went as well as it could have. We know why they think Detective Somerset was involved with those drugs and with the Keeper killings, and we have a viable alternate explanation. Now it’s time to start digging: we look for security footage from the station, from places they ate lunch—any chance you have a security camera aimed at your trash? Someone might have picked through the garbage to get those baggies.”
Hazard barely heard her; he shook his head.
“Too bad,” Thompson said. “The next thing we’ll do is start pulling character witnesses. Everybody who worked on the force with him.”
To his own surprise, Hazard laughed. “They’re all dead. Or they’re in disgrace. Or they’re in prison.”
Thompson’s beads clicked as she stood. “That’s an exaggeration. Let’s go.”
“I’m going to stay and talk to Glenn.”
“Ok. I need to make a few calls—”
“No, you don’t have to stay. Whatever happens with Glenn, you can’t help me there.”
“I’m not convinced about that,” Thompson said. “Frankly, I think you need all the help you can get.”
“The only thing you need to worry about is that I might murder my future father-in-law. You can go.” His gaze refocused on the water bottle, and he had to squeeze his eyes shut. “Thank you.”
She touched his shoulder and left.
For a while, the normal sounds of the station filled the emptiness: the coffee maker’s percolating, the microwave’s whir and beep, the copier’s thrum-whoosh, the fax machine’s screech. Shoes clicked toward the interview room and stopped
Hazard opened his eyes and saw Carmichael. The detective’s features were pinched, and she stood with her hands on her waist, trying to give him what she probably considered a deadly look.
“You know him,” Hazard said. “You ought to be fucking ashamed of yourself.”
Carmichael held the stare for another minute, and then she left, the sounds of the station swallowing up her steps.
Hazard closed his eyes again and tried to figure out how to save his fiancé.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
JULY 5
FRIDAY
8:22 AM
SOMERS DIDN’T KNOW what time it was when he woke, disoriented, in a shadowy space that smelled like broken particleboard and wet cement. As his eyes adjusted to the morning light that made its way through the display windows, he examined his surroundings and remembered. He groaned as aches and pains from a night of sleeping on a sales counter manifested, and then he groaned again when he remembered why he was here and how truly his life was screwed.
He had spent the night in an abandoned cell phone store deep inside Smithfield. It was one of the center units in an empty strip mall; judging by the signs in the window PAY AS YOU GO – GOVERNMENT PHONES – SCREEN REPAIRS – CALLING CARDS – CASES – CHARGERS and by a few accessories with knockoff Apple designs, this had been one of the many business that catered to Smithfield’s poor. Somers didn’t know how to pick a lock, which normally he liked to hold over Hazard’s head as a sign of the high moral ground, but which was pretty inconvenient in a time like this. On the back of the strip mall, though, he found one door had a broken window, and it had been easy to let himself in. He bumped through the darkness doing a very, very limited search, and then he used two concrete blocks that he found in what had probably been the storeroom to barricade the back door. If someone pushed hard enough, they’d be able to force it open, but Somers hoped that the noise would be enough to wake him first. He tried not to think about Saturday mornings when Hazard sometimes had to rip the covers off to get him up. Then, after putting on his undershirt and the button-down shirt, he stretched out on the sales counter and, within moments, slept.
Now, in the morning light, his mouth tasted like what Hazard had once described as Limburger chee
se smeared on a rat’s ass. His clothes were stiff with dried sweat, and he itched all over with bug bites. Somers gave himself a few lazy scratches as he moved to one end of the store, peering out the display windows at an empty street, the asphalt buckled and broken, weeds pushing up in every crack, sometimes in the middle of the road. He wandered to the other end of the store, checked his improvised barricade, and found it still secure. Then he tried to figure out how to be a smart fugitive instead of a dumb one.
The first thing he needed was to change his appearances. Since radical reconstructive surgery wasn’t an option—Somers kind of liked his face, and he was pretty sure Hazard did too—he had to think of some other ways to hide in plain sight. Clothes, of course. But also his appearance overall. He wished he had a mirror; sleeping on a sales counter in a discount phone store probably did wonders for the transformation, but he knew he needed more.
Letting himself out the back, Somers checked the other units in the strip mall: two had no markings whatsoever, and when Somers peered in through the windows, he saw only an empty storefront. The unit on the north end, though, was the clearly defunct TRUDY KING WAHREDUA’S TOP REAL ESTATE AGENT – OUR HOUSE IS YOUR HOME. Judging by the layer of dust Somers could see through the glass, nobody was going to come anytime soon to clear out the remaining furniture or office supplies. Still, it didn’t seem like his best bet. He worked his way in the opposite direction and checked the remaining units. One was KLIMBING KOALAS, which was the largest unit and had only a single remaining floor mat, evidence that some sort of climbing—duh—or tumbling or gymnastics had taken place inside at one point. The next was a shuttered military surplus store: SHERMAN’S MARCH – MARCH YOUR WAY TO GREAT DEALS.
Military surplus sounded very, very useful to a man in Somers’s position, but the store looked like it had been completely emptied out. He found a brick, smashed the window in the back door, and let himself into the unit. Without a phone or a flashlight, he didn’t have any way of improving his search of the stockroom, but he did the best he could. He stumbled around, checking mostly by touch, and found a whole lot of nothing. A couple of spiderwebs, sure. And something that scraped on the wall, a nasty sound that made him stumble back, heart pounding in his chest, until he realized it was a poster, and the sound had been the paper against the cement. He finally gave up.
