by Chris Culver
“Yeah,” I said.
“Then why don’t we skip the date and stay friends? I don’t take offense.”
My shoulders relaxed, and I nodded. I breathed a little easier.
“Good, because I’m not interested at all,” I said. After a few moments of awkward silence, I laughed to myself a little. “Believe it or not, this conversation is the closest I’ve had to a date in years.”
“I believe that,” said Blatch. “Good night, Detective. I’ll talk to you later.”
“Good night,” I said. He hung up before I could even finish speaking. I sat in my kitchen until Roger sauntered inside. He looked at me, yawned, and then lay down on the linoleum with his head between his paws. “I think I made a fool out of myself.”
Roger didn’t react, so I glanced at the clock on my microwave. It was twenty to four in the morning. I looked at the dog, stood, and put my cell phone on the counter by the stove before yawning.
“You can stay up, dude, but I’m going back to bed. It’s too early to wear pants.”
As I lay down in bed again, I found sleep elusive. My mind kept drifting back to my brief conversation with Detective Blatch. I last went on a date nine years ago. Maybe it was time again. Then again, based on how I had botched a simple conversation, it was probably better if I stayed single. Life was less mortifying that way.
My love life could wait. For the moment, I wanted to sleep.
16
Nick Sumner leaned against the side of his vehicle. It was ten to four in the morning, and the sun was still several hours away from rising. There were four tractor-trailers in the rest area’s parking lot, but the men and women who drove the huge machines were asleep inside their vehicles. Nick’s Toyota was the only car in the passenger-car side of the lot.
It wasn’t the nicest interstate rest area Nick had ever been to, but it was far from the worst. The building smelled clean, and mature trees shaded the area near the picnic tables. The location afforded him little privacy, but he didn’t need privacy. This was a meet and greet. It should be easy. Still, he had tucked a suppressed .22-caliber pistol into his waistband. The weapon didn’t have a lot of stopping power, but it could still scramble someone’s brain at close quarters. It would work well here.
Ten minutes later—right on time—a red pickup truck pulled into the lot. Two men sat inside. Both were in their late twenties, and they had the hard eyes common to professional killers and drug dealers. Nick had set up the meeting after finding their contact information in Austin Wright’s cell phone.
Nick waved to them but didn’t move from his vehicle. The two men stayed in their pickup for two or three minutes before he felt Wright’s phone buzz.
That you?
Nick waved the phone like a torch over his head after reading the message. The men in the truck stepped out. They were tall and thin. One wore a pistol in a holster on his belt. The other likely had a gun somewhere, but Nick couldn’t see it.
“Who the fuck are you?” one asked.
“Nick Sumner,” he said, smiling. It was too dark to see much, but a smile didn’t cost him anything. “I’m a friend of Austin Wright’s. He gave me his phone and told me to call you.”
“We’re not interested in seeing Austin’s friends,” said the man who had spoken earlier. He wore a red sleeveless T-shirt and had tattoos over most of his arms. Despite the heat, the other man wore a black, long-sleeved T-shirt and dark shorts. They turned to leave simultaneously.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said Nick. “There’s no reason to leave yet. You guys drove all the way out here to do business, and it so happens that I represent some very serious businessmen.”
“What kind of serious businessmen?” asked the man in the black shirt.
“The kind who look out for their interests,” said Nick. “You may not realize this, but Austin Wright was a thief. He sold you folks fentanyl, but he stole the chemicals used to make those drugs from my employers.”
The man in the red shirt crossed his arms. “How is this our problem?”
“That’s where things get tricky,” said Nick. “Austin and his merry band of misfits stole from us and sold those products to you. You didn’t understand what they did, so my people will forgive and forget on one condition.”
“What condition?”
“I need information,” said Nick. “My employers have a large organization overseas, but we don’t dabble in domestic affairs. Here, we invest. We’ve sunk sixty million dollars into a company in Missouri, and we’re afraid for our investment. Austin ripped us off, but he wasn’t the only person involved. I’m guessing you know more than we do. We’ll call it an information exchange. You tell us everything you know, and we’ll forget that you’re holding our property.”
“Are you a cop?” asked the man in the red shirt.
“That’s a good question,” said Nick, reaching into his pocket. Both men tensed, but they didn’t draw their weapons. They were skittish, but not jumpy. They seemed like professionals. He could work with that. He pulled out Austin’s phone and sorted through the images until he found one of Austin’s body. Then he tossed it underhand to the man in the red shirt.
“Did you shoot him?”
Nick nodded. “Yep.”
The two men looked at the photo.
“I liked Austin,” said the man in the black shirt. “He was a good guy.”
“I’m sure he was,” said Nick, “but he got his hand caught in the cookie jar. My people are strict, but we’re fair. You stay out of our way, we’ll stay out of yours. If someone steals from us, though, bad things happen. Life spans get shorter.”
“If you say Austin stole from you, I believe you. We don’t owe you shit, though. Lose our number.”
“Okay,” said Nick, reaching behind him for his pistol. “You have a boss or supervisor I can talk to?”
“Yeah, but he won’t be happy you waxed Austin,” said the man in the black shirt. “Like I said, we liked him. He sold us a quality product at a fair price.”
“That he did,” said Nick, nodding. “Does your boss think you came here to meet Austin?”
For a moment, neither man said anything. Then the man in the red shirt spoke.
“Yeah. Why?”
“No reason,” said Nick. His weapon cleared his belt holster in a fraction of a second. He squeezed the trigger. The round hit the man in the red shirt square in the face. He went down fast. The man in the black shirt ducked and reached behind him for his weapon, but Nick aimed and fired smoothly and quickly. The round hit him in the forehead. He, too, fell to the ground.
In the silence that followed, a semi roared past on the highway. Nick walked to the men on the ground and put another round into each of their heads, ensuring that they were dead.
Then he picked up Austin’s phone from the ground and slipped it into his pocket before walking to the pickup truck. He snapped on a pair of latex gloves taken from the inside pocket of his jacket and opened the door, where he found a duffel bag full of money in the passenger footwell.
He grabbed the bag and drove out of the rest area before anyone even saw him. He’d be just fine.
Nick had worked in this world for a long time, and in those years, he had learned an important lesson: Killing people and getting away with it was a lot easier if someone else pulled the trigger. Soon, some bad men would come to St. Augustine looking for their friends in the red and black shirts. When they found they were dead, they’d look for those responsible.
St. Augustine would have a lot of dead chemists soon, which meant Nick was almost done in town.
It was nice when things worked out.
17
Roger woke me up by barking from the front room at about six the next morning. He must have seen a rabbit or squirrel near the house. Even this deep in his golden years, Roger remained vigilant against the ferocious threat posed by all rabbits, squirrels, and cats that stepped within a two-hundred-foot radius of our front door.
I groaned and swung my
legs off the bed. My head didn’t hurt, but my mouth was dry. The room felt cool and comfortable. Since it was still early, I dressed in a sports bra and shorts and took a jog through the woods behind my house. Roger didn’t even follow me out the door.
The storm that had destroyed the campsite where we found Laura Rojas had knocked down almost a dozen trees in my woods, creating an obstacle course on my running trail. That was okay. It made my muscles work all the harder.
By the time I got back to the house, sweat, dried leaves, and a thin layer of dirt covered my skin, but I felt wide awake and energized. Even with a full day of grinding work ahead of me, I felt good. After my run, Roger sat with me in the kitchen as I scrambled eggs and toasted bread. It started earlier than I had expected, but it became a nice morning.
By eight, I had showered, dressed, and driven to work. The parking lot at the station was full, and the lobby buzzed as the evening and day shifts swapped places. I said hello to people as I passed and then attended the morning briefing in the conference room. Delgado and Harry had yet to find Aldon McKenzie; Paige Maxwell and Jude Lewis hadn’t shown up; and no one had reported any other major crimes in St. Augustine overnight. Typical day.
After the briefing, I swapped my notepad with work on Laura Rojas’s murder with the notepad I had taken to the hospital when I interviewed June Wellman. Her case was as important as anything else I had been doing, and it threatened to get lost in the shuffle. She deserved better than that.
I checked my cell phone to ensure it had a full charge and then walked to my truck, which I drove to Waterford College. Benedictine monks had founded the school almost two hundred years ago as a Catholic seminary, but over time, its mission had changed until it became a private, nondenominational liberal arts college for the sons and daughters of wealthy Midwesterners. It was a good school.
As I drove through Waterford’s brick front entrance, I left the rural, poor streets of St. Augustine and entered an affluent world of privilege and power. Mature trees swayed in the morning breeze, and undergraduates walked to class, backpacks slung over their shoulders as their eyes remained glued on cell phones. No leaves or weeds littered the sidewalk, and no cracks marred the roads. The Federalist-style academic buildings looked as imposing as any courthouse in the world.
The college employed its own police force, but they deferred to us on major felony investigations. I stopped by their office to tell them I was on campus to interview students, which they seemed to appreciate. A sleepy-looking uniformed officer offered to escort me around the school, but I told him I could manage on my own. Besides that, I carried a map and a gun. The world was my oyster.
I started at June’s sorority. It was a little before nine when I arrived, and half the girls in the house—June included—were still asleep. The girls I spoke to seemed nice, but few of them had gone with June to the fraternity the night Chad had raped her, so few of them had firsthand accounts of what happened. Of those girls who went, none saw Chad slip anything into her drink or force her to drink more than she wanted.
Next, I walked to Chad’s fraternity. Someone had locked the front door, so I rang the doorbell until an older woman in an apron opened.
“Can I help you?”
“Yeah,” I said, flashing her my badge. “I’m Detective Joe Court. I’m looking for Chad Hamilton. Have you seen him this morning?”
The woman blinked. “I’m the cook. I don’t see the boys until lunch.”
“Please get someone who can help me.”
She began to say something, but a tall, handsome young man stepped into the doorway before she could. His slick smile reminded me of a dead criminal defense lawyer I once knew. He wore jeans and a navy-blue T-shirt that hugged his chest and broad shoulders. College girls probably swooned over him. I could use that.
“I’m Jake, the chapter president. Molly’s the cook. She doesn’t know the brothers. Can I help you?”
I flashed my badge at him.
“I need to talk to Chad Hamilton.”
He looked at my badge, but then his eyes strayed to my chest and hips. He wasn’t leering, but he wasn’t subtle, either. When he looked at my eyes again, he gave me a cheesy grin and held the door wide open.
“Beautiful women are always welcome in the Sigma Iota house.”
“Terrific, thank you,” I said, stepping inside. The fraternity’s entry had carpeted stairs that led up to the first floor and down to the basement. The house smelled like bleach and stale beer with just a hint of vomit and body odor. It reminded me of my station’s drunk tank.
I took the stairs to the lobby and found two guys in pajamas lounging in front of a giant television.
“Either of you two Chad Hamilton, by chance?”
The guys looked to Jake, their president.
“This is a detective,” he said, the cheesy smile never leaving his face. “She’s a police officer.”
One guy sat up and held up his hands.
“I’m just a pledge.”
Jake chuckled. “It’s all right, Tony. She’s here to talk to some brothers. Why don’t you go home? You look like you haven’t showered in days.”
Tony nodded and left, barely taking the time to put on a pair of sandals. The other guy followed without saying a word, so I looked to Jake.
“Now that I’m in, I would appreciate it if you told me where Chad was.”
A frown replaced Jake’s smile. “I think he’s upstairs in his room, but we only allow brothers and guests up there. It may be a while before he comes down. You’re welcome to wait here.”
“I’d like to talk to him. You think you could get him for me?”
He sucked in a deep breath through his teeth before shaking his head. “Chad can be grumpy when he wakes up, so I think it’d be better if we waited. Unless you have a warrant. If you have an arrest or search warrant, you’re free to go up yourself and get him.”
He smiled again. I returned it.
“So you’re the fraternity’s lawyer and its president. Good for you.”
“I’m not a lawyer, but I am prelaw, and part of my job as the house president is to protect the brothers when appropriate.”
“Well, you’re doing a fine job, Jake,” I said, looking around the lobby for the fire alarm. I found one near the front staircase, so I crossed the room and pulled it. An ear-piercing wail filled the air. Jake hurried after me and tried to push the handle up to turn the alarm off, but I wagged a finger at him and shook my head. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
He took a step back. “What are you doing?”
“Fire drill!” I shouted. “It’s important to conduct regular fire drills in communal living environments like this. As a sworn law enforcement officer, this is part of my community policing duties.”
Footsteps pounded on the floor above me.
“Everybody, get the fuck up. This isn’t a drill!” shouted a voice from upstairs. I looked at Jake and smiled.
“I’m glad to hear at least one of your brothers is taking this seriously.”
Within moments, young men—and more than a few young women—streamed down the steps. I waited by the fire alarm for another few minutes until everybody left. Then I joined the men and women on the lawn in front of the house.
“Okay, guys!” I shouted, holding up my badge. “Thanks for cooperating with the drill. Everybody but Chad Hamilton is free to go back inside.”
Several guys grumbled, but nobody complained aloud. A young man walked toward me. His pale skin and curly red hair spoke of Scandinavian ancestry. I must have gotten him right out of bed because he wasn’t wearing a shirt. He looked at me and then to Jake, confused.
“I’m Chad,” he said, looking at me up and down. “Who are you?”
“Detective Joe Court, St. Augustine County Sheriff’s Department. I’m glad you’re up. Let’s talk.”
“Can I get a shirt?”
I smiled and looked at Jake. “Be a dear, Jake, and get your brother a shirt. He’s underdressed.�
� I looked at Chad again. “We need to talk about June.”
His chest and face turned red.
“Oh, shit.”
“Good,” I said, smiling. “It sounds like you know what we need to talk about. Let’s go inside. I hope you’ve got good answers for me.”
18
I sat down in the lobby on a floral-print couch a few minutes later. Chad—who was now wearing a plain white T-shirt—and Jake sat across from me. Chad’s right foot bounced, and he worked his hands together. Jake’s face was almost emotionless. He’d be a good lawyer one day. Good for him. The world needed good lawyers. I reached into my jacket for my cell phone, opened a voice recording app, and put it on a coffee table between us.
“Okay, guys,” I said, smiling at both men. “I’m Detective Joe Court with the St. Augustine County Sheriff’s Department, and I’m sitting in the Sigma Iota fraternity house at a little after nine in the morning. With me is Chad Hamilton. Before I begin with my questions, this is an interview to gather information about an event that occurred in this fraternity house several days ago. Chad, you’re not under arrest, and you’re under no obligation to answer my questions. If you’d like, you can have an attorney with you. If my questions make you uncomfortable, you can leave. That clear?”
He looked to Jake.
“What happens if he leaves?” asked Jake.
“I have a credible report that Mr. Hamilton raped a young woman upstairs. If he refuses to talk about it, I will investigate the allegation to the best of my ability. That means people will know about it, including his professors and the university administration. If he talks, we might clear this up today. We can keep things quiet and save everybody some embarrassment.”
“You should talk,” said Jake. “The house doesn’t need this kind of publicity.”
Chad drew in a breath and nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “Ask whatever you want to ask me.”
I stayed with him for about an hour. I even let Jake stay because he shut up as soon as Chad talked. Chad claimed he and June had been dating for the better part of a year and that they’d had an active sex life. I didn’t want details, but Jake broke his silence to voice his agreement and said every brother in the house had heard them having sex at least once.
