by Gregory Ashe
“Ree, maybe we should talk about this stuff.”
“Sure. I want to hear about the case.”
“No, that’s not what I meant.”
Hazard set his phone down. He looked at Somers. And he said, “Please, John. I’m not asking you to give me protected information. I just . . . I just want to hear about it. Whatever you can tell me.”
Somers actually dropped his fork. “You think I wouldn’t tell you?”
“I’m a civilian. Information about ongoing investigations—”
“Jesus Christ, Ree. You’re my boyfriend. You’re the smartest person I know. You’re the best detective I know. If you’re willing to listen, Jesus, you’re going to have to tell me to shut up.”
“I’ve gotten pretty good at that.”
With a real smile on his face, Somers began to talk. And eat. Whatever his objection to the meal, it was forgotten as he launched into an account of the case. A few times, Hazard tried to stop him, but Somers waved the warnings aside and kept talking.
And inside, Hazard felt something coming to life. Like he’d been walking in the dark, and now lights were coming on. He listened to Somers’s description of the crime scene. He listened to the paraphrased interviews. And then, to his own surprise, Hazard found himself asking questions. Did he say this? Did she say that?
It was almost like the old days.
“So,” Somers said as he scraped a fork across his empty plate. “What do you think?”
Hazard grabbed his coffee and took a drink. He shrugged. “Nothing on the security cameras?”
“Not yet. No sign of this guy. He walks out of the apartment and, as far as we can tell, disappears. Cravens is going to have people keep looking at the footage, but . . .” Somers waved a hand dismissively. “So, who else was in on it?”
Hazard shrugged again.
“Come on,” Somers said. “Right now, I like that girl Cynthia for it. She’s got a weird thing for professors; I wouldn’t be surprised if Fabbri had a thing with her, cut it off, and she went crazy.”
“That’s a good theory.” Hazard raised his coffee again.
“Oh no,” Somers said, catching the mug and pulling it back down. “Now you.”
“Come on, I don’t do that kind of stuff anymore.”
“Three months and you’re out of practice?”
“I—”
“Bullshit.”
“John, I—”
“Bullshit.” Somers had a crazy grin. “Tell me.”
“I think it’s strange that the adjunct—what was his name?”
“Carl. Don’t pretend like you don’t remember.”
“I think it’s strange his story doesn’t match up in so many ways. And he’s right: cui bono? Who benefits?”
“So you think it’s Carl.
“I don’t know.”
“No, that’s good. That’s really good to know.”
“John, I’m just saying—” Hazard stopped. “This is not a representation of my ability to make a final, conclusive deduction—”
“Like the time you were convinced you knew how The Sixth Sense was going to end.”
“Shyamalan cheated,” Hazard growled, getting to his feet.
“And I think,” Somers said, sprawling back in his seat, studying Hazard from under hooded eyes, “that it was Cynthia Outzen who killed Fabbri because she was a jilted lover.” Then Somers stood. He took the mug of coffee, gently easing Hazard’s fingers away from the ceramic, and set it on the table. Then he brought Hazard’s hands down to his waistband. “Now. I believe I was having some ideas about you when I got home.”
Hazard had one of those tiny Emery Hazard smiles. He bent and kissed Somers once, and then he pulled his hands away. “You need to go to bed.”
“Sure. Come with.”
Laughing, Hazard extricated himself, collected his coffee, and started stacking Somers’s plate and utensils. “I’ve got stuff to do, John. And you’re exhausted.”
“Not too exhausted to fool around with my hot, hulking boyfriend.” Somers was behind Hazard now, sliding his arms around Hazard’s waist, kissing Hazard’s shoulder and arms through the thin cotton of Hazard’s t-shirt. “Come on. It’s been a while.”
“It hasn’t been that long.”
“It feels like forever.”
Hazard was very careful. He had to be so careful these days, careful about almost everything. He set down the stack of dishes. He took Somers by the wrists—gently, carefully—and he turned around, stepping out of the embrace.
It took him a moment too long to know what to say. Confusion, then pain sparked in Somers’s face and disappeared.
“I’ve got to—” Hazard began.
“Yeah,” Somers said.
“I thought I might take a swing at the utility sink today.”
“I’m going to do it, Ree. I promise. Tonight. Or tomorrow if the case stays hot.”
Hazard brought Somers’s hands up. He kissed his palms.
“Ree, you don’t ever have to—I mean, you can just tell me.”
Hazard bent and kissed him. Then he released Somers’s hands, turned him toward the stairs, and gave him a push.
“Go get some sleep.”
But Somers slowed and turned back. He didn’t say anything. He just watched Hazard.
Hazard made himself stand there as long as he could; then he turned and picked up the dishes and made his way to the sink.
“Don’t forget,” Somers said, his voice so normal that Hazard wanted to punch out the window over the sink, “we’ve got dinner with the sheriff tonight.”
“I’ll call and cancel. You’re going to be busy working—”
“No, it’ll be fine. I’ve got to eat dinner sometime, and we’ve been trying to set it up for ages.”
“He’ll understand, John. We’ll do it another time.”
“No,” Somers said sharply. Then, back in that painfully normal voice, “No. Dinner, tonight, with the sheriff.”
“Ok.” Hazard ran the hot water and said, “Get to bed.”
Somers left; it was like he vanished, turned to smoke. No creaking floorboards. No protesting stairs. That part of Hazard’s brain, where the lights had come on, was doing calculations. Somers was an easy sleeper; he’d be totally out in the next five minutes, and he could sleep in a trainyard.
No, Hazard told himself.
He did the dishes.
That part of his brain, though, kept working. It was a fifteen-minute drive from their house to Wroxall. It was fifteen minutes to anywhere in Wahredua.
No.
He wiped down the counters.
Somers was already asleep; Hazard’s internal timer assured him of that. Fifteen minutes to get to Wroxall. Fifteen minutes to get back. How long would Somers sleep? Hazard checked the clock on the stove. Almost nine-thirty. Four hours? Five? Hazard guessed four, and he threw himself a safety net: three hours. He’d have to be back in three hours. Minus half an hour for travel. That left two and a half hours to look at the crime scene himself, to do a preliminary canvass, and to get back.
No.
Hazard got the mop and bucket. He got the jug of Fabuloso. He started the hot water again, measured out the cleaner, and poured it in. As the suds built, he told himself he wasn’t a detective anymore. He wasn’t even a private detective, although Somers had been after him for months now, ever since their last trip to St. Louis, to open his own agency. He was just a guy. And he had no reason to get involved.
He came back to reality just as the bubbles crested and spilled down the side of the bucket. Swearing, Hazard turned off the hot water. The smell of Fabuloso filled the kitchen; it stuck to his hands when he wiped them on his shirt.
He wasn’t going anywhere. He was going to mop the floor—like the good little houseboy you are, a nasty voice said inside him. He was going to mop the floor. He was going to clean up the front flower beds. He was going to overseed a part of the
lawn in back that was patchy. He was feeling better, so much better, as he listed out his routine. Yes. He was going to clean the baseboards. They hadn’t done that since moving in, and Somers liked a clean house. Hazard felt great.
None of which explained why he found himself creeping upstairs, careful to avoid the warped boards and the creaky risers. At the top, he paused, listened. Their bedroom door was open, and he could hear Somers’s even breathing. Hazard turned toward the front of the house. He went into the office. He shut the door, and he didn’t dare turn on the light. He felt like he was burgling his own house.
They shared a desk, and as Hazard opened the bottom drawer, he still wasn’t sure why he had chosen this as his hiding place. It seemed like a terribly stupid place, where Somers was likely to look if he needed the stapler or a rubber band. Hazard shifted office supplies until he found the small bundle. He pulled it out of the drawer. He unfolded the protective paper.
Five hundred business cards lay like a bad deal in poker.
Emery Hazard. Private Investigator.
No phone number. No email. He didn’t have an office or a name for the agency. Ordering the cards had been stupid. Sheer stupidity, prompted by one stupid conversation in St. Louis after that asshole North McKinney had crawled under Hazard’s skin again.
Hazard skimmed twenty off the top and stuck them in his pocket. Then he rewrapped the cards, returned them to the drawer, and covered them with Post-Its, a tape dispenser, a box of Bic pens.
He was out of the house, driving toward Wroxall, before he realized he had forgotten to mop the floors.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
NOVEMBER 1
THURSDAY
10:07 AM
HAZARD PARKED TWO BLOCKS north of campus, and he felt lucky to find the spot. Although the college had grown, and campus had grown with it, parking continued to be a problem. And finding a spot big enough for the Odyssey wasn’t easy. The minivan had been a practical choice, Hazard reminded himself. A new life. New priorities. A minivan just made sense.
He found the residential building on North Quad easily; as always, Somers had been clear and precise in his account, and Hazard had asked the right questions. His steps quickened as he approached the building. Had he asked those questions on purpose? Had some part of him been planning this from the beginning? Hazard wasn’t sure. In his opinion, people were far too ready to blame their poor decisions on some shadow-self they called the subconscious, but at the moment, he found himself facing the dilemma of not knowing, not entirely, why he had done what he had. Or, for that matter, why he was doing this, right now.
The Quad was busy today, with students lounging on the lawn, enjoying the mixture of bright sunlight and crisp autumn weather. Other students hurried along the walkways, some with heads bent over books or notebooks, others lost in music or podcasts, and a few watching the people around them. Hazard disappeared into this swell of humanity; he didn’t look like a college kid, but he was just a big guy in a t-shirt and jeans. The only people who looked twice were a couple of gay boys he’d seen in the Pretty Pretty when Somers dragged him there. One of the boys waved. Hazard kept walking.
He reached the residence hall right as a girl was coming out, and Hazard grabbed the door, waited for the girl to pass, and stepped inside. Obstacle one, the secure front door, was now successfully bypassed. He ignored the elevator, found the stairs, and started climbing. His heart rate went up—still a comfortable level, because all the cardio he’d done since injuring his arms made the stairs easy. But then his heart rate went up some more. And he wasn’t thinking about cardio anymore. He wasn’t thinking about all the stairs. Someone had committed a crime here, and synapses were snapping and popping like Mardi Gras.
The top floor, Hazard realized, had been given over entirely to the resident head and a few supply closets. His bump keys worked on the closet doors, and Hazard found nothing suspicious in his quick scan of toilet paper, mop, plunger, microfiber towels. He moved down the hall to the apartment that had belonged to Jim Fabbri.
But when Hazard reached the door, he stopped. Police tape formed an X, but the tape didn’t bother him. What bothered him was the splintered wood around the lock and the way the door hung open a quarter-inch.
Dropping into a squat, Hazard examined the door more carefully. He didn’t have any equipment, but he used his phone to take pictures of a few black scuffs on the wood. Hazard was willing to bet that the marks had come from shoes and that they had been left when someone kicked in the door.
He took pictures of the lock next. Something was off, and it took him a moment to realize what it was: in his experience, it was more likely for the jamb to splinter first, allowing the bolt or latch to slip free and the door to open. In this case, though, it was the door that had splintered. Hazard took another moment to consider this, and then he had his answer. The jamb—the whole frame, in fact—was original construction. High-quality oak that had only gotten tougher with time. But the door was a replacement, and the broken section near the latch confirmed Hazard’s guess. Particleboard.
So, he told himself, his pulse accelerating, start with the facts. The resident head lived alone on the top floor of the hall. He had died violently in the presence of witnesses during a party. That meant that the door had been open, and when first responders arrived, no one had needed to force the door. And because the apartment was still an active crime scene, very few people would have risked entering without permission. Even fewer people would have taken the even greater risk of kicking in the door—yes, the apartment occupied the top floor, but students on the floor below might have heard something.
Most likely? The killer or an accomplice had come back here. Those weren’t the only possibilities; Hazard had seen enough strange things, things that defied common sense or logic. But he had long ago decided that the best method was to play things by the odds without ruling out other options. And right now, in light of the information he had, the odds said that the killer had come back or had sent someone in his or her place.
Why?
That one was cake, Hazard thought. To remove incriminating evidence, either by taking it away from the crime scene or by destroying or effacing it.
Hazard didn’t even let himself think about it; he used his elbow to nudge the door open, and then he slid between the crossed lines of tape and entered the apartment.
He was surprised that the smell wasn’t worse; it still lingered, the familiar stink of a violated body. The animal smell activated instinctive centers of Hazard’s brain, opening the floodgates on adrenaline. But the detached part of his mind noted that he had expected the smell to be worse. Because someone had come through the apartment, dispersing some of the stench? Or for some other reason?
Filing the question away, Hazard studied the apartment: lots of comfortable seating around a large TV, and a hallway that led deeper into the apartment; a spacious kitchen with a door that led to a pantry, Hazard guessed. Although the countertops had been cleared of the food and drink Somers had described, plastic cups and bowls remained. The Halloween banner looked limp today, some of the tape already having pulled away from the wall. But what took most of Hazard’s attention was the site of the murder.
In a direct line from the front door, a blood-soaked sofa blocked the path to the windows. Aside from the bloodstains, the sofa itself was unremarkable—some sort of microfiber upholstery, the whole piece looking like the quasi-commercial grade furniture used in institutions like dormitories. But again, something tugged at Hazard’s mind. He studied the scene for another two minutes, running possibilities, variations, scenarios. Not about the murder. Just about the sofa. There was something so damn strange about the sofa.
When nothing came to him, he crossed the room. He wished he had brought gloves, but he decided to keep his tampering to a minimum. He studied the sofa up close, and still nothing came to him. He squatted down again. Here, he could see the mist of blood that had stained the carpet tiles. Hazard sw
ept his gaze left. Then right.
A few drops of blood off to one side of the sofa.
But instead of moving to investigate, he swept his gaze left again, towards the rest of the furniture. Something bothered him.
There.
Crabbing sideways, Hazard bent closer for a better look. Yes. The carpet tile had an indent. Hazard dropped onto hands and knees and crawled a few feet farther. More indentations. The kind of marks that furniture left when it sat for a long time in the same spot. Long enough, in fact, that running a vacuum over the carpet wouldn’t erase the marks. Not immediately, anyway. Hazard returned to the bloodstained sofa and checked the feet. No indentations.
Dropping back onto his haunches, Hazard tried to figure out what that meant. The obvious answer was that someone had recently moved this particular sofa. In fact, due to the persistence of the old impressions and the absence of new ones, Hazard guessed the sofa had been moved shortly before the party—within a day or two, although he’d need to do some sort of research on the particular resilience of these carpet fibers and calculate the weight of the sofa, among other things.
More importantly, for the moment, was the question of why. Why had someone moved the sofa before the party? Hazard realized that the position of the sofa was what had bothered him when he had entered the apartment. It stood directly in front of the door, separate from the rest of the seating. It didn’t match any of the interior design principles that Hazard had observed or intuited from watching Somers set up their new home. For that matter, it didn’t even seem to serve a practical purpose. It blocked the view from the windows, and it would have created a snarl in the flow of foot traffic.
And, Hazard thought with bleak satisfaction, it had put Jim Fabbri in a very excellent position to be murdered. He was willing to guess—and it was a guess, although one that he liked—that whoever had convinced Jim Fabbri to move the sofa had also been the one who had arranged to have Jim Fabbri killed.
