by Gregory Ashe
Another why still troubled Hazard, though. Motive. From what Somers had told Hazard, faculty and students at Wroxall had not been pleased with the hiring of Jim Fabbri. And while Somers had bet on Cynthia being the killer because of her strange attachment to her professors, Hazard wasn’t sure that any of the motives—professional contempt, envy, or a failed romantic entanglement—answered the question of why Jim Fabbri had been killed. And why were the Ozark Volunteers involved? That was where everything went to shit; even if someone could convince Hazard that Fabbri had been murdered over his job, he’d never believe that a rogue faculty member—or grad student—had colluded with a white supremacist group just to remove one lousy professor.
None of the pieces fit. But that was ok, Hazard thought, standing, dusting his hands on his knees, staring out into the bright expanse of the quad. He was good at figuring out how to make the pieces fit.
He resumed his investigation of the room by returning to the micro-trail of blood spots near the sofa. He followed them around, behind the sofa, and to the window. Blood smeared the casing, the glass, the latch. It was an old window, a single pane of thin glass. Hazard studied it, studied the dried blood.
He went to the pantry, used the hem of his t-shirt to cover his hand, and opened the door. In the small space, he found a roll of paper towels and tore off several sheets. He laid one sheet just below the window; when he opened it, he knew that some of the dried blood would flake, and he wanted to dispose of any sign of his presence. He used another to turn the latch—smoother than he expected, which meant that maintenance must be keeping up with the windows, even though they looked seriously outdated. He lifted the window and stuck his head out.
Below him, open air dropped twenty feet before reaching a low projection of stone—something ornamental from when the building had been built over a hundred years ago, Hazard guessed. Nothing looked out of place. It was hard to tell at twenty feet, but Hazard didn’t see any unusual discoloration that might have been left by drops of blood.
He turned his attention to the outside of the window and the dorm’s walls. Nothing. No bloody handprints. No smears. No scuffs. No sign that anyone had tried to enter or exit this way. Hazard thought back to what Somers had said: Cynthia had told him that she had come to this window and opened it with the intent of getting air and, also, hoping to catch sight of the killer. A fresh gust of November air, crisp without being cold, made Hazard feel stunningly alive; Cynthia had been right about fresh air. And the view took in the whole quad. If the killer had left this way, she would have had a chance to see him.
Hazard craned his neck, looking up. The roof hung out several inches, exposing soffits and fascia and an ancient gutter. No marks here, either. Hazard stretched, careful not to brush against the window, and got his hand inside the gutter. He couldn’t see what he was doing, so he ran his fingers along the metal carefully. He found only the runoff of old asphalt and wet, moldering leaves.
Grimacing, Hazard pulled himself back inside the apartment, shut the window, and collected his paper towels; he had been needlessly cautious about laying one down because no blood had flaked, in spite of his predictions. He wadded them up and stuffed them in his pocket, to be burned at home.
So far, nothing contradicted any of the stories he had heard from Somers. The detail about the sofa, though, was interesting. That meant something. He was sure of it.
Hazard moved to the TV next. The DVD player sat on a small stand to one side. Hazard could see fingerprint dust on the plastic case, but he wasn’t willing to disturb it. He pulled one of the business cards from his pocket and, using the stiff end of the card, powered on the player and pressed the eject button. Empty. Which meant one of two things: either the police had taken the DVD, or the killer had. Both were interesting. What was so important about the DVD Fabbri had chosen to shock his guests with?
Hazard repeated the maneuvers with the card, closing the tray and powering down the player. Then he moved down the hall. Nothing of interest in the hall bath or the empty bedrooms. In the office, he stole a pencil and used it to shift papers around, snapping pictures of articles and book covers. Several of them looked like fascinating reading in their own right—one of the books, on the carnivalesque empowerment of drag communities through ritualized fetishism, he thought he might ask Somers to buy him for his birthday. But Hazard also wanted to keep all avenues of investigation open for the moment; if the killing was related to Fabbri’s academic position, the articles might have some bearing on it.
His search of the master bedroom and en suite bath yielded nothing, and Hazard had completed his private evaluation of the crime scene in under thirty minutes. He left the way he had come, using the hem of his shirt to tug the door closed—although it fell open a quarter-inch almost immediately because the broken latch refused to catch.
Instead of leaving through the front door, Hazard let himself out at the bottom of the stairwell, exiting on the side of the dorm near the North Quad’s northern gates. He stood for a moment, the November sunlight like a heat lamp on his face. His heart rate was still accelerated. He felt dizzy, and he closed his eyes, turning the sun into a red glare against his lids. He tried to be analytical. Elevated heart rate could be linked to the physical exertion of coming down the stairs, or to the last of the adrenaline from his slight fear of being caught in his investigation. It could have been due to worry over the case. Perhaps he had uncontrolled hypertension.
Or—Hazard heard Somers’s voice, dry and amused, inside his head—you’re just really excited to be doing this stuff again.
Hazard shook off the thought, opened his eyes, and made himself focus. In Hazard’s best guess, the killer would have come out this door: it was the closest stairwell to Fabbri’s apartment, and it exited to the side, where the killer could have headed north, east, or west, and vanished from campus in moments.
So where had the murderer gone?
Hazard wanted to see the area by night; any number of factors—nonfunctioning streetlights, traffic patterns, the placement of security cameras—might have influenced the killer’s decision. In mid-morning, Hazard was forced to work without complete information.
He knew a few things, however: he knew lights and cameras webbed campus, so it was unlikely that the killer had gone the way Cynthia had expected. To a lesser extent, that same problem applied to the borders of campus; if Hazard were the killer, he would have wanted to get away from even the possibility of a camera.
That left north. But two blocks north, a popular student bar was open past midnight. Hazard knew the bar, McGrath’s, and had been in on several occasions: once, as a minor, to ogle the college boys and try to score a neglected beer; and later, several times when Hazard had been home from college himself. He had still enjoyed ogling the boys, although by then, he had been dating Alec.
Hazard cast another look east and west along the street, and then he crossed and headed north. If the killer had been what the witnesses described—young, well-built, and dressed in unremarkable clothes—it would have been an easy matter for the killer to remove one or two identifying pieces, such as the Cardinals hat and the cloth covering the lower half of his face, and walk past the bar without anyone looking twice. If the killer had planned ahead and stashed a change of clothes nearby—just outside the residence hall, for example—he could have changed clothes and walked into the bar to meet up with friends. Hell, Hazard thought. It was Halloween. He could have stashed a costume. This close to the bar, he could have partied with friends, slipped out, changed clothes, murdered Jim Fabbri, changed back, and returned to his friends before anyone noticed he’d been gone. That late in the evening, everyone had probably been too shit-faced to notice anyway.
It was just past eleven in the morning, and this side of Wahredua was beginning to show signs of life: college kids stumbling out to get coffee, maybe with a kick, to soothe the Halloween hangovers; a few poor souls walking dogs or scrambling for their cars, late to work, their face
s set like they were trying not to puke. Adults—sometimes only a few years older than the kids—looked on with a kind of knowing bewilderment, as though they remembered but still couldn’t quite believe.
When Hazard reached McGrath’s, an OPEN sign hung in the door, but Hazard ignored it. If the killer had come this way, he wouldn’t have left an impression. It had been Halloween: even if he hadn’t wanted to change clothes, he could have walked past the bar in his Ozark Volunteers getup, covered in blood, and everybody would have just thought it was a costume in poor taste.
Instead of going inside to ask questions about a man nobody would remember, Hazard stopped and reconsidered the way he had come. If Hazard had been the killer, would he have ditched the murder weapon by now?
That was a difficult question to answer because there were too many different possibilities. If Hazard had changed costumes, he would have hidden the murder weapon and the clothes and come back for them later. In that case, Hazard still had a chance of finding them. But Halloween made everything different; last night, nobody would have blinked at a man carrying a bloody knife, regardless of what clothes he wore.
Frowning, Hazard paced down the alley, studying the back of McGrath’s. Nothing much to see, really: an old brick building, worn bumpers on the loading docks, two dumpsters, battered and blue. A sign on the dumpster closest to Hazard said: NO PICKING VIDEO SURVEILLANCE. And that sign, as sure as anything else, meant that the killer hadn’t wandered back here to drop off a bloody knife and a change of clothes.
The thought went through Hazard, freezing him in place. He went back to the street. He considered, again, the two blocks he had walked. Once residential, the 1970s-era homes in this area were slowly being torn down and the land rezoned and converted to a commercial/residential mixture. Like so many of the areas around Wroxall College, it was becoming a pseudo-urban space, with businesses occupying the ground floors and apartments and condos building upward.
Hazard jogged back to the north boundary of Wroxall. On the block closest to campus, development was mixed. More than half the block was still made up of those 70s-era homes: squat structures, their roofs almost flat, with asbestos siding that had probably once been mustard-colored or turquoise or rust, and now all looked like the same pukey-gray. He walked up to the second block. It had lost all of its original homes, and several construction sites showed the continued development of the area. Hazard walked the length of the block and then back. Cameras, of course. All over. Cameras for the businesses. Cameras for a bank ATM. And cameras for the construction sites—theft of materials was always a problem.
No chance, Hazard thought, his skin tingling. The killer wouldn’t have stayed on campus. And he wouldn’t have risked this second block if possible, not with all those cameras. Hazard studied the first block, the one closest to campus, considering the old homes. If I were running, Hazard thought, which one would I pick?
Obviously the one with the broken asphalt drive, with knee-high weeds strangling the chain fence and a good-sized sapling growing out of the gutter.
A chain had been hung across the drive with the warning NO TRESPASSING. Hazard stepped over and padded up the drive. A second NO TRESPASSING sign was taped inside a front window of the home, while below, an illegible tag showed a teenage sense of daring. Hazard kept moving up the drive, away from the street. He passed through the carport, noticing the broken lock on the door that led into the house. Kids, he guessed, and not college kids. High school vandalism. Or maybe junkies. He kept walking.
The backyard was a jungle. Presumably at some point it had been a pleasant green space, but nature had reclaimed it entirely. Dozens of saplings poked their heads over grass that came to the middle of Hazard’s thighs. An aluminum awning sagged, and morning glory hung like a curtain, hiding what had probably once been the porch. Hazard’s skin prickled. He didn’t like this place, didn’t like the hiding spots, didn’t like the way he was exposed. His pulse throbbed in his throat, making it hard to swallow. He focused on his breathing.
He could see a path through the tall grass, the brittle stalks bent and broken. A small voice suggested this might be a good time to call Somers. Hazard was still focusing on his breathing. And he slowly bricked up that little voice until he couldn’t hear it anymore.
Twenty yards to where the trail ended.
He could walk twenty yards. He walked that far every day. But a nasty voice reminded him that he walked twenty yards every day inside the same house, every day the same number of steps from the bathroom to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the basement, from the basement to the front door.
Twenty yards.
He started walking. His brain wouldn’t shut up. All the parts that Hazard had powered down were now awake and shimmering with electricity. He had turned them on again, and it had felt good, but now he couldn’t turn them off. Someone could be hiding behind the morning glory with a rifle, lining up a shot between Hazard’s shoulder blades. Someone could be bedded down in a ghillie suit.
Ten yards.
Someone could be inside the house, with a neat little circle cut out of old glass. Someone could be screened by the short-leaf pines and mistletoe that ran between the houses.
Five yards.
Sweat stung him under the arms. He could feel more sweat on his neck, the dampness of the cotton.
Ten feet.
A Canada goose launched out of the grass.
Hazard swore, his hand already reaching for the gun he carried under his arm. Only he didn’t have it anymore; he grabbed his tee, grabbed nothing.
The big bird struggled to get airborne, its wings flapping awkwardly, and then it glided a few dozen feet and landed again in tall grass, the tip of its dark head visible now as it honked furiously, angry at being startled.
Hazard could understand. Adrenaline prickled his skin; too much adrenaline. He had to close his eyes for a minute. He had to remind himself he wasn’t in the Haverford, wasn’t a moving target for Mikey Grames.
Blinking his eyes clear, Hazard dried his hands on his jeans and started forward again. He’d have to shower, hopefully before Somers woke; he could smell the fear sweat soaking his clothes. But he kept going. It was just a goose. Just a damn Canada goose.
At the back of the lot, Hazard found the grass matted where someone had paced back and forth. Looking for a spot, Hazard guessed, to climb the chain fence. On the other side of the fence, huge weeds blocked any sight of what lay beyond. Hazard could see where several of the tall stalks had been beaten down. He placed a hand on the top of the fence and vaulted it easily. He took two steps through the tangle of vegetation and found himself in an alley.
With a dumpster.
Hazard didn’t even have to worry about prints; the dumpster’s lid hung open. He looked in: black garbage bags, white garbage bags, an aluminum stepladder, a plastic airplane, on and on.
His phone began to ring.
Hazard would have ignored it, except he thought it might be about Evie. Somers’s name showed on the screen.
“You’re supposed to be sleeping,” Hazard said as he used the back of his hand to roll a garbage bag out of the way.
“I did sleep.” But Somers didn’t sound like he’d slept. He sounded tired. And grumpy. Which was, Hazard considered, a very un-Somers-like characteristic. “Where are you?”
“John, you barely got an hour’s sleep. Why are you up again?”
“I don’t know. This case.” Across the call came the sound of clothing rustling; Somers dressing, Hazard thought. “I’ve got a million things to do.”
“You need—” Hazard nudged aside another bag.
“I wanted to talk to you about this case a little more before I left. Why the hell would the Ozark Volunteers have anything to do with this?” Then, with slightly keener interest, “Where are you?”
“I just—” The lie caught in Hazard’s throat before he had a chance to finish. He rolled aside another bag and stared.
�
��If you took my dry cleaning in, I’m going to lose my goddamn mind.”
“John.”
“No, I’m serious. I want to do some of the stuff around the house, Ree. I want to help. I should be helping. I—”
“John, will you shut up?”
Silence.
“I think you need to see this.”
Somers’s voice, when it came back, was cool and controlled. “Where are you?”
Hazard rattled off the closest intersection, gave directions, and waited for his boyfriend to arrive. And while he waited, he studied the four-inch folding blade tactical knife, open and crusted with blood, that lay in the dumpster.
CHAPTER TWELVE
NOVEMBER 1
THURSDAY
6:12 PM
SOMERS CAME; WHEN HE saw the knife, he asked questions like a cop. What, when, where, why, how. And then he called it in, and the Wahredua PD took over the area, combing for more evidence. Some of the uniformed officers went back to the residence hall to re-examine the scene; Hazard left out the fact that he had gone inside, and only mentioned he had seen the broken latch from the hallway.
But that was all. Hazard felt strangely relieved at first. No questions about why Hazard had been there. No questions, really, about Hazard at all. Why this house, Somers had asked. Why this street? Why this block, why, why, why? But nothing—Hazard knew—that got to the heart of the matter. Why were you here? What were you doing?
“Let Somers do a little of the work,” Gross shouted after Hazard, cracking up half the guys. Their laughter chased Hazard as he trudged back to the minivan.
Hazard spent the rest of the day alone. In the dark. Floating.
That night, he went to dinner at Sheriff Engels’s house. It was a low-built ranch with what looked like a new roof, although the house itself had to be thirty years old. Along the porch, mums and pansies and tall, auburn grasses made a display of fall colors. The sheriff’s car was parked in the driveway, along with Somers’s Mustang—so he’d already arrived—and then two other cars: a Lincoln crossover, silver-colored and looking expensive, and then a sporty red Mazda convertible.
