The Rational Faculty (Hazard and Somerset: A Union of Swords Book 1)

by Gregory Ashe

  “You looked like a liar,” Hazard said. “And a suspect.”

  “I know, ok? I know. It was stupid. But I need this job, and I don’t want to get my friend in trouble.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Mitchell’s young face twisted with torment. “Man, come on. I’m telling you the truth.”

  “What did this guy look like?”

  “I don’t know. I saw him from behind; he had his back to the glass. But I could see Jim straight on.”

  “This is ridiculous. You’re wasting my time.” Hazard stood, pushing back his chair so that it screeched along the tile.

  “No, wait.” Mitchell grabbed him again, his wrist this time. “Please, I’m telling you the truth.”

  “Just like you told the police.”

  “I couldn’t see the guy’s face, but I know it was him. I saw what he was wearing, and he looked, um, cute. From behind. And I kept thinking that maybe he and Jim were hooking up, maybe Jim wasn’t as straight as he seemed. Because a couple of times, with Jim, I kind of felt a vibe, you know. So I was watching them out of the corner of my eye.”

  Hazard shook off Mitchell’s grip. “You saw Jim talking to somebody. It could have been anybody.”

  “No way. I know it was that guy, the Volunteer who attacked him. I was at the party, remember? I grabbed his shirt, I almost had him. I know it was the same guy: same build, same clothes. I know it.”

  “So what?” Hazard said, shrugging. “They talked. You can’t give me anything I didn’t know.”

  “You can’t mean that,” Mitchell said, his voice rising into a shout, the flush blooming in ugly patches again. “You can’t be stupid enough not to realize—”

  He cut off at Hazard’s slight smile.

  “What—” Mitchell sounded woozy. “Did you—are you trying to trick me?”

  “I’m trying to see how serious you are.”

  Mitchell licked his lips. “Serious. A hundred percent serious.”

  “If you’re right, and Jim knew this man, it changes how the case needs to be investigated. This isn’t just some sort of micro-incident in the Ozark Volunteers’ cultural war. This was personal somehow.” Hazard tried hard to stop the rest of it from slipping out, but he failed. “I can’t believe John didn’t at least hear you out.”

  “I think he would have,” Mitchell said. “I really do. But his partner, he’s kind of an asshole. Once he found holes in my story, he read me the riot act. That was the end of it.”

  Hazard turned over the story. He didn’t like it. He didn’t like that Mitchell had lied once and, for all Hazard knew, could be lying again. But the fact that Hazard didn’t like it didn’t necessarily make it false. And Mitchell was here, willing to put his own money on the table to make something happen about it. He thought briefly of Somers at dinner, the mixture of scorn and pity bleeding through the beer: Wasting his time with petty shit like dry cleaning.

  “Why would Jim Fabbri have any connections to the Ozark Volunteers?” Hazard asked. It was just a question, and a logical one, but Hazard could feel the slippery slope he had started down.

  “You know what I think? I think he wanted to use them for his next project. A close analysis of white supremacists in rural Missouri? I mean, Jesus, that’s raw material to keep him in publication for the next twenty years.”

  “I thought he worked on sexuality or gender. Something like that.”

  “He did. But it’s not like you can really tease that stuff apart anymore. Intersectionality shows that—”

  Hazard waved him to silence. “I know what intersectionality is.” He frowned. “You think this man was an informant?”

  Squirming in his seat, Mitchell shook his head. “No, not that. Not exactly. I mean, that makes it sound like he’s reporting their activity. It sounds like something a cop would say.” Another smile, as though Mitchell was trying to take the sting out of the words. “I think he was, like, a research subject. I mean, nobody would call him that either. Somebody for Jim to talk to, get stories from, learn about the organization.”

  “An informant.”

  Mitchell’s smile grew crooked. “That’s kind of cute, the way you do that.”

  Ignoring him, Hazard considered Mitchell’s point. The Ozark Volunteers, as far as Hazard knew, were closed-mouthed and clannish, wary of outsiders. For an academic, they might look like a golden egg: an endless supply of new articles, book chapters, surveys, and studies. But only with an access point. Only with a way past the walls the Ozark Volunteers used to keep the rest of the world at bay.

  “You didn’t hear anything they said?”

  “They were outside. I was inside.”

  “And you don’t read lips?”

  A tiny furrow grew between Mitchell’s eyebrows, and his grin was crooked again. “I can’t tell when you’re being serious.”

  “I’m always serious. Can you read lips?”

  “No.”

  “What the hell were they talking about?” Hazard said.

  “Find the guy and ask him,” Mitchell said. “That’s what I’m paying you for. Well, I’m paying you to find him and prove he killed Jim. But you can talk to him when you catch him; that could be kind of your bonus, you know?”

  “I haven’t agreed to work for you yet.”

  “But you want to.” Mitchell leaned in. “Please, Mr. Hazard. You’re good at this. You’re the best at this. And Jim, whatever else he did, he didn’t deserve this. I’ll pay you whatever you ask. I’m not rich, but I’ve got a little cash, and I can get a line of credit on my card—”

  Hazard held up a hand. “This isn’t a good idea. Let’s sit down with Detective Somerset. You can tell him—”

  “No.” Mitchell’s face was red again. He scooted his chair back, stood, and then dropped back again. He slammed a fist on the table. “No, God damn it. I want you. You. You’re the one who can find this guy, Emery. I don’t want your boyfriend and his asshole partner. I came here, I offered you good money. If you say yes, I’ll pay you whatever you ask. And I’ll tell you something I haven’t told anyone yet.”

  “Withholding information from the police is a form of obstruction.”

  “You’re not police.”

  “I think we’re done here.”

  “They were fighting. There. I told you. I’m not holding anything, no aces, no cards up my sleeve. You know it all, ok? I’m not really an asshole, I just—I just know you’re the one who can do this, and I don’t want you to walk away from it. Please. They were fighting. Jim was shouting—no, I couldn’t hear him. And I couldn’t hear the other guy. But Jim tried to walk away, and the guy grabbed him, shook him up, and then Jim started nodding really fast. He gave the guy something. I don’t know what. There. That’s all of it, and I just—please. Please say yes.”

  A shiver ran through Hazard. He wanted to push back from the table. He wanted to kick Mitchell’s skinny white ass out the door. But he kept thinking of what was waiting for him: the couch, the dark house, the ceiling staring back at him. And inside him, that string of lights was going on, one after another, and he felt the old parts and pieces of his brain start to turn again.

  “I charge fifty dollars an hour,” Hazard said before he even really knew what he was saying. “Plus expenses. And I need a thousand-dollar retainer to start.”

  “Fine.” Mitchell was grinning, that crooked grin. “Yes, God, awesome. Fine.”

  “In cash. Or I’m waiting until the check clears.”

  “You’re all customer service, is that it?” Mitchell laughed, and it was such a kid sound, so full of genuine excitement, that Hazard actually felt a smile touch his lips. “Fine. I’ll get it for you before tonight.”

  “Monday will be fine.”

  “No, no way. You’ve got to come tonight.”

  “Where?”

  “A bunch of people in the department are hosting a celebration of life for Jim. They’re all going to be there.”


  “They?” Hazard asked.

  “Everybody who was at the Halloween party. And there’s something you need to see.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  NOVEMBER 2

  FRIDAY

  3:37 PM

  HANGING UP THE PHONE, Somers blew out a disgusted breath. Dulac, sitting in the desk paired with Somers’s, was talking quietly on another line, although Somers could hear the occasional “Yeah, man,” and “Whoa,” and even a real gem that slipped out: “Fuckin’ A.” Somers managed to keep from looking over at his partner, but some of what he was feeling must have leaked out; Dulac hunkered down, cupping the phone with his hand to muffle his voice. Somers thought the guy was blushing.

  Somers flipped through the murder book, which lay open on his desk, and pulled up a blank document on the computer. He thought about making a list—any kind of list. Anything that would be a new track and maybe provide a lead. In a separate stack, a pile of follow-up calls waited for him; he and Dulac had worked their way through a good chunk of the calls, which had already been filtered once by uniformed officers. The good side was that at least Somers didn’t have to return calls about UFOs that had been seen hovering over Jim Fabbri’s residence the night he was killed. The bad side was that the rest of the calls were just as bad.

  “Sorry,” Dulac said, that ultra-innocent smile flashing out at Somers as he hung up the phone. “That was my little bro.”

  Somers grunted; he heard himself, heard how very much he sounded like Hazard, and wondered, briefly, how the universe had tipped everything upside down.

  Forcing himself, Somers asked, “Everything ok?”

  “He’s crushing it, man. He’s slaughtering it. Guys are falling over for him; he’s a total babe.”

  “You really think highly of your brother,” Somers said, trying to keep his voice neutral.

  Dulac exploded with laughter, stretching across the desk to slap Somers’s arm. “Dude, single child.”

  “Big surprise.”

  “I’m talking about my frat bro. My little. You know?”

  “I guess that’s better.”

  “Dude, you have no idea. He’s stone-cold gorgeous. Best fuck of my life; too bad we’re just friends. Hey, don’t give me that look. We didn’t do anything until we were both out of college, you know, because we didn’t want it to look bad.”

  “No look,” Somers said, holding up both hands.

  “And I’m not screwing around, I promise. Although he did say he might drive down for the weekend.” Dulac’s face shifted into angelic purity before he quirked an eyebrow, and Somers laughed despite his best efforts not to. “He’s some kind of administrator for the FBI,” Dulac continued. “Not an agent, you know, but they’ve got a million other people working there. He’s going to ask a buddy—”

  “A buddy?”

  More angelic innocence undermined by an eyebrow. “—a buddy to look into this. Totally unofficial, you know. Is there any buzz on the Ozark Volunteers, anything in the air about Fabbri. That kind of stuff.”

  “They’ll do that for an administrator?”

  “Dude,” Dulac said, slapping Somers’s arm again. “They’ll do it for a buddy.”

  “I’ll take whatever I can get.”

  And that was the truth. The case, today, had turned frustrating. After Hazard had discovered the knife—which the ME was still examining—everything had come to a standstill. It didn’t look like a standstill, of course. It looked like a frenetic, windmilling chaos; Somers hadn’t stopped moving all day, not even to eat, and a headache was gnawing at him. They’d started with the Ozark Volunteers, but that had been a shitshow from the first minute. Somers had started with Paradise Valley, a trailer park controlled by the Ozark Volunteers. At every door, they’d gotten either silence or a cocktail of dead-eyed women and howling children. Nobody who could—would—tell them anything, especially not over the din of children. They’d driven past the Rutter compound, another Ozark Volunteer outpost, and found the gate chained and the compound, by the look of it, abandoned. Somers had sworn, extensively, and driven back to Wahredua; he had a feeling he knew what he was going to have to do in order to talk to someone in the Ozark Volunteers, and he didn’t like it.

  The rest of the day, they’d dug into the backgrounds of everyone at the party, at first digitally and then making a trip to campus, asking around for anything. Literally anything that anyone might tell them. But for the first time, Somers was starting to realize that, in their own way, the academic enclave might be as clannish and defiant as the Ozark Volunteers: professors disappeared, grad students stared mulishly at the ground and insisted they’d never heard of fill-in-the-blank. Once, Somers had been talking to an otherwise pleasant young man with a soft Indian accent. The kid had talked himself in circles, insisting he didn’t know anything. Finally, struggling with an Emery Hazard-level desire to smack the kid on the back of the head, Somers let him go. And then, down the hall, he saw Lena Brigaud watching him. Smiling.

  So, out of frustration, they had retreated to the detective’s last stand: phone tips.

  “Pass me another,” Dulac said.

  “Do you want the guy who saw Jim Fabbri running across the neighbor’s roof two nights ago? Or the one who saw Cynthia Outzen skinny-dipping with, quote, ‘white supremacist leaders’?”

  Dulac screwed up his face. “Naked white supremacists? Pass. Give me the rooftop runner.”

  Somers didn’t pass it over, though. He dropped the sheets, made a noise in his throat, and said, “This is bullshit.”

  “It’s the job, man. We do the shit nobody else wants to do. We’re heroes. That’s why all those badge bucks can’t wait to jump our bones.” Dulac had that pie-stealing grin when he added, “I mean, for those of us who are single.”

  Somers had a reply about exactly why Dulac was still single, but before he could say anything, Patrick Foley came across the bullpen. Maybe his uniform collar was a little tight, or maybe it was something else, but Foley was even redder than usual, and his shoes clicked hard on the vinyl flooring.

  “What’s up?” Somers said.

  “Dr. Boyer’s here to see you.”

  With a grin, Somers said, “You doing introductions for everybody now? Go tell the guys in the kitchen I’m going to be coming in for a Diet Coke.”

  But Foley didn’t move—or rather, he didn’t walk away. He was moving, little shifts of his weight, adjustments to his position. Somers wanted to sigh again; he knew all the signs of a fight.

  “What?” Somers said.

  “We just weren’t sure,” and Foley jerked a thumb over his shoulder, as though to emphasize that the whole department was behind him, “if you wanted Boyer to give the report straight to Hazard instead.”

  Before Somers could reply, Dulac was out of his seat, crowding into Foley’s space, saying, “What the fuck did you just say to my partner? What the fuck did you say? Did I mishear you, you miserable Irish fuck?”

  The ferocity caught Somers by surprise; it must have caught Foley by surprise too because the big, red-headed man stumbled back, giving ground to Dulac.

  “All right,” Somers said, grabbing Dulac by the arm and dragging him toward the desk. They were close to the same size and build, and it wasn’t as easy as Somers had thought. “Enough, Gray. Drop it.”

  Dulac had stopped shouting, but now tension thickened the air; at the entrance to the bullpen, Dr. Boyer waited, her arms wrapped around herself.

  “Listen, you little piece of shit,” Foley shouted, driving a finger in Dulac’s direction. “I’m going to—”

  “Just walk away, Patrick,” Somers said. “You said what you wanted to say, all right?”

  “Fuck you,” Foley shouted, still stabbing his finger at Dulac. “You fucking asshole, I will fucking rip you apart.”

  “Fucking try it, just fucking try it,” Dulac yelled, slipping free of Somers’s grip and charging before Somers caught him again.

&n
bsp; Step by step, Foley retreated, still raining down expletives. When he was gone, the crowd lingered a moment longer; Somers could feel the blood in his face, but he made himself meet every stare in turn, and slowly the crowd of uniformed officers and civilians began to disperse.

  “What the hell was that?” Somers said, shoving Dulac into a chair.

  Already, the angry red splotches were fading, and Dulac turned a wounded schoolboy look on Somers. “Bro, nobody talks to you like that. I got your back, ok, I got your—”

  “Shut up. Just shut up. We’re going to talk about this later, all right? For now, try to be a professional.”

  Dulac’s wounded schoolboy look got a little more wounded.

  Shaking his head, Somers crossed to the bullpen gate. Dr. Denice Boyer was tall and painfully thin, dark hair cut short, dark eyes serious and vibrant and at odds with the rest of her washed-out, clinical appearance. She had replaced Dr. Kamp, the county’s previous medical examiner, after Kamp had been attacked. So far, she had been about a billion times better than the old drunk, although Somers suspected he might be a little biased in his calculations.

  “I’m sorry about that.”

  “Boys,” was all Boyer said.

  “Do you want to talk now?” Somers managed a smile. “I promise Dulac isn’t as much of an asshole as he just appeared.”

  “But he’s still an asshole?”

  “Ask me another day.”

  Boyer let herself through the gate, and together they returned to the desks. Dulac, in the meantime, had reverted to freckles and shit-kicker grins.

  The grins faded as Boyer passed copies of her report and began to explain.

  “So the knife matches,” Dulac said, frowning as he considered the paperwork. “It’s definitely the murder weapon.”

  “It’s consistent with the wounds.”

  “That’s what I’m saying,” Dulac said.

  “No,” Somers said, studying the report. “It could be the murder weapon, but you’re not sure. It’s something to do with this, is that it?”