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

by Gregory Ashe

  “Actually,” Hazard said. “I wanted to—”

  “And it doesn’t help on the other end either. I’ve watched every minute of footage from ten o’clock forward. Nobody comes out of the building who matches the killer’s description. Two girls come out around 10:32, using the main entrance, and they’re so wasted that one falls into the boxwood and the other one falls in after her. They were still there, by the way, when Carlson arrived on the scene. And then, at 10:38, the whole building comes pouring out.”

  “What I was going to say,” Hazard tried again.

  But Somers felt like he’d shoved his finger into an electrical outlet. “Jesus Christ, Ree. Jesus Christ. That’s how he got out of there.”

  Hazard raised an eyebrow.

  “He walked right out in the middle of the crowd. Nobody looked at him twice.”

  “I read the witness statements. Nobody saw him after he left Fabbri’s apartment.”

  “I know. He changed. Probably just lost the hat and bandana and sunglasses and pulled on a jacket.”

  “He wouldn’t do that. Someone would have seen his face.”

  “They all saw his face, Ree. He’s a fucking student. He might even live in that fucking dorm; nobody thought twice about seeing him in the crowd.”

  Hazard had gone still. “And then, later, he slipped out and laid a false trail with the knife, nudging us toward Carl’s apartment.”

  “Ok, let’s get back to the station,” Somers said, launching off the bench. “I’m going to get a list of students who stay in that dorm. Then I’m going to pull every drunken Wroxall kid out of bed and make them look at the footage with me until I know the name of every single person that left the building that night.”

  Nodding, Hazard opened his mouth.

  “Thank you, Ree. Jesus, you’re amazing. You’re absolutely amazing. You know that, right? Come on, I want to get back.”

  “John.”

  “Come on, Ree. Christ, I’m such an idiot for not thinking of this earlier, but come on.”

  Hazard considered this for a moment and then said, “You go on. I’ve got something else I want to check.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll bring it to you if I’m right.”

  “Is this like the knife?” Somers asked, a grin flashing out. “Am I going to have to explain to Foley why you’re doing my job?”

  “First you need to explain to Foley how to get his head out of his ass. Go, John. I’ll call you if I’ve got something.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  NOVEMBER 4

  SUNDAY

  1:27 PM

  HAZARD WATCHED HIS BOYFRIEND jog back to the police station. Then, collecting the empty coffee cups, he requested an Uber. Somers had apparently forgotten that they’d driven together that morning.

  The Uber took him back home, where he got his shoulder holster, his concealed carry license, and the Ruger Blackhawk that he had purchased to replace his old .38. He liked the way the revolver felt in his hand; he liked that it was chambered for .45 Colt cartridges. But most of all he liked that it looked so fucking badass, even if Somers had one time caught Hazard checking himself in the mirror, Blackhawk in hand, and teased Hazard for wanting to be a cowboy.

  Shrugging on his tactical jacket, which did a decent job of covering the shoulder holster, Hazard grabbed his keys. He drove the Odyssey to Wroxall and, on Sunday afternoon, was surprised to find the street parking full. Again. Even his spot hidden in the alley was being used by a massive Silverado. Hazard drove circles until finally he managed to wedge the Odyssey into a space by a fire hydrant, four blocks west of campus.

  The air had a static charge like a thunderstorm, but it had nothing to do with the weather. The sky was still that crisp blue-white. The air still stirred in pleasantly chill breezes. It took Hazard half a block to realize why the day felt off: the streets were crammed with cars, but nobody was on the sidewalks, stores and restaurants were empty, and houses and apartment buildings had a strangely shuttered look—blinds down, curtains drawn. Like everybody knew that something bad was going to happen except Hazard.

  A block away from campus, he saw the first man: stringy hair combed back, belly spilling out of a white tank top, a swastika in blue-green prison ink visible on his upper arm in spite of the cold. And a blowsy blonde with a Bright Lights banner in one hand, the white fabric collecting leaves and mud, and a mentholated cigarette in the other. And a pair of guys with trucker hats that said Bright Voices. And on and on.

  They clustered in threes and fours up and down the street. It wasn’t a mob, not yet. But these people were the seeds of one.

  He called Somers.

  “You’ve got something?”

  “Not yet. Something bad is about to happen.” Hazard explained what he was seeing. “You’d better call Cravens and get people down here.”

  “Shit, Dulac and I are on our way over there right now. He had a good idea: take a laptop with the videos instead of trying to get kids to come into the station. We’re almost to the dorm.”

  Hazard swore.

  “I’ll call Cravens,” Somers said. “She’ll send some people over. But I want to get in that dorm and ask questions. If this motherfucker really does live there, I want to wake him up, haul his ass out of bed, and take him into the station today.”

  “That’s a little ambitious.”

  “Witnesses told us he’s tall, broad-shouldered, dark blond hair, maybe brown. How many of them are going to fit that description?”

  “In a college dorm built for rich WASPy kids?”

  Somers sighed. “I forgot about your college boy fetish.”

  “I do not have—”

  “I better call Cravens. Wait. Why are you on campus?”

  “I’ll be in touch,” Hazard said, disconnecting.

  The gathering members of the Ozark Volunteers—or the Bright Lights, or whatever the hell they called themselves—stayed on the far side of the street, and Hazard breathed a sigh of relief when he crossed into campus. He wasn’t sure how much time he had; his guess was that Naomi was stoking the fires, and a full-on riot was about to break out. He needed to move fast.

  It didn’t take him long to find the arts building that Mitchell had described: a huge, glassed-in gallery at the front, with a large stone building at the back, presumably for offices and other, less artistic functions. Hazard walked around the outside of the gallery once, spotting security cameras, and then he went up to the doors.

  Sunday, 9 AM - 5 PM.

  He went inside and did a loop, spotting the interior cameras. As Mitchell had described, a girl was stationed at the welcome desk. When Hazard got to the desk, he swallowed a sigh. She was wearing a fluffy white cardigan and a pink pencil skirt. With chunky black glasses and a ponytail, she was giving off the look of a girl who took her job very seriously. Hazard was all about female empowerment. Fuck the patriarchy. But he didn’t have time to deal with bureaucracy.

  “I need to see footage from your security cameras.”

  “Hi,” the girl said. Even her voice sounded pink. Bubble-gum pink. “I’m Kimmy. How can I help you?”

  “I just told you. Security cameras. Right now.”

  “Oh my God,” she squealed, putting a hand to her mouth. “Oh my God, it’s you.” She grabbed the phone off her desk. “Hold on, I just need to get a quick snap.”

  “Not a fucking chance,” Hazard growled, swatting at the phone.

  The girl was surprisingly agile, and a moment later, she was spinning around in her chair, taking a second picture. A selfie this time. Hazard batted at the phone again.

  “Oh my God, seriously, you look just like him.”

  “Who the fuck are you talking about? And what the fuck are you doing?”

  “I’m keeping up my snap streak,” she said, in a tone that indicated he might be mentally defective. “And you look just like that police officer, the one who retired in the big corruption scandal.”


  “Emery Hazard.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That is me. I’m him.”

  “I know. But you actually look like him too, which is amazing.” She sang the word. “Half the time you meet a celebrity in real life, they don’t look anything like what they’re supposed to. One time I met Justin Bieber, only he looked ancient, like he was, um, thirty, and I—”

  “Security footage,” Hazard snapped.

  The girl jolted in her chair. “I can’t—I mean, I’m not supposed to—”

  Carefully, Hazard had to remind himself. Carefully. “Kimmy?”

  She gave a fractional nod.

  “Do you want to help solve a murder?”

  “Oh my God. Yes. One time, my friend, Janie Columbus, she was at Riverside Burgers when you and your boyfriend were there, and—”

  “Kimmy, I need to see that security footage.”

  “Right, I know, and I mean, I totally—”

  “You’d be a crucial help in the investigation. Think of the snap streak from that.” Hazard was using the term like a man thumbing through a nuclear submarine training manual.

  “Oh my God. Oh my God.”

  Hazard waited.

  “Ok, but you can’t, like, tell anyone. Ok?”

  “Of course not.”

  “And aren’t you, um, not a cop?”

  “My boyfriend’s a cop.”

  “Oh my God, he’s so hot. Were you two really a couple in high school? Because Janie said she heard one time you guys fu—did it in the locker room in front of the whole wrestling team, and—”

  Fire wreathed Hazard’s face. “Security cameras. Right now.”

  With a squeak, Kimmy launched out of her chair. Hazard followed her down a hallway, and she let him into a room with stacks of machinery and a four-screen monitoring station.

  “I don’t know how it works,” Kimmy said, passing her phone from hand to hand. “I don’t know what—”

  Ignoring her, Hazard pushed his way past and dropped into the chair. The system was simple and, thank God, entirely digital. No need to rummage through stacks of cassettes or DVDs. He pulled up October 31st and brought up the four exterior cameras on the four screens. Then he ran through them.

  At 4:47 PM, Jim Fabbri moved into the image. Then, at 4:51 PM, a man in a Cardinals hat came along the side of the building. Just as Mitchell had said; Hazard wanted to swear. He should have come here yesterday, but they had gotten busy with Naomi and the strange note on their door, and then—

  Well, no excuse for it now.

  The killer matched Lena Brigaud’s description, from the little Hazard could see of him. The security footage was in color and high resolution; even with the poor camera angles, it was easy to make out the Cardinals hat, the sunglasses, the bandana loose around his neck. Hazard couldn’t see the rest of his clothes, but he could tell that the guy was tall and muscular with light brown or dark blond hair.

  A soft tap drew his attention, and he glanced over his shoulder Kimmy was tapping on her phone, holding it up as though framing Hazard in the camera again.

  “Put that away,” Hazard said.

  Hazard couldn’t see the killer’s face well enough to capture a still image. He switched to the interior cameras. Two of them were no help because they looked at the other side of the building, and one of the remaining cameras caught mostly the front of the gallery. The fourth camera, though, was perfect. It was angled from high up, looking out over an enormous sculpture that reminded Hazard of an Oreo cookie blown up to epic proportions. It caught the killer dead on: Cardinals hat and sunglasses, but bandana down. He was a handsome guy. He was young.

  More tapping from Kimmy; she was whisper-squealing, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”

  It gave Hazard an idea. He pulled out his own phone and proceeded to take pictures of the image on screen. Then he captured several stills as digital files and, for good measure, sent them along with the camera feeds to an online cloud storage account.

  Kimmy’s phone binged. And then again. And then a third time, and twice more following that.

  Hazard glared at her over his shoulder.

  “Sorry,” she said, shrinking down a little. “It’s just, I mean, everybody’s going to talk about it.”

  “Talk about what?”

  “Uh. Jesse.”

  “You know this guy?” Hazard spun in the chair to face her. “You know who this is?”

  “Jesse Clark. He’s, um, super hot. And super gay, by the way. Janie made out with him at a party in Fort Lauderdale over spring break, but the next day, he was literally boning this guy in the shower while Freddy Manachowski was dying from a hangover in the room they were sharing, and Janie said—”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Uh, yeah. Freddy took like a million snaps of it. The guy wasn’t even that hot, but Jesse’s a total slut, and—”

  “No.” The word escaped as a strangled noise. “Jesse. You’re sure this guy with the hat and glasses is Jesse Clark.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How can you tell? He’s got a hat and glasses?”

  Kimmy made this little noise of mixed disgust and disbelief that Hazard recognized as universal to young people. “That’s his celebrity incognito look. He wears it, like, every day because he’s convinced he’s going to move out to Hollywood and get ‘discovered.’ I told him—” A series of dings from her phone interrupted her, and she tapped busily.

  “You know him,” Hazard said. “Personally, I mean. When was the last time you saw him?”

  Another of those vexed little sounds; this time, Kimmy didn’t look up from her phone. “Uh, like, I don’t know, every day. Rehearsals.”

  “He’s here?”

  “He better be.” Kimmy looked up long enough to roll her eyes. “He’s, like, an actor. I told you that.”

  “No, you said—” Hazard didn’t argue the point. He launched out of the chair. “Where?”

  “The theater—” Kimmy pointed vaguely, still staring down at the screen.

  Hazard ran.

  Past the gallery, the arts building opened into a series of hallways and lobbies and reception areas, obviously intended for a variety of functions. It wasn’t hard to find the theater, however; everything flowed in that direction, obviously in an attempt to require patrons to pass every other third-rate piece of art in the building before they got to see the third-rate performance of Annie or A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  When Hazard burst through the double doors at the entrance to the theater, he stumbled into darkness and a foul, closed-up smell. He pulled the door shut and saw what he had missed: a note taped to the door. Midsummer Rehearsal Multipurpose B.

  A gawky girl in a linen romper was staring at Hazard. He ripped the note from the door and waved it at her. “Multipurpose Room B?”

  “Are you even supposed to be in here?”

  “Multipurpose Room B?” he roared.

  Squeaking, she pointed down the hall.

  Hazard ran again. He found the room; on the other side of a wall of windows, a cluster of maybe twenty people, all of them college aged, most of them dressed in black, stood in a loose circle. One was carrying a papier-mache donkey’s head, and Hazard’s brain gave a satisfied click at having guessed Midsummer.

  They were all staring at their phones.

  That was when Hazard realized what had happened. Kimmy had blown the whole fucking thing. Kimmy had snapchatted the images from the security camera. She had probably told the whole world that Jesse Clark was the killer.

  And, of course, Jesse had seen it too. Or a friend.

  Pulling open the door, Hazard shouted, “Jesse Clark?”

  The kids in black stared at him.

  “Which one of you is Jesse Clark?”

  “He’s not here.” That one must have been the director: older, wiry, with patchy black facial hair. “And who are you? This is a closed rehearsal, and—”

&nb
sp; “He hasn’t been here in days,” a boy said, running his hand through his hair. “Totally AWOL since Halloween.”

  “What do you mean, AWOL?”

  “He’s not coming to rehearsal,” the boy said. “And he’s not—”

  “Timothy, please be quiet,” the director snapped. “What don’t you understand about a closed rehearsal? We have work to do. Jesse’s not here. Goodbye.”

  “I need to talk to—”

  “Are you police?”

  From the way the director said it, from the way his wiry frame vibrated with dislike, Hazard knew the director had recognized him and already knew the answer.

  “No.”

  “Then this is a closed rehearsal.”

  Hazard left the arts building and emerged into pale November sunlight, the grass crunching underfoot, and found himself staring out at the North Quad.

  Jesse Clark had killed Jim Fabbri. He had vanished on Halloween. Somers needed to know, Somers needed to—

  Screams rang out across campus.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  NOVEMBER 4

  SUNDAY

  2:01 PM

  THE KID SOMERS WAS interviewing kept picking his nose. He had to be eighteen, maybe nineteen, with a bad complexion and worse posture. Above his desk, he had a pornographic poster of a brunette in what Somer’s guessed was meant to be a teacher’s or a librarian’s outfit: a pencil between her teeth, an apple between her bare breasts, short plaid skirt hiked up to expose the whole business that this picker was really interested in.

  “I don’t know,” the kid said, curling into himself. His finger crept a few inches closer to his nose; he obviously thought he was very sly.