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

by Gregory Ashe

  The manager, a short man in a Members Only jacket, smelled distinctly like sauerkraut. He eyed Hazard and then looked at Somers. “Your partner?”

  “No,” Hazard said.

  “He fixes sinks,” Somers said. “Do you have any sinks that need to be fixed?”

  Hazard glared at Somers over the top of the manager’s head.

  “I fix the sinks,” the manager said. “Nobody around here fixes anything but me. You looking for a job?”

  “No,” Hazard said.

  “Yes,” Somers said. “He’ll do anything. He’ll do it cheap.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “Ask him about making omelets.”

  “Be quiet, John.”

  “I pay minimum wage,” the manager said, eyeing Hazard again. “But you get a free room. You can do whatever you want. You can have a girl in there if you want.”

  “Did you hear that?” Somers said. “A girl.”

  “Shut up,” Hazard said.

  The manager unlocked the door to Mitchell’s apartment and stood in the hall, dry-washing his hands. “If he’s dead, I’m not going in there. I’ve got enough ghosts as it is.”

  “Did you hear that?” Somers said again. “You could have a girl and a ghost.”

  “My brother-in-law,” the manager said to no one in particular. “An absolute dick in life. Absolute dick. And now he’s got nothing better to do than remind me I should have gone to college.”

  They left him out there.

  The apartment was clean and sparsely decorated: a ficus near the window; in the kitchen, a kitschy, four-photo frame designed to look like a treehouse with pictures of Mitchell and a man and woman Hazard took to be his parents. Nothing on the walls. Furniture that looked like it was mostly cardboard and recycled plastic.

  They moved deeper into the unit. In the bathroom, a transparent shower curtain printed with tropical fish hung at one end of the tub. At the other, a small bottle of lube sat next to an anal douche kit. Someone, presumably Mitchell, had left a spray bottle of cologne by the sink.

  The bedroom was a disaster zone. Bifold closet doors stood open, revealing a jumble of clothes and hangers. More clothes littered the floor. A single poster for the TV show Mindhunter was tacked above the twin bed; on its white background, a bloodstain like a Rorschach blot obscured a screaming face. On the bed, open and face down, was a book, but Hazard couldn’t read the title at that distance.

  “He was going out for a date,” Somers said, standing next to the bed and pointing to a string of foil-wrapped packages. “Condoms. Lube packets.”

  “Or anonymous sex.”

  “It’s the twenty-first century, Ree. For these kids, anonymous sex is like hand-holding and a sock hop.”

  “Or he might have gone to the Pretty Pretty.” That idea sparked another, igniting a cool, luminous trail through the pathways of Hazard’s brain. “Hold on.”

  He got out his phone and dialed the sheriff.

  “Engels.” The voice was ragged; worry was starting to work on the man, the effect more powerful with every hour.

  Hazard explained briefly: his missing client, the wellness check, the indications that Mitchell might have been going to the club.

  “I don’t understand,” Engels said. “You think he had something to do with Rory going missing?”

  “I just want to know if Rory mentioned meeting anyone in town. Or if he might have known Mitchell somehow.”

  “No. He never said anything like that.”

  Hazard opened his mouth, but before he could ask his next question, Somers lifted his own phone and pointed to the screen. The blond man mouthed, Texts.

  “What about his text messages? Phone calls? If he was on your plan, I assume you can get a record of them.”

  “Hold on.” Engels’s breathing sounded labored, like a man having a heart attack. “Hold on.”

  For what felt like a long minute, no sound came across the line. Then Engels was back, and pages rustled. “The last call was a few days before they disappeared. We already checked that out; it was to a guy he works with. I remember looking through the texts, but I didn’t—no. He hardly sent any texts. He got a few incoming ones, alerts about credit card bills, and a couple from friends in Columbia. Nothing that took us anywhere. If that’s all, I really need to get back to work.”

  When the call disconnected, Hazard looked at Somers and shrugged. “It was worth a try.”

  “It’s not necessarily a dead end. Mitchell, Phil, and Rory disappearing, it’s very strange, especially when we’re in the middle of a murder investigation. The fact that Phil and Rory, at least, were last seen at the Pretty Pretty, and the possibility that Mitchell went to the same place, that’s important too.”

  Hazard shrugged and pocketed his phone.

  “Besides,” Somers said, “text messaging isn’t as popular as it used to be. People have all sorts of options now for privacy: iMessage, Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal. Use any of those options, and your phone company won’t be able to show the content of the message. Actually, they won’t even have a record of the message. That’s kind of the whole point.”

  “It’s fucking annoying, from a law enforcement perspective.”

  “But it’s great for a revolution.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A revolution is when—”

  “Don’t start, John. The book.”

  Grinning, Somers lifted the book from the bed; Hazard would have said something, but Somers was already taking care not to lose the page that the book was open to. He turned it over, examined the page, and held it out to Hazard.

  “A History of Wroxall College: Complete and Unabridged,” Hazard read from the front. And then, from the page the book was open to, “Chapter Fourteen. Laying the Groundwork for Higher Learning: Sewage, Foundations, and the 1917 ‘Copper Pete’ Scandal.”

  “Sounds absolutely riveting.”

  “I’ve never heard of this book.”

  Somers glanced at Hazard and groaned.

  Ignoring him, Hazard flipped forward a few pages. Then back. “This was Mitchell’s bedtime reading?”

  “Guess so.”

  “No way.”

  Somers moved over to the closet, shifting clothes, shuffling boxes on the single shelf. “It was on the bed, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but he wouldn’t be reading this for fun.”

  “What books do you have on your nightstand? This week, I mean.”

  “A Field Guide to Blood Spatter, Bas-Relief in the New Kingdom, Parapsychology and the Loss of Affect.”

  “And?”

  Hazard could feel his cheeks heat. “That doesn’t count.”

  “And?”

  “It’s just a print-out. It’s not technically a book.”

  “What’s the other one, Ree?”

  “I’ve got a print-out copy of the Anarchist’s Cookbook, ok? And you’re missing the fucking point. He’s a kid. A smart kid, but a kid.”

  Somers was still searching the closet when he asked, “What kind of books were you reading when you were his age?”

  Hazard glared at his boyfriend’s back.

  “I bet you read a lot of Nietzsche.”

  Hazard tried to glare harder.

  “Tell me you didn’t have a copy of On the Genealogy of Morals when you were his age.”

  “You didn’t know me in college.”

  “Ok, but just tell me you didn’t have a copy of On the Genealogy of Morals.”

  “The point is that Mitchell is the kind of kid who’s going out on Friday night, getting laid—”

  Somers glanced over his shoulder. “I just think you can be honest and tell me if I’m wrong. Did you have a copy of On the Genealogy of Morals when you were Mitchell’s age?”

  “Yes. Yes, I fucking had that fucking book. Now, will you—”

  “And was it on the nightstand?”

  “No. Will you—”

  �
��Are you doing some sophistical wiggle to get out of this? Are you playing semantics?” Somers’s eyes narrowed. “You didn’t have a nightstand. You had it on the floor next to your bed. A whole stack of books, I bet.”

  It was uncanny.

  “Ree?”

  “What I was trying to say—”

  “Ree, it’s a really simple question.”

  The word almost strangled Hazard. “Yes.”

  Somers cocked his head and cupped a hand behind his ear.

  “Don’t get fucking cute, John. I am not in the fucking mood for it.”

  With a grin, Somers turned back to the closet. “Ok, I get your point. About Mitchell I mean. Maybe he has the book out for a reason. But my point is valid too: maybe he just likes that kind of stuff.”

  Hazard waited for it.

  “You know,” Somers said, turning around again, beaming another smile. “Boring stuff.”

  “What now?” Hazard said.

  “Well, it’s like you said: when people disappear, they usually go places they’re familiar with. Comfortable with. Family, friends. Someplace they feel safe.”

  “If they disappear by choice. That doesn’t apply if they’ve been—” Hazard stopped himself and frowned.

  “Is that where we’re at with this? Do we think Rory and Phil and Mitchell were kidnapped?”

  “I don’t know,” Hazard said. “Honestly, I have no idea why Jesse would go after them. Rory and Phil might give him some leverage over the sheriff, and Mitchell is technically an eyewitness, but it just doesn’t make any sense.”

  Somers shrugged. “Let’s look for phone numbers, contact info. Mom and Dad. Friends.”

  “We should be looking for Jesse.”

  “We don’t have anywhere to look. When we finish here, we can go back to beating our heads against the wall.”

  So they looked. And it took less time than Hazard guessed; on the far side of the fridge, a magnet held a Halloween card. It had been signed, Love, Mom. He dug down in the trash and found the envelope, smeared with what smelled like tikka masala sauce, but with the return address still legible. He ran it through an online search engine, got a number, and dialed.

  He kept the call short, impersonal, and unofficial. Nothing to worry the mother, not until they had a better idea of what was really going on. When he ended the call, he returned to the bedroom and found Somers on the bed, flipping through A History of Wroxall College.

  “She says he’s not there. I told her a whole story about how I knew Mitchell, about why I was trying to track him down. She says she hasn’t seen him in weeks. She’s going to give him a call right now.”

  Somers hummed and kept reading.

  “My guess is that she won’t be able to reach him,” Hazard continued, “and she’ll get worried. Pretty soon, she’ll be raising hell too, and that’s good for us. The more people looking for Mitchell, the better.”

  “Right,” Somers mumbled.

  “Come on, let’s get going.”

  “Complete and unabridged is goddamn right,” Somers muttered to himself. Then he looked up at Hazard, his eyes soft as they refocused. “The lady who wrote this, she’s got copies of every page of the initial construction budget. They’re reproduced in here. She’s got blueprints, archival photos, journal entries from everybody. The first dean of students. A guy who dug trenches. A woman who sold coffee and sandwiches to the construction workers.”

  “See?” Hazard couldn’t keep a hint of wounded defensiveness out of his voice. “That stuff can be pretty interesting. I’ve got this documentary you might like about the history of history departments. It’s called Herodotus to Horne: Historians and the Rise of Burkeian—”

  “Oh God, no. Sorry. I totally gave you the wrong impression. This is boring.” Somers waved the book. “Incredibly, horribly boring.”

  “Oh.”

  “I just wanted to emphasize how boring it was.”

  “Well, you could have said that instead of, you know.”

  “Giving you false hope?”

  Hazard managed to hold his head high. “Yes.”

  “Sorry, baby.” Somers replaced the book and swung his legs off the bed. “I guess we should get back to the station and check in with Dulac. I asked him to pull in people from the arts facility; maybe some of them can tell us where Mitchell—holy shit.”

  “What?”

  Somers ran past Hazard, and Hazard spun and sprinted after his boyfriend.

  “What?” Hazard called again, but Somers was streaking past the building manager and heading for the elevators. “John?”

  “I think I know where Jesse’s hiding.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  NOVEMBER 5

  MONDAY

  1:02 PM

  WHEN HAZARD AND SOMERS got to the arts center, someone had taped a flyer to the inside of the glass doors. Midsummer Rehearsals in Kolb Concert Hall. Somers rapped on the glass as he stepped inside, drawing Hazard’s attention to the paper, and Hazard grunted in acknowledgment.

  At a desk on the far side of the glassed-in gallery, a girl with a ponytail was tapping away at her phone. As they approached, she glanced up. She squealed.

  “Oh my God.” She scrambled out of her chair and trotted around the desk. “Oh my God, both of you. I’ve got to get a snap, oh my God, hold on. Just hold on.” She kept coming, tottering on her high heels, until she seemed to decide she had the right position. Then she turned around, held up her phone, and pressed a button.

  Somers smiled for the camera. Next to him, Hazard was growling.

  “Jesus,” she said, “how many chins do I have? Hold on. Let me get one more—”

  “Enough,” Hazard said. “Kimmy, we need to get into the theater.”

  “Is this, like, about Jesse? Because I haven’t seen him. I promise. And I know Mr. Reisenbach would have said something. He’s batshit mad right now, you know. It’s bad enough, Jesse going missing, but now they have to be in the Kolb. Might as well put on Midsummer inside a crackerjack box.” She shrugged. “At least, that’s what he says.”

  “Keys,” Hazard said. “Now.”

  “Well, the thing is—”

  “Why are they in the Kolb?” Somers said. He had an idea, one that he’d explained to Hazard on the way over. Where might Jesse Clark take refuge when the shit hit the fan? Not with family or friends; they’d already tried to find him there. But maybe in a place he felt safe. Somewhere close. Somewhere with a lot of entrances and exits. Somewhere he could get to food and water and a bathroom when he needed to. A place he knew intimately. The theater, maybe.

  “Oh, half the people here think the theater is haunted. Funky smells. Things with the lights—one of them fell, nobody knows why. They came in one morning and it was in pieces all over the stage. And something got damaged. One of the canvas sets, I think. I don’t know. Oh. And the trap door. Patricia Main says she almost died; the trap door popped open right under her.” Kimmy giggled. “I could hear her scream all the way out here.”

  Hazard and Somers exchanged another look.

  “Keys,” Hazard said.

  “I’ll have to call Robbie. He went absolutely ape when he saw my snap from last time and you were looking at the video—”

  “This is police business,” Somers said, flashing his badge. “Keys. Then you can call your manager.”

  Kimmy tottered back to the desk and picked up a set of keys on a lanyard. “If I could just get one quick snap with your badge—”

  Grabbing the keys, Somers jogged toward the theater, Hazard at his side. It didn’t take them long to reach it, and when they did, Somers got the key on the third try, and the lock turned easily. When they stepped inside the theater, Somers smelled it.

  When he locked eyes with Hazard, Hazard said, “Fuck. I smelled it before, but I thought—”

  They ran inside, flipping on the house lights so that everything had a dusty, yellow glow. What took the longest was finding a way do
wn to the trap room. Hazard, of course, was the one who found the ladder, and he went down first, ignoring Somers’s call to wait. Somers climbed after him, swearing.

  Fluorescent tubes on the walls illuminated everything with a flat, flickering light. The smell was worse, bad enough that Somers had to cover his mouth with his sleeve and Hazard rucked up his shirt to breathe through the cotton.

  Even this far into the process of decomposition, the body was clearly Jesse Clark. He had fallen through one of the traps; that was obvious from the way he lay, his body broken on the concrete, his head twisted and flattened on one side. Judging by the bloat, the fissured flesh, the bloody foam, the maggots, Somers thought he’d been dead for days.

  Hazard shook his head and, speaking through his shirt, said, “Fuck.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  NOVEMBER 7

  WEDNESDAY

  7:00 PM

  THE NEXT TWO DAYS dragged by. Things started to settle back to normal, and normal, to Hazard, felt like a cage. Some wild, feral part of him was throwing itself against the bars; that same part of him thought he might die if he had to keep doing normal for the rest of his life.

  It was normal for Somers to go to work and come back exhausted. Defeated. It was normal for Hazard to drift through the house, losing hours during the day, with no sense of where the time had gone or what he’d been doing. It was normal to think about normal things: what about the utility sink; was it time for an oil change; what to make for dinner? Hazard had salmon in the refrigerator that needed to be cooked. And the asparagus was looking iffy. But the last two days—the last week—had been exhausting.

  He ordered pizza. And, out of guilt, ordered a salad too.

  Somers didn’t say anything about the salmon in the fridge. He didn’t say anything about the pizza. Nothing about the salad. He said things like, “Oh, thanks,” and “Sorry, napkins,” and in one burst of effusiveness, “Do you want a beer?”

  Another night, another time, Hazard might have wondered. Tonight, though, he understood. He felt the same way. The Fabbri murder had been closed. Jesse Clark was dead, and that death had been ruled a suicide by Denice Boyer, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary. With Jesse dead, Cravens had done the sensible thing: she’d dumped Jim Fabbri’s death on Jesse and wrapped the whole thing up with a bow.