by Gregory Ashe
Somers, shifting on the seat, picked up the line of questioning. “What my partner is asking is, did she use those exact words?”
“How the hell should we remember?” Bing said. “All we want to do is forget it, and now that Hadley’s dead, you’re dragging us through that shit—”
“No.” Daisy had a slightly curious look on her face. “No, she didn’t. I remember every word of that damn email. She said she needed help. She said she needed a real man to take care of her.”
“You’re sure?”
“I read that email a hundred times, Detective. A thousand.”
“And it was sent from her email?”
“For the love of God,” Bing said. “What is this? Are we chasing our tails in here?”
“Yes,” Daisy said. “From her email.”
Hazard spoke sharply, leaning into the words. “What is her email address?”
“It’s her first and last name. What is this about?” For the first time, Daisy Bingham looked genuinely curious. “What’s going on?”
A small but violent disappointment flared in Hazard. For a moment, he hoped he had caught a thread in this maze. But the email that had been used to contact Wayne Stillwell was different from Hadley’s personal email account. That didn’t necessarily rule her out; email accounts were easy to create. But for a moment, the similarities had been dizzying: contact with a strange man, no promise of payment, and the specific language about needing a man—not a boy, a man. Even without matching emails, it was clear that the messages were related. But had Hadley sent both of them? Or had someone modeled the second message on her first? And if so, who?
“Is there anything else from Chicago that we should know?” Somers said. “That boy, Peter. Has he tried to contact her? Made any threats?”
Bing shook his head vigorously. Daisy gave a languid shrug.
“Anything else?”
“Having our home burned down pretty much ended our time in Chicago, Detective. We lived a few weeks in an apartment—God, it was awful, carpet like you wouldn’t believe—and then Bing dragged us all to the quietest shithole in the whole world.” A smile dimpled her cheek. “Pardon my French.”
Hazard barely heard her. He had the itch now, the maddening itch of being able to see—almost, almost—the shape of the puzzle. He was close, and his thoughts bent towards it completely, turning over everything they had uncovered in the past few days: the emails at Stillwell’s, the blackmail recording that Glenn Somerset held, Mayor Newton’s insistence that they abandon the case, and Swinney’s revelations about Lender and the phone call that had ended Stillwell’s life—a phone call that had originated from Hadley Bingham’s mobile phone after the girl had died.
Somers was asking something—more questions about Chicago, but Hazard already knew, in the bluish-cold mixture of logic and intuition, that nothing else mattered about Chicago. He heard himself speaking almost before he knew what he was going to say.
Balancing Hadley’s phone on his palm, he said, “Do you recognize this?”
Daisy began to shake her head.
“That’s Hadley’s.” Bing glanced at the phone and then at his wife.
Her head frozen in mid-shake, Daisy’s face became a mask.
She didn’t know, Hazard realized. She hadn’t recognized the phone. Now that was very interesting.
Bing was still talking. “How did you—”
“This was recovered with her belongings at the crime scene.”
“Shouldn’t it—” Bing made an enveloping gesture with his hands. “Doesn’t it need a plastic bag or something?”
Ignoring the question, Hazard said, “Do either of you know her passcode?”
“Hadley wouldn’t tell me what she ate for breakfast,” Daisy said. Her voice aimed at something light, mocking, but her eyes had latched onto the phone. “She definitely never told me her passcode.”
“You?”
Bing shook his head. “No. I mean, I can call the phone company. I pay the bill; they’ll—”
“Yes, that’ll be fine,” Hazard said. “The sooner the better, in fact.”
“I don’t understand,” Bing said. “Aren’t you going to return—”
“Right now,” Hazard said.
“What?”
“Call the phone company right now. See if they can unlock the phone.”
For a moment, Bing seemed speechless. One big hand came up and wiped at his forehead, dragging sweat through the thick black curls. Then he sprang out of the seat and marched deeper into the house. Daisy watched him go, and then her eyes returned to the phone.
Would she admit that she didn’t recognize it? Or would she keep up the charade? Whatever else she was, Daisy Bingham was a cool customer. The mask hadn’t slipped an inch, except around those doll eyes. Those eyes had come terribly, vibrantly alive.
“Parental controls,” Somers said. His voice shattered the silence, and it was all Hazard could do not to jump.
“What?” Daisy said.
“On smartphones. Almost all of them, they have these parental controls. Some of them are built into the phones. Some of them are apps you download. It’s a way for parents to make sure they have some way of keeping track of their kids’ digital lives.”
Cocking her head, sending sparks through the chestnut cascade, Daisy said, “What are you saying?”
“Didn’t you and your husband have something like that on Hadley’s phone? It looks like an expensive model. I’m sure you would have wanted to keep track of it—and of your daughter, of course.”
For a moment, Daisy didn’t answer. Then she said, “My husband told me about you. When we moved back here, he started talking about the old days. I wanted to know all about this little shithole. I wanted to know about the movers and shakers. And he told me about you.”
The words were hooked, each one sharper than the last, and Hazard watched as the color drained from Somers’s face until his normally golden skin was splotched with red. “Did you have those parental controls installed on Hadley’s phone?”
“Is it true? What he told me, I mean.” And then her eyes drifted to Hazard. She waited, as though expecting a reaction from him, and Hazard stared back at her. After a moment, Daisy laughed—tittered, Hazard’s mind said, she’s fucking tittering, her fingertips pressed to her mouth—and said, “He doesn’t even know, does he?”
“Please answer the question,” Somers said, his voice cracking with undercurrents of emotion.
Daisy stared at Hazard for a moment longer, the tittering fading into a smile, as though still waiting for him to join in.
“Is there a reason you’re not willing to answer my question?” Somers said. “You looked surprised earlier. Did you recognize the phone?”
An ugly scree of fury scraped the smile from Daisy’s face. “Will you let up about that already? Bing takes care of all that.”
“All what?”
“All of it. The money. The bills. Hadley. All the shit, he shovels it. If he had something installed on the phone, you’ll have to ask him about it. It’s something he would do. He had me followed once. Did you know that?” She straightened, her back slightly arched, offering a view down the plunge of her negligee. “We had been dating for a few years. Bing got this crazy idea into his head that I was cheating on him. I told him: I don’t cheat. If I want somebody in my bed, you’ll know. But he had me followed just to make sure. There’s not a lot of guys who will do that. Not a lot of guys who care.”
She was bragging, Hazard realized, and the realization brought the cold-steel gearwork of his analysis to a halt. This woman was bragging that her now-husband had hired a man to stalk her. And for a moment, Hazard was back in that shitty apartment he’d shared with Alec, and Alec had the belt, and he’d said—Jesus, what had he said? This is because I care? That didn’t sound right; those memories were hazy. Hazard had done his best to block them out.
But not Daisy Bingham. Daisy was proud. Prou
d, especially, of the attention and desire her husband had shown. And now, in a different light, Hazard remembered the ways she had described Hadley: Daddy’s girl, Daddy’s princess, Daddy’s favorite, all spoken with the twisted bitterness that underlay everything she said.
“Has your husband had anyone else followed?” Some of the color had returned to Somers’s face. “Does he have a habit of hiring private investigators?”
“Do you think that’s how he found out about you?”
Somers flushed again, but this time, Hazard spoke. “You’re baiting a sworn officer of the law, Mrs. Bingham. Why?”
Those doll eyes batted and flitted. They looked like glass from a distance. Dark, dead glass. She didn’t speak; she didn’t have to speak. That smile reappeared on her face and it just kept growing like she had a secret that might just make her explode.
“I’m very sorry,” she finally managed to say, but that smile didn’t budge, not an inch. “Please. Ask whatever you need to ask.”
“How did Hadley handle the move to Wahredua?”
Daisy made a thoughtful noise, her finger mockingly perched on her lips as she pretended to consider the question. “Hmm. How did a teenage girl deal with moving from one of the best cities in the world to this shithole that smells like something stuck in the toe of a boot? Do you want to guess, officers?”
“Are you saying she was unhappy?”
“Hadley hasn’t been happy since puberty. No, longer. Since she started school, really. But she was particularly unhappy about coming here. She had to leave behind everything. Bing and I agreed that was for the best, but Hadley hasn’t changed.”
“What do you mean?”
“That sofa, for example.”
Hazard brushed the back of his hand over the leather, so smooth it glided under his touch.
“What about it?” Somers said.
“I asked her to vacuum the sofa cushions.”
“And?”
“See for yourself.”
Hazard rocked sideways and felt under the cushion. He found the ragged edges of leather spilling out batting.
“Cut the cushions like she was going to serve them for dinner. I guess I’m just lucky she didn’t come after me with the knife.”
“You were in the room?”
“Do you think I would have stood here and watched? No, Detective. I came home and found the place like this.” For a moment, something genuine peered out from behind Daisy’s mask—a weary, helpless look. “We’d gotten to the point that I didn’t think we could leave her at home alone anymore.”
“Did she have any friends? Bing said you’ve lived here for a few months. Someone from school—”
“Her grandfather,” Daisy said immediately. “You couldn’t pry those two apart. Both of them just as stubborn and just as awful as the other.”
“Anyone outside the family?”
“Christ, you probably mean those faggots.” Daisy’s mouth curled into an expression of mock horror as she glanced at Hazard. “Oh, Detective. I’m so sorry.”
Hazard didn’t bother to respond. He was struggling inside himself, struggling to recapture the liquid-crystal clarity of thought that he had experienced earlier. What had he seen? What had caught his attention in this conglomeration of strange events?
“Who are you talking about?” Somers said.
“Those boys. The ones from high school. The ones she was dating.”
“These boys are gay, but she was dating them?”
Daisy flapped a hand. “It never made any sense to me. One time, just once, I said something to her about it. I said if she wanted a boyfriend, fine. If she wanted to be on the pill, if she wanted condoms, if she wanted the HPV vaccine, fine. But I said, what good is any of that if those two are too busy screwing each other?”
“You were very frank with your daughter.”
“No need to sound so judgmental, Detective. Hadley gave it back ten times over. She said their relationship was purer than that. She said—here’s Daddy’s sweet little girl for you—she said she didn’t plan to grow up like her whore mother. Those were her words, to my face, in my house. Like her whore mother.”
“What did she mean by that?”
“Fuck you.”
Somers didn’t press the point, but Hazard could feel his partner’s sudden pulse of satisfaction.
Daisy had collapsed into moody silence, picking at the negligee’s strap again, when suddenly she burst into speech again. “They’re not even really faggots, though. I mean, they can’t be. I don’t know what kids call it now. Maybe they’re bi. Maybe they don’t even use labels anymore. But I saw the way the one, the big one, looked at Hadley, and he wasn’t thinking anything pure. And—” She paused, as though her words had almost carried her too far.
“And what?”
She shrugged and took the plunge. “And they stole her underwear.”
“What?”
“They were always over here, and one day I heard Hadley get in a huge fight with them. The next day, someone came into the house. We don’t lock the doors—Bing promises we don’t need to. Shows what he knows, I guess. Those boys walked right into the house while we were gone, and they tore Hadley’s room to pieces. The weekend before, we’d driven into Saint Louis, and I’d bought Hadley all new things at Victoria’s Secret. A bagful. And that’s what they took—they couldn’t steal old panties, I guess.”
“I’d like to hear a little more about those boys,” Somers said. “Their names. Anything else you remember about fights with Hadley.”
Daisy opened her mouth, but before she could speak, Hazard got to his feet. “Can I use your bathroom?”
Jabbing a finger towards the hallway, Daisy said, “I know those boys weren’t gay. Not all the way, at least. One time Bing walked in on them when they were here, and he swears they weren’t doing anything wrong, but I know something happened. Hadley couldn’t even look her father in the face. Not for a week. Back in Chicago—”
As Hazard moved down the darkened hall, he missed the rest of Daisy’s story. His mind was still turning over the similarities between what had happened to Peter in Chicago and what had happened here. And the dynamic in the Bingham home, toxic and claustrophobic, mixed with his other observations. The doting father. The jealous mother obsessed with attention, sexuality, and control. And what about the sheriff? Where did grandfather fit into this horrible menagerie?
What was clear now—clear, at least, to Hazard—was that someone either wanted Hadley Bingham to appear involved in the shooting, or she actually had been involved. If it had been Hadley, then perhaps last night’s events had simply spiraled out of control. This time, the lunatic she asked for help had been too dangerous, too unpredictable.
But if it had been someone else, then it had to have been someone who knew enough about Hadley’s past to make her involvement seem probable. Who? Her mother? Her father? Her grandfather? All three of them seemed likely suspects. But who else had found out? Her boyfriends—the faggots, as Daisy had called them? Mayor Newton? How hard would it have been to dig up a few pertinent facts from Hadley’s background and use them to stage last evening’s performance?
The problem, of course, was that Hazard had too many unknowns in his equation. It was impossible to advance his theories any farther without more evidence. Concrete evidence. Something that would either cement Hadley as the victim of her own twisted plan or vindicate her. That was what Hazard needed, and so he hurried down the darkened hall, checking doors, searching for her bedroom.
One door along the hall stood open, and weak light showed through the crack. Hazard, hidden in the shadows, examined the scene in front of him. Seated at an expansive glass-and-steel desk, Bing had his head in his hands, studying the phone that lay on the desk’s glass top. He wasn’t talking to the phone company; that much was obvious. But he also hadn’t returned to their conversation. Why? Grief? The need to escape, for however short a time, his wife’s caustic com
pany? Guilt? Any of the three were possible. All three were possible. Hazard waited a moment longer, and then, just as he was about to skirt the doorway and continue his search, Bing’s phone rang
Hazard froze, pressing himself against the wall, his heart stuttering wildly. The phone continued to ring, and not until the fifth ring did Bing scoop up the phone and swipe a big finger across its glass. He spoke dully, head still dropping forward, as though it were too heavy to lift. Then, all of the sudden, he snapped upright, every inch of him locking taut.
“What?”
For a moment, Bing was silent as the voice on the phone answered. Then, jerking the phone closer to his mouth, Bing shouted, “I heard what you said. I heard damn well. One fucking bullet. There? Is that enough for you? One. I heard the report—no, no, no, you shut up. Just shut your fucking mouth. This has nothing to do with you.” Then he dropped the phone onto the desk. His chest was heaving as though he’d run straight up a mountain, and he ran heavy hands through thick curls, clutching so tightly that the skin around his eyes pulled tight.
One bullet. Hazard hesitated a moment longer, and then he shifted past the door, suddenly embarrassed to be observing Bing in a moment of hidden pain. As he crept down the hallway, Hazard heard weeping coming from the study behind him.
One bullet. The thought came again, clear, echoing in his head. What did that mean? One bullet had killed Hadley? That’s what it sounded like, but who would call Bing with that kind of information? And why?
Hazard found Hadley’s bedroom on the second floor and used the flashlight on his mobile phone to examine the space. It was a large room with an en-suite bath, and in no way had the descriptions of Hadley prepared him for what he saw. Hazard had anticipated huge posters of goth and metal bands. He had expected a spartan, utilitarian organization. This was a girl, after all, who had gone out of her way to defy her parents, to become everything they didn’t want her to be. This was a girl, he had reasoned, who would seek out and embrace a counter-culture—maybe several of them.
Instead, he found princesses. Paintings of them. Figurines. Dolls. Embroidered pillows. Even the bedspread had a Disney princess stretched across its cotton. Hazard played the mobile phone’s light across the room again and then once more. The shadows swept and loomed, and in the fluttering light, the dolls’ eyes were luminous.
