by Gregory Ashe
All the factors were there. If Hazard had wanted to line it all up and write the profile of a man on the edge, a man who might decide it wasn’t worth it to go on living, the profile would have looked eerily similar to Hoffmeister’s.
So why didn’t he buy it?
A young, dark-haired woman with a name tag that said Carlson let Hazard past the cordon. He took the steps up the porch, put on a pair of disposable gloves, and opened the front door. Through the doorway, Hazard could see Hoffmeister hanging from a noose. Hazard felt a moment of nausea as the smell of piss hit him, and then he detached that part of his brain and turned his attention to objective details.
First, the body: face swollen and black; scrapes along his neck, opened by the wire rope that bit into soft flesh; his hands taped behind his back.
Then, the room: someone—for the moment, Hazard allowed the possibility that it had been Hoffmeister—had punched a hole through the ceiling, looped the wire rope through the opening and over a joist, and brought it back down to tie the noose. Plaster dust speckled the floor. Also on the floor lay an overturned chair, a few feet from Hoffmeister, where it might have fallen when he kicked it over. And under the chair, just visible from where Hazard stood, a smartphone. Hazard traced the wire rope down to an electric winch, crudely bolted to the floor, splinters still marking the fresh damage to the boards. The winch was plugged into an outlet in the wall.
The whole setup looked more complicated than Hazard liked. He studied it all again, committing it to memory.
“Hey.” The voice was Norman’s, rougher than usual, and the officer was red eyed when he stepped into the living room. “Shut the fucking door. This is a fucking crime scene. Maybe you don’t remember what that means.”
“Where’s Cravens?”
“In the kitchen. And you can go the fuck around. We’re not touching anything until Dr. Boyer gets here and removes the—” Norman stopped, his voice drying up as he tried not to glance at the body, lost, and looked.
Hazard shut the door, walked around the side of the house, and found Cravens not in the kitchen but running a tight operation from the back yard. Somers leaned against the fence, arms crossed, while uniformed officers scurried back and forth at Cravens’s snapped commands. In between orders, she was talking to Gross, who looked just as red eyed as Norman; her words drew plumes in the freezing air.
“—everything, every single thing. If this was a suicide, fine, but if it wasn’t, I want every piece of that house bagged and tagged and held until Judgment Day. Is that clear?”
Norman’s balding head bobbed along with every word.
“Go,” Cravens said.
Norman shuffled toward the house.
As Hazard approached Wahredua’s chief of police, Somers offered a wave, but he didn’t join him. Chief Cravens was a short woman with silver hair in a neat bun; passing her on the street, catching her out of the corner of his eye, an ordinary guy might have mistaken her for somebody’s grandmother. She had a round face, full hips; she probably could have worn a sweater covered in cat hair as a disguise. But looking at her head on, few people would miss the steel in her eyes. She hadn’t become Wahredua’s first female detective and then first female chief by baking gingersnaps. And she hadn’t done it by keeping her hands clean, not entirely, either.
“I want to hear all of it,” Cravens said before Hazard could greet her. “From the top.”
So he told her, laying out everything the way Hoffmeister had told him, adding in his own interviews and assessments, although he omitted the part of his conversation with Savanna Twilight where he had snuck into the jail.
“For the love of heaven,” Cravens muttered. Then, more loudly, “That’s more or less how Peterson told it, although he hadn’t talked to the pastor or to that antifa woman.”
“Antifa?” Somers said from the fence.
“Don’t eavesdrop, Detective Somerset. You’re part of this investigation; you’ll be working with our outside consultant. Get your ass over here and quit trying to look pretty for your boyfriend.”
Somers grinned and sauntered over to join them. “Antifa? Like anti-fascist?”
“That’s what I said, isn’t it? What’s her name? Savanna something? Where is she now?”
“Savanna Twilight,” Hazard said. “And we don’t know where she is.”
“We have the address from the bail paperwork,” Somers said, “but she wasn’t there last night.”
“Find her. The woman called for Officer Hoffmeister’s death in front of the whole town. I want her ass in an interview room, and I want her there until I know everywhere she’s been for the last two weeks.”
Hazard glanced over his shoulder; officers still moved with a frantic energy, but from years spent at scenes similar to this, he could tell most of the activity was make-work, the uniformed police responding to the charged energy from their commanding officer.
“You think this was a murder,” Hazard said.
“I’m the chief of police, Mr. Hazard. I’ll let the medical examiner make that determination, with support from my detectives.” After a pause, she added, “And from you, I suppose.”
“Where’s Detective Dickbreath?” Hazard said
A hint of color came into Cravens’s face, and she straightened her back. “Detective Somerset, please have the consultant review the home. Be quick about it, too, please. We’re paying him by the hour.”
As Hazard followed Somers toward the house, Somers said, “There’s that natural charisma again.”
“Fuck off. What do you have so far?”
“It’s just too bad your silver tongue gets you into trouble sometimes.”
“I already said fuck off.”
“People would follow you into hell, the way you inspire them. They’d die for you, the way you win their hearts and minds with just a few simple words.”
Hazard let a silent moment pass as they took the stairs. “If you’re finished?”
“For the moment.” Somers pointed through the open door while he snagged a fresh pair of booties. As he drew them on, he said, “Norman and Gross are keeping everyone out of the front room. Living room. Whatever you want to call it. The rest of the house is open, but they haven’t finished photographing it yet, so we’re not moving anything.”
“Who found him?” Hazard asked, pulling on his own booties and a fresh pair of gloves. “And when?”
“One guess.”
“Lloyd.”
“Bingo. Right around noon—we can double check the call logs, but it was only a few minutes after the hour. Ehlers, who’s still on dispatch, managed to do her job right this once: she got everybody out here as fast as she could. Of course, she did it by screaming hysterically and then collapsing in the middle of the bullpen,” Somers added with a shrug, “but you can’t have everything.”
“It’s such a fine fucking department I wonder why I left sometimes.”
“Part of it’s because you were fired,” Somers added helpfully.
Hazard shoved his smartass boyfriend out of the way and entered the house. As he had felt two nights before, Hazard was struck again by the signs of bachelor living and poor maintenance: dirty dishes in the sink, dust bunnies under the kitchen table, rusted screws poking out where the dishwasher had worked itself loose beneath the countertop, a coupon for a $5.99 medium pan pizza held on the fridge by a magnetized picture of a 1950s pinup girl. He walked a circuit of the small kitchen. An empty bottle of Maker’s Mark stood on the table next to a chipped tumbler. On its side, like part of a tableau, next to the tumbler lay a small prescription bottle of translucent brown plastic. Hazard used the ferrule of a pencil to roll the bottle, to avoid smudging any latent prints, and read the label: a prescription sleep aid. A hypnotic.
“Somebody needs to count those,” he said, withdrawing the pencil and letting the bottle roll back into place. “Although OD and hanging seem excessive.”
“Let me make a note,” Somers
said. “Gee, can you spell that for me? OD? Is that right? Golly, Mr. Hazard. It’s a good thing you’re here. Us local bumpkins would have walked right past those pills.”
Hazard flipped him off and then pointed to the countertop. “Where’s the toaster?”
The slight flicker in Somers’s face was confirmation.
“You didn’t spot that,” Hazard said.
“Toast crumbs,” Somers muttered. “God damn toast crumbs.”
“Do you want me to spell toaster for you too?”
With a grin, Somers nodded. “Oh, yes, please, Mr. Private Detective. But go really slow. Our schoolmarm left when I was on my fourth year of the third grade, so I didn’t get much book learning.”
“Jesus Christ,” Hazard growled, “did you hit your head this morning?”
Somers just grinned some more.
On someone else, Hazard might have found the attitude disrespectful in the presence of death, especially the death of a co-worker. But police, especially those who worked closely with homicides, developed coping methods for death. They manifested in different ways, although humor was common, a flippancy to offset the overpowering reminder of their own mortality. And Hazard knew Somers. Knew him better than anyone else, maybe—or liked to think so. Even though Somers might not have liked Hoffmeister, Somers was still a human being, and humans were biologically programmed with an aversion to seeing a fellow human dead.
“I should have asked this earlier,” Hazard said. “Are you ok?”
Somers’s smile faded. “Yeah. I mean, what a shitty thing to happen. The guy didn’t deserve this.”
“So you think it’s a murder too?”
“I think it’s not coincidence that a guy gets shot at one night and then two days later is strung up. But I think there’s a lot of stuff we can’t explain.”
Hazard frowned. As he moved into the bedroom, he asked, “Time of death?”
“The ME hasn’t even gotten to work on him yet.”
Hazard threw a backward glance over his shoulder, fixing his boyfriend with a look.
“Lloyd said he was still warm when he got here. But—”
“But?”
“You know how Lloyd is. I mean, not exactly the shiniest badge in the bullpen.”
“Don’t use metaphors.” Hazard frowned. “He’s stupid but not that stupid. I mean, if Lloyd can’t tell the difference between a warm body and a cold one, he shouldn’t have a gun. He shouldn’t be allowed to shop for his own groceries. Why was Lloyd out here? Noon on a Wednesday?”
“So you think it’s a murder too,” Somers said with a slight crook at the corner of his mouth, to show he knew he was parroting.
“It’s like you said: too much to be coincidence. If Lloyd was giving Hoffmeister a ride to work, he should have been out here this morning. Did Hoffmeister call in sick? Did Lloyd say why he felt like he needed to check on him?”
Somers was studying Hazard now with that uncomfortable way he had of looking like he knew everything happening in Hazard’s head. “Hoffmeister missed court; he took the day because the criminal trial started today.” Then, after a beat, he added, “You think Lloyd did this.”
“I think whoever finds and reports the body has a statistically higher chance of being the killer.”
“You think Lloyd came here, installed that whole setup, and hanged Hoffmeister. Then he called it in?”
Hazard grimaced. “That’s the problem.”
“That’s one of the problems.” Somers jerked a thumb at the front room. “Maybe the biggest one. You saw the front room?”
“Most of it. From the doorway.”
“So you saw how he did it: knocked holes in the ceiling, ran the wire rope over a joist, bolted that goddamn winch to the floor. All he had to do was plug in the winch, get it going, and put that noose around his neck. If somebody did that, it would have taken time. Maybe an hour. Maybe more. And what was Hoffmeister doing all that time? Why don’t we have any neighbors who saw somebody going in or out of the house today?”
“Why the chair?”
Somers blinked, but he caught up after a moment. “Why did he stand on a chair?”
“That winch could tow an F-150 out of a ditch, John. It certainly could have lifted Hoffmeister off the floor. There was no need to stand on a chair.”
“Maybe he wanted a little extra time to think. Maybe he wasn’t sure.”
“If it was a suicide, he was sure. He taped his hands. It sounds impossible, I know, but it’s actually not uncommon in hangings. Suicides only do that if they’ve attempted the act before and don’t trust themselves not to back out. A pretty well-known author did it not that long ago.”
Somers shrugged. “He wasn’t that bright, Ree. Maybe he just thought it was a necessary part. Or maybe he wanted to kick it out, take the initiative, and the electric winch was the final backup.”
Hazard blew out a breath, scanning the bedroom. He didn’t see anything different. He opened drawers, rifled clothes, looked under the bed. Nothing drew his attention. He checked the bathroom: the same thing. As he got closer to the living room, the smell of urine grew stronger. Norman and Gross were leaning against the wall; they shot identical, sullen glares at Hazard, and they looked more like kids who’d been sent to the corner than grown men who’d suffered a tragedy.
“You can’t go in there.”
“Yeah, you can’t. Not until the ME’s done.”
Hazard shook his head and studied the room from the hallway, taking it in from a new angle, looking for anything he might not have spotted the first time: Hoffmeister’s body, motionless and slack; the wire rope running through the punched out plaster and down to the electric winch; the winch’s power supply cord running to the outlet; a small plastic plug adapter, a fancy one. For a moment, that troubled Hazard, and then he glanced at the outlet next to him: two-prong. Older houses like these often didn’t have grounded outlets, so whoever had plugged in the winch had needed an adapter.
Jerking his head at Somers, he left Norman and Gross and headed out the back door. Now he caught a glimpse of Lloyd pacing the front yard, running both hands through his hair, his dark, elvish features in a shocked disarray that looked like the emotional equivalent of a school bus going through a china shop. Hazard watched him for a moment, looking for any flaws in the performance. Somers stood with him, the familiar smell and heat of his body welcome against the December chill.
“If it’s murder, we have problems,” Hazard said, still watching Lloyd: a man trying to walk off grief. “You said nobody went in or out?”
“Neighbors didn’t see anyone.”
“It’s a weekday. They might have missed something.”
Shaking his head, Somers said, “There are enough snoopy old birds on this street that nobody missed it. Think about Mr. Tomlinson. He’s on the corner lot, and he doesn’t miss anything. Practically lives at the front window. I think he knows my poop schedule.”
“Your poop schedule?”
“From watching the bathroom light go on.” Somers jerked a thumb at the privacy fence that ran around the backyard. “And before you say it, nobody went through the back either. See that house directly behind Hoffmeister’s lot? Across the alley? Well, the lady who lives there is a royal snoop. She won’t say it straight out, but she basically admits to watching the alley night and day. Sits by the window to read, she says. And Hoffmeister’s gate has been open. She swears up and down nobody came through last night or this morning.”
“Ok, so, nobody saw anyone go in or out. That’s a problem. Hoffmeister died within a few hours of Lloyd discovering him, and that’s a problem too: the setup in there is too complicated; it would have taken time.”
“And, more importantly, it’s too elaborate: why not just shoot him? Why not bash him over the head? Why not beat him to death?”
“Ok,” Hazard repeated. “So if it’s murder, we’ve got a lot of problems. But if it’s suicide, that’s got problems too
.”
“Why does he set up the chair?” Somers said.
“And why the winch? The same question about complexity: why go to so much effort? Hoffmeister wasn’t handy; I bet if we check the sinks, at least one of them will have a slow drain, and we’ll find burned-out lightbulbs, stuff like that. He doesn’t make an effort for anything else, so why go to all the effort of smashing the ceiling, running the rope up through the hole, bolting down the winch, all of it? Why not the pills and the bottle?”
Somers rolled one shoulder; his attention had gone to Lloyd too, now, and his eyes were narrow. “It feels like somebody’s pushing us really hard to think this is a suicide. The pills and the bottle? I mean, come on. Why not a razor too? Why not a loaded gun? Why not put out all the props and really set the stage?”
Nodding slowly, Hazard processed the words. As usual, Somers had put his finger on something Hazard hadn’t quite been able to name: an unease at the sight of the pills and bourbon. Now he realized what had troubled him: it had been too heavy-handed, too on the nose.
“Or a fake suicide note,” Hazard said. “Typed, so we couldn’t check handwriting.” He ran backward through the last few days and felt his cheeks heat. “That’s what I haven’t liked about this case from the beginning. I feel like I’ve been railroaded. By Hoffmeister, I mean. Pushed and pushed toward the idea that somebody wanted to kill him, when the only evidence was—” He cut off, the heat in his face flashing to fire.
“The only evidence was somebody shooting at him on our doorstep,” Somers said drily, “trying to kill him?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I do,” Somers said. “And now somebody wants us to think suicide. Who’s running the show, then? Hoffmeister’s dead, so we know he was right: somebody did want to kill him. But who? And why?”
