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

by Gregory Ashe

  “That’s it,” Boyer said.

  “It looks like the inventory of a chem lab,” Dulac said. “All this stuff was on the knife? Maltose? That’s a sugar, right?”

  “Yes. The blood had corn syrup on it. And red dye.”

  “Fake blood?” Somers said.

  “It’s a classic,” Boyer said. “Very easy formula, although you can add other things in to stabilize it, change the viscosity, and so on.”

  “Dude,” Dulac said, smacking Somers’s shoulder. “It was Halloween. Fake blood. Cynthia had fake blood, remember?”

  Somers nodded. “But Cynthia had fake blood on her face, already dried, and not on her hands. There was no way it got on the knife.”

  “Definitely not in these quantities,” Boyer said. “The same costume blood is all over the scene. Some of the guests were carrying tubes of it; Gross found one of them under a sofa.”

  “Fake blood on the scene I can understand,” Somers said. “It’s Halloween, somebody’s carrying it, it falls out of a pocket, somebody tramples it in the stampede. Fine. But fake blood on the murder weapon?” He shook his head. “How does it get there? The killer put fake blood on the knife?”

  “To scare people,” Dulac said.

  “A real knife would scare people.”

  “No, man. I’m saying, it was Halloween. That’s a perfect way to get a weapon past everybody—make it look super fake, covered in fake blood. Nobody looks twice.”

  Boyer was nodding, her dark eyes darting toward Dulac and then back to Somers. “That was one of my theories too.”

  “Or,” Somers said, “we’re looking at a decoy.”

  “And that’s the other.”

  “He buys two knives, so the wounds are consistent. He covers one with fake blood, leaves it for the police to find. But some of the blood is real.” Somers tapped the paper. “The knife does have some of Fabbri’s blood on it. Then—he messed up? Touched the knife with a glove that had some of Fabbri’s blood? And Jesus Christ, what’s he going to gain from this? He’s an idiot if he didn’t think we’d figure out it wasn’t blood in the first five minutes. So, all he’s done is tell us that this isn’t the real murder weapon.”

  “Maybe that’s it,” Dulac said. “Maybe this guy’s psycho. It’s a game for him, you know? He’s telling us straight out that this isn’t the knife—fake blood—but he’s also telling us he put it there, and so he makes sure some of Fabbri’s blood is on it. So we know he did it.”

  Somers shrugged. It didn’t seem likely, and he saw the same skepticism in Boyer’s face. But—but he didn’t have anything better.

  “What’s this?” Somers asked, pointing to another line.

  “An adhesive,” Boyer said. “I found some on Fabbri’s belly and crotch, and trace amounts on his hands.”

  “Bondage,” Dulac said.

  Raising an eyebrow, Somers said, “Are you asking or offering?”

  “Dude, always offering,” Dulac said with a laugh. “But I’m saying, here,” he mimed a line across his belly, “and here,” another line across his crotch, “means the dude was taped up for something kinky. Trust me, I had a bro who was crazy about it, practically begged his girlfriend to do it. And of course we had to hear the whole thing, all the whipping and spanking and crying, and Jesus, one time, I remember him begging her to—”

  “Ok,” Somers said. “Ok.” He looked at Boyer.

  She shrugged. “It’s possible. Most bondage tape is self-adhering—I only know for professional reasons, in case you’re wondering—”

  “Slick,” Dulac said with another shit-kicking grin.

  “But it’s possible.” She shrugged. “Frankly, I have no idea what it could be. I’ll leave that kind of work up to you.”

  They spoke with Boyer a few more minutes, but nothing in the report drew Somers’s attention—a low blood alcohol level, no sign of illegal drugs, not even marijuana, no terminal illnesses or other hidden conditions. Boyer, likewise, had nothing else to offer, and so she excused herself and left.

  “All right,” Somers said, sliding the autopsy report to the side and looking at Dulac. “Let’s go get a coffee. Out of shop. We need to talk.”

  “Hold on.”

  “No, this isn’t the kind of thing I want to wait. That stuff you pulled with Foley, we need to figure it out. Today.”

  Dulac was typing madly on his computer. “Dude, hold on.”

  Coming around the desks, Somers said, “Right now, Gray.”

  For the first time since Somers had met him, Dulac flashed him an irritated look. “You want to talk? Fine. Here it is: you did a shitty thing, talking to your boyfriend about this stuff. You know we don’t talk about ongoing investigations, and you know he’s not police anymore. You might not like it, but that’s what it is.” Dulac took a breath, and in the same tone, said, “But I’m your partner, and no matter how stupid I think you’re being, I’m not letting some uniform asshole pin you to the wall for it.”

  Somers stared at him.

  “Done?” Dulac said.

  Somers was still staring. Finally he managed to say, “You’re right. I should have kept my mouth shut; it won’t happen again.”

  “Dude,” Dulac said, a smile breaking his seriousness. “Come on, I’ve seen pictures. Your boyfriend is smoking. I’d tell him whatever he wanted to know.”

  “Ok,” Somers said.

  “He wouldn’t even have to ask me twice.”

  “Ok. You made your point.”

  “I’m just the new kid in town, maybe I see him out for a run, no shirt, all those big muscles covered in sweat, and he doesn’t even have to ask me the first time. I just start talking. Anything so he’ll hang around another minute.”

  “That just goes to show that you’ve never tried talking to him,” Somers said with a grin. “I can’t wait for him to meet you.”

  “Yeah, man,” Dulac said, stretching out his fist again. “Right on. Double date for sure. I’m going to find the sluttiest college boy and—”

  “Before you go straight into a wet dream,” Somers said, “what’s this?”

  “Oh.” Dulac moved the mouse across the screen, which was currently displaying a map. Several red pins marked locations around an area that Somers recognized as the Wroxall campus. “I just wanted to see the whole picture, you know? Here’s the dorm where Fabbri was killed. Here’s the off-campus apartment where Cynthia Outzen lives. Here’s Lena Brigaud’s townhouse.” He scrolled out.

  “The trailer park,” Somers said, tapping one pin, then another, “and the Rutter compound.”

  “Yep.”

  “Ozark Volunteers live lots of places; most of them are private residences. It’s not just those two spots.”

  “I know. I just wanted to see. But this is what I was going to show you.” Dulac scrolled back in, close to the Wroxall campus, and moved the cursor up a street. It stopped over a house.

  “Where Hazard found the knife.”

  Dulac cut the mouse right until it hung over a pin.

  “Shit,” Somers said. “Shit. Why didn’t we see that?”

  “Because the neighborhood is totally wonky. This street curves like crazy, makes it really hard to tell where you actually are. Unless you look at it from above, like this.” Dulac indicated the street. He was right; Somers had looked at the address a dozen times that day, and he hadn’t realized that the apartment was only two blocks—cutting across lawns and through a small park—from where Hazard had found the knife.

  “Let’s go visit Carl Klimich,” Somers said.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  NOVEMBER 2

  FRIDAY

  4:14 PM

  CARL LIVED IN A three-story walkup with an English Tudor façade badly in need of repair. The stairs sagged, and although the November afternoon was bright and clear, the outdoor carpeting was squishy underfoot. When they got to Carl’s apartment on the second floor, they stopped, and Somers reached for the Glock ho
lstered at the small of his back. Dulac, just as efficiently, had a compact revolver in one hand. The door to Carl’s apartment hung open, and inside, everything was in disarray: the sofa turned over, a mirror broken at the base of the wall; from somewhere deeper in the apartment came voices.

  Somers had a sudden, horrible vision of Dulac charging in like a cowboy, but all Dulac did was tilt his head, the question obvious: who’s first? Somers tapped his own chest, kicked the door and took up a position just inside, already clearing one corner. He kept his gun and his attention moving, clearing the second corner. Dulac, with the same cool efficiency he had shown outside, had cleared the third. He met Somers’s gaze just long enough to flash a smile, looking like a manic kid under all those freckles, and then they moved to clear the next room.

  The voices were louder as they moved deeper into the apartment, and Somers tried to keep them at the periphery of his attention as they cleared bedrooms, closets, the bathroom. Then they had reached the back room of the apartment, the door shut, the voices muffled but obviously angry. They took up position again. Someone screamed, and Somers threw the door open, moving into position as Dulac followed.

  In a few moments, they had cleared the room and were staring at a television showing some sort of horror video. The screams kept coming, although they were fragmented, electronically modified and looped back. A blond woman lay on her side, and the camera would show close ups of her face—just a quarter of it, maybe part of her mouth and her jaw, and then spiders crawling across it, or roaches. Then the camera shot would jump to the folds of diaphanous material gathered between her legs, and then a hard cut to—

  “Jesus Christ,” Dulac said.

  It took Somers a moment to realize what he was seeing: video footage of a chicken laying an egg, taken from below. His gorge rose, and when he glanced over, Dulac looked green.

  The video continued like that: quasi-sexual images, usually of the same young, blond woman, but sometimes of other girls, once a boy, interspersed with scenes of graphic violence, or shocking images from the natural world: animals giving birth, larvae hatching, a snake shedding its skin. In the background of the video, a metal track played.

  “What the fuck is this?” Dulac was still staring at the video, and he still looked like he might toss up his lunch.

  Somers examined the room. He guessed that the apartment listed it as a bedroom—it had a nice window that looked onto the park, a closet, plenty of room for a twin bed. Maybe a kid’s room. Only Carl wasn’t using it as a bedroom. It was obviously some sort of study: an enormous plastic folding table, like the kind at a picnic or a church potluck, took up one wall, and it held a keyboard, a mouse, books, papers, newspapers, at least a dozen empty styrofoam take-out cups of coffee, a paper bag from Big Biscuit that was translucent with grease, and on and on. It even had a crew sock folded inside out. After another look around the room, Somers thought he knew what the sock had been used for, and he felt like laughing—but a sick kind of laugh, like he didn’t know what else to do.

  The walls were worse. Maybe even worse than the video, in some ways. The images were all sexually explicit, all featuring extremely young men and women—possibly minors, although it would be difficult to prove—in bondage and restraint: leather dog masks, full vinyl bodysuits, handcuffs, chains, clamps. Many of them looked like amateur photos; many of the subjects showed signs of bruised or broken flesh. Many of them had objects inserted in them.

  “Is that a kid’s firetruck?” Dulac said.

  Somers didn’t answer. He pulled out a pair of disposable gloves, passed them to Dulac, and put on his own pair.

  He needed out of the room, away from the smell of a closed-up room and solitary sex. He worked his way through the rest of the apartment: bathroom, bedroom, closet, living room, kitchen. Signs of bachelor living: dirty clothes, grime caked around the toilet, a freezer stocked with Lean Cuisine. But signs of a fight, too. And maybe a hasty departure. The broken mirror, the overturned couch, a hang rod ripped out of the closet, a carry-on suitcase spilling out a stack of academic books on the fetishization of the body and other weird shit. Had Carl abandoned the books? Or had the suitcase been knocked out of his hand by an attacker?

  “Dude,” Dulac called from the back room.

  Bracing himself, Somers went to see what his partner had found. Dulac had cleared a space on the folding table and set a drawer on top, which he had pulled from the television stand. A small collection of sex toys filled the drawer, a bottle of cheap lube, more of the crew socks—not paired, but stacked individually. Now that the initial shock was fading, Somers felt more of that nervous laughter. He met Dulac’s gaze and rolled his eyes.

  “Like he never got past being a fifteen-year-old,” Dulac said. “This was in the trash.”

  In his gloved hand, he held a roll of tape.

  Somers blinked and shook his head. “No way.”

  “You heard Boyer: the adhesive on Fabbri’s dick.”

  “It wasn’t on his dick.”

  “You know what I mean. He and Carl were banging. Having some fun with tape. Something went bad, they fought, and Carl decided to get revenge.”

  “Except Fabbri was kind of cute. And allegedly straight. And Carl is . . .”

  “A human dumpster?” Dulac said with a shrug. “Doesn’t matter. If Carl was good at this kind of stuff, bondage and domming, and Fabbri wanted it bad enough, it wouldn’t have stopped him. My bro, the one who wanted his girlfriend to tie him up, he was desperate for it. Desperate. He’d tell anybody who asked he was straight, but when she broke up with him, guess who came knocking at my door, wearing nothing but his birthday suit and carrying a roll of this,” Dulac displayed the tape again, “like it was Christmas.”

  “It doesn’t fit,” Somers said, looking around the room, trying to imagine Jim Fabbri arranging a hookup with Carl.

  “That’s what he kept trying to tell me after I got him all taped up. But I convinced him.”

  Somers was deep in thought, and now he glanced up. “What?”

  “Let’s just say I didn’t have to leave the house if I wanted some action. Not for the rest of the semester, anyway.”

  “No, I mean,” Somers wiped his face and then laughed. “Holy shit. Do you make this stuff up?”

  Dulac held up three fingers: Scout’s honor.

  Somers rolled his eyes. “I’m not sold on that angle.”

  “He said that too, but then I got his hips up a little, found that p-spot, and—”

  Somers studied the video, still playing. And then it clicked. “Holy shit.”

  “What?”

  “This is the video.”

  “What?”

  “This is the video. The one that Jim played at his party.” Somers shook his head. “Only—only I don’t think Jim meant to play it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think Carl switched the DVDs. Something like that. I think Carl put this in the DVD player, and when Jim started it up, it shocked everybody. Got their attention.”

  “How do you know it’s the same one?”

  “I don’t. Yet. But how much do you want to bet?”

  “Dinner. When we double.”

  “You’re on. We’ll check it against the DVD Norman and Gross collected from the crime scene. Hazard eats like a fucking bear before winter, so I hope you don’t mind dipping into your vacation budget.”

  Dulac just grinned. “Let’s say you’re right—just to talk this out, until we can check the DVD at the station. Carl switches the DVDs. Why?” Shaking his head, Dulac said, “Doesn’t fit with what the witnesses told us. They told us Jim liked to put on a show. Liked to shock people. He had the whole thing with the DVD planned.”

  “Did he?” Somers was turning it over in his mind, faster now. This was what it had felt like, pieces clicking, a heat like magma working its way through his chest, on the best cases with Hazard. “I think they were partially right. Jim probably did have someth
ing planned. He probably did want to shock them, just like they expected. But remember, Lena told us he was angry? She was looking right at him when the DVD went on, and she said he was upset. That’s not the right reaction. He should have been pleased. Happy that he got to rattle the bars a little, freak out his guests.”

  “So Carl replaces the DVD,” Dulac said, a furrow between his brows, “for, what? A distraction?”

  “It worked, didn’t it? Lena was the only one who really saw the attack. Everybody else was too focused on this nightmare.” Somers gestured at the screen. “And Jim made it easy, because everybody just assumed he had planned the DVD and its effect.”

  “Jesus.”

  Somers moved over to the folding table. The books matched the ones he had seen spilling out of the suitcase: dense, academic volumes on gender identity, sex as containment, even a euphemistically titled textbook called The Lock and the Key with, on its cover, a key being . . . inserted. Many of the papers were academic articles. And many of them had been authored or co-authored by Jim Fabbri.

  “He was obsessed,” Dulac said, fanning a stack of newspapers. Each one had been opened to an article about Jim Fabbri. Different articles, Somers realized. Fabbri had made the newspapers many times over the span of many years.

  “Computer,” Somers said, tapping a bare spot.

  “You think somebody took it?”

  Somers got down on hands and knees, pushed back the rolling chair, and crawled under the folding table. Lots of dust bunnies. Lots of cords. A flattened Big Mac box, and maybe fifteen Filet-O-Fish wrappers crumpled and tossed against the wall. No computer.

  “Let’s call this in,” Somers said. “Get a warrant and go through the whole thing systematically.”

  Dulac made the call to Cravens, and the chief began setting things in motion.

  When Dulac had hung up, Somers was studying the room from a new angle.

  “What?” Dulac said.

  “What don’t you see?”

  “Condoms.”

  Somers blinked. He hadn’t thought about that. “He mentioned condoms in the interview, didn’t he?”