by Adira August
Mike looked for the road, but the thick growth of trees blocked his view.
“There’s Morganfeld’s,” Leon said.
Mike had been looking in the wrong direction but managed to catch a glimpse of the big boulders as they passed Morganfeld’s monument to modern architecture. He and Twee hadn’t seen much of it last night, inside or out. They’d been taken to the guesthouse where Asher and Caden lived.
“Detective!”
Mike Merisi heard the shout. Leon stopped and got out, tilting his head back to look almost straight up. Mike followed and saw a young blond man leaning over the edge of the wooden hot tub, steam rising behind him.
Merisi had met him last night, briefly. “Hey, Carter.” Another face and nude torso joined him, arms circling Carter’s chest from behind.
“Sorry you can’t join us,” Carter grinned and giggled as the other guy pulled him back.
“Got the camera?” Leon asked, leading Merisi away from the edge of the property. Mike held it up. He was already filming, albeit a bit surreptitiously, holding the camera casually, just a thing in his hand.
“See here?” Leon took them to a wide place next to the trail free of trees. “It’s an overlook, for the waterfall more than the view. Everybody’s got a view.”
Mike held up the camera and panned slowly across the vista to the narrow fall of gurgling water rushing down through the forest below.
“Keep shooting and pan around toward the hill, then tilt up.”
Mike followed Leon’s directions.
“What do you see?”
“Everything,” Merisi answered, lowering the camera. “There’s a whole swath of hillside where the trees were cut away.”
“Right, what you can see from here, you can see better from there, higher up. Carter spends a lot of time looking at Snow and his house. We took his binoculars away, though.” He pointed. “There, that’s his place, kinda up on a rise. Set sideways, so you can see the front and back. Who comes and who goes.”
Merisi peered through the viewfinder, filming. “Why doesn’t it have windows?”
Leon grinned. “It’s a big A-frame, man, you lookin’ at a roof that meets the ground. ‘Round the back or front, it’s all windows. And that boy got no curtains.” He went back to the PEV. “I’m gonna drive around the track, keep the camera on me.”
It took Leon about a half hour to circle the development. Merisi wasn’t worried about recording the time, as the camera did it for him. Leon was right. From this angle, he could be seen at all times, except for a few seconds behind a boulder or a thicker stand of trees. Many of the houses were visible—Cam’s most of all.
Afterward, Leon drove them back to Mike’s car. He got out and leaned his hands against the roofline, bending down to speak to Leon.
“Why are you guys pretending to be gay and what are you really doing in that house?”
“Aren’t you s’pose to read me my rights before you ask a bunch of questions, detective?”
“Only if I suspect you of some crime and you aren’t free to leave.”
Leon put the vehicle into reverse. “Huh. Learn something new every day.” Mike stepped away. “You got that memory card?”
Mike held it up.
“Guess we don’t need to see each other again.” Leon backed into a one-eighty and took off.
11:30am - Case Meeting 2
* * *
“So you talked to Asher Gamble?” Natani demanded of Twee, after she’d explained everything they did with Deputy Wes and going to Houston’s. Natani couldn’t believe how fast this case was going south. Civilian personnel were not allowed to interrogate suspects or witnesses.
“Mike said he had to at least contact him and his grandfather. He said it’d work better if it was me. You know, ‘cause I’m a girl and little and lisp and everything. Nonthreatening.”
“What was the pretext?” Hunt asked her.
“Identifying the body,” she said. “That’s my purview, so it was okay as long as I stuck to that.”
“Smart,” Hunter said. “Did you show him a picture?”
She shook her head quickly, her curls bouncing. “Nooooo. I wouldn’t show a child something from the crime scene. Gordi said he’d get us a nice one before he peels the face off.”
Cam’s lips pressed, but he did not run for the bathroom to vomit. Months of listening to crime scene talk was deadening his squeamishness.
“How did you know to go to Morganfeld’s at all?”
“Houston’s house is upslope from all the others. Seems like one of her hot tub boys is a big fan of Cam’s,” she said, looking at him. “This case seems to have a lot of your fans.”
He shrugged.
“He watches for you. Saw you talking to Asher. Mike wanted to use it as a pretext to get you alibied by two witnesses.”
“Just me? Not the lieutenant?”
“Especially the lieutenant,” she answered. “The hot tub brigade didn’t identify him, just gave a description. I really think”—she turned to Hunter and Natani— “he wanted me to keep Asher busy while he talked to the old man.”
Hunt and Cam exchanged a look. “And how’d that go over?”
“Fine,” she shrugged. “Mike got Caden to lead him out of the room, like it was his idea. But all he wanted to talk about was Asher. I guess Mike let him. Said Asher was so strange when he was a kid he’d had the boy committed to Table Mountain Center for a while after his father died.”
Hunter frowned. “He was ten. His own grandfather put him in a mental ward?”
“TMC isn’t exactly Cuckoo’s Nest,” Cam said.
“It’s for rich people, mostly,” Natani said. “And it’s supposed to have an exceptional pediatric department.” She looked at Cam. “Who paid? The handyman grandfather couldn’t afford it.”
“Morganfeld,” Cam told her. “Seems to be quite the philanthropist.”
“I wanted to meet him so much!” Twee pouted. “Never saw him.”
“What did you get from Asher?” Hunter asked. “Any help at all with identification?”
“Not really. He described Jason Furney as”—she consulted a note—“a skinny old guy with gray hair and wire rim glasses.” She looked up. “I guess Asher would meet him Sunday mornings by that jogging path. Supposedly, Jason said he should skip school Wednesday and come to the meeting place. Maybe you scared him off.”
“So Asher wasn’t waiting for us,” Cam said.
“Wire-rims like the ones you found on the body?” Hunt asked.
“Yup. Still on his face and everything.”
He keyed on her tone. “But?”
“They were clean,” she said. “Pristine.”
“People clean their glasses all the time, though,” Cam said.
“Not this clean,” Twee said. “Oil migrates along the temples, nose pads and parts of the eye wires that touch the skin. That happens pretty quickly, and the print powder sticks there.” She looked at Hunter. “The victim did wear glasses, but depressions in the sides of his nose didn’t match the nose pads on the glasses he was wearing.”
“You’re saying he wore glasses, but not those?”
“That’s what it looks like,” she said. “There’s another thing. The steering wheel was clean except for the victim’s prints.”
This was starting to sound familiar to Hunter. He caught a look from Cam. The bedroom doorknob was on both their minds.
“You don’t think he was driving the PEV,” Natani said.
“Welllllll -” Twee hesitated.
Hunter repressed the desire to shout “WHAT?” and waited her out. He’d learned it was worth it.
“This isn’t science, buuuuut … it feels like someone, maybe more than one, is massively fucking with us.”
Diane coughed midswallow of coffee. Twee didn’t swear.
“There’s more,” Hunter suggested, eyeing her shrewdly.
“Asher had a book Minnie gave him
,” Twee said. “He showed it to me when I asked if he had anything that might have Jason’s fingerprints on it. He said Jason had looked it over. It was a hardcover first edition of On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross with a mylar cover, one a collector puts on.”
Natani nodded. “That book came out in the early seventies, right?”
“Nineteen sixty-nine,” Cam said. He put an image of the copyright page onscreen. There was a strip of something white with printing that read “Start Here.”
“That’s a plastic bookmark. It’s not old. Asher said Minnie warned him not to lose her place.”
“The copyright page was her ‘place’?” Hunter asked.
She shrugged. “The boy said he didn’t move it. In fact, he said he never opened it at all. He let me take the book. The bookmark did have prints. They don’t match the victim.”
“Is that all?”
“The prints on the interior of the mylar cover don’t match either the bookmark or the victim. I didn’t ask Asher for his prints. I wasn’t sure legally how far to push it.”
“I’m not sure ‘legal’ means diddly-squat in this case.”
They all turned to find Mike Merisi standing just inside the door with his arms full of take out bags. He walked up to Hunter and dumped the bags onto the table in front of him.
“Lunch,” he said, putting a bank card on the table. “Thanks for buying.”
Hunt looked at the card. It was his.
Cam gave him a head-tilt, eyebrow-lift, I took it out of your wallet on the coffeetable which I wouldn’t have if you’d slept with me like you were supposed to look.
“No problem.” Hunter slid the card into his wallet, checking the contents to see what else might be missing. “I know we don’t work during lunch, usually, but maybe Merisi will entertain us with the tale of how he cleared Cam and I last night?”
The team was passing around sections of three large subs, packets of chips and cans of soda.
“It was Twee, really,” Mike said, taking his usual place between Twee and Cam. “She seduced one of the guys who lives there.”
“I did not!” she protested, unable to hide a self-satisfied smile. “I just wanted to know whether he was gay or not.”
“His boner testified to ‘not’,” Merisi said, tearing a bite off a roast beef and horseradish sauce sandwich.
Natani looked from one to the other. “Boner?”
Cam had the image on screen. Blown up. Enhanced for detail.
“Oh dear Lord!” Natani slapped her hands over her face, then peeked at the screen from between her fingers. “We’re gonna get sued so hard.”
Hunter hadn’t taken any food. He watched Mike Merisi who wasn’t laughing at Natani with Cam and Twee. Merisi caught his look over the edge of a soda can he half-drained in one long draught.
Camden Snow, always alert to Hunter’s moods and reactions, realized there was something passing between them. A kind of understanding that came from belonging to the brotherhood of cops. There was danger, something they wanted to keep from the civilians. But Cam couldn’t see where it was coming from.
Hunt nodded so slightly to Merisi it was more intention than movement. Merisi lowered the can and pushed the food away. Hunter rapped twice on the table with his knuckles.
The women saw where their boss was looking and gave Merisi their full attention. Twee turned to a clean page in her notebook.
“Every man we saw at Houston’s was naked. It’s early March; it’s cold at night. And we were at what? Over seven thousand feet?” He looked at Cam.
“Right about.” Cam called up a topographic map with contour lines and elevation markings.
“Can you mark on the map where Hanging Valley is?” Merisi asked.
Cam frowned. He overlaid another map, that showed the paved roads up he gulches, labeled the radio towers on Mount Morrison. But Cam found no indications of his own neighborhood.
“This can’t be right,” he said to himself. He loaded several more area maps, satellite views, maps that showed hunting blinds, the road up Sandy Gulch. No Hanging Valley.
“You’re wasting your time,” Merisi said. “These satellite images are recent, in the past year. Those properties have been there a while. Someone’s hidden the whole fucking development.”
Natani scoffed. “That’s ridiculous. Cam just had a picture of it up there.”
“I created it,” he said. “It was just a schematic, not to scale.”
“Fine,” she said. “But we know where it is. Jeffco sheriffs do. School buses do. The Post Office does.”
“No, they don’t,” Cam said. “There’s a service building just inside the entrance. Maybe you didn’t see it in the dark. The mail goes there, all deliveries. Asher’s the only school age kid I know of living in the development. I’ve never seen a school bus there.”
“What are you saying?”
Cam shrugged. “I’m saying we’re a bunch of rich people, and it’s not really a development. It’s an enclave built by a billionaire who”—Cam stopped short with a glance at Hunter—“invited his friends to buy in.”
“Bullshit,” said Merisi who didn’t miss the look. “Why would anyone keep the place off satellite images and who has the power to do that, anyway?”
“This particular billionaire has some pretty high-level contacts in the military. Not sure what he makes or does for them, but the DOD would,” Hunter told him.
“But people do know where it is,” Natani said again. “So what’s the point?”
“Locals know,” Hunter said. “But let’s say you’re a fan in Skokie, Illinois and you want to know where Morganfeld lives. You know he drops in at the radio station on Mount Morrison for interviews. You might find enough off-hand references in interviews to know he lives in Bear Creek Canyon. What you won’t be able to do is scan the area and find the housing development where he lives.”
“That’s fanciful but not logical,” she said. “Whoever can order edits of satellite images isn’t worried about stalker classical music fans, and the Houston woman isn’t famous.”
“I agree. So what are they worried about? Merisi, tell me what you found at Houston’s.”
“Well, I’m fairly certain none of those guys are gay, at least, not obviously,” Merisi said. “Leon, whose dick we all enjoyed, took us back to the deck that overlooks the … enclave. All of ‘em, Leon and the hot tub guys, were staring at Twee’s butt. She leaned over a railing and wriggled at them.”
Twee blinked innocently. “I was tired. My feet hurt. I was just shifting my weight.”
“From the looks, every guy there would have been happy to find a place for you to lie down,” Merisi said. “It’s just an impression, I suppose, but they seemed late twenties to early thirties. All built, not a twink to be found. I’m guessing ex-military.” He gave Hunter another cop look.
With another subtle movement of his head, Hunter let Merisi know he believed him. “You think Houston is in charge, or they are?”
“My guess is she’s captain and Leon’s first officer. But all of them just happened to be on deck, not only when you saw Asher, but when you walked back to the house and left for dinner.”
“But you couldn’t confirm that they could see us, because it was dark,” Hunter said.
“No, sir, I couldn’t. I told them someone would come back today.”
Hunter stood. “Don’t go alone. Wait for Jeffco.”
“They don’t scare me.”
“They scare me,” Hunter told him firmly. “And I’m not going. You’re outmanned and outgunned, walking into their stronghold with no clear idea of their intent. Do your job with the resident’s permission and get out. Am I clear?”
“I just came from there, actually.” He fished a memory card from his pocket he handed Cam.
Hunter barely hesitated. “Good, write it up, I want to see it when I get back. Twee, get on the backpack.”
Hunter rapped the table a
couple times, an unconscious habit that the team learned meant he was done. He went into his office and came back almost immediately in his black leather jacket. He gestured to Cam to follow him.
Cam shut the door to the office and walked Hunter to the elevator.
“I’m going to talk to Hart and then go see Asher,” Hunt told him. “While I’m up there, I’ll pick up some stuff for you. Text me a list. We’ll stay at my place tonight.”
“You’ll stay at your place tonight. I don’t take relationship orders from you, Hunter.” Cam’s tone was cool, but blotches of angry color rose in his neck and face. “I’ll be in my own bed. And don’t count on being in it with me any time soon.”
He turned to stalk off; Hunt grabbed him by the elbow and spun him around.
“Goddammit!”
“Get off me!”
A flurry of hands snatching at jackets and shirts, two bodies bumping and twisting, each vying to shove the other into the nearest wall.
Thuh-WHUMP!
Twee winced. Mike pressed his ear harder against the door.
ThuhWHUMP-WHUMP!
“Hey!” Natani hurried over and grabbed Merisi’s shoulder. He jerked away and whirled to face her.
“Don’t get inspired, Detective,” Natani said drily. “You, I can replace.”
“Sorry. Instinct.”
She pointed him back to the table and sat back down, herself. “When they knock a hole in the damn wall, what am I supposed to write in the damage report?”
In the hall, Hunt and Cam were locked together in front of the elevator, neither able to gain advantage, neither willing to release the other. Cam was the stronger of the pair, but Hunter had a couple inches on Cam, years of experience handling violent suspects, and was far more ruthless. He kept his foot between Cam’s and twisted him slightly to keep his weight on his bad leg.
“This isn’t personal. I’ll sleep on the fucking couch,” Hunt grunted, struggling to keep Cam from dumping him sideways off his feet.
“It’s personal to me. And I’m going to make damned sure it’s personal to you! And I don’t give a crap where you sleep!” Cam gave Hunt a shake, making his teeth snap together.