by Gregory Ashe
“Ron’s got an update for us,” Cravens said.
Somers had to grind his teeth to keep from speaking. He didn’t want the case; one way or another, it was going to go back to drugs—either a lab or a squatter who was using and forgot to put out a candle—and that meant Lender and Swinney should have it. Besides, he wanted to focus on the vandalism and assaults. It was the only thing that had made Hazard open up so far, and Somers wanted to make the most of that opportunity.
“It was arson,” McClinckie said. “Gasoline all over the place. Fire started in the kitchen; we think he lit the fire there because the kitchen is near the door, easy to get out once the fire started. Best guess on the time the fire started is around eleven-thirty, although it might have been a little later.”
“He?” Hazard asked.
McClinckie waved a furry hand. “He, she. The murderer.”
“Jesus,” Somers said.
“They found a body,” Cravens said. “Burned down to the bones, if you can believe it.”
“Adult male,” McClinckie said.
“ID?” Somers asked.
“No way to tell,” McClinckie said. “Not for us, anyway. But I can say this: whoever did this, he knew what he was doing. You can’t trust a fire, even a house fire, to get rid of a body like that. This guy made sure: lots of accelerant, lots of fuel, lots of oxygen. Made a damn funeral pyre.”
Hazard opened his mouth, but Somers beat him to the question. “Dental records?”
“Dr. Kamp is looking into it, but—
Hazard cut her off. “But without at least a possible ID, it’s like a needle in a haystack.”
Cravens nodded, and she didn’t look pleased at being interrupted.
Somers groaned. He knew Hazard was right; there was no central dental record database, no computerized way of searching for any possible matches. It was old-fashioned; they needed a name and only then could they start trying to match them—and that was only if they could get dental records. Most of the people in Smithfield didn’t have those. But the part that made him groan, though, was Kamp. Well, that and having Hazard interrupt the chief.
“Problem?” Hazard said.
“I’ll explain later,” Somers said, wishing he could keep the frustration from his voice. “So you’re telling me I’ve got a John Doe murder to deal with? I’m going after the Volunteers for the vandalism thing; you know that, Chief. Throwing this on top of it, well, like he said, it’s a needle in a haystack.”
“Then get out your magnifying glass, Detective.” Cravens looked at Hazard. “Anything you want to add?”
“Back burner.” Hazard tossed the words out like he was asking if anybody brought chicken salad for lunch. “We’ve got bigger stuff to do.”
“Excuse me?” Cravens said.
“From what I understand, you’ve got a string of vandalism and assault with hate crime as the motivation. A John Doe murder in Smithfield? Yeah, let’s work it, but let’s have some perspective.”
“I’m going to give you the benefit,” Cravens said in a measured voice, “of pretending you didn’t say that. You get that benefit once, Detective. You’d better not ever think or say something like that again. Not in my department. Are we clear? There’s only one perspective on murder in my department.”
Hazard frowned. “I don’t understand. You’ve got the mayor breathing down your neck on this. The college is probably looking for a reason to storm in and sweep you out of office. You’re putting the screws to us to get the hate crimes solved, but now you want us to pretend like this John Doe case has equal weight when we both know—”
“Jesus Christ,” Somers whispered, grabbing Hazard by the arm. “Shut up.”
“Somerset,” Cravens said, her face flushed with anger, “is this how you feel?”
“Chief, he’s new. And let me tell you, this is a misunderstanding. My partner and I would never—”
“Detective Hazard can speak for himself. Well?”
Hazard shrugged. He could feel Cravens’s anger like an avalanche burying him, but he didn’t care. This was Wahredua; it wasn’t the fucking NYPD. “I’m a pragmatist. You want something done, you tell us what you want done. But I’m not going to pretend—”
“That’s enough. Let me be perfectly clear, Detective Hazard: no one is pretending that the John Doe case is important. It is important. In fact, it’s just become the most important thing in your entire life. I’m going to want updates from you on this investigation every day. No, make that twice a day. And I would very much like those reports to reflect your earnest and sincere understanding of how very important this case—and all your cases—are. Otherwise, and this goes for both of you, I’ve got uniformed officers who will understand that I expect all cases to receive the same attention and diligence.”
By this point, Ron McClinckie had sunk into his chair and was pawing at his thinning hair. His hands left soot-streaks along the side of his head; he looked like a man who was ready to tunnel his way out if he couldn’t get to a door.
“What you’re saying,” Hazard began.
“What you’re saying,” Somers cut in, dragging Hazard to his feet, “is dead-on, Chief. We understand. Message received loud and clear. Reports twice a day. This is important; we take everything seriously. It was just a long night, you know, and—”
“That’s enough, Somers.”
“Right, Chief. Going to get started on this right now, Chief. Right now. We’ll check in this afternoon.”
“I’m not—” Hazard tried to say, but by then Somers had maneuvered Hazard into the bullpen and yanked the door shut. Behind them, he could already hear Cravens apologizing to McClinckie.
“Move your ass,” he whispered to Hazard.
“What?”
“Now,” Somers said, hauling him towards the door.
A moment later they cleared the building, but Somers didn’t slow down until they were driving away in the unmarked Impala. Then he gave Hazard a shove and said, “Are you a complete idiot?”
“What’s the problem?” Hazard said, flexing his huge arms so that his sleeves seemed in danger of splitting. “I don’t like being manhandled.”
“You don’t like it, huh? How would you like having your ass handed to you? Busted back down to patrol? Or out of a job?”
“Because I said what everybody was thinking?”
“Because you said something that is completely unethical, not to mention inappropriate and downright stupid.” Somers heaved a huge breath, trying to get his temper back under control. “You’ve got to watch what you say.”
Hazard grunted and looked out the window.
“I’m serious,” Somers said.
No response.
“You ever heard of politics?”
“I’m not an idiot.”
“Then don’t act like one; the fire chief is sitting in the room, and you whip out your dick and want to measure it?”
“I said what everybody was thinking. Even McClinckie was thinking—”
“It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if Jesus Christ Himself, capital H, were in that room and thinking it. You can’t say it.”
“Because of politics?”
“Because—” Somers took another huge breath and tried to let it out slowly. Their fresh start wasn’t feeling quite so fresh anymore. “Do you really not get this? Or are you making this hard for me?”
“I get it.” Hazard turned, and those scarecrow eyes pierced Somers again. “I just don’t give a fuck.”
“Fine,” Somers muttered. “It’s on your own head.”
“Yeah,” Hazard said without looking at him. “It is.”
“Maybe you could think about me, then? I look like shit too when you do this kind of stuff.”
Hazard made a noise in his throat; it was quiet, but it sounded like a laugh.
It was too early in the day for a drag-down argument, so Somers shook off the laugh and turned the car towards Newton Mortuary. The family-owned business, which had been in Wahr
edua for three generations and which competed, now, with a nationwide chain of funeral homes called Dear Departed, sat a few blocks north of the police station. Normally, Somers might have walked the distance, but today he’d been in such a hurry to get clear of Cravens that he’d gotten in the car without thinking.
“Funeral home?” Hazard asked as they pulled into the freshly repaved parking lot.
The smell of asphalt filtered through the car vents and, when Somers opened the door, struck in force. “The ME has his office here; the old station was too small for a full lab and storage facility, and we didn’t have the money anyway. Once Dr. Kamp got set up here, there wasn’t really any point in moving him, especially when it would have cost a fortune to move things back to the station.”
“What’s the deal with Kamp? Even Cravens seemed to have a chip on her shoulder.”
“You’ll see.”
“Why don’t you just tell me?”
“Because my head is killing me and I already pulled your ass out of the fire once today.”
“I don’t need you to—”
Somers didn’t wait for him to finish; he swung his legs out of the car and headed towards the mortuary. Hazard caught up with him at the door. “I said I don’t need you to—”
Somers jerked the door open, letting out a wash of cold air and the lemon-smell of disinfectant. His skin prickled; it always prickled when he smelled that lemon disinfectant and when he felt the feathery cool of the mortuary. It was just air conditioner, he knew that, but it reminded him of, well, death. It reminded him of his Uncle Sal and his Aunt Vera, of Harriet Strauders, his middle school English teacher, and of Jeff Langham, who had killed himself in junior year and had been the only one, the only one in four years, who had died in their class. That had been strange, it really had, how Jeff had been fine, really fine. Everybody liked him. No, everybody loved him. God, he’d even been friends with Hazard, and back in high school that had taken a hell of a lot. Then, one day, Somers had been peeling off his socks after baseball, and he’d been thinking they were ruined—he’d slid into home and they’d ripped up his calf—and he’d looked up and seen his mom leaning against the faux wood paneling of their Chrysler LeBaron, head in her hands, sobbing, because she’d just learned—it spread like wildfire through the crowd at the high school game, everybody seemed to know at the exact same moment—that Jeff Langham had shot out the back of his head at the end of the gravel road that ran past the Bouche farm and ended at the bluffs over the Grand Rivere.
Somers realized he was holding his breath, and he let it out and drew in another lungful of lemon disinfectant. His skin was still prickled. Every funeral in Somers’s life had been held here, and so his skin prickled like a goddamn cactus.
“You going to be sick again?” Hazard asked. “You’re all pale, you’ve got goose-pimples, and you—”
“I’m not going to be sick.” Somers paused and shook off a tiny shiver. “Hey, I just want to be clear about something. What happened back in Cravens’s office, it can’t happen again. If you don’t want to play the game, at least let me play it. You’ve got to listen to me, ok? For your own good, I mean.”
“I don’t have to do anything, Somers. You’d better remember that.”
Somers shook his head. “Never mind.” He cast about for something to break the tension—something to try, once more, to connect with Hazard, built the trust they needed as partners. Something from the past, maybe. Something that didn’t involve the shitty way Somers had treated Hazard. Something they had shared back then, the only tragedy that had hit their high school class. He let a moment pass, long enough for the tension to bleed out of the air, and then he clapped Hazard on the shoulder and nodded towards the mortuary chapel. “Hey, you ever think about Jeff Langham?”
Hazard froze as though he’d been glued in place. Then his head swiveled towards Somers. “That some kind of joke?”
Somers stared at Hazard, shocked at the look of crystallized rage in his partner’s face.
Before Somers could respond, a voice called from across the lobby, “Shut that door. You’re letting out the A/C.” It was Mrs. Newton, so old and bent and dried that she looked like a match for the broom she held.
“What’d I say—”
“You—” Hazard cut off, his anger seeming to choke him. He shook his head. “You know what? Forget it. All that stuff I said about a fresh start? Forget it. Same old fucking John-Henry.”
He strode across the lobby, barked a question at Mrs. Newton, and followed her pointed finger towards the ME’s office. Somers stared after him, trying to figure out what the hell had just happened.
HAZARD KNEW HE WAS MOVING, but it didn’t feel like walking. It felt like swimming. Or floating, maybe. Floating through this boiling red mist. Or maybe he was underwater. Maybe that was why he couldn’t hear a damn thing like the pressure had plugged up his ears. Maybe that was why his chest felt like it was caving in like his ribs were about to snap and skewer him. Jesus, maybe that was why he felt like he was drowning.
He knew he was moving, though, and he knew he wasn’t drowning. That was a big deal; you could feel like you were drowning, you could feel like you were going to be crushed, so long as you knew it was just a feeling. If you knew it was just a feeling, you could keep doing what you had to do. Well, for the most part. It was pretty damn hard—feeling or no feeling—not to turn around, right then, and pop Somers in the eye. But it wouldn't end there, Hazard knew. If he got started, he might not stop.
“Hey.”
The voice came from a great distance, and it was muted by the underwater pressure in Hazard’s ears. He kept moving down a cramped hall with peeling vinyl flooring, smelling—no, tasting—something rotten in his mouth. Smelling, yeah, smelling his own sweat, sweat and the summer-weight wool jacket, Jesus, he wanted to be sick.
“Hey.” A hand grabbed him.
It was Somers. And Hazard didn’t even think about it; he was bigger than Somers, stronger, and a hell of a lot meaner when it came down to bare bones. The blow was more of a swat than a real punch. The back of his hand collided with Somers’s chest, knocking the blond man back onto his heels and dislodging his hand from Hazard’s shoulder. Hazard started down the hall again, and then it was too much, that pressure in his ears, the feeling that his head was going to split, and he swung around.
Grabbing Somers by the jacket, he took two steps and slammed his partner into cheap paneling. It rippled under Somers’s weight, and Somers’s face rippled too, shock crossing those exquisite features. He’s a heartbreaker, ladies, a real fucking heartbreaker. Right then, though, he looked terrified.
Hazard’s face felt hot and stinging like he’d stuck his head into a beehive. Was he going to cry? No. Fuck no. He hadn’t cried in ten years. He hadn’t cried since college, the night Alec LaTourneau, who was French-Canadian and Hazard’s first boyfriend, had gotten drunk and slapped Hazard around the apartment, first with his hand, then the belt, laughing because he liked making the bigger man jump. That was the last time. Hazard had sworn it would be the last time ever.
“You touch me again,” Hazard said, and the pitch of his voice was canting up and down like a sinking ship, “you shake my hand, you grab my sleeve, you so much as bump me in the mother-fucking hallway, and I will kill you. Do you understand me?”
“Man, talk to me. What’d I say? Was it—”
If Somers said Jeff’s name, if he even got it on his lips, Hazard didn’t know what he’d do. So Hazard shook Somers once, hard enough that a seam in Somers’s jacket ripped, and then Hazard said, “Stop talking. We’re done talking about anything except work.”
The transformation in Somers’s face took place over a matter of moments: first, there was a look of genuine pain, mingled with transparent, shining frustration. It was a look that made Hazard wonder, just for an instant, and second-guess himself. Then the pain and frustration transformed into a warm confidence that this was just a big misunderstanding.
“Yeah,”
Somers said. Then, shrugging Hazard’s hands from his jacket, he repeated, “Yeah, man. I’m sorry. Really.”
Hazard kept eye contact for a moment longer, but in the end, he was the one who looked away first. What the fuck had he seen in Somers’s face? Had Somers truly been sorry? He had almost seemed . . . surprised, or even confused, but that wasn’t possible. Somers knew what had happened to Jeff Langham. Was Somers’s comment only meant as a cruel jab? Or had he mentioned Jeff’s name as a threat, to send a message about what could happen to Hazard? Unsure of what to do next, Hazard stumped down the hall, needing a moment away from his partner.
The shit at the bottom of it all, the thing that kept Hazard’s back stiff and his anger hot, was that he knew Somers knew what had happened to Jeff. Hazard had done some digging when he first became a detective. He’d requested the file from the Wahredua PD by making up bullshit about a similar set of circumstances in St. Louis. The file that had come back had been a page. One fucking page, that’s all they could spare for Jeff. But that page had held a key piece of information: a greengrocer’s wife, Ophelia Moree, had seen three boys talking to Jeff Langham in the late afternoon of the day he shot himself. No names were given, but Hazard recognized the descriptions: the three boys had to have been Mikey Grames, Hugo Perry, and John-Henry Somerset.
So Hazard knew that Somers been part of it, just like Somers had held his arm when Mikey Grames had carved that G into Hazard’s chest. Just like Somers—
—in the locker room, the faint down on his arms golden in the fluorescent light—
—had shoved Hazard down the only flight of stairs in Wahredua High and said that’s what faggots deserve. Nobody had ever said anything about Jeff. The ME had ruled a suicide, and that was the end of that. But Jeff wouldn’t have killed himself, he wouldn’t have left Hazard alone, not unless something terrible had happened. And so Hazard needed to know. This was why he’d come back. This was why he was here. What had happened to Jeff Langham, who had been Hazard’s boyfriend for two short weeks in junior year? Two short weeks before Jeff swallowed a bullet.