Pretty Pretty Boys

by Gregory Ashe

  Hazard thought he knew—or at least, he thought he could guess—what had happened. Someone had found out about Jeff. Someone had told someone else. And underneath the placid surface of Wahredua High, the humiliation, the persecution, and the torture had driven Jeff to take his own life.

  Was that what Somers was hinting at? That he knew something, that Hazard might be in the same kind of danger? Hazard wasn’t sure; everything had gone dark at the time of Jeff’s death. It had taken everything in Hazard not to follow the same short, brutal road out of Wahredua. And so he was sure he had missed things, missed the vital clues that might tell him what had happened. When Hazard had come back from that darkness—

  —the locker room, and sweat beading on Somers’s collarbone, and then falling down those fucking stairs—

  —everything had changed, and nobody would talk to Hazard about Jeff Langham. Nobody would talk to Hazard about anything.

  But the worst part, the part that was building a scream in Hazard’s throat, building it brick by brick until Hazard felt like he was choking, until he yanked at his collar and at his tie and thought maybe this was what a panic attack felt like, the worst part was that Hazard had almost forgotten. He’d almost fallen for Somers’s act: the lie that Somers was friendly, that he was damaged, that he was reformed, that he was trying to make up for the past, that he was, at the end of it all, someone different than the John-Henry—

  —in the locker room, inches away from Hazard, so hot he was fucking steaming, literally steaming from the shower, wisps of it rising from tan, toned muscle—

  —who had shoved Hazard down the stairs and said that’s what faggots get. But Hazard wasn’t going to be fooled; he’d gotten a wake-up call today, just a moment ago. As soon as he’d fought back against Somers’s authority, as soon as he’d refused to play Somers’s game, Somers had come at him with the most awful thing he could think of: Jeff Langham. Hazard wasn’t an idiot; he knew a threat when he heard one.

  With a start, Hazard realized that he’d reached the end of the hallway and was facing a metal-reinforced door. He tried the handle—locked—and saw the keypad bolted to the wall. Somers came up behind him, and Hazard noticed that, in spite of Somers’s look of nonchalance, he was careful to keep his distance from Hazard.

  “You’ve got to put in the code,” Somers said.

  And the way he said it like they were friends, like what had just happened down the hall was nothing but a bad patch and he was already willing to bump fists and be bros again, made Hazard think, very seriously, about attacking Somers right there.

  “It’s the same code for everybody,” Somers said, trying for a dry smile. “Top security around here. Try to remember it. Or, if you want, I can write it down.” His grin widened and he punched in 1-2-3-4.

  The lock clicked, and Hazard thrust the door open and pushed past Somers. On the other side, he found a room that didn’t look like any ME’s office Hazard had ever seen. Small, octagonal black-and-white tiles covered the floor and three-quarters up the walls. It was dingy tile; it probably hadn’t been scrubbed since it had been installed, and Hazard guessed it wouldn’t ever be scrubbed until after a nuclear winter wrapped up. There was a steel autopsy table that looked older than Calvin Coolidge—not, Hazard noted, stainless steel, but some other grade, with a reddish brown stain creeping along the closest corner and with a chipped, turquoise enamel that had probably been meant to protect it. Refrigerated drawers lined the far wall; one of the drawers was open, and sitting on the metal tray inside was a row of vodka bottles in varying states of emptiness. The bottles explained in part the office’s smell: a mixture of alcohol, vomit, and smoke.

  Completing the picture, a man slumped across a homemade desk—a plywood sheet set on two sawhorses of different heights, so that a computer monitor perched at a precarious angle on top. All Hazard could see of the man, who lay with his head tucked into the crook of his elbow, were three things: he was Caucasian; he had a mass of Einstein-like gray hair; and under his white lab coat, he was completely naked.

  “That’s the ME?” In his shock, Hazard forgot his desire not to speak with Somers.

  “Dr. Kamp,” Somers said, his voice pitched at normal volume even though the man at the desk was obviously sleeping.

  “Should we . . . come back?”

  “He’s fine.” Somers must have caught Hazard’s look of disbelief because he chuckled; the sound wasn’t quite right, not quite natural, but it was obvious Somers was determined to play as though their encounter in the hallway had never happened. “Watch.” He clapped his hands and shouted, “Fire, there’s a fire, run for your life.”

  Kamp snorted; his hand twitched, catching a Cuervo bottle, which toppled and rolled and shattered on the filthy tile. Kamp didn’t move again.

  “Jesus, how is this guy the ME?”

  Somers shrugged, moving towards the desk. He shuffled through the papers as he spoke. “Kamp’s old-school, but he’s good. Genius, probably. And a local boy. Kind of a celebrity.”

  “A naked drunk?” Hazard shrugged. “I guess that’s Wahredua’s finest.”

  Without looking up, Somers pointed at the wall behind Kamp’s desk. Hazard studied the framed diplomas. Degrees from Harvard, University of Chicago, Johns-Hopkins. “This guy was a brain surgeon?”

  “Worked out of LA for about a hundred years,” Somers said. He held up a stained folder with a triumphant noise and added, “He moved back here when he got too unsteady to keep performing surgery. It crushed him, I think. He turned into a drunk.”

  “Takes one to know one, I guess.”

  Somers flushed and continued, in a slightly less even tone, “When he’s sober, he’s good. Really good. He can look at whatever you bring him and give you what you need.”

  “So what did he give us? That’s the report?”

  Nodding, Somers flipped open the folder and scanned the paperwork. Then he swore and tossed it back on the desk.

  “What?”

  “All he’s got is the date and time and John Doe. Nothing. He hasn’t done a thing.” Somers leaned across the slanted desk and grabbed Kamp by the shoulder. “Wake up, you old tramp. Wake up and do your job.”

  Kamp made a smacking noise and buried his head deeper in his elbow.

  With a sigh, Somers finally gave up. “Never mind. Hey, what are you—”

  Hazard ignored him, crossing to the row of refrigerated drawers and opening them one by one—and skipping the one that held Kamp’s vodka. When he found the one he wanted, he rolled out the tray. The black body bag was zipped shut, but the smoky, meaty scent from the previous night’s fire still managed to permeate the barrier.

  “You can’t—” Somers said.

  Hazard yanked the zipper down and opened the bag.

  Bones. Not even a skeleton—the intense heat, which had burned away flesh and sinew, had seen to that. What Hazard found was a bag of bones, jumbled together. Even the skull had come apart; rustling the bag, Hazard spotted the lower jaw, which had settled lower in the debris.

  “Not much to see,” Somers said, joining him at the drawer.

  In the face of death, Hazard’s anger receded—a fire tamped down at the back of his head. He studied the bones and let his brain begin to work. He liked his job. Oh, he didn’t like that people had to die. He didn’t like, for the most part, the people he worked with. But he liked the puzzle, the pitting of his brain and his will against what seemed unsolvable. And he liked justice. He would have liked, a hundred years ago, to see his man stick his head through a noose.

  “This is going to be fucking impossible,” Somers groaned. “And thanks to you, we’ve got twice-daily reports. How fast can you write up a report that says we found nothing and did nothing?”

  “Stop being a baby.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me. You’re acting like a child. You’re a detective, right?”

  Hazard didn’t look, but he could feel Somers’s glare.

  “Well?”


  “Yes, I’m a fucking detective.”

  “So start thinking like one.”

  Somers muttered something.

  “What was that?”

  “Don’t push me, Hazard. You might have gotten all those muscles since high school, and you like those shirts that look like you’re going to pop out of them, but deep down you’re not that different.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means I know you’re not a bully, so stop acting like one.”

  Hazard blinked and tried to confine his surprise.

  “All right,” Somers said, scrubbing the back of his head. “We go back to Smithfield. We look at the trailer, or what’s left of it, and we start canvassing. I worked Smithfield for five years; I’ve still got some people I know.”

  Hazard studied the bones; he wasn’t a doctor and had no university training in anatomy, physiology, or medicine, but he’d spent enough time on the job that he knew a few things. “Why do you kill someone and then burn them?”

  “We don’t know he was dead first. If it even is a he.”

  “It is. Bone size. And the pelvis—see, here.”

  “Damn,” Somers said sourly, “anything you don’t know? Besides, I mean, how to talk to the chief of police?”

  Hazard ignored that. “Why do you burn a body—whether he was dead before the fire or not?”

  “Torture.”

  “With that much accelerant? With that much preparation to make sure the body burned down to bone?”

  “Because you don’t want someone to identify the body.”

  Hazard nodded. “Exactly.”

  “So we look at missing people.” Somers scrubbed at the back of his head again. “Two problems with that.”

  “What?”

  “If these are Ozark people—and I’m not just talking about the Volunteers, I’m talking about any of the backcountry people—they might not report someone missing. Even if I showed up on their front door, asking about someone in particular, they might not tell me. No, let me say that again: they definitely wouldn’t tell me. We should talk to Upchurch, too; he has contacts in the Volunteers, maybe he could tell us something through back channels.”

  “What’s the other problem?”

  “Smithfield people—I’m talking most of them—won’t have anyone to report them missing. Serial killers target that kind, right? People that disappear and nobody cares. That’s Smithfield from top to bottom. I’ll talk to my contacts, like I said, but they won’t know everyone, and they might not tell me if they did.”

  “You didn’t even want this case, and now you’re turning it into a serial killer?”

  “I was making a point.”

  Hazard nodded; inside the cool cocoon of work, he could recognize that Somers made good points. Somers knew the area, he knew the people, and, more than that, he knew how to talk to people. All skills essential to a detective—and all skills that Hazard didn’t have. He found himself admitting, silently, that he was going to need his partner. And a part of him wished he had listened to Somers back at the station. Why, Hazard asked himself for the millionth time, do I manage to be such an asshole when it matters?

  So for the moment, he’d make use of Somers—right up until he could jump ship and get a transfer.

  “Let’s go to Smithfield,” Hazard said.

  SOMERS GUIDED THE CAR BACK into Smithfield. He played it cool—or as cool as he could manage, with his head still pounding so hard he thought his brain was going to leak out his ears—and he tried to keep things light. He’d screwed up somehow by mentioning Jeff Langham. He’d sent Hazard into a rage. On anybody else, Somers would have called it a killing rage.

  A dark panic flickered deep inside Somers, like a candle about to blow out. What was that all about? Did Hazard know the truth? If he did, how much? Somers racked his brain and couldn’t come up with anything. There was only the single-page report in the department records, and it hadn’t mentioned any names, but Somers knew that didn’t matter. Hazard was smart. Very smart. If he dug deep enough—Somers gave a mental shake, throwing off the dangerous thoughts. It had been a long time ago, and everything about the suicide had been hushed up. Buried along with Jeff Langham. That part of Somers’s life was over, and he wasn’t going to let it control him. And why did Hazard care so much? Had Hazard been—

  —boyfriends—

  —friends with Jeff?

  As the town shifted around them, with the red brick buildings dropping into clapboard houses, with neatly trimmed yards giving way to rusted expanses of chain-link and weed-choked sidewalks, with trash mounded along the street like old victory monuments, Somers tried to make small talk, and Hazard wouldn’t have any of it. The more Somers tried, the more Hazard seemed to shut down. The other man’s anger was hardening, settling into an icy shell. His dark, brooding good looks were fixed towards the window. A lock of his long hair had slipped down over his forehead and hung in front of his eyes.

  And for the hundredth time in the last two days, Somers asked himself why he was trying to so hard. Why did it matter if Emery Hazard hated his guts? Why did he care if Hazard thought he was still the same piece of shit he’d been back in high school? Somers hadn’t seen Hazard in fourteen, fifteen years. Somers had gone to college. He’d grown up. He’d seen a bigger world, with bigger and better ideas, and he’d come back to find Wahredua growing bigger and better too. He’d been a stupid kid, but he wasn’t that kid anymore.

  That was part of the answer. Another part was that John-Henry Somerset liked people, and he wanted people to like him. He knew, just below the surface of conscious thought, that he was funny and likable and good-looking. He expected people to like him; it was normal, natural, it was just a thing that happened. Everyone liked him—everyone, that was, except Emery Hazard. It had pissed off Somers in high school, and he was starting to realize that it still bothered him. It didn’t make sense, especially when Somers was now going out of his way to be likable.

  But the deep-down part of Somers, the part that crept out at night and stared him eye to eye when he couldn’t sleep in the early hours, that part told Somers that the rest of it was more or less bullshit, that the only reason Emery Hazard mattered to Somers was because Emery Hazard was a way of proving that Somers had changed, that the past could be redeemed. It was a pretty simple equation, even if Somers rarely allowed him to express it clearly: if he could make things right with Hazard, if he could prove that he could atone for the past with the kid he had tortured—

  —with his hand on Emery’s neck in the locker room, feeling the wiry boy’s pulse like a hummingbird under his palm, feeling the mist of condensation on his skin, feeling something dangerously unsettled in his own chest, like the world had tipped over and spilled everything sideways—

  —back in high school, if John-Henry Somerset could do those things, then he could make things right with Cora too. That, at least, was what he told himself when the world was at its darkest.

  “You worked this part of town?” Hazard said, his rough, deep voice breaking Somers’s thoughts.

  “Yeah.”

  “Tough spot.”

  Somers shrugged.

  “That how you made detective?”

  “Part of it.”

  Hazard nodded, his dark eyebrows knitted in anger or thought or some other dark, stormy emotion typical of Emery Hazard. The loose lock of hair—too long, almost, for a detective—still lay across his forehead. It was at odds with the rest of Hazard’s neat, tightly controlled appearance. It made him look almost boyish.

  “What are you smiling about?” Hazard asked in a dangerous voice.

  “Nothing.” Somers pointed ahead. “Start at the trailer?”

  Hazard nodded.

  By daylight, the street—Villanova—looked like any other part of Smithfield. Two brick buildings stood like bookends on one side of the block; one had crumbled inwards, leaving a single wall standing, while the other looked more or less intact. The rest of the block
was made up of prefabricated housing and single-wide trailers, all in various states of disrepair. A matted tangle of trash and weeds choked the curbs. Somers pulled the car to a stop and got out.

  The police cordon was still in place, and for a moment, Somers thought the scene had been abandoned. As he and Hazard approached, though, a bull-necked man strode from around the side of the trailer. He was wearing a blue Wahredua FD t-shirt and jeans, and Somers knew him—he’d been three years ahead in high school and wrestled all the way to state. Redgie Moseby changed course when he saw them and stuck out a thick hand.

  “Redge,” Somers said. “You know Hazard? Emery Hazard, went to school—”

  “I know him.” Redgie, normally friendly, was wearing a sneer, and he bit off the words.

  Somers waited; he could feel Hazard’s tension—the man was always coiled like a spring, it seemed—but nothing came of it.

  “You here all day?” Somers asked.

  “Somebody’s got to keep it sealed. Fucking arson scene, you know? Could be weeks of digging through that shit-heap, and got to have a real live person here the whole time. Fucking nightmare.”

  “You got the sign-in? We caught it, and we wanted to take a look.”

  Redgie grunted and jerked his head towards a truck parked nearby. “Can’t really go inside; most of the floor is burned through, and what’s left isn’t stable. We’re going to have to get scaffolding, go through the whole thing inch by inch.” He retrieved a clipboard and shoved it at Hazard, somehow managing to ignore Hazard while doing so. “You caught it, huh? Shit luck for you.”

  Somers fought to keep anger out of his voice. “Yeah, bad luck.”

  As though Somers hadn’t answered, Redgie’s gaze drifted to Hazard, and his sneer deepened. Redgie didn’t have to say what he was thinking; everybody for about three blocks could have read it off his face.

  But, Redgie being Redgie, he spoke anyway. “You really a cocksucker—”

  Somers didn’t let him finish. He grabbed a handful of Redgie’s shirt, popped Redgie once in the nose, and when Redgie stumbled in shock, he marched Redgie backward to the edge of the cordon. Somers popped him twice more and then let Redgie fall. Adrenaline tingled all over him like Somers had dipped his toes in lightning, and he stared at Redgie’s bloody face.