Transposition

by Gregory Ashe

  “You know who wasn’t in bed? Meryl. She wasn’t in bed once, not all night. Maybe you didn’t notice she was wearing hiking boots with mud. Maybe you didn’t wonder what she was doing. Well, why don’t you see what she was up to, while you still have your badges?”

  The hallway shone with crisp, white, electric light, and it poured over Hazard, easing the tension in his shoulders. He felt himself breathing deeper, grateful for the dusty carpet and the lingering cigar-smoke and the hint of lemon furniture polish. Anything was better than Benny’s grotto.

  “That fucking goblin,” Somers said, his cheeks slashed with red, his hands balled into fists. “If you hadn’t been there—”

  “He never would have said anything in the first place. Drop it, Somers. I’m an easy target, and Benny’s a coward.”

  Somers didn’t say anything, but the furious lines etched in his face didn’t ease, and his hands stayed tight at his sides.

  They found Meryl in the entry hall, sitting on the bottom-most step, her legs pulled up to her chest. She had let down her coppery hair, and it spun across the creamy white of her neck and over the thick wool sweater she wore. She still had on the hiking boots, and the mud on them looked fresh. Too fresh to be from yesterday.

  At the sound of their descent, Meryl glanced over her shoulder. “Oh,” she said, wiping at her face. “It’s you.”

  They joined her at the bottom of the stairs, and Meryl stood as she continued to wipe her eyes. She had obviously been crying, and her nose was red and swollen and a trickle of mucous still showed where she hadn’t cleaned it away. “I guess I’m next,” she said. “Go on. Ask me.”

  “Are you all right?” Somers asked.

  She gave a hiccuppy sob. “No, I’m not all right. Come on, ask me.”

  Somers’s voice softened. “Where were you last night?”

  “I was in bed.” Meryl eyed them defiantly, even as tears spilled down her cheeks. “The whole night. You can ask anyone.”

  “Can anyone verify that?”

  “No.”

  “Someone told us you never went to your bedroom. Is that true?”

  “Was it Benny?”

  “Is that true?”

  “I went to bed. I went to bed at nine o’clock, and I stayed there the whole night.” But her lower lip trembled, and she looked like a woman coming apart by inches.

  “Have you left the house today, Meryl?”

  “Yes.” She took a breath, steadying herself. “I followed you as far as the conservatory.”

  “Why?”

  Her eyes darted away. “Because I wanted to see if I could help.”

  “But?”

  “But it was too cold. I came back to the house.”

  “Did you know that someone shot and killed Ran today?”

  She didn’t scream or faint or wring her hands, but her eyes welled up with tears too quickly for her to blink them away, and her breathing became faster. “You think I did it. I didn’t. I swear to God, I didn’t do it.”

  “Where were you yesterday,” Somers asked, “during the fake murder?”

  This, at least, seemed a question that Meryl could answer. Her voice almost sounded steady as she answered. “I was at the range until I heard the gunshot. Then I went to the river.”

  “Did you see anything strange?”

  “What?”

  “Anything strange? Anything you didn’t expect?”

  “No.” Meryl shook her head.

  “Was anyone missing?”

  “No. Leza and Ran were doing their parts somewhere else, and Columbia, Benny, and I were at the river. Thomas was sulking out by the forest.”

  “You saw Mr. Strong?”

  “Yes, he stood right at the tree line, which is a fair distance, but he made sure we could see him. He wanted us to see how angry he was. That was Thomas’s style; he always made sure everyone knew how he felt. Is that all? Can I go?”

  Somers gave Hazard a tiny shrug.

  “Why did you go outside?” Hazard asked.

  “I already told you: I thought I could help.”

  “That’s a lie. You went out there for a reason. I’m starting to think that reason was to kill Ran. Maybe to kill me and my partner too.”

  This time, Meryl did let out a soft cry. Then she pressed her lips together and shook her head.

  “Who was inside the house today?” Hazard asked. “This morning, on the landing, I found a shoe print with melted snow. Who came inside the house?”

  That struck home. Meryl’s whole body stiffened, and she quivered like she was hanging from a clothesline in a summer storm.

  “I’m not saying another word,” she whispered. “Not until I have a lawyer.”

  “Meryl,” Somers said, his eyes going from her to Somers. “For God’s sake, tell us what’s going on.”

  She shook her head. For another moment, she stood there, swaying in that invisible wind, and then turned and sprinted upstairs. A moment later, the crash of her door echoed down the hallway.

  Hazard slammed his fist into the wall. “Damn it.”

  Somers dropped his head into his hand.

  “Don’t act like that,” Hazard growled. “I had to push her. She was hiding something.”

  “Yeah, you big dolt. She’s hiding something, and she’s absolutely scared to death—and she’s not scared of us.”

  HAZARD AND SOMERS TOOK DINNER up to their room, and no one seemed to care. The other guests’ earlier fear about their own safety had transformed into something else: a wary tension on the knife’s edge of panic. All it would take, Hazard thought as he followed Somers up to the attic, was one loud noise, and they’d all shatter. They’d already turned on each other, retreating into tribes of one and two, and it would take only a snowflake to start the whole avalanche moving. Then there would be blood.

  The attic room was cold but not as cold as it had been the night before. That was due, at least in part, to the closed window in Thomas Strong’s study—tonight, winter had to stay outside. When Hazard sat on the bed, he kept as far to the edge as possible. Somers picked at his lasagne and salad, head down. He didn’t notice Hazard on the edge of the bed. Hazard had the feeling that he wouldn’t have noticed if Hazard stripped down and gave him a lap dance. And what, Hazard wondered as he pinned a bite of lasagne, had put that idea into his head?

  The pasta sauce tasted like canned tomatoes, and the ricotta had as much flavor and substance as a used pillowcase. Hazard dropped the plate on the floor. “Can I use your phone?”

  “What? Oh. Yeah.” Somers punched in the passcode and handed over the phone.

  “You still alive?” Swinney asked when she picked up the call. “Or did Hazard chew your ass off?”

  “This is Hazard.”

  “Oh.”

  “Somers is fine.”

  “Look, I wasn’t—”

  “Are you always worried about his ass?” Hazard cocked an eye at Somers, expecting some sort of response, but the blond man stared at his plate, tracing lines in the sauce with the tines of his fork.

  “I knew it was you,” Swinney said.

  “Sure.”

  “Just a joke, Hazard.”

  “How’s your vacation?”

  “I’m sitting in the bullpen, my eyes about to fall out of my head. Cravens called yesterday, and I got to make the drive all over again. You two couldn’t be considerate enough to get stranded with a murderer during a work week, could you?”

  “What’ve you got?”

  “Christ, where to start? Lender’s not back yet, just so you know. His flight got canceled. The storm. So it’s just me, and there’s only so much I can do when the whole world is shut down for the holiday.”

  “Yeah, your job is real hard.”

  “Fuck off,” Swinney said, but Hazard could hear the smile in her voice. “You’re not the only one with a murder. You know that, right? They called out the Ozark Major Case Squad. Every detective in five counties is hauling ass to get back here.”

 
; “To Windsor?”

  “No. Like I said, you’re not the only one with a murder. Some maniac has been shooting his way across the state. He started at the Kansas border, shot a cop and took his car. He must have run into trouble because he killed an old couple at a truck stop and took their vehicle. Then he shot a guy in a parking lot outside Columbia—that guy survived.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah, well, we don’t have a whole lot to go on. He’s a big guy, he doesn’t ask nicely, and he’s in a hell of a hurry to get somewhere. Finding him in this weather is going to be a bitch.”

  “You have some time to help us?”

  “Shit, the chief told me to plant my ass here. I’m all yours. What do you want first?”

  “Any of the people here convicted murderers?”

  “Sorry, try again.”

  “Anything interesting on them?”

  “Plenty. You want their birthdays? Their home addresses? Oh, and one of them wrote an incriminating note, covered in fingerprints, licked the envelope so we’ve got DNA, and laid out the whole plan.”

  “You want to try any more standup? Or can we get some work done now?”

  “Jesus,” Swinney muttered, and now the smiled had dropped out of her voice—dropped like an anvil out of a goddamn cloud. “Put Somers on, why don’t you?”

  “What do you have?”

  “I managed to get Strong’s will. Just about screamed myself hoarse talking to Judge Platter, and then I had to scream myself out all over again talking to Strong’s attorney, but I got it.” From across the line came the sound of paper shuffling. “Guy was a real sweetheart, it sounds like. Left almost all of it in a trust for, here it is, ‘removing the vagrants from city parks and establishing scholarships for marginalized white males,’ and then it goes on to specify straight, cis, all the good stuff.”

  “He didn’t make a lot of friends with his staff either,” Hazard said. He glanced at Somers, surprised by his partner’s withdrawn pose. Somers had abandoned the pretense of eating and now lay stretched out on the bed, arms behind his head, studying the ceiling. “So nothing in the will?”

  “I didn’t say that.” Swinney’s voice dropped, not quite a whisper, but definitely in an effort to quiet the next words. “Look, this stuff gets serious. Some people—” She hesitated, and Hazard wondered what names she was considering. “Some people wouldn’t even pass it along. Some people would make this paper disappear.”

  “What?”

  “I’m telling you this because Somers says you’re the real thing. Is that true?”

  “What does it say?”

  “Is it true?”

  “I don’t know. Somers can say whatever he wants.”

  At those words, Somers’s head rolled towards Hazard. Crimson stained his cheeks, and his eyes—those ocean eyes—looked like a hurricane was moving in fast.

  “What do you get?” Swinney asked. “A discount for being an asshole every day of the week?”

  “I want to hear it, whatever you’ve got. Right now.”

  “Somers better know his shit.” Swinney cleared her throat and, her voice dropping even lower, said, “Strong’s controlling interest in Strong, Matley, Gross goes to InnovateMidwest.”

  InnovateMidwest. That was interesting. That was really interesting. Hazard’s hand tightened on the phone, and he squirmed upright.

  “You know what that means?”

  “Yes.” It meant Mayor Sherman Newton was now involved in this case, and that meant it was a hell of a lot messier than Hazard had anticipated. InnovateMidwest was Newton’s own investment firm, and it had been responsible for buying up large swaths of Wahredua and Dore County—and then, more often than not, abandoning them. When the abandoned buildings became infested with drug dealers, the homeless, sex workers, and more—in other words, when surrounding property values dropped like God fumbling a hot potato—InnovateMidwest was there, ready to buy up that property too. And the cycle continued.

  But what did Mayor Newton or InnovateMidwest have to do with Strong, Matley, Gross? Was it coincidence that Thomas Strong had brought his entire firm to Wahredua? Surely not. And that meant it wasn’t coincidence that Strong had been killed here either.

  “All right?” Swinney said.

  “That’s it?”

  “The rest of it’s just small stuff. Strong left some money to his family, and some of his personal items go to friends. He even separated out a few thousand shares of stock for another trust, but that’s a joke. I looked up the firm’s current value, and right now those shares aren’t worth getting out of bed for.”

  Not now, maybe, but how much would they be worth when the world saw Strong, Matley, Gross return to its former unprecedented success?

  “What was the trust?”

  More paper rustled, and Swinney said, “The Argus Improvement Foundation. Why? You heard of it?”

  “No,” Hazard said, pulling in a deep breath. “But I’m willing to bet that Adaline Argus has.”

  AFTER A FEW MORE MOMENTS OF TERSE CONVERSATION, Hazard ended the call to Swinney. He sat against the headboard for a few more moments, his mind turning over what he had just learned. The larger revelation, that Mayor Sherman Newton now owned a controlling interest in Strong, Matley, Gross, changed everything about the case. Not only did it bring in a new, high-profile suspect—the kind of suspect that, if things went south, could end a cop’s career—but it also tangled up the question of motive: Newton was as rich as God, or pretty close, so why would he risk luring Strong out to Wahredua and drawing attention to himself?

  More than the revelation about Mayor Newton, though, the detail that tugged at Hazard’s thoughts was the shares left to the Argus Improvement Foundation. It seemed impossible that the name was a coincidence; what were the odds that Adaline Argus was Thomas Strong’s personal secretary and, at the same time, that Strong was contributing to an unrelated trust fund? Hazard was willing to guess that they were pretty close to zero. The shares, with the prospect of a sudden jump in the firm’s value, made Adaline a suspect as well.

  “Well?” Somers asked. “Are you going to tell me, or am I supposed to read your mind?”

  So Hazard told him, and when he’d finished, he said, “You said you knew Newton. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know him. He’s a friend of the family; a friend of my parents, really. But I don’t know him.”

  “If he’s a family friend, how can you not know him?”

  There was the slightest pause before Somers answered. “Just one more letdown, huh?”

  “Do you think he’d be involved in something like this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think he’d kill for money? That’s a pretty simple question, Somers.”

  “I said I don’t know.”

  “How can you not know? You’ve got to have some kind of opinion.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t.” Somers rolled to his feet. The flush stained his cheeks like wine, so dark it was purple, and his blue eyes, now gray, flicked around the room, everywhere but Hazard. “I’m going to wash our clothes. You want me to take yours?”

  “I want you to talk to me about our case.”

  “Fine. Wash your own clothes.” With that, Somers snagged his phone from the bed and left the room, slamming the door behind him.

  Hazard stared after his partner. It would be nice if once, just once, he had some sort of clue as to what was happening inside John-Henry Somerset’s head. Then, with nothing better to do, he settled back on the bed and began to think.

  No matter how many times he turned the question over in his head, the same problems presented themselves: everyone, to one degree or another, had a motive. Everyone, in the same way, had opportunity. It was unfortunate that Hazard and Somers had arrived when they had; if they had gotten to the house even an hour or two earlier, they might have had a chance to talk to Thomas Strong while he was still outside wandering the grounds. That, Hazard thought, would have been an enlightening conv
ersation.

  But if Thomas Strong’s murder presented a multiplicity of possible murderers, then Ran McCain’s offered an opportunity to plot a line towards the killer. Two data points, Hazard knew, would give him a better shot at solving the murders than just one. Although he knew it was an assumption, he was willing for the present time to believe that the same person had wanted both Ran and Strong dead.

  If that were true, then the line could point towards Leza. Leza had discovered Strong’s body, which made her the statistically likely killer. And if Leza were the killer, she would have needed to procure the murder weapon at some point during the day. Most likely, that had been when she had gone to the firing range with Ran. Leza would have realized that Ran posed a threat, and it had been a simple matter to convince Ran to wipe down the guns. Leza had waited in ambush and shot him.

  The assumptions, of course, were that Leza was both a calculating murderer and an excellent shot under terrible weather conditions. While Hazard was willing to believe the first, he had seen no evidence for the second, and it didn’t ring true. Leza had also produced the text message from Thomas, asking her to check in with him in the morning. That text message had pointed towards Columbia as a potential killer—and Columbia’s alibi, Adaline Argus, was now a suspect too.

  Hazard felt a headache starting, and he massaged the center of his forehead. The other possible line he could plot between the two deaths led to Benny. Benny had been manipulating Ran in order to ruin Thomas Strong and lower the value of Strong, Matley, Gross—either in a bid to acquire the algorithm for himself or as part of a plan to sell the company to someone else. If Benny thought that Strong were standing in the way of all that money, he might have been willing to kill. And once Strong was dead, Ran would be a loose end: he knew too much about the truth behind Strong, Matley, Gross’s plummeting value, and he knew too much about Benny Prock in particular.

  In either case, Hazard thought, Ran had posed some kind of threat to the killer. He let out a sigh. Of the two possibilities, Hazard was leaning towards Benny. His best guess was that Mayor Newton had conspired with Benny somehow, arranging for Strong’s death and promising to reward Benny. There were holes in that line of thought, and Hazard knew he was biased against Benny because the man was an ass.