Police Brutality (Hazard and Somerset: A Union of Swords Book 2)

by Gregory Ashe

  “Before anything else, I want to know—”

  “Holy shit, dude.” Dulac came around the corner, the words high and excited as he jogged toward them. Slapping Hazard on the shoulder, he said, “Awesome, awesome, glad you’re here, gotta get the Three Amigos back together. Dude: Holy. Shit.”

  “You got something from the neighbors?” Somers said. “Somebody saw someone going into the house?”

  “Better,” Dulac said, a grin stretching his freckles. “Somebody got a fight on camera.”

  Somers told Dulac to take them to the neighbor who had recorded a fight, and the younger detective took off with puppy-dog enthusiasm. Somers and Hazard followed more slowly.

  “He’s like a goddamn puppy,” Hazard said.

  Somers just smiled at the shared thought. “What were you saying? First thing you want to know?”

  “Exact time of death. I want Boyer to lock it down as closely as she can. And I want her to make sure we’re not missing anything on the body.”

  “If he were forced into that noose, he might have abrasions. Or bruises, contusions, stuff like that from the struggle. Is that what you’re thinking?”

  “Yes. But I also want to know if he had a terminal illness. Or a brain tumor. Or anything, for fuck’s sake, that could explain how weird things have been lately. If he had a reason to kill himself—”

  “I thought we agreed this is murder.”

  “I don’t like coincidences, and I think murder is the best theory. But I don’t want to rule anything out. Not until we have more information.”

  The house that Dulac led them to looked moderately better kept than the others on the block: the tuckpointing had recently been redone, and a rattan swing on the porch looked new, piled with brightly-colored cushions that gave the house a vibrancy missing from the rest of the street. Dulac was on the stairs, practically wagging his tail and panting, hands on his hips as he spoke to a man waiting on the porch. The man had to be in his sixties, with a trimmed beard and restless eyes.

  “This is David Schoen,” Dulac said, like he was introducing the next contestant on a TV show. “Mr. Schoen has some impressive home security.”

  “Dave Schoen,” the man said as he took Hazard’s hand first, and then repeated, “Dave Schoen,” as he pumped Somers’s.

  “Mr. Schoen, show the detectives the outside first, would you?”

  “Not much to show, I’m afraid.” He led them to the end of the porch, where a small, digital security camera was mounted under the eaves. “I put these in myself a couple of years ago. Mike—” He pointed to the next house. “Mike wasn’t living here yet, and we had a crazy guy in that house. Crazy. Drank all day. Drank all night. Had huge, screaming fights with his woman. We took turns calling the cops on him, not that they did jack.” He seemed to remember who he was speaking to, and he hurried on. “Well, I’d said a thing or two, and he’d said a thing or two, and one night he put a paver through my car window. I put these cameras up the next day. If that son of a bitch wanted to destroy my property, I was going to have it on record.” A pseudo-pious expression crawled across Schoen’s face, and he looked upward briefly. “Thank God, that man did get help. I think he’s doing all right. Living somewhere else now, of course.”

  Somers was enjoying Hazard’s obvious struggle to keep from rolling his eyes.

  “Looks like you’ve got a good eye on Officer Hoffmeister’s property,” Somers said. “Detective Dulac says you’ve got something to show us.”

  “That’s right. Well, happy to be of help. Happy to do whatever I can. If you want to come inside for a minute . . .”

  He led them through a home that had obviously seen a great deal of love and care: dusted and swept, the wood polished to a shine. Then he took them downstairs, apologizing the whole way. “I finished the basement myself. Had to do it. Had a wife at the time, and Beverly, God love her, wasn’t built with an off switch. She just kept talking and talking, and if I weren’t down here working, I was supposed to be up there nodding my head at her clucking and being a ‘good listener,’ although God only knows what that means.”

  “Did you hear that, Ree?” Somers said.

  Hazard leveled a flat look at him.

  “I’ll probably end up having to do the same thing,” Somers said. “Rip everything out and refinish the whole basement. You just do so much clucking.”

  “You are not as funny as you think you are,” Hazard muttered as they got to the bottom of the steps.

  Their journey ended there: in front of them, taking up one wall of the basement, was a massive monitor divided into four parts. Each one showed a high-resolution color feed from the cameras. Shoen picked up a remote, clicked, and four new feeds replaced the originals. “They’re on all day, every day,” Schoen announced. “Nothing to it, once you’ve got it set up. Just let them run.”

  “Show them what you showed me,” Dulac said.

  Schoen punched a few buttons, and a single feed dominated the screen, rewinding at a furious pace. After a few seconds, Schoen stopped the feed and played it forward.

  The street was dark except for two failing sodium lamps, which gave cotton-ball glows. Somers had to focus on the details to pick out the shape of Hoffmeister’s house.

  “This is worthless,” Hazard said. “It’s too dark; I can’t see anything.”

  “You’ve got to get used to it,” Schoen said. “It’s not as good as the expensive ones, I know, but it’s a nice system, and you’ve just got to get used to it. See—here.” He stabbed a finger at the screen.

  As though on cue, a figure moved down the street. He—or she—was just a blip in the image, and Somers had to admit Schoen was right: it took some getting used to. But the longer Somers stared at the video, the easier it was to use movement to identify the significant shapes in the blurred image.

  The man that Schoen had pointed to walked down the block and stopped at Hoffmeister’s house. He went into the yard, up the steps, and disappeared into the deeper shadows under the porch.

  “Go ahead,” Dulac said.

  Schoen pressed a button, and the video sped up.

  “There’s nothing for a few minutes,” Dulac said. “I think he’s knocking on the door, probably having a conversation with Hoffmeister until, yeah, right there.”

  Schoen returned the video to its normal speed, and two blurred shapes tumbled down the porch steps and onto the grass. They wrestled there, rolling together once, as though locked together by their hatred. The distance and the darkness made it hard to tell anything except that they were fighting: the intensity, the severity, they were lost. It could have been a very bad fight, Somers thought, the kind where one man beat another to death. Or it could have been a tussle, just a few punches because one guy said the wrong thing.

  When the fight ended, the two shapes separated. One of them moved toward the street in a lurch, ignoring the sidewalk and jetting out onto the blacktop, as though drunk or confused from the blows. The other shape stayed in Hoffmeister’s yard, weaving back and forth along the property line. Somers imagined yelling, but he knew that wasn’t right; none of the neighbors had heard anything. So instead, he pictured Hoffmeister toeing the edge of his property, breathing wildly, wanting to lunge and resume the fight.

  Why hadn’t he?

  “You can fast forward again,” Dulac said, and the video sped up. After a few more minutes, the figure in the street hobbled away, sticking to the center of the blacktop as though not caring that a car might come along and smack them into the next existence. The shape in Hoffmeister’s yard moved back toward the deep dark of the porch and disappeared.

  “Again,” Hazard. “Give me that.”

  “You have to be careful—”

  But Hazard already had the remote, and he played the scene back again, pausing at times, speeding it up, slowing it back down. Somers watched, but try as he might, he didn’t catch anything he hadn’t noticed the first time: the figure walking down the sidewa
lk, conversation on the stairs, both men suddenly shooting off the porch and wrestling in the grass, and then the sudden end to the fight.

  “How far back do your recordings go?”

  “A week, but—”

  “Show me two nights ago.”

  Schoen did some more complicated tapping, sorting through a collection of video files on the screen until he found the one he wanted. When he played it, he tried to hold on to the remote, tucking it against his chest, but Hazard wrested it from him and started jabbing buttons again. The video sped forward. Somers knew what Hazard was looking for: the green Chevy that had trailed Hoffmeister to their house, where someone had taken potshots at the officer while he was standing in their doorway. On the section of street that Schoen’s camera covered, no green Chevy was visible, but it could have been parked just up the block, and Somers thought Hoffmeister might have said something about the alley behind his house, but—

  “That asshole liar,” Somers muttered as events unfolded on the screen in front of him: a dark shape trotting down the porch steps, moving to the car with slow, easy movements. When Hoffmeister—because it had to be him—drove away, a thirty-second gap followed before the green Chevy came into view, no license plate, rolling easily along behind Hoffmeister.

  “For fuck’s sake,” Hazard growled. Plastic squeaked and groaned as his big hand tightened around the remote.

  “He wasn’t running for his life,” Somers said. “He wasn’t panicked. He walked out of his house like he was running late for work but wasn’t too worried about it. And that Chevy didn’t trail him the way he said; that wasn’t a high-speed pursuit. What the hell was it?”

  “It was a fucking con,” Hazard snapped. He pointed the remote at the screen, pressing buttons with his thumb, and the plastic casing of the remote squeaked. “That asshole lied to me.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  DECEMBER 19

  WEDNESDAY

  1:49 PM

  IN THE BASEMENT, WITH THE security footage still frozen on the screen, Somers waited for the explosion. Hazard was still clutching the remote, holding it so tightly that the plastic chirped in protest. The countdown was already beginning in Somers’s head: 10. 9. 8.

  “You can’t be so rough with it,” Schoen said, reaching for Hazard’s hand but not quite daring to take back the remote. “You’re going to break it.”

  “That fucking piece of shit lied to me,” Hazard said, mostly to himself as he worked the remote like a blind man. “That fucking asshole shoved my nose into a pile of his own bullshit. Why won’t this fucking thing fucking rewind? Why won’t this goddamn, piece of shit, cock-busting fucktoy do a single fucking thing it’s supposed to do?”

  “Uh, Ree,”

  With a wordless growl, Hazard shoved the remote at Schoen, turned, and took the stairs out of the basement. Schoen turned the remote in his hands, studying it.

  “He cracked the case. That son of a gun cracked the case.”

  “Will you sort this out?” Somers said. “And get copies of those files. The whole files, please.”

  “Yeah, but,” Dulac threw a look of consternation at Schoen and then at Somers. “Dude, we’re partners. Come on, don’t ditch me.”

  “I’m not ditching you. I’m just going to make sure he doesn’t hulk-smash anything valuable. Get the files, ok?”

  “I’m not a newb, dude, I’m—”

  But Somers was already taking the stairs, darting through the well-dusted stillness of Schoen’s front rooms, and hurrying outside. Hazard was standing on the lawn, glancing about like a man who wanted a sledgehammer or a pneumatic drill but, hell, he’d settle for a croquet mallet as long he still got to do some serious damage. As Somers reached Hazard, Hazard launched off again, his long strides eating up the sidewalk.

  “So, let’s not jump to any conclusions, yet.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Don’t get angry, not until we know what really happened.”

  “I’m not angry.”

  “Right, well, that’s great. Because you’re doing a really good impression of being angry.”

  “I’m fine, John.” His stride picked up pace. He was practically jogging. “I’m just very, very aware of the fact that my client was a lying, dick-hole piece of shit who manipulated me.”

  “That feels a little bit like jumping to conclusions.”

  Hazard just walked faster until they got to the end of the block.

  “Ree,” Somers said, catching his sleeve.

  Hazard spun around so fast that Somers dropped the sleeve.

  “He told me somebody was trying to get into his house.” Hazard took a step toward Somers; Somers held his ground. “He told me he ran for his fucking life, with that truck riding his ass.” Hazard took another step; Somers stayed where he was. “He told me someone was trying to kill him, and he stood in that doorway and pretended somebody was shooting at him.” Hazard’s next step brought his chest bumping against Somers’s, his scarecrow eyes flashing as he towered over him. “So don’t tell me not to lose my fucking temper.”

  Somers didn’t move, even though Hazard was big, and he was angry, and he could be surprisingly frightening, even after all this time together, even when his anger was clearly directed somewhere else. He just stood there, Hazard leaning into him like he meant to start something—a fight, a fuck—with Hazard’s breath hot in the winter day, white curls of steam mingling with Somers’s own quickened breathing.

  “Maybe we should get into cage fighting,” Somers said.

  At the words, Hazard’s rage seemed to spark and then go out. His shoulders relaxed; he eased back a step.

  “I’m sorry,” Hazard said. “But I was blind. I was stupid. I believed everything he said, and the whole time, he was playing me for an asshole.”

  “Hey,” Somers said, catching his wrist. “No jumping to conclusions. And no beating yourself up. What do we know, really know, from that video?”

  “He—”

  “No. You’re still wired and you’re going to say something stupid. Be smart. Say something smart.”

  Wrenching his arm from Somers’s grip, Hazard let out a slow breath. “I was going to say, he lied about running.”

  “That’s not what you were going to say,” Somers said with a roll of his eyes, “but I won’t be a jerk and make you admit it.”

  Hazard had the good grace to blush.

  “He lied about running,” Somers agreed. “That doesn’t mean the rest of it wasn’t real.”

  “Why lie, then?”

  “Maybe he was embarrassed that he didn’t suspect anything until it was too late. Maybe he left the house for another reason, one he didn’t want to confess. Maybe he wanted to tell a better story.”

  “Tell a better story?”

  “He probably wouldn’t have thought of it that way. He probably wouldn’t have even done it consciously. But we all do it: self-edits, revisions, details that we convince ourselves don’t matter if we add them or take them away. We all want to be the heroes of our own stories. Or the victims. And that means, sometimes, telling a better story. Sometimes, in the real version, we look like unaware doofuses, and we convince ourselves that as long as the important stuff is true, the rest of it doesn’t matter.”

  Hazard rubbed his jaw. “When we went to his house—”

  “Pig’s head in the freezer. Yeah, I remember. That’s why I said the story is partially true; somebody was after Hoffmeister. But maybe he didn’t tell you the whole truth, and the video shows parts of that. He’s an asshole, but I don’t think he was just jerking you around for fun.”

  “That’s too complicated. He’s lying about someone trying to get into the house, but he’s telling the truth about someone trying to kill him, but he’s lying about running. It’s too complicated to make sense.”

  Somers had an answer for that, but he didn’t like the thought of sleeping on the sofa that night. So instead he said, “Just because you l
ike things simple doesn’t mean things are always simple. Life is messy; people are complicated.”

  Hazard set his jaw, and a fringe of scarlet ran along his cheekbones, but he didn’t say anything. Maybe he didn’t want to spend the night on the sofa either; maybe he’d worked out enough aggression the night before and was back to stockpiling.

  “Ok, let’s drop that for a minute,” Somers said, fast-tracking the part of his brain that tried, very hard, to think like Emery Hazard when he needed it to. “We’ll come back to it when we have more information. Isn’t that the smart thing to do? We don’t even have enough information to make a hypothesis, so let’s wait until we can come up with a possibility and test it.”

  Hazard gave a fractional nod. “Christ, I don’t even know where to start with this. If Hoffmeister was lying, that resets everything. I spent days thinking he’d pointed me toward potential suspects. If he was fabricating, though, then maybe I’ve wasted days for no purpose.”

  “You made some money,” Somers said. “You’re a little closer to buying me all those diamonds I want.”

  With a grunt, Hazard seemed to consider him. Then, ducking his chin with something that Somers thought might be shyness, he pulled out his phone. As he tapped at the screen, he said, “I know you think you’re joking, but all this talk about marriage, and the stuff about diamonds—I think I figured out what you’re getting for your birthday. And Christmas, too. It’s going to be big, so I’m going to wrap the holidays together. If that’s ok.”

  “Ree, I was just joking. Honestly. I don’t want diamonds. I don’t care about that stuff. And you don’t have to . . . you don’t have to rush anything just because I keep saying dumb things.”

  “But if I wanted to get you something, I mean, something that I think you want. Maybe even something I think you need. If I wanted to get that for you, would you—would you want to see it first? Just, you know, I don’t want to get something you’d hate.”

  Somers felt his tongue go loose in his mouth. “I mean, Ree, I don’t know, I never even thought about it, the details I mean, that kind of stuff. With Cora I had a family ring, but it’s definitely a woman’s, and I—Jesus, I didn’t mean to bring up Cora, not when we’re—” He took a breath, blinked a few times, settled his feet to make sure the cement hadn’t liquefied under him. “I guess, yeah. I mean, we should probably look at, um, stuff like that together. It’s not like we have to do tradition, right?”