Guilt by Association, page 23
part #4 of Hazard and Somerset Series
“She said she stopped when she heard the gunshot,” Somers said. “I doubt she got much farther than this—look, the grass up there is still standing.”
“She might have gone through the woods. She might be lying.”
Somers moved up to stand next to Hazard. He was so close that Hazard felt his heat, smelled his hair and the sea-salt notes of his cologne. Extending a hand, Somers held his index finger and thumb close together and mimed pinching something on the beach.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“You remember what Scott said?”
“He didn’t say anything about you standing this damn close to me.”
Somers didn’t move, not exactly, but somehow the bastard was now leaning even closer, and Hazard fought the urge to clock him.
“Scott,” Somers said, his breath tickling Hazard’s neck, “said something about the killer looking down at them. Like they were ants. That’s not quite how he said it, but do you remember?” Again, Somers mimed opening and closing his fingers. “Something about how he must have seen the sheriff. Not so big. Was that it?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You think that’s why somebody did this?”
“What?”
Somers had somehow moved in even closer. His chin was practically resting on Hazard’s shoulder, and his breath—warm, soft breath—was making Hazard want to jump out of his own skin. “Power. You feel big, you make the other person small. Somebody made Sheriff Bingham really small. So small all they had to do was move a finger—” Somers mimed closing his fingers again, as though crushing a bug, “—and poof.”
Hazard wasn’t enjoying the closeness. He wasn’t appreciating it. Not exactly. It’s just that it was so damn cold. And Somers did smell good. A little bit like the ocean. A little bit like sex. And if Hazard turned his head right now, their lips were already aligned, and—
“So what do you think?”
“Huh?” Hazard’s voice came out like gravel on sheet metal.
“Do you ever listen to me? You think that’s why somebody would want to kill the sheriff? Fukuma, for example. She seems like she’s very concerned with power. She wants it. She doesn’t want anybody else to have it. Gendered power dynamics.” Somers leaned in even closer, whispering the next words: “And if you even pretend to be surprised that I know a phrase like gendered power dynamics, I’ll push you down this hill.”
“Did that come up a lot at frat parties?”
“God, you’re an asshole sometimes.”
“You might be right.”
Somers chuckled.
“About the motive, I mean. Whoever wanted him dead planned it. Rutter might have wanted to feel powerful, killing the man who had murdered his brother—”
“If we take Dudley’s story at face value.”
Nodding, Hazard continued, “Or, as you said, Fukuma might have wanted power over a political figure who had made her feel powerless in the past.”
“And Dudley,” Somers said. “The sheriff put her in the jail. Made her work night shift. He’s the one who made her an accessory to murder—that’s how she sees it, anyway—and now she feels powerless to make it right.”
Somers let out a thoughtful breath, and Hazard shivered. Right out of his skin; he was going to jump right out of his fucking skin if he had to feel that breath on his neck one more time. He took a step away, turned on his heel, and plunged between the trees.
The scraggly undergrowth thinned after a few feet, and Hazard stumbled into a clear space. He caught Somers by the arm as his partner followed, and Hazard indicated the clearing ahead of them.
“Look at that,” Somers said.
Hazard was looking. He was looking at something very interesting. And in his mind, Hazard was already running backward through the events. She heard the shot. She saw the sheriff dead. She knew she was in trouble if she stayed, and she’d be in even more trouble if she were caught with something like this.
“Who do we know,” Somers said, a lazy smile lighting up his face, “with a history of making these little gems?”
Hazard nodded. “Fukuma.”
Then he bent down to pick up the Molotov cocktail.
WHEN THEY BROUGHT THE MOLOTOV COCKTAIL to Cassella, of course, he was ecstatic. He showered them with praise—Somers, mostly, who lapped it up like a goddamn cat. Hazard confronted Norman and Gross, and the two patrol cops blustered and bullshitted until Hazard got sick of them and left. Cassella stuck around long enough to tell everyone he was going to have one of the patrol boys lift prints from the bottle. Then he left to get a warrant for a DNA sample from Fukuma. This was enough, as far as Cassella was concerned, to take it to Judge Platter. As far as Hazard was concerned, Cassella wasn’t just counting chickens before they hatched; he was counting before there were any goddamn eggs.
After that early discovery, however, Hazard’s day began to go downhill. Cassella had reiterated his charge that Hazard and Somers continue investigating the other suspects, but the reality was that the Major Case squad had already done most of the work. Hazard and Somers spent a chunk of the day driving around, checking in with people who had previously been contacted, knocking doors, canvassing neighbors.
They even checked on the witnesses to the shooting, hoping that one of them might have remembered something. Eunice Moody, under a mask of face powder, was overseeing the setup for a charity auction. The South-Central Missouri Ladies Regional Ornamental Plantings luncheon—at least, that’s what the banner said. Moody was snappy at a harried catering staff, most of them young men and women who were probably college students and trying to earn an extra buck.
“Sorry to interrupt you,” Somers said, eyeing the ballet of chairs and tables and wait staff. “We’ll only take a minute.”
“They’ll be fine,” Moody said, flicking fingers at an acne-speckled young man, who turned around and ran. “I’m really only here to terrorize them. I wouldn’t be here at all if half of our fundraising hadn’t gone missing.”
By all appearances, Hazard thought, she was doing a hell of a job at the terrorizing part.
“The ladies whatever it’s called,” Somers said. “You got robbed?”
“Something like that. Our treasurer, Pearl Warren, moved to some godforsaken spot in Kansas six months ago. Surprise, surprise, she isn’t answering any phone calls.”
“It wasn’t a scramble?” Somers said. “Trying to throw this together?”
“Not really, dear. Your mother helped. She’ll be here soon—why don’t you stay and we’ll all have tea?”
Somers looked like he’d rather drink poison. “Don’t you need to stay? You know, to get everything ready?”
“No, dear. I told you: I’m really only here to raise hell. That’s the secret to a good leader, I think. Wind them up like clockwork—wind them up until they think their heads are about to pop off. Then let them go. If you planned things right, it’ll work out.”
“Unless something unexpected happens.”
“If you planned it right,” Moody said, “you’ve already expected everything.”
“Even if someone takes half the money,” Hazard said.
“Look around you, Detective. As I said: I expect everything.”
Unfortunately, she had nothing new to tell them, and when they left her, she clapped her hands and stalked towards a young woman. The poor girl spilled a tray of silverware and started sobbing.
They found Beverly Flinn, her bleached hair limp with sweat, at the community center. She spoke to them for a few minutes during a break in the rehearsal—it was a play Hazard had never heard of, but Beverly lit up at his question, and she began rattling off her description.
“It’s like Snapped meets King Lear. God, it’s a dream. You’ve got to see it. I’ll get you comps.”
But she didn’t remember anything more, and they left her there.
Dr. Hayashi worked at an urgent care clinic—one of those revolving door facilities set in a washed-out strip mall. A mother and boy were the only ones waiting, and the boy had a serious case of chickenpox. It wasn’t until Hayashi had a break that she spoke to them at the counter, her voice so low that Hazard wanted a shovel to scrape it off the ground.
“Oh. Um. Yes. I mean, it’s very good of you to come. But, no. No, I don’t remember anything. Um. No. No, I don’t.”
McAtee, they found setting a speed trap on the highway out of town. Somers’s parked the Interceptor behind McAtee’s cruiser, and they approached the passenger side door. Hazard didn’t want to give McAtee any pretense for shooting them on accident. In the days since the murder, McAtee’s eye had bruised from Somers’s punch. Hazard found himself thinking about McAtee, about all that money squirreled away, about why McAtee’s family would do a thing like that. McAtee didn’t roll down the window until they’d knocked three times.
He cussed them up one side and down the other, but he hadn’t remembered anything.
When Hazard and Somers got to Randall Scott’s farm, Hazard was forcibly reminded that farming paid a hell of a lot better for some people than it did for others. Scott owned about as much land as the state of Rhode Island, and he had a house that wasn’t much smaller. A small woman in a rayon blouse and stirrup pants led them through the house. Lots of trophies, lots of pictures of Thailand, lots of pictures of a boy—Scott’s son, Hazard thought, and he remembered that the boy had died a long time ago. He remembered, too, the tragedy: a series of rapes, escalating in violence, and then someone had found the boy dead in a ditch. An angry brother or father or uncle, everyone said. Ugly, the kind of ugliness that stuck to a family.
They found Scott emptying the trunk of his car. He nodded to them, setting metal contraptions on the ground. Traps, Hazard realized. Big, nasty steel traps that looked big enough to take off a man’s leg—anything smaller would likely just get snapped in half.
“Coyotes,” Scott said. “Damn things get worse every year. You know what’s hell about coyotes? They do damn well under pressure. If you lay into a pack of wolves, for example, start picking them off, you can knock them out pretty quick. I’m not speaking for myself; just speaking about how things were done. That’s not true about coyotes, though. Damn things are mean as hell. You can’t keep them down no matter how much you try, not without wiping them out completely.” And that was all he could tell them, and Hazard wondered if Sheriff Bingham had been more of a wolf or a coyote. Had he been brought down because he’d lost his pack? Or had he been tenacious, too tenacious, and someone had wiped him out?
Lionel Arras, again, was nowhere to be found. They tried his office. They tried his home. They dragged Market and Jefferson, hoping to catch sight of him at one of the more popular restaurants in town. Nothing.
“He gave a statement,” Somers said.
“After he ran out of the house. Now we can’t find him again. That doesn’t seem strange to you?”
“We’ll find him.”
“I didn’t say we wouldn’t find him.”
“I didn’t say you did.”
When they left Scott’s house, they drove south towards the Rutter compound. Somers insisted on playing that ridiculous twanging music. Once, after a particularly screechy section of strings, Hazard had failed to hide a dirty look, and then Somers had turned up the volume like a real bastard. After that, it was a matter of principle, and so Hazard gave Somers—and the radio—the dirtiest looks he could manage.
The sun cut through the last quarter of sky, and the light came from behind Hazard. Where it touched Somers, that golden light was perfect: gold on top of gold, shining on his jaw, his cheek, his hair, the beginning wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. In that light, the blond stubble on Somers’s cheek gleamed and became visible. What would it be like to run his thumb over that? Rough, God, yes, Hazard knew it would be rough. It looked soft, but he’d felt it before, and it was scratchy as hell. But the scratch of it, that could be nice too in its own way. He could run the back of his hand down Somers’s cheek. He could lean in. How would it feel against his lips? How would it feel against his tongue? He knew—Christ, he had to adjust his legs—he knew how it would taste.
And he’s married, you worthless fuck, Hazard told himself. He’s married, and he’s got a daughter, and tonight he’s going to dinner with his wife because he loves her. And the only decent thing you’ve done, the only worthwhile thing in your whole goddamn life, was keep him from screwing up his own life last night. So you can stare at him. You can think about catching those blond bristles between your teeth and tugging until he yelps—he shifted again, wondering how strong the zipper was, if his trousers would just split down the middle—yeah, you can think about that all day long, but the only good thing you ever did was not letting him ruin his shot at happiness.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Football.”
“Nope. What, really?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on.”
“The sunlight.”
And then they drove on in silence. When they reached the Rutter compound, the gate was still shut, and the signs on the gate still offered a range of unsolicited opinions about breeding, sexual proclivities, and and the temporal and eternal destinies of trespassers.
Now, though, there was a Ford Taurus with rusted wheel wells parked across the length of the gate. Somers let out a groan.
“You recognize it too?” Hazard asked.
“What the hell is she doing here?”
Behind the Taurus’s steering wheel, Lisa Dudley’s form was visible. She was staring through the gate, into the compound, and her big-boned body looked like it was strung on tight wires.
When Somers knocked on the glass, she jumped. “Easy,” Somers said, motioning for her to roll down the window.
“Geez. Sorry about that; just about gave me a heart attack.”
“Miss Dudley.”
“I know, I know. We talked about this.”
“We did.”
“I’m not causing any trouble.”
“You’re parked so they can’t get on their land. That’s illegal.”
“I wouldn’t stop them if they showed up.” Today, Dudley wore a long, ill-fitting shirt with a floral print; it had come off the rack in about 1987, Hazard guessed. She pulled at the lace neck and squirmed in her seat. “I would’ve moved.”
“You can go on and move now,” Somers said. “What are you doing here, Miss Dudley?”
“I just wanted to talk. I thought maybe if we talked, I could understand what was going on.”
“You wanted to talk to Dennis Rutter?”
Dudley gave up on trying to make the shirt comfortable, and she clasped the steering wheel with both hands. “I’m not an idiot. You don’t have to talk to me like I am.”
“What are you really doing here?”
“I’m not a liar, either, sir. Ma would strip my hide if she thought I were a liar. I’m twenty-seven next month, and I’ve never seen a need to lie before.”
“Just drink,” Hazard said, “gamble, fuck around, sleep in ditches.”
“All right,” Dudley said.
“Real lady-like,” Hazard said.
“All right.” Pinpricks of sweat glistened on Dudley’s forehead and darkened the floral print under her arms. “You like that, don’t you? You like talking to a woman like that. Well, I’ve never so much as said a sour word to you, never so much as raised my voice. Ma says that’s how the gays are, and I suppose she’s right.”
“Get home,” Somers said. “And don’t do something stupid like this again.”
“I wasn’t doing anything stupid. Ma didn’t raise any stupid children. I’m here on account of Rutter. I thought it over, and I’m going to find him. I’ll find him before you do.”
“Get home, Miss Dudley. Right now, before I decide you’re blocking private property and take you in to the station.”
Lisa Dudley’s tires threw up gravel as she tore away from the compound. Hazard watched her go; he was ignoring Somers.
It didn’t work. Somers said, “You’re hard on her.”
“She was being stupid. And she’s an adult.”
“You rode her hard when we talked to her the first time.”
“I don’t pack her in cotton batting if that’s what you mean.”
“And I do?”
Hazard shrugged.
“What are you thinking?”
“You’re not going to complain some more? You’re not going to tell me I’m being a dick?”
“You are being a dick. You know you are. And you’re doing it on purpose. Are you still worked up about last night? Because I thought we were over that. This morning, we got over that fast because we’re adults.”
“There’s nothing to be worked up about.”
“Sure.” Somers gave a curt laugh. “All right, if that’s what you say. So you’re trying to get a rise out of Dudley. You’re pushing her to see how fast she falls and which direction.”
Hazard shrugged again, approaching the Interceptor.
As Somers swung up into the driver’s seat, he said, “You think she did this?”
“She can’t account for where she was. Nobody can. She’s an excellent marksman.”
“Markswoman.”
“She got motive. She’s got opportunity. She’s got means. And she shows up at the Rutter compound.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“What would you do if you were the killer?”
“I don’t know. What would you do?”
“I’d try hard as I could to pin it on somebody else. Somebody like Rutter.”
Somers frowned. The sunlight surfed across the bridge of his nose, brightening the hollows of his eyes. “And if Rutter is dead, it’s sure hard for him to make his own case. But why would she sit out here, plain as day? That’s not real smart.”
“She was a county deputy,” Hazard said, nodding to the road so that Somers would start driving. “If she’d been smart, she would have been a cop.”
