Reasonable Doubt, page 28
part #5 of Hazard and Somerset Series
“He’s not. The van’s gone.”
Somers didn’t answer.
“And if he were still there,” Hazard said, “you’d be the one who needed to stay back.”
“Ree.”
“I’m going to take care of this, Somers.”
And with that, he strode into the brushy woods, tacking close to the trail that Jesse had left. Somers followed, pulling the .40 from the small of his back and jogging to keep up. The trees grew close together, their canopy still thin in early spring, their shadows skeletal. After a few yards, the wheatgrass and blackberries shrank, and dead leaves and needles crunched underfoot. Hazard was hurrying now, frantic energy overriding his normally cautious movements, and Somers loped after him.
The trees broke ahead, and crepe-paper sunlight crinkled over everything. Honeysuckle grew in a line, thick and bold as if drawn with a Sharpie, and the branches swished and snapped as Hazard plunged through them. On the backswing, honeysuckle slapped against Somers’s chest, and its pollen puffed into the air, sickly sweet in his nose. And then he cleared the line of honeysuckle, cleared the dense, granular clouds of pollen, and found himself scraping down a rough embankment. A creekbed, he realized, long dry to judge by the accumulated detritus of leaves and twigs and a skull that might have belonged to a shrew or a vole. Hazard didn’t see the tiny white bones, and they popped under his huge feet like snappers on the Fourth of July.
Hazard didn’t see those bones because his gaze was fixed on Sister Naomi, who was dead and sprawled at the edge of the creek. She had died in agony, Somers knew, although her face had gone slack and empty in death. He knew because a rust-colored trail marked the bed of dry stones and leaves and bones, showing where the old woman had dragged herself in her last fight for survival. At the end, though, her wounds had been too much for her; blood stained the front of her robe, and a knife—a large knife, it looked like—had sliced two neat lines in the fabric.
For a moment, Hazard studied the dead woman, and then he took two steps away from her, towards the far bank of the creek. He kicked a stone, and it cracked and wobbled and shimmied across the bed. Then he stopped moving. He wasn’t still; there was too much violence inside him, too much hate and fury ricocheting like atoms in a nuclear reactor. The air was still in the dry creek bed, and Somers thought he could smell that violence: in Hazard’s sweat, in the mustiness of bones bleached in sunlight, in the weak, watery shit of Sister Naomi’s lacerated bowels. And Somers’s thoughts were pulsing in time with his heartbeat, distant, dry thoughts at odd with his heart hammering against his chest, and he realized he was supposed to be the calm one, he was supposed to be the one who kept his cool.
Forcing himself to squat next to the dead woman, Somers examined her. He started with her hands: nails broken, a long slash crossing her palm and climbing the inside of her arm. Defensive wounds. She had known the bastard was trying to kill her, and she had fought back. That was good. Somers forced his thoughts to order against the red tingeing his vision. If she’d managed to scratch Jesse, there would be biological evidence under her nails.
Somers didn’t touch the bloodied robe. He didn’t need to see the deep cuts that had ended her life. But he looked at her shoes and saw wheatgrass trapped in the laces of old, battered Keds, and saw mud on the heels where she had tried to dig in and stop Jesse from hauling her into the woods. He looked at her face. Those eyes with cataract clouds had gone to glass, and they looked like marbles you could buy by the hundreds. Somers wanted to close those eyes. He knew better than that, but he wanted to nonetheless. She was old. She had lived a hard life, hard enough to drive her into the madness of John Oscar Walden’s cult, and she had died like this, alone, afraid, and still fighting. Someone ought to have the decency to close her eyes.
“Move,” Hazard said.
Wiping hands on his trousers, Somers cleared the body. Hazard took his spot. His inspection took less time, but the big man drew on a pair of latex gloves and shifted the old woman’s body. In his mind, Somers saw the way Hazard had touched Sirkaa Hastback, urging her into the house, and the way Hazard had cradled Evie against his chest, and the way he held Somers at night, and again Somers was struck by the realization that Hazard didn’t know, didn’t have any idea, of the kind of man he really was. Emery Hazard might think he knew himself, but he had only scratched the surface, and for some reason that hurt. That knowledge was like a fist trying to yank Somers’s heart straight through his ribs.
“What the hell—” Somers said, shock forcing him to focus his attention on what Hazard had found.
The big man sat back on his heels, a book lying in his hands. The plastic cover had cracked and fissured, and the onionskin paper was yellowed with age. Decades’ worth of oil carried by fingertips had darkened the edges of the pages, and now blood rubricked the margins, pasting the pages together as Hazard opened the book.
“What the fuck was she doing?”
“That’s what she was trying to protect,” Somers said. “She was bleeding out. She was dying. And what she cared about, what she wanted to save, was her Bible. It was the most important thing in the world to her.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Look at all that blood. She clutched it to her chest, and she was bleeding out, and she—” But Somers stopped because he was wrong. In the tremulous white light of the creek bed, he could see he was wrong. Blood marked the pages of the Bible. But it wasn’t a wash of blood. It wasn’t a flood of thick heartsblood that had soaked the book. The blood was streaked. Smeared. Thin in places, although a few globs had soaked the paper.
Hazard thumbed through the book and stopped where a bloody thumbprint marked a page early in the Bible. Very early. And Somers felt eighteen years of Sunday School come back, his brain singing a Sunday School song with the books of the Bible in order: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy—
“Joshua,” Hazard said.
“You think she did that? You think she was dying and she dragged herself to the edge of the bank and then she paused to look up her favorite Bible verse?”
Hazard didn’t answer. He was reading, his fine dark brows like charcoal lines smudged together.
“What chapter?” Somers said. “What was so important?”
“Here,” Hazard said, his voice so thick and choked that Somers barely understood the word. He shoved the book in Somers’s face, and Somers scanned the page. Joshua, chapter ten. The bloody fingerprint had obliterated several verses, but it wasn’t hard to tell what Sister Naomi had wanted to read one last time before she died.
“And there was no day like that before it or after it,” Somers read, “that the Lord hearkened unto the voice of a man: for the Lord fought for Israel.”
Hazard closed the book carefully. He rocked Sister Naomi’s body, slid the book under her arm, and let her come to rest against the dusty stones of the creek bed. All of the movements were precise, controlled. To anybody else in the world, they might have even seemed calm. But to Somers, to Somers they looked like the movements of a man about to shatter. Or explode. And again he thought himself thinking about a grenade, and the shrapnel that was left at the end, and thinking, no, no, no, because he’s mine.
“The Lord didn’t fucking fight for her, though,” Hazard said. “Did he?”
WAHREDUA REGIONAL HOSPITAL was a complex of multi-colored buildings scattered seemingly at random across several acres, all painted to match a piss-and-shit themed palette. At least, that’s how Hazard always thought of it. There was, admittedly, the stray splash of orange amidst the browns and mustards and olive-greens, but that didn’t really improve anything.
The main building of Wahredua Regional, where Swinney had told them that Clyde was being treated, had a row of TV news vans parked outside, with cables snaking in a million directions and satellite dishes cocked towards the sky.
“This is going to be a mess,” Somers said.
Hazard ignored him. He didn’t ignore Somers because he thought the man was wrong; Hazard knew that Somers was probably putting the situation mildly. It would be a mess inside as reporters continued to pick the bones of the most interesting regional story in years: the cult leader who had risen from the dead, the abused boy found wandering the wilderness, the influx of new worshippers. What would they do when they learned about the rest of it, about Sister Naomi and Brother Jesse?
Just thinking the names made Hazard tense. He took deep breaths. He cleared his mind, swept out all the dirt and dust and debris. He had no room for emotions right then; what he needed was logic, analysis, cool and calculating reason. But it didn’t matter what he tried to do. He had watched a documentary about the formation of the Hawaiian Islands, and he remembered one scene with graphic detail: the inside of a volcano, the magma roiling, climbing, splashing, and then falling in on itself. It was a maelstrom of liquid stone and fire, and he remembered thinking, when he saw the documentary the first time, that he was seeing a kind of madness, an inversion of order, as cold hard stone liquefied into fire. And he had that inside himself, now, that same liquefaction, the same fluid heat that had transformed everything he had been before.
He had been fine until Naomi. He had been in control. Yes, he had moments of weakness. Yes, when the memories of Elah became vivid, when he caught himself back in the sanctuary, stifled in that incandescent furnace, yes, he had doubts. But Somers had helped with that. Somers had shown him that he could keep going. Somers had convinced him he could help.
Now, though—now Hazard didn’t think he could help. He wasn’t even sure he could think; he couldn’t think, anyway, with the same precision and logic that he had relied on before. Now all that cold stone had melted into magma, and it was sloshing, splashing, crashing, rising. Volcanoes eventually exploded; that’s what they did. That was their nature. And when they were done, they were just a smoking hole in the ground. That’s what would be left, Hazard realized. Whatever was coming, whatever was building inside him, that was where it would end.
“Ree,” Somers said as he parked the Interceptor. “Maybe you should stay here.”
Hazard dropped out of the SUV and marched towards the hospital. Somers came up alongside him, and his hand wrapped around Hazard’s arm, not trying to slow him, just holding him. Anchoring him, Hazard realized with a flash, and amidst all that heat, Hazard felt a pang. Because at some point, Somers would stop trying to hold on. At some point, Somers would let go, and then gravity or the gulf stream or the trade winds or whatever the hell blew through the universe would carry Somers back to—
—his family—
—Cora and Evie, and that would be the end of this: boyfriends or fuck-buddies or an easy screw, whatever the hell he wanted to call it.
Movement ahead plucked Hazard out of his thoughts, and he focused. Reporters clustered near the doors. Lights shone, blistering the hospital glass, and boom mikes swung overhead, and men and women with elaborate coiffeurs and expensive clothes scurried and scrambled and fought for position.
But it wasn’t the reporters and producers and assistants who caught Hazard’s attention. It was the dark-haired young man with the patchy scruff on his cheeks, arms swinging at his side as his steps ate up the cement, his movements rapid and circular, almost manic. Rex Kolosik looked like shit; the last few days hadn’t done him any favors. He’d been a good-enough-looking guy when Hazard had seen him last. Young, and with the kind of pleasant good looks most young people enjoy. Now, though, dark shadows drew at his eyes, and his hair was greasy and flat. His clothes were wrinkled, and as Hazard approached, he scented body odor and stale grease, a kind of McDonald’s smell, floating around Kolosik. It was the smell of despair.
“Waiting for your big chance on screen?” Somers said.
Kolosik spat, turning towards them, and his hands plunged into the pockets of his mechanic jacket. “What do you want?”
Somers eyed the door, where the reporters were clustered, and then shifted his gaze to Kolosik. At least twenty yards separated Kolosik from the attention, and Somers’s message had to be clear: Kolosik had been left in the cold.
“What happened?” Somers asked. “She decided she didn’t want to take a cable guy back to California with her?”
Kolosik spat again. “You think you’re funny.”
“I think you’re starting to look like a stalker, Rex. You were hanging around at the park when Peyton gave an interview, and now you’re here. What’s that about? You really that hot for her?”
For a moment, Kolosik’s hands tightened into fists inside his pockets, and the outline of something flat and long pressed against the fabric. Then he relaxed. “A man’s got responsibilities. He’s got to care for his own. I know that, and she knows that. She’s going to change her mind. She’s going to remember who I am, and she’s going to change her mind.”
“And you’re going to stick to her like glue just to make sure. Is that it?”
“I heard Peyton talking to her mom about you. A couple of fag cops.”
Somers sighed. “Don’t do anything stupid, Rex. You don’t want to embarrass her. Then she’d really hate you.”
As Somers headed for the hospital doors, Hazard trailed after him. Rex shouted, “She’s going to change her mind. She needs me. She just forgot for a little while, but she needs me!”
And then the glass doors slid closed behind Hazard, and he smelled disinfectant and lemon floor polish, and the chrome and tan waiting room spread out ahead.
Peyton Laflamme was walking towards them, but she hadn’t noticed them yet. Her head was turned, and she was in fierce conversation with her step-mother. Linda Mercaldi, with her black leather jacket and her shock of blue hair, still looked butch enough to teach the Hell’s Angels a few things, but the illusion popped like a soap bubble as she drew nearer.
“I don’t care if that was her favorite flower,” Peyton was saying in a harsh whisper. “I don’t care if that was her favorite drink. I don’t care what she wore on the weekends. None of that shit matters, do you understand? I’m going home, and I’m going home as me. Can you get that through your fucking head?”
Linda—butch, balls-out Linda—was nodding her head, bobbling in agreement, her mouth twisted into what Hazard guessed was supposed to be a smile.
“Because if you can’t get that through your thick, dyke skull, you can damn well forget about—”
Peyton reared back when she saw them, and the savage intensity of her expression flattened. It was a little like watching someone walk into a wall in slow motion. First there was shock, and then a smear of anger, and then a fumbling recovery.
“Detectives,” Peyton said. This was the new Peyton: the hair, the makeup, the aura like she burned hundred-dollar bills for fun. But those eyes, the three-card-monte eyes, those had stayed the same. You could take the girl out of the street, Hazard thought, but the street didn’t come out as easily. “What are you doing here?”
“It’s a hospital,” Somers said. “Maybe we’re sick.”
“You’re here to see Lazarus.”
“His name is Clyde,” Hazard said, unable to stop himself.
“You can’t see him,” Peyton said. “He doesn’t want to see anyone but me.”
“I guess we’ll find out when we get to his room,” Somers said.
“Why can’t you just leave him alone?”
“The way you left Rex Kolosik alone?” Hazard said. “Just dump him when he’s not useful anymore?”
Peyton’s eyes narrowed. “Rex is a sweet boy, but he’s—he’s a journeyman electrician who’s doing satellite installs. He’s not exactly husband material.”
“Why not?” Somers said. “He sure seems to like you.”
“Do you need to talk to my daughter?” Mercaldi said. “Because otherwise, she has people waiting for her.”
“Those reporters,” Somers said, nodding. “They’re excited for another shot at you, Peyton. You’re giving them exactly what they want: a pretty girl who has overcome a horrible tragedy, with just a whiff of sex to get everyone listening even if they’re too embarrassed to admit it. Why?”
“What do you mean?” Peyton said.
“What are you getting in return? A book deal? Speaking tours? Is it smaller than that? Do you just want to be on Good Morning, America? Because if that’s what it is, you’re selling yourself way too cheap. You might be able to get a movie-of-the-week out of this.”
Peyton’s expression was fixed, almost rigid, and she said nothing. Mercaldi, however, gripped Peyton’s elbow and steered her around Somers and Hazard. “Next time you want to talk to my daughter,” she said over her shoulder, “call her lawyer first.”
Hazard arched an eyebrow, watching them as they paraded through the doors and into the glare of camera lights. “You got them pretty riled.”
“It was a little easier than I expected,” Somers said, frowning. “What’s she hiding?”
“You think she killed Walden?”
Somers shook his head. “I have no idea.”
“Kolosik might know.”
“Kolosik is still in love with her.”
“He’s carrying a knife, and he’s following her after she dumped him. That doesn’t sound like he’s still in love.”
“That’s exactly what it sounds like. How’d you know he’s got a knife?”
Hazard shrugged. “I saw it. And I think he’s got a mind to use it.”
“A few days ago, I would have said Rex Kolosik isn’t the kind of guy who’d do much more than throw a few punches. But, hell—” Somers blew out his cheeks. “At this point, I’ve got no idea.”
A nurse directed them to Clyde’s room, and they found Patrick Foley perched on a chair outside. The carrot-top cop was playing on his phone, and his big body rocked and shifted as he swiped at the screen, as though he needed to move his whole body to dodge whatever was coming at him in the game.
“Why the hell am I always on shit duties like this?” Foley grumbled when he saw them, but he didn’t put away the phone.
