MAY 17
SUNDAY
8:05 AM
BY THE TIME SOMERS parked behind the Ace in the Hole, the tidal wave of guilt had crashed over him. He’d gone to Hawaii with his parents when he’d been a teenager. That was where he’d learned the word swash—the rush of seawater up the beach after a wave broke. When the swash ran out of momentum, it ran back down the beach—backwash. What he remembered, fifteen and sun-bronzed, standing at the threshold of earth and water, staring out at the restless calm of the ocean, was the grains of sand washing out from under his feet.
He turned off the Mustang. He didn’t let his head fall back. He stayed there, staring out the windshield. The May sun was climbing steadily, the temperature climbing with it. He had parked next to one of the dumpsters, and a piece of foil wrapper was caught between the lid and the steel. Enough of a breeze stirred the foil, making light dance on it, and the same light left spots in Somers’s vision. He thought, maybe, he should close his eyes.
Evan Pawloski’s eyes had been open when his father found him. Why had someone told him that? Why was it relevant?
The steering wheel creaked under his hands.
“John?”
Somers blinked; the light rippled, and he turned his head toward his husband and blinked again. “Sorry. I need some sleep again.”
“Again?”
“I mean, I need some sleep, I guess.”
Hazard’s eyes narrowed. “Evan is going to be fine. You were doing your job, interviewing him. This is not your fault.”
Somers nodded.
Hazard hesitated. Then he cupped the side of Somers’s face. The lower part of his hand rested against Somers’s neck, and he had a sudden, vivid image of a bedsheet twisted into a rope. He startled, got hold of himself, and pulled away from the touch more slowly. Naturally. Coolly. Gotta look cool.
“I think—” Hazard began.
The crunch of tires on broken asphalt interrupted him, and Somers turned, opened the door, and got out of the car. He shut the door so he didn’t have to hear Hazard’s worried breath.
Light bounced off the Impala’s windshield, and Somers shaded his eyes to see Palomo driving, with Dulac in the passenger seat. He had called the detectives after his conversation with Engels. Then, after filling them in, he’d called the station and requested patrol officers to take Ruff and Ayelet into custody. Even if what they said was true and they had nothing to do with Loretta’s death, they both needed to be charged with a number of crimes, and Somers intended to see that they were prosecuted here and in New York.
The Impala came to a stop beside him, and as the engine cut off, the door opened. Dulac unfolded himself from the car. The detective looked like a wreck, his hair sticking up on the side, his face blotchy, and reeking like a mixture of booze-sweat and a drunk’s special brand of halitosis. What’s going on with you, Somers wanted to ask. What is it, this thing eating you up, that you won’t tell me? But he didn’t ask. He could still feel sand washing out from underfoot.
“Chief,” Dulac said hoarsely.
On the other side of the Impala, Palomo looked tired but alert, the house blend for a seasoned homicide detective. She nodded and said, “Chief Somerset.”
“You’ll need to talk to Cardarelli and Ayelet Ames later,” Somers said, “but I didn’t want to do this without backup.” He gave Dulac another look. He thought, again, the same questions, and again he didn’t ask them. Look what had happened the last time he asked too many questions. And that was self-indulgent and self-pitying, and it made him ashamed, but it also felt pleasant, shockingly good, to feel so bad about himself.
“You look like you crawled out of a club kid’s anus,” Hazard said to Dulac.
Dulac was trying to flatten the hair on the side of his head, crouching to use the passenger mirror. “Bro, don’t be a nut-drip. And anyway, I’m out of practice. I haven’t done anything fun in, like, forever. Do you know the last time Darnell and I did anything besides go to work and eat dinner on the couch and have, like, straight-people sex in the dark?”
“I happen to like Darnell,” Hazard said. “He has a respectably diverse investment portfolio, he’s extremely economical with household management—including clothes, John, as an aside—and he has a five-year plan.”
“Yeah? Well, try dealing with that five-year plan every day.”
“Gray,” Hazard said in a surprisingly compassionate voice, “I can see that you’re going through something, and I’m sorry, but say something bad about Darnell and see what happens.”
Dulac opened his mouth, hesitated, and shut it again. He looked around from the mirror to glare at Hazard.
Whatever might have happened after that was prevented by the arrival of Joyce Sturgis in her white Escalade. She pulled close to the building and stopped by the employee door. When she got out of the car, she had her hair in a ponytail and was wearing a racerback sports bra, yoga pants, and Nike Air Force 1s, which Somers had sent Hazard pictures of three different times for gift ideas, and which he still hadn’t gotten. When Hazard had suggested—apparently with no sense of irony—that they buy them for Colt for his birthday, Somers had taken a walk.
“This is ridiculous,” Joyce said. She looked like she was trying not to frown as she moved to unlock the steel door—probably trying not to mar her makeup. “I’ve got people coming at nine to prep for lunch. This is my business, in case you forgot, and I can’t spend all day with the police trooping in and out because they don’t have anything better to do.”
“Was there some sort of misunderstanding, Mrs. Sturgis?” Somers heard himself speaking, but it felt like he was hearing it off TV. “A witness saw a missing boy being loaded into a food truck belonging to your restaurant.”
“And I’m telling you, someone stole the truck. It’s gone, isn’t it? Do you see it anywhere?” She paused and gestured around the lot, the keys jangling in her hand. “It’s not invisible, for gosh sake.”
“We appreciate you taking the time to let us walk through the premises.”
“And after this, you’re going to want to ‘walk through’ my house, I suppose. Well, everyone’s talking about Ashley Boone, and I can tell you right now, he’s not in my restaurant, and he’s not in my house.” She pulled open the door. “Don’t you think I want to find that food truck as bad as anybody else? Do you have any idea how much one of those things costs?”
When she took a step toward the door, Somers shook his head. “Mrs. Sturgis, I’m going to ask you to stay out here with Mr. Hazard, while my detectives and I inspect the building.”
“It’s a Sunday,” she said, already taking out her phone. “Do you have any idea how many people go out for lunch on a Sunday?”
“I still think it’s an oversight in the code that a killing is still technically murder even when it’s justified,” Hazard said in a not-quiet-enough voice, to judge by the noise Joyce made.
“Keep an eye on her,” Somers said more quietly. “Let me know if anyone else shows up. Anyone, Ree.”
Hazard nodded. His mouth tightened, and in a whisper, he asked, “John, are you ok?”
“Peachy,” Somers said and smiled his chief-of-police smile. He turned before Hazard could press the issue, and when he reached Dulac and Palomo, he said, “Ready?”
“Ready, Chief,” Dulac said.
Palomo nodded.
They approached the building, and Dulac and Palomo must have worked out between them who was going first because Dulac took the lead, then Palomo, then Somers. He was still outside the building, staring into the relative darkness of what appeared to be a storage area, when he heard Dulac toggle a switch.
“Damn lights don’t work,” Dulac said.
Palomo moved so fast that, for a moment, Somers thought she was attacking Dulac from behind. His brain caught up a moment later as two things happened simultaneously: Palomo yanked Dulac backward through the doorway, and inside the storage room, something exploded.
In the next instant, as Palomo stumbled back, barely missing Somers, he had a glimpse of Dulac: shards of glass pierced one side of his face, glittering in the sun. He hadn’t started bleeding yet. He hadn’t made a sound.
Then Dulac screamed, and Palomo was shouting, “Help me get him down, help me get him down,” and Somers had to shout over her, “Not on that side—the glass, for Christ’s sake.” Dulac reached up to check the injuries, and Somers grabbed his arm. It turned into a struggle, Dulac’s panic fueling him, making him ridiculously strong as he tried to wrench his arm free from Somers’s grip. Blood was welling up all over his face. So much glass. Even his eye was full of blood. And then there was too much blood to identify individual injuries; gore masked one side of his face.
“Gray, Gray, Gray,” Somers tried. “Calm down. You’ve got to calm down or you’re going to make it worse. Gray, you’ve got to—Gray, God damn it!”
Dulac screamed again, thrashing, his head whipping from side to side. He clipped Somers on the forehead, and Somers rocked back, his vision shuttering for a moment as he tried to shake it off. Somehow, he held on to Dulac, and then, a moment later, shock must have set in because Dulac’s legs folded, and the sudden weight threatened to topple Somers.
Together, he and Palomo eased the younger detective onto the asphalt, his uninjured side resting on the blacktop. Somers looked around for something to pillow his head, but Hazard was already there, handing him his wadded-up windbreaker. Dulac was shaking. He had stopped screaming, but now he was hyperventilating. Somers lifted his head long enough to place the windbreaker under it and put a hand on his shoulder. More glass was embedded there, Somers realized, pieces of it stuck in Dulac’s shirt and jacket, running down his arm. Somers found his hand, which only had a few nicks and scratches, and gripped it.
“Gray, can you hear me? You’re going to be ok. Squeeze my hand. Come on, let me know you can hear me. You’re going to be just fine. Squeeze my hand, bro.”
“The Ace in the Hole,” Hazard was saying, phone to his ear. “Yes. Yes.” He tore the phone away long enough to whisper, “En route,” and then put it back to his ear and said, “Yes,” again.
“Deep breaths,” Somers said. “You’re not getting any air, Gray. Take a big, deep breath. They’re coming. You’re going to be fine. Can you give me a squeeze? Don’t make me feel like an asshole, bro, talking to myself like this.”
A moment later, Dulac’s hand tightened around Somers’s until it hurt. Somers didn’t care, barely felt it. He closed his eyes and drew his own deep breath.
That was when he heard the screaming from inside the Ace.
His eyes shot open, and he found Hazard staring back at him. The bigger man tossed his phone to Joyce, who caught it with a fumbling look of amazement.
“That’s Ashley,” Hazard said.
Wisps of smoke drifted out through the doorway.
“Ree, we can’t go in there—”
Hazard eased the Blackhawk out of the holster and started toward the restaurant. Then he reversed course, jogging back to the Mustang. When he came back, he was carrying a flashlight.
“Ree, we have no idea—”
“That’s Ashley,” Hazard said again flatly. “If someone set that place on fire, I’m not going to stand here and listen to that boy scream while he burns to death.”
Somers grimaced. The stream of smoke was thin, barely visible in the day’s brightness. But it was there.
“Gray, I’m going to be right back. Yolanda’s here. She’s going to take care of you until the ambulance gets here. You’re going to be fine. I need you to relax, take deep breaths, and stay strong.” Somers tried to think of more; all he could come up with, though, was, “I’ll be right back.”
Dulac squeezed his hand and, somehow, managed a sharp nod, the windbreaker rustling as his cheek slid along it.
Palomo kneeling next to him, took his hand as soon as Somers released it. Her other hand was on her service weapon, and her gaze flicked between Joyce and Dulac.
“We don’t know anything yet,” Somers said when her gaze flicked to Joyce again, and she rocked the service weapon in its holster.
Her voice was brittle. “No, sir.”
“But don’t take any fucking chances.”
Harder now. Flint. “No, sir.”
As Somers moved toward the building, Hazard held out a hand. “No, John—”
“This is not a conversation,” Somers said and snatched the flashlight.
When Somers stepped into the storage room, he smelled what he thought was gun smoke. After the bright day, the room was dark, his eyes still trying to adjust. Overhead, the broken necks of bulbs showed where the improvised explosive had detonated. He could make out the shelves lining the walls, the paper towels, the cleaning supplies, the bag-in-boxes of syrup for the fountain drinks. One door was set into the wall opposite him; another door led off the room to their left. Ashley’s cries for help were louder, although the words themselves were still indistinguishable.
Somers shone the light on the path in front of him, looking for anything irregular. He saw nothing—no tripwires, no pressure plates. Then reality struck; if the person behind this was high tech, the whole place could be crisscrossed with infrared beams, and he’d never see them.
“They used a light switch as the trigger,” Hazard whispered with that uncanny way he had of tracking Somers’s thoughts. “And the bomb itself was simple—gunpowder inside a bank of incandescent bulbs. Whatever else we’re dealing with, it will most likely be low tech.”
Something in his voice made Somers turn. Hazard was gritting his teeth, probably unconsciously, the muscles in his jaw standing out; his color was chalky in the faint light. They had been in places like this before, places engineered to kill. Hazard still carried the scars, inside and out.
When Somers opened his mouth, though, Hazard shook his head and said, “I’m fine.”
“What do you think is on the other side of that door?”
Hazard shook his head. He glanced around the room and pointed to a mop and bucket against the far shelves. Somers moved slowly, using the flashlight to check each step. Sweat soaked the back of his shirt by the time they reached the mop. Then he retraced his steps. When he was sure they were both clear, he used the end of the mop to depress the door handle. It took a few tries before he managed to open it. The door swung open an inch. Somers breathed out in relief.
The blast from the gun—shotgun, his brain suggested—tore through the interior door like it was paper. The shot dimpled the exit door and its steel frame and threw up puffs of plaster dust where it struck the wall. Chunks of wood had been chewed from the length of the mop.
Ears ringing, Somers shook his head and said, “Fuck.”
Hazard nodded in his peripheral vision.
After a moment, Somers forced the door open the rest of the way. His eyes were adjusting to the darkness, and now he could make out the shotgun mounted with duct tape to the back of one of the dining booths. Wire around the depressed trigger completed the simple setup. Low tech, sure, but it still would have ripped a human being in half. As he eased forward into the dining room, studying the floor in front of him, Somers felt part of his brain drift back to Joyce. He had missed her initial reaction to the lightbulb bombs; he had been focused on Palomo’s sudden movement and then on Dulac’s injuries.
“She seemed surprised,” Hazard said unprompted. “Scared enough to shit those yoga pants, actually.”
“But was it real?” Somers asked. “Or is she just a good actor?”
Hazard didn’t answer because, of course, there was no answer. Not yet.
As Somers moved farther into the dining room, he could make out more and more of it. Motes of dust danced in the bars of light that came through the windows. The smell of gunpowder was strong, but with undernotes of bleach and something else, a mustiness that suggested bar towels that needed laundering. Even with the sun coming through the windows, shadows pocketed the large room, and in those shadows, the acrylic cutouts took on life, shifted their weight, readied their guns. Somers blinked and tried to keep his eyes clear, but the strain of looking for wires or other traps was already starting to tell, and when he risked a glance up, the rest of the room seemed to swim.
“This is worse than a fucking shooting gallery,” Hazard muttered.
Somers nodded. The river-stone hearth yawned on his right. Light glinted on the bottles racked behind the bar, turning them into fox eyes. Ashley was still shouting—one word, over and over again. Help, Somers decided, even though the word was still muffled.
“Does this place have a basement?” Hazard asked.
“Are you kidding me?”
Hazard made a weird noise, and Somers heard it then, the note of untrammeled frustration, and suddenly he was on the brink of laughter too. It was the stress, the unrelenting tension, the roiling grief and fear for Dulac, all of it stirred up and trying to find relief. Hazard’s hand closed over Somers’s shoulder. Somers squeezed Hazard’s fingertips. Then they moved on.
Swinging double doors near the bar connected to the kitchen; Somers could make out the industrial appliances and the hum of motors on the other side. They had to stop while Somers searched for something to test the doors. Hazard ended up having to retreat to the storeroom to bring back the trusty mop. They stood to the side while Somers probed at the doors, but after several minutes, nothing happened.
When he checked his husband, Hazard’s face was lined with thought.
“What?”
“Why the lightbulb bombs?”
“They worked, didn’t they?”
“They weren’t fatal. If anything, they put us on guard. What if Dulac had walked into the storage room and opened the door to the dining room? He would have been killed.”
“He might lose that eye as it is, Ree. The only reason it’s not worse is because Palomo acted as fast as she did.”
Hazard’s brow furrowed as though he wanted to argue the point, but Somers turned back to the doors. He gave them a final hard push with the mop, and they fluttered open and then shut again, swinging easily. Gut clenched, Somers pushed through into the kitchen.
His steps slapped the tile. The smell of bleach and dirty dishwater was stronger here, and all the metal and ceramic gave back echoes, turning his own movements into sounds he questioned. The stairs were located on the far side of the kitchen, and the blackness below was absolute. The flashlight showed only the wooden treads and then a circle of the concrete foundation at the bottom. Ashley’s voice came clearly for the first time: “I’m here! I’m here! Help!”
Somers inspected the treads as best he could, but he had a shit angle and only the flashlight to see by. He held his breath when he took the first step.
No boom. No explosion. No hail of buckshot.
After a moment, he eased himself down again.
The fifth step rolled under him, and he fell forward. Concrete rushed up at him. Darkness like batwings. Then he realized he wasn’t falling; he was hanging forward, out over the emptiness, because his husband was clutching the back of his shirt.
“A little help, John,” Hazard gritted out. “You’re spending too much time sitting at that fucking desk.”
Somers felt about with his feet until he located a step, tested it, and planted himself. A moment later, Hazard let the shirt relax, but his grip didn’t loosen.
“Son of a bitch,” Somers said when he could talk again.
“Slowly,” Hazard said.
“Son of a motherfucking bitch.”
Hazard gave his shirt a little shake, but he didn’t release him. Somers started down again. He could feel his heart in his face. He could smell the flop sweat that had started up too late, his body flooding with adrenaline after the fact. And, more faintly, he thought he could smell death. He tested each step as he went down. When he reached the bottom, his legs were trembling.
He breathed in, wiped his forehead, and spun the flashlight around the concrete shell. He stopped when he saw Derrick Sturgis.
“On the ground!” Somers shouted, pulling the Glock. But his nose and brain were already telling him that he was too late.
Derrick Sturgis was dead. He was slumped over an old metal desk, one side of his head disfigured by what must have been a gunshot wound. Blood had dried on the side of his face and down his neck and chest, stiffening the fabric of a salmon-colored knit polo. A revolver lay on the floor below his hand.
Somers played the light back and forth, gathering impressions of the space: stacks of cardboard boxes, the smell of cold concrete and what might have been mouse droppings, old pallets leaning against one wall, crates of liquor bottles with dusty empties.
Ashley’s shouting had reached a new pitch: “In here! In here! I’m in here!”
The sound was coming from a reinforced door set into the wall next to Derrick’s desk. Somers checked the floor ahead of them as they moved toward it. While Hazard approached the door, Somers covered Derrick—the man was dead, but there was still a gun in play, and the nightmarish funhouse aspect of the Ace in the Hole made Somers doubt everything.
“Let me out! Help! Help!”
“Ashley,” Hazard tried.
“Help! I’m in here!”
“Ashley!”
“Help! Help! Help!”
“Ashley Bennett Boone, for God’s sake, be quiet!”
The silence sounded like the Pacific in Somers’s ears. He remembered that dusk had been like a backwash too, as though the whole world were dissolving, being drawn out to sea.
“Mr. Hazard?” Ashley asked in a choked voice.
“Ashley, I need you to check the other side of the door. We’re going to get you out, but I need to know that it’s safe.”
“It’s dark. I can’t see anything.”
“Feel around the door. Follow the doorframe with your fingers.”
“Just open the door! Mr. Hazard, please, please, I just want to get out—”
“Ashley!” When a kind of nothing had vacuumed up the rest of the boy’s small, stifled sounds, Hazard said, “You’re going to be fine. I’m going to make sure you’re fine. Now, I want you to reach out and touch the door. You can do that, right?”
Even the silence had its own stuttering heartbeat.
“Ashley, let’s play a game. For everything you do correctly, I’m going to conveniently forget some fuckery in which you engaged my son. For example, if you reach out and touch the door, I’m going to forget that you convinced my son that it was a good idea to tip over those portable toilets they set up when they were renovating the old Baptist church.”
Sniffling came from the other side of the door. Then Ashley said, “I’m touching it.”
“Great. Now, I want you to find the knob, and I’ll pretend I don’t know that you and Colt stabbed each other with pencils in an attempt to see who would scream first when you were supposed to be learning about Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses.”
The knob rattled. Ashley cleared his throat. “It’s just a doorknob.”
“You’re doing very well. Now I want you to follow the doorframe with your fingers. If you do this, I will perhaps not remember quite so clearly when I heard you tell my son that you found where your parents keep the key to the liquor cabinet at the farm.”
When Ashley spoke again, his voice had firmed up. “You said you’d forget. Not that you wouldn’t remember as clearly.”
Hazard raised an eyebrow to Somers, and Somers nodded and moved toward Derrick’s body and the desk; Ashley would be fine, especially if Hazard continued to throw him lifelines, ways to act and respond normally in a terrifying situation. In this case, it just happened to be that those lifelines consisted of mild bullying.
“As a compromise,” Hazard was saying behind Somers, “I will also throw in a hazy-at-best recollection of finding a stolen stop sign under my son’s bed after you and he went, quote, ‘to Denny’s.’”
Ashley protested, but Somers was no longer paying attention; the fact that Hazard’s efforts were working was all that mattered. His attention was now focused on Derrick. The man had clearly been shot in the side of the head, and although it would take the ME to confirm, the wound looked consistent with the revolver that lay on the floor, inches below his dangling fingers. Derrick’s face had slackened in death, and the blood had already drained away, leaving him looking like an unfinished waxwork. Somers started to turn his attention to the desk. Then he turned back.
Derrick Sturgis wore boots. If Somers had to guess, based on his own footwear, he would have said size eleven. Boots and jeans and a blue sweatshirt. And now that Somers looked more closely, he wondered if some of the gore on the shirt was older—in places, the stains were darker and had a fixed look that suggested that they’d set in the fabric. The sleeve of the sweatshirt was torn at the cuff. He thought of the blue fibers that had been recovered from under Loretta Ames’s fingernails. Somers moved closer, grimacing at the smell. Part of his brain showed him Derrick suddenly surging to life, springing at him. No more jump scares, Somers told himself. Maybe no more movies at all.
From behind him came two sharp blows. Somers glanced back. Hazard was opening the door, a broken piece of the frame suggesting where the bolt had torn free. Ashley emerged a moment later, his face streaked with dirt and tears and snot. He crashed into Hazard, and Hazard wrapped one arm around the boy’s shoulders, turning him into his chest so that Ashley wouldn’t see the corpse. Ashley talking into Hazard’s chest, and Hazard patted his back and made listening noises. But his gaze came to rest on Somers, and his face held a question.
Somers turned back to the desk and spotted what had drawn his attention in the first place. He read the paper without lifting it; the whole place would need to be processed, and that included latent prints. But when he’d scanned the words twice, he swore and shook his head. He looked back at Hazard.
“He says he did all of it—the murder, the kidnapping, everything. It’s a full confession, and Ree, it’s got details only the killer would know.”