from what Hazard had seen the night before, the Keeper was continuing to refine his technique. He had also played them for a bunch of fools, using the spotlighted murder to draw attention away while he abducted Mitchell.
Was Mitchell dead already? Hazard could still see him the way he’d found him in the college sub-basement, the vicious gut wound, the boy left to die slowly and painfully.
Hazard’s spoon stilled in the yogurt. Then he tossed the spoon in the sink and pitched the yogurt, half-eaten, into the trash. He grabbed the sink with both hands, and the stainless steel was gritty with dried soap scum under his touch. He could go at it, really scrub it with some Ajax. He could do the floors too. He could do the windows, inside and out, and get into the tracks where Somers never cleaned and make sure they were spotless.
Because what the fuck else was he supposed to do? How was he supposed to come up with a plan? How was he supposed to find Mitchell? How was he supposed to stop the Keeper when he’d been cut off from the crime scenes, the physical evidence, the witness statements, security footage from police and civilian cameras? He knew—he hoped—that Somers would give him access to whatever he could, but Hazard suspected that with Riggle on watch and with the FBI getting involved sooner or later, the amount of information Somers could pass along would be limited at best. His hands tightened until they ached.
He couldn’t help anyone if he lost his mind. And maybe, just maybe, it would be better if he stayed on the periphery of the case. Not out of it, not completely. But standing in the kitchen, alone, watching the cardinal groom his feathers, Hazard could admit that he might be a liability. Last night, for example, when terror had taken him in the elevator. Somers had cleared Mitchell’s apartment alone, which was a good way to get shot and killed. Hazard had been so . . . so fucking afraid that he’d had to stay in the hallway, shaking like a kid, until Somers told him things were under control.
So maybe it was better this way. For now.
And even if Hazard weren’t directly involved in the investigation, he could still do his part. Easing his hands off the sink, he made his way back upstairs to their office. He opened the filing cabinet and took out everything he’d accumulated on the Keeper. Even though he had hundreds of pages of material, in the morning light, it looked pathetic. At the front of his collection were copies of reports from the Keeper’s first killing. The killer had left no forensic evidence, nothing that might help establish his identity. If Hazard were honest, he couldn’t even be sure the Keeper was male, although statistically, it was more likely.
To those reports, Hazard had added the results of his own efforts, which were even more pathetic. His research on the Keeper of Bees covered everything from Vergil to the 1925 novel by Gene Stratton-Porter, which had spawned a series of adaptations, one of them famously lost. It was a long historical stretch summarized in less than a page.
He had another set of pages, where he had listed everything he could find on Missouri apiaries, apiculture, and related industries—honey, for example. He had drilled down into the records kept by the Missouri State Beekeepers Association, noting ancillary clubs and smaller, regional chapters of the association. He had dug through sites that sold local honey, many of which identified apiaries by name and address. He had listed every regional festival or fair that might have reasonably included beekeepers or honey sellers. And in the last few months, he had called or visited as many of them as he could: MSBA chapter meetings held in church basements, the St. Louis Honey Festival, even the poorly named Birds and the Bees Festival (when Somers had seen the name and nothing else written on Hazard’s calendar, he had asked, “Do you still have questions about how it works?”). Hazard had even gone so far as to print out a copy of the 2015 revised Missouri statute governing the sale of local honey and exempting it, under certain restrictions, from being identified and regulated as a processed food.
In other words, he had nothing.
He had called every apiarist, honey seller, or bee aficionado that he could find listed in the state—and he’d visited many of the ones who wouldn’t