return his phone calls.
He still had nothing.
But detective work, whether private or police, often came down to the same basic elements: persistence, hard work, and luck.
Hazard started by calling shipping companies who transported bees. He used the contact information given in the copies of the reports Somers had brought home, when the Wahredua PD had been in hot pursuit of the Keeper, and one of the most promising leads had been the bees. In most cases, Hazard was able to speak to the same person who had responded to police inquiries after the Keeper’s first attack. A few times, he got juggled until he ended up with someone who could help him. As soon as he identified himself—omitting his recent parting of ways with Wahredua’s finest—and mentioned the ongoing investigation, the men and women he spoke to were happy to help. Or as happy as cubicle dwellers ever were.
Happy or not, though, none of them could help Hazard. He asked for any shipments in the last year involving the transport of live bees, and he got a bare handful, all of them delivered to cities in other parts of the state: Kansas City, St. Louis, Cape Girardeau. None of them had been anywhere close to Wahredua.
Next, he tried local apiarists. He hit dead end after dead end. He asked about anyone who had purchased bees. He asked where they had lived and about any contact information they might have shared. He even swallowed the bile at the back of his throat and asked if the beekeepers remembered any unusual feelings. Had the person seemed strange? Had they seemed off somehow? Aggressive? Or unusually charming? The closest he came was the sale and transport of a colony to a woman in Osage Beach, within easy driving distance of Wahredua. Hazard called the woman, only to find out that Alma Zerber was eighty-two and didn’t drive. A quick Facebook search confirmed that Alma really was eighty-two and that she had a dozen grandkids who filled up her Facebook timeline. Hazard had never seen so many overbites at one time.
He was still working his way through local beekeepers, still hitting dead ends, when the alarm on his phone began to buzz. He glanced over and saw that it was three; time to pick up Evie. He dismissed the alarm, left the disarray of papers and notes as they were, and headed to the minivan. He tried to turn off the back burner of his brain, where frustration and resentment were simmering. His attention needed to be on Evie, and it wasn’t fair to make her suffer because he kept slamming into a brick wall on this case. As he backed out of the garage, he made one last effort to box up the Keeper and put him away. For a few hours. For Evie’s sake.
And then he realized he had another option, and he dug out his phone and made a call.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
JULY 2
TUESDAY
3:21 PM
THE SEARCH OF WESLEY’S townhouse yielded nothing.
Standing in the living room, Somers tried to make sense of what he was seeing. He had only been here once before; he had come with Hazard to question Wesley about his relationship to a murdered man. Somers remembered the impression he’d had at the time: a guy still getting back on his feet, and trying to do it on a pastor’s income. The townhouse still held the same motley furniture, obviously a collection that had been purchased at thrift stores or donated by parishioners. It still had the faint flea-market smell of musty fabric. A few cheap lithograph prints hung on the walls.
What puzzled Somers, though, was the things that were missing. On several of the shelves in the living room, clean spaces interrupted a light layer of dust where items had been removed. Some of them he could guess at—one of those spaces probably marked where a framed picture had stood—but many were just fuzzy shapes in the dust. In the bedroom, it was worse: drawers were open and empty, the clothes hanging in the closet had been pushed aside and knocked askew, as though something hidden behind them had been rapidly retrieved.
“You’re sure we’re the first ones to search this place?” Dulac asked, running a gloved finger through the dust.
“That’s what Riggle said.”
“Well, I hate to break it to you, but it looks like someone beat us here.”
Somers nodded and walked through the house again.
“Wesley and Susan were fighting,” Dulac said. “Maybe she noticed something and got upset. Something Wesley