racing down the street made the world look like an old film that had been sped up. Hazard passed the Magic Dragon Bakery—ignoring the wave from the owner, a septuagenarian pothead who was perpetually trying to lull him into a false sense of security with sweets—and took the stairs to the second-floor landing. He unlocked the door to his office, and then he went through the process of getting ready for the day: turning on the lights, starting the coffee, doing a quick once over of the waiting area to make sure everything was presentable. Warm, humid air leaked through the cracked front window; with the thunderstorm moving in, it was as thick as wool.
Coffee in hand, files in the other, Hazard settled at his desk. He flipped through everything on the Keeper—now painfully outdated, everything months old, since he didn’t have access to the reports and information from yesterday’s attacks—and found his good mood evaporating. He couldn’t solve a crime when he didn’t have access to any information. He couldn’t stop the Keeper when he was cut off from the investigation.
A horn blatted on Market Street, and Hazard stiffened in his seat, his heart accelerating. He shoved the paperwork to the side. What he was doing, combing through these pages again, was pointless. He grabbed a blank sheet of paper, grabbed a pen, and then he sat still.
At the top, he wrote: MURDER OF SUSAN MORRISON.
Below, he bulleted all the information he could remember. He started with what he believed had stayed the same: the Keeper had killed the victim with a gunshot to the face; he had incorporated the element of bees; and he had posed the body in a way that was supposed to suggest an element of the Orpheus and Eurydice story. Then, to the side, Hazard listed the new elements of the Keeper’s ritual, which included posing the body outdoors, staging it with lights, and using the murder as a distraction.
As a distraction. Hazard hesitated. He hadn’t considered this before, not in this way. With the first set of killings, the murders had been an end in themselves. Hadn’t they? Hazard had assumed the answer to that question was yes; it had seemed the only possible answer. That type of elaborate killing, which was performed to sate some kind of need or provide some kind of release, was an end in itself.
Except with Susan, it hadn’t been. Susan’s murder had been a distraction to lure the police away while the Keeper abducted Mitchell. Hazard went back to the first murders; had it been a distraction too? He couldn’t see how. The Keeper’s killings had paralleled another series of murders, and for a while, Hazard had thought they were related. But at the time, the Keeper’s actions had looked like an abduction, perhaps an attempt to use a hostage to stop the investigation. The victims had been hidden in the college sub-basement and discovered only by following clues the Keeper had left behind. There had been an element of spectacle, yes, but not in the same way as with Susan’s death.
And now that Hazard considered the possibility, he had to admit that there were other differences. Serious, substantive differences. For one thing, Susan had been killed in her home; Rory, Phil, and Mitchell had been drugged and abducted while in public, probably at the Pretty Pretty. For another, Susan’s death and . . . presentation, for lack of a better word, had occurred within hours of each other. Phil, Rory, and Mitchell had been held and tortured for days; Rory had died after Hazard found them, and Mitchell had survived because they were able to rush him into surgery. Another difference was that Susan was a woman. A woman dating a trans man, yes, but a straight, cis woman. Phil, Rory, and Mitchell were all gay men, which Hazard had initially thought the Keeper might be mission oriented, the kind of serial killer who felt a mandate to eliminate a class of undesirables—in this case, homosexuals. Susan’s death threw out that possibility.
Hazard parted the page with a line and jotted possibilities: a copycat, an accomplice, external factors, internal factors. After another moment, he crossed out the copycat. Too many details between the first and second killing had aligned; for all their faults, the Wahredua PD had made an effort to keep those details out of the press. That meant a copycat killer would have to be someone with access to those records, and Hazard thought the