a few synopses,” Hazard said. “It was a long time ago. It’s hard to remember.”
“This is a travesty,” Noah said.
Hazard squared his shoulders, chin up. “I should probably get Evie home. It’s almost her bedtime.”
“Dang it,” Somers said, checking the clock. He rolled out of the chair, clapped Noah on the shoulder, and said, “Another time.”
“Are you sure?”
“Thanks for having us over.”
“You can stay, John,” Hazard said.
But Somers just smiled and helped him collect Evie, and then a swarm of children was trying to hug Evie and hug Somers and hug Hazard. Hazard decided the best policy was to do what you were supposed to do with most wild animals: stay still and wait for them to go away. The barrage of hugs finally ended, and Somers had a crazy-ass grin as he led Hazard out of the house.
“What?” Hazard said.
“I just love you sometimes.”
“Sometimes?” Hazard grumbled.
They got Evie through her bath and into bed, and then Hazard read in bed while Somers played on his phone.
“You could have stayed, John. If you wanted to watch the movie, I could have gotten Evie to bed.”
“I know,” Somers said. And then he tossed the phone on the bed and rolled, straddling Hazard. He looked down. He carefully closed the book and lifted it from Hazard’s hands.
“I was reading that.”
“I noticed.”
“If you want to watch those movies, I don’t care. I want you to watch what you want to watch.”
“I’ve seen it before,” Somers said, shucking his shirt, exposing the hard lines of muscle and ink. “Besides, I think I liked your version better.”
“Yeah?” Hazard said.
Somers took his hands and moved them up to his chest, leaning into the touch. “Yeah,” Somers whispered.
CHAPTER TWO
JULY 1
MONDAY
8:07 AM
SOMERS WAS AT HIS DESK, clicking through emails that had arrived overnight. The bullpen inside the Wahredua Police Department was busy; uniformed officers had just completed the morning briefing, and now they milled around, talking and drinking bad coffee and putting off patrol for a few minutes. The city’s four detectives were all at their desks: Carmichael and Moraes worked all the drug-related cases in the city—despite their best efforts, central Missouri still produced and distributed a great deal of meth—and Somers and Dulac worked everything else.
At the moment, thankfully, everything else made a pretty small pile: Somers was currently examining expert testimony in a case of destroyed mailboxes. The self-appointed expert, Mrs. Bruce Campbell, had been Somers’s 7th-grade science teacher, and she insisted that the mailboxes had been destroyed with what she continuously referred to as an IED. For the sake of John-Henry Somerset, who had taken a B- in 7th-grade science (she included the grade when she reminded him of how they knew each other), she explained the acronym at the beginning of the email: improvised explosive device.
Somers didn’t doubt her opinion, but his annoyance at her tone had made the case a frequent topic of conversation with Hazard over dinner. He made a note to arrange an interview. As he moved on to the next email, though, Chief Cravens opened the door to her office and called his name. When Somers looked up, she beckoned.
Dulac silently held out his fist, and Somers bumped knuckles with him as he made his way out of the bullpen. He let himself into the office and found Cravens behind her desk; an older man with a crew cut and police blues stood to one side. On the desk, a cardboard box was folded shut, and the pictures of Cravens’s nieces and nephews were gone.
“Go ahead, John-Henry,” Cravens said, gesturing to a chair. “This isn’t exactly an official conversation.”
Somers took in the cardboard box again; when his eyes moved to Cravens’s face, he saw the exhaustion there, the deep lines that had formed over the last year, the dark smudges under her eyes.
“Should I say congratulations or I’m sorry?” he asked quietly.
“Ask me in six months,” Cravens said.
Somers thought about his father, who had recently won the mayoral election, and about the chief of police, who served at the mayor’s discretion. “If my father—”
“No,” Cravens said, and she smiled and waved a hand. “I’m past all that.”
Outside, the fax machine screeched on and on, the note rising higher and higher until it cut off with a short series of sputters. It reminded Somers of a 1980s TV robot screaming, Malfunction, malfunction. The noise seemed to serve as some sort of signal, because the uniformed officers began to drift toward the exits, heading out for another day’s work. In a