car—hell, for that matter, stolen a car—it could make finding him much, much easier. Hazard thought for a few more minutes, and then he got out of the minivan and hiked back toward Dulac’s building. New construction lined this street: buildings with stucco and glass and chrome, all of it mixed use, nail salons and comic book shops side by side with condominiums. The breeze carried a hint of Dawn dish soap. In the park across the street, he identified the source of the smell: a gaggle of kids, most of them barely older than Evie, were playing on a Slip ‘N Slide while two older women watched. Hazard judged from the suds on the polyethylene that the soap was working as a lubricant.
Half a block down from Dulac’s apartment, though, was a corner store that had clearly survived gentrification; the molded plastic sign just said FOOD in red letters on a yellow background, and security cameras on the walls pointed up the cross streets. The inside of the store was packed with rows of shelving: Dinty Moore stewed beef and Bubble Tape and sanitary napkins and a Hello Kitty backpack bristling with dust. Behind the counter, a woman in a hijab wore a name tag that said Liyana.
“I need to see your security footage,” Hazard said. “I’m a private investigator, and I’m working a case on a missing person.”
The woman stared back at him, her dark eyes blank and hard. Seconds dragged by.
“Police?” she said.
Hazard shook his head.
Another minute dragged past. The shop was relatively dark, but where July sun came through a window, motes of dust drifted. The air smelled like freshly sanded wood and a mélange of spices—anise and cumin, and definitely more—that Hazard judged came from a pot bubbling on a hot plate behind the register.
Hazard pulled out cash again. “I offered the last guy two hundred.”
She nodded.
Counting out the bills, Hazard passed them over. She shut the door, locked it, and flipped the sign. Then she led him into the back, into a cramped office with a desk and filing cabinets and a Pack N Play and a Valentine’s Day card filled with flowing script in what Hazard guessed was Punjabi or Urdu. The MacBook that she set on the desk looked brand new, and she scrolled and clicked easily through a maze of options.
“What day?”
“Wednesday. Maybe Thursday too, but let’s start with Wednesday.”
She clicked once more, and two separate videos began streaming, each filling half the screen. Hazard took the seat when she offered it and worked his way through the video. He assumed Dulac would be coming down Barnard, the bigger of the two cross streets, and so he paused the second feed and sped up the recording of Barnard. Some of the cars were easy to dismiss because they didn’t look anything like Dulac’s sedan—panel trucks, minivans, an aging Chrysler convertible that went back and forth a few times, the woman behind the wheel looking painfully lost. Who the hell would buy a convertible in central Missouri, he had no idea. At 06:58:12, Dulac’s car passed the corner market. Hazard switched over to the other feed, watched the vehicle turn into the apartment lot, and disappear. He stayed on this feed now, watching the sped-up footage until noon. Lots of sedans on the residential road. Lots of minivans. Another convertible, a Chrysler again. But nothing he could connect to Dulac. He went back and watched the same stretch of footage on the Barnard feed.
Dulac had never left the building. Or, better said, he had obviously left at some point. But he hadn’t left, on foot or in a vehicle, in a way that the cameras here had recorded. Hazard pushed back from the desk.
Then he stopped. He restarted the Barnard feed and watched the Chrysler meander back and forth on the early morning footage. The video quality wasn’t amazing, but he could make out some of the license plate. It was the woman behind the wheel, though, who held his attention. He didn’t recognize her, and he could just see enough of her hunched over the wheel to give a basic description: dark hair, a big woman. But something about her tickled the back of Hazard’s brain. Switching over to the second camera’s footage, Hazard scrolled forward until he saw the Chrysler convertible again. The time stamp said 08:01:00. The car was pulling out of the lot at Dulac’s apartment building.