“He’s got something that weekend. A family thing. And he wants me to go with him.”

  “How many scholarly articles does his family publish every quarter?”

  “You know what? This is why I don’t talk to you about my personal life. I don’t need you judging me, Emery. Not everybody just—just falls into this perfect relationship with the love of their life, ok? Did you ever think that maybe some of us have to fucking work for it?”

  In his mind, Hazard saw his husband’s careful, coordinated movements as he padded out of the bathroom, his body in profile as he drew clothes from the dresser, never quite looking over. The old childhood game—if you can’t see them, they can’t see you.

  Some of the harshness went out of Nico’s voice as he said, “What?”

  The phone rang.

  “Oh my God, don’t—” Nico began.

  Hazard picked it up.

  “—answer that!” Nico finished in a whisper.

  “Astraea,” Hazard said.

  “Mr. Hazard?” Chase’s voice was raw; the Mr. Hazard thing had somehow started when Chase and Nico had gotten more serious, probably because Hazard was the closest thing to a responsible adult male in Nico’s life. “Is Nico there? He’s not answering his phone, and I’ve called all our friends, and nobody knows where he is.”

  “What’s going on with Nico’s academic conference?”

  Chase’s silence was a question mark.

  “I understand there was some kind of scheduling conflict,” Hazard prompted.

  “No, Mr. Hazard. I don’t think so.”

  “You have a family thing?” The lie spun out of the darkness. “I was looking at Nico’s work calendar.”

  “No, Mr. Hazard, that’s, like, two weeks later. Fourth of July. Mr. Hazard, is he there?”

  No, no, no, Nico was mouthing, shaking his head, his shaggy hair flying.

  “We’ve got a work emergency, and the second time I caught Nico on his phone, I took it away. He’s on a call right now, following up on something for me. It might be a long night, Chase.”

  The pause had a helplessness to it that made Hazard squeeze his eyes shut, and it only got worse when Chase said, “Mr. Hazard, he had a panic attack tonight. I don’t think he should be working.”

  “I’ll keep an eye on him, Chase. And I’ll tell him to call you when we get a break.” Hazard hesitated and added, “He’s fine for now. You can stop worrying.”

  “Sure,” Chase said miserably, and Hazard understood the boy’s frustration; when had it ever been that easy?

  After the phone had settled in the cradle, Nico said, “Thank you, Em. Thank you, thank you, thank—”

  “You lied to me.”

  Color rushed into Nico’s face, darkening the coppery skin. He bit his lip and looked away.

  “He’s worried about you, Nico.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “He’s a human being. He deserves to be treated better than this. You’re allowed to have a panic attack; you’re not allowed to—to hurt him because you’re scared and hurting too. You’re not allowed to pretend everything’s ok.” He felt like he had double vision, all the words he had wanted to say in the bedroom tumbling out of him now. “You’re not allowed to ice him out until you decide you need company again.”

  “You know what, Em? When I want your relationship advice, I’ll ask for it. It’s none of your business.”

  “When you come sneaking into my office to hide from your on-and-off-again boyfriend, it becomes my business, and since nobody else will tell you that you’re treating him like shit, I will.”

  “I don’t have to listen to this,” Nico said, pushing off from the desk.

  “You surely fucking do.” Hazard seized his arm and yanked him back. Nico stumbled and let out a shocked cry. “You haven’t even finished canceling the tickets, and you haven’t printed the cancellation for the bursar’s office, and I just fucking lied for you, and I am not a fucking liar, so you’re going to sit your ass down and do some fucking work until I decide I’m ready to let you leave.” He gave Nico a shake hard enough to make Nico’s head bobble. “Understand?”

  “I hate you!”

  “Great!” Hazard shouted back at him. “Join the fucking club!”

  He towed Nico over to the seat, closed the Delta window, and shoved Nico into the chair. “Loretta Ames,” he said. “I want everything you can dig up on her.”

  Nico set his jaw and looked sidelong at the door.

  “I will duct tape you to that seat, Nicolás. Do you have any doubts about that statement?”

  “You’re such an asshole.”

  “Get to work.”

  Hazard left him there and returned to his office, propping the door open so he could listen for sounds of flight or other fugitive behavior. He powered up his laptop and began to work on Joyce and Derrick Sturgis. The going was slow at first; he was still wired from the confrontation with Nico, still aching from everything with Somers, and all he could do was blindly click until he realized he’d opened eighteen tabs to eighteen different forensic pathology publications on disemboweling, which told him a little about his state of mind.

  It was enough to let him gather himself, though, and he started the search for real, starting with public searches, then sweeps through their social media profiles, and then government databases that could be accessed online. The web searches yielded nothing more than the few times that Joyce and her parents’ group had made the news, and her social media profile was nothing more than screed after screed about schools and children and the dangerous people being allowed to teach her children. Derrick, in contrast, was practically a cipher. The web searches about him turned up a variety of results, including a LinkedIn account for a man in Sussex and a high school football coach’s Hudl account, apparently based in Arkansas, but nothing about the Derrick Sturgis in Wahredua, Missouri.

  The Case.net. searches, though, were much more interesting, although the summaries were so brief that they gave Hazard virtually no information at all. He dug through the notes on his phone until he found a name, and then he placed a call.

  “Chester,” a man’s gruff voice answered. Something in the background suggested that he was in a vehicle.

  “This is Emery Hazard.”

  A beat of silence, and then Officer Tom Chester of the Jefferson City Police Department said, “Ok.”

  “I want to know everything about Joyce and Derrick Sturgis. Joyce had an arrest in Jeff City back in 2017.”

  Chester grunted. “Call you back.”

  It was a simple deal; they had met when Hazard had been tracking down a deadbeat husband in Jeff City, and Chester had been willing to provide some assistance in return for compensation. It wasn’t how all cops were, and it wasn’t how Hazard wanted most cops to be, but that didn’t make people like Tom Chester any less useful when the need arose.

  The phone rang eight minutes later, and Chester launched into the spiel without waiting. “She got picked up at an out-of-towner bar called the Parakeet. The officers booked her for assault, and when they found out the guy she was hitting was her husband, they upped it to domestic violence.”

  “She was hitting her husband?”

  “One of the guys sent me the photos. You know what they say: never delete anything. I’ll pass them along. I bet that son of a bitch didn’t see out of his right eye for a month.”

  “But the charges got dropped?”

  “Her lawyer got them down to a misdemeanor.”

  Hazard thought about that. Assault, domestic violence, drunk driving, an injured girl. Joyce’s list of skeletons—violent skeletons—was growing, and—

  “’Course, once they started looking, a lot more came up.” Chester cleared his throat as though reading from a list. “A couple of deputies from the Boone County Sheriff’s Department wanted to tell them about the time they tried to pick up a couple of kids for dealing at a dive bar outside Columbia. Apparently this lady was drunk off her ass, and she went after them. Screaming, shoving, telling the officers they couldn’t take those kids, telling the kids to run. I guess she thought she had a real solid legal argument, saying the deputies hadn’t mirandized the kids and, therefore, it was an illegal arrest. They booked her for interfering with an arrest, and that got haggled down to disorderly conduct.”

  “What is she? Fucking Teflon?”

  “Got a good lawyer. She rolled her truck a few years before that, drunk driving, left it upside down in a ditch. Couldn’t get her with a DWI because they didn’t catch up to her until the next day, but everybody knew she was drunk as a skunk.” Chester’s voice sounded amused. “I guess back then, she thought she was the royal shit. Had pictures of herself with some of those Ozark Volunteer asshats all over her Facebook. That stuff came down, but not before people saved screenshots.”

  “Good fucking Lord.”

  “The husband isn’t a treat either, just so you know. The Boone County boys? Well, the night she got that interfering with an arrest charge, he showed up, all puffed up and ready for a fight, so they figured they’d look him up too. Fifteen or twenty years ago, when he was a freshman at Mizzou, he got picked up for indecent exposure. Got his johnson caught in a fucking downspout, I shit you not. The sorority girls up there throwing things down at him, and this little shit can’t do anything but cover his head and try to get his willie free. Two years later, they had this woman on campus, a guest speaker, and he followed her. Grabbed her tits. That was right about the time two good old boys who happened to be starting linemen and Southern Baptist choirboys came out of their dorm. They sent that kid halfway to the bosom of Abraham before campus police showed up and put a stop to it.”

  Hazard had to stop for a moment to take that all in. “Did anything stick from that?”

  “Class A misdemeanor assault, on account of he was a drunk college kid and was just playing a prank.”

  “Sure, he was.”

  “Did get himself expelled, though.”

  “Thank fuck.” Hazard breathed out slowly. “Anything about the daughter?”

  “Nothing about a daughter. Anything else?”

  “No,” Hazard said and disconnected. He sent the funds transfer through, and a moment later, he received several messages containing the booking photos of Joyce and Derrick Sturgis, as well as an image of the rolled truck and several grainy screenshots of what appeared to be her Facebook page.

  After considering the photos for several minutes, Hazard sent a message to his son: I need Kirsta Sturgis’s number.

  Colt sent it a moment later. No words, nothing but the number.

  Are you all right? Hazard asked.

  Nothing.

  Hazard tried the number. It went to a prerecorded voicemail, and when it was time to leave a message, he identified himself and asked Kirsta to call him back. He ended the call, and from the reception area came the sound of castors squeaking and then the slap of flip-flops. Nico appeared in the doorway. He had, of course, somehow managed to make his shaggy hair look suspiciously more kempt in the intervening time, although how he had done so without leaving his desk was another mystery.

  “How did you fix your hair?”

  “I didn’t do anything to my hair,” he said, which was one of those lies, Hazard suspected, that was also a trap. “Do you want to hear what I dug up on the Ames women?”

  “Is that actually a question?”

  “You know, people do all these social things—”

  “What did you learn, Nico?”

  “Well, do you want to start with the police or with her literary agent?”

  Hazard checked the clock. “Nico, it’s got to be eleven o’clock in Manhattan. How in the world did you get a hold of anyone?”

  “That’s typical.” Nico put his hands on his hips, which threatened to tug the tiny shorts down into what Officer Chester might have called johnson territory. “You know, I’m not just a pretty face you can stick behind a desk, Emery. I’m smart. I’m talented. I’m competent-plus—that’s your rating, by the way. I’m—”

  “Jesus Christ, Nico, I know! Anybody would have had trouble—” He stopped at the tiny smile playing in the background of Nico’s face. “Why are you doing this to me?”

  “Because sometimes I feel so awful about myself I want to dig my claws into somebody else.” He shrugged. “Because I feel like being a bitch.”

  “Nico.”

  “Fine.” He dropped into a chair, arms and legs akimbo, and checked a piece of paper in his hand. “I called the precinct closest to where the Ameses’ live, and I told them I was a private investigator contracted to the Wahredua PD. They wanted to check, so while they called the station here, I decided to look up Loretta’s agent. His name is—” He checked the paper. “Rufino Cardarelli, but according to his website, he goes by Ruff. It looks like it was designed in 1995, by the way. He still uses green on black for one of the pages.”

  “You weren’t alive in 1995.”

  “Yes, I was!”

  “You weren’t using the internet.”

  “I went to this modern art installation, and one of the things was called Netscape.”

  “Nico, I have had a seriously fucked up day. Can you please make my life harder some other time? A Tuesday, preferably, when John is going to make tacos?”

  Nico appeared to die for a moment, head hanging over the back of the chair, and groaned to the ceiling, “I legit should be allowed to hate you for how adorable that is. It’s not fair. It’s not fair that you’re nice to me and I have to be nice to you and I can’t just hate you for having this amazingly perfect life.”

  “It’s not so perfect, and I’m not going to be nice for much longer.”

  “Well, I didn’t mean you’d been nice tonight. You’ve been an ass tonight.” Nico brought his head up. “What’s wrong? Did John-Henry put fourteen percent of his paycheck into your Roth IRA instead of fifteen?”

  “The amount we put into the Roth varies monthly—Nico, for the love of Christ, what did you learn?”

  “Well, I learned Ruff Cardarelli is too cheap to hire a web designer, and aside from Loretta, all his clients appear to be, well, nobodies. I mean, I searched them. A lot of them don’t even have books published, so I guess they’re wannabes, right? Anyway, I called him, and he said—”

  “Wait, he had a number listed on the website?”

  “No; I had to use one of the white page lookups.”

  “But he answered the phone?”

  “Well, on the third call. And when I told him why I was calling, he was really eager to help. He told me he actually doesn’t rep Loretta anymore, and when I asked about the website, he got squirrelly and told me he’d forgotten to change it.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Yeah, I think he’s using her name to try to build up his stable.”

  “His stable?”

  “Whatever you call the authors he reps. Barn? Pen? Coop?”

  Hazard rubbed his eyes.

  “Once we got past the ‘oh, my gosh, that’s terrible’ part of the conversation, he actually wasn’t that nice about Loretta. He said she’d had one or two good books, and the rest had been flops. According to him, her career has tanked. She makes her living with these speaking arrangements and by ‘mentoring’—I could hear the air quotes when he said it—younger writers. He did say one thing that was interesting; he got on a tear about Loretta not turning out anything good, etcetera, and kind of not thinking about it, he said something about Ayelet being ten times the writer, she just couldn’t get any traction. He said she needed her moment. When I asked him what he meant, he couldn’t change the subject fast enough.”

  Frowning, Hazard turned that over. “Loretta’s own career didn’t take off until she got in the national spotlight by facing down protesters. Maybe he means something like that, something that would propel her into the spotlight and make people take a look at her writing.” Then Hazard saw the expression on Nico’s face, and he said, “Like her mother’s murder.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Well, fuck.” Hazard tried to fit those pieces into the picture. It would explain a lot. Then he shook his head. “But she hired me—Ayelet, I mean.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time someone did that to look innocent.”

  Nodding slowly, Hazard said, “Did he give you anything else?”

  “Not really. After he let that slip about Ayelet, he couldn’t get off the phone fast enough.”

  “Did the police call you back?”

  “Well, I got the desk sergeant. He said he’d be happy to help, interagency cooperation, blah, blah, blah, but there’s not much to tell. The police did respond to what he kept calling the ‘alleged incidents,’ but aside from documenting everything and doing some interviews, there wasn’t much they could do. He did tell me that when he ran the names, Ayelet came up with a laundry list of arrests—the more interesting ones were shoplifting, possession of a controlled substance, and a stolen car. He didn’t exactly say this, but the suggestion was that if someone was trying to get rid of Mom, it was probably the daughter.”

  “That’s two things pointing to Ayelet.”

  Nico held up two fingers and offered a small smile.

  “Good job.”

  The smile got fractionally bigger, and Nico said, “I’m sorry for being a bitch.”

  “I don’t care.”

  Rolling his eyes, Nico got up from the seat. He turned toward the outer office, then he hesitated and turned back. “Em, is everything all right? Really?”

  Hazard opened his mouth to say yes, everything was all right, and heard himself, instead, say, “No.”

  Nico’s dark eyes were surprisingly soft, and he nodded. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  Hazard stared at his desk. His fingers tightened around the arms of the chair.

  “Emery, why don’t we talk about it?” Hazard’s eyes stayed locked on the desk, and in a firmer voice, Nico said, “Let’s go get a drink and talk about it. You’ll feel better. And then you can yell at me about Chase, and you’ll really feel better.”