Somers and Hazard produced their identification, and Markle called it in. When she emerged from the cruiser, emotions shuffled through her face. Some surprise, yes, and some irritation too, but mostly worry. Edwards, sweating harder than ever in spite of the brisk April air, accepted her report with a nod. Of the two, Markle was the one to watch, Somers decided.

  “You’ve got a dead girl in there?” Edwards said.

  “That’s what I called in.”

  Edwards blew out his mustaches again. “Can’t have it. Can’t have it at all.”

  “It’s an inconvenience, I know.”

  “Family friendly,” Edwards pronounced, jerking his thumb at Markle again, even though Markle didn’t look like she’d be friendly until you got a few beers into her and showed her your tattoos. “That’s something special, you know. This whole place, this area. We don’t need people dragging their shit down here.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Hazard said.

  “It means why are two city cops from a pissant town poking around Ted Herney’s property.”

  Somers explained, and Edwards blew out his mustaches a few time and mopped his forehead, but when Somers finished, all Edwards said was, “Can’t have this going on. Just can’t have it.”

  The deputy took a step towards the cave, and Somers said, “You’ll probably have to send your partner. It’s a tight fit.”

  Edwards ballooned, his face plummish as he blew out another breath, but he jerked his thumb at Markle and she took off for the cave.

  “You’re scratched halfway to Jesus,” Edwards said, fixing his eyes on Hazard.

  “You should see the other guy,” Somers said.

  Hazard looked like he might say something—something annoyingly factual about how there hadn’t been another guy, how it had been a cave wall, something like that—but the ambulance door opened, and a young paramedic hopped to the ground. A young, strapping paramedic. He had a scarlet mohawk, biceps like cannonballs, and a swagger. And he was looking at Hazard. He swaggered his way right over to them, and in one of the campiest voices Somers had ever heard, said, “Well, well, well. It looks like somebody needs some attention.”

  Hazard met the paramedic’s look flatly. “I’m fine.”

  “Don’t be silly.” The paramedic swatted Hazard’s chest. “Come over here and let me take a look at you.”

  Edwards’s mouth had twisted, and he was staring fixedly at the cave.

  “I said I’m fine.”

  “Sure you are, honey. You’re real fine.” Somers watched as the brawny paramedic with the camp-tastic voice hooked an arm around Hazard’s waist and nudged him towards the back of the ambulance. “I bet all the boys and girls tell you that.”

  And Hazard was going with him. Somers stared. Hazard—the hulking Neanderthal—let the paramedic tug him towards the back of the ambulance. Somers took a half step and then paused. Yeah, Hazard had a lot of scrapes. Some of those scrapes definitely needed to be cleaned and bandaged. So take a breath, Somers told himself. Take a breath, that’s all. All that paramedic is going to do is wipe him down with disinfectant. It’s not like they’re getting lubed up. It’s not like that. It’s just disinfectant and bandages. And those thorns, the ones that punctured his palm, the paramedic would have to clean those up too.

  Think about the case, Somers told himself. You found a dead girl in Walden’s old home. In the cave that he and his cult used. So who’s the girl? Britney Cowper, that was his best guess.

  Somers’s eyes flicked to Hazard, now seated inside the ambulance, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his catcher’s-mitt hands flat out while the paramedic squealed, “Oh my God, you’ve got such big hands.” And Somers found himself thinking this is ridiculous, this is fucking ridiculous. Hazard is yours, he told himself. He loves you. He said he loves you. Sure, he said it. So why is he back there letting that mohawk-queen with the giant arms touch him? Why does he have his jacket off? Why are his shirtsleeves rolled up, for Christ’s sake? What about that?

  He pummeled the questions, breaking them down and scattering the pieces, forcing his mind to return to the case. Britney Cowper. All right, so maybe the dead girl was Britney. That would explain why she was missing and why no one knew where she was. No one except the killer. But why was she dead? She had been fighting with Walden; Clyde had told them that. Had Walden killed her and hidden the body here? And maybe someone else had found out and killed Walden in turn? God, that felt convoluted. Why had Walden and Britney been fighting? Somers didn’t know, but his gut told him the answer was important. Had Britney known something? Something about Walden, something that might have ruined him?

  Giggling from the ambulance interrupted his thoughts. Hazard had his shirt rucked up under his arms, exposing the dense muscle and stiff, dark hair across his abdomen. His face was red, but he wasn’t angry. Far from it. And that fucking mohawk queen with the cannonball biceps was running latex-gloved hands over Hazard’s chest, his fingers probing, teasing, caressing.

  Edwards made a disgusted noise.

  “I’ve got to check on something,” Somers said, and he didn’t like the sound of his voice. Didn’t like it at all.

  Hazard’s face could have started a nuclear reaction when he saw Somers. With his shirt still pinned up under his arms, he squirmed, brushing at the paramedic’s hands. The paramedic ignored him. He was obviously having one hell of a time.

  “How’s he look?” Somers asked. And there it was again. That note in his voice. Like a cracked bell. A note ringing ugly as fuck.

  “Real fine,” the paramedic said without glancing up. “I’ll get him patched up, though. And I’ll make sure everything’s,” he laid lewd emphasis on the word, “in working order.”

  “Good. I’m going up the road to check on things.”

  “Hold on,” Hazard said, fending off the paramedic for a moment, tugging his shirt down. “I’ll come with you.”

  “Not a chance,” the brawny paramedic said, pinning Hazard against the side of the ambulance. “You’re still bleeding, and I want to make sure you’re taken care of.”

  “Jesus,” Somers said. “You go ahead and do that. Take real good care of him.”

  “Oh, I will.”

  “Somers, don’t you fucking walk away from this,” Hazard said, his voice now slightly strangled as he struggled to keep the paramedic from hiking up his shirt again. “Don’t you dare.”

  With a dimestore grin, Somers gave him a mock salute and headed up the dirt track. It wasn’t like Somers hadn’t seen people check out Hazard before. Men and women both found that dark, brooding thundercloud of a man attractive. Somers didn’t mind. He didn’t mind the Pretty Pretty boys fawning over him. He didn’t mind the moonbrain stares when Hazard walked into the club. He didn’t mind—he didn’t, Somers emphasized to himself, not at all—mind the way that paramedic pawed at him. Those guys weren’t Hazard’s type. Especially not that musclebound paramedic. Not Hazard’s type at all. So it didn’t bother Somers. He didn’t mind. Let the mohawk boy eye-fuck Hazard. Let him grope the big man. Somers’s didn’t mind at all.

  Only he did. Right now, right here, he did mind. He minded so much he could have exploded, and that explosion would have measured in the gigatons. And the worst part was that he didn’t know why it hurt so much right now, when all those other times, Somers could laugh it off, smile, enjoy the fact that men and women might want Emery Hazard but it was Somers who had him. Right now, though, with that lug of a paramedic running his hands up Hazard’s chest, with Hazard playing dumb about the whole thing, Somers couldn’t laugh. He couldn’t smile. He couldn’t so much as get his heart to take a normal thump-thump, and instead it pounded off-rhythm, and Somers thought this what a heart attack felt like, like a hydrogen bomb mushrooming inside his chest.

  Because in the cave, when he had pulled Hazard loose from the slot in the stone walls, Somers had felt something. Something dangerous shooting into his heart, a combination of mass and velocity that had started a chain reaction. Hazard had called his name. Hazard had reached back for him—reached back for him, for John-Henry Somerset. That’s what had slammed into Somers’s heart fast enough to cause fission. That tremor in that deep voice. The panicked curl of those fingers. And Somers had known that Hazard needed him, that Hazard wanted him, that for a moment in time, even if it was only a moment, Hazard had forgotten about the past and had only cared about this John-Henry, the one he could call to and reach out for. And if this is love, John-Henry thought, kicking a rock so hard it cracked against the bole of an oak and wobbled off into the grass, if this is love biting holes in me, if this is love knowing he can’t ever forgive me all the way and wanting it anyway, if this is love feeling whole one moment and then blasted apart the next, whenever some hunk swings around and starts pawing at Hazard—if this is love, Somers thought, just put a bullet in me now.

  The road. He dragged his focus to the road. It wasn’t a road at all, barely more than two dried tracks of mud that snaked between the growth of trees and weeds and blackberry bushes. Lost in thought, Somers had already come a good distance down the trail. A stand of pines bristled behind him, their branches blocking any sight of the cave or the cruiser or the ambulance. Ahead, the trail curved again. Somers started forward, chugging the crisp April air, turning his face to the sunlight, crooking a finger under the knot in his tie.

  The road. Think about the road, he told himself. And the case. Britney Cowper, that’s who the dead girl was. He didn’t have proof, not yet, but it would come. He was sure of it. She hadn’t been dead long; rigor had begun to ease, but it hadn’t faded completely, and that meant she’d been dead for more than a day but not more than three. A large window, but it fit Britney’s disappearance. Her appearance, too, fit what Somers knew of Britney: young, pretty, but with the signs of a hard life visible even in death.

  Clouds drifted over the sun, and Somers paused. Dirt puffed around his shoes and dusted the leather. Who had been the last person to see Britney Cowper alive? Peyton. They had gone together to the store. That’s what Peyton had told them. And then Britney had run back to Walden’s house. And then Walden had killed her. It could have been someone else. It could have been Kelley Jane. She might have killed the girl out of jealousy. But Somers didn’t believe that Kelley Jane was the jealous type. She certainly hadn’t seemed bothered when she described her husband’s sexual adventures. No, Somers kept coming back to Walden as the killer. Clyde had told them that Walden and Britney had been fighting. He had even witnessed one of the fights—the end of it, anyway. But what had they been fighting about? And why had Walden decided to kill her?

  The April day had brightened. The last few clouds shifted overhead, flouncing west, and the sun lanced down again. Somers squinted ahead. Light flashed through the dusty, olive-and-sage brush. He peered closer and took a step. Dust puffed again. The glimmer of sun on chrome winked through the scrub. There was definitely something down there.

  Trotting now, Somers made his way down the rutted dirt. To his left, bushes clumped together, walling one side of the road. But now that Somers was paying attention, he could see broken branches and torn leaves. Something had passed through here, something large and heavy. The scrub, although broken and flattened, was slowly recovering. In a few more days, maybe a week, it might be hard to tell that anything had passed this way at all.

  Pushing through the brush, Somers winced as thorns tugged at his jacket, catching in the wool, the branches popping back as he forced a path clear of them. Once he was clear of the bushes, he stopped.

  Ahead, the ground dropped into a shallow depression. Someone had mounded fallen branches over an old silver Chevy. Somers eased himself down the slope, kicking branches out of his way. One long branch rolled and clattered, and its noise filled the clearing. In spite of the spring air, Somers was sweating now, and his mouth had a metallic tang like he’d run his tongue along the Chevy’s bumper and picked up some of those flakes of rust. Wrestling a path through the branches, Somers dropped low enough to look through the windows.

  The Chevy had left a factory in Flint, Michigan probably forty years before, and when it rolled off the line, pristine white fabric had covered the seats. Now, a hundred different hands and asses had grimed the fabric, flattening it, the dirt acquiring a lacquered sheen after so many decades. It would have been smarter to toss a match through the window than try to clean the car. Hell, it would have been better than reupholstering it. The owner, or owners, had done just about everything but taken a dump in the back seat.

  But it was the front passenger seat that drew Somers’s attention: the rust-colored stain, the same color as the taste in his mouth; the fabric upholstery that had bunched while wet and had dried in stiff rucks; and the smear of something the color of brick, with long, dark hairs trapped in the stain.

  “Somers?”

  Something roughly the size of a bear crashed through the brush at the top of the hill. When Hazard emerged, he was plucking at his hair, trying to free himself from a bramble that had somehow gotten caught there. He finally ripped himself free, swearing, his long hair curling across his eyes.

  “What the hell are you doing down there? Is that a car? What’s going on?”

  Somers knocked aside another of the fallen branches, and it dropped heavily against the Chevy’s trunk with a low chime.

  “I think we found John Walden’s missing car.”

  CRAVENS'S VOICE BUZZED OVER THE PHONE, and the sound carried her irritation perfectly. “I don’t have an answer for you, Detective. Not yet, anyway.”

  Hazard and Somers sat in the Interceptor, the call routing through the Bluetooth speakers. Since Somers had uncovered the Chevy, they had spent the following hours doing nothing. Or rather, Hazard corrected himself grimly, less than nothing. They had watched as the Taney County officers Edwards and Markle puttered around the cave and the Chevy. They had occasionally returned to their cruiser, muttering into the radio, listening to the squawking replies. Edwards, underneath his mustache the color of a golden retriever, was trying hard as hell to look like he’d done something important. Markle just looked like she wanted a cigarette.

  The paramedics lingered for an hour. Ulises, the paramedic who had been so . . . attentive, had pouted on the back of the ambulance, making eyes at Hazard the whole time, and Somers had prickled and bristled and squirmed like he was squatting on a wasp nest. At least Ulises was gone now, though, and Somers was finally sitting still. Hazard had sensed something off the whole time, as though Somers—

  —were jealous—

  —had something against the buff paramedic, but Hazard wasn’t sure what. Not exactly, anyway.

  At one point, Hazard had gotten so tired of sitting around that he had grabbed some of the forensics gear they kept in the Interceptor and had tried to go to work on the Chevy, and that had shot a rocket up Edwards’s ass so fast that the fat deputy just about hopped out of his pants.

  Cravens was speaking again, Hazard realized, and he had missed the beginning. “—still trying to toss this back on us.”

  Hazard glanced at Somers, but Somers had his attention focused on the phone. “That makes sense, Chief. She went missing from Wahredua.”

  “I don’t care if it makes sense, Detective. I don’t care what your personal opinion is about the death of that girl. What I know is that two of my detectives were working an unrelated—let me stress that, an unrelated—case, and happened to discover a body. They did the responsible thing and called it in to the local authorities. At that point, they stayed long enough to give statements and ensure that the local authorities had control of the scene, and then they left. Am I making myself clear?”

  Hazard’s brain scrambled to process the fragment he had caught earlier. “Hold on: they’re trying to throw her back to us?”

  The buzzing silence was enough of an answer.

  “That makes sense,” Hazard said. “That car, it’s probably John Walden’s. And that makes the girl Britney Cowper. And from what that car looks like, we think she was killed somewhere else and brought here, most likely to hide the body.”

  “Detective Hazard—”

  “And it only makes sense that she was killed at Walden’s house, within Wahredua’s city limits.”

  “Detective—”

  “And if that is Britney Cowper, then her death is definitely linked to everything that happened to Walden, and—”

  “That’s enough.” Cravens’s shrill words cracked, and Somers shook his head and turned to look out the glass, and Hazard felt bad because of that—because of the way Somers shook his head, but not for the rest of it. “I’m going to say this once, Detective Hazard, and that’s the only time I’ll say it: Wahredua doesn’t need another murder. Is that clear? The body is in Taney County. The car is in Taney County. Until those Dolly Parton-loving lunatics can prove that girl was killed somewhere else, you’ll keep your damn mouth shut, and that’ll be the end of it. Are we clear?”

  Hazard’s knuckles shifted, white under his skin as he grabbed the armrest.

  “Are we clear?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right.” Cravens didn’t sigh, not quite, but her next breath was easier. “I want you to get back here. You’re wasting time down there while the rest of us are scraped as thin as beggar’s butter trying to keep this town from going up in flames.”

  “What?” Somers said, his attention moving back to the phone.

  “They’re pouring in. The whole goddamn state, it looks like. The mayor thought they might be good for business, but they’re not even that. They’re like lice. Filling up the parks and the streets, sleeping on benches, putting up tents in sandboxes. That whole Walden farm has turned into Woodstock. A bunch of goddamn lunatics living in the mud, that’s what they are.”

  “You’re talking about people coming because of Walden? Believers?”

  “God only knows what they believe, Detective. What I know is that they’re here, and they’re vagrant, and all I’ve got are the drunk tank and a few beds over at the county jail. Even if I wanted to sweep them up, I couldn’t do it. Even if I had a place to keep them, I couldn’t do it because we’re spread so thin. And two of my detectives are half a state away trying to drag another murder onto our plates.” She sighed this time, a real sigh, and said, “Get back here. Now.”