Swinging double doors near the bar connected to the kitchen; Somers could make out the industrial appliances and the hum of motors on the other side. They had to stop while Somers searched for something to test the doors. Hazard ended up having to retreat to the storeroom to bring back the trusty mop. They stood to the side while Somers probed at the doors, but after several minutes, nothing happened.

  When he checked his husband, Hazard’s face was lined with thought.

  “What?”

  “Why the lightbulb bombs?”

  “They worked, didn’t they?”

  “They weren’t fatal. If anything, they put us on guard. What if Dulac had walked into the storage room and opened the door to the dining room? He would have been killed.”

  “He might lose that eye as it is, Ree. The only reason it’s not worse is because Palomo acted as fast as she did.”

  Hazard’s brow furrowed as though he wanted to argue the point, but Somers turned back to the doors. He gave them a final hard push with the mop, and they fluttered open and then shut again, swinging easily. Gut clenched, Somers pushed through into the kitchen.

  His steps slapped the tile. The smell of bleach and dirty dishwater was stronger here, and all the metal and ceramic gave back echoes, turning his own movements into sounds he questioned. The stairs were located on the far side of the kitchen, and the blackness below was absolute. The flashlight showed only the wooden treads and then a circle of the concrete foundation at the bottom. Ashley’s voice came clearly for the first time: “I’m here! I’m here! Help!”

  Somers inspected the treads as best he could, but he had a shit angle and only the flashlight to see by. He held his breath when he took the first step.

  No boom. No explosion. No hail of buckshot.

  After a moment, he eased himself down again.

  The fifth step rolled under him, and he fell forward. Concrete rushed up at him. Darkness like batwings. Then he realized he wasn’t falling; he was hanging forward, out over the emptiness, because his husband was clutching the back of his shirt.

  “A little help, John,” Hazard gritted out. “You’re spending too much time sitting at that fucking desk.”

  Somers felt about with his feet until he located a step, tested it, and planted himself. A moment later, Hazard let the shirt relax, but his grip didn’t loosen.

  “Son of a bitch,” Somers said when he could talk again.

  “Slowly,” Hazard said.

  “Son of a motherfucking bitch.”

  Hazard gave his shirt a little shake, but he didn’t release him. Somers started down again. He could feel his heart in his face. He could smell the flop sweat that had started up too late, his body flooding with adrenaline after the fact. And, more faintly, he thought he could smell death. He tested each step as he went down. When he reached the bottom, his legs were trembling.

  He breathed in, wiped his forehead, and spun the flashlight around the concrete shell. He stopped when he saw Derrick Sturgis.

  “On the ground!” Somers shouted, pulling the Glock. But his nose and brain were already telling him that he was too late.

  Derrick Sturgis was dead. He was slumped over an old metal desk, one side of his head disfigured by what must have been a gunshot wound. Blood had dried on the side of his face and down his neck and chest, stiffening the fabric of a salmon-colored knit polo. A revolver lay on the floor below his hand.

  Somers played the light back and forth, gathering impressions of the space: stacks of cardboard boxes, the smell of cold concrete and what might have been mouse droppings, old pallets leaning against one wall, crates of liquor bottles with dusty empties.

  Ashley’s shouting had reached a new pitch: “In here! In here! I’m in here!”

  The sound was coming from a reinforced door set into the wall next to Derrick’s desk. Somers checked the floor ahead of them as they moved toward it. While Hazard approached the door, Somers covered Derrick—the man was dead, but there was still a gun in play, and the nightmarish funhouse aspect of the Ace in the Hole made Somers doubt everything.

  “Let me out! Help! Help!”

  “Ashley,” Hazard tried.

  “Help! I’m in here!”

  “Ashley!”

  “Help! Help! Help!”

  “Ashley Bennett Boone, for God’s sake, be quiet!”

  The silence sounded like the Pacific in Somers’s ears. He remembered that dusk had been like a backwash too, as though the whole world were dissolving, being drawn out to sea.

  “Mr. Hazard?” Ashley asked in a choked voice.

  “Ashley, I need you to check the other side of the door. We’re going to get you out, but I need to know that it’s safe.”

  “It’s dark. I can’t see anything.”

  “Feel around the door. Follow the doorframe with your fingers.”

  “Just open the door! Mr. Hazard, please, please, I just want to get out—”

  “Ashley!” When a kind of nothing had vacuumed up the rest of the boy’s small, stifled sounds, Hazard said, “You’re going to be fine. I’m going to make sure you’re fine. Now, I want you to reach out and touch the door. You can do that, right?”

  Even the silence had its own stuttering heartbeat.

  “Ashley, let’s play a game. For everything you do correctly, I’m going to conveniently forget some fuckery in which you engaged my son. For example, if you reach out and touch the door, I’m going to forget that you convinced my son that it was a good idea to tip over those portable toilets they set up when they were renovating the old Baptist church.”

  Sniffling came from the other side of the door. Then Ashley said, “I’m touching it.”

  “Great. Now, I want you to find the knob, and I’ll pretend I don’t know that you and Colt stabbed each other with pencils in an attempt to see who would scream first when you were supposed to be learning about Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses.”

  The knob rattled. Ashley cleared his throat. “It’s just a doorknob.”

  “You’re doing very well. Now I want you to follow the doorframe with your fingers. If you do this, I will perhaps not remember quite so clearly when I heard you tell my son that you found where your parents keep the key to the liquor cabinet at the farm.”

  When Ashley spoke again, his voice had firmed up. “You said you’d forget. Not that you wouldn’t remember as clearly.”

  Hazard raised an eyebrow to Somers, and Somers nodded and moved toward Derrick’s body and the desk; Ashley would be fine, especially if Hazard continued to throw him lifelines, ways to act and respond normally in a terrifying situation. In this case, it just happened to be that those lifelines consisted of mild bullying.

  “As a compromise,” Hazard was saying behind Somers, “I will also throw in a hazy-at-best recollection of finding a stolen stop sign under my son’s bed after you and he went, quote, ‘to Denny’s.’”

  Ashley protested, but Somers was no longer paying attention; the fact that Hazard’s efforts were working was all that mattered. His attention was now focused on Derrick. The man had clearly been shot in the side of the head, and although it would take the ME to confirm, the wound looked consistent with the revolver that lay on the floor, inches below his dangling fingers. Derrick’s face had slackened in death, and the blood had already drained away, leaving him looking like an unfinished waxwork. Somers started to turn his attention to the desk. Then he turned back.

  Derrick Sturgis wore boots. If Somers had to guess, based on his own footwear, he would have said size eleven. Boots and jeans and a blue sweatshirt. And now that Somers looked more closely, he wondered if some of the gore on the shirt was older—in places, the stains were darker and had a fixed look that suggested that they’d set in the fabric. The sleeve of the sweatshirt was torn at the cuff. He thought of the blue fibers that had been recovered from under Loretta Ames’s fingernails. Somers moved closer, grimacing at the smell. Part of his brain showed him Derrick suddenly surging to life, springing at him. No more jump scares, Somers told himself. Maybe no more movies at all.

  From behind him came two sharp blows. Somers glanced back. Hazard was opening the door, a broken piece of the frame suggesting where the bolt had torn free. Ashley emerged a moment later, his face streaked with dirt and tears and snot. He crashed into Hazard, and Hazard wrapped one arm around the boy’s shoulders, turning him into his chest so that Ashley wouldn’t see the corpse. Ashley talking into Hazard’s chest, and Hazard patted his back and made listening noises. But his gaze came to rest on Somers, and his face held a question.

  Somers turned back to the desk and spotted what had drawn his attention in the first place. He read the paper without lifting it; the whole place would need to be processed, and that included latent prints. But when he’d scanned the words twice, he swore and shook his head. He looked back at Hazard.

  “He says he did all of it—the murder, the kidnapping, everything. It’s a full confession, and Ree, it’s got details only the killer would know.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  MAY 17

  SUNDAY

  3:44 PM

  IN THE HOSPITAL WAITING room, Hazard watched his son pace. Colt’s face was blotchy, and he walked stiffly, arms folded, elbows forming acute angles. The waiting room wasn’t that big, but a heavyset older man—the turban suggested that he might be Sikh—was the only other person. He had watched Colt for a few minutes, figuring out his pattern, and then drawn his legs back to clear as much of a pathway as possible. Then he’d disappeared inside a Lee Child novel; Hazard only recognized the name because he had once caught Somers trying to hide one behind the nightstand.

  “Sit down,” Hazard said, catching Colt’s arm on the next pass.

  Colt let himself be drawn into the seat. His whole body was stiff, as though he were made out of wire and wood. He kept his arms crossed, and then, in a feat that Hazard suspected was only barely physiologically possible, he managed to slouch down in the chair while preserving that intensely rigid posture and began to kick a chair in the row opposite them. The TV in the corner was playing a soccer game that, apparently, was being broadcast on a Spanish-language channel. Between the announcer’s rapid-fire (and unintelligible, to Hazard) commentary and the clunk-clunk-clunk of Colt’s—formerly Somers’s—Adidas against the chair, it took approximately two minutes before Hazard said, “Good Christ, Colt.”

  Glaring, Colt turned on him.

  Hazard wrestled with the first words that wanted to come out, which were something along the lines of, You’re driving me out of my fucking mind. It had been a long day after a long, sleepless night, and all of it was starting to catch up with him. After ushering Ashley out of the Ace, he had waited while Somers dealt with Dulac and then with the horde of law enforcement that had descended on them. At Somers’s insistence, they had secured the building and held it until they could get a specialist from St. Louis who would walk them through the process of dismantling the traps throughout the building. It was one thing for the chief of police and his husband to risk their necks, Hazard guessed. The liability of sending unprepared officers into that shitstorm, however, was another matter entirely.

  Everything had seemed to take forever: the milling cops, the rounds of questions, the logistics of maneuvering so many bodies and so much bureaucracy. The first ambulance had arrived quickly enough, and Frannie Langkop, one of the paramedics, had given Dulac something that had calmed him down. Then she and her partner had strapped the injured detective onto a stretcher and loaded him into the ambulance. Frannie had looked grim as she’d shut the doors to ride in the back with Dulac. Then they’d had to wait for a second ambulance to take Ashley, and since Ashley’s parents couldn’t be contacted, Hazard had offered to ride with the boy. He’d texted Colt on the way, and of course, his son had managed to arrive at the hospital before the ambulance, which raised some serious questions, in Hazard’s mind, about speed limits and other traffic ordinances.

  Since then, he’d been here with Colt, waiting for a doctor to appear, for a nurse to give them an update, for Somers to text him back.

  Colt gave the chair another defiant kick.

  “Let’s take a walk.”

  “I don’t want to take a walk.”

  Hazard rubbed his jaw to buy himself time. “I understand you’re worried and upset. I’m worried and upset too. But Ashley is going to be fine. I know when you care about someone—”

  “Oh my God,” Colt said, throwing himself out of the chair. “I’ll go on a walk. I honestly can’t be around you right now; you’re driving me out of my fucking mind.”

  Hazard let that one go.

  At the door, Colt stopped and looked back. He played with the door handle, not quite meeting Hazard’s gaze.

  “I’ll call you,” Hazard said.

  The apology was etched in the boy’s face, even if it didn’t quite make it to words; Colt nodded, wiped at his eyes, and yanked the door open. The sound of the Adidas on the linoleum faded quickly; he must have been close to running.

  Across the room, the heavyset man looked up from his book. “When my wife was sick, my daughter told me that if she had to listen to me breathe for one more minute, she was going to stab me in the throat.”

  “This is not conversation hour.”

  The man blinked.

  Grudgingly, Hazard forced himself to add, “I understand that you were attempting to make a human connection.”

  The man nodded slowly as he returned to his book and murmured, “Everyone’s under a lot of stress.”

  When the door opened minutes later, Hazard looked up, expecting that Colt, as usual, had no cash on hand and wanted money for the vending machines. Instead, Darnell stood there, dressed in a Bass Pro Shop tee and blue jeans. Behind the beard, his face had a crumpled look, as though the weight of the day’s events had caused some sort of internal collapse. He made his way blindly over to Hazard and dropped into a seat. Then he leaned forward, elbows on knees, and put his face in his hands.

  The soccer announcer’s rapid Spanish. The tick of the clock. The whisper of a page turning.

  “I’m sorry,” Hazard said.

  Darnell nodded. A moment later, he cleared his throat and sat up. “Nobody will tell me anything. I’m his emergency contact, but all they’ll say is that he’s in surgery, and they’ll let me know when they have an update. I about got myself thrown out; I guess I figured it’d be better to drive myself crazy in here than not have any chance of knowing what’s happening.”

  Hazard listened to Darnell’s heavy breathing. “You’d be in good company. I think I’ve gotten kicked out of this hospital twice. You should have seen how they coded one of the procedures they did on my arm.”

  Across the room, the heavyset man in the turban raised an eyebrow without looking up from his book, and heat filled Hazard’s face.

  The door opened again, and Noah came into the room. He was alone—no Rebeca, no kids—and he took the chair next to Darnell. “Hey,” he said, nodding in greeting. “We just heard about Gray. Rebeca’s working up a schedule so somebody’ll be here, you know, whenever they know something.”

  For some reason, that made Hazard’s throat so tight that all he could do was nod.

  Noah was studying Darnell. “When was the last time you ate something?”

  Darnell shook his head.

  “Did you eat breakfast?”

  “I don’t know. No. I was going to meet Gray for lunch.” His throat moved. “To talk. To try to talk about—” He had to stop again. “Then they called and told me—”

  Noah gave him a beat. Then he touched Darnell’s arm, his face surprisingly gentle for the goofball who had once tried to wrestle all six of his children while beating some sort of level on a game that he and Colt and Somers were obsessed with. “Come on,” Noah said, urging Darnell to his feet. “You need something.”

  “I can’t eat,” Darnell said, but he was letting Noah shepherd him toward the door.

  “We’ll get you a protein shake then,” Noah said as the door closed behind them. “Things look better when your blood sugar isn’t crashing.”

  Then they were gone, and the Spanish patter filled the quiet room.

  Minutes dragged past—five, ten, then a quarter of an hour. Hazard took out his phone; he couldn’t text Somers again, not when he knew his husband was overwhelmed, but he needed to do something. He could call Cora, maybe. Check on Evie.

  But the sound of the door brought his head up, and his husband was standing there: eyes tight with what was probably a killer headache, shirt dappled with blood, but solid and real and present. Hazard didn’t even know he needed the hug until Somers’s arms were wrapped around him.

  When they broke, Hazard heard himself say, “Colt’s going out of his mind, and Darnell, I mean, I had no idea what to say, and—” He managed to rein in the rest of it. “Jesus, John, I’m glad you’re here.”

  “I don’t think anyone knows what to say in these situations,” Somers said as they both sat. “Where is Colt?”

  “He went on a walk.”

  “Your husband was driving him out of his mind,” the man with the paperback said. “According to your son.”

  Hazard scowled across the room. “Thank you for your contribution.”

  But a tiny grin had slipped out on Somers’s lips. “He’s worried about Ash; he’ll be fine. And Darnell?”

  “He’s taking it bad. Dulac’s still in surgery. I don’t know if it would be better if they hadn’t had that horrible fight the night before, but I don’t think it could be much worse.” Hazard gave him the rest of the updates, which were really no updates at all.

  Somers listened and nodded. When Hazard had finished, he said, “Do you want to hear about it?”

  “You’re goddamn fucking right I want to hear about it.”

  “Well—” Somers paused and glanced at the man across the room.

  He waved the paperback at them as he heaved himself to his feet. “Go on, go on. I need to stretch my legs anyway.”