Leaving the barn, he called out again for Kleinheider, but all he got back was the wind soughing over the bluff, catching the long Indiangrass and tangling the stalks, stirring up dust from the washed-out gravel drive. Hazard moved around to the back of the house. The white shapes he had noticed before were, as he had guessed, beehives, with bees drifting lazily through the air. Kleinheider also had a large garden: beanpoles and staked tomatoes and low, neat rows of lettuce and kale, all of it surrounded with chicken wire. An orchard of apple trees completed the property; the fruit coming in was small and green, and Hazard had no idea what type of apple Kleinheider might be bringing in.

Next, he made a circuit of the house. If it had a basement, it didn’t have any lower windows, so Hazard decided to look in through the windows on the main floor, which were set slightly too high for him. He found a bucket near an outside spigot and carried it with him, setting it down at each window and climbing, ignoring the plastic’s protests, fighting a smile the second time when he thought of what Somers would say about that ominous noise. From what he could see, the inside of the house was what he expected: heavy drapes bleached by sunlight; furniture that was thirty or forty years old; an ancient, cabbage-rose wallpaper; a pump organ; in a front room, most likely called the parlor, enough doilies and precious figurines to choke a Victorian horse.

He had cleared two sides of the house when he looked into an office and saw a man he guessed was Victor Kleinheider. He lay on the floor, half-covered by a desk that had fallen on top of him and surrounded by a pool of blood.

“Fuck,” Hazard swore. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Dropping down from the bucket, he carried it back to the spigot, and then he stood in the house’s shadow and stared out at the line of white hive boxes and the slow unfurling greenness of southwestern Missouri, the spine of knobby humps at the horizon, the blue of the sky. He was about to do something stupid.

In the Odyssey, he found his gear bag and pulled out booties and disposable gloves. He carried them with him to the back porch, pulled them on, and studied the door. It looked ancient; too old, probably, for his bump keys, so he’d have to pick it. But when he jiggled the latch, it swung open, and the smell of shit and blood and a violated human body wafted out, with undernotes of Fabuloso and moldering fabric. Hazard breathed shallowly as he moved into the ancient house. He took the most direct path he could into the office, where he studied the scene again, this time from the doorway.

The stench was worse here; putrefaction and bloat had set in, meaning Kleinheider had been dead for at least a couple of days, although probably not for a full week—the discoloration and rupturing of the skin wasn’t very far progressed. The dead man lay on his back, pinned by a particleboard desk. On one side of him, the CRT monitor for an ancient computer had cracked against the floor. On the other side, a Bakelite trash can lay on its side, snowing crumpled receipts and junk mail onto the rug.