The process of breaking and entering, searching, and having a small victory had allowed Somers’s subconscious to process some of what had happened to him. He wasn’t sure why Riggle had sent cops to arrest him, but in his gut, he knew two things: he’d been framed, and this had something to do with the Keeper. Hazard’s plan of a playdate at the park as a signal that it was safe to come home was a nice fantasy, and Somers would be sure to stop by the park that afternoon, just in case. But he knew Hazard wouldn’t be there. This hadn’t been a mistake, and if Hazard hadn’t been so damn smart, Somers would be sitting in a jail cell at county right then.

The only other thing that Somers could think of, and something he didn’t like at all, was that the timing of this frame job was too convenient. The Keeper investigation had stalled until Somers and Hazard started making progress on it; Riggle had been satisfied with trying to pin everything on Wesley, and while Park had voiced suspicions early on, she hadn’t really focused on Somers until he had found the hidden room at Sexten Motors. It wasn’t until the case had started moving again that someone had tried to remove Somers from the equation. That made him very worried about what might happen to Hazard next.

Somers set the thought to the side and made his plan. He needed food. He needed a phone. And he needed to find out what had happened to Nico and Dulac; that was the next best move, now that he was on the run. The faster they found the Keeper, the faster things would get back to normal.

He knew where he needed to go. Sighing, he checked the cross streets and started walking toward Dynamo Dill’s.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

JULY 5

FRIDAY

1:23 PM

WHEN HAZARD FINALLY got out of the station, it was early afternoon. His conversation with Glenn Somerset had yielded nothing except an awareness that Somers’s father shared Hazard’s agonizing helplessness—and, of course, the all-too-familiar experience of being blamed for everything that went wrong in Somers’s life.

The sun shone in a clear sky, and asphalt and brick and glass trapped the thick, Midwestern heat. Sweat broke out across Hazard’s face and chest and back; it was worse when he got into the Odyssey. Rolling down the windows didn’t help much, although the breeze as he drove across town at least wicked some of the sweat from his face. He stopped to get more cash from the ATM, and then he kept driving. It was strange to see how life rolled on for everyone else: a woman struggling to walk a pack of dogs; a couple of teenagers playing catch in a weedy, gravel lot between Mansheim Shoes and The Petite Petunia; an older woman whom Somers would probably have described as snazzy, in a lime-green pantsuit with shoulder pads out of the 80s, jauntily making her way down the street. For all of them, today was just another day—an added holiday, maybe, if their employer had stretched out the Fourth and given them Friday as a bonus.