The clatter of the phone hitting the nightstand was followed by the bed shifting, Somers’s bare feet hitting the floor. Hazard squashed the pillow, peeking out, and said, “Bad?”

“Bad,” Somers said, dragging on jeans. “Get up. You’re coming too.”

Hazard rolled out of bed and started digging through the clothes he’d left by the side of the bed. The denim rasped against his legs. His fingers fumbled the button on the waistband, failing to secure it once, then twice, and then he abandoned it with a disgusted breath and yanked the zipper up. A buzzing sound had filled his head.

“Is it . . .”

Somers grunted once and might have nodded as he wriggled into a tee.

“John?”

“Yes,” he said. “It looks like it, anyway. The Keeper of Bees.”

Hazard sat to pull on socks. “At the college again?”

“No.”

“Where?”

“Sexten Industrial Park.”

“Do they know—I mean, who . . .” Hazard couldn’t finish; his mind flashed to Mitchell, and the locks, the alarms, the cameras.

“Susan.”

“Who?”

“Ree, sweetheart: socks. Hurry.” Somers was belting on the holster with his Glock. “Susan Morrison.”

“Wesley’s girlfriend?”

Somers shoved his feet into sneakers and came to stand in front of Hazard. He brushed the dark hair out of Hazard’s eyes and said, “Is this too much for you? There’s no judgment, but I need you to be honest.”

“No,” Hazard said, dragging on the socks. “No, it’s not too much.”

“Would you tell me?”

“Of course.”

“God, you’re an awful liar.”

Hazard asked more questions as they drove across town in the Mustang, but Somers didn’t have any answers. Between questions, Hazard could only stare out of the car. At this hour, so much of the city was dark that the few remaining lights seemed spread out across enormous distances—dim, yellow sodium lamps; harsh, brilliantly white specks of halogen; a wink of red at a traffic blinker. The smell of fast food lingered in the Mustang, something Somers must have picked up during a long day of work, and Hazard’s stomach turned. He leaned into the window; the glass was cool under his skin.

Sexten Industrial Park was located out past the Tegula plant, which was a manufacturer of ceramic tiles near the city limits. The approach was disorienting; they first had to pass the Tegula plant, which was ablaze with lights and activity, the third shift in full swing. For a moment, as they drew even with the factory, it was like something out of a bleak future: a world of steel and incandescence and shadows. And then they were past it, tumbling into real darkness, with the bulking outlines of older buildings ahead of them like bones from another epoch. They drove past a plant that, for the first ten years of Hazard’s life, had made cardboard boxes. Then they drove past an abandoned kitty litter factory. Then a cabinetry shop that had, for six months of Hazard’s time in high school, been appropriated by the senior class as a spot to drink and have sex, and which had ended when Mary Bead had cut herself and demanded a tetanus shot, and word had finally gotten out about what was happening. Sexten Park was an industrial graveyard; there was even an ancient automotive factory, Sexten Motors, that had opened at the turn of the century and shuttered in the Great Depression.