“Anything you say, Detective Somerset,” Norman said.

“Jesus, Ronnie, I didn’t say that to piss you off.”

“Loud and clear, boss,” Gross said. “Extend the search all the way to the Sexten Motors building. Inside too?”

“You want to make the assignments for the grid, Detective Somerset?” Norman said.

Behind them, a tractor trailer pulled out of the Tegula plant, the muted roar of its engine rising as it accelerated. The window was down. The driver, who had to be fifty, and those fifty years had been hard, was listening to Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball.”

“No,” Somers said. “You guys can do it. Just tell me where you want me.”

“You better stay over here,” Gross said. “Make sure we don’t screw anything up.”

“Might want a hat,” Norman said. “Sun’s intense today.”

“Especially when you’ve had your head up somebody’s ass lately,” Gross said.

“I’ll take back left,” Somers said. “That all right?”

“Better check with Riggle,” Norman said.

“Better call your dad,” Gross said.

Shaking his head, Somers got gloves from the car and headed out into the overgrown weeds.

They searched all afternoon. The thing about a grid search was that it was thorough, effective, and grinding work. Excruciating. The initial search of the crime scene itself and the perimeter had been conducted by specialized techs and overseen by Special Agent Park and the FBI. That was where the most significant finds almost always were. And while Somers knew that extending the crime scene and processing it like this could turn up important evidence—ten years before, they’d brought a man to justice because after strangling a girl in a forested stretch of a state park, he’d stopped by the side of the road to pee and polish off a bottle of peach schnapps—he also knew that, most of the time, it was shit work and it yielded absolutely nothing.

It was also Missouri in July, the sun hammering his back, the humidity thick enough that he felt like he was swimming. The t-shirt was soaked within the first half hour; burrs and seeds from the weeds caught on his sneakers and jeans, and some of the nastier plants sliced his arms or, in the case of a patch of nettles that he overlooked, left his forearm itching and burning from wrist to elbow. He drank water as much as he could, but he didn’t need to pee once. It reminded him of two-a-days in high school, football practice in the morning and then again in the late afternoon. Chris Kearney, Somers remembered, who had played linebacker and had a habit of dropping the weights after a set and loosing a victory scream, had passed out on two separate occasions during those practices. When Somers stopped, wiped his face, and chugged water, when he looked at the heat warping the air above the brick hulk of Sexten Motors, he thought about Chris keeling over in the middle of hundies.

Shift change was coming up when Somers stopped in the middle of the section of grid he was working. It took him a moment to understand what he was seeing.