When Hazard picked up the razor again, Somers kissed him on the cheek.

“You’re not mad? About last night, I mean.”

Hazard grunted again and stiff-armed his boyfriend out of the bathroom.

“Ree?” Somers said, poking his head back into the bathroom.

Hazard facepalmed him out again.

“It’s just,” Somers said, finger combing his hair as he slid into the bathroom again. “If you’re mad—”

“For the love of Christ, I am not mad, I am not upset, I am not passive aggressively ignoring you. Now can I please just shave in peace?”

For some reason, that made Somers get a huge grin, and the blond man barely made it out of the bathroom before he started to laugh.

Hazard paid careful attention to get the spot under his chin and, at the edge of conscious thought, decided he would never understand his fiancé.

“If you have time,” Somers said, “could you take the laptop to Darnell?”

Clicking off the razor, Hazard said, “Where do you think Dulac is?”

“I don’t know. That’s kind of the whole problem.”

“I’m asking where you think he is.” Hazard moved into their bedroom, discovered that the Baby Shark tee Somers had bought him was the only clean thing he had left, and dragged it on. When his head popped through the collar, Somers had a hand on his chin and was watching. “Don’t ogle me,” Hazard said.

“I like ogling you.”

“It’s objectifying.”

“Hell yes, it is.”

“Could you please focus?”

“Have you been doing more crunches? How is that even possible?”

Snapping his fingers, Hazard said, “Hey.”

Somers’s face stilled, and he said, “Honestly, I don’t know. He’s never done this before. Disappeared like this. I can’t think of a single rational explanation for why he’d go AWOL. The last message I got from him was about checking out a lead, but there’s no reason he wouldn’t have followed up by now. Even if he were out of state, he could have called and let me know.”

Hazard spoke slowly: “He might not be contacting you on purpose, John.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think,” Hazard said, picking his words carefully, “it’s very unlikely that Nico and Dulac coincidentally disappeared at the same time.”

“Wait a minute. You think Dulac had something to do with this?”

“I don’t have any evidence of that.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“I think that he fits a lot of the criteria for this killer,” Hazard said. “So do a lot of people. Noah fits them too.”

“And Darnell,” Somers said. “He was on your list too. But it wasn’t Darnell.”

“No, that was a hypothesis. The evidence didn’t bear it out.”

“Who else?”

“Wesley.” Hazard shrugged. “And Nico, although honestly, Nico is a long shot.”

“Because you dated him.”

“No,” Hazard stopped and studied Somers: the color high in his cheeks, hands clenched at his sides. “Why are you angry?”

“I’m not angry. I just think it’s funny that you’re dead set on Dulac being part of this somehow, and Nico barely merits a mention.”