The Keeper of Bees ARC

by Gregory Ashe

  “His girlfriend was savagely murdered,” Dulac said, arms crossed as he leaned against the wall. “How’s that for a reason?”

  “Gray,” Wesley said again, shaking his head. “We’re friends. Why are you—we’re supposed to be friends.”

  “Did you leave the house after you got home from the Lindauers?” Somers said.

  “No.”

  “Not even stepping outside? Not even for a minute? Maybe you didn’t pick up the morning paper, so you ran down the driveway to pick it up?”

  “I don’t get the paper delivered. Nobody gets the paper delivered anymore.”

  “So you were in the house all night?”

  “My client has already answered that question,” Thompson said.

  “How was your relationship with Susan?” Somers said.

  Wesley’s mouth dropped open, and he spread his hands, glancing around, like he was playing to an invisible audience. “Great. I mean, fantastic. We love each other. She’s kind, smart, funny, patient. She’s—” He stopped, ran his fingers around his mouth. “She’s dead.” The words sounded like a test run, just trying them out.

  “What about Sunday?”

  “What about it?”

  “Don’t do that,” Somers said.

  “You’re . . . you’re using your personal relationship against me,” Wesley said. “You can’t do that.”

  “On Sunday, you were seen in an altercation with Susan Morrison.”

  “We had a tiff. You son of a bitch, I can’t believe you. You fucking son of a bitch.”

  “What were you arguing about?”

  “Nothing. It was nothing.”

  “It didn’t sound like nothing,” Dulac said, stretching as he pushed away from the wall and sauntered over to the table. “It sounded like you were pissed. Really, really mad. At Susan.”

  “It was a minor disagreement. She wanted to move in; I said I needed my space. Hearing Gray and Darnell planning the move, it set her off. And I can’t believe you two. You’re supposed to be helping me; that’s why I asked for you. You’re supposed to be making this better.”

  “Did she see something she wasn’t supposed to?” Dulac said. “We’ve been thinking about that. After you killed Rory Engels—”

  “I didn’t kill anyone!”

  “—and mutilated Phil Camerata—”

  “I’ve never hurt anyone!”

  “—and gutted Mitchell Martin—”

  “Stop it!” Whirling to Thompson, Wesley shouted, “Make them stop this!”

  “—what did you do after that?” Dulac was still asking. “Did you keep something? A trophy? A little memento you could jerk off to? And Susan found it, got curious, started asking questions. You said she was smart; maybe she started to put things together. She confronted you—”

  “At a dinner party? Are you out of your mind?”

  “—and you realized she had to go. Is that what happened?”

  “I’m done,” Wesley said. “I’ve got nothing else to say.”

  “I think that’s enough for right now,” Thompson said, braids clicking as she stood.

  “What was the fight about?” Somers asked.

  “That’s all for now, Detective.”

  “What were you arguing about?” Somers said.

  “I don’t know,” Wesley screamed. “I don’t know. I want to go home. I hate this and I want to go home.”

  “Susan Morrison isn’t ever going home again, you little fuck,” Dulac shouted, bulling towards the table. “Susan Morrison isn’t ever going anywhere again because you murdered her—”

  “Detective,” Thompson shouted, getting in Dulac’s path. “Get a hold of yourself!”

  “—killed her to keep your secret—” Dulac was shouting.

  Grabbing Dulac, Somers forced him out of the interview room and dragged the door shut behind them. As soon as the latch clicked into place, Dulac shivered and wiped his face.

  “Fuck,” he whispered. Then, louder, “That was fucking awful.”

  The door to the observation area opened, and Riggle came out. He was appraising Dulac, an eyebrow raised, as he said, “Pretty good work in there, Detective.”

  Dulac stared at the ground and nodded.

  “The feebs still have the crime scene locked down. I want you guys to check out Wesley’s apartment, see what you can find. If you’re right, Detective Dulac, and Susan Morrison did find something, I want to get it before the feds do.”

  “Chief,” Somers said, “we pressed Wesley pretty hard in there, but I honestly don’t see him as a suspect. A person of interest, yes, but we’ve got nothing solid except his relationship with Susan. I’d be more comfortable if we let him go for now while we built a stronger case.”

  “Detective Somerset, I’ve got twenty-five years of experience. I know a guilty son of a bitch when I see one, and that freak is guilty as sin.”

  “Chief—”

  “You got your orders, Detective Somerset. Get the fuck out of my stationhouse and do your job.”

  Riggle’s polished boots clicked against the linoleum as he strode away.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” Somers said quietly to Dulac. “In there, I mean.”

  “No matter which way this goes, dude, somebody’s going to be the bad guy. It might as well be me.”

  The comment was so strange that Somers didn’t know what to say, and before he had recovered, Dulac was moving toward the doors.

  “Let’s go,” Dulac said. “We’ve got orders.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  JULY 2

  TUESDAY

  9:10 AM

  HAZARD GOT OUT OF BED, washed his face, and stood at the sink. Water ran down his cheeks, beading along his jawline before sliding to his chin, where heavier drops fell to splatter against the porcelain. After Somers brought him home from Mitchell’s, he had pretended to sleep so that Somers would leave. But pretending had turned into a kind of restless dozing. The tsunami of panic that Hazard had experienced in the elevator of Mitchell’s building had drained him, and however Hazard might disagree with some of Somers’s conclusions, he had to admit that Somers was right about one thing: the attacks were getting worse.

  Drying his face, he went back to the bedroom and grabbed jeans and a tee. He tossed the wet towel over the back of a chair, dressed, and went downstairs. He grabbed a container of yogurt and ate standing at the sink, staring out the window. A cardinal perched on the branch of a wild plum, feathers ruffled as though he’d just had a scare. Hazard saluted him with the yogurt.

  Ok. A plan.

  The Keeper of Bees was active again. He had killed Susan Morrison, and from what Hazard had seen the night before, the Keeper was continuing to refine his technique. He had also played them for a bunch of fools, using the spotlighted murder to draw attention away while he abducted Mitchell.

  Was Mitchell dead already? Hazard could still see him the way he’d found him in the college sub-basement, the vicious gut wound, the boy left to die slowly and painfully.

  Hazard’s spoon stilled in the yogurt. Then he tossed the spoon in the sink and pitched the yogurt, half-eaten, into the trash. He grabbed the sink with both hands, and the stainless steel was gritty with dried soap scum under his touch. He could go at it, really scrub it with some Ajax. He could do the floors too. He could do the windows, inside and out, and get into the tracks where Somers never cleaned and make sure they were spotless.

  Because what the fuck else was he supposed to do? How was he supposed to come up with a plan? How was he supposed to find Mitchell? How was he supposed to stop the Keeper when he’d been cut off from the crime scenes, the physical evidence, the witness statements, security footage from police and civilian cameras? He knew—he hoped—that Somers would give him access to whatever he could, but Hazard suspected that with Riggle on watch and with the FBI getting involved sooner or later, the amount of information Somers could pass along would be limited at best. His h
ands tightened until they ached.

  He couldn’t help anyone if he lost his mind. And maybe, just maybe, it would be better if he stayed on the periphery of the case. Not out of it, not completely. But standing in the kitchen, alone, watching the cardinal groom his feathers, Hazard could admit that he might be a liability. Last night, for example, when terror had taken him in the elevator. Somers had cleared Mitchell’s apartment alone, which was a good way to get shot and killed. Hazard had been so . . . so fucking afraid that he’d had to stay in the hallway, shaking like a kid, until Somers told him things were under control.

  So maybe it was better this way. For now.

  And even if Hazard weren’t directly involved in the investigation, he could still do his part. Easing his hands off the sink, he made his way back upstairs to their office. He opened the filing cabinet and took out everything he’d accumulated on the Keeper. Even though he had hundreds of pages of material, in the morning light, it looked pathetic. At the front of his collection were copies of reports from the Keeper’s first killing. The killer had left no forensic evidence, nothing that might help establish his identity. If Hazard were honest, he couldn’t even be sure the Keeper was male, although statistically, it was more likely.

  To those reports, Hazard had added the results of his own efforts, which were even more pathetic. His research on the Keeper of Bees covered everything from Vergil to the 1925 novel by Gene Stratton-Porter, which had spawned a series of adaptations, one of them famously lost. It was a long historical stretch summarized in less than a page.

  He had another set of pages, where he had listed everything he could find on Missouri apiaries, apiculture, and related industries—honey, for example. He had drilled down into the records kept by the Missouri State Beekeepers Association, noting ancillary clubs and smaller, regional chapters of the association. He had dug through sites that sold local honey, many of which identified apiaries by name and address. He had listed every regional festival or fair that might have reasonably included beekeepers or honey sellers. And in the last few months, he had called or visited as many of them as he could: MSBA chapter meetings held in church basements, the St. Louis Honey Festival, even the poorly named Birds and the Bees Festival (when Somers had seen the name and nothing else written on Hazard’s calendar, he had asked, “Do you still have questions about how it works?”). Hazard had even gone so far as to print out a copy of the 2015 revised Missouri statute governing the sale of local honey and exempting it, under certain restrictions, from being identified and regulated as a processed food.

  In other words, he had nothing.

  He had called every apiarist, honey seller, or bee aficionado that he could find listed in the state—and he’d visited many of the ones who wouldn’t return his phone calls.

  He still had nothing.

  But detective work, whether private or police, often came down to the same basic elements: persistence, hard work, and luck.

  Hazard started by calling shipping companies who transported bees. He used the contact information given in the copies of the reports Somers had brought home, when the Wahredua PD had been in hot pursuit of the Keeper, and one of the most promising leads had been the bees. In most cases, Hazard was able to speak to the same person who had responded to police inquiries after the Keeper’s first attack. A few times, he got juggled until he ended up with someone who could help him. As soon as he identified himself—omitting his recent parting of ways with Wahredua’s finest—and mentioned the ongoing investigation, the men and women he spoke to were happy to help. Or as happy as cubicle dwellers ever were.

  Happy or not, though, none of them could help Hazard. He asked for any shipments in the last year involving the transport of live bees, and he got a bare handful, all of them delivered to cities in other parts of the state: Kansas City, St. Louis, Cape Girardeau. None of them had been anywhere close to Wahredua.

  Next, he tried local apiarists. He hit dead end after dead end. He asked about anyone who had purchased bees. He asked where they had lived and about any contact information they might have shared. He even swallowed the bile at the back of his throat and asked if the beekeepers remembered any unusual feelings. Had the person seemed strange? Had they seemed off somehow? Aggressive? Or unusually charming? The closest he came was the sale and transport of a colony to a woman in Osage Beach, within easy driving distance of Wahredua. Hazard called the woman, only to find out that Alma Zerber was eighty-two and didn’t drive. A quick Facebook search confirmed that Alma really was eighty-two and that she had a dozen grandkids who filled up her Facebook timeline. Hazard had never seen so many overbites at one time.

  He was still working his way through local beekeepers, still hitting dead ends, when the alarm on his phone began to buzz. He glanced over and saw that it was three; time to pick up Evie. He dismissed the alarm, left the disarray of papers and notes as they were, and headed to the minivan. He tried to turn off the back burner of his brain, where frustration and resentment were simmering. His attention needed to be on Evie, and it wasn’t fair to make her suffer because he kept slamming into a brick wall on this case. As he backed out of the garage, he made one last effort to box up the Keeper and put him away. For a few hours. For Evie’s sake.

  And then he realized he had another option, and he dug out his phone and made a call.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  JULY 2

  TUESDAY

  3:21 PM

  THE SEARCH OF WESLEY’S townhouse yielded nothing.

  Standing in the living room, Somers tried to make sense of what he was seeing. He had only been here once before; he had come with Hazard to question Wesley about his relationship to a murdered man. Somers remembered the impression he’d had at the time: a guy still getting back on his feet, and trying to do it on a pastor’s income. The townhouse still held the same motley furniture, obviously a collection that had been purchased at thrift stores or donated by parishioners. It still had the faint flea-market smell of musty fabric. A few cheap lithograph prints hung on the walls.

  What puzzled Somers, though, was the things that were missing. On several of the shelves in the living room, clean spaces interrupted a light layer of dust where items had been removed. Some of them he could guess at—one of those spaces probably marked where a framed picture had stood—but many were just fuzzy shapes in the dust. In the bedroom, it was worse: drawers were open and empty, the clothes hanging in the closet had been pushed aside and knocked askew, as though something hidden behind them had been rapidly retrieved.

  “You’re sure we’re the first ones to search this place?” Dulac asked, running a gloved finger through the dust.

  “That’s what Riggle said.”

  “Well, I hate to break it to you, but it looks like someone beat us here.”

  Somers nodded and walked through the house again.

  “Wesley and Susan were fighting,” Dulac said. “Maybe she noticed something and got upset. Something Wesley couldn’t explain.”

  Somers looked at Dulac.

  “Dude, I’m not saying he killed her. But this is weird.”

  “What’s weird is that nobody stayed to secure this place,” Somers said. “Not even tape on the door. When they came to arrest him, why didn’t they do a search?”

  “Because Riggle hired a bunch of dumbasses, plus they’re newbies.”

  “This is a waste of our time,” Somers said. “Come on.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Just come on.”

  They drove a few miles, and Somers parked the Mustang, studying the apartment complex across the street: a cluster of single-story buildings, each divided horizontally into three or four units. The blue paint was fading, already a dirty gray at the bottom, and in places the vinyl siding drooped and bowed. Someone in management must have decided a little paint would perk the place up, because the shutters were an eye-watering yellow, but the effect was clownish. Along a few windows, flower boxes held wilting ma
rigolds. This part of town was older; the drainage ditch along the side of the road was grassy and overgrown, and the asphalt was cracked and patched. On the other side of the street, a few single-family residences looked like they’d fall over in the next good thunderstorm.

  Susan Morrison lived at 1221 Old York Road, which was the center unit in a building of three apartments. The units backed up to the street, their postage-stamp yards screened by a privacy fence.

  “Riggle seems like a real control freak.”

  Somers nodded.

  “If we search her place without him telling us to, he’s going to blow a gasket.”

  “We’re detectives,” Somers said. “This isn’t the Girl Scouts, and I don’t need anybody to tell me how to do my job.”

  Dulac cocked his head.

  “You got a problem with that?” Somers said.

  “Oh, no. I’ll follow you into hell, man. I was just trying to figure out if you were starting to look like Hazard too. Some couples are like that, you know. You sound like him, but—hey, wait.”

  Somers got out and shut the door behind him.

  “Front door is on the other side,” Dulac said as he got out of the car.

  “Yeah.”

  “Dude, drive around. It’s fucking July out there; I don’t want to ruin this suit.”

  Dulac was right; the humid heat of a Midwest summer had swamped Somers immediately. But Somers still walked the length of the block, studying the back of Susan’s apartment and the units to either side. Then he walked the block in the other direction. Dulac stood near the Mustang, hands on his hips, staring.

  “Walk down there and then back,” Somers said.

  “It’s really hot. We could drive to the end of the block and back.”

  “You’re just making this take longer.”

  Grumbling, Dulac made his way to the end of the block and back. When he joined Somers, he said, “So?”

  “What’d you notice?”