Page 77 of The Hard Way

“We have a motel clerk who identified them,” I continued. “We have footage of them at the Pig together the day she bought the cheese that killed Tim Zietlow.”

“He kills Tim Zietlow with our cheese, gets Nancy Zietlow, and then in two years he calls in the Millers’ loan the way he called in the loan for Mom and Dad. And he gets twice the farm.”

“Not if we can help it,” Odin said, and I think even Vanessa keyed into the threat in his voice. And she one hundred percent loved it, just like I did.

“You have all this proof now, so…” She raised her eyebrows, hopefully, expectantly. I so badly wanted it to be that easy, my heart nearly burst.

“It’s not enough,” Odin grumbled. “All circumstantial. Nothing we have ties Hank to the cheese.”

“Except we know now that he had to directly infect it,” I said. “That’s something.” I looked over at Vanessa. “This was totally helpful. Let’s think this through. I’m Hank. I want to get rid of Tim Zietlow and crash the farm, all in one fell swoop. I do this whole unplugging thing, because I know you’ll toss the cheese. But I need to be sure the cheese is actually contaminated. What do I do? I need to get salmonella to smear on it and then I wrap it back up. Because I don’t see him capable of growing salmonella.”

“Hell no,” Vanessa said.

“Is it that difficult?” Odin asked.

“Oh, yeah,” I said, “you really have to work at it.”

“But the university,” Vanessa said. “The universities order it from a lab to do experiments with. I learned that during this whole mess—I was reading up on it, and there are only two labs in the country that supply strains of salmonella for experiments, and they’ll only send it two-day air to researchers at universities.”

“So we look for Hank’s university connections,” I say.

“No,” Odin said. “A man like Hank isn’t going to ask some researcher buddy for a deadly toxin and have the buddy find out Hank’s lover’s husband is dead from that exact toxin. No. He’s more careful than that.”

I thought about Odin at the Cobblestone. The way he wanted to look in Hank’s eyes. Odin was using that information, that knowledge now.

“We’re looking for a break-in,” he continued. “And it wouldn’t be a break-in at the local university. Too obvious, too easy…”

Vanessa hung on Odin’s words. She seemed as enchanted with him as I was. It made me feel happy for her to meet and appreciate him.

“It would be a lab in another county, somewhere outside of the range of this outbreak. Outside of your distribution range,” Odin said. “Somewhere where nobody thinks to connect the dots. It still doesn’t give us Hank…”

“It’s a lead, though!” I called Thor and left a message about what we’d discussed. If they were still at Hank’s place, maybe they could look for something…I don’t know what. I wasn’t one of the superspies in the equation.

“We’re going to get you out of this,” I said to Vanessa as soon as I hung up.

“What are you going to do?”

“Investigate the fuck out of it,” I said.

“And if that doesn’t work?”

“We’llfucking-gwork it out another way,” Odin said.

Vanessa turned to me. “Come back. Come be alive. We won’t tell. It would mean so much.” To Kaitlin and Candace, she meant.

“It’s dangerous,” I said. “They’ve already gone through my death once.”

Vanessa looked ashen. “What does that mean? You’re in that much danger? You think you’ll die…”

“Over my dead body,” Odin growled.

She took this in. “But those people who are your enemies…you worry about them.”

“A lot,” I said. “And I’m not willing to saddle those two with any kind of knowledge that puts them in their sights. You shouldn’t even know.”

“Fuck that,” Vanessa said.

“We have to go,” Odin said. “I don’t like you out here without your disguise.”

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