Still Life With Crows (12 page)

All around the Fellowship Hall, people put down their forks and turned their attention to the little man in the seersucker suit.

“Thank you,” the man said. He stood erect, hands folded in front of him like he was at a wake. “My name is Stanton Chauncy. Dr. Stanton Chauncy. I represent the Agricultural Extension of Kansas State University. But of course you know that.” His voice was high, and his manner of speaking was so crisp and precise that his words were almost overarticulated.

“The genetic enhancement of corn is a complicated subject, and not one that I can readily elucidate in a venue such as this,” he began. “It requires knowledge of certain disciplines such as organic chemistry and plant biology that one could not expect a lay audience to possess.” He sniffed. “However, I will attempt to impart the most rudimentary of overviews to you this afternoon.”

As if of one mind, those who had gathered in the Fellowship Hall appeared to slump. There was a collective exhalation of breath. If they had hoped to hear praise heaped on their town or their Sociable, or even—dared one hope?—word of Chauncy’s impending decision, they were sadly disappointed. Instead, the man launched into an explanation of corn varietals so detailed that the eyes of even the most enthusiastic corn farmer glazed over. It almost seemed to Ludwig as if Chauncy was
trying
to be as boring as possible. Whispered conversations resumed; forkfuls of mashed potato and turkey gravy were slipped into furtive mouths; small streams of people began moving back and forth along the far walls of the hall. Dale Estrem and the Farmer’s Co-op crowd stood at the back, arms folded, faces set hard.

Smit Ludwig tuned out the droning voice as he looked around the hall. Despite everything, he appreciated the small-town atmosphere of the Sociable: its homespun provinciality, and the fact that it brought the community together, even forcing people who didn’t like each other to acknowledge the other and be civil. It was one of the many reasons why he never wanted to leave—even after his wife had passed away. A person could not get lost in Medicine Creek. People were taken care of, nobody was forgotten, and everyone had a place. It wasn’t like that in L.A., where old people died unloved and alone every day. His daughter had been calling a lot lately, urging him to relocate nearer her. But he wasn’t going to do that. Not even after he closed the paper and retired. For better or worse, he was going to end his days in Medicine Creek and be buried in the cemetery out on the Deeper Road, beside his wife.

He glanced at his watch. What had generated these thoughts of mortality? He had a deadline to make, even if it was self-imposed, and the time had come for him to go home and write up the story.

He made his stealthy way to the open doors of the hall. Beyond, late afternoon light illuminated the broad green lawn of the church. The heat was unbroken as it lay over the grass, the parking lot, and the cornfields like a suffocating blanket. But despite the heat—and, in fact, despite everything—a part of Smit Ludwig felt relieved. He could have fared a lot worse at the hands of his fellow townsfolk; he had Maisie, and perhaps Pendergast, to thank for that. And on a less selfish note, he’d be able to write an upbeat piece about the Sociable without dissembling. It had started with a certain grimness, he felt: a stoic sense that the show must go on, despite everything. But the gloom and oppression had seemed to lift. The town had become itself again, and not even Chauncy’s stultifying lecture, which still droned on behind him, could change that. The thirty-third annual Gro-Bain Turkey Sociable was a success.

Ludwig fetched a deep, slow breath as he looked out from the steps of the church. And then, suddenly, he froze.

One by one, the people around him began to do the same, staring out from the wooden doorway. There was a gasp, a low murmur. Like an electric current, the murmur began to jump from person to person, running back into the crowds within the hall itself, growing in volume until Chauncy’s exegesis of variegated corn kernels came under threat.

“What is it?” Chauncy said, stopping in mid-sentence. “What’s going on?”

Nobody answered. All eyes were fixed on the horizon beyond the open doors of the hall, where, against the yellow sky, a lazy column of vultures wheeled in ever tightening circles above the endless corn.

Fourteen

W
hen Corrie Swanson pulled up to the church, people were standing on the front lawn, huddled together in groups, murmuring anxiously. Now and then somebody would break away from one of the groups and stare out in the direction of the cornfields. There must have been fifty people out there, but she didn’t see Pendergast among them. And that made no sense, because he’d asked her to come right away. He’d been most insistent on it, in fact.

It was almost a relief to find him missing. Pendergast was going to get her into even worse trouble than she already was in this town—she could feel it in her bones. She was already the town’s A-number-one pariah. Once again, she wondered what the hell she’d gotten herself into. The money was still burning a hole in her glove compartment. He’d get her in trouble, and then he’d be gone, and she’d still be stuck in Medicine Creek dealing with the consequences. If she were smart, she’d give him back the money and wash her hands of the whole thing.

She jumped involuntarily as a black figure seemed to materialize out of nowhere beside the car. Pendergast opened the passenger door and slid in as sleekly as a cat. The way he moved gave her the creeps sometimes.

She reached for the dashboard, turned down the blaring sound of “Starfuckers” by Nine Inch Nails. “So, where to, Special Agent?” she said as casually as she could.

Pendergast nodded toward the cornfields. “Do you see those birds?”

She shaded her eyes against the glow of the sunset. “What, those turkey vultures? What about them?”

“That’s where we’re going.”

She revved the engine; the car shuddered and coughed black smoke. “There’s no roads out that way, and this is a Gremlin, not a Hummer, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Don’t worry, Miss Swanson, I will not get you mired in a cornfield. Head west on the Cry Road, please.”

“Whatever.” She stamped on the accelerator and the Gremlin pulled away from the curb, shuddering with the effort.

“So how was the Turkey Sociable?” she asked. “That’s like the big event of the year in Shit Creek.”

“It was most instructive—from an anthropological point of view.”

“Anthropological? Yeah, right, Special Agent Pendergast among the savages. Did they introduce that guy from KSU, the one who wants to grow radioactive corn around here?”

“Genetically modified corn. They did.”

“And what was he like? Did he have three heads?”

“If he did, two must have been successfully removed in infancy.”

Corrie looked at him. He looked back from the broken seat with his usual placid, mild, unsmiling expression. She could never tell whether or not he was cracking a joke. He had to be the weirdest adult she’d ever met, and with all the characters wandering around Medicine Creek, that was saying something.

“Miss Swanson? Your speed.”

“Sorry.” She braked. “I thought you FBI guys drove as fast as you wanted.”

“I’m on vacation.”

“The sheriff goes everywhere at a hundred miles an hour even when he’s off duty. And you always know when there’s fresh eclairs at the Wagon Wheel. Then he goes a hundred and twenty.”

They hummed along the smooth asphalt for a while in silence.

“Miss Swanson, take a look up the road, if you please. Do you see where the sheriff’s car is parked? Pull in behind it.”

Corrie squinted into the gathering dusk. Ahead, she could see the cruiser pulled over onto the wrong shoulder, lights flashing. Overhead, and maybe a quarter mile into the corn, she could see the column of turkey vultures more clearly.

It suddenly clicked. “Jesus,” she said. “Not another one?”

“That remains to be seen.”

Corrie pulled up behind the cruiser and put on her flashers. Pendergast got out. “I may be a while.”

“I’m not coming with you?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“No problem, I brought a book.”

She watched Pendergast push his way into the corn and disappear, feeling vaguely annoyed. Then she turned her attention to the back seat. She always had five or six books flung about willy-nilly back there—science fiction, horror, splatterpunk, occasionally a teen romance that she never, ever let anybody catch her reading. She glanced over the pile. Maybe, while she waited, she’d start that new techno-thriller,
Beyond the Ice Limit.
She picked it up, then paused again. Somehow, the idea of sitting in the car, reading, all alone, didn’t seem quite as appealing as it usually did. She couldn’t help but glance again at the column of vultures. They had soared higher now. Even against the gathering dusk, she could see they were agitated. Perhaps the sheriff had scared them off. She felt a twinge of curiosity: there might be something out there in the corn a whole lot more interesting than anything she’d find in one of her escapist novels.

She tossed the book in the back seat with a snort of impatience. Pendergast wasn’t going to keep her away like that. She had as much a right as anyone to see what was going on.

She flung open the car door and headed off into the corn. She could see where the sheriff had tramped through the dirt. There was another, narrower pair of tracks that ran back and forth over the sheriff’s clown shoes: probably his well-meaning but brain-dead deputy, Tad. And near them, Pendergast’s light step.

It was very hot and claustrophobic in the corn. The husks rose high over Corrie’s head, and as she passed by they rattled, showering her with dust and pollen. There was still some light in the sky, but in the corn it seemed that night had already fallen. Corrie felt her breath coming faster as she walked. She began to wonder if this was such a good idea after all. She never went into the corn. All her life she had hated the cornfields. They started in the spring as so much endless dirt, the giant machines tearing up the earth, leaving behind plumes of dust that coated the town and filled her bed with grit. And then the corn came up and the only thing anyone talked about for four months was the weather. Slowly the roads got closed in by claustrophobic walls of corn until you felt like you were driving in a tunnel of green. Now the corn was yellowing and pretty soon the giant machines would be back, leaving the land as naked and ugly as a shaved poodle.

It was awful: the dust filled her nose and stung her eyes and the moldy, papery smell made her sick. All this corn, probably growing not to feed people or even animals, but cars. Car corn. Sick, sick, sick.

And then, quite suddenly, she broke through into a small trampled clearing. There were the sheriff and Tad, holding flashlights and bending over something. Pendergast stood to one side, and as she entered the clearing he turned toward her, his pale eyes almost luminous in the gathering twilight.

Corrie’s heart gave an ugly lurch. There was something dead in the middle. But when she forced herself to look she realized it was only a dead dog. It was brown and so bloated with the gases of rot that its hair stood on end, making it look horribly strange, like a four-legged blowfish. An awful, sweetish smell hung in the still air and there was a steady roar of flies.

The sheriff turned. “Well, Pendergast,” he said in a genial voice, “looks like we got all riled up for nothing.” Then his eyes flickered over Pendergast’s shoulder, and landed on her. He stared at her for a few uncomfortable seconds before looking back at Pendergast. The agent said nothing.

Pendergast had slipped a small light out of his own pocket and was playing its bright beam over the bloated corpse. Corrie felt sick: she recognized the dog. It was a chocolate Lab mutt belonging to Swede Cahill’s son, a nice freckled kid of twelve.

“Okay, Tad,” said the sheriff, slapping his hand on the gangly deputy’s shoulder, “we’ve seen all there is to see. Let’s call it a day.”

Pendergast had now moved in and was kneeling, examining the dog more closely. The flies, disturbed, were swarming above the corpse in a wild cloud.

The sheriff walked past Corrie without acknowledging her, then turned at the edge of the clearing. “Pendergast? You coming?”

“I haven’t completed my examination.”

“You finding anything interesting?”

There was a silence, and then Pendergast said, “This is another killing.”

“Another killing? It’s a dead dog in a cornfield and we’re two miles from the site of the Swegg homicide.”

Corrie watched in vague horror as the FBI agent picked up the dog’s head, moved it back and forth gently, laid it down, shone his light in the mouth, the ears, down the flank. The angry drone of flies grew louder.

“Well?” asked the sheriff, his voice harder.

“This dog’s neck has been violently broken,” said Pendergast.

“Hit by a car. Dragged himself out here to die. Happens all the time.”

“A car wouldn’t have done that to the tail.”

“What tail?”

“Exactly my point.”

Both the sheriff and Tad directed their lights to the dog’s rump. Where the tail had been there was nothing but a ragged pink stump with a white bone at the center.

The sheriff said nothing.

“And over there”—Pendergast shone his light into the corn—“I imagine you will find the footprints of the killer. Bare footprints, size eleven, heading back down toward the creek. Same as the footprints found at the site of the first homicide.”

There was another silence. And then the sheriff spoke. “Well, Pendergast, all I can say is, it’s kind of a relief. Here you thought we were dealing with a serial killer. Now we know he’s just some sicko. Murdering a dog and cutting off the tail. Jesus Christ.”

“But you will note the difference here. There was no ceremony to this killing, no feeling that the corpse has been arranged
en tableau.
”

“So?”

“It doesn’t fit the pattern. But of course, that simply means we’re dealing with a
new
pattern—in fact, a new type altogether.”