Zoe thought that belligerent was maybe a long word for this group, though she said nothing to the effect. “This is Bob Taylor?” she asked. She had to raise her voice; the man on the ground was swearing and spitting, and the two men holding him down were shouting at him to stay down.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“All right, get him up,” the sheriff barked. “Enough of this. I want a full report.”
The young man stepped forward to help, three of them lifting Bob Taylor bodily from the ground until he could get his feet under him. His face was red and his clothes were dusty from the sidewalk where they had thrown him, a dark blue uniform bearing the name of the store embroidered over a breast pocket. He was fifty-four years old, Zoe estimated, five seven, probably around a hundred and eighty pounds. He was filling out around the middle in his age, his hair cropped close and graying, his face lined from the sun.
All in all, he looked fairly average. He resisted little as the local boys pushed him into the back of a sheriff’s department vehicle, one of them sliding in next to him to keep him honest.
“We arrived about five minutes ago,” the young deputy was saying, addressing Sheriff Hawthorne. Zoe and Shelley listened in, keeping close. A few yards away, the homeowner was watching from her front doorway, one hand over her mouth. “Knocked on the door and asked Mrs. Goodwell if she had a man on the property conducting an installation. She led us into the kitchen, where we found suspect Bob Taylor working on a washer-dryer. He came out from behind it when we asked for his identity, and having confirmed it, we asked him to come with us to answer some questions.”
“How the hell did you get from that to the sidewalk?” Sheriff Hawthorne demanded.
“He became verbally abusive, sir. Started to call us all the curse words under the sun, talking about a job quota and a schedule. I indicated to him that it was better he come with us willingly rather than us having to arrest him. He told us he wasn’t going nowhere to no station and tried to push his way out of the room.” The deputy cleared his throat briefly. Zoe wondered how much of his side of the story had been embellished. “McWillard tried to stop him by catching hold of his arm, and he became aggressive. We had to drag him out here to stop him from trashing the place up. Then he wouldn’t submit to cuffs so we had to take him down.”
The sheriff eyed him balefully. He looked as though he believed even less of the story than Zoe did. “Made a scene of it, too. All right. Get him back to the station. We’ll follow and put him in for questioning.”
“We will take lead on that,” Zoe put in quickly. “He will no doubt respond better to someone who hasn’t just tackled him to the ground.”
The sheriff grunted unhappily, but he didn’t disagree. “Fine. Let’s just get him back first.”
Zoe got one more look at Bob Taylor, sitting in the back of the car, before she and Shelley returned to their own vehicle. He didn’t much look like a serial killer—not that there was a particular look they had. Still. He didn’t fit the trend. He was far older than most multiple murder suspects, especially where the victims were unconnected to the killer’s personal life; someone his age was more likely to kill a wife than a stranger. At the very least, a sex worker. Of course, trends were hardly rules. There were those who broke the curve.
“What are you thinking?” Shelley asked as she strapped in her seatbelt, obviously picking up on Zoe’s mood.
“I’m not sure,” Zoe admitted, starting the engine. “Just that I don’t have a totally good feeling about this.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Ivy switched off the car engine, heaving a sigh of relief. It was good to be home at last. This heatwave sweeping the country was doing no one any favors, and she prayed it would end—and not just because it was uncomfortable.
Her eyes swept across the fields, the corn stalks tall and almost impenetrable to the eye, a tall mass that started at an unnatural straight line and then dominated her view. The road leading up past them was dusty and dry, and the timbers of the barn in front of her were sun-bleached. The quicker this heat was over the better. The corn would be ready to harvest in a matter of weeks, and Ivy wasn’t looking forward to dealing with the farmhands complaining about the sun and slacking off work.
She flipped open the mirror in her sunshield and examined her face quickly, checking her skin. She was showing freckles that came out every summer, scattered across her nose on her fair complexion. She tucked her blonde hair back behind her ear and sighed again. What a drive.
Still, it had been worth it. Ivy grabbed up her purse from the passenger seat and began rifling through it, looking for the appointment card the receptionist had given her. Dr. Patterson—that was his name. The man had been kind and calm and made her feel at ease, not like the last one. He had been a real creep. It was worth going an hour out of her way to avoid that.
Ivy hefted the straps of the purse onto the crook of her elbow and opened the car door, getting out with her keys and the slip of paper clutched in the other hand. She wanted to put it on the fridge as soon as she got in, so she wouldn’t forget. The old doctor’s card could go into the garbage. There was no way she was seeing him anymore, now that she had an alternative.
Ivy traipsed across the space between the barn and the house, listening to the silky sound of a light breeze running through the corn stalks. She couldn’t feel it on her skin, but you could always hear the wind in the corn. It was a soundtrack that had marked her whole life, growing up on this farm with her family, something as familiar as the squawk of crows overhead and the lowing of the cows on the grazing pastures at the other side of the property.
She was halfway to the house when she heard something that made her pause and turn, looking into the stalks with a frown. Was that a whimper? It sounded almost like an animal. Maybe there was a fox in there, or a rabbit, or something else small that had been hurt. She thought of the family cat, Mr. Whipples, who lived in the barn and enjoyed a steady diet of mice and rats. He had been known to bring down the occasional larger animal, though, and he wasn’t always fastidious about finishing them off.
Come to think of it, what if it was the cat himself?
“Mr. Whipples?” she called out softly, making the pss-pss-pss sound that always seemed to get his attention. There was no response. Not even another whimper.
Maybe she’d heard something different and just interpreted it wrong—a bird calling out on the other side of the field, for example. But it had sounded close enough.
Ivy was just deciding to turn back and go to the house, like she had originally intended, when her ears picked up on something else: rustling, not too far away again. Like something was moving through the stalks of the corn, turning the leaves aside as they went. It was out of time with the soft breeze, which seemed to have died now anyway. It was quiet enough that Ivy could hear, back on the other side of the house, one of the cows utter a low moan of frustration at the heat.
She took a few steps forward, right to the edge of the corn. Was something in there?
There was only one way that she was going to find out. Even if it was a wild animal, they sounded badly hurt. Most animals, even predators, wouldn’t attack when they were injured. Especially not if the approaching thing was a human, so much bigger than them. It was probably safe. She told herself that, overriding the natural thrill of fear that went through her at the unknown.