But Zoe was already leaving the room, Shelley in her wake.
A familiar gray head was approaching them down the corridor, clutching his hat in his hands. “Sheriff Hawthorne,” Zoe said. “A pleasant coincidence. We are ready to hand Bob Taylor over to your team for further questioning. He is not our killer.”
“I know,” Hawthorne said gruffly, clearly trying to catch his breath as he paused in front of them. “That’s what I was coming to tell you. He can’t be the killer. We’ve just found another body—and it’s fresh enough that it can’t possibly have been Bob Taylor. He was already in custody.”
Zoe reached into her pocket for the rental car keys. “Where?” she asked.
“Not far. I’ll lead,” the sheriff said, turning to race back along the corridor with Zoe and Shelley following close behind.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Zoe surveyed the horizon, just holding back a grimace. Though the corn fields, the fences, and the farm’s outbuildings blocked the view, she knew what she would see beyond them. She knew this sky, knew the patchwork of farmers’ fields, the roads. She knew them well, because just over the ridge of the next hill was a little town called Capten.
The town where she had grown up, and where the rest of her family still lived, as far as she was aware.
“What is it?” Shelley asked softly. Zoe hadn’t even heard her get out of the car, but she was standing right beside her.
“I do not like it,” she said.
“The murder, or this place?” Shelley asked. “I remember you saying you grew up in a small town…”
Zoe met her eyes and realized that there was very little point in trying to dissemble. Shelley had obviously read her like a book, just like she always seemed to be able to. “A little town right over there,” Zoe said, nodding her head in the right direction.
Shelley glanced in through the open door of their car, studying the GPS. “Capten.”
“It’s this way,” Sheriff Hawthorne called out, interrupting their conversation. The way was obvious—his men had already cordoned off an area of the waving corn stalks, in a circumference that also took in the ground in front of them—but his comment was meant more, Zoe saw, as a means of hurrying them up.
She didn’t need another offer to get out of the awkwardness of talking about her childhood. She strode forward, avoiding the area that the deputies had marked off, where softer earth recorded a few footprints. They were female, she saw instantly from the shape of the print, and belonged to a slim woman of five feet and six inches.
They had to be the steps of the victim. Zoe pressed on, walking carefully and examining the ground as she did so, marking only the footprints that were easily recognizable as the sheriff department’s standard-issue heavy-duty footwear. No other signs littered the ground, and as she passed into a path that had been trampled through the corn, she entered a world of chaos.
The stalks seemed to be everywhere. Weaving around in the light breeze, they reached out to stroke or roughly brush her arms and legs, wanting to catch in her hair, trip up her feet. Zoe thought of a film she had seen as a child, the classic Snow White, with the branches of evil and haunted trees catching at the heroine’s hair. Or was that some other fairytale character? She had never cared for them much, even back then.
The crime scene was obvious before she was fully upon it. Blood had splattered across stalks of corn for some distance, with their distinct pattern allowing it to run through gaps in their formation and splash some way away. Zoe held out a hand to warn Shelley—the tape did not extend this far in, no doubt because the deputies had some trouble getting it to weave through the crops.
The corn opened up suddenly into another flattened area, a glade that opened up in front of them like a parting of the seas. Trampled corn stalks made a soft bed of the floor, and on top of them lay their victim—all except her head, which, as by now Zoe would have predicted, was no longer attached to her shoulders.
“Stand still,” she called out quickly, seeing with horror that the young deputies were tramping about in all directions, trying to take pictures of the scene. They all froze, a fact which Zoe enjoyed for a bare moment: it was nice to see her authority being respected.
But that was instantly replaced by a feeling of dread that perhaps crucial evidence had already been destroyed. The ground was even softer here amongst the stalks, and she saw a footprint that she did not recognize, half-overlaid by one of those standard-issue boots.
“There are footprints,” she called out, her voice carrying to both the deputies, the sheriff, and Shelley behind her. “Nobody take another step until I’ve taken a look at them. This is the first sign of our killer.”
There was begrudging silence as the sheriff and his men stood still. The younger ones shifted for a moment, until a look from Hawthorne had them freezing again, guilty looks plastered across their faces. They clearly knew when they were being reprimanded.
Zoe ignored them, ignored all of the rest of it, and put the soft sighing of the wind through the corn stalks out of her mind. It could almost sound like a voice if you were paying too much attention, and she could not be distracted now. She moved forward carefully, bending low to the ground, taking one step at a time. She examined the ground ahead for footprints of any kind, not just to avoid stepping over them but also to get an idea of where the killer had gone.
The marks emerged from under the clumsy deputy’s prints about fifty yards from the body, peeling away through the corn. The footprints were almost all incomplete—it was difficult to walk here without stepping on the corn itself—but then they hit a broader opening, a lane designed for the farmer’s access, and moved with more confidence.
Zoe crouched as low as she could, and let her eyes read the numbers right off the ground itself. They were looking for a male, almost certainly now, because he wore men’s boots and he was six feet tall. He weighed about a hundred and sixty pounds, and he walked with the slow confidence of a man who was sure of not getting caught. How could he have been so sure? According to the sheriff, this woman’s body had been discovered by her family within fifteen minutes, after they noticed her car in the yard but no one in it.
He had an arrogance about him, she realized. All this time they had thought he was unafraid, that he planned things out so well he had no fear of getting caught. But in this case there had been nothing to stop him from being found in the act. If one of her family had looked out of the window sooner, he might have even been interrupted. It wasn’t the confidence of planning: it was some supreme belief in his own abilities, the cockiness of a superiority complex.
He was mocking them, all of them, with every body he took.
Zoe retraced her steps, carefully, making sure to step exactly back in her own prints. “He went in that direction,” she called out, pointing for the benefit of the deputies. “There’s a trail through the corn, then you hit a broader path and he carries on. You should follow his footprints. Record them as you go. Don’t step on them.”
They had enough sense, at least, to look guilty as they sloped off amongst the corn. An eerie rustling accompanied their progress. If Sheriff Hawthorne took umbrage at Zoe giving orders to his own men, he said nothing.