Chapter 26
Hadley Dawkins
Hadley drew her weapon before the scream had finished fading in the field. She didn’t run toward it. While every instinct pulled her forward, her training won out. Running blind into a situation she couldn’t see was how people got killed, so she held where she was and got her bearings.
A voice.
Low and fast and coming from the north end of the field, from the direction of the access cut. Hadley tilted her head to catch it, but the stalks swallowed the words before they reached her, leaving her nothing but the echo of someone talking.
She didn’t ease out of her stance. That scream had come from someone in pain or in terror, and a person couldn’t fake either one to that extent. She started forward through the stalks.
North meant cutting across the rows, shouldering through one wall of corn and into the narrow gap before the next.
She worked toward it one row at a time, slow and deliberate, closing the distance.
For a while the words remained a muddled tone without making any sense.
The nearer she came, the more they broke apart into pieces.
“...had no choice. You don’t understand.”
Someone else was out there.
Sobbing. Ragged and helpless, a person coming apart at the seams.
Hadley went still between two rows.
She had a sightline now, a tattered gap in the stalks ahead where the corn gave way to the bare ground of the access cut. A vehicle sat in it with its headlights burning against the gathering dusk. She recognized the car. It had pulled away from the front of her station just that morning.
Nora’s car.
“...pulled me over for speeding earlier that day.” The words came clearer as Hadley eased through another row toward the thin path. “Reed spotted the clothes in the back of my car, Nora. He saw them. What was I supposed to do?”
“You killed him.” Nora’s voice was wrecked, and she couldn’t seem to stop saying it. “You killed him. You killed him, Whitney. How could you—”
“No. No, it wasn’t me. Just stop, all right? I didn’t, I just—damn it.”
Hadley dragged a slow breath into her lungs. Nothing she’d heard fit the picture she’d carried into this field.
Whitney Dohl?
Nora’s best friend from the hospital had killed Reed Langley?
It made no sense. What did a speeding traffic stop have to do with Reed being shot in the chest and shoved behind the wheel of his own truck to burn? Had she been wrong the whole time? Was there no thread at all between Reed and Roland Mercer?
It didn’t matter right now. What mattered was a woman coming apart forty feet away with another woman crying at her feet. Hadley would sort through her own part later.
She eased back the way she’d come, one careful row at a time, until she’d put enough corn between herself and the voices that a low word wouldn’t carry.
She brought the radio off her belt, her thumb already on the volume, rolling it down to almost nothing before she keyed it and brought her mouth close to the speaker.
“Dispatch, I need backup at Vinton’s east field, the north access road off County Road 9. Silent approach, no lights, no siren. I’ve got a possible hostage situation and at least one armed subject. Do not announce.”
She waited for the two clicks that indicated they’d heard her transmission, then she killed the volume so the radio wouldn’t betray her before clipping it back into place at her hip.
Hadley figured backup was ten minutes out, if she was lucky. Fifteen or twenty, more likely, this far from anywhere. She was on her own until then, and from the sound of things, Nora didn’t have fifteen minutes.
Hadley started forward again, her weapon raised, and this time she meant to close the distance all the way.
She needed eyes on Whitney’s hands first. A firearm changed everything about how this situation went, and Hadley wasn’t stepping out of the corn to make an arrest until she was confident in what she was walking into.
She slid into the next row for the angle, and the scene opened up in front of her.
Whitney stood in the wash of the headlights with a phone pressed to her ear and a firearm in her other hand. The barrel was pointed down at Nora, who was kneeling in the dirt with her arms wrapped around her own middle.
“Where are you?” Whitney was talking into the phone now. Her voice had climbed into something frayed and pleading. “I’m here. I didn’t know where else to take her. No. No, she hasn’t called yet. I was waiting on you.”
The corn had gone dim with the failing light, and the shadows were the only thing Hadley had going for her. The headlights had Whitney lit up bright and flat, night-blind to anything past the reach of the beams.
It wasn’t much.
But it was something.
“I’ll have her make the call now, but hurry. Please, hurry.”
Whitney lowered the phone. She kept the weapon trained on Nora.
Whitney wasn’t in this alone, and whoever was on the other end of that call was on the way.
Hadley’s read of the entire thing had rearranged itself in the space of a breath.
She’d worked it a hundred ways at her desk, and two of those ways had always held.
Reed wouldn’t have driven out to a back road for a stranger, which meant he’d followed someone he trusted, or someone he had no reason to fear.
And a dead man hadn’t loaded himself into the cab of his own truck.
It took strength to move a body like that.
Either one very strong person or two individuals.
Who was the second person?
Hadley couldn’t stand in the corn and wait to learn that answer while Nora’s life was at stake.
“Listen to me, Nora.” Whitney crouched, bringing herself down to Nora’s level, the gun still raised. “We can all come out of this rich. Every one of us. We don’t have to—”
“That’s what this is about?” Nora’s voice broke on something between a laugh and a sob. “Money. You murdered the man I love for money, Whitney. Do you hear how deranged you sound? You’re pointing a gun at me right now.”
“I told you this wasn’t supposed to happen.” Whitney’s head shook in denial. “It just, it all spun out of control, and I couldn’t, I didn’t—”
Hadley was too far away to announce herself. From here, she couldn’t cross the open ground before Whitney got a round off, and the woman’s hand was shaking so hard that Hadley caught the tremors from where she stood.
She needed to be behind Whitney, with the woman’s back to her and Nora clear of the line. Hadley started moving, west and low, staying inside the last rows where the headlights couldn’t reach.
“I need you to make the call, Nora.”
“I won’t.”
“Yes. You will.” Whitney’s voice scraped upward, panic riding the edge of it now. “You will, Nora, because we are close. We are so close. After everything this past year, you do not get to fold on me now.”
Behind Hadley, far off down the county road, still nothing.
No engine, no gravel, no help.
Just her own breath and the dry whisper of the corn giving way around her as she worked west along the field’s edge, the headlights throwing bright bars between the stalks. Nora had started crying again, and through it she was saying the same thing over and over, dragging it up out of herself.
“Tell me.” Nora’s voice climbed until it cracked. “Tell me how he died. His last minutes. You owe me that, you owe me, tell me—”
“We don’t have time for this.”
“Tell me!”
For a moment, neither woman spoke, and Hadley froze mid-step, certain the silence meant the worst. Then Whitney’s voice came again, gone more resigned than apologetic. Hadley kept moving while Whitney spoke, west and then curling north.
“Reed stopped me for speeding earlier that day.” Whitney cleared her throat, still holding tight to the notion that if she only explained herself, Nora would make some kind of phone call.
“He saw the clothes in the back seat. The trench coat, the one I’d sewn corn husks into, down the sleeves and the hem.
He didn’t say a word about it, just gave me a warning and let me go.
But I know he saw it. I decided to drive to the pub, because I knew he was friendly with the bartender.
I got hold of Sam’s phone, and I called Reed from it, two or three times, thinking I could lure him down there.
Then I would have acted surprised and made up some story about a Halloween costume. Only he didn’t come.”
Sam’s phone. The three calls that never connected, the ones Sam had sworn up and down he never made. Another piece dropped into the place.
“So, I left and started down toward the station on foot, just to talk to him, feel it out. And that’s when I saw him come down the steps to his truck.
I panicked, Nora. I didn’t think. I got in my car, and I made sure he saw me, and I took off speeding, because I knew he’d follow.
Sure enough, he pulled me over out by the festival grounds.
” Whitney’s voice thickened, and still she pressed on, rushing for the end of it, chasing the moment she seemed to believe would finally bend Nora to her will.
“I told him you were in trouble. That he had to come with me. And he did, because it was you. He’d have gone anywhere for you.
But you need to understand that we tried to make him a deal.
We explained everything to him. Offered him a huge cut, but he wouldn’t take it.
He’d gotten it into his head that we were the reason that girl went missing.
That’s when it all got away from us, and he—”
Whitney came to her feet all at once, pressing the heel of the firearm to her brow, the barrel jerking skyward with the motion. Then it swung back down toward Nora, who flinched from the erratic motion.
“I need you to know it wasn’t supposed to happen like that.” Whitney was crying now too, but it still didn’t stop her from working toward what she wanted. “I’m sorry. I truly am. I never wanted to hurt him. But what’s done is done, and all you have to do now is make the call—”
Hadley stepped onto the access road. She set her stance, brought her weapon level, and drew the breath needed to shout a warning.
Headlights swung across the field. They bounced hard up the access road toward the ground Hadley had just stepped onto, throwing the whole cut into a lurching glare and pinning her shadow long across the dirt for one exposed second.
She quickly dropped back into the corn a breath before the beams found her.
Not a cruiser.
Not the sheriff’s truck.
It was a Dodge Ram, its headlights pitching as the suspension worked over the ruts, and it crunched to a stop nose-to-tail behind Nora’s car.
The engine cut.
The driver’s door swung wide.
A dark figure moved up the length of the headlight beams and resolved into a man as he stepped into the flat white light.
Knox Hudson.
And he was smiling. He walked into the glare with his arms slightly open, taking in Whitney and the gun and the woman on her knees, and the expression on his face belonged to a man arriving somewhere he’d wanted to be all day.
“Tonight’s the night, baby.” Knox spread his hands wider, and his grin stretched with them. “Tonight’s the night all our dreams come true.”