mediately called in. “Yeah, Faye?”
“Aren’t you out there at the Harris Farm?”
“Yes.”
“There’s a Sid Lomax screaming in my ear for you
to come. He says he’s out there in the field. They just
found a head.”
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26
% A clearly shaken Sid Lomax waited in his truck for
them at a cut through some woods that separated
one of the large fields from the other.
As Dwight stopped even with him, the farm manager
pulled the bill of his cap lower on his forehead. His
leathery face was pale beneath its tan and his only com-
ment was a terse, “Follow me,” as his tires dug off in the
soft dirt to lead them up a lane at the edge of the field.
Dwight put his truck in four-wheel drive and glanced
in his mirror. Denning had caught up with him and
Richards and Jamison were with him. She must have re-
alized that a car might mire down out here after all the
rain. They topped a small rise, then down a gentle slope
to where two tractors with heavy turning plows blocked
their initial view of a fence post at the far corner of the
field.
The treated post was approximately five feet high
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MARGARET MARON
and about half as thick as a telephone pole. Several men
were clustered upwind from it. As Lomax and the depu-
ties got out of their vehicles, the men edged back and
they had a clear view. For a split second, looking at the
thing rammed down on the top of the post, Dwight was
reminded of a rotting jack-o’-lantern several days past
Halloween when the pumpkin head verged on collapse.
This head was worse—a thatch of graying hair, darkened
skin, empty eye sockets, and a ghastly array of grinning
teeth because most of the lips were gone as well.
Crows? Buzzards?
Blowflies buzzed and hummed in the warm afternoon
sun and a few early yellow jackets were there as well. A
thick rope of red ants snaked up one side of the post.
“Oh dear God in the morning!” Denning murmured
as he moved in with his camera. With his eye on the
