Still Life With Crows

“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.”