someone call us and report that he had seen Dyce and was following him…?”
This time Hatcher made Becker wait.
“… Well, after that. Chief Terhune disappeared.”
The silence had a very different quality to it this time. It was broken only when Becker hung up.
The music came first, before the sound of the tractor, the thrumming of the bass notes cutting through the air as if they were connected directly to the auditor’s viscera. Dyce felt them before he actually heard them, and long before the rest of the music was audible. As it approached, the noise of the tractor obscured the sense of the music, but the steady pulse of the drums and bass came through everything.
Jungle music, Dyce thought again. At grandfather’s house. It must be Birger Nordholm, although the music didn’t sound like anything he would listen to.
With the noise of the tractor to cover the sound of his movements, Dyce crept to the edge and peered out as the tractor entered the yard. He glanced back once to make sure the cop was all right and saw him lying perfectly still on his back. Only the wheels of the tractor could be seen, huge and black and cleated, moving parallel to the house and across the yard-or the space that had once been yard but was now so overgrown with weeds and gouged and flattened by continual passings of the tractor that it was hard to give it a name. Travelling in a blare of racket, the tractor moved out of sight, heading toward the south field, which had once been scrubland where Dyce and grandfather had taken walks through stands of supple sumac, the weed of trees. Grandfather had cut and split the trunks and shaped them into arrows for the bow Dyce had fashioned from a fallen branch of the apple tree by the house. They had spent a summer shooting wayward shafts at a target painted on the barn, but never at a living thing. Grandfather did not approve of hunting, and Dyce was too kind of heart to want to hurt anything. When he cupped in his hands the bewildered moths that made their way into the house and released them out of doors, grandfather called Dyce a “softie,” but always with approval.
Now the scrubland had been cleared and torn by Nordholm’s plow. Dyce had noticed the bushy, stunted tops of soybeans planted there when he drove to the neighbor’s cornfield where he hid his own car. For several hours he could faintly discern the sound of the tractor in the far distance, and when the wind turned and blew toward him, he could occasionally hear something of the music, a phrase or two of melody, or a few lines of the lyrics, not distinguishable as individual words but clearly a human voice. Twice he had started at the sound, thinking it was a real voice he heard, but there was no one there, not even a vehicle all morning on the long approach road that came through the fields to grandfather’s house, then past it to outlying farms. From his vantage point Dyce could see not only the approach road but much of the valley and a long stretch of the county road that led to town. Anyone coming would come from there and he would be able to see them miles away.
At noon the tractor returned and stopped in front of the porch. Dyce could see him clearly as the driver descended and removed his cap, wiping his forehead with his sleeve. It was not Nordholm, but Nordholm’s son, grown now to his mid-twenties and every inch the offshoot of his father. Dyce struggled with the sounds that wanted to come out of his throat, beckoned by the perfect look of the boy. He could have been Dyce’s father himself, the way he kicked his boots against the stone steps, the way he hitched his pants before sitting with his back against the pillar, the way he stretched his legs and sighed as if they had been carrying a dreadful weight. The boy was thin like Dysen, and the sharp bones pressed against his skin so hard it looked as if it would be painful just to wear his face. The Adam’s apple was prominent in his throat when he swallowed and even the hair was right, blond and short and straight as a freshly ironed crease. With the cap off, his ears stuck out from his head.
Dyce felt as if his father had somehow risen-from the dead after all, summoned not by Dyce and grandfather’s vigil of prayer, but by Dyce’s inexplicable tears at the graveside the day before.
The cop lay still behind him, not moving, barely breathing, no longer a worrisome consideration. Dyce wanted young Nordholm, desired him so much, he could feel himself trembling. He had known it would build to this point again, the awful, irresistible yearning that had to be placated before it drove him crazy. He needed it and it had been presented to him in the form of perfection. In the dark, drained of color, still as death itself, the man would not just look like his father, this man would be Dysen as none of the others had ever quite been.
He would take this one, he would give himself this one, perfect man, and he would make it last longer than ever, days and days and days. And the cop could be a sort of side attraction. An appetizer or a dessert.
Dyce wiggled backward, still watching the farmer, until he reached the syringe. It was full and ready and all he needed was a way of getting down and appearing to the young man without scaring him off. Close enough to touch him, that’s all he needed to be. Then he would handle him so gently.
Back at the edge, Dyce glanced up and saw three cars on the county road coming so fast that the first one was almost to the approach road before Dyce had noticed them. The farmer had pulled a bottle of bourbon from somewhere and was sipping from it while holding a sandwich in his other hand. He was oblivious to the cars, oblivious to Dyce stalking him.
All three cars were on the approach road now, sending up plumes of dust. The lead car was state patrol and its lights were flashing, but Dyce heard no siren. The lights went off abruptly as the patrol car approached the farm. In the distance another patrol car appeared on the county road, this time following a civilian auto. Lights were flashing on that patrol car, too, but it was not chasing the other car; it was following it.
The three lead autos tore into the drive and jerked to a halt as the Nordholm boy frantically sought to hide his liquor bottle.
As the men who poured from the cars spun and braced him against the porch pillar, the bottle fell and clattered against the steps, but did not break.
“Nordholm,” the boy sputtered in answer to the first in a volley of questions. “Daniel Nordholm. This is my farm, my dad’s farm. I didn’t do anything.”
The second team of cars ripped into the drive. Dyce, now far out of sight, heard doors slam like volleys of gunfire. The other men were shouting questions and commands at the farmer, fear and urgency in their voices. Dyce did not know how the boy decided which questions to answer as he pleaded his innocence of everything and anything, his voice even more fearful than the other men’s.
Finally one voice took over, asserting itself over the police and FBI.
“The property is registered in the name of Roger Dysen,” said the voice.
“Well-sure, but it’s ours.”
“How is it yours?”
“He made a deal with my dad when his grandfather died.”
“Who made the deal?”
“Mr. Dysen, Roger Dysen. His grandfather died and the house burned down and he was going to college to study math or something. That’s what my dad says. I don’t know, I was too young, but there’s no way to make a living in math around here, so he knew he wasn’t going to be staying, he sure wasn’t a farmer…”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Have you seen him?”
There was a note of annoyance in the voice. “No.”
“He’s soft, he’s very soft, he couldn’t farm a garden. My dad offered to buy the land, but he didn’t want to sell; he didn’t want to work the place but he didn’t want to give it up, either. Like he expected to come back and fix up the house someday, you know? So he worked out a deal with my dad; he gives us permission to farm the land and all we have to do is pay the taxes on the place.”
“When did you last see him?”
“Mr. Dysen?”
“He calls himself Dyce now. Or Cohen.”
“I haven’t seen him in years.”
“Have you seen anyone around here in the last three days? Anyone at all?” The original voice was back in charge again.
“No. Nobody.”
“Have you noticed any sign that anyone has been here? Anything out of the ordinary at all?”
“No.”
“How often do you come here?”
“Here? To the house? Every day.” Someone snapped off the radio as if it had just been noticed.
“Why?”
