Downstate

Chapter 7

Constant Marlowe stretched and felt a bone pop somewhere.

She was back in the waiting area of Detention in the Sheriff’s Office. There was a coffee vending machine. She didn’t think they still made those. And wasn’t about to give it a try and confirm why she hadn’t seen one for several years. There’d be a gas station on the way to Chicago.

Her hand still throbbed some too. She had never done any bare-knuckle fighting in the ring, only matches with gloves (though, she knew from studying the sport, that boxing gloves, ironically, developed from a very different kind of accessory: the Roman cestus, a glove of hard leather strips encrusted with spikes or other sharp edges, worn by gladiators to inflict lethal blows).

The rest of her body was a bit sore but not bad.

Eddie would be hurting a lot more.

Good. She nearly smiled.

The time was 7:30 a.m., early, yes, but police stations, like medical facilities, never sleep.

She wondered how the boyfriends were doing this morning. Had they made up? Well, she’d said her piece and had taken care to encourage Slim to look out for himself while not victim shaming. It was now on him to step up and take charge of his life. Nothing more she could do.

Marlowe was hunched over the phone, examining a map and considering the best way to leave town and head northeast, back to Chicago, when the clerk returned to her desk.

It was not Green Nails. This woman had short pink tips and was wearing a white blouse and dark slacks. Her face was masked with a great deal of makeup, which produced a ring on the collar. The cosmetics were unnecessary, Marlowe thought. Her eyes were bright, and her face farmer girl pretty.

“He’s ready.” A southern drawl. Then: “I was to Chicago once. Went to a play. Oh, it was exciting! Annie Get Your Gun. And that park. On the lake? We had a picnic there, Jim and me.”

“It’s pretty. The park. Especially around Christmas. Lots of decorations.” Marlowe had heard this to be the case.

“Oh, we’ll have to go then. Okay, here’s your prisoner now.”’

Marlowe saw a guard leading the figure, his head down, toward her from the detention cell corridor.

The woman pushed the sheet toward Marlowe and indicated where she should sign to transfer possession from Plains County to her.

A frown crossed the clerk’s face.

Marlowe glanced at her.

“Hotels were pretty pricey. Chicago, I mean. Higher during the holidays, I bet.”

“The trick is to stay out in the suburbs and take a commuter train in.” Marlowe had heard this too.

The face brightened even more. “Well, now, that’s a smart idea. I’ll remember it.”

Sheriff William Dodd was at his desk at 7:45 a.m. per usual.

It was an expression he used frequently. He’d once said, “As per usual,” which most everybody did, but his granddaughter had corrected him. “‘Per’ is Latin for ‘as,’ so you’re really saying ‘As as usual.’ All you need to say is ‘per usual.’”

Seventeen.

Correcting the breadwinner of the household where she and her mother lived.

Prissy but not snotty.

Which the girl definitely had the right to be, given her father, Dodd’s son. Who was living who knew where, and with who knew who.

Different issue.

Shit.

Dodd sipped from the cardboard cup of coffee tempered by four sugars. He was hunched over his desk, which was a chessboard, light-colored file folders sitting in alternating stacks on the dark-gray metal top. Dark and light. He thought this often and wondered if he should learn to play chess, but then he frequently thought about things he should do. Maturing meant you could say, “What the fuck’re you thinking of?”

His to-do lists were mental but he had no trouble creating, organizing and editing them. Today, for instance, there was a budget meeting, wrangling with dick-and-a-half Plains County supervisor Erik Zwill, hiring a crime scene tech and supervising the interrogation of Grantin Abbott, a suspected meth dealer. That would be a fun one.

Then there was the issue of Felipe Vargas. Dodd was resolved to “get him taken care of,” and so he would.

Sooner rather than later.

He wondered if his boat repairs would be done today. He wanted to get some of the boys out on Lake Boyle this weekend. He knew the law. He knew it was a crime to drive a boat when you’d been drinking too much but it wasn’t a crime to sit in a boat and pretend to fish while you were drunk.

As as usual...

He and the wife would have to get Katie to church.

Let the girl try and correct Minister Dave’s language. See how that went.

Dodd picked up his phone, hit a well-worn button.

“Detention,” came the woman’s melodic voice.

“Maggie. That boy from last night.”

“The...”

“From Raleigh’s grocery. The boy.” The sheriff was irritated. How many boys from last night were there?

“Yessir.”

“What’s the status?”

“Status?”

He sighed. Usually Maggie was sharper than this.

“Is he on his way to Stanton yet?”

She said nothing.

“You there, Maggie? I want to hear a hard-breathing telephone call, it won’t be from you.”

Was that comment part of the land mine stuff of men versus women in the workplace together nowadays, saying things that might be taken wrong, and her getting all pippity about it and reporting upstairs?

“I mean...”

“What do you mean, Maggie? Spit it out.”

“He’s on his way, Sheriff. Only, he’s not going to Stanton.”

“What?”

“He’s going to Cook County. That agent from Chicago? She checked him out twenty minutes ago.”

Chapter 8

Her initial thought was: he’s sad.

Then had to modify it: resigned.

Felipe Vargas sat in the passenger seat of her Honda as it sped north, on surface roads, not the interstate. Some of the route was on four lane, most two. Whatever her speed — averaging around forty-five — the wind howled loudly through the window that no longer was.

She noted three tiny glass cubes sitting in the cup holder. And recalled once again Trenton Carr’s performance as Homeless Man One.

Academy Award...

Felipe’s hands were now cuffed in front of him and the cuffs themselves zip-tied to the door handle.

Her earbud was in, and she was awaiting a call from her boss, demanding an explanation as to why she had ginned up fake transport documents to authorize Felipe’s, and not Marcel Descartes’s, release from Plains County.

She said, “You want to work a deal, tell me how you were going to fake the numbers on the cards?”

“The—”

“The gift cards. You’re working with somebody in a crew. Local? Or Chicago, Indianapolis?”

Eyes off the road for a moment, taking in her passenger. A blank expression.

“Or sell them on the dark web? Make a few dollars each. Hardly worth it, you ask my opinion.”

“I don’t know,” he muttered and resumed his examination of whatever he was examining out the window.

Not really responsive to any of her inquiries.

“All right, where’d you get the knife? Tell me that at least.”

“What?”

“The knife?”

She scanned his face once more. “The one you had when you boosted the cards.”

Another look, fast, but careful. Taking in his frown.

“I didn’t have no knife.” His accent was light.

They drove for another ten minutes. The weather had been hot and dusty yesterday, with a feeble but present sun. Now, the sky was gray and it had rained in the night. The temperature had dropped fifteen degrees. The corn rows seemed more indifferent, if not hostile, today.

Felipe turned and looked behind them, at the empty road. He seemed surprised. “Where are the others?”

Now the confusion was hers. “Others?”

He muttered disgustedly, “You know.”

“I really don’t.”

“So. Just yourself. Balls, you got balls.” He sniffed and tried to wipe tears from his cheeks on his shoulder. He was only partly successful.

She was trying to puzzle out his comments when he added, “Where you going to do it?”

“You’re going to have to explain, Felipe.”

A deep breath. “You know, it’s, like, better this way. A girl doing it. Makes me feel, I don’t know. Closer to her.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know.”

Tired of the dance, she snapped, “Now. Out with it.”

But he was in no hurry to answer. “They’d find me pretty soon if you did it in one of these fields. The harvest and everything. You’re looking for a forest. Sure. I could be there for months. Maybe a year. And the trees, they muffle the sound. Better for you. Getting away.”

The understanding was like a blow. “You think I broke you out to kill you?”

He scoffed. “Why bullshit me? I know they were going to have some cons in Stanton do it in the yard. Or the shower or wherever. But they got worried, didn’t want to wait.” A sad laugh. Then a long sigh. “Hey, I curious. How much I worth? How much they pay you?”

Her thoughts tumbled.

“Felipe, I forged the release document to keep you from going to Stanton, not to hurt you. I’m an Illinois police officer. You can be tried anywhere in the state, so I’m taking you to Cook County. Chicago. There’s a juvenile detention center there.”

He frowned — as he tried to make sense of what she was saying.

Trying to parse possible scenarios, she said, “You mentioned the ‘others.’ Who did you mean?”

“A couple of assholes, work for him. Big guy and a skinny guy.”

No! Couldn’t be.

“Last night. Wearing a gray T-shirt, the big one. And his buddy, dark shorts.”

“Yeah.”

Eddie and Slim. So their “lovers’ spat” was probably staged — to take her out. Put her in the hospital to make sure she didn’t interfere with whatever they were up to.

“And working for ‘him’? Who?”

“Raleigh. The guy owns the grocery store.”

“Stealing the cards was about something else, wasn’t it?”

An exaggerated frown, almost as if he’d assumed she’d figured the whole thing out. “Well, yeah.”

“Why?”

“Why do you think? So he’d chase me into the street. And I could beat him to death.”

Chapter 9

Law enforcement is a complicated business. There are many words to describe it: Dangerous. Boring. Political. There are others that can be run up the Hallmark Cards flag. Rewarding, for instance.

But if there’s any term that applies to all branches of law, and applies twenty-four hours a day, it’s this: Improvisation.

Constant Marlowe could not count the times she’d started out on one case and ended up following that trail to another offense altogether, with different perps and victims and modus operandi, maybe related, maybe not.

It could happen anywhere.

Even here, in the bland and corn-filled burg of Plains, Illinois.

She now encouraged Felipe Vargas to continue, and his next sentence explained a lot, including why she was about to pivot and head down the road of a new investigation.

“Raleigh. He killed my sister, Sofia.”

He grew silent and stared out the window. She would let him talk at his own pace. Finally he whispered, “Tica, tica,” and then told her the story.

Felipe and Sofia Vargas had come into the country in a hurry, escaping for their lives from their home in Costa Rica, and arrived here undocumented. The trafficker had no trouble placing them; they’d studied in the American School in Limón, where their father had been a groundskeeper, and their English was good. Felipe went to a farm sixty miles away — he had agricultural experience back home — and Sofia was sent to Plains to work in a grocery store, where she got room and board for free, living in the basement, until she, like Felipe, earned enough to pay back the human smuggler and move on.

Only R&R was not just a grocery store. It was a front for sex trafficking. The women and girls who “worked” there were videoed and the clips posted on the dark web. Buyers would make offers. Raleigh would get paid through wire transfers and arrange transportation to ship the victim to the customer.

“Mail order delivery,” Felipe spat out. “Sofia went to somebody in western Illinois, and when she found out what was going on, she fought back. That was mi tica! And she said she was going to tell the other girls to fight too. But the thing about Raleigh, he’s all, oh no, oh no, wringing his hands. Like a little girl. But he is a fucking snake. He had to stop any talk of fighting back so he ordered her killed. He did it to send a message. And after word got around none of the other girls caused problems. Raleigh won’t let the girls have phones, but one of them, Sofia’s friend, she called me on the landline. She gave me the news.” His voice caught and he cried briefly.

Marlowe said, “And the girls were all undocumented so they were afraid to go to the police.”

He nodded.

She had another thought. “Raleigh figured out who you were after the shoplifting. So he needed to take you out. Somebody planted the knife — to justify you going to Stanton... And get you killed there.”

Felipe scoffed. “He has matones everywhere. Those two here. In prison. On the border too. El Paso.”

A woman who appreciated plotting, Marlowe added, “You gave him the finger too. To make sure he followed you after you perped the cards.”

His eyes gleamed coldly. “I had a pipe hid in the alley. I was going to beat him to death. That’s how Sofia died. The police would come and I’d admit stealing the cards but say he had tried to kill me. There was a rock I put there too. I was going to hit my head with it. It would look like self-defense.”

She remembered her impression last night — that his expression revealed disappointment at his arrest, rather than fear.

“I wondered why you paid for the food and stole something that had no value.”

He wouldn’t know about forged gift card scams.

“I’m not stupid. I didn’t want to go to jail. Like, yeah, it was theft but I didn’t think a prosecutor would go after anyone for that.”

“So that’s why you thought I was working with him. Because I was in the store and I chased you. And then I showed up this morning.”

He nodded.

She said, “Those two men working for him? Eddie’s one. You know his full name? And the other one?”

“No.”

“Were they the ones who killed her?”

“I don’t know. Or maybe he did it himself. Sofia’s friend, the one who called me, said that Raleigh? He’s very cheap, you know, won’t spend a penny he doesn’t have to. Maybe he didn’t want to pay to have her killed.” He looked around and studied the fields for a moment. “All right. You saved me. Thank you.”

She nodded in reply, but absently. She was considering next steps.

Her argument was interrupted by a phone call. Her boss. She changed her mind about answering.

A few minutes later she listened to the message.

Supervisory Agent Stanley Robbins’s stern baritone voice: “Constant, really? Call me. Immediately. There’s a BOLO on you for breaking a prisoner out of detention. And for your information, the kid is a suspect in a murder investigation. They’re saying he killed another undocumented during a robbery attempt last month. He’s been designated APK. And where the hell is Marcel Descartes? I want answers.”

BOLO...

So somebody had put out a “be on the lookout for” order, the modern-day version of an “all points bulletin.” Every law enforcer in Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin would have both her and Felipe’s description, as well as the make, model and tag of the Honda.

And APK was “armed and prepared to kill.” It wasn’t an official law enforcement term but everybody used it. There was no such thing as a shoot-on-sight order in American policing, but these three letters were as close as it got. This meant that if they were stopped, the situation could escalate fast. A hand disappearing behind the back, reaching into a pocket... The odds of a shootout were astronomically higher when a suspect was labeled APK.

“I’m going to assume you’re not a person of interest in a homicide.”

“What does that mean?”

“Did you kill somebody last month?”

“What? No! That’s a lie. I would never—”

“Okay, okay, calm down. I know you didn’t.”

She pulled to the shoulder.

“You letting me go?”

“No. You’re still under arrest.”

“Please. I’ll come back. I promise.”

“Let you go so you can kill Raleigh.”

“No.”

She eyed him. “Really?”

His eyes gleamed again and she nearly laughed at his reply: “Not just kill him. Those other ones too.”

Eyes scanning up the road — and in the rearview mirror: “Here’s the deal, Felipe. I can get you up to Cook County, into juvie detention. You’ll be safe there. Or...”

He was looking at her closely.

“...you can stay here for a day or two. And help me.”

“Help you what?”

“Make a case against the three of them. The sheriff isn’t going to help. And the state police’ll arrest us both first. I need to find evidence or a witness who’ll testify against him. Only the deal is, you don’t leave my sight. Not for a minute. What do you say?”

He debated. “Okay, compañera.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means ‘partner.’”

Good idea, bad idea?

She undid his cuffs and pocketed them. Then slowly repeated, “Compañera.”

And steered the car in a sloppy U-turn and headed back to Plains County.

Chapter 10

I look great. Just great.

Eddie Young glanced at his face in the rearview mirror of the white Ford pickup.

That woman had really done a number on him. He’d looked up her name online. Constant Marlowe. And found she’d been a professional boxer before joining the Department of Criminal Investigations.

She held titles. Big ones. Not corner gym crap. And a record or two for first-round knockouts in her weight division.

Shit.

Young thought that might’ve been a crime last night — using her fists as deadly weapons. But he was hardly going to press charges.

Beside him, scrawny Begg was playing a game on his phone.

If his jaw and cheek and belly and shoulder hadn’t been so sore he might have laughed at the show they’d put on last night. Being gay lovers, having a fight! Young had an overactive drive, sure, but he took care of that with hookers at the truck stop in Barney — or sometimes with the wife — and the idea of sex with Begg was something from outer space.

“You could’ve jumped in.”

“Sorry, my friend,” Begg muttered. “That trick with the gun in the bag? And her moves? She knew what she was doing. She would’ve killed me.”

True. Begg was a fine shot but he couldn’t handle himself with knuckles.

Well, the acting had fooled her; she hadn’t realized she was the target.

But the plan didn’t end up so well.

And now it was time to fix that. Fix everything.

The vehicle was parked outside R&R Grocery. It was just opening up. Young had never thought about what the second “R” stood for. Raleigh would be one, but the other? He asked Begg.

“What? Oh, don’t know.” Back to the video game.

How could he waste time like that?

Maybe R and R, like in the army. Rest and recreation.

The door to the shop opened, and Raleigh stepped out, cradling two large houseplants. He was wearing jeans and a white shirt and a white apron like an old-time butcher. He set the pots down on a table with a half dozen others. Big bushy things with no flowers or buds. The stand bore the sign Ten Percent Off.

Young had been working with Raleigh for six months or so and he’d never seen a soul buy a plant here. You got beer and sandwiches and Spam and laundry detergent and wine at R&R. It was a grocery store. You didn’t buy plants. There was Home Depot for that.

Or wherever the wife bought the plants.

Raleigh rubbed his hands together, dislodging dirt. He walked up to the truck.

They met here on the street because inside the store, above the counter was a very expensive video camera, which Raleigh pretended didn’t work but that was a lie. It functioned just fine. He’d said it was busted because he didn’t want the police asking for a copy of the clip showing the shoplifting. And he definitely didn’t want any video evidence of this meeting.

Young and Begg reached for their door handles. But Raleigh said, “No, this won’t be long.” The man wore his hair swept back, which made it appear thinner than it already did. Comb-overs weren’t so bad — Young was headed in that direction himself — so why didn’t the man try it?

“They’re driving to Chicago. But not on interstates. She’s keeping a low profile and taking her time.”

“You’re sure?”

Raleigh gave a taut frown and Young shut up.

“You didn’t do what you said you would, last night.” Raleigh scanned the street and turned back.

“Nobody told me she was a pro boxer. And she caught me off guard.”

“Nobody told you.” A scoff.

Meaning: maybe it had been Young’s job to do some research.

He wasn’t wrong about that.

“Don’t let that happen again.”

Young was hesitating. “You want... I mean, you want us to take her out too, the woman?”

“I’ll leave that up to you. One thing that might be helpful. Reason she was in town was to collar some bagman for Tyson Barth. You know him? The Chicago mob.”

“Yeah,” Begg said. “He’s a shit and a half. So, if we set it up right, it’ll look like Barth ordered the hit.”

Convenient, Young thought.

Raleigh said, “You have your weapons?”

Begg nodded.

“Get on the road.”

“Well...” He lifted his hands, meaning, it’s a big state; could we narrow it down some?

“Just drive north for now. You’ll get all the information you need.”

Chapter 11

They had stopped at a convenience store.

Felipe had a breakfast burrito. Marlowe wasn’t hungry. She thought about buying that milk, but cookies were an evening thing and the carton would just go bad during the day.

Sitting in the front seat of the Honda, she said, “What do you think about that girl you talked to, Sofia’s friend? Would she agree to testify?”

The boy grimaced. “She’s gone. Somebody bought her. And I don’t know her last name. Her first, it was Maria.”

Among the most common names in the Latino culture.

The women in R&R Grocery Marlowe had seen — the stocker and the cleaning woman and the others living in the basement — might be willing to talk, if Marlowe could keep them safe from both the traffickers and Customs and Border Patrol.

“You said he delivered the women.”

A bitter scoff. “Like they were packages.”

Mail order... “Was it Eddie and his partner?”

“No. He kept them in Plains, for protection. To move the girls, he used a transport company. In Beverly Corner. It does real work, legitimate, I mean, but also women. Drugs and guns too.”

“What’s the name?”

“Fleet something.”

She searched on her phone. The only one in or around Beverly Corner was FleetFoot Transport.

It would take twenty-three minutes to get there.

She accelerated onto the country road, half expecting to see blue and white police cruiser lights coming from all directions.

Felipe’s head was down. Despondency had bloomed again.

His next words, a moment later, were not about the perils of their mission. Or his mourning for Sofia. Turning her way, he asked, “You have brothers or sisters, Agent Marlowe?”

“No.”

“What about someone special? Husband? Boyfriend?”

A thought of Evan Quill materialized. Briefly.

“Not really.”

“That’s too bad.” His voice choked. “Sofia was all I had. I hear you get over losing somebody. You get back to, you know, doing life. But, no. I think you never the same.”

This was not a sixteen-year-old boy speaking. It was someone far, far older.

“You know, I still come home to my apartment, after working in the fields. And I think, just for a second, I think they’ll be there. My father watching fútbol, my mother cooking. Sofia playing in her room.” His gaze turned to the corn rows. “You should find somebody, Agent Marlowe. And if you do, make sure nothing ever takes them away.”

Chapter 12

Sheriff William Dodd didn’t exactly say, “Get the fuck out of my way.” But when he steamed toward the door, that was the effect.

A deputy and two assistants scattered.

As as my request...

She goddamn stole the kid right out from under him.

Dodd had set everything up. The boy’d go to Stanton. And that would be that. All done. Finished. He could swat his hands together like dusting them off before taking a swing with a bat.

Now, what the hell was going on?

Special Goddamn Agent Constant Marlowe...

He trod down the hall and pushed into Detention. Wide-eyed little Cindi Keller looked up.

Her eyes said uh-oh, as well they should, though of course, who could blame her? Never in the history of the Plains Sheriff’s Office had anybody forged a prisoner out.

“Open it.”

She pushed a button and the door buzzed loudly.

“Keys.”

She handed him the set.

He pushed inside and then strode to the single cell at the end. The one where Marcel Descartes sat or paced or stood, or was hanging by a bedsheet, for all Dodd knew or cared.

He unlocked the heavy metal door and stepped inside.

Descartes was sitting. He stared at the sheriff with curiosity.

Which made Dodd feel like he wanted to hit him. “Where is she?”

“Who would that be?”

“Don’t be cute. Did she have a pleasant little hobnob with you before she broke that boy out of here?”

“Of course not.”

“You know something.”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

Anger rushed through Dodd. Happened a lot. He had learned to control it — in a way his son had not.

Descartes must have seen it in his eyes, but he would be thinking that he was pretty much safe. The sheriff couldn’t lay a hand on him. Right?

Probably not.

“She had to’ve told you why she was taking him and not you.”

“Well, she didn’t. I don’t know anything about this.”

Dodd looked him over like a worm about to go onto a hook. “So here you are, Mr. Descartes.”

A blink.

“Sitting in my lockup. And, funny thing, now that your babysitter’s gone traipsing down the Yellow Brick Road... I guess she left you here for me to do what I want.”

“You’re looking at me that way, Sheriff... I don’t know anything.”

“Funny, because you’re the information maven, I hear. No, she would’ve told you what she has planned. Drop the boy off somewhere, come back and fetch you. Of course, what if you weren’t here?”

A frown.

“You ask me, you stole a fucking notebook that happened to have some money inside you didn’t know about. I could let you go. Couple of my buddies could give you a ride to the train station.” He gave the man a half smile that was something out of a horror film. Dodd had worked on the expression for years.

“You’re threatening me!” Descartes was looking up at the security cam and making the connection: The sheriff couldn’t hurt him here, not on camera. But outside? A couple of his goons could do plenty of damage. “I don’t know where she is!”

“Well, think on that, sir. Think real hard. And just sit tight. Oh, that’s right, you have to sit tight, don’t you?”

He turned and pushed out, locked up and, leaving the cell area, dropped the keys loudly on Cindi’s desk.

A moment later he was in Carr’s office. The man was a detective and not a greenhorn and had been shot at on at least on two occasions. But even now, seeing Dodd’s look — a glare, not a smile — gave him a moment’s pause, it was clear.

“Sheriff.”

“What’ve you got?”

“I’ve been on the phone since you told me, trying to find her. Plains PD, nothing. Adler Park, nothing. ISP, nothing.”

Dodd muttered, “‘Constant.’ The hell kind of name is that? What’s she up to?” He massaged his neck. “What do you know about her?”

Lot of questions and his associate sheriff picked and chose. “I checked her creds when she was on her way here about the Descartes takedown. Called Chicago and Springfield just to be sure. All good.”

“Not making sense. We got the Vargas kid on aggravated robbery — the knife. He fought with that customer, we add battery. He resisted arrest, he tried to escape. We got obstruction. He’s a POI in that immigrant homicide a couple weeks ago. And she’s like, ‘Oh, think I’ll break him out.’” He added absently, “She knows something.”

“What?”

Dodd gave no response. He looked his lieutenant over. Carr, sitting in his perfect posture, looked down at his desk. Dodd had been amused that Marlowe had had the straight-arrow associate sheriff play the role of homeless man. He wished there’d been some pictures. But there was nothing funny about what was happening at the moment.

Carr said, “Cook County’s a long way off if you’re avoiding the interstates. Maybe she’s going to the IDCI office in Springfield, book him there.”

“No, she’s not into booking. What else was there about her? About her, strange, I mean?”

Carr said, “Strange?”

The sheriff snapped, “Odd, unusual, unique, different, suspicious.”

The man thought back to what he’d read about Marlowe. “Well, she was a complaining witness in a corruption trial. Against a boss of hers.”

Her boss? Shit.

“Yessir. He was pocketing confiscated drug money. And getting, you know, inappropriate with some of the women officers. Nobody had a problem with the bust, but a few people thought she didn’t need to break his jaw. He sued her from jail. It didn’t go anywhere.

“And then she did the same thing with a suspect in the streets of Gary. An OG from the South Lake Crips. She put her weapon away and took him with her fists. You imagine? She said it was because she wanted to turn him. But probably it was she didn’t like it he was selling meth to high schoolers. Oh, and I saw a picture of her in a sleeveless thing, a T-shirt, in the boxing ring. She’s got a tat on her arm. Big bird, hawk or eagle or something.”

Carr seemed impressed with all of this. Maybe he was kindly disposed, because she had picked him to help nail Descartes.

To Dodd she just sounded loose-cannon.

“You take the office. I’m going out.”

Carr asked, “You have any leads?”

“Not yet. I will.”

He walked to the communications center and spoke with the officer in charge, a nerdy woman who looked like a librarian. While Plains didn’t have the money for sophisticated systems, it was part of an intercounty network that shared video camera images both real time and recorded. Dodd spent hours prowling the network to pluck images that might be helpful.

He now told the officer he wanted ramped-up efforts to find Marlowe, her car and the boy. The young sergeant said she would do everything she could but then added delicately in response to Dodd’s blunt question about facial recognition that Plains was behind the curve on the technology.

This didn’t go down well, and Dodd told her to “get in front of the fucking curve stat.”

He stormed back to his office and foraged in his desk.

Annie, his assistant of twelve months — longer than most lasted — looked at him with a frown of curiosity.

His glare said, in effect, mind your own business and her eyes swept back to the monitor, her fingers to the keyboard.

Dodd supposed, though, he could understand her curiosity. As sheriff he never ran investigations in person anymore. So the woman understandably would be wondering why he’d collected what was in his hand at the moment.

His Glock 17 pistol.

And more curious yet, Dodd took with him two full magazines of extra ammunition, which very few deputies carried, the general thinking being that thirty-four extra rounds was probably overkill.

Chapter 13

Constant Marlowe’s employer, the IDCI, was based in both Springfield and Chicago but she was rarely in the offices there.

A field agent, she spent much of her time investigating cases Downstate, a designation that meant any place that was not Chicago, whether it was down, up or in the middle.

While she’d never run a case in Plains, she had been to this area occasionally. She worked a domestic terror case and closed down a drug operation. Also, she’d brought down a multiple killer — not a serial killer, which is a very specific psychological and criminological classification. The man she had pursued had not taken lives for sexual gratification and preyed on a specific population. He’d simply liked killing people and had shot five for no reason whatsoever — aside from the joy he got from the act.

Running those cases, and others, had taught her about the one constant in this part of the state.

Corn.

The tens of thousands of acres were a massive beige and green and yellow ocean.

And ultimately disturbing.

Soybeans were pleasant ground cover. Wheat offered a friendly wave.

But corn? No.

For one thing, this was practical. The towering plants obscured threats. An enemy could be anywhere. Was he a mile away or coming up behind you, silently, between the neighboring rows.

And you could not get a sure view of prey you pursued either. You might move in, to raid a place you were positive he was taking refuge in, only to find the nest empty. With no indication of where he might have gone — maybe moving in for the kill.

And the other troubling factor, the unprofessional one?

The stalks were creepy, like alien creatures standing at attention, waiting to attack. Some seemed to have human faces, and the wind hissing through the stalks could sound like whispering voices. For Constant Marlowe the supernatural didn’t exist, but places like the cornfields around Plains County did everything they might to change her mind.

As she and Felipe Vargas sped toward Beverly Corner, she approached every crossroad with uneasiness; the corn hid any view of approaching traffic until they were right at the intersection. She expected to see a phalanx of cop cars or an SUV or pickup piloted by Eddie and Slim, or other matones that Raleigh had enlisted.

But so far, no.

The vehicles they spotted were just innocuous passenger cars, a few container semis avoiding weigh stations and produce trucks headed toward market, bearing crops that were harvested earlier than corn.

“Look.”

She nodded, noting the Welcome To sign Felipe had pointed out.

If Plains was small, it was a Chicago or Detroit compared to Beverly Corner, which curiously proclaimed itself to be a “city,” though the population, 4,855, seemed to qualify it as a “town” or “village” at best.

They passed outposts of residences. Some were set on farms, some just homes on modest-size lots.

She asked the boy, “Where did you live in Costa Rica?”

“Liverpool.”

Marlowe’s reaction drew a faint smile.

“No, our Liverpool. Suburb of Limón. On the east coast. Nice. Green everywhere.” He sighed. “I miss it. So much I miss it. I would go to the fútbol games with my father and my friends. My sister would come sometimes too. She could draw! Sofia would draw some of the players. For a small country we have many good players. Pemberton, Plummer, Yeltsin Tejeda — amazing. Johan Venegas, he a midfielder for Saprissa. I met Roy Smith! In person! Defender for Limón. Then my father and I would always see the Drummond brothers. Gerald and Jervis. Twins. Playing for the same team.”

His voice faded. Then he added, “Limón is a port town. A repackaging station for drugs. That’s what happened to my parents. My father, he was foolish. The Los Moreco — our Mafia — rented a house behind ours. They just left drugs out in the open in the garage when they were packing. My father saw some kids looking at the cocaine, like, cool. Tony Montana from Scarface. My father shooed them off and complained to the police.”

In a soft voice now: “He and my mother, they got found two weeks later. They weren’t shot. They were suffocated.” Rage now, clenched fist. “Plastic bags. They do that. Save money on bullets.”

“I’m sorry, Felipe.”

“A policeman told us, me and my sister, we should leave too. And I found a tráfico. And here we are.” He wiped his eyes. “But not mi tica, no. Sofia is with the angels.”

They drove on for five minutes in silence. Then they broke from the corn and entered a bare-bones commercial cluster of shops and diners and bars. Beverly Corner, Illinois, boasted not a single national chain store downtown.

FleetFoot Transport was a small operation with a half dozen battered box trucks and transits in a parking lot protected by razor-wire-topped chain-link.

Marlowe had checked the company’s website — an amateur-looking landing page, but one with sufficient detail about services and pricing that told her that Felipe was right: it had its legitimate side. Always a wise idea for illegal enterprises — having a real company as a front.

She parked in the shadows of a warehouse that appeared not to have been used in the past hundred years.

“I’ll come with you,” the boy said.

“No, you won’t. You’ll wait here. I need you to keep watch. Honk twice if you see those two, Eddie and the skinny one.”

He nodded to the transit company office. “What? You afraid I try to kill him too?”

“I want you to keep watch,” she repeated. A pause. “And, yes, I’m afraid you’ll try to kill him too.”

The handsome young face broke into a smile.

She walked inside the over-air-conditioned front office and stopped at the desk, where a woman sat, wearing snug jeans and a blue cowboy-stitched shirt. Her hair was feathered, 1980s style. Marlowe’s mother had worn it that way... until scarves and wigs replaced the tresses.

“Is the owner in?”

“Mr. Higgins.”

Ah, good. She scored his name without even trying.

“Yep.”

“Well, he’s—”

“Where’s his office?”

The woman inadvertently looked at an unmarked door and, as Marlowe started for it, she said, “You can’t just walk in there!”

The agent flashed her badge and walked in there.

“Hey!”

The fortyish man inside reared back in surprise. His hands, hidden behind a computer, were busy in his lap and at first she thought she’d discovered him at an unzipped indiscretion. But walking up to him, her shield still on display, she noted he was merely trying to remove a mustard stain from his dark slacks. The remains of a pastrami sandwich — and a rather sumptuous one, at that — sat in its foil shroud on a stack of financial statements.

The receptionist began, “Mr. Higgins, I’m sorry. I know how you...”

“It’s all right, Brenda. That meeting? Call and tell them something’s come up. I can’t make it.”

Reluctantly the woman left.

“Stand up.”

He didn’t argue and he complied.

“Lift your jacket and turn around.”

He did and in a voice both edgy and resigned — a tricky combo — he asked, “So?”

This might have been a time for her to say, “This is your lucky day,” or “Made any illegal deliveries lately?” But the no banter rule was still in effect.

“I’m here to offer you a plea deal.”

The lucky day part.

“I didn’t do anything!”

“You want to just dwell on that thought for a minute?”

He slipped out of his denial jacket. “I want to talk to my lawyer.”

“We’ll get to that. But I’m not arresting you yet. We’re just talking plea deal. Prior to the arrest.”

He grew somewhat more pale at the certainty with which she delivered the last sentence. The word “if” did not participate.

“Now, my witness can identify you positively. You were the missing link in the human trafficking investigation against Jack Raleigh.”

His eyes went slightly wider. “I didn’t know... I didn’t know there was one, an investigation.”

She frowned and feigned confusion. “We tend not to share that information.”

Higgins’s face was growing more and more resigned. He would have to know he was living a precarious life, transporting kidnapped women and girls, along with drugs and guns. He would surely have been expecting a moment like this. Earlier in her police career, she’d been surprised at how many of the perps she collared had themselves not been surprised the cuffs came out; they’d known in their hearts it was only a matter of time before they got caught.

“Now, Higgins. I can share some things with you. In our case, you’ve been classified third tier. I was the one rooting for that.”

All fiction, but he was buying it. In fact his eyes revealed gratitude, even if his mouth did not express it with words.

“It’s Raleigh we want, and I need a cooperating witness. You help us, I can definitely work with the DA.”

“You want me to testify against him?” He had gotten a case of the fidgets. Playing with a pencil, looking around the room. Relief that he was third tier, whatever that meant, had given way to near panic. “I do that, I’m a dead man. He’s got cartel connections. How do you think he gets the girls up here?”

“Understood. We don’t want you on the stand anyway. No offense. You look too nervous. Just get us the names of some of Raleigh’s buyers. We’ll take it from there.”

“He’ll know you got the names from me.”

“No reason for him to. Besides, we can get you into protective custody. Get you a new life.”

“Witness protection. I’ve seen how those people live.”

“And whose idea was it to go into business with Jack Raleigh?”

His grimace said, point well taken.

She shrugged. “But you don’t want a safe house and WP, fine. We’ll put you in general pop at Skidmore Max. The yard. And see how that goes.”

“Fuck,” he muttered.

“You help us and, bang, you go from third tier to fourth. We never do that.”

Because, of course, the tiers didn’t exist.

“Really?”

“But I want to see some proof so I know you’re not wasting my time. I’ll classify it as nonadmissible evidence.”

Marlowe told herself to stop making up legal procedures. She might get found out.

But he was happy to oblige. “I don’t have anything here, or in the cloud or on my computer. But I can get you—”

The bullet shattered the window with a stunning crack, shards big and shards small exploding through the office. It struck its target and turned Higgins’s head into something else entirely. Bloody of course but more eerie was the altered shape, elongated like a football.

The second shot, intended for her, missed as she dropped to the floor, and it hit a file cabinet. The third slug landed in a thick log or accounting book.

Then silence.

Damnit.

How the hell had they found her?

She’d checked frequently. Nobody had tailed them here.

She grabbed the only thing in the office that wouldn’t expose her to the window: the shot-up logbook. Crouching, she hurried into the front office.

The cowgirl receptionist was screaming. Another occupant was too — a large man, a truck driver employee perhaps. His throat made the more unearthly sound, and was louder.

“What’s—”

“You need to leave. Now. Call 911. Tell them there’s a shooter at elevation, about two, three hundred yards south of your building. Give the address. Can you remember that?”

“But Tobe!” She rose and started for the office.

“No. Don’t go in there.”

Marlowe guessed there was more than a professional relationship between the two.

“But—”

Time was critical, but Marlowe knew what she had to do. She took the woman by the shoulders. “Look at me.”

Her gaze made a circuit of the blood on the agent’s face and chest and then settled on her eyes.

“I need you out of here now. Don’t go in the office. Can you remember what I said? At elevation. Two, three hundred yards south.”

A slow nod.

A glance to the trucker. “You too. Out now. It’s not safe. Come with me.”

The shooter wouldn’t come to the building to make sure Higgins was dead and to look for evidence — he’d know the police would soon be here. But she didn’t want the woman to see what lay on the other side of the door.

She whispered, “Is he...”

“He’s gone. I’m sorry. Now outside, wait in your cars. Call 911.”

With a last look at the office door, the woman nodded and she and the driver followed Marlowe outside and hurried to their respective vehicles.

Then the two of them — and Tobe Higgins’s horribly rearranged head — were gone from her thoughts altogether.

A squeal of tires. She froze.

And her Honda skidded to a stop, the passenger door swinging open, getaway-car style.

“Get in!” Felipe shouted.

“No, move over.”

“I can drive.”

“Move!”

Grimacing, Felipe hopped over the console.

She dropped into the seat, put the car in gear and sped straight down the main drag, Hill Street.

“Is he dead?”

She nodded.

Felipe said quickly, “It wasn’t me!”

Marlowe nearly laughed.

She skidded to a stop at the intersection at the end of Hill and paused briefly, then decided against the main road and gunned the engine to head down a narrow lane that took them deep into the cornfields.

The boy asked, “What do we do now?”

“We’re both wanted, remember? This is where we get the hell out of town.”

Chapter 14

Sheriff William Dodd parked discreetly behind where the excitement was happening — in and around FleetFoot Transport on Hill Street in Beverly Corner, Illinois. He peeked into the back window of the office of the owner of the transport company. Tobe Higgins.

Or what was left of him.

Not bad shooting.

Now, the Marlowe woman.

And the kid.

Where the hell was everybody? He stalked up the street, removing his gray sheriff’s hat, and wiped his brow with a brow-wiping handkerchief. He used it for no other purposes. Noses were meant to be taken care of with Kleenex or something else disposable.

Damn hot day.

Damn fucked-up day.

A squad car — local PD — skidded to a tire-burning stop beside him.

The driver’s window eased down. “Sheriff!”

Dodd looked over at the police chief. In Beverly Corner it was almost a part-time job.

“What... What’re you doing here?”

“Was nearby on something else,” he lied. “Heard the call.”

The chief waited a moment. And when nothing more was forthcoming, he said, “It was Tobe Higgins. Somebody got him with a hunting rifle! It was a damn sniper. Here, in Beverly Corner. You should’ve seen his head. What it did to him! Oh, Lord.”

The man would do better to calm down. He was a law enforcer, after all.

“A woman was here, with a kid. She’s white, he’s an illegal.”

“Tobe’s girlfriend, well, his secretary, said she was with him when it happened. Had a badge. Could’ve been fake. She didn’t see anybody else. I—”

“So the shooter got away, without anybody getting a look?”

“Far as I know, yeah.”

Dodd muttered, “Which way did she go?”

“Brenda didn’t see.”

“Get back to the crime scene, Billy. Let me know what you find. And no faxes, okay? Send an email. We don’t have a fax machine.”

“You think that’s safe? Email?”

“I’ll stand behind it.”

The man whispered, “You saw what that bullet did to Tobe?”

“Crime scene, Billy.”

The BPD car sped away.

The sheriff walked to Hill Street and looked over the pavement. He guessed that somewhere on the asphalt were marks that suggested where Ms. Bird of Prey Tat Marlowe and her beat-up old sedan had gone, but that was beyond his set of skills.

Hardly needed forensics anyway. He strode to the end of Hill and went into a lonely little store, SpiritJourney, which sold New Age accessories, like yoga mats, incense, self-help books, crystals, statues of Buddha and other gods, even DVDs.

As antiquated as fax machines.

Glancing up at the wall, he approached the middle-aged woman clerk. Her hair was white and streaked with blue, which he thought didn’t work on a number of levels.

“Officer, what’s going on? Were those gunshots?”

“That work?” he muttered, looking up at a security camera.

A slowly drawn out “Well...”

The camera was pointed into the store, but it also probably caught the intersection outside.

He didn’t like the “well.” It suggested a lack of cooperation, and one thing Sheriff William Dodd did not like was a lack of cooperation.

“Does it?”

She nodded.

“Show me the tape.”

“Well, I—”

“Now.”

“Well, I think you need a warrant.”

Well, well, well...

“No, I don’t need a fucking warrant. Show me. Now.”

She was scared more than angry. Indignant was long gone. She motioned him coolly back behind the counter and typed on a keyboard. The security footage came up.

Yes, there it was, Marlowe’s Honda. It hesitated a moment in the intersection — and not for traffic. She was trying to decide which escape route would be best.

She chose northwest.

Into the corn.

Unfortunately for her.

As he ran outside and into his car to pursue, he pulled out his phone. He didn’t even have to offer a silent and angry order to the recipient to pick up. It rang only once before a man’s voice said, “Sheriff. So. Where are we?”

Eddie Young disconnected the call and skidded his pickup to the west, left, and hit the gas.

“She’s headed northwest on McAllister.”

“Don’t know it,” Begg said.

“North side of Beverly Corner. Goes through the fields. Two lane — supposedly — but not big enough for two F-150s to pass each other without losing mirrors. It’s mostly for tractors.”

Begg had given up his games in favor of a map. He was scanning. “Where will it take her?”

“Not where she hopes it will.”

Soon they were passing Hill Street — where a bunch of stuff was happening outside FleetFoot Transport — then veering onto McAllister, plunging into the fields.

With the truck bounding fiercely on the uneven road — and its even rougher offshoots — Eddie began driving a grid pattern in the field.

Traffic cams on highways operated all the time but — a secret that law enforcement doesn’t share — they don’t work that well at night.

Which meant they had to find her and the boy now.

Not a problem. Six hours of good hunting light left.

Then motion ahead of them.

“Look!” Begg gripped his arm.

Marlowe’s Honda was speeding in their direction.

Eddie braked.

She braked.

There’d be no reason for her to believe that the truck was Eddie’s. And, there was no way she could see through a windshield at this distance.

But Marlowe wasn’t taking any chances.

She spun the wheel to her left and vanished into the corn rows.

Eddie tapped the accelerator too. He laughed and didn’t actually massage his sore cheek, but he might as well have. And he thought: Payback.

It was a cliché, and melodramatic, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t savoring the idea.

Chapter 15

Agent Marlowe, you think it’s them?”

She had skidded the car to her left after the pickup coming their way stopped abruptly, like a bull debating charging.

“Let’s assume.”

“One time, my teacher at the American School in Costa Rica, he said, never assume things. You make an ass out of yourself or something.”

She goosed the engine even more and they were soon going forty-five, jostling right and left hard. “When they have high-powered rifles, assumptions are okay.”

He looked back. “You’re right. They turned. Coming after us.”

“How far?”

“I don’t know. A football field.”

“Yours or ours?”

“I don’t know how big your football fields are.” A moment later Felipe asked, “You have another gun?”

“Yes.” The Bodyguard was in its holster and her large weapon, a .40 SIG, rested in her back waistband, both uncomfortable and reassuring.

“Give it to me.”

“No.”

“I can shoot.”

“No.”

He scowled.

She spun the wheel again. Streaking down another tractor path.

He looked back. “They didn’t see it. They kept going.”

It was time for help.

She called the one person in the area she’d relied on before, Associate Deputy Sheriff Trenton Carr.

He was shocked to learn of the human trafficking. “Are you sure? I mean, Jack Raleigh’s a reader in the church!”

That again...

“I’ll tell the sheriff.”

“No. I don’t trust him.”

“Sheriff Dodd?” He sounded astonished.

“He wanted to transport Felipe to Stanton for detention. He was sure to get killed there. I need you to call the local state police barracks and get troopers here. People you trust.”

“Where are you?”

“In the fields a mile north of Beverly Corner. Somewhere east of McAllister Road. I’m sending a geotag.” She called up the app on her phone and sent it. “We might have to move, but we’ll be nearby.”

“Hold on.”

She heard him place the call on another line and have a conversation with ISP. He returned to the call with Marlowe. “They’ll be there in thirty minutes. With tactical.”

He added the pointless but scripted “Be careful,” and they disconnected.

She drove on, pausing once or twice to listen through the missing window for the rattle of the pickup. Nothing. The corn not only left them blind but deafened, as it absorbed sounds thirstily.

“Look, there.” Felipe was pointing.

In the mist ahead of them was a low structure. She sped up and skidded to a stop in the front yard of an abandoned, dilapidated farmhouse, apparently long deserted. It was the sort of place that their pursuers would be drawn to check out if they found it, but it was defensible — with a low stone wall around the house, a yard surrounding that and, beyond, a clearing until you came to the corn, about fifty feet away. A good shooting zone.

Besides, it was better than suddenly turning a corner and finding themselves grill to grill with a two-ton pickup. And they only had to hold out for, now, twenty-seven minutes.

Though the exactness of the number made it sound like forever.

She backed up and braked in front of the attached barn.

“See if you can open the door.”

Felipe climbed out and with some effort pulled the double doors open. She drove inside the barn fast and killed the engine.

He followed and swung the doors shut. They made their way into the house and through the empty rooms, the walls coated with mold and the floors puddled with brown, standing water. Cigarette butts and two condoms. Really? You couldn’t afford a motel room?

The pungent smell stole a bit of your breath.

There was no glass remaining in the windows — many of the panes had been shot out. Rural country target practice — kids armed with guns and boredom.

They stood together and scanned the fields.

“Listen.” Marlowe’s voice was soft.

Now, they could hear the faint growl of the pickup’s engine. It seemed to grow close, then it receded, heading in the opposite direction.

“When did he say the police will be here?”

“Twenty minutes now.”

“I mean what I was saying, Agent Marlowe. I know how to shoot.”

“Keep listening for the truck.”

She stepped away for a fast reconnoiter. Just off the kitchen was a door that led, as she’d guessed, to the basement.

She pulled the door open. No lights, but from the illumination bleeding down into the stairwell, she could see that the steps weren’t rotten; they seemed sturdy enough to support a human’s weight.

“Anything?” she called.

“No.”

She returned to the Honda in the barn. There she found the ledger she’d taken with her from Higgins’s office and then she stepped into the farmhouse’s living room.

“The truck?”

“I can’t hear it.”

A glance out the window. Corn, miles and miles of obscuring corn.

Well, it’s obscuring us too.

She set the book on the floor and crouched over it.

She opened it and the slug — the third shot fired at herself and Higgins — fell out.

This was the reason she had taken the book.

The company owner had told her he didn’t leave evidence of the trafficking jobs at his office so she was sure the records contained in the book were useless; they would relate to the legitimate business.

But all she wanted was the bullet.

If they found the rifle it had been fired from — Eddie’s or Slim’s — they could do a ballistics match and tie the gun’s owner to the murder of Higgins and the attempted murder of an Illinois law enforcement agent. She could then turn him into the magic unicorn she was after: the cooperating witness.

But that would be the next stage of the investigation — if there was one, of course; they first had to survive the cornfields.

She dropped the slug in her pocket and walked to the window. They both kept watch.

Now, seventeen minutes until the state police.

Could time move any more slowly?

After a moment of staring at the corn, she asked, “What was that you called your sister?”

“What you mean?”

“‘Tica’? Was that your nickname for her?”

“No. It’s a, what do you say? A term of endearment. In Costa Rica, it’s what we call people we love. ‘Tico,’ boys. ‘Tica,’ girls.” He gave a sad laugh. “People in the US hear ‘Central America’ and they think it’s all the same. But all the countries, they’re different. Only we say ‘tica’ and ‘tico.’ It is—” He stopped speaking. “Listen.”

Yes, the pickup. It was getting closer.

She pulled the SIG from her waistband. It had no scary laser sight but was a bigger caliber than the Bodyguard. More accurate too, with its longer barrel.

She returned to the window.

Felipe was frowning. “It just stopped. The engine. Maybe it’s gone.”

Maybe.

The silence might also mean that the cornstalks broken by the Honda’s passage had betrayed them, and the men had parked and were making their way toward their prey under cover of the wall of corn.

Chapter 16

Wake-up call.

Marcel Descartes had this sobering thought as he sat on the edge of his bed in the urine-smelling cell, awaiting... well, he really didn’t know what lay in store.

Descartes’s late wife had a rough idea that he did something illegal since the library where he worked part-time didn’t pay the kind of money he always had. And she would sometimes ask was he sure he wanted to do what he was doing?

Whatever it might be.

And he hadn’t paid much attention to it because his underworld job let him do what he loved.

Uncover facts.

Real facts, like the real journalists did.

It was like mining for ore. Gold. Silver.

Uranium.

Explosive uranium.

He recalled thinking he didn’t much care about what happened to the witnesses he was trying to find for Mr. Barth. Some of that was that they were shits too — except there was the little added matter that the boss wanted to take out some family members and bystanders too, to “send a message.”

This was troubling. And this got him thinking about his career.

Mr. Barth wasn’t the only client, of course. How many other people had died because of the information he’d provided?

Innocent people who were not shits?

He hadn’t thought about it much — but he was now. Largely because of that Marlowe woman and her crashing into his life.

Wake-up call.

Another cliché: he’d learned his lesson.

So where to go from here?

They had him on a misdemeanor in Plains, which meant little. Marlowe talked big about the conspiracy with Barth but she hadn’t actually arrested him for it, only the notepad theft. And she was now busy breaking some kid out of jail.

Maybe he could demand a bail hearing before she got back. A misdemeanor. A couple thousand dollars bond, and he’d be out.

He’d return to Chicago and tell Mr. Barth that it was too hot to find the witnesses, and that he was declining to work for him anymore.

The man would be pissed but Descartes would endure it.

Then he’d take some time off. Admire his new typewriter, go to the beach, concentrate on his library job, where he would unearth facts for patrons and supplement that meager income with discreet withdrawals from the three million he had stashed away.

The idea was growing on him.

“Yo, Descartes! Let’s go. Your lawyer’s here.” The Plains County deputy, a beefy dark-skinned man, swung the door to the cell open wide.

But he didn’t want to go.

Marcel Descartes was filled with dread.

Because he didn’t have an attorney.

Mr. Barth had found out he’d been arrested!

The “lawyer” was a hit man. Maybe he was going to deliver poison pills or something.

“Move it.”

Under the impatient gaze of the deputy he rose slowly and walked slowly — nearly shuffling forward.

He was led into a hallway where there was a sign, Interrogation Rooms.

It was into one of these he was now led. A twelve by twelve by twelve cube of stale air and body odor.

More troubling than the atmosphere, though, was the “attorney.”

Sitting on one side of a steel table, he squinted up at Descartes. He looked like a man of the law — trim and precise and in a suit. But his cold eyes told a different story.

He was a killer. Descartes knew this with dreaded certainty.

He nodded gruffly to the seat opposite.

The guard sat him down and, Descartes noted, did not shackle his hands.

Which meant this could be a setup. The guy would claim Descartes attacked him — and break his neck. Even though he wasn’t big he probably knew all kinds of karate ways to kill somebody.

And prominent in the thoughts of Marcel Descartes was a singular one: that he had just scored one of his beloved facts, perhaps the last one he would ever uncover: that Sheriff Dodd was corrupt.

Probably up for sale — and the present high bidder was Tyson Barth.

As was often the case, he thought, yes, there’d been a wake-up call.

But it had come too late to do any good.

Descartes turned to the guard. “Maybe you could stay.” He asked this in a failing voice.

“No,” the icy fake lawyer muttered. “He can’t. He can close the door on his way out.”

Chapter 17

It seemed that Constant Marlowe’s second idea about the reason for the silence was the accurate one.

Eddie and Slim had not left at all but had indeed found the farmhouse and were moving in.

Proof came in the form of a gunshot, which cracked from the front row of corn.

The slug hit the window frame near where Marlowe stood.

“Felipe. The basement. Now!”

“No.”

“I’ll drag you down there myself and that’ll give them time to move in. You want that? Or you want to do what I’m telling you?”

He grimaced. When the second shot zipped through the window and landed in the wall behind them both, he muttered something in Spanish and, in a crouch, hurried to the kitchen and down into the basement.

The order of battle now was to delay. Another twelve minutes would find ISP officers at their doorstep.

She looked out quickly but could see no target.

Damn corn.

Of course, Eddie and Slim could see the farmhouse just fine and yet stay under cover because of the leaves, ears and stalks.

She ducked as another shot also hit the wall. This came from a different angle.

Rising fast, she let go two shots into the dirt near where she believed the first shooter had been.

She wasn’t firing into the crops. One of the first rules of firearms: never shoot unless you can see the target and the backdrop — what’s behind it. Her point was to let them know that she was armed and to think twice about a charge.

Another couple of rounds slammed into the interior, well wide of their mark.

Why were they just shooting at random?

The answer appeared a moment later, when a shadow crossed the wall beside her. She spun about. And she understood their random shooting. It was to focus her attention on them while the real threat flanked her.

Sheriff William Dodd approached.

Somber. He was pointing his gun her way. One of the bigger Glocks.

Marlowe sighed.

She closed her eyes briefly in disgust.

A small town conspiracy at its finest.

There was a brief pause.

And the sheriff fired his weapon.

The slug found its mark.

Chapter 18

Slim, standing just outside the row of corn where he’d stood as a flanking maneuver, looked down at his gut, where Dodd’s bullet had struck him, zipping through the window behind Marlowe.

He looked bewildered. He lifted his gun and Dodd fired again. This bullet hit the man in his head and he dropped, lying completely still.

Marlowe stared at the sheriff, but only briefly. Another shot slammed into the wall behind the two of them. She ducked. Dodd approached and took cover on the opposite side of the window. “Who’s the other one?”

“Eddie somebody. He’s working for Raleigh.”

“Raleigh?”

She asked, “You know about the sex trafficking out of R&R?”

“Damn.” He apparently didn’t. She told him.

“And Jack Raleigh? You know, he’s—”

“A God-fearing reader in the church,” she said cynically.

Two more shots from out of the cornfield.

“I gotta say: you come to town, Agent Constant Marlowe, and all kinds of shit happens.”

She said, “I’ve been in touch with Carr. He called state police.”

“I know. I talked to him too. Wait. You called Trenton, not me?”

“I didn’t trust you. You wanted to get Felipe to Stanton.”

“Of course I did. I knew he’d be taken care of there.”

She frowned.

Dodd noted. “No, not ‘taken care of’ that way. I mean I had guards that were going to look out for him. Avery? It’s juvie but because of that there’s no security to speak of. If somebody wanted to move on the boy, Avery’d be the place for it. He’d be well protected in Stanton.”

He glanced at her. “Oh, if you think it’s all bleeding-heart stuff, uh-uh. Plains’s under investigation for civil rights violations. Justice Department and the state. And I’m running for office. A young Latino gets killed in jail on my watch, there goes my job.

“And then it turns out, somebody was out to set him up. The knife made me suspicious. You didn’t see it, the customer didn’t see it. Somebody planted it. And that rumor he committed the other murder? Just didn’t ring true. So, I had to make sure that young’un lived to see another day.

“Then you waltz off with him, like you’re saving the poor immigrant from the big bad sheriff. There goes my election. I was not very pleased you swiped him from me. The hell is he, by the way? You didn’t get him killed already, did you?”

“Basement.”

Another shot from Eddie struck the wall.

“Goddamnit.” Dodd didn’t suffer from her firearms protocols and let loose a half dozen rounds at a moving stalk.

She called, “Get down! He’s prone and waving the corn as a diversion.”

He ducked just as Eddie fired a few shots of his own.

“You done this before,” Dodd muttered.

“Do me a favor, Sheriff.”

“Which is?”

“You seem a little finger heavy on the trigger. If you need to take a shot, go right ahead, but if not, try to keep that one alive. I could really use a cooperating witness and I’m running out of them.”

Trenton Carr parked his cruiser about two hundred yards from the farmhouse where Marlowe, the boy and his boss were holed up.

Then he made his way slowly through the fields, gun in hand.

He noted the perp’s pickup and the footprints.

Okay, okay...

Quietly he moved through the stalks of corn. There were so many of them that that alone left Carr unsettled. Odd thought: the vegetables were about to be killed and eaten and maybe they weren’t all that crazy about the idea.

He nearly laughed.

About twenty yards into the field he saw him.

The big man, crouching behind a plowed-up line of dirt, peering through the stalks toward what appeared to be an old farmhouse.

Another five feet. Then he paused.

He called, “Eddie. It’s me.”

Startled, the man spun around. “Trent. Gave me a scare. I knew you were coming but still...”

Chapter 19

Carr dropped to his knees, peered at the farmhouse.

“They got Begg. The sheriff shot him. He’s gone.” His voice was angry. Carr knew they’d worked together for months and were friends of sorts.

“How’d that happen?”

“We had this plan. I was going to draw their attention, and he was going to slip up to one of the side windows. But, fuck, Dodd shows up and nails him.”

“Dodd’s here?” Carr was frowning. How the hell had that happened?

“Yeah.” Eddie fired a couple of random shots at the farmhouse. He had no particular target. Man was just venting with his weapon.

Carr considered the situation. Aside from the punk’s death, everything was unfolding pretty well. Earlier in the day, after she’d busted Felipe out, Carr had used the resources of the department — videos mostly — to learn that Marlowe’s car was headed to Beverly Corner.

Why?

Only one reason. From the kid, Marlowe must have learned about Jack Raleigh’s trafficking scheme, which Carr himself was profiting from considerably (he was acting undercover to report to Raleigh about any hint of investigations).

Raleigh also paid him to make witnesses disappear.

So Carr, an avid hunter, had sped to Beverly Corner and taken out Tobe Higgins — and tried to kill Marlowe. But she’d slipped away.

Where had she gone? Eddie and Begg didn’t know. But then Sheriff William Dodd had unwittingly come to his aid: in some New Age store he had found footage of her car turning onto McAllister Road and disappearing into the fields.

Dodd called Carr, who had, in turn, called Eddie and Begg to report about her whereabouts.

Then, ironically, Marlowe herself had called him and ever-so-conveniently sent him the geotagged location. And he — ever-so-deceptively — told her to hold on while he called the state police, which, of course, he faked.

So here they were now, hiding out in a farmhouse with Felipe. Easy to arrange the scene so that it looked like the kid had killed the others. Maybe Carr would even wing himself, fire a glancing shot across his biceps to allay suspicion.

Make him out to be the hero, wounded in the line of duty.

It would sting, but Raleigh was paying him enough to put up with it.

Then too, his wife... A gunshot might gin up a bit of sympathy from her. She hadn’t been all that eager to sashay into the bedroom with him lately.

Gazing through the corn, Eddie asked, “What do you think we should do?”

“It’s pretty simple. I’m going to go in and talk to them, then, when I get a chance, start shooting.”

“You want me to help? Maybe do some cover shooting?”

“Oh, one thing you oughta know, Eddie. Mr. Raleigh wasn’t happy that you didn’t finish the woman agent last night.” Carr lifted his gun.

“What?” Eddie stared at the muzzle. “No!”

Carr shot him twice in the head.

He then holstered his weapon and walked out of the corn, calling, “It’s me, Trent Carr! Don’t shoot! It’s all clear.”

Chapter 20

Maybe it wasn’t as smart as one of her plans — like the homeless guy act that let him pretend to puke and pee behind a bus stop.

But it would do fine.

Investigators would find a reasonable scenario.

The boy killing the sheriff with an untraceable gun he’d managed to hide on his person, and then Carr shooting the boy (with, yeah, a little slight flesh wound action in Carr’s own arm).

There’d be no physical harm to Constant Marlowe. For one thing, shooting state-level law enforcers never ended up well for the shooter. Besides, there was no need. Her breaking the boy out of jail and not searching him carefully and discovering the hidden gun would mean the end of her career and possibly even jail time.

Carr would send her briefly away so she wouldn’t be there to witness the two shootings, and could only assume — to her horror — that she’d made a very bad mistake about Felipe Vargas.

(An added bonus: William Dodd would be gone, and Carr could finally advance past his dead-end post of associate deputy sheriff. True, Jack Raleigh paid him well, but a man has professional pride, right?)

As he walked onto the farmhouse’s weedy front yard and explained what had happened, Marlowe sighed and looked disappointed. “You killed him?”

Dodd said, “She wanted a cooperating witness.”

“Oh. Sorry. He drew down on me.”

Marlowe shrugged. “Okay, we’ll make the case some other way.”

“How far out are the state police?” Marlowe asked.

“About ten minutes,” he lied. “I just talked to them.”

Carr now thought of another good touch. He would arrest Marlowe! He would explain to the respondings that he had found her standing over the bodies of the boy and the sheriff and — shocked that she’d been so incompetent — insisted she hand over her weapon.

She would babble on to the authorities about some human trafficking scheme that Raleigh was behind, but the grocery store owner was even now coaching the girls as to what story to tell — about how he was merely a generous benefactor, helping unfortunate immigrants make a new life in the US. If they were undocumented, he didn’t care. He was helping them escape from political oppression and the cartels. If Immigration wanted to fine him go right ahead. His only true crime was being humane.

Was there any proof about a trafficking ring?

Of course not.

Jack was being scapegoated by citizens upset that he was hiring Latinas.

A shame, but Plains did have a sad history of racial inequality.

And if they were reluctant to go along with him — well, he’d just remind them of what happened to Sofia Vargas.

“Where’s the boy?” he asked.

“The basement.”

When she left to get him, “This’s one for the books, Sheriff.”

“And one we better never see again in Plains.”

You never will, that’s for sure, Carr thought.

Marlowe appeared with the young man. “Felipe! How are you, son?”

His eyes flitted nervously. “Yeah, okay.”

Carr pulled out blue latex gloves. “We should secure their weapons... And make sure they’re both gone.” A nod toward the corn. “We don’t want any third-act surprises. The bad guys suddenly coming back to life, like in horror movies.” He handed a pair to Marlowe. “You want to take one. I’ll look at the other.”

She pulled the gloves on, then walked into the field.

Carr held back, pretending to get a text. He stared at the screen until Marlowe was well into the corn.

The deputy was thinking: For the forensics — those people were so damn good — he’d shoot the sheriff first with the cold gun he’d brought, one without any serial number. Then Felipe with his Glock.

Marlowe would come running and find Carr himself bent over the sheriff, trying to give him lifesaving aid. Pointless, of course, but it would look good.

And then would come Marlowe’s arrest.

Another bonus — he’d get to frisk her.

“Is that the troopers?” Carr asked, glancing into the corn. It was in the direction ISP might come from, so this was a reasonable diversion.

The sheriff and the boy peered out.

Carr stepped behind the sheriff, making sure that after he shot, the boy couldn’t spring toward him.

Now, do it. Before Marlowe emerges from the corn.

He started to reach for the cold gun in his pocket.

It was then that he heard: “Trenton?”

He spun around to see Marlowe standing there, in a curious stance. Right foot back, left forward.

The next thing he saw, but only briefly, was the blur of her right fist as it slammed into his jaw.

Then blackness.

Chapter 21

“The hell?” Dodd asked.

Marlowe was reaching down and removing Carr’s service weapon and a cold gun — an unregistered revolver that he would have used to kill the sheriff. Felipe’s murder weapon would have been the Glock.

She wondered if she was going to die too. No, he had sent her into the corn so that she couldn’t see what had happened to the two men. His “attack” on her was to end her career because she’d missed the boy’s possession of a firearm.

A pretty smart plan, even if it didn’t rise to the level of one of hers.

She cuffed Carr and double-locked the bracelets.

“He’s working for Raleigh,” she said.

“But he killed Eddie,” the sheriff said.

“Raleigh probably wanted the two of them gone anyway. Because they screwed up the job to take me out last night.” She added, “Raleigh knows we’re onto him or will be pretty soon. You should get some of your people there now. The state police too. They should move fast — protect the girls who’re there and preserve whatever evidence they can.”

Dodd pulled out his phone and made the calls.

After he disconnected, he asked, “How did you realize Carr was crooked?”

The answer, she explained, was the bullet in the ledger book that someone had fired her way in Beverly Corner.

“I wanted it to ID the sniper who killed Tobe Higgins, the truck operation owner. We could compare the rifling of any long guns we found with the marks on the slug.”

Dodd said, “But ballistics only works if you have a slug from a crime scene and a suspect’s weapon. You didn’t have a gun for comparison.”

She said, “There’s one other thing you can do: data-mine the bullet. It was a .270, which is not too rare. But this one had an unusual rifling pattern — to give the bullet a faster twist rate than normal.” She explained to Felipe: “Rifling’s the grooves inside the bore that make the bullet spin. That makes it more accurate.” She glanced back to Dodd. “I looked it up online. Those markings meant the gun was a Nosler. I wanted a list of people who owned one and lived in Plains County.”

Dodd was shaking his head. “Smart. But that means checking federal registration, ammunition and gun store purchases. It’d take a full day, at least. And on top of that you need a warrant to look at those records.”

Marlowe scoffed. “We didn’t exactly have time for that, did we?”

“Then what did you do?”

“Here’s the answer now,” she said.

A dark sedan drove up and parked nearby. Marlowe looked at the trim, dark-suited man climbing from the car.

He oriented himself and strode forward.

Clearly surprising Dodd, he and Marlowe embraced, warmly yet chastely.

She said, “Sheriff Dodd. Evan Quill.”

The men shook hands.

She introduced him to Felipe Vargas too.

Dodd muttered, “I’m still in the dark, Agent Marlowe.”

Quill said, “I’m a state’s attorney. My office isn’t that far away. Constant called and told me she had a problem. I drove down and had a meeting with Marcel Descartes.”

“The hell?”

Marlowe took over. “Evan and Descartes came to an... understanding. Descartes’s the king of information. He can find anything on anybody. He called some of his people. They data-mined records and found everyone in Plains County who owns Noslers. There are only five — it’s an expensive weapon, in the thousands. Trenton Carr’s one of them. Evan called me.”

And called her just in time. She had just stepped into the corn to check that Eddie was really dead and to secure his weapon when her phone had rung and she’d learned that it was Carr who was on the take. She’d sprinted around the farmhouse and come in from the back.

The sheriff asked Quill, “How’d you manage that? You threaten him?”

The prosecutor’s face grew amused. “In a way. Your lockup security system? I just got a picture of Descartes and me together.”

Marlowe said, “Evan has kind of a reputation. Once he takes on a case, he doesn’t let go.”

A newspaper had once called him a pit bull/python, an odd image, but one that more or less said everything you needed to know about Evan Quill’s prosecutorial style.

“If that picture had been released,” Marlowe continued, “Barth would know that Descartes had sold out. And I was going to turn him loose on the streets of Chicago when I got him up there. His life expectancy would have been about ten minutes. So, now we’ll get him in witness protection.”

Constant Marlowe finally got her cooperating witness.

In fact, she had two of them, one for each of her two Plains cases.

Descartes would turn on Barth.

And Carr — facing capital murder — would give up Jack Raleigh.

Marlowe now looked at Felipe Vargas, who was gazing down at Carr, awake but slumped, head on his chest.

She said to the young man, “Raleigh’s not going to get the death penalty for your sister’s murder, but he’ll spend the rest of his life in prison.”

The boy scanned Carr carefully, then his eyes rose and took in the front line of the “troops” — the corn, its hues green and yellow and tan, stark in the faint rain that had just started. “Maybe it’s better. Now, he’ll spend every day in a cell, thinking about what he did to Sofia.”

Evan Quill said he had to return to his office. He hugged Marlowe once more and shook the sheriff’s and Felipe’s hands. Then he paused. “Oh, there was one other thing that Descartes wanted before he’d turn. Hope it’s in your budget.”

Marlowe grimaced, thinking that her relationship with her boss, Stanley Robbins, was badly frayed after the past two days. “What is it?”

“A typewriter, off all things. Go figure.”