Part 12 (1/2)

Stillman turned and stared out the window into the dark field. ”It'll go faster with the two of us.”

14.

Stillman opened his suitcase and took out a small Maglite, then handed an identical one to Walker. ”Save your batteries until we get out there.” They closed the trunk of the car and stepped to the edge of the field. Stillman said, ”We've got maybe six hours before farmers and commuters start coming up that road in force. You start down on that end, and I'll start up here. Walk the field in rows, as if you were plowing it.”

Walker asked, ”What will it look like?”

”I think if they were here at all, it was probably sometime today. The weeds will have been trampled down, and they won't have had time to stand back up.”

Walker made his way up into the edge of the field, thinking about Ellen Snyder. Whenever he approached a spot that looked like a gap in the weeds, his breathing became shallow and his arms began to feel weak. He was expecting to see the white face appear in an open-eyed stare between two clumps of alfalfa. But as he walked to the end of the field and came back beside his own tracks, his thoughts became calmer.

Two years ago, if she could have imagined this night, what would she have felt? The one searching for you should be some close relative, not an old boyfriend you had left, expecting never to see him again. There was something intrusive about this. He turned again and came up the next row.

As he walked, he began to believe that what he was doing was spending the night tromping around in an empty field, getting burrs and seeds stuck to a pair of pants that had cost about two days' pay, and scuffing a pair of shoes that cost more. Stillman had paid for them, he thought. He can decide how they get wrecked. Walker glanced to his right to watch Stillman's light sweeping back and forth ahead of him as he trudged on.

There was a quiet rhythm to the night sounds. Walker could hear unseen crickets chirping, the distant call of some invisible night bird, the swish of dry plants against his legs. He set his pace by the sound of his own footsteps, methodically marching the distance out and marching back.

He heard a sharp, shrill whistle, and turned his head. Stillman's light had stopped moving. It shone straight down into the weeds. Walker heard the whistle again. ”No,” he whispered. He began to walk through the weeds toward the light. ”Let it be the money,” he thought. ”Let it be nothing at all.”

He came near Stillman and looked down cautiously, letting his light slowly move toward Stillman's feet. He could see nothing. ”What is it?”

Stillman moved his foot and a clump of weeds fell over. ”That,” he said. ”Somebody did some digging here, and then replaced some of the plants. In a few days, they probably would have taken hold again.”

Walker was silent, waiting.

Stillman sighed. ”We're not going to do any digging, so you can forget about that. We're going to have to concoct a very convincing bulls.h.i.+t story and then locate the nearest cop so we can tell it to him.”

It took a few minutes to reach the next town. As soon as they pa.s.sed the sign that said WALLERTON, POP. 953 WALLERTON, POP. 953, time seemed to stop. There were lights on in the tiny police station, but when they went inside they discovered that the man on duty at the desk was not the watch commander. He was just there to answer the telephone and then walk across the station to the radio desk and ask the woman who served as night dispatcher to put aside the book she was reading and summarize the call to the three patrol cars that were out on the major highways waiting for speeders.

It took Stillman only a couple of minutes to convince the desk officer to make the walk across the room, but it took nearly fifteen minutes for the patrol car to pull up outside.

The two patrol officers climbed the steps into the station, arranging their nightsticks and hitching their belts. The shorter one opened the gla.s.s door and went straight to Stillman and Walker. It took Walker a second to see that she was a woman. She had short, dark hair tied back tightly, and the body armor under her s.h.i.+rt gave her torso a square, plump look. The other cop was a tall, rangy man in his forties who had a weathered, sunburned face and crow's-foot wrinkles beside his eyes, as though he spent his days on a tractor. Walker read their name tags.

The female, whose tag said ORMOND ORMOND, asked, ”Are you the gentlemen who found something in a field?”

”That's right,” said Stillman.

Walker waited for the next round of questions, but it didn't come. She said, ”Why don't you show us where it is?” then turned and walked toward the door.

Walker didn't like getting into the back seat of the patrol car. There were no door handles, and there was a metal cage that separated the back from the front. But Stillman slid in and Walker joined him.

Stillman said, ”It's the field on the corner of Locksley and Waterman Road.”

”The old Buckland place,” muttered the male policeman.

Walker closed his eyes. Things were dreamlike-not quick or startling enough to be a nightmare, just a dream with a slow, growing sense of familiarity as things got worse and worse. It would have to be called something like ”the old Buckland place.”

”How did you happen to be out there this time of night?” asked the woman.

”We're insurance investigators from McClaren Life and Casualty in San Francisco. We've been following a suspect in a fraud investigation,” said Stillman. ”We had a lead that she was in the Ritz-Carlton in Chicago, but when we got there she had just left. We looked at the routes she might have taken to get out, and this one seemed most promising.”

”It did?” The surprise in her voice was what Walker felt. ”Why is that?”

”A lot of reasons,” Stillman said. ”For one thing, in a couple of miles you're in Wisconsin. It's a new state, where she hasn't been seen before, with lots of rural roads all the way north to Duluth, Minnesota.”

”You think she's going to Duluth?”

”No, I think she may be planning to keep going all the way to Canada,” said Stillman. ”Now, you and I know that going to Canada is one of the worst ways to stay hidden. Americans don't look any different from the locals, but the locals know the difference, and anybody looking for you has about a tenth of the faces to look at. But this is an inexperienced, first-offense white-collar suspect. If this turns out to be nothing, we'll probably take a plane and wait for her at International Falls.”

The policewoman didn't a.s.sent or deny it. She just said, ”What kind of vehicle description?”

”Blue Pontiac Grand Am was the last one she rented, but that was in Denver, and just because it hasn't been returned yet doesn't mean she's still got it. We thought maybe what she's been doing is avoiding the interstates and taking back roads.”

”This used to be a main road,” said the male cop. Walker thought he detected a little resentment. It was all part of the dream, and this place stood for all of the small towns that had been bypa.s.sed by the interstate highways and had slowly withered, leaving ruined barns and a few embittered loyalists.

Stillman seemed to Walker to have said too much already. He seemed to be giving them a thousand chances to catch him in a lie. Walker held his breath, hoping the policeman would fill in the time, tell Stillman all about the way the town once was, and the betrayal that the federal government and the politicians in Springfield and the Chicago business interests had pulled forty years ago.

The cop said no more. The car stopped, and Walker saw the sagging skeleton of the barn to his right. The female cop suddenly backed up and swerved to the side in reverse, then turned off the engine. The male cop took the microphone off the dash and said, ”Unit One-two-eight. Show us Code Six at the junction of Locksley and Waterman, out.”

Then Stillman was leading them back into the field with his flashlight, following the trampled weeds.

Suddenly Ormond's flashlight came on. It was a four-battery model that he had earlier mistaken for a club, and its beam was incredibly wide and bright. It flashed ahead for a moment, then swept across the field toward the area Walker had searched, and lingered there. ”What were you doing over there?”

”That was me,” said Walker.

She turned to study him as though she had not seen him before. ”What were you doing?”

”We split the field up and started on both ends.”

”What did you expect to find?”

Walker shrugged nervously. ”Best case-maybe she buried the money out here. Worst case-” He realized he had probably made a mistake, so he changed his sentence. ”I guess I don't know what that is.”

She stared at him for a moment. ”You don't, huh?” Her eyes bored into him long enough to determine that he had no answer, then she turned away and followed Stillman.

”I see it,” called the male cop. ”Somebody's been digging, all right.”

Walker followed the others at a distance. He stayed on the periphery of the bright area cast by their flashlights. The beam of Officer Ormond's flashlight suddenly transfixed his chest. He knew its purpose was to illuminate his face without making him squint and turn away. She asked, ”How much money was it?”

Walker answered, ”Twelve million dollars, roughly. We think she was carrying about a million of it.”

The light didn't move. ”I'm still not clear on why you think she would pick the old Buckland place to bury it on.”

Stillman intervened. ”It was my hunch. We drove out of Chicago, and this was the first place we saw where you could be fairly sure of getting it done and not get noticed.”