Hazen lit another cigarette, coughed, and scratched himself, looking at the dry ranks of corn. He wondered if it was somebody’s cow who’d wandered into the corn and was now dead of bloat and greed. Since when was it a sheriff’s responsibility to check on dead livestock? But he already knew the answer: ever since the livestock inspector retired. There was nobody to take his place and no longer a need for one. Every year there were fewer family farms, fewer livestock, fewer people. Most people only kept cows and horses for nostalgic reasons. The whole county was going to hell.

Realizing he’d put off the task long enough, Hazen sighed, hiked up his jangling service belt, slipped his flashlight out of its scabbard, shouldered the shotgun, and pushed his way into the corn.

Despite the lateness of the hour, the sultry air refused to lift. The beam of his light flashed through the cornstalks stretching before him like endless rows of prison bars. His nose filled with the smell of dry stalks, that peculiar rusty smell so familiar it was part of his very being. His feet crunched dry clods of earth, kicking up dust. It had been a wet spring, and until the heat wave kicked in a few weeks back the summer sun had been benevolent. The stalks were as high as Hazen could ever remember, at least a foot or more over his head. Amazing how fast the black earth could turn to dust without rain. Once, as a kid, he’d run into a cornfield to escape his older brother and gotten lost. For two hours. The disorientation he’d felt then came back to him now. Inside the corn rows, the air felt trapped: hot, fetid, itchy.

Hazen took a deep drag on the cigarette and continued forward, knocking the fat cobs aside with irritation. The field belonged to Buswell Agricon of Atlanta, and Sheriff Hazen could not have cared less if they lost a few ears because of his rough passage. Within two weeks Agricon’s huge combine harvesters would appear on the horizon, mowing down the corn, each feeding half a dozen streams of kernels into their hoppers. The corn would be trucked to the cluster of huge grain silos just over the northern horizon and from there railed to feed lots from Nebraska to Missouri, to disappear down the throats of mindless castrated cattle, which would in turn be transformed into big fat marbled sirloins for rich assholes in New York and Tokyo. Or maybe this was one of those gasohol fields, where the corn wasn’t eaten by man or even beast but burned up in the engines of cars instead. What a world.

Hazen bullied his way through row after row. Already his nose was running. He tossed his cigarette away, then realized he should probably have pinched it off first. Hell with it. A thousand acres of the damn corn could burn and Buswell Agricon wouldn’t even notice. They should take care of their own fields, pick up their own dead animals. Of course, the executives had probably never set foot in a real cornfield in their lives.

Like almost everyone else in Medicine Creek, Hazen came from a farming family that no longer farmed. They had sold their land to companies like Buswell Agricon. The population of Medicine Creek had been dropping for more than half a century and the great industrial cornfields were now dotted with abandoned houses, their empty window frames staring like dead eyes over the billowy main of crops. But Hazen had stayed. Not that he liked Medicine Creek particularly; what he liked was wearing a uniform and being respected. He liked the town because he knew the town, every last person, every dark corner, every nasty secret. Truth was, he simply couldn’t imagine himself anywhere else. He was as much a part of Medicine Creek as Medicine Creek was a part of him.

Hazen stopped suddenly. He swept his beam through the stalks ahead. The air, full of dust, now carried another smell: the perfume of decay. He glanced up. The buzzards were far above now, directly over his head. Another fifty yards and he would be there. The air was still, the silence complete. He unshouldered his shotgun and moved forward more cautiously.

The smell of decay drifted through the rows, sweeter by the moment. Now Hazen could make out a gap in the corn, a clearing directly ahead of him. Odd. The sky had flamed its red farewell and was now dark.

The sheriff raised his gun, eased off the safety with his thumb, and broke through the last corn row into the clearing. For a moment he looked around in wild incomprehension. And then, rather suddenly, he realized what he was looking at.

The gun went off when it hit the ground and the load of double-ought buckshot blew by Hazen’s ear. But the sheriff barely noticed.

Two

Two hours later, Sheriff Dent Hazen stood in approximately the same spot. But now, the cornfield had been transformed into a gigantic crime scene. The clearing was ringed with portable sodium vapor lights that bathed the scene in a harsh white glow, and a generator growled somewhere out in the corn. The Staties had bulldozed an access road in to the site, and now almost a dozen state cruisers, SOC trucks, ambulances, and other vehicles sat in an instant parking lot carved out of the corn. Two photographers were taking pictures, their flashes punctuating the night, while a lone evidence gatherer crouched nearby, picking at the ground with a pair of tweezers.

Hazen stared at the victim, sickness rising in his gut. This was the first homicide in Medicine Creek in his lifetime. The last killing had been during Prohibition, when Rocker Manning had been shot at by the creek while buying a load of moonshine . . . that was back in, when, ’31? His granddaddy had handled the case, made the arrest. But that was nothing like this. This was something else entirely. This was fucking madness.

Hazen turned from the corpse and stared at the makeshift road through the corn, cut to save the troopers a quarter-mile hike. There was a good possibility the road had destroyed evidence. He wondered if it was standard Statie procedure, or if they even had a procedure for this kind of situation. All the activity had an ad hoc air about it, as if the troopers were so shocked by the crime that they were just making it up as they went along.

Sheriff Hazen didn’t hold Staties in particularly high regard. When you got down to it they were basically a bunch of tight-jawed assholes in shiny boots. But he could sympathize. This was something beyond anyone’s experience. He lit a fresh Camel off the stub of his last one and reminded himself that it wasn’t really his first homicide. It wasn’t his case at all. He may have found the body, but it was outside the township and therefore outside his jurisdiction. This was a Statie job, and thank the risen Lord for that.

“Sheriff Hazen?” The towering Kansas state trooper captain came crunching over the corn stubble, his black boots shining, his hand outstretched, mouth tensed in what was supposed to pass for a smile. Hazen took the hand and shook it, annoyed by the man’s height. It was the third time the captain had offered him his hand. Hazen wondered if the man had a bad memory or if he was just so agitated that the handshaking was a nervous reaction. Probably the latter.

“The M.E.’s coming down from Garden City,” the captain said. “Should be here in ten minutes.”

Sheriff Hazen wished to hell he’d sent Tad out on this one. He would’ve gladly given up his weekend fishing—Christ, he would’ve even stayed sober—to miss this. On the other hand, he thought, perhaps this would have been too much for Tad. In so many ways he was still only a kid.

“We’ve got ourselves an artist here,” said the trooper, shaking his head. “A real artist. You think this’ll make theKansas City Star ?”

Hazen didn’t reply. This was a new thought to him. He thought of his picture in the paper and found the idea displeasing. Someone walking past with a fluoroscope bumped into him. Christ, the crime scene was getting to be more crowded than a Baptist wedding.