The Fields
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Synopsis
It starts with a body - a young woman found dead in an Iowa cornfield, on one of the few family farms still managing to compete with the giants of Big Agriculture. For Sergeant Riley Fisher, newly promoted to head of investigations at the Black Hawk County Sheriff's Office, an already horrific crime takes on a personal edge when she discovers the victim is an old friend, from a dark past she thought she'd left behind. Rumour travels fast in small towns, while sweltering heat and state-wide elections only add to the pressure-cooker atmosphere. When another body is found, Riley is in danger of being engulfed by the fear and the frenzy. Something deeply disturbing is out there - and it reaches far beyond Black Hawk County.
Release date: January 25, 2022
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Print pages: 352
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The Fields
Erin Young
1
She ran without thinking, without direction, desperation driving her deep into the fields. The endless rows of corn were an oppressive labyrinth, ripe heads bowing above her, snagging her hair. Blades whipped her palms as she thrashed through the towering stalks, not looking back.
She stumbled on rutted ground, dry soil crumbling beneath her feet. Her sneaker, shucked half off her heel, slipped from her foot. She let it go, the earth spiking through her sock. Blood thrummed in her ears. The night was clotted with clouds, the darkness pressing. She could feel the pollen erupting around her, gritting her eyes. Her mother’s voice singsonged in her mind. Don’t forget your meds, sweetheart! A sob burst between her breaths.
Her lungs were burning. The thrumming in her ears was louder. Something out there. Coming closer. She felt a fresh stab of terror as light smeared the shadows, the knotted canopy shimmering green above her. She threw herself down, curling around the brace roots, eyes squeezed shut. The drone circled overhead, whining like a dentist’s drill. Her eyelids were rinsed with a pallid glow.
Slowly it passed, strobing the fields. Was that a shout she heard beneath its fading hum? Low growl of an engine in the distance? She curled herself tighter into stillness, at one with the roots and the soil. A mouse hiding from a hawk.
As her breaths slowed, the pain—kept at bay by adrenaline—came on. There were points of it across her body: the back of her skull, struck so hard her vision had exploded with light, two fingers of her left hand where she’d fallen, bending back with a nauseating snap, her thigh where the flimsy cotton of her clothes had been ripped open. But worst of all was her neck, where the pain was concentrating in a burning pool.
She went to touch her throat, but flinched when her fingers slid into something slick and pulpy. Her T-shirt was soaked. She had thought it was sweat, the night air so close she could barely breathe. But she could smell the blood now. Warm metal. Iron and rust. Sparks of memory: a tumble from her bike, knees split open on blistering asphalt, her uncle’s slaughterhouse in Fayette, squeals of half-stunned hogs and arcing blades, red beads on her palm welling at the razor’s sting, hot press of another hand to hers.
Her whole body was shaking, teeth chattering. She knew she should get up, but her limbs were leaden. Her breath quickened. The darkness swayed in front of her, a murmur of wind to shiver the corn. There was laughter in her mind. The fields, waist-high with spring crops, rippled before her as she ran. He was behind her, coming up fast. The delicious shock of his arms catching around her waist, her laugh ending in a shriek as she was lifted into the air. His lips on hers; salt-sweat and corn dust. Desire striking a bell inside her.
James.
Her thoughts snagged on him. Shaking confetti from his hair on their wedding day. Straightening his tie in the mirror on his way to work, blowing her a kiss from the front door that she would catch in her hand and pitch back to him. Nights in the beautiful home they had made together, buzz of cicadas through the windows, his brow a knot of concentration, screen glare reflected in his glasses, equations gliding up the lenses. The creak of their bed as he crept in, murmuring an apology as she shifted awake.
“Where have you been?”
“Working.”
“What time is it?”
“Time for sleep.”
Her neck throbbed. The wetness was spreading. She felt a strange fluttering deep inside and realized it was her own heart, fast and faint like tiny wings, beating against her chest.
She saw herself in the kitchen mirror, hours earlier—eyes red, blond hair wayward—as she snatched up the keys and left the house. The drive: AC drying her eyes, the calm-voiced directions of the GPS. Out from manicured neighborhoods along the blaze of the strip mall, Wendy’s and a funeral parlor, Bob’s Lube and the dentist, a woman grinning on the billboard outside, bugs swarming her neon smile. Past the Kum & Go gas station, over the railroad tracks, skirting the oil-black slick of the river, streetlights fading behind. A water tower rising ahead, standing sentinel over the vast dark of the cornfields. She had driven this route before, her mind on him, but fear had always made her turn back before she reached that flag on the edge of the screen, not knowing what she might find. Moths tilting at the windshield. Distant taillights bleeding red streaks through the darkness.
The fluttering in her chest was fainter. Soil puffed up with each gasp of breath to speckle her dry lips. She had never felt so thirsty. James, leaning in close on their wedding day, champagne fizzing in his glass. Oh God. James? Her thoughts were ebbing, memories fading like a freight train rumbling across the prairie night, wind in its wake.
So thirsty. So tired.
Time for sleep.
2
Riley Fisher glanced at the screen again. The GPS still wanted her to turn right, the arrow flashing insistently. Twenty-three minutes since dispatch had called. She drummed her fingers on the wheel, willing the lights to change. The usual flow of morning traffic—pickups and eighteen-wheelers—thundered past on the highway.
“I can walk from here.”
Glancing in the rearview mirror, Riley saw Madison had looked up from her phone. “It’s fine, sweetheart.”
Her niece held her gaze for a moment, then returned to whatever it was she’d been engrossed in since Riley had rushed her from the house, grabbing the girl’s backpack and hustling her into the car. The screen’s glow highlighted the sharpness of Maddie’s cheeks.
The blast of a horn behind told her the lights had changed. Riley turned left. She was driving down Lafayette, passing the department—the opposite direction to where she should be headed—when she saw Logan Wood in the parking lot, sunlight winking off his badge.
Spotting her, he jogged to the sidewalk, hand raised. As she stopped, Logan opened the door and ducked his head in. He was wearing aviators. A black T-shirt beneath his khaki shirt was embossed with the department’s letters in white across the neck: BHCSO. Black Hawk County Sheriff’s Office. “You headed to the scene? I just got the call, but Carter isn’t off shift yet and we’re short on cruisers.”
“Get in.”
Logan slid in, repositioning the Mobile Data Terminal so his broad frame would fit in the Dodge Charger’s low-slung seat. He spotted the girl in the back. “Oh. Hey, Maddie.”
“Hi,” she said, not looking up.
Logan looked at Riley, his tanned brow creasing.
“Ethan,” she murmured in answer, maneuvering her way into the traffic. “I’ve just got to drop her home.”
Six blocks later, Riley pulled up outside the house on the shabby fringes of one of the poorer neighborhoods in Waterloo. The street was potholed, weeds growing between the cracks. The houses hunched close together, flags limp in the airless morning. Rusted grills and sagging lawn chairs protruded from grass grown wild. Outside her sister-in-law’s house a hulking red tow truck was parked on the curb. On the door, MASON LEE’S AUTO REPAIRS was underlined with a wrench.
Maddie climbed out, phone still gripped in her hand. There was a white skull on the case, hollow eye sockets staring between her fingers. Riley didn’t know when it had changed from the sparkled pink one she’d bought for her niece’s fourteenth birthday.
“I’ll see you soon,” she called through the window.
Maddie turned to go, tossing her dark hair and swinging her backpack onto her shoulder.
“Hey! I love you.”
The girl glanced back. A smile softened her face, briefly. “Love you too.” Then she was gone, disappearing behind the tow truck’s red bulk.
Riley waited until the screen door closed, then pulled away.
“About as chatty as Jake and Callie first thing in the morning,” Logan observed.
Riley didn’t answer. She’d met Logan’s niece and nephew a couple of times and had found them bright and garrulous. A surprise, given what they’d been through. Maddie had been more like that: quicker with smiles and affection, a year or so ago. The frayed friendship bracelet on her wrist the girl had spent hours braiding for her, all her favorite colors—peacock blues and ocean greens—was testament to that. It’s her age, Aunt Rose had said. But Riley wasn’t so sure that was the problem. Her gaze went to the rearview, the tow truck still visible as she turned the corner, then put her foot on the gas.
Moments later they were crossing the Cedar River, which gleamed like a sheet of steel, winding its way through miles of farmland and prairie to join the Iowa River that flowed into the mighty Mississippi. Fumes from factories on the riverbanks smeared the sky. The Cedar soon disappeared behind them but maintained its presence in the creeks that fingered their way through the dense woods of the state park. All the waterways here were joined like green veins.
Logan tilted the screen of the MDT, enough for him to read the details listed alongside the GPS map. The destination flag was planted in the middle of nowhere. “A farmer called it in?”
“Just under an hour ago.”
“Who’s on scene?”
“Schmidt and Nolan. Cole took the call.”
Riley tried to keep her tone neutral, but she saw Logan look sideways at her and knew he’d caught the bite in it.
She turned off the highway before they reached Cedar Falls, where she’d started her journey, and finally she was on track, heading north into the county on empty back roads. Cornfields stretched away, signs naming the types and provenance of the corn staked along the roadside. Most bore the name Agri-Co—one of the largest corporations in America, responsible for much of the country’s seed development and a major supplier of agrochemicals. There weren’t many farms in the Corn Belt that didn’t use their products, either sowed in the soil or sprayed on it.
Logan slapped at his neck. “Goddamn bugs.” He studied his hand, then fished a bottle of sanitizer from a pouch on his utility belt, next to his gun. He squeezed a blob into his palm and rubbed his hands together, filling the car with a chemical whiff. “Bugs, shit, and corn.” He slid his disinfected palm toward the blade-straight road, lancing ahead beyond the windshield, clouded with dust. “On and fucking on.”
It was almost a year since Logan joined the department, moving with his folks from Flint. His father, niece, and nephew had been badly affected by the crisis there—when lead seeped into Flint’s water supply after city officials changed the system in an attempt to save money, then tried to cover up the devastating consequences. His mother had determined that a new start in the great green-gold of the Iowa prairie would be good for them all. But Logan seemed to be finding it hard to adjust, not least because he’d been a detective back in Flint, and the transfer had seen him demoted to a deputy in Patrol, and a rookie at that.
“Might as well start calling it home,” Riley told him, looking out over the fields of soy and maize unfurling before them in gentle waves. Here and there, red barns rose from the rippling green like the prows of graceful ships, the blades of Aermotor windmills rising like masts above them. Farther off, silver towers of wind turbines and grain silos marked some of the larger farms in the county, the air gauzy with dust. Closer was a water tower, its potbellied bowl teetering on spindly steel legs. The sky was a blaze of blue, just a few wisps of white cloud. A cottontail day, her mom would have called it.
“So damn flat,” murmured Logan. “Like God went and stomped on it.”
“Missing the purple mountain majesties of Michigan?”
“We had hills. Hills like you’ve never seen, flatlander.”
“It’s Sergeant Flatlander to you, hill-boy.” Riley checked herself as she said it. They’d bantered like this through the six months he’d been assigned as her partner, back when she’d still been a deputy in Patrol—Logan mocking all things Iowan, usually the performance of the Hawkeyes, her ribbing him about his obsession with the gym, his regime of vitamins, and his need for cleanliness.
But things were different now.
Copyright © 2022 by Erin Young
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