Jeffery Deaver

Downstate

Wednesday

Chapter 1

Not easy collaring a suspect when you don’t know what he looks like.

Where he might be.

Who he is.

But even in seemingly impossible cases like this a crack can open up briefly, long enough to catch a break.

If you can play it right and trick into the equation a little luck — that great unknown in the world of law enforcement — you might get your prey.

And if not, well, that was a problem. Mr. X would remain a mystery man. As would the key to scores of impending deaths — adults and children, all innocent, all unsuspecting.

Constant Marlowe piloted her second-, no, make it third-hand Honda Accord into the outskirts of Plains, Illinois, about a hundred miles west and a bit south of Chicago. The landscape made her uneasy; the scabby green and yellow hide of corn rows was eerie to start with, but of more concern was that they efficiently obscured any threats.

Time was urgent — those soon-to-be murders — but her route to the town was complicated. Evasive. As it had to be.

Because she believed Mr. X had learned that he was being pursued.

And therefore might have become a pursuer himself, and that meant she was now prey as well.

With a significant difference being that while he was a mystery, he very likely knew all about her; it was impossible to conceal the identity of law enforcement agents, especially one like Constant Marlowe, who made the press occasionally — for good and for bad.

The day was tired autumn, September. Maybe by the numbers this technically was summer still, but the season waned, and yellow light and yellow husks and yellow dust were the outfit of the day. Many small metropoles in this midriff of Illinois had once been mill towns and now hobbled along with some industry — plastic extrusion, metalwork, automotive — but Plains was and always would be agricultural. The grain elevators — towering high over the flatlands — and horizon-to-horizon fields attested to this fact.

Sticking to evasive mode, Marlowe had driven here from her office in Chicago along surface roads, not interstates, which made the journey west a curious mix of vigilance, the high she felt in pursuing a dangerous opponent... and the inevitable boredom from mile after mile of endless blacktop.

To combat the latter, she had put on an evangelical station for amusement. Marlowe smiled rarely but the stations brought some levity before they staticked to silence when line of sight was lost. She especially liked the call-ins, mostly women who asked the radio audience congregation to pray for their husbands, their brothers, their fathers, sometimes mothers, who were about to be sentenced or were coming up for parole. The preacher suggested that a financial contribution to the 800 number soon to be provided would go a long way in bending the Lord’s ear.

Marlowe was tempted to call in and ask why God hadn’t intervened a bit earlier and sent those loved ones down a righteous, rather than felonious, course. Might have saved a fair amount of everybody’s time, God’s included.

But as with all such thoughts, the leap from conception to execution was too great.

She now paused on the outskirts of Plains, pulling to the shoulder. She stretched, a luxurious maneuver — after moving her pistol out of the way of the seat belt clasp. It was a Smith & Wesson Bodyguard, a .380, and small, but it featured a laser sight under the muzzle. The light was pretty useless for sighting, as any handgun shooter knew, but the crimson beam produced a wonderful oh-fuck-me-don’t-shoot reaction on the part of anyone whose chest the dot centered on. Marlowe’s employer, the Illinois Department of Criminal Investigations, had an absolute rule that no laser-beam weapons were to be carried by its agents — out of concern for lawsuits that perps who were targeted might sue for eye damage.

Or maybe for psychological trauma. Marlowe didn’t know exactly.

She had found an efficient exception to the prohibition, however: she simply didn’t tell anyone at IDCI she carried the weapon.

Which put her in mind of her boss, the fiftysomething Stan Robbins, a lifer in the Department. Law enforcement is usually a by-the-book sport, and nobody played the game better than Robbins. Her scars were from fighting and from blades; his were from bullets, two of them — one prominent on his neck. She sometimes wondered how it was he had not bled to death. So. By the book, a history of courage in the field, and now a deskbound coach. Marlowe respected him.

But she was careful to share only selected details of her operations. Better for him. Better for her.

She scanned the landscape and saw no one who might be a tail.

Which didn’t mean there wasn’t one, of course. In Constant Marlowe’s world, pursuers good and pursuers bad knew the art of being unobtrusive, if not invisible.

A fast look at the map of the town and surroundings on her phone.

Where are you? she thought.

Mr. X was unique among the perps she pursued.

He was not a killer.

He was not muscle.

But he had a weapon. A formidable one. Not a Glock, not a switchblade, not C-4 explosive. No, he was armed with information.

Facts and data that he alone seemed to have the skill to unearth.

If a mob boss or domestic terrorist or bank robber needed details about locations, finances, weapons, travel plans, security, targets — anything instrumental in planning and executing a crime — they would call Mr. X through an elaborate dark-web communications network.

Presently his client was Tyson Barth, who ran a big crew out of Cicero, a Chicago suburb with a history of being home to organized crime. The press called Barth ruthless and sociopathic. Law enforcers used a better description, in Marlowe’s thinking: the squat, balding former weightlifter was a rabid piece of shit.

Marlowe’s employer, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office and Chicago PD were determined to bring him down and were offering a reward. Barth had learned that somebody in his ranks was willing to take the government up on the offer — probably two of his men based out of Chicago.

Barth had waved a large sum of cash Mr. X’s way to find their identities and determine when and where would be an advantageous place to kill them. Barth didn’t want them shot. He wanted them blown up, ideally along with their family and anyone else nearby. As a message that traitors were not to be tolerated.

Marlowe’s department had learned that Mr. X had either discovered them and picked a good spot for the explosive murders or was close to doing so.

Hence her mission here: to ID Mr. X, collar him and, ideally, flip him — turning him into a cooperating witness who would testify against Barth.

Yesterday Marlowe had raided a warehouse in South Chicago, one that she had learned might have been a hidey-hole where Barth could stash drugs, guns, loot... and maybe the occasional body. The raid had been a lightning strike: after the doors were blown with breaching charges, she had hurried inside, gun in hand.

Five minutes later she was outside, swiping through her phone to examine the photos she’d taken in the place.

“Have a lead?” asked an officer from the local precinct, her blond hair in a taut bun.

“We’ll see.” She’d expanded one of the photos with two fingers. She held up the phone, showing a map. “You ever hear of this town?”

“Plains, Illinois? No. What’s there?”

“Don’t know. But I guess I’m about to find out.”

“Didn’t want to be seen walking into your office,” Constant Marlowe said.

She was speaking to Trenton Carr, associate deputy sheriff of Plains County. They were in a coffee shop in the shirtsleeve portion of the city, a place of tired, and deceased, businesses: warehouses, light industry, truck repair. She smelled automotive grease, though maybe that was her imagination.

“Got it. Clandestine. Like spies. Happy to help you, Agent Marlowe.”

“‘Constant’ is fine.” She tended not to use a contraction with her given, as the “s” suffix made it seem that her name was Constance.

It wasn’t. Constant. To which she’d legally changed it from her parents’ well-meaning but just plain wrong choice for her: Prudence.

They ordered coffee — hers — and ice tea.

The man clearly hadn’t known what to expect. Even small towns were no strangers to women law enforcers but they were usually of the crisp uniform variety. Marlowe was in what she usually wore either in office or out: black jeans, a white T-shirt and black leather jacket. She’d polished her boots three weeks ago, no, maybe four. They’d do.

Carr had passed a test of sorts that some women LEOs held when it came to male associates. He had not once glanced at her chest, where a sports bra could be made out in certain light. To some female cops, perusal, however fast, could put the kibosh on a working relationship right there. Marlowe didn’t give a crap. Just accept that certain attraction exists between or within the sexes and move on — as long as no lines, which we all can recognize, are crossed.

Carr did however spend a moment examining the scar on her forehead, particularly obvious today, with the mass of dark red and brown hair wrangled into a ponytail. The several inch disfigurement came not from a perp but had occurred when she was in New Jersey to box. (Notably the injury occurred following the match. Not in the ring. And, as the cliché goes, you should’ve seen the other guy.)

Marlowe had been a pro boxer and had garnered many titles in her division. She weighed 120 and was five six. The weight, of course, mattered only in professional or sanctioned league competitions, back in the day. Now, when she boxed for the fun of it — once a week or so — she sought out opponents larger than herself. In the Illinois Public Safety Boxing Club, her favorite were the women prison guards, who were bigger in general than firefighters and cops.

Fiercer too.

Her gray eyes scanned the dusty street. No threats. Just a big concrete wall with an ancient green and red logo and letters that had grown illegible sometime in the past half century.

“Sheriff Dodd wasn’t too, you know, forthcoming with the details.”

“Because there aren’t a lot.”

She explained the IDCI’s dilemma. A bombing planned with dozens of innocents at risk. Barth’s information man, Mr. X, here in Plains, or soon to be.

And the desperate urgency to identify him and turn him into a cooperating witness.

Carr carefully sipped tea as if concerned it might slosh, and soil his carefully pressed uniform. He wore a wedding ring but because of his meticulously trimmed nails and assembled hair and plane-smooth cheeks and posture, she bet that he ironed the garments himself. There was a military air about him and she knew that the vast majority of soldiers spent more time with an iron than they did with machine guns.

“I’ve heard of this Tyson Barth. Even down here. Is he the you-know-what people say?”

She wasn’t sure what exactly he’d heard but she was safe in saying, “And then some.”

“Next steps?”

“I’m looking for a self-storage operation.”

“Oh, we’ve got those,” Carr said with a sour laugh. “Don’t know if you noticed but Plains isn’t exactly flush. Mega farms’ve taken over the small ones. It’s a pandemic, the firings. There’re three sure ways of making money here. One is payroll advance lending. The second is self-storage. The third,” he added as if describing job responsibilities to a new hire, “is cooking meth.”

Chapter 2

He wouldn’t kill her, of course.

That wasn’t what he did.

His grandkids might say, That wasn’t how he rolled.

But once he found what Agent Marlowe was looking for — a witness, a stash of evidence, who knew what she’d tipped to? — he’d relay those facts to Mr. Barth in Cicero.

And what Barth did with that information: kill her, hurt her, destroy her career? Well, that was not up to him.

Marcel Alexander Descartes — average of weight, average of height, average of looks, average of temperament — had one gift on this earth and there was nothing average about that. He found things that other people wanted but couldn’t find, those things being not gold or money but something far more intoxicating to him: information, data, facts.

The fifty-year-old Descartes discovered motels where witnesses were hiding out. He discovered hidden financial accounts. He discovered shipments of meth and fent that had “accidentally fallen off the truck” during shipment. He discovered buried gold (of which in this business there was more than one would think; only naive, or just plain stupid, criminals accepted crypto). Somebody who had hired him had once joked he could probably even find Jimmy Hoffa’s body. Descartes tended to giggle when he was uncertain about something, and he’d giggled at that, not knowing who Jimmy Hoffa was. He’d looked it up. A union mob guy who disappeared decades ago. A famous mystery to this day. He read some more. He figured out where the body was. He let it drop. The whereabouts of Mr. Hoffa’s corpse was not an assignment he was being paid for.

The latest project — for Mr. Barth — involved mining his network of sources in the underworld and the dark web to track two men willing to dime out the boss and where would be a good place to blow them to pieces.

Pretty easy, bordering on routine — though the bomb part was unique.

But then Constant Marlowe happened.

The agent on a mission to bring Tyson Barth down.

And this was troublesome because his research into her revealed she was a different sort of law enforcer.

One who didn’t always “play by the rules,” one ex-con had said.

He’d learned about a raid on one of Mr. Barth’s warehouses in Cicero just yesterday, in which — according to some helpful people on the scene of the operation — she had found a lead to Plains. Mr. Barth didn’t know exactly what that clue might be, but it was concerning. His illegal activities blanketed the state. There might be a witness or ledger book or security cam footage involving one of his Downstate operations. Didn’t matter if it was years, or decades, old. There was no statute of limitations on murder.

So Descartes’s next few days lay out before him like an obsessive-compulsive traveler’s itinerary for a vacation to the South of France. He’d learn what Marlowe was doing here, give Barth enough information to neutralize her, then hand over the IDs of the two traitors.

And afterward... Ah, beach time!

Florida, maybe.

Or Colombia.

Descartes loved bundling up — to keep the pernicious sun from his ivory skin — and reading books. He liked murder mysteries, playing the game of finding the killer within the first five pages of a crime novel. He almost always did. (His late wife was forever irritated to watch movies with him. His body language telegraphed that he’d spotted the villain early in the flick.)

Presently, his job to unearth the information (never the flippant and insulting “info”) that Agent Marlowe was after had brought him here — the second-story open-air landing of a motel across the street from the U-STORE-IT on Galveston Road in a largely deserted part of Plains.

He had simply strolled in and climbed the stairs. No security, no cameras.

No motel guests either.

He suspected the motel did a fair amount of business after hours. This looked like that kind of neighborhood. But now, no one.

Dressed in a modest gray suit and shirt without a tie — an average outfit that aroused no suspicion — he was standing in the shadows and was 99 percent sure he was invisible from the street. In any event, Agent Marlowe had glanced around several times, but her gaze had not once swept past his nest.

Descartes was pretty sure she believed she was free from surveillance. The art of tailing someone had changed over the years. Now Descartes used the tools of hacking into security and traffic cams and arranging to swap cars every thirty or forty miles for makes and models completely different from the previous one.

The tail, though, hadn’t been easy. Agent Marlowe had clearly assumed she was being followed and taken a dizzying route from Chicago to Plains. But he’d stayed with her, following the agent to a coffee shop meeting just an hour before with a man whose license plate indicated a private vehicle but one registered to the associate deputy sheriff of Plains County. Information he’d uncovered revealed that Trenton Carr had been second in command for four and a half years. He’d be growing impatient, probably, and that meant he’d want a big win to energize his career.

And that, in turn, suggested he might help the rule-bender with the red hair bend the rules even further.

And what, he now asked silently, exactly was in that storage space? What was there in the South Chicago warehouse that led here? And how big a risk was it to Mr. Barth?

And to himself, of course.

A man who appreciated the vitality — and the dangers — of information, he protected his own zealously, keeping his identity closely guarded. Was there something in the storage space having to do with his and Barth’s meeting and conversations? WhatsApp and Signal were good at privacy, but not infallible.

But he would never speculate.

He needed facts.

Facts were popcorn to Marcel Descartes. Details, snippets. They were his addiction, his cocaine, his vodka.

This was true professionally, of course (working for the mob and in his other, his legitimate capacity: he was a freelance research librarian by trade). But he also had personal passionate interest in the phenomenon of information. Like a man obsessing over amassing rare coins or breeding koi, he had a massive collection of anything related to the subject. The scores of shelves at home contained UNIVAC punch cards, semaphore flags, signal lanterns, cuneiform message sticks, pens, typewriters, floppy disks, hard disks, dictionaries, encyclopedias, declassified government documents on surveillance, spy cameras — anything that was a part of an information age (there was no single one capital “I,” capital “A”; every civilization and every era had its own obsession with facts).

Just a half hour ago, he’d parked two blocks away from the self-storage unit and, walking to the motel, he’d been shocked to see in the window of a pawnshop a typewriter of a model he’d coveted for years.

It was a Barnett Standard TypeRight and the rarest of the rare, an electric model from the 1960s. But the device was significantly more than that. It was a tool for espionage — corporate or governmental. When you typed on it, a transmitter sent a radio signal of the order of the keys that the typist hit. These were picked up by a receiving unit. The latter had to be nearby and static would often corrupt the data, but it was state of the art when it was created. It was reportedly instrumental in the assassination of a Russian diplomat in Baltimore and a Lithuanian businessman in New York City. How it ended up here in Plains, Illinois, was impossible to guess.

After this job he would come back and—

His attention snapped back to the self-storage unit. Something was happening with Agent Marlowe.

She had left the office and was pacing on the sidewalk, on a phone call.

It seemed her face was grim. Or was it disappointment? Or, possibly, was she just naturally of that disposition? He knew many facts about her but details like emotions and fears and lusts not manifest in actions remained, with her, with everyone, a mystery, unless and until one had the time and energy to mine, and mine deep.

An example now: Her icy demeanor didn’t negate a humane streak. A homeless man shuffled along the sidewalk and offered a cup. Marlowe fished out a bill for him. He paused as if surprised it was paper and not coins and spoke a few words. She simply nodded and returned to the call.

Descartes watched as the man shuffled drunkenly away. There was little doubt where he was going to spend the money. Just past the storage company, he stepped behind a bus stop bench and dropped to his knees, puking.

It turned Descartes’s stomach and he looked away.

Marlowe now sat down in her car, still on the phone. She plugged in a hands-free, took out a notebook or pad and began flipping through pages.

She then disconnected the call and sat back.

So, was the visit a bust or not?

Ten minutes passed and the reason for her dallying became clear, the answer arriving in the form of a County Sheriff’s Office vehicle. It double-parked, blinkers on, and a woman deputy got out. Marlowe joined her. The uniform handed some folded papers to Marlowe, and she read them, nodding. Then she shook the deputy’s hand and the officer climbed into her car and drove off.

Ah, troubling news for Mr. Barth and himself.

Search warrants always were.

Marlowe walked into the office and displayed the papers. The clerk nodded as she read them over — with some familiarity, it seemed. Made sense. Self-storage units were probably home to all sorts of crime-related goodies. And police surely got warrants with some frequency to take a peek.

The two of them left the office and walked into that portion of the facility where the storage spaces sat. They vanished from view.

Descartes would contact Barth and tell him that Marlowe was executing a search warrant here. The mobster would have to think hard about whether there was anything hidden that might be a concern.

He now noted the homeless man on the move again. After peeing in some bushes, he stumbled back the way he’d come.

Tattered clothing, dirty face and hands, mismatched shoes.

How had he ended up this way? What was his story?

That information would be interesting to learn. Marcel Descartes’s hunger for facts was boundless.

Well, here perhaps was an answer to the homeless man’s plight. As he passed Marlowe’s car he glanced inside and stopped. Then looked around. He was homeless, perhaps, because he was a chronic criminal.

Testing the door handle.

Locked, of course.

Then he walked to a pile of concrete chunks at a DPW worksite and lifted one about the size of a grapefruit.

He wasn’t...

Yes, he was.

Really, buddy? The woman who just gave you some cash?

He reared back and struck the driver’s side window.

Nothing happened.

Homeless stared in surprise. He hadn’t guessed, apparently, that auto glass had to be more resilient to breakage than residential panes.

Again.

Success.

A dozen tiny cubes of glass fell inside and out.

Descartes had expected an alarm, but no. The car was an older model and bare bones. It was registered to Marlowe personally, he’d learned.

Mr. Homeless stared for a moment, as if suddenly realizing what he’d done, then dropped the rock and reached in, grabbing a fast-food bag, some cash — the change from McDonald’s probably — and the pad she’d been looking at.

Then he was sprinting away — well, hurrying in a shuffle.

And making not bad time. This would be his nth offense, and getting arrested once again might mean a long — and alcohol-free — sentence.

He turned onto a street of warehouses.

Marcel Descartes went after him.

He took the stairs to the street two at a time and began sprinting after the thief. Descartes did not belong to a health club but his mob job — as opposed to the library — was active and gave him enough exercise to keep him in the shape of a man ten years younger. Also, no smoking or alcohol helped.

He remained across the street from his target as he slowed to a fast stride, to match the homeless man’s pace.

At the end of the block was a shabby city park. It was clear Plains was not flush with funds for civic improvements. The place, which occupied a whole block, was fiercely overgrown, the benches underpainted. The sad grass needed a mowing.

This would have to be a hit and run, and he would need to get back to his vantage point. Marlowe might be in the storage space for hours. Or she might have found it empty and returned immediately and moved on to searching for her clues someplace else.

And so when Homeless slowed Descartes moved in and grabbed the pad from the man’s hand.

“Hey, asshole!” His voice was slurred and Descartes was overwhelmed by the scent of liquor.

Descartes turned back toward the motel, moving at a fast pace. He loved notepads and Post-its. People usually were conscious of what they keyboarded online. But handwritten notes? They jotted all sorts of things they shouldn’t, from passcodes to bank accounts to mistresses’ phone numbers.

The pad might give him an idea of what Marlowe knew about Barth... and Descartes himself.

And the theft could serve a second purpose. Possibly derailing Agent Marlowe’s career, and eliminating her as a threat to Mr. Barth altogether. It wasn’t as if she’d committed the infraction of leaving a weapon in her car. But if the information on the pad was significant enough — like the name of a witness to Mr. Barth’s operation — that could be fatal to her job.

And it gave Marcel Descartes a huge sense of satisfaction. Like some people feel when hitting a jackpot in Vegas. Two for one...

As he turned the corner toward the street leading back to the motel, he was thinking of the typewriter. He would definitely—

He stopped fast, staring into the muzzle of Constant Marlowe’s gun.

Descartes sighed, not the least surprised now, to glance back and see Homeless, a police badge on a lanyard around his neck, approach.

Whose credentials revealed him to be Trenton Carr, the second-string officer Agent Marlowe had met in the coffee shop upon her arrival in town. Descartes had seen the man’s picture, but the disguise had been masterful, shuffling realistic and the scent of alcohol — poured on clothes, not imbibed — a perfect touch.

He thought back to his earlier reflection about guessing the killer in the first few minutes of a movie.

Today, Marcel Descartes had missed the twist entirely.

Chapter 3

Mr. X — real name the exotic Marcel Alexander Descartes — displayed no emotion as he sat cuffed and seat-belted in the back of Carr’s unmarked cruiser. The officer had scrubbed the dirt off his hands and face with alcohol wipes, and had eyed his soiled garments uneasily. “The wife isn’t going to like this” was his only comment about that part of the operation (so maybe they shared laundry detail).

The plan had unfolded seamlessly.

After the obvious raid at the South Chicago warehouse Marlowe had made the first chess move as she stood beneath the security camera and announced a lead to Plains. The words to the uniformed policewoman, though, meant: there was no lead and the town itself was a purely arbitrary choice. She just liked the name. She was pretty sure, though, that either through electronic security or word of mouth, information would get back to Barth about the Downstate lead.

Then she’d driven here in a suitably evasive manner to make Mr. X, well, “Descartes” she could call him now, to make him believe the mission was vital and she was trying to shake surveillance.

Her plan was to make him believe the evidence she’d learned of was a hidden storage space in the city, also picked arbitrarily with the help of Deputy Carr.

The little performance here involved her talking to the manager not about a warrant but simply inquiring about prices and sizes of units. The document she’d received from one of Carr’s fellow deputies was simply a list, which she herself had drawn up earlier, of items she wanted to store. When Marlowe and the clerk walked into the storage units themselves, Carr, dressed like a drunk homeless man — and delighted to play the role — broke into her car and took her notepad.

Whereupon, as she’d hoped, Mr. X went for it, thinking the pages would have information about her investigation.

Now, Marlowe opened the rear door of the cruiser, parked outside the storage unit, and looked down at Descartes, who gazed back. He wasn’t physically imposing, but his pale skin — fishy, almost iridescent — was unsettling, as were the deep-blue and utterly calm eyes. “Agent Marlowe, you realize I haven’t done anything wrong. I witnessed a robbery and I recovered the stolen objects from the perpetrator. I was in the process of returning everything and reporting the crime — a Good Samaritan — when you illegally arrested me.”

She frowned. “How did you know my name?” She hadn’t introduced herself.

He hesitated, then smiled at this catch.

She continued, “Of course, it’ll be for the jury to decide, but the prosecutor’s argument is you stole the notepad and the money—”

“What money?”

“The five hundred-dollar bills tucked inside the pad.”

He grew still.

“The notebook wasn’t mine. It was Associate Deputy Sheriff Carr’s. He’d left it in the front seat of my car. He has a receipt from Target for it, and the serial numbers of the bills are part of a withdrawal from his personal checking account this morning. A receipt for the food too, which you also stole. So his items, in his possession on the street by the park... and it was him you robbed. And it was robbery under the penal code because you used physical force. A true Good Samaritan would have called 911.”

Descartes thought for a moment. “It’s petit larceny. First offense. That’s nothing. If you want me to turn evidence, Agent Marlowe, you have no leverage. The worst I’d be sentenced to is a few thousand dollars of fines and a month in jail.”

She exhibited a confused look. “Oh, that’s not what this is about, Mr. Descartes. I just needed your ID and your undivided attention. I want Tyson Barth. You conspired with him to kill witnesses.”

“Not true. And even if it were, there’s no evidence. You have no proof at all.”

She met those odd blue eyes easily.

“You have no criminal record, other than this.” A nod at the evidence bag where the notebook sat. “Cooperate. It’ll work out for everybody.”

“Not for any... employers of mine it won’t. And therefore not for me.”

“You may think you’re just Google, or DuckDuckGo. Feeding your clients information. What they do with it isn’t your concern. Is that your position?”

“Brass manufacturers sell their products to many companies. If some of them happen to make bullets...” A shrug. “They’re not guilty of any deaths.”

“Hm. But as you move a little higher up the food chain... the maker of casings, then the maker of live rounds, then the maker of guns themselves... That argument gets a little wobbly, don’t you think?”

“Not really.”

“Watch your foot there.” She nodded to the appendage. He pulled it inside and she closed the door and joined Carr. He said, “My mother had an expression: We’ll let him stew in his own juices.”

Marlowe hadn’t heard it. Amusing.

“Let’s hope,” the man continued, “he’ll decide even just thirty days in jail isn’t a cakewalk. And cooperate.”

“You did a good job, Deputy.” She shook his hand. “I’ll get Cook County to send me the transfer documents, and get a transport van here for tomorrow morning.” Marlowe looked the officer’s grimy clothing over and added, “One thing more.”

“What’s that?”

“Work on your acceptance speech. You’ll get an Academy Award for this performance.”

In ten minutes Marlowe was at her hotel, a part of a functional, reasonably priced chain, which was common on the interstates but, like this one, found occasionally in downtown city neighborhoods. The street it was on featured antique stores, clothing boutiques and restaurants with energetic fryers.

She parked in the garage, the broken window facing away from the main portion of the structure, and took the registration and insurance card with her, though she guessed street crime wasn’t much of a danger in Plains. She walked into the brightly lit lobby, debating. She wasn’t particularly hungry. She’d left one hamburger as part of the bait but had eaten the other and an order of fries before setting up shop at the storage space.

But she wanted something.

Asking the desk clerk for a convenience or grocery store nearby, she was directed up the block. R&R Grocery was typical of urban food and sundry establishments, a miniature version of Safeway or Food Lion, Lucky or Publix — take your pick. Higher prices and a smaller selection. But she was sure it would have what she sought.

The place was nearly empty, only one customer — a teenager looking at the prepared sandwiches. Marlowe hoped it wasn’t his dinner. They were anemic and limp.

The tanned, broad-shouldered man behind the counter, around fifty, looked up from his phone screen and, in response to her question, directed her to the cookie/cracker section, where she picked up a package of Oreos — scoring one with the double filling. There was also a mint variety but those were not for her.

Constant Marlowe was a purist.

Then the dairy fridge, where she picked up a pint of whole milk.

Her repast was set.

She queued behind the boy paying for his food. He was sixteen or seventeen, she guessed, and dressed in baggy gray cargo pants, a bulky black hoodie. Impressive silver running shoes. He was just under six feet and lanky. His features suggested some Latino heritage, though possibly Mediterranean. Constant Marlowe was convinced that in five hundred years the earth would be populated with a single race — though humankind would still find plenty of economic and religious and social and cultural divisions to fight over. Maybe eye color or quantity of hair.

She was not surprised that the clerk kept eyeing him more carefully than he had Marlowe. Her research into Plains, Illinois, revealed that the place, ethnically homogenous for the most part, had been the subject of some media and governmental interest about racial discrimination. There’d even been some violence directed toward people of color.

As he received his change, the boy turned to the window and squinted, nodding his head, as if signaling somebody. It seemed innocent enough to Marlowe but the clerk, maybe thinking his actions were an all-clear signal for a robbery, turned and looked sharply out the glass, the smears accentuated by the failing sun.

The instant the clerk turned away, the boy lunged behind the counter, grabbed a stack of retail gift cards — Target and Best Buy and Macy’s — and bolted for the door.

“Hey!” the clerk shouted.

The boy stopped, gave him the finger, looking him over defiantly, then turned and sprinted away.

Marlowe sighed.

And I thought my day was over.

She set down her purchases.

It seemed there was another customer she had not seen. A businessman in the back of the store. He dropped his handbasket, sending cans and bottles rolling, and ran in pursuit of the boy. He was a solid two hundred pounds — mostly muscle, she assessed — and was moving fast. “I’ll get the prick!”

She shouted a harsh “No!”

Startling the clerk with her volume.

She joined pursuit. Outside she called, “Stop! I’m a police officer.” Easier than explaining the hierarchy of Illinois law enforcement. Her badge was out. Again: “Stop!”

Referring to both males, but mostly to the big man who was gaining on the kid. There are very few instances in which civilians can use violence to stop a property offense crime when there is no physical risk to the victim. And one needed to keep in mind that being heroic might have more direct consequences to you: someone who looked like an innocent graffiti tagger or shoplifter could have a Glock in his waistband or a knife in his pocket.

“No!” she called again.

But the customer, who had to have heard her, paid no attention. At an alleyway he tackled the boy and they went down hard, wrestling, trading sloppy punches. The kid had little experience in street fighting, it was clear. He was mostly protecting his face from the man’s powerful blows and swinging an occasional fist.

She ran up to them. “Back off.”

“The hell are—” the customer began.

She shoved her badge into the customer’s face.

“Oh. Shit.”

He backed off.

She pulled the boy up to his feet and felt him tense.

Stealing gift cards was minor; resisting, on the other hand, was a big deal. And more to the point, given that Marlowe was the arresting, the boy would earn some hurt if he tried to fight.

She shook her head no and though she was some inches shorter he sensed she was not a woman to ignore. His shoulders slumped. She cuffed him.

The customer must have dialed the emergency number. And soon a siren bleated its way through the air.

One squad car, Sheriff’s Office, pulled up, then another. She wondered if it would be Carr or the woman deputy who’d also played a part in collaring Marcel Descartes, but no, they were different deputies, though also a man and a woman.

She showed her creds to the male law officer, in the first car, and explained what had happened. The second deputy, a stocky no-nonsense woman, vigorously patted the boy down, then swapped her cuffs for Marlowe’s. The boy, whose name, according to his ID, was Felipe Vargas, was eased into the back of one of the cars. He sat silently, on his face a look of... what was it? Not anger or defiance or fear.

Disappointment, it seemed.

After pulling on blue gloves, a deputy scooped up the gift cards and placed them in an evidence bag. Into a second went a wallet and money, door keys.

No vehicle key, Marlowe noted.

She, the customer and the deputies walked back to the grocery, where the officers took statements. They queried the clerk too, who turned out to be the store owner, Jack Raleigh. The balding man looked shaken by the incident and was rubbing his hands together in a compulsive way. Marlowe felt sorry that he’d been traumatized.

The woman deputy pointed to the ceiling, where a video security camera sat, but Raleigh admitted it was broken and he hadn’t gotten around to having it fixed yet. He grimaced at the lapse, but the deputies weren’t particularly concerned. There were eyewitnesses and evidence aplenty to support a case.

Business cards were exchanged and the deputies left. The customer returned to his shopping, and Marlowe collected her milk and cookies and walked back to the counter.

She noticed Felipe had left his sandwich and can of Red Bull, which he’d paid for. The owner, Raleigh, said, “Thanks. I’m still shaking.”

“No worries.” She pushed the Oreos and the milk forward and withdrew a credit card.

“No, no, no!” Raleigh said emphatically. “You’re kidding! The least I can do. You want a... I don’t know, hot dog too?”

He nodded to a heated display where a half dozen shriveled sausages revolved under a brutal sunlamp.

“That’s okay.”

He sighed. “You don’t know what it’s like to be in retail nowadays. Kids come in, like that punk. And they just take stuff. Used to be subtle. Pocket things when you weren’t looking. Now, they just stroll in and take what they want and they don’t give a shit if anybody sees them.”

Marlowe was curious. She stepped back and let the customer set his purchases on the counter, but Raleigh thanked him too and comped the food and laundry detergent. The man left, giving Marlowe a nod that was only partially friendly. She suspected he resented that she’d interfered with the fight.

Testosterone could be so tedious...

Raleigh continued, “We call it ‘shrink.’ The word means how much retail stores lose to theft. It includes employee theft, but mostly it’s shoplifting.”

“‘Shrink,’ not ‘shrinkage’?”

Some more handwringing. He barked a brief laugh. “Think it used to be that. But nowadays, everybody likes to mess with language. I guess ‘shrink’ is cooler. He’ll go to jail, won’t he?”

“First offense, probably not. Second or third, then maybe. I don’t know.” Marlowe said nothing else. It wasn’t her case.

A large figure appeared in the doorway. It was William Dodd, the county sheriff. They’d met earlier, briefly, when she was coordinating with Trenton Carr about the Mr. X takedown. He was tall and solid, muscle bulk, not fat. Not young, fifties, but he exuded the air of an athlete. He was perhaps a runner or, given his predatory eyes, an aggressive basketball player.

“Sheriff,” Raleigh said.

Dodd looked up at the nonworking video camera, then to Raleigh and Marlowe, “I need to know: Did he brandish the knife?”

“Knife? I didn’t see a knife.” Raleigh was shaking his head no.

“I didn’t either,” she said.

“You sure?”

What was there to be unsure about. “No knife. And I was right on top of him.”

The store owner was squinting. “I mean, there might’ve been something in his pocket. But it could’ve been a wallet. Or, well, anything.”

“No, I mean brandishing. Showing it to you. Like a threat.”

Brandishing a knife would take a simple shoplifting charge and turn it into armed robbery. In a whole different dimension from shrink.

“Nosir.”

“Well, there was one. Found it nearby where he got tackled. It wasn’t the customer’s. I just asked him. And it probably wasn’t anybody else’s. Just lying right on the sidewalk, anybody coming by earlier would’ve picked it up.”

“No knife,” Marlowe repeated.

Another glance up. “And you’re sure that camera doesn’t work, Jack. There’s a light on it.”

“Yeah, but it’s not hooked up to anything. The recorder part’s broken.”

At this, the big man just grimaced and left without another word.

Raleigh offered, “His rep is he’s not the friendliest law enforcer on the planet. And he’s running for the job again. You’d think he’d be a little more public relations minded.”

The door to a back room swung open and an attractive young woman with dark hair, wearing overalls, wheeled a flatbed cart in, filled with cans and boxes for restocking.

She stopped abruptly. Marlowe’s gun and her belt-badge were visible. The stocker’s eyes went wide.

Raleigh called, “It’s all right, Maria. Little excitement. It’s over with now. All good. Get on with your work.”

She nodded but didn’t seem any more reassured as she began restocking.

Marlowe was gazing out the smeared window, through which shone a burst of setting sun in an indigo sky. A memory from years ago arose: her grandmother cleaning windows with vinegar and newspaper and the girl wondering why the glass didn’t get smeared with ink.

Across the street was a vacant lot, dominated by a To Let sign, and beyond that the cornfields began. The plants were more than six feet tall. The silk strands from the ends of the cobs glowed like torches in the setting sunlight.

She walked back to the counter, picked up the milk and replaced the carton in the case. “I’ve got an errand. Keep it in the fridge for now. I’ll take the cookies, though. Thanks.”

And walked out the door.

Chapter 4

The lockup was typical of towns like Plains.

Most of the cells were joint quarters, housing three or four suspects each. At the end was a solo room. Technically, she guessed, it was solitary confinement. This is where Marcel Descartes was being kept.

Stewing...

A great expression.

Constant Marlowe stood at the detention clerk’s desk. The woman sitting behind it had truly long, bright-green fingernails. How she typed as efficiently as she did was beyond Marlowe, whose polish-free nails were measured in microns, not half-inch increments.

“I’m taking Marcel Descartes to Chicago tomorrow morning. I’ll get you the release authorization order then. You need anything more from me tonight?”

“No, ma’am. Think we’re good.”

Marlowe nodded. But didn’t leave. She was eyeing the holding cells.

No sign of Felipe Vargas. Hadn’t he been brought right here?

Saying nothing to the clerk — offering information made an unsuspicious person immediately suspicious — she sat on a bench, pulled out her phone and sent some texts.

Ten minutes later the boy appeared, being led by the deputy who had responded to the shoplifting. He gripped the boy’s arm. Viselike.

“Look, man,” he began.

“Shut up.”

The boy’s face was bloody.

Was it bloodier than earlier after the dustup with the customer?

She thought so.

After Felipe was in the cell, the officer returned to the desk and the clerk asked, “Arraignment?”

“Oh, he’s going to Stanton tomorrow.”

The woman’s verdant nails paused. “Stanton?” She looked at the screen. “He’s sixteen. You sure you don’t want him in Avery? There’s a juvie wing.”

The deputy swung a still glance her way. “The sheriff said Stanton. Do you want to ask Dodd if he’s sure he means Stanton?”

Green Nails looked down. “Stanton, okay.” Machine-gun keyboarding.

Marlowe watched the man lead Felipe to the back of the corridor where the cells were. He unlocked a door and pushed the boy in.

After it was locked, the big deputy walked to the front desk, snagged a document and left.

Marlowe stepped into the office proper and walked into the sheriff’s doorway.

He looked up. No greeting. He said only, “You remember that knife now?”

“No. Did you have a medic look him over? Vargas?”

Slightly stiffening at the question. “Yeah. The boy’s fine.”

“Something happened between the store and the lockup.”

“He tried to escape. That’ll go in the charging document too, by the way. Obstruction. Battery on a law officer too.”

“Escape, from the back of a squad car?”

“No. After he got out of the squad car and before we got him into detention.” As if speaking to a ten-year-old.

“What did they say?”

“‘They’? Who?”

“Whoever checked him out. EMS?”

“Yeah. EMS. They said what I told you. Fine.” He looked her over. “Cuffs don’t mean a prisoner can’t kick and bite and headbutt. Maybe get their hands on a weapon. And you might want to ask yourself just how it would’ve gone if the boy had pulled out that knife you can’t seem to recall seeing and gone to work on that customer Samaritan. Or Jack Raleigh. The man is a lay reader in the church. Did you know that?”

And how, exactly, would she? “No.”

“He might even have used it on you. We’ll have your boy Descartes all wrapped up pretty as a Christmas present for you tomorrow, Agent Marlowe. Hope you have a nice drive back to the Windy City.”

Chapter 5

No luck with the beverage.

Constant Marlowe wasn’t above an alcoholic drink occasionally. But on the job she was drawn to dairy, provided it was accompanied by the best sustenance on God’s Green Earth, Oreos.

She had the cookies in her shoulder bag, but her trip to the detention center had taken a little longer than she’d planned, and R&R Grocery was closed. A second black-haired young woman worker in a store smock was taking out the trash. She gave Marlowe a distracted nod and turned back to the task of filling a small dumpster.

Milk would not figure in her dinner this evening. Maybe she should have taken the carton with her. How long before it went bad on a warm day like this?

She wished she’d taken the chance.

She was tired — it had been a busy day — and she knew she’d have an equally hectic one tomorrow.

Then she heard voices from nearby, the edge of the park where they’d taken down Marcel Descartes, what seemed like ages ago.

Angry voices.

As she drew closer, she made out two men, arguing and throwing insults. They stood near a bench in sore need of painting, surrounded by grass in sore need of cutting.

The tone, the pacing told her immediately that they knew each other. This wasn’t two guys fighting over a parking slot.

It was a domestic.

She walked past a bush and surveyed the scene.

A large man — overweight, mostly in the gut, with thick arms — faced a thinner and slightly older guy. Bigger was in T-shirt and jeans, and Slim was wearing dark shorts, revealing skinny legs, and a polo shirt in pale blue.

The argument seemed to have roots in jealousy. Bigger was accused of being untrue, but he was the more aggressive in the argument, gesturing angrily and moving right into Slim’s face.

“Gentlemen, evening. Everything all right here?”

They both turned and blinked, the reactions almost comically identical.

She displayed her badge, on her belt.

“We’re fine,” Bigger said.

“What’s going on?”

“Nothing. Just shooting the breeze.”

“Really? Because it sounded like an argument to me.” She turned to Slim. “Are you feeling unsafe?”

“We’re fine.” Bigger was muttering.

“I was asking him,” she said sternly.

Slim said quickly, “No, it’s good. We’re just hanging out and talking is all.”

Hangin’ and breeze-shootin’.

“Has there been anything physical between you two. Pushing, hitting?”

Bigger mocked, “Anything physical.”

Not explaining what the barb was supposed to mean, if it in fact was a barb.

Slim said, “No, ma’am, Officer.”

“Do you live near here?”

“I—”

“Jesus,” Bigger muttered to his partner. “Just shhh.”

“Sir,” she said, “let him answer my question.”

“We don’t live together. Which makes him think he can do whatever he wants apparently. The rules don’t apply to him.”

“What about that cruise?” Bigger muttered.

“I was drunk. And nothing happened.”

“Just head back to your houses or apartments now. Separate ways. It’s bordering on public disturbance.”

“Fuck you, bitch.”

Slim said, “Come on, stop it! You’re only going to get in trouble again.”

Never rise to comments like that. She’d learned that long ago — not in policing but in the boxing ring, where fighters, amateurs, not the pros, would taunt. Their words — like these — were not even puffs of air to Constant Marlowe.

Domestics come in all forms — gender is irrelevant. That love thing can go in all directions, like the splash when a water balloon pops.

She was then noticing a discoloration on Slim’s arm. “Did he do that?”

“No, I didn’t!”

“Could you let him talk, please?”

“Aren’t you the polite little girl. Please, please...”

She ignored him again and looked at Slim’s arm.

“No. I fell! I swear.”

A tumble leaving a twisting bruise with fingerprints on the biceps was a near impossibility.

“You need to be separated for the night. I’m going to get some officers here. They’ll take you to your apartment or a hotel.” Speaking to Slim. “You want to swear out a complaint?”

“Back. Off.” Bigger stepped forward and pushed her away, palm on shoulder.

Striking a LEO — a law enforcement officer — is a stupendously bad idea so she was not fully prepared for the shove. She stepped back. Then continued a few steps more and drew the Bodyguard. Didn’t bother with the laser sight.

“Shit.” Bigger raised his hands.

“No! Don’t shoot him! Please!” Victims of domestic abuse were often embodiments of contradiction.

But pulling triggers was not on the agenda.

In Marlowe’s world, insults were one thing. Touching, however, whether a firm blow or a delicately placed finger to the chest, was something else. That required a response.

“Do either of you have weapons?”

Slim said quickly, “God, no.”

“None of your business.”

She changed her mind and clicked on the laser, put the red dot on his crotch.

Bigger’s eyes grew exponentially.

“Pull your shirt up and empty your pockets on the ground there.”

He hesitated for a moment, then a faint smile — a dark one — crossed his face. He slowly did as she asked.

Slim did the same.

No guns.

She pulled from her pocket a carbon fiber bag with a fingerprint lock on the end. The sack was presently open.

The men frowned as she slipped her weapon inside, then sealed and replaced the bag in her pocket.

The reason for the device was simple. Constant Marlowe was extremely talented with her fists. She rarely lost fights, but it did happen occasionally. When she got into skin with street fighters, she wanted to make sure that they couldn’t get her weapon and use it against her or anybody else. If they had guns she placed those in the bag too before the fighting began — unless, as occasionally happened, they turned and fled.

But not tonight. Bigger knew what was coming and he relished it.

“Eddie,” Slim began. “Let’s just—”

A glare shut him up.

Marlowe shot one his way too.

Bigger held up his palms. “You want some of me, bitch?”

She said nothing. No banter, of course. But just slipped into a boxing pose — so familiar, so comfortable, even with the leather-soled boots and hands that were cool with evening air, not hot from gloves.

Left arm extended, right back. Shifting weight, dancing forward.

“Oh, you are so gone...” Bigger seemed pleased delivering his lines. He too hunched over and circled, his fists tightened. He glared and seemed to scrape the sidewalk with his Timberlands the way a bull signals you’ve made a bad error about choice of field.

A pause.

Then he came in fast.

The man was strong and he had reach. Much of boxing is measurement: How far your opponent’s arms extend when they’re in defense. How far they extend when they’re leaning forward offensively. Same with legs; footwork alone has won or lost many fights.

She took a few blows, glancing.

He was strong, yes, but he had grown used to using mass in place of accuracy.

More assessment. In a match, the distances were noted and mentally recorded for the first few rounds. Here — street fighting in a dry, dusty autumn park — she didn’t have the luxury of time.

Slowly the profile emerged and she recognized the optimal distance to orbit around him.

Now for the main task.

Tire him out.

The three rules of defense in boxing are simple. First: simply step back. Get out of orbit of the reach you’ve just measured, letting his blow land on where you were, not are. Then, a variation: do the same but pivot, so you’re out of the way of his fist but close enough to deliver a blow to the side of his jaw or ribs.

The second defense: parry. Meet his hands with yours and deflect. It works best with gloves; to meet a blow with your bare fist could mean a broken finger. But in street fights a bargain basement alternative was available: knocking his arms aside with a forearm.

Three was headwork. In lay terms, dodge, dodge and dodge.

She used all of these now, letting Bigger — well, Eddie — go to town. With his range he could have done some damage if she weren’t continually in motion.

Forming a strategy.

Tiring an opponent was not defeating him.

She cast an occasional glance at Slim, who was no longer urging his partner to behave. But he was hanging back and displaying no sign of joining in. Had he, a fast blow to the scrawny man’s solar plexus would have turned the fight into a two-person bout again in seconds.

Eddie launched hard jabs and one caught her left side, stinging. The others missed completely and she took the opportunity to deliver a hook to his left jaw.

Smelling sweat and body odor, smelling cologne; the man had certainly doused himself liberally — in an effort to delay a shower or bath for one more day.

“Okay, bitch. I think it’s time you went nighty-night.”

Banter only made you sound silly.

He charged, flailing his arms.

She parried and dodged. Then she decided he was tired enough.

Marlowe was known for her relentless three-blow assault that never stopped, and during which she retreated only as a feint before charging in again. This was how she got her first name. A sports reporter had commented, impressed, on the “constant” overwhelming onslaught against her opponent. The next day: a trip to the courthouse with the name-changing fee in hand.

Marlowe lunged with three rhythmic jabs. He deflected two out of three and took the blow to the rib cage.

Three more.

And then another three.

Then two more, and her left hand drew back.

He prepared to defend against the third punch, which he was sure she was about to deliver, having finally learned her tactics.

But instead of the jab, she swung furiously with her right — a hook to his cheek and jaw, a solid connection. His head snapped back.

Marlowe danced away.

Staggering, blinking, Eddie slumped and he went down on his knees and then his back. Dust puffed out from the ground as if he were a lumberjacked pine tree.

True knockouts — unconsciousness-inducing — are rare in boxing. In Constant Marlowe’s experience they occurred maybe once every thirty or forty bouts and usually in the high-weight divisions, from 170 pounds up. So you rarely saw them in a women’s contest (though Marlowe was an exception; she had scored thirteen pure KOs in her career).

Eddie’s was a technical knockout — so he was awake to endure the humiliation that stung as much as her blow.

“Eddie!” Slim cried. Then a vicious glance toward her. “What did you do to him?” He dropped to his knees and wagged the big man’s face back and forth.

Eddie pushed his hands away and sat up, muttering.

Marlowe unzipped her weapon bag and placed the Smittie back in the Blackhawk gray plastic holster.

Eddie tried to stand up.

“Stay down,” she ordered.

He stayed down.

A squad car responded to her 911 call. The young woman deputy climbed out and looked over the situation. Marlowe explained, and the blonde nodded knowingly. Domestics were a large part of any patrol officer’s watch.

She stepped aside. The officer followed and asked, “Charges?”

She turned toward Slim. “Do you want to? File a complaint?”

“God, no. I just want...”

Marlowe completed the sentence silently:... want him to change, become a new person, turn from night to day. She said to the officer, “I’m not going forward. Give him a ride to the hospital. Check him for a concussion. And if you have a dom abuse lecture—”

“I do.”

“Let him have it.”

The officer helped Eddie up and got him into the patrol car. They drove off.

Slim said wistfully, “It was my fault. I said some things...”

Marlowe gave him a kind look. “No, none of this is your fault. People can say anything they want, they disagree, they argue. When it crosses the line into violence, no, not acceptable.”

Slim was nodding. Maybe hearing her, maybe not. “Can I... should I bail him out?”

“He’s not going to jail.”

“If only he didn’t drink; that’s when it gets bad. He’s good when he’s sober.”

She said softly, “I know it’s hard. One of the hardest things in the world. But keep telling yourself you don’t deserve what he’s done to you.”

Slim took a breath — to probably excuse himself for excusing the bully. Then his shoulders slumped. “I always do that.”

“Remember — look out for yourself. You deserve it.” She gave him one of her cards and he walked back to the parking lot. He might’ve had a drink or two but she assessed he wasn’t over the limit.

She gave a statement to the deputy. When they’d finished, the woman climbed into the car and sped off. Marlowe continued on to her hotel.

At the front desk she asked the clerk if by any chance she had some milk.

“There’s coffee creamer in the rooms.”

“No, to drink.”

“Oh, the kitchen’s closed. And I’m afraid everything’s locked up. The fridge too. You’d be surprised what people take if you leave it out.”

No, Constant Marlowe wouldn’t be surprised at all.

Chapter 6

“Hey.”

Evan Quill’s voice was bright through the phone. “How’d it go? Mr. X?”

Quill was an Illinois state prosecutor and Constant Marlowe could share everything about a case with him. Then again, even if he weren’t, she would share everything with him anyway.

She explained about the ploy to score the man’s identity and arrest him.

She heard a chuckle.

And added, “Barth’ll still have a contract out on the witnesses, but I’m going to convince Descartes to cooperate and hope that’s enough to roll up Barth permanently.”

“He agreeable to talking?”

“Not at all. But I haven’t started to be convincing yet.”

“Ah.”

Quill was, not surprisingly, still in his tidy office near the courthouse — neat and ordered because he liked it that way. That thought in Marlowe’s mind was fleeting, though, replaced by a very different memory: of two nights ago in another neat and orderly place, Quill’s bedroom. The image was of them lying together, sweating and drowsy, naked, on top of a burgundy comforter, still covering the bed because neither had wanted to take the time to remove it when they’d stumbled into the room, unbuttoning, unzipping.

He was presently not very far away, about a half hour north. More trees where he lived and worked. Less corn.

The connection between the two was complicated and now was not the time to consider anything other than that agreeable memory... and the fact that she enjoyed hearing his voice.

She lifted her hand from the bucket of ice sitting on the bedside table. The swelling wasn’t bad. (While the motel was lacking in the milk department, it had ice cubes aplenty.) The digits would be back to normal tomorrow. Why couldn’t the bad guys agree to wear gloves?

“You ever prosecute a shrink case?”

“Assuming you’re not talking a psychiatrist... shoplifting. I have, but there’s shrink and then there’s shrink.”

“Okay.” She ate a cookie and sipped not-bad decaf from the room’s Keurig.

He explained there had been a huge increase in organized retail theft lately. “An OC boss sends people — usually kids or women — into stores with garbage bags or reusable shopping bags. And they just start pulling stuff off the shelves. They deliver them to the crew and get a fee. The items go up on e-commerce websites. eBay and the reputable ones have algorithms that can sometimes sniff out suspicious sellers but with low-ticket items, it’s tough. That’s type A shrink.

“Then there’s B, traditional shrink. Kids do it for kicks or to perp things they’re not allowed to buy — liquor or cigarettes. Sometimes the homeless just need food. If the value’s under a couple of hundred, I scare the hell out of them and let it go. The second time, I charge.”

“What about gift cards?”

A pause. “You nailed a perp pocketing some?”

“Not my case. Just happened to stumble across it. A kid down here in Plains.”

“That’s type A. Very organized crime. It’s a popular scam. They steal blank cards, put their own barcodes on the back and cover them with scratch-off ink. The cards go back on the rack. As soon as somebody activates the card at the register, it’s the scammer’s card that gets the money. They have a system — like a boiler room. Banks of people keep trying to use a card and empty the cash before the customer uses it. I prosecuted somebody who had six thousand cards in his trunk. It’s international. And a popular way to launder money.”

It sounded too sophisticated for Felipe Vargas. “Could somebody just steal them and sell them online?”

“Sure. But they’d make pennies on the dollar. Hardly worth it. Retailers can’t seem to learn their lesson. They just leave the racks of cards open. Ready for picking.”

“This kid grabbed some from behind the counter. They weren’t on a rack.”

There was another pause. “That’s odd. The whole point of gift card theft is to hit a rack in the corner of the store when nobody’s looking. Steal the cards, swap the numbers and put them back. Nobody’s the wiser.”

“Rumor was he had a weapon too. Knife.” She removed her hand from the ice and dried. “But I never saw it.”

“Planted?”

“Sheriff, the deputies, they do not like this kid. He’s Latino. May be part of it.”

Quill said, “Plains County. They’ve had race issues. Justice has brought some civil rights cases, I think.”

“What do you know about Stanton? The kid’s being sent there till arraignment.”

“Stanton? How old is he?”

“Sixteen.”

Unflappable at the stand, Quill was now clearly troubled. “No, no, no, he can’t go there. It’s adult, and dangerous as hell.”

“Sight and sound?” she asked.

Under Illinois procedures a juvenile could be held in an adult facility briefly provided it met the requirements of a sight and sound barrier between adults and the young offender.

“Not really, not at Stanton. Avery’s got a whole juvie wing.”

She recalled that Green Nails had recommended that facility over Stanton but the deputy had rejected the idea as counter to Sheriff Dodd’s wishes.

Why was he so eager to get him to Stanton?

Quill was asking her something.

She’d missed it. “What?”

“When are you back?”

“Tomorrow. I’ll get Marcel Descartes on the transport van to Cook County.”

“After, come on back here for a day or two... I don’t remember,” he asked coyly, “did we have any unfinished business?”

Another memory of them in bed, jazz playing softly, the late summer breeze aromatic with leaf dust wafting through the windows, to untidy his tidy floors.

She knew his line was a setup, like a volleyball player, so she could deliver a witty — and flirtatious — response.

But not a single clever phrase occurred. She settled for: “I’m going to get some sleep. Call you tomorrow.”

Thursday

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.”

One Week Later

Chapter 22

Ebbett’s Falls lay an hour west of Plains.

The burg had a population of twenty-five hundred and labeled itself a “hamlet,” with far more humility than Beverly Corner. The mix appeared to be a fifty-fifty split between Anglo and Latino. People tend to think of the migrant population — documented or otherwise — working in the picking fields of California’s verdant Central Valley or the cotton and tobacco fields of the South. But the hog-butchering, skyscraper-building, smoke-spewing Illinois of the Robert Frost poem was only a portion of the state, and a small one at that.

And Ebbett’s Falls was typical of that vast majority of acreage. Its residents grew untold quantities of staples destined for America’s tables: sorghum, oats, wheat, soybeans.

And, of course, corn.

One resident of the town, Felipe Vargas, was among those who kept the cycle of food humming along smoothly.

The boy lived in a two-story beige apartment building, on a bland but clean block near downtown.

Constant Marlowe rang the bell and the boy, in jeans and a white T-shirt, appeared, letting her inside. She noted immediately that his rooms were well scrubbed and ordered, if a bit spartan. A bedroom containing a neatly made futon and dresser. A living room with a couch and small-screen TV that appeared to be used for watching streaming shows from his small laptop. A blond dining table in the kitchen sat between two mismatched chairs. A few superhero posters graced the walls, bright and bold and utterly out of context.

The most memorable feature was a shrine to his sister.

A photograph of her Catholic confirmation, another of the two of them together, when in their early teens. A dozen more. A candle was burning. It was scented. Some Indian spice aroma — jasmine maybe.

The hour was about 5:00 p.m., a weekday, and the smell of shampoo or soap was in the air too; he would have showered after his shift in the fields.

Marlowe declined the offered ice tea or soda. “The judge has scheduled the trials. No bail for Raleigh or Carr. They’ve arrested a couple others who were working for them.”

Matones...

“You need another statement?”

“No, I had to check on a related case and thought I’d stop by to give you an update. And just say hi.”

Felipe had recounted for the record the details of the day of the shoplifting incident. Wisely he mentioned nothing about his intent to kill Raleigh, but said he stole the gift cards in an attempt to prove that the man was guilty of sex trafficking and murdering his sister. That this made no sense didn’t bother the local prosecutor, who was, like most of them, less interested in motive than with the nuts and bolts of testimony and evidence to win a conviction.

The DA took into account that the “shrink” in question — the cards — had zero value and were not part of a fraud scheme. And he believed that the knife had been planted by one of the two deceased thugs to make him appear more dangerous. Charges were dismissed. And it was not within Plains County’s bailiwick to pursue Felipe for being in the country illegally. If ICE or Homeland Security wished to pursue that issue, that was up to them.

And if they did, Constant Marlowe would intervene. She was owed favors from law enforcement officers working for many different agencies. Given that his parents died at the hands of drug lords, and he too was at risk, she would make certain his asylum status was approved.

She got a text.

“Ah, that’s the other case. I’ve got to meet with a state police officer. Okay if I let him in?”

“I guess.” Felipe had probably had enough law enforcement in the past few weeks to last a lifetime but if it was Constant Marlowe doing the requesting, he wasn’t going to say no.

At the knock, she opened the door and let in a young uniformed state trooper.

And another individual too. A pretty, dark-haired Latina, around eighteen or nineteen years old. She looked around the room warily until her eyes landed on Felipe.

The identical reactions — of shock — were priceless.

He stepped forward and threw his arms around his sister, Sofia. She too gripped hard, as if it would be all too easy for the other sibling to vanish.

Both began crying softly.

“Tico, Tico...” Sofia kept whispering.

After a moment she stepped back. She turned and hugged the trooper too, embarrassing him to no end, and — after Marlowe thanked him with a smiling nod — he headed out the door to attend to less sentimental police work.

“But... How?” Felipe stammered.

Marlowe said, “You told me that one of Raleigh’s techniques was intimidating people. And that the man was cheap. I was thinking that it was a lot easier — and less expensive — to simply spread the word that he’d killed a rebellious trafficking victim rather than actually hurt her.

“I found the FleetFoot driver who took her to Raleigh’s customer in East St. Louis. He gave me the name. I went there and had a discussion with him. He admitted your sister was with him. In the basement.”

“So he’s in jail?”

Marlowe cocked her head. “He will be. After he gets out of the hospital.”

Felipe gave a brief smile.

“You’ve got a lot to get caught up on. And—”

She was interrupted by a hug of her own from Sofia. “Gracias, gracias, gracias.”

Marlowe nodded a farewell to both siblings and soon she was on her way back to Chicago.

For ten minutes, she debated.

Call?

Don’t call?

She called.

“Hey,” said Evan Quill.

Marlowe said, “Mackinac Island. Grand Hotel.”

The magnificent place was in Lake Huron, between the Upper and Lower Peninsulas of Michigan. The massive hotel dated to the 1800s and had counted among its guests a half dozen US presidents and their families. Mark Twain regularly stayed there, and Thomas Edison premiered this thing called the phonograph on the front porch.

When she was young, her parents were planning to visit the island, on what would have been their first family vacation. But events intervened and the trip never happened. Marlowe had always wanted to go.

“Heard of it. Are you... is this a trivia call?”

“Meet me there tomorrow. Just for a couple of days.”

“Long drive.”

That was impossible to deny.

He then said, “What time is good?”

“Cocktail hour?”

“That works.”

She added, “No cars. Horses only.”

“I can’t ride.”

“It’s buggies.”

“I can buggy.” A pause. He asked, “You sure about this?”

There were reasons Evan Quill would ask this question.

“I’m sure.”

“See you then.”

They disconnected.

A half hour of evangelical radio later, her phone buzzed with a text. From her boss, Stan Robbins.

Urgent

Money laundering case just broke. Big. Hedge fund manager in Skokie is washing funds from three offshores. Hundreds of millions. Meeting in the morning with Justice and Treasury. Nine a.m. my office. Need you there.

She dictated and the word populated the screen:

Terrorism?

A moment’s delay while he processed.

No

Then she asked:

Any issues of death or injury?

Robbins’s response was:

Just financial crimes. Why are you asking?

No hesitation as she told her phone what to say next:

Can’t help you, Stan. I’ll be in next week.

She set her phone to silent and placed it on the passenger seat — on top of the empty McDonald’s bag that had been part of the sting to collar Marcel Descartes.

Now her mind turned to a vital question: What should she pack?

This was not an idle inquiry. The last time Constant Marlowe had taken a vacation was... Well, she honestly could not remember. A little black dress? She thought she had one.

Bathing suit?

Maybe in the attic somewhere.

High heels?

She laughed.

Well, she would figure it out. She edged the car up to eighty and rather than turn on the radio again, she simply sat back and enjoyed the cool autumn air, streaming in through the window, open by default, as the phalanx of tall corn stalks, stern and indifferent, sped past.

Content

Jeffery Deaver
Downstate

Wednesday

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Thursday

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

One Week Later

Chapter 22