Vicious Circle Read online

  VICIOUS CIRCLE

  BY

  TODD RITTER

  Vicious Circle

  Copyright © 2011 by Todd Ritter

  www.toddritteronline.com

  ISBN: 978-0-578-09380-2

  This eBook is licensed for personal use only. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  One

  Despite three years flying the same route, Bill Higgins had yet to tire of it. Philadelphia to O’Hare. Twice a day, four days a week. Two hours there, two hours back and home in time for dinner with the missus. It was Bill’s dream schedule. Little turbulence. A good crew. The passengers were mostly well-dressed businessmen too preoccupied with their BlackBerrys and iPads to be much of a problem.

  But what Bill liked the most about the route – what he loved, in fact – was the view. You didn’t get an eyeful like this piloting the red-eye from JFK to LAX. Even worse was going to Europe, with its dull stretch of Atlantic that could make you cross-eyed with boredom.

  No, Bill enjoyed flying right at the edge of America’s heartland. The land was open there – a patchwork quilt of fields and farms. Those amber waves of grain the song talks about? He’d seen them, and they never failed to take his breath away.

  The scenery started early, too. Taking off from Philly, it was only a matter of minutes before the concrete swamp of the city and its McMansion-choked suburbs gave way to an area so pretty it belonged in a calendar. Fields there rolled straight into a line of small mountains dotted with pine trees. Sandwiched between them was a narrow lake about two miles in width.

  Situated west of the lake was a small town that looked so quaint from 20,000 feet that Bill assumed it was just as nice on the ground. A hundred or so houses clustered together. A few streets of commerce. A couple of church steeples to give it that Norman Rockwell feel. Bill had never set foot in the town itself. He doubted he ever would. But he knew its name, which he found to be equally as charming – Perry Hollow, Pennsylvania.

  That morning, Bill began looking for the town before the plane even finished its ascent. It was just after 6 a.m., on a July day already as hot as a firecracker. The sun had scorched away the last of the morning mist, leaving nothing but clear skies. Below, the earth was at full bloom, green as far as the eye could see. In the far distance, pine-dotted peaks appeared on the horizon. Below them, sunlight winked off a narrow lake.

  “There it is,” Bill said.

  His co-pilot, Randall Smithy, was in the process of steadying the plane’s altitude. “That town you like so much?”

  “Yep. And it’s looking as pretty as a postcard.”

  “Think you’ll ever go there one day?”

  “Nah. Not the wife’s kind of place to visit. She prefers Vegas.”

  “Gotcha. Can’t say I blame her.” Randall studied Bill as he looked out the cockpit windshield, scanning the ground for the fields, the lake, the town. “I came from a place like that. Couldn’t get away fast enough.”

  “That’s a shame,” Bill said. “You just didn’t know how good you had it.”

  They were closer now, the town and its surrounding fields and forests in full view. Most of the fields were sprouting corn, which did indeed look to be knee-high by the Fourth of July. A few contained hay, barely a month away from baling. The rest grew mostly soybeans. Those were large squares of green that ran uninterrupted for acres.

  Except for one.

  “I’ll be goddamned,” Bill muttered. “Randall, are you seeing this?”

  His co-pilot, who had taken over his duties while he gawked, wasn’t even looking outside. “I’ve seen the town, Bill. Don’t think I need to see it again.”

  “You haven’t seen anything like this.”

  Curiosity piqued, Randall looked out the window. When he let out a low whistle, Bill knew he had seen it, too.

  “What the hell do you think it is?”

  “I’m not sure,” Bill said.

  He was lying. Bill Higgins had a pretty good idea what he was looking at. He just didn’t want to say it out loud. And if he was right about the thing in the field, then something mighty weird was going on in that town far below.

  Two

  Kat broke down and bought an iced coffee. She preferred her java piping hot, just a hair shy of burning her tongue. But that morning was too muggy for anything that didn’t contain ice cubes. Ninety degrees by 8 a.m. Even with the chilled coffee coursing through her body, Kat felt like she was on the verge of melting.

  It didn’t help that she was stuck in a stifling patrol car, windows down and A/C off, pointing a radar gun at nonexistent traffic. It was the wrong day to go fishing for speeders. Everyone else in Perry Hollow had the good sense to stay indoors. The rare cars that did pass were all going the speed limit. Kat was tempted to give up and go back to the station, but like a stubborn angler, she didn’t want to leave without making at least one catch.

  In the distance, she heard the steady roar of a V8 engine. The sound got her hopes up. Maybe it was a sports car. Something sleek that was going so fast she had to pull it over. It’s not that she longed to hand out a ticket, although that did have its perks, especially if there was a Grade-A jackass behind the wheel. She just wanted to get her Crown Vic moving enough to let a light breeze flow through the window.

  Steadying her radar gun on the windowsill, Kat caught sight of the car rounding a bend further up the road. It was a Mustang of recent vintage, and moving at a good clip. The driver either didn’t see Kat or just didn’t care, because he didn’t even make an attempt to slow down.

  Grade-A jackass, Kat thought. This one could be fun.

  The Mustang was almost in the radar’s range when Kat’s radio blasted a bass note of static.

  “Chief?”

  The voice belonged to Louella van Sickle, the department’s dispatcher. Kat reached for the radio with her right hand while aiming the radar gun with her left. But as she moved, the radar tilted upward, missing the Mustang completely as it flew by.

  “Chief? You copy?”

  “I’m here,” Kat said, tossing the radar gun onto the passenger seat. “I had a fish on the line. Looked like a whopper, too.”

  “Well now you have an assignment,” Lou told her. “I just got a call about some vandalism.”

  Kat used the sleeve of her uniform to wipe the sweat from her brow. “Please tell me it’s somewhere cold. Like the community pool. Or the meat freezer at the Shop and Save.”

  “Sorry,” Lou said. “It’s the Winnick farm.”

  Kat’s entire body stiffened at the name. George Winnick was the first victim of the Grim Reaper, a serial killer who had terrorized Perry Hollow the year before. Kat found his body stuffed into a homemade coffin on that very same stretch of road. Hearing his name brought back memories she wanted to forget.

  “Who’s at the place now?” George’s widow, Alma, had up and moved to Florida six months after his death. She now rented the whole shebang – land, house, barn and all.

  “The caller said his name was Landon Gale,” Lou said. “Ever meet him?”

  “No, but I guess I’m about to.”

  Kat pulled out into the road, heading to the farm that lay on the outskirts of Perry Hollow. Although the air still swirled with the dust left in Mr. Mustang’s wake, she didn’t roll up her window. She might have missed out on writing a ticket, but at least she finally got her breeze.

  Landon Gale was not the kind of farmer Kat was expecting to see.
He was young – twenty-seven, tops – with a wiry frame, mop of brown curls and a patchy beard that made him look younger instead of the other way around. Like most farmers, his jeans were faded and his workboots were dusty, but his T-shirt came courtesy of the Sex Pistols.

  His wife, too, wasn’t the type of woman you’d normally find on a farm. She was short and skinny, her blond hair cut into an asymmetrical bob and brightened with streaks of pink. She wore a floral sundress that couldn’t quite hide a baby bump.

  As for their frowns, well, Kat had seen those before. On the faces of farmers bent to the breaking point by bad weather, high fuel prices, low demand. Farming wasn’t easy, and it seemed that Landon and his wife had only recently discovered that fact. Standing side-by-side in front of their rented farmhouse, they looked like the hipster version of American Gothic.

  “So,” Kat said, “what kind of vandalism are we talking about?”

  She looked around the farm, checking for signs of damage. The produce stand next to the road was sturdy, but empty. The house looked livable, if a bit ramshackle. The nearby barn was surrounded by a few roaming chickens pecking at the ground. The plaintive moo of a cow inside cut through the stifling air. Running alongside the barn was a massive garden, which looked to be thriving in the steamy heat. Kat spotted sunflowers and string beans and tomatoes as fat as baseballs ripening on the vine.

  “It’s not vandalism,” Landon said. “It’s outright destruction. I can’t harvest a damn thing now.”

  “That doesn’t quite answer my question.”

  “The field.” The farmer stretched a lanky arm in the direction of the soybean field behind the house. “Someone took a lawnmower to it or something.”

  Kat’s gaze crossed the yard to the field in question. It was full of soybean plants for as far as the eye could see. Save for a few bare patches in the distance, it looked to be in good shape.

  “Seems OK to me.”

  She wasn’t trying to play devil’s advocate. She just wanted to get a handle on the situation. Yet Landon glared at her as if she were Satan incarnate.

  “Well, it’s not,” he said. “This is going to ruin us.”

  “What time did you discover it?”

  “Six or so,” Landon said. “Maybe a little after.”

  “And it took you two hours to call the police?”

  Landon Gale glared at her again, adding a bit of Gen-Y sarcasm to his response. “Yeah. It’s that fucking bad.”

  “He’s not making this up.” It was Landon’s wife, who up to that point had been stone still and totally silent. “You should see it.”

  “I intend to,” Kat said. “And I don’t think I caught your name.”

  “It’s Aimee.”

  “Aimee Gale?” Kat asked. “I need a full name for the report.”

  “Just Aimee. Taking your husband’s last name seems so barbaric, don’t you think?”

  As a matter of fact, Kat did. She had insisted on keeping her last name when she got married. Seeing how she was divorced within a year, it was a good call. That was at least one thing she and Just Aimee had in common.

  “So you discovered the vandalism at six,” Kat said. “Before that, when was the last time you were in the field?”

  “Yesterday.” It was Aimee, tugging her dress over her enlarged stomach. “About five o’clock. I was visiting one of the neighbors and took a shortcut through the field to get home.”

  “Well,” Kat said, “I can tell you already the damage wasn’t done by a lawnmower.”

  She got another one of those glares from Landon. “How do you know? You haven’t even seen it.”

  “Because whoever is responsible for this did it in the middle of the night. I’m assuming if it was a lawnmower or any other kind of farm equipment, you would have heard it. And I’m also assuming that if you had, you would have told me about it by now.”

  Landon Gale scratched the back of his neck as he sized up Kat. She was a good foot shorter than he was, and, unfortunately, not nearly as skinny. But she was smart, a fact that finally seemed to dawn on the farmer. He nodded appreciably before saying, “Come on. I’ll show you the damage.”

  They left Aimee behind as they trudged into the field. The soybean plants, ankle-high and dark green, swished against their legs. The leaves still contained traces of morning dew, and Kat felt more moisture soak into the cuffs of her uniform with each step. Between that and the way she was sweating in the intense heat, it was turning out to be a very damp day.

  “You two haven’t been here very long, right?” she asked.

  “Less than a year.”

  “Where are you originally from?”

  “Brooklyn,” Landon said.

  “Interesting. Usually it’s the other way around.”

  The farmer shrugged. “We needed a change. I was bartending. Aimee was waiting tables, saving up for grad school. A lot of our friends were moving out. Going upstate or to California. Seemed like a good idea. Brooklyn’s so fake now. Full of phonies. And I was becoming one of them. Talking about helping the environment when half the time I didn’t even bother to recycle. Buying only organic, farm-fresh produce while ignoring the fact that I was living in the middle of a concrete wasteland. I needed to get out of town. Find a patch of land to live off of.”

  “You wanted to walk the walk,” Kat said.

  “Yeah. I thought it would be easy.” Landon shook his head, indicating it hadn’t been. “Shows you how much I know.”

  “What about Aimee? How did she feel about coming out here?”

  “Reluctant,” Landon said. “It took some convincing but she came around.”

  Up ahead, Kat saw a strip of field where no plants seemed to grow. Another vacant patch sat a few feet beyond it, with a third one after that. Each strip was about a yard in diameter, and seemed to curve widely – cutting through the field in a large arc. The plants there were pressed flat into the ground, as if they had been crushed by a giant cookie cutter.

  Kat shook her head in pity. Landon was right. The damage was much worse than she thought.

  “I told you,” the farmer said. “This is the end of the road for us.”

  “Are things that tight?”

  “We sank everything we had into renting this place and getting it started. I had lined up an order with an organic tofu company out in Lancaster County. They offered to buy the whole field. Now I can’t even give them half of what they ordered. Without that, all we have is the produce stand and maybe a few orders from the restaurants in town.”

  Kneeling in the first flattened strip, Kat examined one of the damaged plants. Its stem was broken, its leaves already starting to turn brown. Most of the plants were in a similar condition, leading Kat to assume that neither they, nor the farmer who planted them, would be bouncing back anytime soon.

  “Who all knew about this deal with the tofu company?”

  “A few people,” Landon said. “Neighbors and such.”

  Walking again, they stuck to outermost ring of flattened plants. They moved clockwise, circling the field slowly. At regular intervals, other strips of damage shot away from them in straight lines that cut through the field.

  “I need names.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” Kat said, “maybe one of them wanted to sabotage it.”

  Landon faltered, as if knocked back by a strong wind that only he could feel. “Sabotage? Why would someone want to do that?”

  “Maybe one of the neighbors doesn’t like you,” Kat suggested. “Or maybe they want to drive you off the land and have it for their own. Have you made any enemies that you know of?”

  “No. None.”

  Despite the quickness of his answer, Landon appeared to be thinking the question over. Stroking his amateur beard, he eventually said, “Tom Hawkins, maybe. But I wouldn’t call him an enemy.”

  Tom Hawkins owned a hundred acres next to the Winnick property. Like many of Perry Hollow’s farmers, he kept mostly out of town and out of trouble. But
he did have an ornery streak. Kat remembered an incident several years earlier in which Alma Winnick had complained about the stench of the manure he was using in his fields. The next morning, she found a sack of the stuff – wide open and swarming with flies – sitting on her front porch.

  “So you had a run-in with old Tom. When was this?”

  “Right before planting season,” Landon said. “He stopped by to offer his unsolicited advice. Walked around the place as if he owned it. House. Barn. You name it. He said Mrs. Winnick asked him to keep an eye on us.”

  “Did she?”

  “Not according to her. I called her that night and asked. She told us to ignore him. Said he was just mad that she decided to rent the land to strangers instead of selling it to him.”

  “Would he have known about the deal you made?”

  “It’s possible he heard it from someone else,” Landon said. “We don’t talk. To him, it’s like we don’t exist. When he drives by and we’re out in the yard, he doesn’t even wave.”

  “Then I’m assuming he wasn’t the neighbor Aimee was visiting yesterday evening.”

  “No. She was over there.” Landon pointed to the back of the field. Through the sun-drenched haze, Kat could just make out the roof of a barn and a silo sitting about a half-mile away.

  “That’s the Elliott farm, right?” she asked.

  Landon nodded, although the question had been more of a rhetorical one. The land had been in the same family for as long as Kat could remember. She knew it was farmed by John Elliott, the fourth generation to toil in those fields.

  “I guess you guys are on good terms, then.”

  “John’s been a big help,” Landon said. “He’s given us tips. Introduced us to some of the other farmers. He’s made heaps of progress with Aimee. She’d never even seen a cow close up until we moved here. Now she can milk them.”

  “And he also knew about the deal with the tofu company?”

  “Sure. He’s the one who put me in touch with them.”