Vicious Circle Read online

  They stopped walking when the farmhouse was once again in front of them. They had come full circle. Aimee remained in the front yard, shielding her eyes from the sun. She looked so fragile all alone out there, with her too-round stomach and her too-short dress, that Kat felt a stirring of worry for the young woman and her unborn child. What would they do if, as Landon suspected, their entire harvest was ruined?

  “I plan on talking to both Tom Hawkins and John Elliott. If one of them did this, I’m going to find out about it.” Kat looked again to Aimee, who waved at them from across the lawn. “And I’ll make sure that they pay for it.”

  Lou van Sickle’s voice erupted from the police radio attached to the shoulder of Kat’s uniform. “Chief? You still out on the farm?”

  “Yep, Lou. Still here.”

  And still sweating profusely. Beads of perspiration trickled down her back and pooled lightly at her bra strap. Strands of blond hair stuck to her forehead, which she whisked away with her free hand.

  “I just got off the phone with someone named Bill Higgins,” Lou said. “He’s a pilot. Says he flies over the area several times a day.”

  “And?”

  “Well,” Lou said, “he gave me his phone number and wants you to call him. He said he saw something interesting this morning that you might want to know about.”

  Three

  “A crop circle? Is this some kind of a joke?”

  Kat was on her cell phone in the kitchen of Landon and Aimee’s rented farmhouse. The place was a mess, with dishes stacked precariously in the sink, countertops dark with stains and a floor that looked like it hadn’t been mopped in ages. The table she sat at was covered with mail, loose papers, seed catalogs and, for no particular reason, a claw hammer. Apparently Aimee was a terrible housekeeper – another thing the two of them had in common.

  “Trust me, Chief Campbell,” Bill Higgins replied. “I’m being completely serious.”

  “And you first noticed it this morning?”

  “Yes. My co-pilot and I both saw it clearly. If you’d like, you can talk to him as well. I’m sure some passengers saw it, too, but they might be harder to track down.”

  “There’s no need for that,” Kat said. “I’m at the property now. In fact, I was just in that field a few minutes earlier.”

  She heard a huff of surprise from the pilot. “And you didn’t think it was a crop circle?”

  No, Kat had not. Why would she? Things looked much different on the ground than they did from the air. All she had seen were lines of flattened soybean plants. She never for a second thought that they formed a pattern.

  “Are you sure it’s Perry Hollow you were flying over? Maybe you’re getting us confused with another town.”

  Or another state. Or another state of mind.

  “Positive,” Bill said. “I’ve admired the area for years now. I can recognize it instantly, no matter the altitude. First the fields, then the mountains, with the lake and the town in between.”

  “And how big did this supposed crop circle look?”

  “Big enough to see from 20,000 feet,” Bill said.

  “I meant acreage. Just toss out a guess.”

  “Twenty acres. Maybe more.”

  Kat covered the receiver with her hand and looked to Landon Gale. He and Aimee stood on the other side of the kitchen, leaning against the dirty counter. Aimee had a dish towel in her hands, which she wrung with obvious nervousness.

  “What’s the size of that field?”

  “Thirty acres,” Landon said.

  So far, Bill Higgins was pretty much on the mark. If he was a crackpot, he at least had most of his facts straight.

  “I’m not crazy,” the pilot said, as if reading her mind. “I don’t believe in aliens or ghosts or that more than one gunman killed Kennedy. But what I saw in that field this morning defies logical explanation.”

  He was wrong on that point. Kat already had an explanation. Someone – she didn’t know who – had decided to flatten half of Landon Gale’s crop, although she wasn’t exactly sure how. Or why.

  “I appreciate you calling, Mr. Higgins,” Kat said, fingering the handle of the hammer sitting on the table in front of her. “But I assure you that there is a logical explanation for what you saw. And while it might have looked like a crop circle from the sky, I’m certain that the situation here on the ground is very different.”

  “I didn’t think you’d believe me,” Bill said, sighing. “But I’m telling you, Chief Campbell. I know what I saw. And if you get yourself up in the air and look down on that field, you’ll see it, too.”

  The pilot’s advice echoed through Kat’s brain as she ended the call. He had a good point. She had only seen the damage up close. Maybe looking at it from above would help her understand how extensive it was. Hell, maybe she’d also see what Bill Higgins thought he saw, although she doubted it.

  Still, the idea was worth trying. Kat gave the hammer a hearty spin before turning once again to the farmer and his wife. “Do you guys know anyone who has a plane?”

  A half-hour later, Kat found herself in the rear seat of a two-person biplane. In the front was a ruddy-face man named Sonny Duncan. Like aviators of old, he sported a leather helmet and goggles over his eyes. Kat had neither. She also, incidentally, didn’t have a good feeling about this.

  They were taxiing down the road that ran in front of the Winnick property, getting ready to take off. Kat had volunteered to drive out to meet him, but Sonny wouldn’t hear about it.

  “I can be there in ten minutes,” he had told her nonchalantly. “It’s no problem at all.”

  It might not have been a problem for him, but it certainly was for Kat. She would have preferred taking off from a more suitable location. Say, an airport. She also would have preferred a different plane, one that looked like it hadn’t been flown by Charles Lindbergh and that actually provided a roof over their heads. Kat wasn’t necessarily afraid of flying, but sitting out in the open like that made her feel nervous deep in the pit of her stomach.

  “How do you know Landon Gale?” The plane’s engine was so loud that she practically had to shout in order to be heard.

  “I know all the farmers around here,” Sonny shouted back. “I do contract work for half of them.”

  Kat assumed that. The plane, after all, was a crop duster. Painted yellow, it had a double stack of wings in the center, inches away from the cockpit. The propeller was located at the nose of the plane – a whirring blur of motion that could chop off a limb if you got close enough. Attached to the bottom wings was a series of hoses and nozzles that ran beneath the plane. Sprayers for the pesticide the plane carried in a compartment in its belly.

  “Has Landon Gale ever hired you?”

  Sonny shook his head. “He’s organic. No chemical pesticides. I used to spray the fields when George Winnick farmed them, and one of the neighbors told me I should do the same for the Gale kid if I had any left over. Three months ago, I was flying by, had a little extra in the tank and decided to give him a sample.”

  “I bet that didn’t go over too well,” Kat said.

  “It didn’t. He ran out of the house yelling and gesturing for me to stop. I brought the plane in for a landing and apologized. I felt bad that I had almost ruined his whole crop. So when you called me this morning, I figured I owed them a favor.”

  “I understand he’s an organic farmer,” Kat said, “but is the pesticide really that dangerous?”

  “Depends on who you ask,” Sonny answered. “I think they’re safe if you always wash your produce. But, trust me, you don’t want to ingest this stuff. And you especially don’t want to get it into your lungs.”

  They had picked up speed, bumping down the road in a way that Kat could only describe as teeth-rattling. She still had that nervous feeling in her stomach, which grew more pronounced when she pondered what would happen if someone decided to drive down the road. Cars were sparse there – none had gone by since she had arrived – but it could happen.


  Kat prayed that it didn’t.

  “What was the neighbor’s name?”

  Sonny either couldn’t hear her or didn’t understand the question, because he replied with a confused, “What?”

  “That neighbor who told you to spray Landon’s field.” Kat was yelling so loud her throat hurt. “What was his name?”

  “Tom Hawkins,” Sonny said, just as loud. “Now stop talking or soon you’ll be swallowing bugs.”

  The plane left the ground with surprising smoothness. Once airborne, Sonny kept the plane in line with the road below them until they were a hundred yards past the treetops. The plane then banked lightly, reversing direction in one wide, sweeping arc.

  Looking over the side of the plane, Kat’s apprehension melted into something more like awe. Everything looked so peaceful from up there. Beautiful, too. The fields and forests of Perry Hollow resembled streaks of paint from van Gogh’s brush. Shades of green that seemed dull on the ground popped with fresh vividness. The water of Lake Squall, so murky and algae-filled up close, was a pristine mirror that reflected their journey.

  Sonny Duncan seemed at home in the cockpit, working the controls with the laid-back confidence of a man who had been doing the same thing his entire life. He used his whole body when steering the aircraft, leaning slightly in whatever direction he wanted to travel. To Kat, it looked like he and the plane were a single entity – two parts moving as one.

  “How long —”

  Kat stopped herself, remembering the pilot’s warning about insects. Before speaking again, she held a hand in front of her mouth for protection.

  “How long have you been a pilot?”

  “Since I was fifteen,” Sonny said. “Started in 1960. Dusted crops during the week and did stunts on the weekend.”

  Kat’s sense of awe was interrupted by the sensation of her stomach tightening again. “Stunts?”

  “Sure. Air shows. Daredevil contests. I can fly this thing into a loop, if you want.”

  “No need.” Kat instinctively grabbed the bottom of her seat and held on tight. “All I want is to circle the field a few times.”

  Sonny gave her a thumbs-up before swooping the biplane to the right, bringing them directly over the Winnick property. First, they glided over the farmhouse, where Kat saw dark spots on the roof where shingles needed to be replaced, then the yard. Landon was there, a mere speck against the green, peering up at them.

  The vandalized soybean field spread out behind the farmhouse. Along both sides were small strips of trees that marked the property line. Running behind it was a wide creek that divided the Winnick property from John Elliott’s.

  Sonny banked the plane again and directed it over the soybean field. Below them, the strips of flattened plants merged together to form a definite pattern.

  Kat whipped out her cell phone, which of course contained a camera, and started taking pictures. She tried to get a wide range of shots, focusing first on the field as a whole before zooming in on individual parts, of which there were many.

  The design was a circle with three evenly spaced lines jutting out of it. Inside the circle were two more circles. The center one sat directly in the middle of the field – a complete circle perfectly proportioned. The other two surrounded it like rings, radiating outward. Kat and Landon had walked the circumference of the outside one, not knowing it was just one piece of a much larger puzzle.

  The arms projecting away from the outermost circle were the straight lines Kat had noticed on the ground. All three ended in more shapes. Two of them were in similar circle-within-a-circle patterns. The third was different – a triangle, its tip facing a far-flung corner of the property that had been overrun with weeds.

  Kat felt a growing sense of unease as she snapped picture after picture. The sheer size of the design was overwhelming. Bill Higgins hadn’t been lying when he said the pattern in that field denied logical explanation. It was a freak of nature, an anomaly, something that clearly did not belong. Just looking at it sent a shiver scurrying up Kat’s back.

  She also knew that Bill – poor Bill, whom she had merely patronized – was right about something else. The thing carved into Landon Gale’s soybean field was most definitely a crop circle. And Kat had no idea how it got there.

  Four

  By ten that morning, word about the crop circle had leaked out, sending a healthy swath of the county’s population scurrying into the heat to get a glimpse of it. The road in front of the Winnick property had become so clogged that Kat was forced to call Carl Bauersox, her night deputy, back into work to deal with the crowds.

  By eleven, the station’s phones were lit up with people far and wide claiming to have seen strange lights in the sky the night before. Lou van Sickle reported them all dutifully and with the patience of a saint. The only time she cracked was when a man from Vermont called to say that the circle meant the world would soon be coming to an end.

  “Good,” Lou had replied. “Then maybe I can finally get off this damn phone and go pee."

  By noon, the station got a call of a different stripe. It was from Nick Donnelly, the state police detective who helped investigate the Grim Reaper killings a year earlier. Although he lived forty-five minutes away, Nick made sure to stay up-to-date on happenings in Perry Hollow.

  “What the hell is going on out there?” he asked Kat after Lou transferred the call.

  “Nothing much,” Kat said. “Just your normal, everyday crop circle. How did you find out about it?”

  “It’s on the local news.”

  “Right now?”

  Nick chuckled, no doubt picturing the open-mouthed look of shock on Kat’s face. “Yep. This very minute.”

  A small TV sat on top a filing cabinet in a corner of Kat’s office. She flicked it on and saw an aerial view of the crop circle being broadcast on one of the Philadelphia news stations. The report next cut to footage of people trudging through the yard on their way to the field. Instead of shooing them away, Landon Gale welcomed them with a hearty smile. The produce stand, empty mere hours earlier, overflowed with bounty from the farm’s large garden. Aimee manned the table, bagging onions and snap peas while accepting wads of cash.

  “Looks like business is booming,” Nick said.

  “I’ll say.” Kat noticed that Landon looked positively gleeful as a blow-dried reporter – one apparently impervious to the heat – asked him about the crop circle. “Two hours ago he was worried about losing everything.”

  “Maybe this is a blessing in disguise,” Nick said. “Or at least one giant stroke of luck.”

  Kat turned off the TV. “I’m surprised you’re not on your way here to help me check it out.”

  “Wish I could. But I’ve got a full plate.”

  Nick was no longer a cop, but he still hit the pavement daily trying to solve cold cases the police have given up on. Kat thought it suited him.

  “Anything juicy?”

  “I’ll tell you about it later,” Nick said. “Go back to your crop circle.”

  The Perry Hollow police station was too small to have a conference room. But it did have a break room, which is where Kat retreated to brief her force. All two of them. Carl and Lou sat at attention as she littered the break room table with photographs of the crop circle.

  “Before we start investigating this in depth,” she said, “let’s all agree that this was not the work of aliens.”

  Carl and Lou stayed silent.

  “Seriously, guys?”

  “I don’t think we should necessarily rule it out,” Carl said. “You’ve said yourself we need to look at all the possibilities when working a case.”

  “And we should,” Kat countered, “when those possibilities actually exist. And until I’m proven wrong, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say UFOs don’t exist.”

  Lou spoke up. “I’ve talked to two dozen people today who’d argue with that statement.”

  “Let them,” Kat said. “All I know is that we have one field with
a lot of damage. And someone is responsible. So far, we have two suspects, Tom Hawkins and John Elliott.”

  “They’re the two nearest farms, right?” Carl asked.

  Kat nodded. “Both knew about a deal Landon Gale had made to provide his whole soybean crop to a tofu company. I’m thinking one of them got a little jealous.”

  “Maybe they saw how much money Landon was going to make from the sale and decided to get in on the action themselves,” Lou suggested.

  “That would certainly be a good motive.” Kat turned to Carl. “Drive out there and check the fields that Tom and John farm. See if one of them is also growing soybeans.”

  “Right-o, Chief.”

  “While you do that, I’ll talk to the farmers themselves. See if one of them is hiding something.”

  Kat grabbed one of the photographs from the table – an overview of the entire field. She turned the picture around, looking at the crop circle from all angles. While she firmly believed it was the work of humans and not aliens, she had no clue about the rationale behind it.

  Clearly, someone had wanted to destroy Landon Gale’s crop. Yet there were easier ways to go about it. A lawnmower, like Landon first suspected, or even a John Deere with a plow hitched to the back. So why be so elaborate about it? Why spend what had to be hours turning the field into an intricate pattern?

  Of course there was another question to be answered: How? Kat was still baffled by just how the crop circle was created. She had a feeling figuring that out would help lead them to the real culprit. And she knew just the person to ask.

  “Scratch that,” she said.

  Carl and Lou had been filing out of the break room, but now they both paused at the door.

  “You’re not going to interview the farmers?” Lou asked.

  “I am. But not right now. First, I need to talk to a crop circle expert.”

  “And how are you going to find one of those?”

  “Easily,” Kat said, smiling. “I happen to live with one.”

  Kat tried to hold her son’s hand as they trudged up the front steps of the Perry Hollow Library, but James wanted nothing to do with it. He was eleven, that age when parental affection of any sort was regarded as totally embarrassing. James had Down syndrome, and when he was born doctors told Kat his emotional development might be much slower than other kids his age. So far, that wasn’t the case. He seemed just as prickly as any other eleven-year-old boy whose mother longed to feel his hand in hers.