Vicious Circle Read online

  All three of them stood silently a moment, frozen in place. Kat should have left them alone. She sure as hell wanted to. But their expressions were so unreadable that she felt the need to remain there. Just for a little bit longer. Just until she was certain one of them wasn’t going to lash out at the other.

  Outside, she heard the crunch of tires on gravel. A vehicle coming up the driveway. She craned her neck, looking to the window over the kitchen sink. Through the lace curtains that hung there, she saw a red pickup truck pull up next to her patrol car.

  “It’s John Elliott,” she said, cursing his wretched timing. “I’m going to handle this. Both of you stay where you are.”

  Aimee nodded before staring down at the floor. On her way to the door, Kat swept past Landon, who showed no signs of making a move. She hoped he stayed that way.

  Once outside, she saw that the last of the onlookers had left. That was good. It meant no strangers would witness the ugly scene that was potentially brewing.

  “Just get back in your truck and go home, John,” Kat said. “Don’t move until I get there. If you have the time, you might want to think about calling a lawyer.”

  John Elliott did the opposite, sliding out of the truck and leaning on the door while squinting in confusion. “What’s going on?”

  “The crop circle. I know you did it, and I know why.”

  John’s face brightened. Not the reaction Kat had been expecting.

  “So you found it?”

  “Found what?”

  She heard footsteps behind her, beating against the ground like the hooves of a wild horse. Landon Gale grabbed her before she could even turn around to see him coming. He shoved her to the ground. Hard. Kat thrust out her arms to stop the fall. The left one took the full brunt of the fall, vibrating with pain as her body crumbled onto the grass after it. By that point, Landon was already near the truck, running toward John at top speed.

  “I trusted you!” he shouted. “I fucking trusted you!”

  There was something in his hand, blurred by the swiftness of his movements. It wasn’t until he raised his hand over his head that Kat saw the wooden handle and the dull gray of steel.

  It was, she realized, the hammer from the kitchen table.

  “Landon, don’t!”

  John let out a helpless yelp as Landon brought the hammer down. The blow connected just above his left ear, creating a sickening thud that echoed across the yard. Instantly, John slumped forward. His forehead smacked against Landon’s chest, keeping him aloft.

  Still on the ground, Kat grabbed the handle of her Glock and yanked it from her holster. On the edge of her vision, she saw Aimee standing in the yard. She was screaming, a wail that rose and fell like a siren.

  At the truck, John was still propped up by Landon’s body. Each movement left a smear of blood across his T-shirt. Landon lifted the hammer again.

  “Landon!” Kat was on her feet now, training her Glock on Landon while trying to ignore his wife’s panicked screams. “Get away from him or I’ll shoot!”

  The farmer didn’t bother to look at her as he swung the hammer at John’s head once more. Kat steadied her aim. She took a deep breath. Then, just as the hammer was about to strike a second time, she fired.

  Eight

  John Elliott was lucky to be alive. That was the good news from the doctor. The hammer had glanced off his head at just the right angle. Had it been slightly to the right or a millimeter to the left, he most likely would have been lying in the morgue instead of the county hospital’s ICU.

  The bad news was that his skull was severely fractured, he suffered a concussion and that he’d need to be monitored closely for the next twenty-four hours in case his brain started to swell. Then there was the possibility of permanent brain damage. Kat considered that news too depressing to even think about.

  As for Landon Gale, his future wasn’t looking so bright, either. Physically, he was doing a whole lot better than John. Kat had merely shot him in the shoulder, which was enough to make him drop the hammer. Had he landed a second blow, she would have been forced to shoot him again, most likely in the chest. Then he, too, would have been in the morgue instead of being patched up in the emergency room.

  Kat sat in the waiting room, flipping through an issue of National Geographic until the doctors allowed her to take Landon into custody. Then he’d be put in the station’s only holding cell for the night. In the morning, sheriff’s officers would take him to the county jail for his arraignment. And there he’d stay until a verdict or a plea deal, whichever came first. Kat didn’t expect Landon’s wife to come up with bail money.

  Aimee, incidentally, was in the waiting room with her. Cradling her stomach, she stared at the wall, both motionless and expressionless. Kat felt bad for the girl. She felt bad for everybody involved. It was just another case of generally good people making spectacularly bad decisions. Now all of them were going to end up paying for them.

  “This is all my fault,” Aimee muttered. “It’s all on me.”

  Kat wanted to tell her that everything would be OK, but couldn’t. She didn’t like lying to people, even if it was to make them feel better. John might be brain-damaged, Landon would surely face aggravated assault charges and Aimee most likely would have to raise her baby on her own. The upside was that Kat had raised James all by herself, so she knew it could be done.

  “You must think I’m a terrible person,” Aimee said.

  Kat shook her head. “I think you’re learning some hard lessons. But you’ll get through all this. You might not think so now, but you will.”

  Aimee turned to her. There were no tears in her eyes and no girlish expression on her face. She simply looked Kat directly in the eyes, woman to woman.

  “Thank you for saying that.”

  “No need to thank me when I mean it.”

  “I still don’t understand why John went to all that effort,” Aimee said. “If he wanted to get back at me, he could have just told Landon what was going on.”

  “He probably wanted to get revenge without getting caught,” Kat replied. “Hence the anonymous damage.”

  “I get that. But why did he make it look like aliens attacked the field?”

  Kat had been wondering the same thing about the crop circle, even before she knew who had created it. Sure, she understood the apparent motives – jealousy, revenge, lashing out. But if John had wanted to destroy Landon’s crop, it would have been far easier for him to just drive his battered pickup through the field. Instead, he had created a random pattern among the soybeans, an act that made absolutely no sense.

  Unless the pattern in the field wasn’t random at all.

  Excusing herself for a moment, Kat left the waiting room and stood outside the hospital, pacing the sidewalk. There had to be another reason for the crop circle – something more than mere payback. It might have been easy to make, but it certainly had to have been time-consuming. So why else would John spend hours in the middle of the night creating it?

  Kat’s mind raced. So did her legs, propelling her up and down the sidewalk. Every time she passed the emergency room’s automatic doors, they’d open and close with a muffled whoosh. She barely noticed it. She was too lost in her thoughts.

  She recalled what John had said earlier that afternoon when she interviewed him. He had tried to make light of the situation, to charm himself out of a real interrogation. And Kat, like an idiot, had allowed it to happen. As a result, she never picked up on one key phrase.

  “Maybe it’s a sign,” John had said then.

  Now there was no maybe. Now Kat was certain that it was a sign. John had been trying to tell her something with that crop circle. But what was it? And why didn’t he just come out and say it?

  Kat grabbed her cell phone. The pictures taken from the crop duster were still saved on it. She scrolled through them, seeing the center circle and the two rings around it. She mulled the possibility that that was the sign. John was the center circle, caught between Land
on and Aimee. Or was Aimee the center circle? That seemed more appropriate.

  She decided that both theories were not only wrong, but also stupid. To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a circle was just a circle. She moved on, studying a picture of the entire field. Her eyes were drawn to the three arms that jutted out of the crop circle. They had confounded her ever since she first saw them. Two of them had circles at the tips. The third had a triangle. Why?

  Pacing again, Kat suddenly remembered what John had said right before Landon barged into their conversation with a hammer. His words had been forgotten in the chaos that followed, but now Kat heard them with crystalline clarity.

  So you found it?

  Kat looked at one of the pictures on her phone again, gasping. It was a close-up, isolating the arm with the triangle from the rest of the crop circle. Staring at the image, Kat couldn’t help but feel stupid for not seeing it sooner.

  The triangle wasn’t really a triangle at all.

  It was an arrow, pointing to a corner of the field where no soybean plants existed. Instead, it looked to be overrun with weeds and wild grass. Kat had a feeling there was something hidden in that isolated corner of the field.

  She also suspected that John Elliott knew exactly what it was.

  The sun refused to go down without a fight. It hung low and heavy in the sky – an orange orb flaring with rebellion as it neared the horizon. Kat turned her back to it, feeling the heat on her neck. She was hot. She was tired. She was certain she smelled like something dead. Yet her day wasn’t over. Not by a long shot.

  She was back in Landon Gale’s field, standing in the center of the crop circle. She had called Carl to the hospital, ordering him to take Landon directly to the holding cell in the station once he was stitched up and bandaged. Carl, understandably hot and tired himself, didn’t react well to the news. At least he was indoors. Kat was back outside with the heat and the bugs.

  It was stifling in the field, the earth radiating the heat it had been absorbing since dawn. A cloud of no-see-ums, drawn to her sweat, swarmed around Kat’s face. They scattered when she swatted at them, but regrouped soon after, following her as she walked.

  She was going northeast, following one of the straight lines flattened into the soybeans. She stopped when she reached its end, both feet inside the triangle John Elliott had created. About fifty yards away was the northeast corner of the field. It was a neglected patch of land partially shaded by the tree line that separated it from one of Tom Hawkins’s corn fields.

  Moving closer, Kat could see why Landon had avoided planting anything there. The land was sunken slightly, making it difficult to navigate with a tractor and plow. It most likely collected water when it rained, adding to its undesirability. Spring rains would only wash away the seeds and summer storms would drown the plants.

  Yet something was growing there. Thriving, even. Kat counted nine plants altogether. Fueled by moist soil and plenty of sun, each one was waist-high and vibrantly green. When she was in the crop duster, she had assumed the plants were unwanted brush. But on the ground, standing among them, Kat knew exactly what they were.

  And she didn’t like it one bit.

  Nine

  “What do you know about this?”

  Kat held up the leaf so Landon Gale could see it through the bars of the holding cell. It was fan-shaped and sported seven thick fronds, spread apart like fingers on an open hand.

  Landon tilted his head, studying the leaf. “Is that —”

  “Marijuana? Yes, it is.”

  No one else was around, Kat having sent Carl to the break room for a few minutes. Lou had taken James out to dinner with her husband and grandchildren. Now it was just Kat and Landon, and she was determined to get some answers.

  “I found it in that untilled corner of your soybean field. How did it get there?”

  “I was just about to ask you that question,” Landon replied.

  “Well, someone had to plant it there. My first guess would be the guy who farms the field.”

  Landon hadn’t been looking so hot before Kat showed him the marijuana leaf. His face and hands were smeared with dirt and his hair lay flat against his head. Rings of sweat under his arms darkened his T-shirt, which was still stained with John Elliott’s blood. Peeking out of his left sleeve was a flash of white gauze from where his shoulder had been bandaged.

  Yet the farmer suddenly looked much worse once Kat mentioned the marijuana. His face went pale, making the dirt there stand out even more. His body, already slumped with exhaustion, looked about ready to fall apart.

  “You think I put it there?”

  “Who else could have done it?”

  “I don’t know,” Landon said. “Why don’t you ask John Elliott? He fucked up everything else in my life. Why not this?”

  Kat would have loved to talk to John, but she couldn’t. Not after Landon took a claw hammer to his head. Still, she had a pretty good idea of what was going on. She assumed John had found the marijuana plants while walking his dog though the fields. Like Kat, he probably thought Landon was behind it, but stayed silent out of allegiance to Aimee. But when she broke off their affair, he decided to tell the police. With Landon out of the picture, there was a chance Aimee might come back to him.

  Only John couldn’t tell the police outright. Aimee would have never forgiven him for turning in her husband. Instead, he had to do it anonymously, in a manner that he thought could never be traced back to him.

  Thus, a crop circle was born.

  “John didn’t grow this marijuana,” Kat said. “He designed the crop circle so that I’d eventually see it. That makes you the most likely culprit, unless you’re going to tell me next that your wife did it.”

  Kat intended to ask Aimee about it at some point. But she was still at the hospital, sitting at John Elliott’s bedside. Maybe she felt guilty about what Landon had done to him. Or maybe she had changed her mind about her feelings for John.

  “I wouldn’t put it past her,” Landon said. “I don’t even know who she is anymore.”

  There was despair in his voice, a sadness so strong that Kat couldn’t help but feel sorry for him.

  “You’re already in a lot of trouble,” she said. “And this just makes things worse. I strongly suggest that you cooperate with me on this. It might end up helping you in the long run.”

  “How?”

  “I know the county prosecutor. He might be willing to go easier on you if you give us information about the drugs. Names would be good. Who’s distributing it. Who’s buying it. A few good leads can go a long way.”

  Landon stood and circled the inside of the cell like a lion itching to escape the zoo. “I can’t give you names because I don’t know any. I told you, I have no idea how that got into my field. I’m a legitimate farmer. You have to believe me.”

  “Then tell me who else could have planted it.”

  “I’m stumped,” Landon said. “Other than maybe Tom Hawkins, I don’t think anyone even knows about that patch of land It’s not near any roads. The only way you can see it is —”

  Kat snapped her fingers, cutting him off. She knew exactly what Landon was getting at. She also knew without a doubt who was responsible for the marijuana in his field.

  It was fully dusk by the time Kat returned to the Winnick farm. The sun had given up and gone away for the night, ceding the sky to the moon, which had yet to rise. The lack of light colored everything an ominous gray-blue. At the farm, Kat saw the silhouettes of the house and barn, but not much else. No lights were on anywhere. All was quiet.

  She pulled into the driveway, the headlights of her patrol car sweeping over the back of John Elliott’s pickup truck. The door was still ajar – following the hammer attack, no one had thought to close it – and Kat saw the interior light flickering weakly. The truck’s battery was about to die. Right now, that was the least of John’s problems.

  Still, Kat got out of her Crown Vic and marched to the truck. When she took the keys out of the
ignition and closed the door, the interior light blinked out with relief. That was her good deed for the day.

  She moved past the truck and around the farmhouse to the back yard. That’s when she saw the biplane.

  It sat in the middle of the soybean field, a dark shape against the quickly darkening sky. Just beyond it, running as fast as he could, was Sonny Duncan. A bulging trash bag was slung over his shoulder. Kat had a pretty good idea of what was inside it.

  Neither Sonny’s presence nor the bag surprised her. Surely, he had noticed all the attention the crop circle brought to the farm. He needed to clear out before someone discovered what he was really growing in that distant corner of the field. Unfortunately for Sonny, Kat already had.

  She realized he was the person behind the marijuana crop when Landon mentioned how hard it was to see the field. Since it wasn’t visible from the road, the only way to see it was from the air. And the only people who did that on a regular basis were Bill Higgins, the airline pilot who called about the crop circle, and Sonny Duncan, cash-strapped crop duster. Since Bill had never even set foot in Perry Hollow, that left only one suspect.

  “Sonny!” Kat’s voice shot through the still, evening air and echoed off the side of the plane. “Drop the bag!”

  Ignoring her, the pilot vanished behind the plane.

  “This isn’t going to end well for you,” Kat called. “Don’t make it any worse.”

  Sonny’s voice rose from beneath one of the wings. “It can’t get any worse. They’re about to take my house. My plane. Everything. If I turn myself in, I’ve got nothing.”

  Kat saw movement – a flash of darkness dropping into the plane’s backseat. It was the trash bag. The movement jostled the bag open and freshly cut marijuana leaves spilled out. Sonny accepted the loss and jumped into the front seat. Within seconds, the plane’s engine was humming.

  “Sonny, don’t!”

  Kat sprinted across the yard. Sonny was trying to make a run for it. She didn’t know how much fuel there was in the plane, but she assumed it was enough to take him far away from Perry Hollow. If that plane took off, there’d be little hope of ever catching him.