Page 61 of Where the Fields Don’t Reach

“...had no choice. You don’t understand.”

Someone else was out there.

Sobbing. Ragged and helpless, a person coming apart at the seams.

Hadley went still between two rows.

She had a sightline now, a tattered gap in the stalks ahead where the corn gave way to the bare ground of the access cut. A vehicle sat in it with its headlights burning against the gathering dusk. She recognized the car. It had pulled away from the front of her station just that morning.

Nora’s car.

“...pulled me over for speeding earlier that day.” The words came clearer as Hadley eased through another row toward the thin path. “Reed spotted the clothes in the back of my car, Nora. He saw them. What was I supposed to do?”

“You killed him.” Nora’s voice was wrecked, and she couldn’t seem to stop saying it. “You killed him. You killed him, Whitney. How could you⁠—”

“No. No, it wasn’t me. Just stop, all right? I didn’t, I just—damn it.”

Hadley dragged a slow breath into her lungs. Nothing she’d heard fit the picture she’d carried into this field.

Whitney Dohl?

Nora’s best friend from the hospital had killed Reed Langley?

It made no sense. What did a speeding traffic stop have to do with Reed being shot in the chest and shoved behind the wheel of his own truck to burn? Had she been wrong the whole time? Was there no thread at all between Reed and Roland Mercer?

It didn’t matter right now. What mattered was a woman coming apart forty feet away with another woman crying at her feet. Hadley would sort through her own part later.

She eased back the way she’d come, one careful row at a time, until she’d put enough corn between herself and the voices that a low word wouldn’t carry. She brought the radio off her belt, her thumb already on the volume, rolling it down to almost nothing before she keyed it and brought her mouth close to the speaker.

“Dispatch, I need backup at Vinton’s east field, the north access road off County Road 9. Silent approach, no lights, no siren. I’ve got a possible hostage situation and at least one armed subject. Do not announce.”

She waited for the two clicks that indicated they’d heard her transmission, then she killed the volume so the radio wouldn’t betray her before clipping it back into place at her hip.

Hadley figured backup was ten minutes out, if she was lucky. Fifteen or twenty, more likely, this far from anywhere. She was on her own until then, and from the sound of things, Nora didn’t have fifteen minutes.

Hadley started forward again, her weapon raised, and this time she meant to close the distance all the way. She needed eyes on Whitney’s hands first. A firearm changed everything about how this situation went, and Hadley wasn’t stepping out of the corn to make an arrest until she was confident in what she was walking into.

She slid into the next row for the angle, and the scene opened up in front of her.

Whitney stood in the wash of the headlights with a phone pressed to her ear and a firearm in her other hand. The barrel was pointed down at Nora, who was kneeling in the dirt with her arms wrapped around her own middle.

“Where are you?” Whitney was talking into the phone now. Her voice had climbed into something frayed and pleading. “I’m here. I didn’t know where else to take her. No. No, she hasn’t called yet. I was waiting on you.”

The corn had gone dim with the failing light, and the shadows were the only thing Hadley had going for her. The headlights had Whitney lit up bright and flat, night-blind to anything past the reach of the beams.

It wasn’t much.

But it was something.

“I’ll have her make the call now, but hurry. Please, hurry.”

Whitney lowered the phone. She kept the weapon trained on Nora.

Whitney wasn’t in this alone, and whoever was on the other end of that call was on the way. Hadley’s read of the entire thing had rearranged itself in the space of a breath. She’d worked it a hundred ways at her desk, and two of those ways had always held. Reed wouldn’t have driven out to a back road for a stranger, which meant he’d followed someone he trusted, or someone he had no reason to fear. And a dead man hadn’t loaded himself into the cab of his own truck. It took strength to move a body like that.

Either one very strong person or two individuals.

Who was the second person?