Stone shook his head. “I want to believe you, Welcome,” he said. “I really do. But I still have trouble wrapping my brain around the extent these killers went to in order cover up what you say happened here.”

He took his powerful flashlight out again and shone it at one of the overhead spotlights—then at another. None of them was lit, but all the bulbs appeared intact.

“I thought you said you shot out the lights,” Stone said. For the first time, there was a note of cynicism in his voice.

“They could have been replaced,” George said.

“And we could be in the wrong place. You guys haven’t spent much time out here in corn country, if you’ve spent any at all. It’s sort of like another planet to you. You could be feeding off one another. We see that sort of group dynamic from time to time. It’s like a form of hysteria or mass hypnosis. You start following some suspicious thugs out of the city, and get yourselves double-crossed and ambushed. No one’s attention to details is all that sharp. The stories get twisted on one another.”

Cap strode up to the police chief and, hands on hips, glared down at him. It was as if Michelangelo’s David had decided to confront the tourists who were gawking at him. “Do I look hysterical?” he asked.

Lou, who was kneeling nearby, inspecting the soil, glanced back at his chisled friend and grinned.

“Duncan, don’t get me wrong,” Stone was saying. “I just think we should go at this in the morning with a lot more men and some dogs.”

Cap took a step back.

“What about Notso?” George insisted.

“Notso’s dead,” Cap said. “I saw him get shot.”

“I don’t give a damn what you saw. I’m not leaving my cousin out here in this stinkin’ field to get eaten by animals.”

“We don’t even know if this is the right field,” Stone said.

Lou felt the situation getting tense. He did not know George well enough to predict his actions or whether Cap would be able to control him. He imagined him facedown in the dirt with his hands cuffed behind him and Gilbert Stone’s knee in the small of his back.

At that moment, Lou’s hand brushed over another clump of dirt. This one had something hard embedded in it—something hard and sharp. So sharp that it took a few seconds for him to realize that he had been cut. He inspected the side of his palm. Blood was oozing out of a half-inch-long slice. Carefully, Lou worked his fingers around the edges of the object that had cut him. He scraped the dirt away and was left with a large shard of glass—thick, textured glass.

“What’s that?” Stone asked, inspecting the object with his flashlight.