Headlights from an approaching car illuminated the roadway behind them. Reflexively, the three of them dropped down beside the Prizm. Lou tensed while Cap reached for a rock to use as weapon. The car rumbled past them without slowing. Lou felt his tension ease. He took out his smartphone and went straight to Google.

“Wish you didn’t turn that gun over to Chief Stone,” Cap said to George, dropping the rock.

“He asked for it and he’s a friggin’ cop. What in the hell was I supposed to do?”

“You did right. Sorry, pal. I’m a little short on sleep.”

“When did Stone want us back here?” Cap asked Lou.

“He said eight. Do you guys want to go home and shower, then come back?”

“That’s only a few hours from now,” Cap said, checking his watch. “I can call someone to open Stick and Move. What do you say we go back to those fields and do some more searching on our own.”

“I’m in,” Lou said, stifling a yawn. “I don’t have to be at the ER until tomorrow.

“What are you looking up?”

“Corn.”

“Learning anything?”

“Maybe. Back at the house you asked Chester about the number of ears on a stalk. It says here one or two—three at the very most. But I can’t find anyplace that says four or five, and look, there’s a five right there.”

“They look like torpedoes,” Cap said.

Lou broke off an ear from the top of a stalk, stripped it, and snapped it in two at the center. Then he started counting kernels.

“This is incredible,” he said. “It says in this article here that because of the way an ear develops, there are always an even number of rows of kernels—usually fourteen or sixteen. This one has twenty-four. Multiply the number of rows by the number of kernels per row, and you get how much corn there is per ear. This article says between four hundred and six hundred, depending on whether the ear has fourteen or sixteen rows. Well, this monster has about fourteen hundred.”

“Plus all those extra ears per stalk,” Cap said.

“Exactly. That’s a powerful lot of corn.”

“It’s more than that,” George said. “It’s Frankencorn.”

“What?”

“Frankencorn. I did a paper on the genetic modifications in the fishing industry, and they used the term Frankenfish to describe these genetically engineered humongous salmon.”

“So that’s what you think these ears are?”

George snapped off an ear, peeled the leaves, and held it up, turning it from one side to another. “That’s it, exactly,” he said. “I’m sayin’ it’s Frankencorn. Freaky corn. I’m sayin’ it ain’t natural. GMO, baby. Genetically modified organism.” George flipped the ear aside disdainfully.