Rixton shoved an iced coffee and a bag of warm donuts into my hands the second my butt landed in the passenger seat of our cruiser. The entire car smelled like a bakery, and my mouth watered. Working second shift, two until ten, meant lunch was usually in my rear-view mirror when I clocked in. That hadn’t happened today. Neither had the cookies and milk. Dad had zonked out by the time I returned to the living room, and watching his fitful sleep had robbed me of my appetite.
“How’s your dad?” Rixton asked around a classic glazed. “I meant to ask earlier but… baby brain.”
“Still a zombie.” I hauled out my treat and picked at the sprinkles. “I hate seeing him like this.”
More than that, I hated knowing his condition was my fault. War and her coterie might have inflicted the damage, and I would make them pay for what they’d done, but I was the reason he’d been targeted. There was no tap dancing around that grim truth.
“Your dad is tough, and he’s got you.” He tugged a wet wipe from a packet tucked in the console and cleaned the sugar from his fingers. “He’s going to get through this.”
I shoved the donut into my mouth to avoid formulating an answer.
“Unit four-one-six,” the radio crackled. “We received a 911 call from Hensarling Farms out on Virlilia Road from an unidentified male. The caller was incoherent, but a second male voice was heard shouting ‘the fields are burning’ before the line disconnected. Arson suspected. The fire department is en route. Police backup has been requested.”
“On our way, dispatch.” Rixton powered up the light bar and flipped on the siren. “We’ll be there in twenty.” He stomped on the gas, and I tightened my seat belt. “Those cotton plants will be as dry as tinder. The whole farm will go up if the water fairies don’t get their asses there quick-like and in a hurry.”
“Don’t mock the whole department just because Captain Estes called you out that one time.”
Rixton cut his eyes toward me. “He called me Officer Krispy Kreme.”
The problem wasn’t the nickname. It was that he had answered to it on reflex in front of a half-dozen firefighters who now catcalled him every time we rolled up on a scene.
“You’re right. What was I thinking?” I deadpanned. “Clearly, they’re the enemy.”
“Damn straight.”
Fifteen minutes later, we bumped off the asphalt and hit a dirt road that T-boned up ahead. Straight took you to what appeared to be a cluster of barns. Right put you on a narrow lane already clogged with fire trucks that cut between two fields of ripe cotton and led up to the Hensarling homestead. We kept straight and parked between five pickups belonging either to the employees or neighbors come to lend a hand.
“Canton PD,” Rixton announced when no one came running. “We’re responding to a call for assistance.”
A young girl bolted from between two buildings to meet us. She ran straight up to me and took my hand, ignoring my flinch, and hauled me along after her. “Hurry. Please. It’s Mr. Rowland. He’s gone nuts. They can’t hold him much longer.”
Rixton and I exchanged glances then followed the girl down an alley between two massive buildings overflowing with hulking machines painted in trademark greens and yellows. A dirt lot crowded with rusted out equipment sprawled behind the tidy barns, and a small crowd had gathered in its center.
“Deena, you go on now.” A woman dressed in jeans and a tee covered in soot rushed toward us and turned the girl on her heels. “Sit in the bed of the truck and wait for me to come get you. Don’t move a muscle.” She pressed a phone into the girl’s hand. “Play a game or watch one of your shows. Just don’t come back here no matter what you see or hear.”
The girl’s voice wavered. “Momma?”
“It’s all right.” She gathered her daughter close. “Just do as I say, you hear?”
“Yes, ma’am.” The girl dragged her heels, but she didn’t look back, and that appeased her mother.
“I’m Detective Rixton, and this is my partner, Officer Boudreau.” Rixton took lead while I watched our backs. “We’re responding to an emergency call traced back to a landline phone associated with this address.”
“I’m Jessica Hensarling. This is my grandma Ruth’s farm.” Up close I saw a crimson smear across her left cheek that competed with the black smudges. The eye above it swelled with the start of what would become a wicked shiner. “Pete Rowland made the call on the barn phone before he lost his damn mind.” She indicated we should walk with her. “He’s right over here.”
A lump that might as well have been a charcoal briquette lay curled on the ground. Had I not recognized the diamond pattern charred into the section nearest me as roasted cowboy boots, I wouldn’t have thought I was looking at human remains. As easy as breathing, the cold place welled up in me, allowing me the distance to filter out the cooked meat smell that explained the fainter tang of vomit.
Careful not to disturb the scene, I walked a slow circle around the body. As I cataloged the location of each twisted limb, I noticed the metal nozzle grasped in one gnarled hand and the silvery canister he had contorted around while in his death throes.
This nutbar had set fire to the farm and then himself using a drip torch meant for controlled burns.
Rixton was modeling the stone-cold cop face I worked so hard to emulate. The laughing man who cracked jokes faster than old timers could shell pecans had blocked his heart behind a wall of ice too.
“His skin is still crackling.” He squatted next to Rowland’s head. “Based on the time dispatch pinged us and our distance from the farm, he must have turned the torch on himself within seconds of ending the call.”
“I tried to stop him,” Ms. Hensarling murmured, her voice gone weak. “He clocked me with the base of the drip torch.” Her fingers traveled up her face to press against the cut over her cheekbone. “He was sobbing, begging for help and then…” Her gaze dipped to his ruined corpse. “I’m going to be sick.”
We let her stumble to a nearby forklift where she emptied her stomach on its right front tire. We hesitated long enough for one of the others to break from the pack and comfort her. Rixton and I had retreated too deep into our heads to offer more than placations to the witnesses, and lip service wouldn’t solve the mystery of what had happened on this smoldering tract of farmland or why this man had taken his own life in such a brutal fashion. Wearing indifference as a shield, we started the evidence collection process.
Six hours after we arrived at Hensarling Farms, Rixton and I climbed back in the cruiser and pointed her toward the station. Gone was the bakery-fresh scent that had filled the car. Instead we smelled like death, sweat, and a sickly combination of diesel fuel and gasoline. Our clothes were filthy, our hands blackened, and we had yet to sink back into ourselves. Our bodies were running on autopilot and doing a damn fine job of keeping our minds insulated from the horrors left behind us.
Mr. Rowland hadn’t stopped with razing the fields. Our arsonist was also a murderer.
One of the mechanics, Mr. Aguilera, had checked his two sons out of school for orthodontist appointments and brought them back to the farm with him to play with the barn cat and her kittens. The boys had been racing up the rows in the field when the fire started, and their legs had been too short to outrun the blaze.
For as long as I live, I will never forget how the small teeth in those blackened skulls looked strung with fine, silver wire.
“I need a stiff drink and a hot shower,” Rixton announced. “I can’t go home like this.”
“I don’t think I’m going back to the Trudeaus’.” I sounded far off, miles away from here. “Dad and I always drink a beer on the front porch together on the bad nights. We don’t talk. We just sit and listen to the frogs sing.” I rubbed the grit from my eyes. “I need that slice of calm after what we saw.”
“What we saw is why you don’t need to be alone tonight. You want some company?”
“I’ve got a friend I can call,” I said, thinking of Miller, “but you’re welcome to the downstairs shower.” I remembered the bare shelves in the fridge I had bleached earlier in the week. “I’ll have to hit the package store.”