Besides, Rowenna thought, she wasn’t alone. She was with Joe.
And the corpse was gone. The corn, just days away from harvest, rose high into the sky, even after being trampled by so many people, Mother Nature protecting her own. The earth might not be eternal, but she would go on for millions of years, even if man didn’t. Life sprang from her, organisms tinier than the eye could see and as huge as elephants and whales—and as egotistical as man.
But all her creations returned to her, became part of her, in the end.
And she accepted them all back, just as she had accepted the blood that had dripped from Dinah Green.
Rowenna felt the strength of the ground itself, and the whispering, growing corn.
Maybe even the corn could sense that its time was coming.
She tried to shake the feeling of dread and finality that had seized her there in the vast field. She tried to tell herself that the rich scent of nature was sweet, and that the breeze was like a caress.
It didn’t matter. Nothing could change her mind.
She didn’t want to be there.
Joe was standing a short distance away from her. “Well?” he said softly.
She shook her head. “I’m not sure what you think I can do. The crime-scene unit has already been through here. What do you expect me to find that they didn’t?”
“What do you feel?” he asked her.
“Joe, I’ve told you, all I do is put myself in the victim’s place and try to think logically.”
“Okay, think logically.”
“Do you think she was killed here?”
He nodded.
“Where was she found? Exactly?” Rowenna asked.
He pointed next to her. She felt like an idiot. Nature was taking back her own, but there was a numbered marker right by where she was standing, and if she’d looked down, she would have seen the stake thrust deeply into the ground.
He walked over to her and handed her a color photocopy of Dinah Green’s driver’s license.
The woman had been pretty. Hair: dark brown, almost black. Eyes: brown. Height: five-three. She’d managed a shy smile for the photographer at the driver’s license bureau. She looked like a woman who had a lot of living to do, and was eager to get out and do it.
The breeze began to blow harder, or so it seemed. Rowenna looked up as it whipped her hair. The sun looked strange, with an opaque haze haloing it. And it was dropping. All too soon, darkness would come.
Rowenna closed her eyes and lost herself in that place where the intuitions came.
She thought she could hear someone pleading. A feminine voice, fraught with terror and, amazingly, hope…The human heart lived on hope, even against all odds.
Rowenna winced as, somewhere far away, as if in the memory of another time in this very place, she heard a scream.
And then laughter. A man’s cruel laughter.
There was a struggle, and then the woman’s voice again.
“I’ll be good, I swear.”
And a man talking. A deep voice, with a note of implacability in it.
“It’s too late.”
And then a struggle. Moaning.
Another scream. This one of choking agony.
And then…
Then she understood everything—what he did, where he did it, even, to a degree, why. And she was terrified.
Suddenly Rowenna found herself fighting for breath, her hands clutching her throat as if to fend off an attacker. She fell to her knees in the cornfield, knowing his hands were around the woman’s throat, feeling them around her throat, his strength…brutal and impossible to combat.
She heard a snap as a tiny bone at the back of the throat broke….
“Ro!”
Joe was at her side, shaking her, dragging her back to her feet.
She blinked rapidly.
That eerie haze no longer obscured the sun, whose rays shone down gently on her.
“Ro, are you all right?”
Joe was anxious, she thought, but at the same time, he didn’t appear to be the least bit sorry for what he had just put her through.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” she said. And she was. The sun was warm. The breeze was gentle. Life was normal.
“What did you see?”
“I don’t see things,” she whispered, and she didn’t know if she was protesting to him, or to herself. Because this time what she’d felt had gone way beyond imagining the victim’s final moments and had taken her straight into the twisted mind of a killer.
“What did you feel?” Joe pursued.
“Okay, looking at it logically, this is my theory. He kidnaps his victim. He has someplace where he takes her, a place where he can keep her a prisoner without being afraid of being caught or seen. I doubt this place is in the city, unless he had a soundproof room built. And I have a feeling of darkness. As if he uses darkness itself as one of his tactics for terrorizing his victim. He keeps her alive, he makes her his plaything, except…”