Douglas J. Preston - Still Life with Crows

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, public or private institutions, corporations, or persons living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright 2003 by Lincoln Child and Splendide Mendax, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Warner Books, Inc.

Hachette Book Group

237 Park Avenue

New York, NY 10017

Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

First eBook Edition: July 2003

ISBN: 978-0-7595-2809-3

Relic

Mount Dragon

Reliquary

Riptide

Thunderhead

The Ice Limit

The Cabinet of Curiosities

By Douglas Preston

Dinosaurs in the Attic

Cities of Gold

Jennie

Talking to the Ground

The Royal Road

By Lincoln Child

Utopia

Edited by Lincoln Child

Dark Company

Dark Banquet

Tales of the Dark 13

Lincoln Child dedicates this book to his daughter, Veronica.

Douglas Preston dedicates this book to Mario Spezi.

L incoln Child would like to thank Special Agent Douglas Margini for his ongoing advice on both law enforcement matters and electric guitars. I would also like to thank my cousin, Greg Tear, and my friends Bob Wincott and Pat Allocco, for particularly sage advice on the manuscript. Victor S. was very helpful in providing certain necessary details. Id like to thank the following people for helping make sure that the life of a writer need not be that of a monk: Chris and Susan Yango, Tony Trischka, Irene Soderlund, Roger Lasley, Patrick Dowd, Gerard and Terry Hyland, Denis Kelly, Bruce Swanson, Jim Jenkins, Mark Mendel, Ray Spencer, and Malou and Sonny Baula. Thanks to Lee Suckno for various and sundry ministrations. Most importantly, I want to thank my parents, Nancy and Bill Child, my brother, Doug, and my sister, Cynthia, my daughter, Veronica, and especially my wife, Luchie, for their love and support. I would also like to gratefully acknowledge my adoptive hometown of Northfield, Minnesota, whichin the nostalgic spyglass of memoryretains all the charms and graces of small-town America while somehow managing to avoid its limitations.

Douglas Preston would like to express his very great appreciation to Bobby Rotenberg for reading the manuscript and offering excellent suggestions. I thank my daughter Selene for her invaluable advice, especially with the character of Corrie. I am deeply indebted to Karen Copeland for her tremendous help and support. And I thank Niccol Capponi for innumerable fascinating literary conversations and excellent ideas. My thanks goes to Barry Turkus for dragging me up and down the Tuscan hills in bici, and to his wife, Jody. I also wish to thank some of my Florentine friends for providing a counterbalance to many solitary hours spent in front of the computer. They are Myriam Slab-binck, Ross Capponi, Lucia Boldrini and Riccardo Zucconi, Vassiliki Lambrou and Paolo Busoni, Edward Tosques, Phyllis and Ted Swindells, Peter and Marguerite Casparian, Andrea and Vahe Keushguerian, and Catia Ballerini. I am also most indebted to our Italian translator, Andrea Carlo Cappi, for his friendship and advocacy of our books and for giving us a piece of excellent advice on this novel in particular. And how can I help but acknowledge the incomparable Andrea Pinketts? Finally, I want to express my greatest appreciation to my wife, Christine, and my two other children, Aletheia and Isaac, for their constant love and support.

And, as always, we want to thank in particular those people without whom the novels of Preston and Child would not exist: Jaime Levine, Jamie Raab, Eric Simonoff, Eadie Klemm, and Matthew Snyder.

Although we have used southwestern Kansas as the location for this novel, the town of Medicine Creek, as well as Cry County and many of the other towns and cities mentioned in the novel, are either fictitious or are used fictitiously, as are the characters that populate them. We have not hesitated to alter the geography and agriculture of southwestern Kansas to suit our fictional purposes.

M edicine Creek, Kansas. Early August. Sunset.

The great sea of yellow corn stretches from horizon to horizon under an angry sky. When the wind rises the corn stirs and rustles as if alive, and when the wind dies down again the corn falls silent. The heat wave is now in its third week, and dead air hovers over the corn in shimmering curtains.

One road cuts through the corn from north to south; another from east to west. Where the two roads cross lies the town. Sad gray buildings huddle together at the intersection, gradually thinning along both roads into separate houses, then scattered farms, and then nothing. A creek, edged by scraggly trees, wanders in from the northwest, loops lazily around the town, and disappears in the southeast. It is the only curved thing in this landscape of straight lines. To the northeast rises a cluster of mounds surrounded by trees.

A giant slaughterhouse stands south of the town, lost in the corn, its metal sides scoured by years of dust storms. The faint odor of blood and disinfectant drifts in a plume southward from the plant, riding the fitful currents of air. Beyond, just over the horizon, stand three gigantic grain silos, like a tall-masted ship lost at sea.

The temperature is exactly one hundred degrees. Heat lightning flickers silently along the distant northern horizon. The corn is seven feet high, the fat cobs clustered on the stalks. Harvest is two weeks away.

Twilight is falling over the landscape. The orange sky bleeds away into red. A handful of streetlights blink on in the town.

A black-and-white police cruiser passes along the main street, heading east into the great nothingness of corn, its headlights stabbing into the rising darkness. Some three miles ahead of the cruiser, a column of slow-circling turkey vultures rides a thermal above the corn. They wheel down, then rise up again, circling endlessly, uneasily, rising and falling in a regular cadence.

Sheriff Dent Hazen fiddled with the dashboard knobs and cursed at the tepid air that streamed from the vents. He felt the vent with the back of his hand but it wasnt getting any cooler: the AC had finally bit the dust. He muttered another imprecation and cranked down the window, tossing out his cigarette butt. Furnacelike air boiled in, and the cruiser filled with the smell of late-summer Kansas: earth, cornstalks. He could see the circling turkey buzzards rise and dip, rise and dip above the dying smear of sunset along the horizon. One ugly motherfucker of a bird, thought Hazen, and he glanced over at the long-barreled Winchester Defender lying on the seat beside him. With any luck, hed get close enough to assist two or three of them into the next world.

He slowed and glanced once again at the dark birds silhouetted against the sky. Why the hell arent any of them landing? Turning off the main road, he eased the cruiser onto one of the many rutted dirt lanes that cut their way through the thousand square miles of corn surrounding Medicine Creek. He moved forward, keeping a watch on the sky, until the birds were almost directly overhead. This was as close as he was going to get by car. From here, hed have to walk.

He threw the cruiser into park and, more out of habit than necessity, snapped on the lightbar flashers. He eased his frame out of the cruiser and stood for a moment facing the wall of corn, drawing a rough hand across his stubbled chin. The rows went in the wrong direction and it was going to be a bitch getting through them. Just the thought of shouldering through all those rows made him weary, and for a moment he thought about putting the cruiser in reverse and getting the hell back to town. But it was too late for that now: the neighbors call had already been logged. Old Wilma Lowry had nothing better to do but look out her window and report the location of dead animals. But this was his last call of the day, and a few extra hours on Friday evening at least guaranteed him a long, lazy, boozy Sunday fishing at Hamilton Lake State Park.