He took the paper and slid it inside his coat pocket. “You mean, call if I start acting crazier than I already am.”
Neither of them laughed.
* * *
Dale arrived home just in time for dinner. Connie was mashing a pot of potatoes to go along with baked pork chops, and Curtis was setting the table. A tiny breeze from the open window over the sink cooled the small kitchen.
“You’re late,” Connie said. “I wasn’t sure if you were eating with us or not. You didn’t call.”
Dale kissed her cheek. “Yeah, I had a … last-minute interview to finish up before I could come home.”
“You missed my baseball practice again,” Curtis said, twisting a cloth napkin between his hands.
“I know, little man, I’m sorry. Big new case. You know how it goes.” He ruffled Curtis’s dark, wavy hair, identical to his own.
“You still need to eat and sleep,” Connie said.
Dale laid his coat on the back of a chair and sat at the table, resting his elbows on either side of his empty plate. He was tired enough to fall asleep sitting up. He’d barely slept but for a few hours on a lumpy couch in the office before he’d had to get up at dawn to ride on the backs of garbage trucks around dozens of neighborhoods, digging through trash cans full of rotten food, dirty diapers, old newspapers, broken bottles, and crushed soda cans for any potential evidence. At one point he’d opened a bag full of rancid chicken meat crawling with maggots, and he’d gagged so hard he’d dry-heaved. And after four hours of searching thousands of cans, nothing.
Connie dropped a spoonful of potatoes onto Dale’s plate. “Curtis and I are going school supply shopping tomorrow, so I’ll need the checkbook.”
“It’s in the top drawer of my nightstand.”
“I have to get a protractor this year,” Curtis said. He perched on the chair next to Dale.
“Is that so?” Dale said. “I liked geometry.”
“I hate math,” Curtis said. “It’s so hard.”
Just as Dale started to answer, the wall telephone rang. Connie set the potatoes down and picked up the receiver.
Dale nudged Curtis’s arm as Connie talked in the background. “If math gets tough again this year, I’ll help you. I promise.”
Curtis propped his chin in his hand and picked at the vinyl tablecloth. His small face was dotted with summertime freckles. “You’ll be too busy with this case. I just know it.”
“Dale,” Connie cut in. “It’s Chief Hagen.”
She held out the black receiver and stretched the curly cord across the room to his chair.
“Yeah, Chief,” Dale said.
Connie crossed her arms over her chest, waiting.
The conversation was quick. A tip had just come in on the hotline about a cornfield between north Des Moines and the little bedroom community of Ankeny. The team needed to gear up for another search. A woman, a psychic, insisted that Chris Stewart was lying injured in this particular field. She was having visions. She could see him. And since Chief Hagen took tips from psychics seriously, he wanted the team reassembled immediately.
Dale stood and hung up the phone.
“Let me guess,” Connie said. “You have to go back to work.” Irritation dripped from her voice.
“I’m sorry,” Dale said, slipping his coat back on. He wasn’t happy about it either. Tips from psychics were ridiculous. They never amounted to anything. The search would be a waste of time.
“I’ll be back before you know it,” he said.
“No, you won’t.” She turned to the stove and stirred the gravy. “You said you wouldn’t get like this again after the last time.”
Dale stopped. “Connie, this is my job. And it won’t be like last time, I promise.”
“We’ll see.”
He couldn’t blame her for being angry. Cops’ wives weren’t saints, after all. They were just women who wanted to eat dinner with their husbands every night.
“Did someone find Christopher Stewart?” Curtis asked. “Do you have to chase a suspect? Will it be dangerous?” He twisted the napkin again.
“It’s just a search, little man. Nothing serious.”
Curtis became fretful when Dale worked the long, early days of a case, and Dale, in turn, worried about his son. Curtis was already an anxious kid without the added stress of his father putting in twenty-hour days on a case that had terrified an entire city.
Dale probably didn’t do enough to ease Curtis’s anxiety, because Dale himself was paranoid and overly cautious. The families of cops could be easy targets for any crackpot. He’d never allowed their home address and telephone number to be listed in the phone book, they never took family pictures for the church directory anymore, and Dale made Curtis tell his friends his father “worked for the city”—a protectively vague description—instead of telling them he was a cop. And after working on the high-profile Klein case, Dale had insisted that both Connie and Curtis start going by Connie’s maiden name, Fuller, to further protect their identities. Goodkind was too distinct and easy to track down. Connie had thought Dale’s request was crazy and they’d argued for weeks about it, but he’d finally worn her down and she’d registered Curtis at his new middle school as Curtis Fuller a few weeks ago.
Dale shoveled three bites of the potatoes into his mouth, grabbed a warm roll from a basket on the counter, and left without saying anything further to Connie. It was best to just let her be.
* * *
Thirty minutes later, he arrived at the outskirts of Ankeny as dusk settled. Starting at the north edge of the field, each team member walked the rows of eight-foot cornstalks with flashlights. Every patch of disturbed dirt, every depression in the ground, every broken stalk had to be examined.
Hours passed into inky darkness. In his rush, Dale hadn’t thought to dress for hiking through a cornfield on a humid August night. His black wing tips were caked with dust and had rubbed blisters on the backs of his heels. He’d abandoned his tie and sports jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his dirty, sweat-stained shirt.
In the middle of a row, he bent over and rested his hands on his knees, feeling unsteady. How many fields had he searched during the Klein case? At least a dozen. He’d lost count.
The cases were an endless echo of each other.
Dale straightened and thrashed at a cornstalk with his flashlight. The razor-sharp edge of a leaf cut his cheek, and he winced.
He should’ve told Hagen on the phone that tips from psychics were a waste of time. They’d gotten hundreds of them during the Klein case, all worthless. But Dale hadn’t been raised to talk back. He knew how to take orders. He’d been obedient his entire life. A good kid who rarely got into trouble. A soldier, and then a cop. His mother used to say he was such an obedient child that he’d been born on his due date.
Too obedient.
If only his mother had known.
Chief Hagen’s voice crackled over the radio clipped to Dale’s belt. He was suspending the search until sunrise.
Dale emerged from a row and stood in a dirt clearing. He mopped his forehead with a handkerchief and checked his watch. Four AM. He now hadn’t slept in nearly twenty-four hours.