Page 39 of Where the Fields Don’t Reach

A body came down out of nowhere.

It came down in a graceless pitch, arms wheeling for a hold that wasn’t there. A sheet of clear plastic came along with the momentum, but it billowed halfway down, delaying its own fall. It was impossible not to track the descent of both. Hands and fingers clawed at nothing, desperate to catch anything of substance. A shoe came free and pinwheeled off on its own, leaving its owner to land first.

The sound of the impact was the worst part.

It wasn’t a thud. It was something flatter, wetter, and more final, a heavy slap of weight against tile with a smaller crack underneath it. The sickening sound carried clearly across the lobby and lodged itself somewhere in the building’s far recesses.

The tarp settled last, drifting down over the tile a beat behind him.

No one moved at first, too stunned at what they’d witnessed, though Nick’s grip gradually eased on her arm now that the danger had passed. The student beside Knox began to make a thin, rising noise. Knox himself stumbled back a full step, one hand thrown up to his mouth, the binder he’d been carrying dropped at his feet.

The burn behind her sternum flared hard and high, up into her throat, and she swallowed against it. Nick muttered expletives under his breath and reached for the radio on his belt. With every second that ticked past, the aftermath spread a little further across the polished tile.

Roland Mercer lay crumpled at the foot of the staircase.

One arm had somehow folded beneath his weight at an angle a shoulder didn’t allow, and one leg had come to rest bent up over the bottom step. Dark blood pooled into the grout lines and followed them outward in thin, straight veins. His glasses had skidded six feet across the floor, one lens spider-cracked, one earpiece snapped clean away. His mouth hung open, and his eyes were fixed on the lobby ceiling.

Hadley forced herself to take the first step toward him, and then the second, her own pulse loud in her ears. This man had been her one thread back to whoever had killed Reed, the single loose end she’d been pulling on these past two days. Now it was gone, yanked clean out of her grasp.

16

Nick Turner

September 2026

Wednesday – 10:24 am

Dr. William Zanes had been crouched over the body for the better part of ten minutes. He’d had his gloves on before he cleared the doors, and he paused only to murmur the occasional number to the tech keeping his notes. Behind him, another technician knelt at the foot of the stairs with a camera, working the angles in a steady rhythm of shutter clicks and white flashes that lit the underside of the railing. A sheet of clear plastic lay half-folded a few feet from the body, a numbered marker set beside it where it had come to rest. A third tech crouched over the cracked glasses six feet off across the tile, a yellow marker already down, reaching for a second to flag the single shoe.

The rest of the lobby belonged to Nick’s deputies. Strickland had the stairwell. Holt worked the crowd penned behind the tape with a notepad. The yellow line ran from a stair rail to a column to the frame of the front doors, and behind it the gathered students and faculty stood three deep, phones up, the low buzz of them filling the space where the morning’s ordinary noise had been an hour ago.

It had taken Nick close to twenty minutes to lock down the campus. He’d leaned on campus security to close the gates and hold everyone already inside until his deputies could take a statement from each of them. There’d been the usual grumbling about missed classes and parking, and a pair of students had made it three steps toward a side exit before Holt turned them around.

He’d lost track of Hadley twice and found her both times without much trouble. She’d kept herself out of his way, which he appreciated and didn’t trust for a minute. She didn’t have it in her to stand at the edge of a thing like this and wait to be told what came next. She drifted the perimeter of the room, stopping here and there to trade a few quiet words with the people his deputies hadn’t reached yet. To anyone else, she’d have passed for a woman keeping her hands busy to settle her nerves. Nick wasn’t fooled, though. She’d decided days ago that Roland Mercer was tangled up in whatever had happened to Reed Langley, and a body on a lobby floor hadn’t shaken that loose. If anything, it had set the hook deeper.

One of the forensics techs came down the staircase, and there was nothing in the man’s face to say he’d turned up anything useful on the upper levels. He’d spent a good while on the landing, where a section of railing stood roped off, the balusters gone and the orange cones knocked askew. The plastic that should have covered the gap was the same sheet folded on the lobby floor beside the body. Given that he and Hadley had both heard the man scream before he fell, Nick doubted Zanes would be ruling this one a suicide.

They weren’t the only ones who’d heard Roland cry out.

Knox Hudson and his student had given the first deputy near-identical statements, which was likely why Hadley had the pair of them cornered by the windows at the back of the building, working whatever a second telling might shake loose that the first hadn’t.

“Sheriff.”

Nick turned. A heavyset man crossed the lobby toward the tape, his suit buttoned a notch too tight across the middle, a woman keeping pace at his shoulder until the two of them drew up at a respectable distance from the line.

“Could I have a moment of your time?”

Nick crossed to the tape and ducked under it to the public side rather than wave the pair into the scene. He didn’t need the introduction. The same face hung framed on the wall just inside the entrance.

“I’m Dean Fred Briscoe.” The handshake was firm and held a beat too long, the grip of a man used to respect. “This is Annette Belkin, one of our psychology faculty. She’ll be coordinating grief counseling for any students or staff who’d like to speak with someone over this tragedy.”

“Ma’am.” Nick gave her a nod and let his attention rest on her a moment. She held a tissue, which she’d worked soft between her fingers. Her eyes were rimmed red, her hair done with a care that hadn’t slipped. Either the woman was grieving, or she’d decided grief was the expression the morning called for and put it on accordingly. “My only request is that you set those appointments up off-site. My people are still clearing this building.”

“For how long?” Annette’s brow drew down. The tissue went still in her hand. “My office is upstairs, and I’ll need access to my office.”

“Closed to the public for now, Ms. Belkin.” Nick caught the shift of her gaze and followed it. Hadley had peeled off from the windows and was crossing the tile toward them. “You’ll get back into your office. There’ll just be areas that stay off limits.”

He would spend the better part of the afternoon in Roland Mercer’s office before driving out to the man’s residence in Holloway. Hadley would be at his elbow the entire time, and he had no intention of denying her the access. She was the one who’d run the connection from the professor to Reed in the first place. Nick would be a poor excuse for a sheriff to pull the line out of her hands now that it had led to a body.