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“That vest,” Cole said, from somewhere in the next row. “That color. You should have thought about that.”

She looked down. The pumpkin-orange of her vest was the brightest thing in the dim maze. A beacon. She was a beacon.

She stripped it off in one movement, balled it, dropped it, and hurried further. She had the white hat on her head—she pulled that off too, dropped it—and the bag was making noise, it was going to give her away, but her wallet and the wine and—she let it go. Heard it fall against the stalks. She kept walking, changed direction twice, trying to make distance without a sound.

She stopped.

The phone is in the vest pocket.

She looked back. She could not go back.

She had ten feet of visibility before the next turn.

She rounded the next turn and went down to her knees at the base of the corn, pressing in where the stalks were densest, where the leaves grew thick and low and the remaining layer of warmth from the day was still held in the earth. Brown sweater. Brown corduroys. She pulled her knees up and made herself small.

From somewhere far away, a signal tone—three blasts, loud and automated.

Attention please. For your safety, we ask all guests to vacate the festival grounds immediately and proceed to the car park. This is not a drill. Please leave calmly via the nearest exit. The festival will resume shortly.

Her heart was slamming. She listened to the muffled sound of movement, the distant noise of the crowd, footsteps on the other side of the stalls. She heard people leaving—the particular sounds of it, strollers and children and someone calling a name.

Then it got quiet.

The kind of quiet that was not peaceful.

She stayed where she was. The cold was coming up from the ground through the knees of her trousers. The sky above the corn had gone from gold to a pale gray-blue and was getting darker. She could hear the faint sound of the bluegrass band, very far away, until it cut off abruptly.

She should have screamed. She should have screamed in the middle of the crowd while there were still a hundred people around her.

She stayed where she was and waited.

Chapter 12

Into the Corn

The lights of the festival were visible from the county road, strung above the field in long bright lines against the darkening sky, and Keith drove toward them with his foot down and both hands on the wheel and his mind very carefully on one thing at a time.

First thing: She had gone into the maze. Good instinct badly timed—the crowd would have been safer, but she hadn’t had a moment to think, and the entrance was right there and now she was in.

Second thing: Cole was armed. He was off duty, suspended, operating outside any jurisdiction, and he had nothing left to lose and one reason left to be in Maple Lane Falls. That made him more dangerous than McGraw, not less.

Third thing: the phone in the vest pocket. He’d heard the line go silent mid-sentence and had left the station at a run.

Les was two cars ahead of him on the county road, light bar going. Every vehicle they had.

The car park was still half full when he pulled in, people moving toward it in the unhurried way of an evening winding down, and he was out of the truck and through the crowd before the engine stopped ticking. He found Tate at the edge of the festival ground already, which meant Les had been fast, which meant the call had gone out before Keith had even parked.

“State guys brought a thermal,” Tate said, falling into step. His face was its usual unreadable, but his eyes were working the crowd. “Les has checked. Two bodies in the maze, one moving.”

“Cole.”

“Has to be.”

“She’d hide,” Keith said. “She wouldn’t move unless she had to.”

Tate glanced at him sideways. “I know.”

They reached the entrance as the last of the crowd filtered out—a woman on crutches working as fast as she could, the knot of people backing up behind her too polite to push, a couple still pulling on jackets, someone scanning the grounds for whoever they’d come with. Keith stood at the rope and watched them go, and the field emptied and the quiet came down over the grounds like a hand placed flat.