Hope's Peak (Harper and Lane #1)(25)

What do I want?

Harper goes to the kitchen and fetches a glass of water from the tap. She chases it with a few aspirins, and washes those down with more water. Harper stands by the sideboard, wanting to sleep, knowing she can’t.

It feels as though she’s led Stu on, giving him hope that what they’ve been doing would lead to something deeper. Sleeping with him, getting close, but never once telling him that she loves him. She has feelings for him, misses him in her bed, misses his touch . . . but at the same time, there’s something pulling her away, keeping him at arm’s length. Harper craves his affection, the comfort of being intimate with him. And yet she knows that’s different from wanting to be in a relationship.

There are times she wishes she’d stayed in San Francisco. Her whole reason for leaving in the first place had been to flee her broken marriage.

What will I do if Stu and I don’t work out? Run to another town? Another city? Pull up stakes and take off every time a relationship goes south?

The clock on the kitchen wall ticks away, keeping the tempo of the time slipping from her grip, running like sand through her fingers.

Her cell phone rings, making her jump out of her skin. Harper swipes the screen and answers, pressing the cell to her ear.

Thirty minutes later, she and Stu are on the road.



The rain has stopped and the dawn is setting the horizon ablaze, but neither detective is in a mood to appreciate it. Stu rubs his forehead.

“Hey, why don’t you take the aspirin in the glove compartment?” Harper asks him.

“I don’t like takin’ pills,” Stu says obstinately.

Harper rolls her eyes. “Christ, Stu. They’re not pills. Not like that, anyway. They’ll help with the headache.”

He straightens. “What headache?”

Give me strength . . .

“You’re an ass, you know that?”

Stu looks out the passenger window. “Yep.”

They arrive at Gerry Fischer’s land, and Harper pulls in behind a patrol car with the lights running. A forensics team is already on the scene, their van in front of the black-and-white. They’ve set up lights on stands in the field to the left.

Stu and Harper climb out. The passenger-side door of the patrol car is open. One of the police officers is sitting with his legs planted on the ground, head down, looking sorry for himself. His partner waves them down and approaches with his hands on his belt, as if he’s an old-time lawman in a long-gone frontier town. “Mornin’.”

“This is Stu Raley. I’m Jane Harper.” They both show their ID badges. Harper nods in the direction of the man perched on the passenger seat. “What’s up with him?”

“He don’t handle the stiffs too well.”

Stu shares a look with her. “Uh-huh.”

The officer shakes hands with them. “I’m Weinberg. That there is Tasker.”

“Tasker, huh?” Stu asks, looking away as he mumbles something inaudible under his breath.

Weinberg leans in close. “On the job eight months. Know what I’m sayin’?”

“I see,” Harper says. “Tell me about the body.”

“Gerry Fischer works this land. All this is soybean,” Weinberg explains, indicating the rows of vegetation around them. “He got a call in the night. Something about a car parked out here.”

“Right,” Harper says, looking back to where CSU has set up the lights. “Then what?”

“Got here, found the body. Female, probably late teens, early twenties,” Weinberg says.

Stu scratches his forehead. “Coroner here yet?”

“ME’s on his way.”

Harper pats Officer Weinberg on the arm. “Alright, we’re gonna go have a look. You boys had better stick around.”

“Sure, Detective. We’ve got orders to remain here until the crime scene is secured.”

“Good.”

As they pass Tasker, the young officer looks decidedly green around the gills. Harper leads Stu Raley into the field where CSU is working. Under the intense illumination they have erected around the body, the girl looks like the centerpiece of a dramatic theater production. The soybean stalks cast spidery shadows over the girl, and, as with Alma Buford, she looks as if she is sleeping. But the bruises on her neck say otherwise; the purple handprints are so clear, Harper can make out the actual shape of fingers in the dead girl’s flesh. The crown sits lopsided on her head, as if it slipped after the killer set it there.

Stu looks visibly disturbed by the blood that has run from the girl’s privates and onto her clothes. The killer managed to close her eyes, but there was nothing he could do about her mouth—it remains agape, open in an expression of frozen terror. “Fuck.”

Harper squats down next to the girl, careful not to get near the mud. She looks at her, then up at Stu.

“We have to stop this.”





6


By the time Stu Raley catches a ride with CSU back to Hope’s Peak PD, the sun has risen and Harper wishes she could have San Francisco’s climate back—cool in the day, even cooler at night. In some way, Harper misses the fog rolling in off the bay. She misses eating out in Chinatown. But there are bad memories, too. Things she’d rather forget.

The car bounces along the dirt road leading to Gerry Fischer’s farmhouse. It’s an impressive spread of buildings against a never-ending backdrop of crops. Far as the eye can see, rows and rows of short green soybeans.