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a second stub, then a third and a fourth. All broken. Pendergast returned to the edge of the clearing, selected a cornstalk that still stood. He knelt down and grasped it at the bottom, but no matter how hard he tried, he could not break it.
    He ventured farther into the clearing itself. It hardly mattered where he put his feet—it could not be more disturbed. He moved slowly, crouching now and then to examine something in the riot of corn and dust. Once in a while he would pick up something with a pair of tweezers he’d removed from a suit pocket, look at it, and release it. For almost an hour he moved across the clearing in this fashion, bent over in the baking sun.
    He kept nothing.
    At last, he reached the far end of the clearing and moved into the dense corn rows themselves. There had been a few pieces of torn fabric found clinging to some of the cornstalks, and it wasn’t difficult to find the tags marking their locations.
    Pendergast moved down the row, but there were so many footprints and dog prints that it was hopeless to try to follow anything. The report said that two different sets of bloodhounds had been put on the track but had refused to follow it.
    He paused in the forest of corn to slip a tube of glossy paper from his pocket and unroll it. It was a photograph, taken at some unidentified point before the crime, showing the field from the air. The corn rows did not go in straight lines, as it seemed at ground level, but rather curved to follow the topography of the landscape, creating elliptical, mazelike paths. He located the row in which he stood and carefully traced its curve. Then, with difficulty, he forced his way into the next corn row, then the next. Once again he examined the aerial photograph, tracing the path of the current row. Much better: it went for a long distance across flat ground and then dropped down toward the bottomland near Medicine Creek, at a point where the creek looped back toward the town.
    It was, in fact, the only row that actually opened onto the creek.
    Pendergast walked down the row, heading away from the murder site. The heat had settled into the corn and, in the absence of wind, was baking everything into place. As the land gradually declined toward the creek, a monotonous landscape of corn revealed itself, stretching to an ever more remote horizon, oppressive in its landlocked vastness. The distant creek, with its clumps of scraggly, half-dead cottonwoods, only added to the sense of desolation. As Pendergast walked he would stop occasionally to examine a cornstalk or a piece of ground. Once in a while his tweezers would pluck something up, only to drop it again.
    At long last, the corn row opened onto the bottomland along the creek. Where the cornstalks and field dirt gave way to sandy embankments, Pendergast stopped and glanced downward.
    There were footprints, here in the firm sand: they were bare, and deeply impressed. Pendergast knelt, touched one print. It was from a size eleven foot. The killer had been carrying a heavy body.
    Pendergast rose and followed the tracks to where they entered the creek. There were no corresponding tracks exiting on the far side. He walked up and down the creek, looking for a point of emergence, and found nothing.
    The killer had walked for a long distance in the creek bed itself.
    Pendergast returned to the corn row and began making his way back to the clearing. The town of Medicine Creek was like an island in a sea: it would be difficult to come or go without being seen. Everyone knew everybody and a hundred pairs of keen old eyes, staring from porches and windows, watched the comings and goings of cars. The only way an outsider could arrive at the town unseen was through this sea of corn—twenty miles from the next town.
    His first instincts had been confirmed: the killer was probably among them, here, in Medicine Creek.

Seven
    H arry Hoch, the second-best-performing farm equipment salesman in Cry County, rarely picked up hitchhikers