But the sheriff did switch on the official red spotlight, and, once outside of the city, sent the car lurching forward in a swift rush of gliding speed.
It was ten miles to Sam Beckett’s place, and the sheriff made it in ten minutes flat from the time he had started the motor on the County car.
Sam Beckett, looking shaken and bewildered, was waiting for him. Mrs. Beckett was standing beside him, making the fitful, useless motions of a frail, nervous woman under the influence of great excitement.
“You all alone, Sheriff?” she asked, apprehensively, almost incredulously.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Land sakes, you two hadn’t oughta go traipsing around there all alone! You can’t tell what’s over there.”
“What did you see, Sam?” Eldon asked.
“This girl lying face down, right in the fresh plowed ground. She’s sort of blonde like. Ain’t much more than twenty, I’d say. Nice clothes and — this hole in her back. Looks like she’d been stabbed.”
“You make any tracks around the place?”
“Just where I walked up to her.”
“Okay, let’s go see.”
Beckett said, nervously, “I was plowing and she was lying there right on the plowed ground, and no one had left any tracks. If somebody killed her, he must have...”
The sheriff climbed on the tractor and stood with his feet braced on the drawbar. “Let’s go over in this,” he said.
“Now you be careful!” Mrs. Beckett fired a shrill warning after them.
“We’ll be careful, ma’am.”
The sheriff felt of his belt.
“Got your gun?” Mrs. Beckett asked.
Eldon laughed. “Wasn’t looking for my gun. I was looking to see if my flashlight was hanging on my belt. It’s okay.”
The sheriff opened the gate when they crossed over to the old Higbee place. “Keep right in your same tracks, Sam,” he said, “just as well as you can.”
Beckett nodded and drove back across the plowed ground, keeping in the same tracks he had made before. By following those tracks, it was easy to return to the place where the headlights illuminated the huddled, inanimate object lying on the plowed field.
“Those footprints,” the sheriff said, “are they yours?”
“They’re mine.”
“There aren’t any other footprints at all, Sam?”
“That’s what I noticed,” Beckett said uneasily. “I was telling you there wasn’t any tracks.”
“She just didn’t float down here, Sam.”
“The way I figure it,” Sam said, “is that she must have been stabbed and then probably started running. She ran across the field, and the first furrow she came to, she pitched forward and fell on her face, and didn’t have strength enough to get up. She died right there. Then I came along with the plow and didn’t see her the first time around. After that it was easy to miss her.”
“How come you missed her the first time?”
“That was before the moon came up, and I was watching right where the front wheels were going, I kept looking down, way down.”
The sheriff climbed down from the tractor, being careful to step in the same tracks Beckett had made. He bent over the body. His flashlight sent its beam up and down the still figure. His fingers felt for a pulse, but he was careful not to move the body. Then he stepped back to the tractor and said, “Back up, Sam. Keep in your same tracks. When you get to hard ground, stop.”
On hard ground the sheriff once more left the tractor and, with his flashlight close to the ground, moved slowly along, giving each blade of grass a hawklike scrutiny.
“No blood,” he said.
“I could have plowed up the blood.”
“You could have. But if this girl had been running after she’d been stabbed, the blood would have dropped down on her skirt. The blood’s only on her coat.”
“By gosh, that’s so!” Beckett exclaimed. “I never thought of that.”
The sheriff went on, “Tell you what you do, Sam. Go back and telephone Undersheriff Quinlan. Tell him to get a photographer and to get in touch with the coroner. Looks to me as though we’re up against something mighty puzzling here. Me, I’ll stay here and kinda watch that things aren’t disturbed. Tell Quinlan I’ve got the County car. He’ll have to come out in his car.”
“Okay,” Beckett said, the relief in his voice indicating that he was only too glad to get away.
“Okay. After you phone George, better come back with your tractor. I want to have the photographer stand up on the tractor and take a shot looking down at the body just to show the way it’s lying, and that there aren’t any tracks.”
“Except mine,” Beckett said.
“Except yours,” the sheriff remarked tonelessly.
2
Beryl Quinlan, the nineteen-year-old daughter of the undersheriff, had been sitting within reaching distance of the telephone for more than an hour. Roy Jasper was scheduled to call from Fort Bixling. And it spoke volumes for Beryl’s feeling toward Roy that she would wait for an hour in any one place simply to talk with him over the telephone.
In the living room, Beryl’s father was having a mysterious low-voiced conference with three of the town’s leading citizens. They had no idea that Beryl was in the reception room waiting for her call. Seated in the big chair by the telephone, she was too completely engrossed to concern herself with the import of the occasional snatches of conversation which drifted out through the curtained doorway of the living room. But she did recognize the voice of the real-estate agent, John Farnham, generally known as a “crusader,” and, later, the voices of Edward Lyons and Bertram Glasco.
“I couldn’t do it,” Quinlan said in a low voice which somehow seemed to lack finality. “Bill Eldon is my superior officer.”
“Bill Eldon’s crowding seventy,” Glasco said from the smug complacency of his fifty-two years of well-fed prosperity. He was a political bigwig, caring only for power, and was reputed to be able to make or break any man in the county politically.
“Well, now,” Lyons interposed quickly, conscious of his own sixty-six years, “it isn’t his age that’s the matter with him. It’s the general way he does things. He’s old-fashioned. He’s too unchangeable — too dated. That’s it, he’s dated.”
Lyons beamed at the astuteness of his own diagnosis. Publisher of the Rockville Gazette, he was also a political opportunist whose entire influence had been built up by a shrewd ability to forecast the trends in local political opinion. He had a habit of being on the winning side. And after identifying himself with the winner, he managed to impress upon the uninitiated, and some few of the cognoscente as well, the vote-getting importance of the Gazette.
“Your duty,” Glasco suavely pointed out to Quinlan, “is to the County, its people. You’re drawing pay from them. Personally, I don’t think Bill should run again, and I don’t think he would if he were faced with a hot fight.”
“It might not be a hot fight,” Quinlan said.
Lyons cleared his throat. “The Gazette would make it hot.”
“See here, George,” Glasco hastily interposed, “if, in the next important case that breaks, you’d just ride along and not make any suggestions, Bill Eldon would dig a hole for himself and fall in it — flat on his face.”
“Is it your idea that I should lie down on the job?”
“No, no. Not at all,” Glasco protested hastily. “Just follow his instructions. Do whatever Sheriff Eldon tells you to, but don’t go out of your way to make suggestions.”
“I don’t think I’d like to do that,” Quinlan said somewhat dubiously.