Page 70 of The Children of Eve

Britney exhaled hard enough to visibly deflate.

“Taylor Goff and Levi Hixon.”

Bang goes your local pot source, thought Eric. Goff and Hixon, twenty-eight and twenty-nine respectively, were minor local troublemakers inexorably mutating into something worse. Goff was reputed to like his girls young, and Hixon liked them even younger. Britney and Paris would have earned whatever they were due to consume in that barn—earned it, and then some.

“Did you see them walk away?” asked Wen.

“I wasn’t looking back,” said Britney. “I just wanted to put distance between us and that barn.”

Whatever Britney might claim to the contrary, Eric doubted Goff and Hixon had exited without first taking a peek for themselves. He just hoped they hadn’t screwed with the scene. Detectives would also need to ask them how often they convened their little social club up at that barn, in the faint hope that they might have noticed something odd in the preceding days. Wen didn’t make Goff and Hixon for killers, though, or not like this. If they ever got around to doing the deed, they’d be smart enough not to abandon the body to be found by a pair of teenagers they were due to meet in a sex-for-joints arrangement.

“Are we in trouble?” asked Paris.

“We’ll see,” said Wen, keeping them dangling. He’d leave any further questions to the detectives, in case one or both of these girls knew more about the man in the barn than they were telling. “For now, I want you to get back in your car and stay warm.”

“We’ll need the keys to turn on the AC,” said Britney. “The other cop took them from us.”

“That’s not going to happen,” said Wen. He didn’t want anyone panicking and deciding to lead law enforcement on a merry dance. If a call from Broadway or Hollywood didn’t result from his work in local theater, Eric Wen hoped to make a career of policing by rising through the ranks, and nothing was better guaranteed to wreak havoc on those plans than having witnesses—or, worse, potential perpetrators, whatever his instincts to the contrary—flee the scene because a sheriff’s deputy was foolish enough to leave them with keys in the ignition.

Wen headed over to his colleague, Inge Schuler. Her first name was actually Ingina, from High German, and Wen could only begin to imagine how much grief that had caused her during her school years. Some relief would have arrived with adolescence because Schuler was tall, blond, and striking, bordering on beautiful. Wen might have fallen a little in love with her were he not already in love with his Chinese-American fiancée, and were said fiancée not above burying him upside down in a hole in the woods if she suspected him of so much as contemplating relations with a rangy Germanic blonde, or even a short one.

“I don’t like this,” said Wen. “We ought to be up there already.”

“Do you want to get shot by the Dolfes?” asked Schuler.

“I don’t want to get shot by anyone.”

“Neither do I, which is why we’re still down here.”

Schuler hadn’t called the dispatcher but instead contacted the station commander at Western Loudoun directly, because some conversations were better off not conducted across open lines. He’d promised to get back to her in five minutes, but the best part of ten had elapsed by thetime her cell phone rang again. Wen was beginning to fret about when the medics might get there, for fear the two witnesses were wrong about the guy being dead. Schuler put the call on speaker for Wen to hear, but kept the volume low so it didn’t carry to the girls in the car.

“That’s not Dolfe land, not yet,” they were assured. “There’s a holdup on the paperwork. The Realtor responsible for the sale says she doesn’t know anything about any barrier or sign on the road, so you just take it down and get on up to that barn to secure the scene. Backup’s on the way, with medics and detectives close behind.”

Wen could already see the lights of the first of the approaching vehicles as the call was ongoing, which meant that someone would be available to watch Britney and Paris. The deputies might have to draw straws to pick who stayed behind and who got to enter territory that the Dolfes now regarded as theirs, with all the potential associated difficulties, but the more guns they had once they moved past the roadblock, the better. Perhaps they could handcuff the girls to the steering wheel and deal with the civil rights implications later.

“What if someone starts shooting?” Wen asked the station commander.

“You have my permission to shoot back, and possibly the sheriff’s too, if he thinks you have any chance of hitting a Dolfe.”

“Seriously.”

“I am being serious. What it comes down to is, the Dolfes don’t own that land and have no business pretending otherwise. Now do what you have to and find out whether there really is a body in that barn or someone is playing games with a scarecrow.”

The station commander hung up. Wen stared at Schuler, and Schuler stared at Wen. They were then joined by a third deputy, Howard Negus, who had just arrived and commenced staring at both of them.

“What’s the deal?” Negus asked. “You find out who the dead guy is yet?”

“Nope, but the Dolfes think they own the land that barn sits on,” Schuler told him.

“The Dolfes think they run the whole county,” said Negus, who was not Virginian by birth and walked with a heavy tread.

“You want to be the one to knock on their door and tell them they don’t?” asked Wen.

“Fucking crackers,” said Negus. “I have a shotgun in the car, if that helps.”

“I think they prefer ‘hillbillies,’?” said Schuler. “Still, I’d get that shotgun if I were you.”

“What about the kids?” asked Wen, indicating Britney and Paris. “Someone ought to stay with them.”

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