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The lights above the stalls were still on. The bluegrass band had stopped. In the middle distance he could see the cold white glow of Les’s torch moving toward them.

He looked at the maze entrance. Dark between the rows, the corn gone black-green in the low light, the smell of it damp and specific.

Les arrived with the thermal camera and two state deputies. He passed the camera to Tate without comment, read the image for a moment, and turned it so Keith could see.

Two signatures. One moving in the northeast quadrant, slow and deliberate. The other stationary, pressed close to the southwest wall, small and still.

Keith handed the camera back.

“Tate goes northeast,” he said. “I’ll take southwest.”

Les looked at him for a long moment. “Keith.”

“Southwest,” Keith said.

He went in.

The maze was a different thing in the dark—the daytime version a puzzle, this version a place with a person in it who wanted Rachel dead, and Keith moved the way he’d been trained to move in enclosed spaces, heel-to-toe, weight forward, listening. The corn was loud if you weren’t careful. He was careful.

He followed Les’ directions over the earpiece, left, then left again, and then straight on, keep going. He passed her vest, an orange shape on the ground. Then a white hat, a few feet on. She’d stripped herself of everything bright. She’d kept her head. Good.

Les’s voice came through the earpiece, low and steady. “They’re running a grid. Two minutes, maybe less.”

Keith moved faster.

He found her by the faint sound of her breathing—controlled and shallow, the breath of someone trying very hard to be quiet—pressed into the base of the corn in the densest part of the row, knees drawn up, entirely still. The brown of her sweater and trousers disappeared into the shadows. Her dark eyes were open and enormous.

He crouched. He put his mouth close to her ear.

“I’ve got you, babe.”

She startled anyway—a full-body flinch, the reflex of someone who’d been bracing for a threat—and the small involuntary sound she made carried, too high and too sharp, and somewhere in the northeast quadrant the footsteps stopped.

Then changed direction.

Les’s voice came low through the earpiece. “On you. Thirty seconds.”

Keith pulled Rachel in and put his body between her and the sound, his back to the corn, both arms around her. She pressed her face into his chest. He could feel her shaking.

The footsteps came on, slower now. Certain.

A shout rang from the far end of the maze—flat, authoritative. A second voice. The crack and scuffle of boots.

Keith closed his eyes.

The shot came through the corn like a door slammed in a quiet house.

Pain lit up his left shoulder, sharp and immediate, and his body filed it the way adrenaline does—later—and he kept his feet and kept her behind him and stood.

Many voices, all at once. Les, recognizable even at a distance. Another voice ordering someone down, down, hands. The corn loud with movement, footsteps converging from every direction.

Then quiet.

Les’ voice, closer: “We’ve got him, Keith. We’ve got him.”

Rachel’s grip on his jacket had not loosened.

“Okay,” he said. His shoulder was starting to make itself known in a way that was going to be difficult to ignore. “We’re okay.”