Beasts of the Field: The Puzzle
Episode IX
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← In Episode VIII: The Girlfriend, Judith, fresh out of the hospital, questioned one of Samantha Scott’s friends and unknowingly put them both in danger.
While Beasts of the Field can be read as a standalone story, you may appreciate the characters and their interactions more if you are familiar with Judith’s first adventure, Down in the Holler, in which she investigated a cold case in rural Kentucky. Click here to read Down in the Holler.
McFerrin’s police station thrummed with quiet, latent energy. The miniscule team of officers milled around their desks, exchanging information in staccato whispers and keeping one eye on the door of the interrogation room.
Judith trailed behind Tim through the cramped jumble of desks. His usual ambling walk was mechanical, his face pale and expressionless. She hadn’t thought Tim’s face could be completely without emotion. He always had a smile lurking somewhere near the surface, at times buried beneath worry or the sudden intensity that stole over his face in moments of danger. She’d even, just once, seen anger there. But now his face was blank, his eyes open but not looking at anything, even as he navigated the maze-like path to the observation room and its one-way mirror.
As they reached the far side of the room, the door to the interrogation room opened, and Judith caught a fleeting glimpse of the back of Noah Clampitt’s head as he sat, slumped and surly, at a gray table. A tall officer with well-kept salt-and-pepper hair stepped out of the room. Peeking around Tim’s shoulder, Judith snagged a quick look at his nametag: CHIEF KELLY.
“He lawyered up,” Kelly said, shaking his head with the phantom of an exasperated sigh.
“He what?” Tim’s shuttered gaze traveled to the police chief’s face.
“Said he won’t answer any questions without a lawyer. Wants to talk to a public defender.”
“He’s never done that before,” Tim said, his voice flat and factual.
“Maybe he finally got smart.” Kelly looked past Tim at Judith, and his two-toned eyebrows lowered like skeptical caterpillars. “You heading to take a look?”
Tim nodded.
“Both of you?”
Tim nodded again and, without another word, opened the door to the observation room. Judith inched around the police chief and slipped past Tim into the room. The door clanged shut behind them.
The room was small and dark, with a table, two chairs, and one long window looking in on the interrogation room, where Noah sat alone, handcuffed to the table. The crazed jittering in his eyes was slower now, but his face was set, his hands clenched.
Why, Noah? Pieces of the case swirled through Judith’s brain, but they wouldn’t land, wouldn’t take shape into anything that made sense.
“Do you think you’ll be able to get a reading?”
Judith jumped, startled from her thoughts by Tim’s voice in the dim room. She cleared her throat. “I think so.”
Apprehension slunk into her mind the moment the words left her mouth. The headaches, the bizarre chunks of missing memories, the stabbing pain in her head when she’d tried to do a reading on Willow – would she be able to get a reading? She wasn’t sure.
Stamping down the thoughts, Judith closed her eyes. They needed a reading, so she would get a reading. That’s the only reason she was here.
Tentatively, she reached out, letting go, loosening her grip and letting the reins slip from her fingers.
Why, Noah?
Slicing pain seared through her skull, clamping around her head like a vise. She tensed, then tried again, straining against it. If she could just push through, then maybe –
The knife-sharp pain burst in white light across the inside of Judith’s eyelids, and she gasped. Her knees buckled, her eyes flew open, and the rough cement wall was moving closer, racing toward her as she fell forward.
Throwing up her arms, Judith stumbled and scraped against the wall just as Tim’s hands caught her and pulled her backward.
“What was that?” Behind her came the screech of metal along the floor, and Tim slid her into a chair. “Are you okay? What happened?”
Tim’s voice was right beside her, but Judith couldn’t look at him. Instead she stared at her shoes and willed away the throbbing in her head. If she couldn’t do this, she had no purpose here in this station, in McFerrin. If she couldn’t do this, she was of no use to Samantha or Dr. Tierney or McFerrin County or Tim.
But she couldn’t lie.
“It’s not working,” Judith said. She might as well rip off the band aid. No point in dragging it out. “I can’t.”
“You can’t do the reading?”
“Not since –” Judith stopped, her words evaporating. What was she supposed to say? Since her ‘accident’? Since Noah Clampitt ran her off the highway and almost killed her? Was she supposed to say that she’d taken a shower and then immediately tried to take another one because she had no memory of the first, and she didn’t know what else she couldn’t remember? That trying to do a reading felt like someone was taking a red-hot ax to her head? That it was well within the realm of possibility that the abilities she’d taken for granted, about which she’d been so ambivalent, could be gone forever?
She felt Tim shift beside her, and from the corner of her eye she watched him run his hand over his tired eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“What? No –”
“I shouldn’t have asked you to do this. You just barely got out of the hospital.”
“All of my questionable decisions today are my own responsibility,” Judith said. “You didn’t make me do anything.”
With a quiet sigh, Tim stood, then held onto Judith’s arm as she eased herself to her feet. “Come on, I’ll take you back to the motel.”
“It’s not even two blocks away. I can walk.”
“You have a head injury and almost passed out in the observation room. I’m driving you.”
Although her instinctive response was I’m not an invalid, Judith couldn’t dispute the fact that Tim had a point. At the moment, she actually was an invalid. She wasn’t here in McFerrin on a little jaunt through coal country. She was here because the last time she’d tried to leave, a hillbilly with ambiguous motives very nearly killed her. And she wasn’t exactly at her strongest or most stable.
“You’re still planning on going back to Lexington tonight?” Tim said.
“Are you? Do you need to stay here now, after –”
Tim shook his head, the light that had sparked back into his eyes for a few moments dimming again. “No, it happened within city limits. Police jurisdiction. They don’t need me here. I can still drive you.”
Judith moved toward the door, which suddenly opened, letting in a beam of harsh fluorescent light. Officer Bowen’s stocky form filled the doorway, and he stopped short at the sight of Judith.
“What’s she doin’ here?”
“Leaving,” Tim said, steering Judith toward the door.
“She ain’t supposed to be in here.” Standing in their path, Bowen crossed his arms.
“She was consulting. The chief knows she’s in here, and he didn’t have a problem with it.”
“Once the public defender gets here, I’m gonna have to go in there and question this guy with a lawyer breathin’ down my neck. I don’t want to have no con woman spectator in here watchin’ me.”
An indignant rebuttal, complete with the statistics that she remembered from her long-lost notebook, lit on Judith’s tongue, but Tim’s hand on her back propelled her forward around Bowen.
“There ain’t no good reason for you to be bringin’ her in here –” Bowen raised his arm, stopping Judith with a hand on her shoulder. It was a small gesture, barely a touch, but Tim pushed between them, face to face with Officer Bowen.
“We’re leaving,” Tim said. In the narrow room, even through the dim light, Judith could see his shoulders tense beneath his shirt. “Drop it, Bowen.”
The tendons in Bowen’s wide jaw moved like ropes beneath his skin. “You ain’t got jurisdiction here, sheriff. This ain’t your station.”
Keeping his eyes on Bowen, Tim reached back and nudged Judith toward the door. She slipped past him, and he pulled the door open, leaving Officer Bowen, arms still crossed and face still red, alone in the observation room.
Judith followed Tim out of the small, cramped station, her cortisol levels surging, making her fingertips tingle. She didn’t know what sour history floated between Tim and Officer Bowen, but Tim had been rigid with fury in a way she’d never seen him before.
She was certain that Tim would never throw the first punch, but she had a quiet, niggling suspicion that a small part of him wished Bowen had.
“Willow told me something,” Judith said as the evening shadows swallowed Tim’s car on the long, winding highway north toward Lexington. “I meant to tell you earlier, but I forgot in all the…everything.”
“Hm?” Tim’s gaze turned toward her for a moment, then back to the road. Even when he looked her way, he was looking through her, his eyes somewhere far away.
“She said that Noah bragged about ‘grabbing a girl’ while out with his friends, and that the girl wouldn’t be able to identify them because she couldn’t see well.”
Tim’s hands tightened around the wheel, and the shutters over his eyes opened a crack as he turned back toward Judith.
Judith took a breath, sickened by thoughts of Samantha’s last moments, but shot through with relief at seeing Tim’s eyes come back to life for a moment. “Willow also said that someone stopped them before they could…do what they were going to do. Someone took the girl from them, and they didn’t see her again after that.”
“Did Willow say who that someone was?”
“She claims it was Leon Skaggs.”
Tim let out a breath and leaned his forehead on his hand, resting his elbow beside the car window. “Oh, Leon,” he said, shaking his head.
“But it doesn’t make sense,” Judith said. “If Leon killed Samantha, then why was it Noah who ran me off the road and killed Doctor –”
“He’s still just a suspect,” Tim said, his voice sharp. “Police haven’t found any footage from security cameras, and there hasn’t been time for the ballistics analysis to come back yet.”
Judith pressed her lips together. Yes, Noah was just a suspect. But the rabid fire in his eyes when he’d stormed into his house, his body quivering with drugs and adrenaline – what better explanation was there but that he’d just murdered Dr. Tierney and fled the scene, only to find in his house an overly-curious woman with a known connection to law enforcement talking with his girlfriend? What else would a man like Noah do in that situation but fly into a violent rage?
“I’m sorry,” Tim said with a rough sigh. “Maybe Noah and Leon were in cahoots or something. Maybe what Willow heard was a cover story. Or maybe Noah, or even Willow, was lying about Leon.”
“Either way, we still have no idea how Samantha even died.”
Tim took a long breath. “I forgot to tell you something too. The Lexington medical examiner came up with mostly the same results as Heather – Dr. Tierney.” Tim paused, his face tightening. After a moment, he continued. “Except for a few things. He was still unsure about the cause of death, but he disputed her claim that the body wasn’t moved after death. He said something about the way the blood pooled – livor mortis, I think he called it – showed that she was moved within the first few hours after death. So the death is officially listed as suspicious.” Taking off his hat, Tim tossed it into the backseat and ran agitated fingers through his hair, rumpling it but doing nothing to remove the indentation left behind from his hat.
Tim looked very official, like an old-fashioned sheriff, in his hat, but Judith didn’t mind him without it. His hair was thick, though she’d never seen it without a dent from his hatband. It looked like it would be soft to the touch.
Judith shook her head, shoving away the thoughts. Why was she thinking about Tim’s hair at a time like this? It was a distinctly unhelpful distraction.
Tim spoke again, his voice tight. “Now we can’t even ask Dr. Tierney why she lied.”
Judith wasn’t adept at making suppositions about other people’s emotions. More often than not, she misinterpreted their tone or body language and came away with an incorrect impression of the conversation. But with some people – Constance, her parents, her brother, and now, somehow, Tim – she could simply watch his face, and know.
Judith collected her thoughts, wrangled her own twisting, uncomfortable emotions, before speaking. “You had no way of knowing what would happen to Dr. Tierney.”
“I knew she was scared,” Tim said. “Really scared. And I didn’t do anything. I didn’t ask her any questions or try to stop her. I just let her leave.”
“Noah was covering his tracks.” Judith frowned into the darkening sky, bruised purple and blue over the mountains. Even as she said the words, they didn’t stick. There was no sense to this case. If Noah killed Samantha, then why had Willow told a rambling story about Leon taking her? And if Leon was the culprit, then why was Noah doing his clean-up, incriminating himself at the risk of spending the rest of his life in prison?
Tim didn’t respond, his eyes lost somewhere in the distance, and the two of them lapsed into silence.
Miles wound on, and no thought that came to Judith’s head seemed appropriate to fill the dead air. It was unlike Tim to be so quiet, so distant.
But what would she do in Tim’s shoes? She didn’t usually try to imagine herself in other people’s situations because her reactions were often so different from the actions with which she was trying to empathize that the whole experiment was unhelpful. But if she were a law enforcement officer, someone elected to serve and protect, and her decision not to pursue a line of questioning led to the violent death of a high school friend – a first love, even, though the thought made her skin feel sticky and her stomach churn – how would she react? Would she stare into space, silent and distracted? Would she replay the situation in her head, over and over again, looking for the moment she could have said something, the moment she could have changed things? Would she wish someone odious would throw a punch just so she’d have an excuse to swing back?
She wasn’t sure. But, this time, she could imagine it.
Judith couldn’t sleep in cars. Even when she tried, she would wake at every stop, every change of speed or turn in the road. But with Tim silent and dead-eyed behind the wheel, Judith balled up her coat and leaned it against the window, and suddenly she woke to the car easing to a stop outside her house.
She sat up, disoriented. “We’re here?”
Tim, already outside of the car, didn’t hear her. He opened her door and held her arm as she stepped out. A quick insistence that she was fine, that she didn’t need help, flitted through Judith’s mind, but in the dim glow of the streetlights Tim’s face was drawn, his gaze still far away. She didn’t say anything, just let him walk beside her up the path, up the porch steps, and to the door.
Judith fished in her purse for the spare keys Constance had brought her. Finding them, she unlocked the door, and her mind spun into motion, whirling itself into a sudden frenzy. Should she invite Tim in? Would that be too forward? Did he want to be alone, or did he need company? What should she say? Was this awkward for everyone, or just her?
“Goodnight,” Tim said. “Thanks for your help today.”
Realizing that she’d been standing with the door open for several seconds, Judith started and turned toward him as he made his way down the porch steps. “Thank you for driving me home.”
Tim offered a wan smile. “No problem.”
“Enjoy your –” Judith searched her mind, trying to remember why Tim was supposed to be in Lexington. “Conference.”
“Get to feeling better.”
Under the yellow glow of the streetlamp, Judith watched Tim and his long shadow walk slowly back down her front path, and something within her hurt, something small and sharp in the vicinity of her chest, something unrelated to her cracked ribs.
Stepping inside and closing the door behind her, Judith reached to deactivate her home alarm system, but it was turned off. Shirley – she was a wonderful neighbor, as neighbors go, but technology was not her strong suit.
From somewhere in the back of the house came barking and an insistent clanging. Judith turned on the alarm and switched it to HOME, then made her way through the darkened house, following the sound of Orwell’s massive feet banging on the door of his kennel. He must be excited to have her home again. His bark was a loud, deep-throated noise that she’d heard only a handful of times.
“Orwell, it’s me,” she called into the house as she felt her way toward the kitchen. No need to turn on the lights, since she’d be going right to bed. She didn’t want to have to make another trip out to the living room just to turn them off.
Orwell’s barking was frantic, his long nails scratching against the metal with each smash of his powerful paws. Had Shirley forgotten to come let him out of his crate today? Had he not gotten a walk?
“I’m coming, I’m coming.” Judith shuffled down the short, dark hallway leading toward the utility room, where she’d managed to squeeze Orwell’s massive crate.
As she neared the arched doorway to the kitchen, pain sharp as an ice pick pierced her head, flashing white in her eyes. Gasping, she leaned against the wall, breathing through the stabbing in her head. Orwell’s barking grew louder, his pounding paws rattling her aching skull.
“I said I’m coming.” Her voice was raw with the last dregs of pain as the horrible burning subsided and the white faded from her vision.
Judith pushed herself off the wall and took a few shaky steps down the hall. She started to pass the kitchen, then paused.
Something, she wasn’t quite sure what, had caught her eye. A tiny flash of residual light in a dark corner, where it shouldn’t be. A quick reflection of the dim orange glow that leaked through the kitchen window.
Then the light moved, flying upward with a faint whoosh of air. The dark corner came alive with movement, and a shadow surged forward. The lone beam of light from the streetlamp fell on Clem Skaggs’ fierce, determined face and caught on a knife, long and sharp, its razor point disappearing into the darkness as it barreled toward Judith.
Thank you so much for taking time to read Beasts of the Field!
→ Keep reading! Episode X: The Blade
← Read Episode VIII: The Girlfriend
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Girl, you sure know how to tell em!
Noooo! Clem 😭