Hotwire

Hotwire (Maggie O'Dell #9)

by Alex Kava

Alex Kava is the author of ten previous novels, eight of which feature FBI profiler Maggie O’Dell. A former PR director, Alex dedicated herself to writing full time in 1996. She lives in Nebraska, USA. Find out more at: www.alexkava.com.

TO DEBORAH GROH CARLIN,

the wizard behind the curtain

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 8

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

THIRTY-FOUR

THIRTY-FIVE

THIRTY-SIX

THIRTY-SEVEN

THIRTY-EIGHT

THIRTY-NINE

FORTY

FORTY-ONE

FORTY-TWO

FORTY-THREE

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10

FORTY-FOUR

FORTY-FIVE

FORTY-SIX

FORTY-SEVEN

FORTY-EIGHT

FORTY-NINE

FIFTY

FIFTY-ONE

FIFTY-TWO

FIFTY-THREE

FIFTY-FOUR

FIFTY-FIVE

FIFTY-SIX

FIFTY-SEVEN

FIFTY-EIGHT

FIFTY-NINE

SIXTY

SIXTY-ONE

SIXTY-TWO

SIXTY-THREE

SIXTY-FOUR

SIXTY-FIVE

SIXTY-SIX

SIXTY-SEVEN

SIXTY-EIGHT

MONDAY, OCTOBER 12

SIXTY-NINE

SEVENTY

SEVENTY-ONE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 8

ONE

NEBRASKA NATIONAL FOREST

HALSEY, NEBRASKA

Dawson Hayes looked around the campfire and immediately recognized the losers. It was almost too easy to spot them.

He could pretend he had some super radar in reading people, but the truth was he knew the losers because … what was that old saying? It takes one to know one. It wasn’t that long ago that he would have been huddled over there with them, wondering why he had been invited, sweating and waiting to see what the price of the invitation was.

He didn’t feel sorry for them. They didn’t have to show up. Nobody dragged them here. So anything that happened was sort of their own fault. Their price for wanting to be somebody they weren’t. Admission to the cool club didn’t come without some sacrifice. If they thought otherwise, then they really were hopeless losers.

At least Dawson accepted who he was. Actually he didn’t mind. He liked being different from his classmates and sometimes he played up the part, purposely wearing all black on football Fridays when everyone else wore school colors. Being the geek got him noticed, even garnered an eye roll from Coach Hickman, who before Dawson started wearing black on Fridays hadn’t bothered to remember Dawson’s name.

At the beginning of the school year, during roll call for history class Coach would yell out “Dawson Hayes” and look around the entire room, over Dawson’s head and sometimes straight at him. When Dawson raised his hand, Coach Hickman’s eyebrows would dart up like the man would never in a million years have put a cool name like Dawson Hayes together with the pimpled face and the hesitant, skinny arm claiming it. Dawson didn’t mind. He was finally starting to get noticed and it didn’t matter how it came about.

Even now he knew the only reason for his continued invitation to these exclusive retreats in the forest was because Johnny Bosh liked what Dawson brought to the party. Tonight that something was burning a hole in Dawson’s jacket pocket. He tried not to think about it. Tried not to think how earlier he had lifted it—that’s right, lifted, borrowed, not stolen—from his dad’s holster while the man slept on his one night off. His dad probably wouldn’t care as soon as he heard Dawson was hanging with Johnny B. Okay, that wasn’t true. His dad would be pissed. But wasn’t he always encouraging Dawson to make friends, go do stuff that other kids were doing? In other words, be a normal teenager for a change.

Dawson thought that was part of his problem—he was too normal. He wasn’t a superstar athlete like Johnny B or a tobacco-chewing cowboy like Trevor or a brainiac like Kyle, but just holding the Taser X26, with its lightweight, bright-yellow casing that fit perfectly in his hand, gave him a new identity and a sense of confidence. All he had to do was point and wham, there goes fifty thousand volts of electricity. And suddenly Dawson Hayes, the powerless, became powerful. He could control anyone and everyone. With this sleek piece of technology in the palm of his hand Dawson felt like he could do anything.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t just the Taser. Maybe the salvia had a little something to do with it. He’d been chewing his wad for about fifteen minutes and he could already feel the effect. That was just one of the highlights of tonight.

Dawson looked for the camera hidden behind some low sweeping pine branches. Though it remained camouflaged he could see the green dot blinking only because he had helped Johnny set it up earlier, making sure the tripod blended in with the trees. No one else knew it was there. Being the geek in residence did have its advantages.

Dawson glanced around at the campground. They had stomped out an area for themselves in a secluded part of the pine forest where they probably shouldn’t have a frickin’ campfire. Johnny B said no one could see them from the road or the lookout tower, though it didn’t matter. Both would be vacant. On one side was an open field, a swell of tall rolling grass separated by a barbed-wire fence. On the other side was the thick beginning of ponderosa pine. About ten yards away the Dismal River snaked by. Dawson could hear the water tonight, just a whisper running over the rocks.

They had left their vehicles about a quarter mile down in a deserted turnoff, a two-tire trail worn into the knee-high grass. They had to climb over a barbed-wire fence to enter the forest. The trek was only the first test of the night but Dawson thought it revealed quite a lot about tonight’s guests. How they maneuvered and crawled over the sharp barbs showed just how capable they were. Whether they turned to help the next person get over or under the fence or if instead, they looked for assistance. Or worse, expected assistance.

That was another thing about Dawson that made him different from other kids his age. He liked watching how people reacted to each other, to their surroundings, and especially to the unpredictable. His generation had become mindless zombies, mimicking and copying each other, caught up in their own little worlds of what is rather than what if. That was probably what interested him most about Johnny’s experiments.

There were only seven of them here tonight and yet they still grouped together in their cliques. Johnny was surrounded by the babes, Courtney and Amanda. Tonight even Nikki had inserted herself into the cool clique, which disappointed Dawson. He had hoped that Nikki would be better than that. All three girls looked like they were hanging on every one of Johnny’s words, laughing and tossing their hair back then tilting their chins in that way girls do to show their interest.

That was okay. Johnny was good at looking like it was his club, his party. Quarterback, homecoming king, he was charming but with just enough of a badass attitude that nobody challenged him. Being Johnny’s friend was safer than being someone who annoyed him.

Dawson wasn’t quite sure why Johnny wanted the Taser. He didn’t need it. Johnny exuded confidence, even in those silly cowboy boots. Kids called him Johnny B and it was the coolest nickname. Dawson had even heard Mr. Bosh call out “Johnny be good” at one of the football games and then the man laughed like he expected just the opposite from his son and that it was perfectly okay with him.

The first flash of light came without a sound. Everyone turned but only briefly.

The second flash crackled overhead. Dawson thought it might be lightning but it blurred into blue and purple veins that spread over the treetops like a crack in the twilight sky.

Dawson heard “oohs” and “aahs,” and smiled to himself. They’re tripping out, enjoying the fireworks. He probably was, too.

He hadn’t used salvia before but Johnny B said it was better than anything from the family medicine cabinet and way more potent than regular weed. Johnny said it was like “rock’n’roll fireworks squeezing your brain, convincing you that you could fly.”

Dawson thought the stuff looked harmless. Green, the color of sage, with wide leaves and similar to something he’d find in his mom’s old flower beds.

God, he missed his mom.

Dawson squashed some more of the plant into a tight wad and stuck it into his mouth between his gum and cheek like chewing tobacco, no longer wincing at the bitter flavor.

Johnny had called the plant “Sally-D” and told them that the Indians used it for healing. “It’ll clear your sinuses, clean out your guts, soothe your aches, and erase the static in your brain.”

However, he also sounded this excited last week when he had them all snort the OxyContin he’d crushed into fine particles. He had been able to confiscate only two of the pills from his mom’s medicine cabinet so the effects—when crushed and spread out among a dozen kids—didn’t quite live up to Johnny’s promises. But here he was, once again, sounding like an infomercial, working his magic and getting them to give the new drug a try in the hopes of feeling good and being cool.

Less than a minute after Dawson’s second hit he felt light-headed, a pleasant mind-tickling buzz that disconnected him from the others as he watched them stumble and laugh and point at the sky. It was like he was watching from another room, in slow motion from a faraway galaxy right outside his bedroom window.

There was a deep bass rhythm pounding, pounding, pounding at the base of his skull. Tree branches started to sway. Their trunks multiplied, by twos then threes.

That’s when he saw the red eyes.

They were hidden in the bush, back behind Kyle and Trevor, right behind Amanda.

Fiery dots watched, darting back and forth.

How could the others not see this creature?

Dawson opened his mouth to warn them but no sound came out. He lifted his arm to point but he didn’t recognize his hand, yellow and green, almost fluorescent in the flashing strobe light that came out of the treetops. Waves of purple and blue crackled through the branches.

That’s when Dawson first smelled the heat. Almost like someone had left on a hot iron for too long. Then suddenly the smell was stronger, reminding him of scorched hot dogs on an open campfire—black, crispy, burned meat. Then he remembered they hadn’t brought any food.

The sensation started as a tingle. Static electricity traveled the airwaves. The others felt it, too. They weren’t “oohing” and “aahing” anymore. Instead, they stumbled, heads tilted upward, searching the treetops.

Dawson looked back at the brush for the fiery red eyes. Gone.

His head swiveled. He could hear a mechanical click in his head like his eyes had become a machine. Each blink scraped like a camera shutter. Every movement ticked and echoed in his head. His nostrils flared, sucking in air that singed his lungs. A metallic taste stuck in his throat.

The next flash of light sizzled, leaving a tail of live sparks.

This time Dawson heard shouts of surprise. Then cries of pain.

Suddenly the fiery red eyes came running out of the brush, racing straight at Dawson from across the campsite.

Dawson raised his arm, aimed the Taser, and pulled the trigger.

The creature reeled back, fell, and sprawled in the leaves, kicking up glowing stars that shot out of a bed of pine needles. Dawson didn’t wait for the creature to spring to its haunches. He turned and started running, or at least his legs did. The rest of him felt carried, shoved into the forest by a force stronger than his own feet.

It was all he could do to raise his arms and protect his face from the branches. They tore at his clothes and slashed his skin. He couldn’t see. The pounding at the base of his skull drowned out all other sound. The flashes were hot and bright behind him. In front of him, total dark.

He hit the wire hard. The jolt of electricity knocked him off his feet. He stumbled and felt his skin pierced and caught like a fish on a thousand hooks. The pain wrapped arrows around his entire body and stabbed him from every direction.

By the time Dawson Hayes hit the ground, his shirt was slick with blood.

TWO

FIVE MILES AWAY

“There’s no blood?” Special Agent Maggie O’Dell tried not to sound out of breath.

She was annoyed that she was having trouble keeping up. She was in good shape, a runner, and yet the rolling sand dunes with waves of tall grass made walking feel like treading water. It didn’t help matters that her escort was a good ten inches taller than her, his long legs accustomed to the terrain of the Nebraska Sandhills.

As if reading her mind, State Patrol Investigator Donald Fergussen slowed his pace for her to catch up with him. She thought he was being polite when he stopped, but then Maggie saw the barbed-wire fence that blocked their path. He’d been a gentleman the entire trip, annoying Maggie because she had spent the last ten years in the FBI quietly convincing her male counterparts to treat her no differently than they’d treat another man.

“It’s the strangest thing I’ve ever seen,” he finally answered when Maggie had almost forgotten she’d asked a question. He’d been like that on the drive from Scottsbluff, giving each question deliberate consideration then answering with genuine thought. “But yeah, no blood at the scene. None at all. It’s always that way.”

End of explanation. That had also been his pattern. Not just a man of few words but one who seemed to measure and use words like a commodity.

He waved his hand at the fence.

“Be careful. It could be hot,” he told her, pointing out a thin, almost invisible wire that ran from post to post, about six inches above the top strand of four separate barbed wires.

“Hot?”

“Ranchers sometimes add electric fencing.”

“I thought this was federal property.”

“The national forest’s been leasing to ranchers since the 1950s. It’s actually a good deal for both. Ranchers have fresh pastures and the extra income helps with reforestation. Plus grazing the land prevents grass fires.”

He said all this without conviction, simply as a matter of fact, sounding like a public service announcement. All the while he examined the wire, his eyes following it from post to post as he walked alongside it for several steps. He kept one hand out, palm facing her, warning her to wait as he checked.

“We lost five thousand acres in ’94. Lightning,” he said, his eyes following the wire. “Amazing how quickly fire can sweep through the grass out here. Luckily it burned only two hundred acres of pine. That might not mean much somewhere else, but this is the largest hand-planted forest in the world. Twenty thousand of the ninety thousand acres are covered in pine, all in defiance of nature.”

Maggie found herself glancing back over her shoulder. Almost a mile away she could see the distinct line where sandhill dunes, covered by patches of tall grass, abruptly ended and the lush green pine forest began. After driving for hours and seeing few trees, it only now occurred to her how odd it was that a national forest even existed here.

He found something on one of the posts and squatted down until he was eye level with it.

“Most forest services say fire can be good for the land because it rejuvenates the forest,” he continued without looking at her, “but here, anything destroyed would need to be replanted. That’s why the forest even has its own nursery.”

For a man of few words he now seemed to be expending them, but maybe he thought it was important. Maggie didn’t mind. He had a gentle, soothing manner and a rich, deep voice that could narrate War and Peace and keep you hanging on his every word.

At first introductions, he had insisted she call him Donny and she almost laughed. In her mind the name implied a boy. His bulk and weathered face implied just the opposite. His smile did have a boyish quality accompanied by dimples, but the crinkles at his eyes and the gray-peppered hair telegraphed a more seasoned investigator. But then all he had to do was take off his hat—like he did now so the tip of his Stetson didn’t touch the wire—and the cowlick sticking straight up at the beginning of a perfectly combed parting brought back the boyish image.

“Ranchers hate fire.” Donny paused to take a closer look at the wood post immediately in front of him. He tilted his head and craned his neck, careful not to touch the fence or the post. “The ranchers shake their heads at rejuvenation. The way they look at it, why destroy and waste all that valuable feedstock.”

Finally he straightened up, put his hat back on, and announced, “We’re okay. It’s not hot.” But then he tapped the wire with his fingertips like you check a burner to make sure it’s been turned off.

Satisfied, his huge hands grasped between the barbs, one on each strand of the middle two, separating a space for her.

“Go ahead,” she told him.

She had to wait for him to shift from a gentleman to a fellow law enforcement officer. It took a few minutes for his blank stare of protest to disappear. Then he finally nodded and readjusted his grip to the top two strands instead of the middle two so he could accommodate his longer legs.

Maggie watched closely how he zigzagged his bulk between the wires without catching a single barb. Then she mimicked his moves and followed through, holding her breath and wincing when she felt a razor-sharp barb snag her hair.

On the other side of the fence they continued walking through the knee-high prairie grass. The sun had started to slip below the horizon, turning the sky a gorgeous purple-pink that seeped into the twilight’s deep blue. Out here in the open field, Maggie wanted to stop and watch the kaleidoscope effect.

She caught herself tucking away details to share later with Benjamin Platt, only she’d relate them in cinematic terms. “Think of John Wayne in Red River,” she would tell him when she described the landscape. It was a game they played with each other. Both of them were classic-movie buffs. In less than a year what started as a doctor-patient relationship had turned into a friendship. Except recently Maggie found herself thinking about Ben as more than a friend.

She stumbled over the uneven ground and realized the grass was getting thicker and taller. She struggled to keep up with Donny.

He was a giant of a man, wide neck and barrel chest. Maggie thought he looked like he was wearing a Kevlar vest under his button-down shirt, only there was no vest, just solid, lean muscle. He had to be at least six feet five inches tall, maybe more because he seemed to bend forward slightly at the waist, shoulders slumped as if walking against a wind, or perhaps he was uncomfortable with his height.

Maggie found herself taking two steps to his one, sweating despite the sudden chill. The sinking sun was quickly stealing all the warmth of the day and she wished she hadn’t left her jacket back in Donny’s pickup. The impending nightfall seemed only to increase Donny’s long gait.

At least she had worn comfortable flat shoes. She’d been to Nebraska before so she thought she had come prepared, but her other visits had been to the far eastern side near Omaha, the state’s only metropolitan city, which sprawled over a river valley. Here, within a hundred miles of the Colorado border, the terrain was nothing like she expected. On the drive from Scottsbluff there had been few trees and even fewer towns. Those villages they did drive through took barely a few minutes and a slight decrease of acceleration to enter and exit.

Earlier Donny had told her that cattle outnumbered people and at first she thought he was joking.

“You’ve never been to these parts before,” he had said rather than asked. His tone had been polite, not defensive when he noticed her skepticism.

“I’ve been to Omaha several times,” she had answered, knowing immediately from his smile that it was a bit like saying she had been to the Smithsonian when asked if she had seen Little Bighorn.

“Nebraska takes nine hours to cross from border to border,” he told her. “It has 1.7 million people. About a million of them live in a fifty-mile radius of Omaha.”

Again, Donny’s voice reminded Maggie of a cowboy poet’s and she didn’t mind the geography lesson.

“Let me put it in a perspective you can relate to, no disrespect intended.” And he had paused, glancing at her to give her a chance to protest. “Cherry County, a bit to the northwest of us, is the largest county in Nebraska. It’s about the size of Connecticut. There are less than six thousand people in nearly six thousand square miles. That’s about one person per square mile.”

“And cattle?” she had asked with a smile, allowing him his original point.

“Almost ten per square mile.”

She had found herself mesmerized by the rolling sandhills and suddenly wondering what to expect if she needed to go to the bathroom. What was worse, Donny’s geography lesson only validated Maggie’s theory, that this assignment—like several before it—was yet another one of her boss’s punishments.

A couple of months ago Assistant Director Raymond Kunze had sent her down to the Florida Panhandle, smack-dab in the path of a category-5 hurricane. In less than a year since he officially took the position, Kunze had made it a habit of sending her on wild-goose chases. Okay, so perhaps he was easing up on her, replacing danger with mind-numbing madness.

This time he had sent her to Denver to teach at a weekend law enforcement conference. The road trip to the Sandhills of Nebraska was supposed to be a minor detour. Maggie specialized in criminal behavior and profiling. She had advanced degrees in behavioral psychology and forensic science. Yet it had been so long since Kunze allowed her to work a real crime scene she wondered if she would remember basic procedure. Even this scene didn’t really count as a crime, except perhaps for the cows.

Now as they continued walking, Maggie tried to focus on something besides the chill and the impending dark. She thought, again, about the fact that there was no blood.

“What about rain?”

Almost instinctively she glanced over her shoulder. Backlit by the purple horizon, the bulging gray clouds looked more ominous. They threatened to block out any remaining light. At the mention of rain, Donny picked up his pace. Anything more and Maggie would need to jog to keep up.

“It hasn’t rained since last weekend,” he told her. “That’s why I thought it was important for you to take a look before those thunderheads roll in.”

They had left Donny’s pickup on a dirt trail off the main highway, next to a deserted dusty black pickup. Donny had mentioned he asked the rancher to meet them but there was no sign of him or of any other living being. Not even, she couldn’t help but notice, any cattle.

The rise and fall of sand dunes blocked any sign of the road. Maggie climbed behind him, the incline steep enough she caught herself using fingertips to keep her balance. Donny came to an abrupt stop, waiting at the top. Even before she came up beside him she noticed the smell.

He pointed down below at a sandy dugout area about the size of a backyard swimming pool. Earlier he had referred to something similar as a blowout, explaining that these areas were where wind and rain had washed away grass. They’d continue to erode, getting bigger and bigger if ranchers didn’t control them.

The stench of death wafted up. Lying in the middle of the sand was the mutilated cow, four stiff legs poking up toward the sky. The animal, however, didn’t resemble anything Maggie had ever seen.

THREE

At first glance, Maggie thought the scene looked like an archaeological dig revealing some prehistoric creature.

The cow’s face had been sliced away leaving a permanent macabre grin, jawbone and teeth minus flesh. The left ear was missing while the right remained intact. The eyeballs had been plucked clean, down to the bone, wide sockets staring up at the sky. Though the carcass lay half on its side, half on its back, stiff legs straight out, its neck was twisted, leaving the head pointing nose-up. Maggie couldn’t help thinking the animal had been trying one last time to get a look at who had done this to her.

Maggie guessed at the gender. Anything that would identify the cow as male or female had been cut away and was gone. And again, there was no blood. Not a speck or a splatter. What had been done was precise, calculated, and brutal. Still, she needed to ask.

“Forgive the obvious question,” she said carefully, treating this like any other crime scene, “but why are you absolutely certain predators did not do this?”

“Because bobcats and coyotes don’t use scalpels,” a new voice said from behind her. “Not the last time I checked.”

This was obviously the rancher they were meeting. The man came down the hill letting his cowboy boots slide in the sand, picking up his feet over tufts of grass then sliding down some more. Even in the fading light, he maneuvered the terrain without needing to look. He wore jeans, a baseball cap, and a lightweight jacket—the latter something Maggie was starting to covet.

“This is Nolan Comstock,” Donny said. “He’s been grazing his cattle on this parcel—how long has it been, Nolan?”

“Near forty years for me. And I’ve never lost a cow that looks like this one. So I hope you aren’t gonna waste my time and yours just to tell me a fucking coyote did this.”

“Nolan!” Donny’s usually calm, smooth voice now snapped. Maggie saw his neck go red; then, correcting himself, he changed his tone and said, “This is Maggie O’Dell from the FBI.”

Nolan raised a bushy eyebrow and tipped back his cap. “Didn’t mean any disrespect, ma’am.”

“I’d prefer you didn’t use that term.”

“What? The FBI doesn’t swear these days?”

“No. I mean ‘ma’am.’”

She saw the men exchange a look but they’d missed her attempt at humor. She ignored them and squatted in front of the carcass, making sure she was upwind. She hadn’t come all this way to get into a pissing contest between an old rancher who couldn’t care less about a woman FBI agent and a law officer who insisted he notice.

“Walk me through the details,” she said without looking back at either man. They were losing light and patience would soon follow.

“It’s like all the others.” It was Donny who answered. “Eyes, tongue, genitals, left ear, sides of the face—”

“Left ear,” she interrupted. “Is that significant?”

“ID tags usually go in the left,” Nolan said.

When Maggie didn’t respond, Donny continued. “All are precision cuts. No blood from the incisions. It’s like they’re completely drained. But there’s no footprints. No tire tracks.”

“And no animal tracks,” Nolan added. “Not even hers. Her calf’s been bleating. No way she wandered off without it. The rest of the herd’s about half a mile west of here. I’m guessing she’d been down here two days, and yet, take a look. Vultures haven’t even touched her.”

And no flies or maggots, Maggie noticed but didn’t mention. Without blood it would take longer for the carcass to attract the regular vermin that usually invaded.

Maggie stood, walked to the other side of the animal, and squatted down again. Several minutes passed as she let her eyes scan and examine. She noted the complete silence, the almost reverent quiet of her hosts. She glanced up at both men who remained side by side watching from a good fifteen feet back like spectators, waiting expectantly.

“So is this where I’m supposed to hear the theme music from the X-Files?” she asked.

Neither man blinked or smiled.

Seconds passed before Nolan turned to Donny and said, “X-Files? What the hell is that?”

“It was a TV show.”

“TV show?”

“It was a joke,” Donny explained, recognizing it as such but he still didn’t smile.

“A bad joke,” she added as way of an apology.

“You think this is a joke?”

It was too late. She’d struck a nerve. Nolan bared yellow, coffee-stained teeth in a sarcastic smile accompanied by narrowed dark eyes.

“This is no prank,” he told her. “And this isn’t the only one. By my count, this is number seven in three weeks. And just here on forest property. That doesn’t include what we’re hearing about over the border in Colorado. And it doesn’t count those that haven’t been reported. I know at least one rancher who found a Black Angus steer last month but he won’t report it on account of insurance won’t pay on cattle mutilations.”

“I didn’t mean to offend you,” Maggie said. “I just meant that it is very strange.”

“That other guy, Stotter”—and this time Nolan was addressing Donny—“he seemed to believe it was UFOs, too. There’s no way to catch these people. Hell, I don’t even know if it is people according to you experts. All I’m saying is that I’m gettin’ tired of lame explanations and excuses.”

“So what do you think it is?” Maggie asked as she stood to face him.

The old rancher looked surprised that she’d want his opinion.

“Me personally?”

She nodded and waited.

Nolan glanced up at Donny, almost as if what he was about to say might offend the state patrolman.

“I think it’s our tax dollars at work.”

“You think it’s the government,” Donny said. “Because of the lights and the helicopters.”

“Helicopters?” Maggie asked.

“Folks out here are used to seeing strange lights in the night sky. Some claim they’ve seen helicopters,” Donny explained. “There are a couple of ranchers in Cherry County who use helicopters to check their herds.”

“These are no ranchers’ helicopters.” Nolan shook his head. “Those make noise. I’m talking black ops helicopters.”

“And others have claimed they’ve seen alien spacecraft,” Donny added with a tone that was meant to nullify both claims.

“Followed by fighter jets,” Nolan said, not paying attention to Donny who now rolled his eyes and crossed his arms over his massive chest.

“That was only one time,” Donny came back with. “We’re smack-dab between NORAD and STRATCOM,” he told Maggie. Then to Nolan he said, “There wasn’t any verification from either military base on fighter jets in this area.”

“Of course not.”

Maggie stood back and watched them. There was obviously a lot of information left out of her x-file. Nolan pinned her down with his eyes.

“So maybe you can tell us,” he said. “Is there some classified government project?”

She looked back at the butchered animal, noticing how the open wounds still looked raw in the fading light. Then she met the rancher’s eyes.

“What makes you think the government would tell me?”

That’s when the two-way radio clipped to Donny’s belt started squawking.

Even in the Nebraska Sandhills, Maggie recognized the codes. Something was wrong. Very wrong.

FOUR

TEN MILES ON THE OTHER SIDE

OF THE NATIONAL FOREST

Wesley Stotter struggled with the tailgate of his 1996 Buick Roadmaster. The wireless microphone stabbed at his Adam’s apple but remained attached to the collar of his flannel shirt. He was fully aware that he was live streaming yet he was caught speechless, his eyes glued to the sky.

Lights exploded in the distance. Blue and white moving up then down, right to left like no aircraft Stotter had ever seen. But he had seen similar lights before.

“Son of a bitch,” he said out loud, suddenly not caring if the FCC slapped him with another fine. They had been trying to run him off the air for more than a decade but Stotter was used to people trying to shut him up. As a result, UFO Network—his grassroots organization dedicated to proving the existence of extraterrestrial beings and the government’s attempt to cover it up—only grew stronger. He had built a loyal following of thousands. Tonight his radio and webcam audiences were in for a real treat.

“You will not believe this, my friends,” he said, adjusting the wireless mic as he pulled at the car’s tailgate. It finally dropped open with a crack, metal scraping on metal. Without looking, he found a duffel bag and his fingers frantically searched inside the bag until he found the camera.

“More lights in the night skies,” Stotter began his narration while trying to calm his shaky fingers. Sometime in the last several years arthritis had started to set in, making everything a challenge. He wiped his sweat-slick palms, one at a time, on his khakis and continued to fumble with the buttons on the camera.

“Friends, I’m in the Nebraska Sandhills tonight, just outside of Halsey and about ten miles east of the national forest. Holy crap! There they go again.”

The lights made a sharp pivot and headed straight toward Stotter. There were three, like bright stars in tight formation, moving independently but together as a unit.

He swung the camera up, relieved to see the viewfinder open and the night-vision function on. The Record button was a bright red. It took every bit of concentration for Stotter to steady his hands.

“Those of you listening who are Stottercam subscribers, you should be getting a shaky view of this incredible sight. For the rest of you let me attempt to describe it. The lights are going to come directly over me. Friends, it looks like Venus and two companions—that’s the size and brightness—only they’re moving together through the sky, slowly now. But just a few seconds ago they were shooting up and down, independent of each other. Almost like polar opposites.”

Stotter had been chasing lights in the night sky since he was old enough to drive. As a boy he had listened to his father tell stories about his days in the army. John Stotter had been stationed at the army’s guided missile base at White Sands shortly after the end of World War II where a classified program did test launches of German V-2 rockets. Fifty miles to the east was a nuclear-testing facility at Alamogordo and also nearby was the army’s 509th airfield just outside Roswell, New Mexico.

The story Wesley Stotter enjoyed the most was the one his father told about being on night patrol July 1, 1947, when he watched an alien spaceship fall out of the night sky and slam into the desert. John Stotter had been one of the first to arrive at the crash site. His description of what he saw that night could still raise the hair on Wesley’s arms.

Wesley Stotter would be sixty next year and as a self-professed expert in UFOs he had seen many strange things, but he had yet to experience anything like his father’s close encounter.

Maybe tonight was that night.

The lights stopped before reaching Stotter and hovered over an area of sand dunes. Somewhere in between Stotter knew that the Dismal River snaked through pasture land. The water separated grazing fields from the national forest. Stotter contemplated driving closer but there were no roads. Only sandy, bumpy cattle trails in the tall grass. He couldn’t risk spinning the tires of the Stottermobile and getting stuck in a blowout or scraping off the muffler again like he did two weeks ago.

He loved his Roadmaster. The wood panel had one small scruff—that was all—and the interior was still in pristine condition. Every year he told himself maybe he should get an off-road vehicle, but money was tight these days. His syndicated radio gig didn’t pay much and his UFO Network depended on membership fees.

Stotter missed the days of the Comet Hale-Bopp and cults like Heaven’s Gate stirring up the public. How could you beat or replicate young followers putting on their Nike high-tops, tightening plastic bags over their heads, then lying down and waiting for the spacecraft traveling in the tale of the comet to come and whisk them away to their greater destiny? No one could make up crap that good.

These days the Internet allowed UFO junkies to get their fill 24/7. They didn’t have to depend on Wesley Stotter. But just as the economy was cyclical, so was alien fascination. The more unsure and chaotic the world became, the more people started looking for something to blame their fears on. So Stotter’s webcam investment was giving Stottermania a second life.

He continued his narration for his radio audience, slipping in his characteristic tidbits of history and folklore, the kinds of things his cult following gobbled up.

“This is sacred land,” he said in a soft reverent tone and yes, sure, a bit theatrical. “The Cheyenne hid in these valleys in between sand dunes, surviving a brutal fall and winter in 1878–79. Soldiers from Fort Robinson hunted them down, wanting to imprison them. When that didn’t work, they slaughtered more than sixty men, women, and children right here in these valleys.

“They say the Dismal River ran red with their blood. So you might, indeed, call this hallowed ground. Coincidence that another civilization would hone in and choose the sky over this same valley where the energy of Cheyenne spirits still rise up at twilight? Nope. I don’t think so.”

Stotter’s hands were steady now, the camera tracking the lights. How many minutes had it been? They had remained stationary for so long that anyone first seeing them might simply think they were stars.

Then just as suddenly as they had appeared, they shot out, so quickly Stotter couldn’t move the camera fast enough. They streaked above him, shooting up and out, like meteors, only no jet stream, no cosmic dust was left behind. Without a sound they were gone.

Stotter stayed plastered to the side of the car where he had leaned to hold himself up. His head tilted back, his face to the sky, mouth gaping. Only now did he notice his flannel shirt was glued to his sweat-drenched back. His beard itched and his balding scalp tingled. There was a ringing in his ears and it felt like an electrical surge had passed through him.

He glanced back, expecting the lightning to be close. Instead the thunderheads stayed on the horizon. In the twilight they looked more like mountains than clouds.

He signed off and managed to reach up and click off his microphone. That’s when he heard a voice saying “… asking all emergency personnel … ”

It was his police scanner. Had they seen the lights?

“ … reporting injuries. Southwest side of the forest off Highway 83.”

Wesley Stotter spun around to look at the sky over the national forest. It was in the opposite direction of where he had seen the lights. But it had to be related.

He checked his watch. Then he rammed his equipment back into the duffel bag. Slammed the tailgate, making three attempts before it stuck in place.

He was close enough that he could be one of the first to arrive. He would witness the damage before anyone had a chance to cover it up this time.

FIVE

Maggie recognized the smell from another time, another place. Scorched flesh, singed hair. This is what her father smelled like lying inside his casket. He had been a firefighter, killed in the line of duty. Maggie would never forget the smell of his burned flesh, despite the plastic wrapped around his arms and legs.

The odor was alarming, but it was the moans—soft, wounded cries in the darkness—that unnerved Maggie the most. She wasn’t a first responder. Though she knew CPR, most of her victims didn’t need it. Usually, by the time Maggie arrived, they were dead.

Slices of light from high-powered flashlights caught the huddled figures crouching, hiding. Leaves swirled and skittered away like frightened animals.

Maggie would never forget the looks on their faces. Eyes wide. Lips trembling. Some of them mumbled incoherently. Hands and arms flayed in front of them, jerking under the flashlight beams like stoned dancers under a revolving disco ball.

Maggie had put on her leather jacket before leaving the pickup but her chill came from within. The darkness inside the forest disarmed her, swallowing up everything that the flashlights missed.

The canopy of branches became a moving ceiling, creaking and swaying. Gaps allowed a view of black sky. Once in a while the full moon pierced through the cloud cover—the result a brief and startling streak of sudden illumination.

A tall, thin forest ranger named Hank guided Maggie and Donny. He had met them at the main campground, telling them they wouldn’t be able to get a vehicle down to the site.

“You’re the first to arrive,” he had said with such relief Maggie found herself hoping Donny would know what to do with the injured. Her specialty—heaven forbid it was called on—would be dealing with those who could afford to wait.

“Damn, it’s steep,” Donny kept repeating.

Maggie was thinking the same thing as she followed him down an overgrown trail, feeling more than seeing, grabbing branches before they whipped into her face, missing a few and feeling the sting. How the hell were they going to get the injured back up this path?

By the time the three of them reached a flat clearing, they were breathing hard. Maggie felt sweat trickle down her back despite the cold.

“We’re here to help,” Donny called out so low and gentle Maggie wondered if anyone heard him. “We need to get some light down here, Hank.”

“I’ve got one of my guys bringing down strobes with a mobile generator.”

The dispatcher’s details had been scant. She’d received a 911 call from the forest, but the cell reception kept cutting out so she had trouble deciphering the message. A group of teenagers had been attacked. There were injuries. No, they didn’t know who—or what, she had emphasized—had attacked them. She added that the caller sounded stoned and he wouldn’t tell her why they had been in the forest.

“You’re an EMT, right?” Donny asked Hank.

“Yes, sir.”

“Agent O’Dell?”

“No.”

“But you know the basics?”

“Very basics. I’m a little rusty.”

“Let’s do a quick check.”

Donny tipped his flashlight back at himself.

“I’m State Patrolman Donny Fergussen. We’re here to help. You’re not in trouble. If you’re hurt, call out. If someone’s hurt next to you, call out for them.”

Silence. Even the moans went quiet.

An owl hooted. Branches creaked in the breeze.

Finally a voice, a girl’s, thin and high-pitched, yelled, “Over here.”

Another voice, a male from the opposite side of the darkness. “I’m hurt pretty bad.”

Then another girl’s voice, on the verge of tears. “I think he’s dead. He’s not moving. Oh my God, he’s not breathing.”

Donny looked to Hank, the only EMT. The ranger simply said, “I’ll take that one.” He shot his flashlight in the direction and followed the beam.

Donny pointed the opposite way to indicate that he’d take the “hurt pretty bad” male. That left Maggie with only her pen-size Maglite to check the girl. She avoided shining it in their faces, scanning for anyone down and not moving. Two girls huddled together under a tree. Maggie tried to get a take on the area while making her way to them. She walked slowly, acutely aware of not disturbing what could be a crime scene.

Hank had led them down through the forest but on the other side of this clearing Maggie could see the rolling hills of pasture separated from the forest by a barbed-wire fence. And close by there had to be a river—she could hear water.

Her penlight picked up something fluttering in the branches, hanging down from a pine tree about ten feet away. She needed to check on the girls first. Maggie swept the light across the path with slow swipes. Every time the beam brushed close, the girls jerked as if the thin razor of light had sliced them.

“Are you two okay?”

They stared at her with glassy eyes. One finally nodded. The other girl lifted her arm to Maggie and said, “He bit me.”

Maggie bent down a couple of feet in front of them so she could get a better look without startling them again. She traced over the girl’s arm with the penlight, making the girl jump back.

“I won’t hurt you. I just want to see your arm.” Still that blank stare. “I’m Maggie. What’s your name?”

“Amanda,” the girl with the bite mark said and batted the hair out of her face.

Both of the girls were in shock but other than the bite mark Maggie couldn’t see any blood. The other girl’s eyes stared, still wide and unblinking, at something above and beyond Maggie’s head. She turned to track what it was. The dark object hanging from the tree swayed back and forth.

Maggie stood, flicked the penlight up, and pointed as she moved closer. It looked like a dark piece of cloth pierced on the branch. She was almost directly underneath it when she realized it was an owl, hanging upside down.

A dead owl.

Startled, Maggie took a quick step aside and tripped over a log. She lost her balance and fell, hitting the ground hard and dropping her light.

“Agent O’Dell?” She heard Donny call out. “You okay?”

Maggie fumbled in the pine needles, trying to get back up while her hands searched for her penlight. It was still on, about three feet away. She reached for it just as she noticed what it was that she had tripped over.

The beam of light shined directly into the wide-open eyes of a boy who appeared to be dead.

Then he blinked.

SIX

Wesley Stotter knew a back way to the forest. The sandy road became impassable after a little rain but with any luck he’d be out of there by the time those thunderheads arrived.

The grass was almost taller than the Stottermobile. Even the grass growing in the middle of the tire tracks scraped the bottom of his car. The sand sent him sashaying if he went too fast. Yet he pressed down the accelerator. No way could he climb it on foot. Once upon a time he wouldn’t have hesitated. He didn’t mind growing older until he realized one more physical limitation.

Grasses gave way to trees. Back here were oaks instead of ponderosa pine. The leaves had started changing, some had already fallen. The road wound in such tight turns it was impossible to see what was around the next corner. Branches hung low enough to scratch the car’s roof rack. The trees had been planted in straight rows years ago but brush filled in the rows and in the moonlight shadows seemed to spread and devour any openings.

Just a little ways more and he would get to the clearing. A couple more bends to climb around. Then it would be a short hike down to where he believed the radio dispatcher had sent emergency personnel.

He goosed the accelerator a little more, fishtailing in the sand before turning up the next curve. Stotter thought he saw movement to his right between the trees. He slowed and craned his neck to get a better look out the passenger window.

Someone was running. Someone or something.

The front of its face bulged, the back looked hunched. The head swiveled and it looked at Stotter with glowing red eyes.

Then it was gone before Stotter had a chance to decide whether he had really seen anything at all.

He sped up, winding around the trees when a flash of light blinded him.

Stotter slammed on the brakes and held his arms up in front of his face to protect his eyes. The light swept back and forth over the hood. The engine coughed and died. The headlights went dark. He kept one arm up while he fumbled for the keys. Found them and twisted. No response.

The light flashed off. Then came back, piercing him.

A burning sensation raced through his body. His stomach, his lungs, his heart felt like they were on fire. The pain was unbearable, a flame sweeping through his veins. He thought his chest would explode.

And then it stopped.

It took him a minute to unclench his body, to breathe, to open his eyes. That’s when he realized the light was gone, too. Only darkness surrounded the Roadmaster. Darkness and silence.

He tried to look out the windows but his vision had blurred. The light had blinded his eyes. He wouldn’t be able to see a man—or an alien—if he was standing in front of him at the hood of the car.

Stotter grabbed for the key in the ignition and turned it again.

Nothing.

Usually there was enough battery juice left for the dome light. Whatever that beam of light was, it had knocked out the entire electrical system of his vehicle.

He crawled frantically around, locking all the doors. He climbed over the backseat to retrieve his duffel bag, yanked it open, and started pulling out item after item until he found it.

He wrapped shaking arthritic fingers around the handle of a Colt .45.

SEVEN

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Maggie told the boy.

His eyes darted back and forth like a wild animal captured.

“Try not to move,” she said when she saw the barbed wire wrapped around his body. But he hadn’t even attempted to move and she wondered if he couldn’t, either from fear or pain. Like the girls, he was definitely in shock.

She swept her light as discreetly as possible, scanning the length of his body. She had to force herself not to wince when she saw the sharp barbs stuck tight into his arms, his chest … dear God, even his neck. It looked as if someone had rolled the wire around his body, cinching it tight, piercing him deep with every barb. Was it possible he had run into a fence and accidentally wrapped it around himself?

“Ibba … I … so hot,” he stuttered.

Maggie crawled over and sat back on her haunches. For the first time she saw blood. So much blood. She felt it now, slick on her hands and her jeans where she had fallen.

In her ten years as an FBI agent, Maggie had seen cruel and brutal wounds, bloody dismembered bodies, organs left in containers, and only once had she gotten physically ill. But she felt nauseated now. It wasn’t the sight of blood still pouring from a live body but rather her inability to stop it.

She thought she had compartmentalized the memories, but suddenly the images flooded her brain of a long-ago killer making her watch. It wasn’t the splatters of blood or the victims’ screams that haunted her nightmares as much as the sense of complete and utter helplessness. And that’s exactly what she was feeling now.

She considered calling Donny but she was afraid to even raise her voice. She was hesitant to move, because she didn’t want to startle the boy any more than he already was.

Dark pools of blood covered the leaves and pine needles beneath him. His shirt was wet and rusty with it, and yet the overwhelming smell Maggie noticed was not of blood but of singed hair and burned flesh.

She examined the wire again. She couldn’t see a single strand that didn’t have barbs. It wasn’t the plain electric wires that Donny had pointed out to her earlier.

She leaned in close enough to see that the neck wound had congealed blood around the razor-sharp barbs buried in the flesh. That was good. It wasn’t gushing blood, which most likely meant it had not hit the jugular. But his neck muscles bulged against the restraint and a blue vein pulsed against bright red skin.

“Holy crap!” Donny whispered from behind her and Maggie felt a sigh of relief.

The boy’s eyes didn’t look up at the new voice. They stayed on Maggie’s. Hard and tight on her. That was good, too. She had become a focal point for him. Maybe not so good. She had no clue what to do as his focal point.

“I’m not sure if he’s still bleeding,” she said without breaking eye contact and surprised to hear her voice remarkably calm and steady. “He’s definitely in shock.”

“Can we move him like this or can we snip him loose?”

Maggie wanted to say, Aren’t you supposed to know? I only know what to do with dead people.

Instead she took a deep breath and tried to access her internal databank. She had been stabbed several years ago, in a dark, wet tunnel, miles away from help. Another memory, carefully tucked away in yet another compartment of her mind. What she did remember was that she had lost a lot of blood, and she wouldn’t have, had the killer left the knife inside her, instead of yanking it back out.

“I think we might start the bleeding again if we pull the barbs out. And I’m not sure he’ll be able to stand the pain.”

“Holy crap,” Donny muttered again.

Maggie continued to watch the boy’s eyes, trying to determine if he understood what they were saying. If he did, he gave no indication. His eyes never left Maggie’s. She didn’t think she had seen him blink since that first time when she stumbled over him.

“Can you understand me?” she asked the boy, slowing down the question and emphasizing each word. “Blink twice for yes.”

Nothing. Just the same glassy, wide-eyed stare.

Then his eyelids closed and popped back open. Closed again and the effort alone looked so painful they stayed closed longer before popping open again.

Maggie’s heart thumped hard, relief mixed with a new anxiety. He was conscious and he was in pain.

“I’m Maggie,” she said finally. “I’m going to help you.”

“Dawdawdaw … ” He babbled, only this time the frustration seemed to drain him. The muscles in his face and neck were tight, his jaw clenched.

Maggie noticed that nothing else moved. His fingers didn’t flex. His legs—though twisted into a knot beneath him—did not budge. No part of him attempted to fight or stretch or even press against the barbed-wire restraints.

She scanned one more time, looking for anything that resembled electric wire and checking for burn marks. None, that she could see. Yet the smell of singed hair and burned flesh and the apparent paralysis all seemed to support her suspicions. The boy wasn’t only in shock. He had also suffered an electrical shock.

EIGHT

PHIL’S DINER

WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA

Colonel Benjamin Platt ordered a cheeseburger, ignoring the raised eyebrow and disapproving look from the diner’s most senior waitress. To test just how far he could push her, he asked for mustard and extra onions. The waitress, named Rita, had known Platt since he was a med student at William and Mary and pulled all-nighters slinging back lukewarm coffee, hunched over his textbooks.

Back then his attempt at flirting would sometimes win him a piece of stale pie. On a good night the pie came with a scoop of ice cream. Platt couldn’t remember when they both had given up all pretense of Rita being his Mrs. Robinson. Instead, she became a sort of mother hen who watched over his heartburn and kept his arteries from clogging.

“Visiting in the middle of the week?” Rita asked as she poured coffee into the mug without looking, keeping her eyes on his, trying to detect his emotional state. Weird thing was, she could. And what still fascinated him most was that she knew exactly when to stop pouring, right when the scalding-hot coffee reached within an inch of the mug’s lip.

“I’m meeting someone,” he said. These days he didn’t get back to the diner very often except when visiting his parents, who were retired.

She raised an eyebrow.

“No, not that kind of someone.” He grinned.

“I would hope not with those extra onions.”

Then she turned around and left him, and he swore she added a bit more swing to her hips leaving than she had when she approached.

He smiled again. She could still make him feel like that awkward college boy. Didn’t help matters that tonight he wore blue jeans, a faded gray William and Mary sweatshirt, and leather moccasins with no socks. He ran his fingers over his short hair realizing the wind had left it spiked. Just as he glanced at his reflection in the window he saw Roger Bix getting out of a rented Ford Escort. Platt didn’t know the man well, but he knew enough to guess Bix wasn’t happy about driving a compact anything.

In the glare of the diner’s neon sign Bix’s shock of unruly red hair looked bright orange, suddenly reminding Platt of the comic-book character Archie. Only Bix was the cocky version, unaware that his paunch hung over his belt. Evidently he thought himself inconspicuous despite the pointed-toe cowboy boots and Atlanta Braves jacket. He looked nothing like a cowboy or an athlete.

Platt waved at him as soon as Bix came in the door. He watched the man scrutinize the surroundings with pursed lips, emphasizing his disapproval. Bix had asked to meet somewhere discreet and totally away from D.C. politicos. Close to Norfolk, where Bix said he had spent the day, and two hours outside the capital, Phil’s Diner met the criteria, despite it not being up to Bix’s personal standards.

“William and Mary?” Bix said in place of a greeting, pointing at Platt’s sweatshirt and letting his slow Southern drawl elongate his sarcastic disgust as he slid into the booth. It seemed there was no pleasing the man tonight. “I took you for a tough guy. Big Ten. Like Notre Dame, maybe. Certainly not William and Mary.”

“Notre Dame’s not part of the Big Ten. It’s a free agent.”

Bix shrugged, lifted his hands palms up as if to say college sports was not his thing.

Platt had met Bix several years ago at a conference on infectious diseases. Both were young for their titles, Platt as the director of USAMRIID (pronounced U-SAMRid—United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases) at Fort Detrick and Bix as CDC’s (Centers for Disease Control) chief of Outbreak Response and Surveillance Team in Atlanta. A year ago they worked together on an outbreak of Ebola, a case that pitted both men against their superiors. The fact that they had retained their positions spoke volumes. That neither man celebrated his victory by making the talk-show circuit or in any way acted like a celebrity revealed a dedication to integrity that couldn’t be quantified by a job title. It was, perhaps, the only thing these two very different men had in common.

Rita appeared at their booth again.

“Just coffee,” Bix said without even looking up.

“Anything else?”

“Just coffee,” he repeated, now with an air of dismissal.

Rita slapped a mug down in front of him and started pouring. Soon Bix realized Rita was staring at him instead of where she was pouring. Platt watched Bix’s eyes dart between Rita’s and the mug. He was sitting up and preparing for an overflow. Rita lifted the pot without a drip. A sigh escaped from Bix.

“Sure you don’t want a slice of peach pie?”

This time Bix glanced up at her and without hesitation said, “That sounds great.”

Platt smiled. Rita must have witnessed Bix’s entrance, sensed his disapproval, and set things straight the way no one else could. Leveled the playing field in a matter of seconds.

It seemed like a good time to ask, “Why did you call me, Roger?”

Platt waited for the CDC chief to spill one, then two more packets of sugar into his coffee, taking his time, to regain his cocky, self-assured composure. When he finished he planted both elbows on the table, gathered the mug in his hands, and sipped.

There was no hint of levity in his voice when he leaned in and said to Platt, “I called you because I need someone I can trust. I need someone I know can keep his mouth shut.”

NINE

NEBRASKA NATIONAL FOREST

Maggie didn’t think it possible, but the floodlights made the forest scene even eerier. Stark shadows appeared where none had existed in the darkness. The fallen pine needles and dried leaves came alive. Animals that had been otherwise invisible suddenly became alert, threatened by the light and skittering away. Hank had mentioned something about cougars and bobcats, and Maggie could swear she saw one stalking them from the ridge up above.

Maggie watched as Hank and one of the paramedics gently lifted the boy wrapped in barbed wire onto a stretcher made from a tarp. Rather than carry him up the trail, they had cut the fence that separated the pasture from the forest. They’d take him over the dunes in the back of an ATV to deliver him to a rescue unit waiting on the other side. It was the closest they were able to get a rescue vehicle and they could barely see the halo of the headlights.

Maggie walked with them through the narrow paths of tree trunks, pretending to help carry a corner. She knew the two men could do so easily but she couldn’t break the connection with the boy. Earlier, as soon as she started to trail out of his line of vision his head started pivoting around, frantically searching for her. But the paramedic had given him an injection to relax and sedate him and now the boy finally closed his eyes. So she escorted them to where the cattails grew taller than her, to where the ATV idled. One short climb over the sand dune and she knew he’d be safe.

She hurried back and started helping Donny prepare the next of the wounded when she saw a man appear at the top of the dune. Backlit by the headlights behind him, he looked larger than life.

Maggie glanced at Donny who had noticed, too.

“The sheriff?” she asked.

“Probably.”

Within seconds another silhouette appeared on top of the hill. Then another. Two more. And still another.

“They know this is a crime scene, right?”

When Donny didn’t answer she glanced back at him. He looked like a deer caught in the headlights.

She counted six men. One started down the hill toward them.

“We have to limit how many people come inside the perimeter,” Maggie said. “You told me most of the injuries weren’t life-threatening, right?”

“That’s right. The rescue crew knows we’re bringing them out to their unit. They’ll set up a triage area on the other side of that sand dune.”

“Then who are these guys?”

The others started following the first.

“Donny?”

“Could be the mayor. City councilmen. Maybe parents. We have two dead teenagers and five injured. They’ll want to see if it’s their own kids.”

“You can’t let them come tromping onto a crime scene.”

“Nothing I can do about it.”

“Excuse me?”

“This isn’t my jurisdiction.”

“It’s not theirs, either.”

Seconds ticked off. The men continued single file down the sandy trail, the same path that the ATV had just taken. The men were almost to the cattails. Their heads bobbed in the shadows of the floodlights: one with a cowboy hat, two with baseball caps, the others bareheaded.

Maggie stood up. Donny stayed on his haunches. She shot him a look, hoping to mobilize him. Instead, he stared at the approaching men, accepting the inevitable, this giant of a man silenced, almost cowed.

Then she heard him whisper, “It is federal property.”

“So it’s Hank’s jurisdiction?”

She saw him shake his head.

“FBI trumps Forest Service.”

Maggie’s pulse raced. He was right. She wasn’t sure why it hadn’t occurred to her. She was the only federal investigator present at a crime scene on federal property. Crap! Officially, that made it her jurisdiction.

She didn’t take time to figure it out. Instead, she marched to meet the entourage that arrived at the fringe of their perimeter, almost to the halo created by the floodlights.

“Gentlemen, this is as far as I can allow you.”

“Just who the hell are you?”

She opened her jacket, pulling it wide enough for them to glimpse her holstered weapon while she pulled out her badge.

“I’m the sheriff of Thomas County,” a short but solid man said as he elbowed his way to stand before her.

“And I’m the county attorney,” said the man who glanced at her badge but batted away her hand like her credentials didn’t matter. “I handle all the death investigations around here.”

“Sheriff, I hope you’ll give us a hand,” she said while purposely looking at the county attorney. “But the rest of you need to turn around. The forest is federal property.” She hoped that she sounded convincing. “This is a federal crime scene. Right now we need to keep access limited. We’re trying to bring out the injured while preserving the evidence.”

“This is ridiculous,” one of the men said.

“How many injured?” the sheriff asked as he stepped closer. “Darlene’s radio call never said.”

“If these other gentlemen will leave I can fill you in, Sheriff.”

“Wait. I think my son is here. I just need to know if he’s okay.”

“Frank, tell this woman I handle all the death investigations for three counties.”

“Gentlemen, please,” Maggie raised her voice. “If you’ll return to the area over the hill we can continue. We should be able to have some information for you in the next hour.”

“This is absolutely crazy. You don’t have the authority to tell us what to do.”

One of the men grabbed Maggie’s shoulder to push her aside.

“These are our kids. We have every right—”

He stopped so suddenly another man bumped into him. They all stared at the Smith and Wesson now aimed at the man’s face.

“Lady, you cannot be serious.” But he didn’t move.

Even the sheriff stood to the side and made no attempt to argue.

The others took several steps backward. Maggie could see beads of sweat on the county attorney’s forehead.

“Sheriff,” Maggie said, “would you please inform these gentlemen that I don’t have the time to make federal arrests right now, but I certainly will do that if it’s necessary.”

The only sound was the generator, a steady hum up on the ridge, muffled by the trees. A fork of lightning flashed far over the clearing, followed by a distant rumble. A reminder that time was running out.

“I’ll let you guys know what’s going on,” the sheriff said, and he edged closer to Maggie still keeping a yard between them.

Finally the men turned to leave, casting glances over their shoulders while mumbling to one another. Even the county attorney grudgingly left, after kicking at the ground like a toddler shaking off a tantrum.

When they were past the cattails Maggie said to the sheriff, “I’m Maggie O’Dell.”

She holstered her weapon still watching the men, only looking at the sheriff when he said, “I’m Frank Skylar. What the hell’s the FBI doing out here?”

“Believe it or not, I just happened to be in the neighborhood.” She held back adding “unfortunately.” She started leading him back to the crime scene when she added, “I’ll need you to call the coroner. See if you can get him here before those thunderstorms make it.”

“Well, that’s a bit of a problem.”

She stopped to look back at him, disappointed that she was still going to have him working against her. “And why is that?”

“You just sent away the coroner.”

“One of those men was the coroner? Why didn’t he say so?”

“Actually he did. Oliver Cushman is our county attorney. By state law the county attorney is the coroner as well.”

It was Maggie’s turn to say, “You cannot be serious.”

TEN

WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA

“I just spent three days in Norfolk,” Bix told Platt after chewing two forkfuls of peach pie.

“I’m guessing not at Virginia Beach on vacation.”

“Forty-two students at Geneva High School were throwing up their guts after eating lunch in the school cafeteria.”

“Food contamination?”

Bix didn’t respond.

“Unfortunately it happens more often than we realize.” Platt’s second bite of cheeseburger didn’t taste as good as his first. It certainly did nothing to Bix’s appetite. For a guy who wanted “just coffee,” he worked his way through the slice of pie like he hadn’t eaten all day.

“What was it?” Platt asked when Bix didn’t immediately offer an answer. “E. coli? Salmonella?”

The CDC chief put his fork down, grabbed his mug, and slurped coffee.

“Don’t know.”

“Too early to tell?”

“No. I don’t know. I’ve tested for all six major strains of E. coli and three different strains of salmonella. I haven’t found it yet.”

Platt stared at him, waiting for Bix to stop looking around the diner as if suddenly he didn’t want to talk. Bacteria could be tricky. Oftentimes you found only what you tested for. It wasn’t as if you put a sample under the microscope and the various germs lit up in different neon colors. Platt knew there were more than two thousand species of salmonella alone. Most of those existed in animals and humans without causing damage. Some were serious pathogens that could cause a wide range of illnesses and infections from gastroenteritis to typhoid fever.

“Are you saying it might be something we’re not used to seeing?” Platt asked.

“Could be a mutated version. I just don’t know.”

Platt watched the CDC chief fidget with his silverware.

“Was it accidental or intentional?”

“You know some people say our nation’s food supply is an accident of epidemic proportions just waiting to happen. We have an administration that’s declared child obesity a matter of national security and they want all vending machines out of schools. They want McDonald’s to quit enticing kids with toys in Happy Meals. They call Cheerios on the carpet for claiming their cereal reduces cholesterol when Cheerios is not federally approved”—he shot quote marks in the air—“to make such claims. And in the meantime, we have a national food supply that is more vulnerable than ever to accidents, contamination, and tampering. The feds’ answer? They need more regulations and yet they don’t, won’t, and can’t inspect what they already have authority over. They’re shutting down egg suppliers for a salmonella outbreak but forty-eight hours before that salmonella outbreak, a USDA inspector reported the supplier ‘good to go.’”

He shoved the silverware away and pushed back against the vinyl booth. All the while Platt sat quietly, allowing him his rant.

Platt was a soldier. He didn’t have the luxury of publicly voicing his political views like Bix, who, despite being a government employee, was still a civilian. That didn’t mean that Platt didn’t agree with Bix, at least with some of what he said. But it was late. Platt had driven almost two hours to the diner. He had the same drive back waiting for him. He didn’t owe Bix any favors. They were even as of Platt’s last count.

“What’s going on, Roger?”

Bix, finished with the pie, put his elbows back on the table, intertwined his hands, making a steeple of index fingers.

“It’s obviously a food-borne illness. Obviously some sort of contamination that took place. All of them ate lunch that day in the cafeteria and within hours they displayed typical symptoms of food poisoning: nausea followed by vomiting, abdominal cramps followed by diarrhea, then fever. That’s the first day. I wish they would have called me then.

“The second day, some began passing blood and complained of light-headedness. The third day, several experienced extreme pain. Some hallucinations. There were two seizures.”

“When did they call you?”

“This morning. Day four.”

Platt only now realized he had shoved aside the plate with his half-eaten hamburger. Under the table his hands balled up into fists. It couldn’t be happening again. It wasn’t possible. Less than two months ago in Pensacola, Florida, dozens of soldiers who had returned from Iraq and Afghanistan had gotten ill—several fatally—after surgeries to repair or replace their injured limbs. The symptoms had been similar. It ended up being a tissue contamination that no one could have suspected or predicted. Realizing another massive contamination could be happening again, only now at a high school, sent a wave of nausea through Platt.

Bix continued. “Most food-borne illnesses hit those with compromised or weak immune systems—the elderly or little kids. But these are teenagers—their immune systems not yet fully developed but they’re not high risk. Whatever this is hits quicker, faster, and harder than anything I’ve ever encountered.”

“Any deaths?” Platt almost didn’t want to know the answer.

“No. It’s early, but I don’t think there will be because, for the most part, these kids are all fairly healthy. That’s not to say there won’t be long-term effects for some of them. We’ve got almost a dozen hospitalized and I still haven’t been able to find the source of the contamination. I’ve personally ripped apart the kitchen. Found a few questionable lapses in cleanliness but nothing that warrants this degree of illness.”

“What about a kitchen worker?”

He shrugged. “Possible, but we interviewed and tested all of them. No one was sick. Could one of them have contaminated what they served because they went to the bathroom and didn’t wash their hands, didn’t glove up? I can’t say for sure, but this was so severe I’m thinking it had to be a food item that was already contaminated. For it to work this quickly I’m thinking the food had to have an established bacteria settled and waiting.”

“Did you find anything in the leftovers?”

“No leftovers. Remember, day four. Everything’s already in the trash. Dumpster already hauled off.” He held his hands up hopelessly. “I do have the list of what they ate and the suppliers. I could probably spend dozens of hours tracking down whether the contamination happened at the processing plant or at the distribution warehouse or even in the school kitchen. And these schools get stuff from all over the place, not just one center. It’s crazy, is what it is.”

“This can’t be the first time it’s happened.”

“CDC hears about it only when kids are hospitalized or if there are deaths. Haven’t had any reports in months. But schools are notoriously slow about reporting to us. And kids get sick. A lot.”

“Waiting until there’s forty-two at one time seems inappropriate. What are you finding in the victims?”

“I told you what we’re not finding—none of the usual strains. My lab guys back in Atlanta are still searching. It might be salmonella but a mutated strain. Do you remember the spinach recall in 2006? Two hundred and five cases. Twenty-six states. One hundred and two hospitalized. Five deaths. Only five, thank God. That was E. coli 0157:H7, a particularly virulent strain.

“I worked that case. We started by checking all the wrong things. It was E. coli so we were pulling victims’ refrigerators and trash cans apart looking for hamburgers, anything with ground beef. Several victims kept telling us, ‘No, we don’t eat red meat, we’re very health conscious.’ Spinach was one of the last things we even thought to look at. The victims were healthy but the strain was brutal.

“This reminds me of that case and I don’t like it.” He tapped his fingers against his lips. “I’m afraid this is going to be something like salmonella on steroids.”

“Any chance it’s intentional?”

Bix sat back again, the vinyl creaking beneath him. He started to rub his eyes then crossed his arms instead, and Platt figured he had just watched Bix shut down. He was surprised when the CDC chief said, “Yeah, I do. I can’t tell you why, but I do suspect it might be deliberate.”

“Have you told that to the USDA?”

“I called the department responsible for the school lunch program and they referred me to the new undersecretary of the Food Safety and Inspection Service. All I could get was some lackey in her office who told me that the undersecretary would get back to me after she gets my report and is able to do an assessment. Then she referred me back to the department that I originally called. I hate that runaround crap. And FSIS has a brand-new undersecretary, Irene Baldwin. I don’t know her but I already don’t trust her. She was the CEO of some huge food corporation. To me it seems a little like inviting the fox in to watch the henhouse.”

“Okay, then how about the FBI? Aren’t they supposed to be in charge of … what do they call it, agroterrorism? If this is intentional it would fall under their jurisdiction.”

“Right. In partnership with FSIS, FDA, and DHS. But yeah, FBI leads it. They put me in touch with Assistant Director Raymond Kunze. Actually I asked for Margaret O’Dell. I remembered she was the one who helped you crack that Ebola case last year. But I was told she’s out of town on assignment. Someplace out west in Oklahoma or Idaho.”

“Colorado.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Kunze is giving me R. J. Tully. He was on the Ebola case, too, but I heard he got suspended. Not sure I like getting second string.”

“Tully’s good. That case was personal for him. You’d be lucky to get him on this.”

Bix nodded.

“I’m not sure why you called me, though. You’ve got the FBI. You have some of the best scientists in the country back in Atlanta. If you want me to be a part of some task force, of course, I’ll help. But I’m not sure what I bring to the equation.”

“Your presence brings the one thing I hope I don’t need.”

“What might that be?”

“The United States Army.”

ELEVEN

NEBRASKA NATIONAL FOREST

After the last of the survivors was removed from the scene Maggie wasn’t sure how to proceed.

“I’ll radio for Olly Cushman to come on in,” Sheriff Skylar told her.

“No, wait. Does the county attorney have medical training?”

“Medical training? Probably as much as you or me.”

“I spent three years in premed.”

He stared at her. Then finally said, “I’m sure he’s taken the same death investigation workshop I did.”

“A crime scene like this one is going to require someone with more training than a weeklong workshop.”

“Actually, it’s a day.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s pretty comprehensive,” Donny offered, then he quickly looked away, rubbing at his jaw but it was too late. Maggie had already seen his disapproval.

“You can’t examine these bodies out here anyway. We need to bag ’em up, get ’em to a proper facility. Maybe North Platte.” Skylar was addressing Donny now as if the two of them would make the decision. “Got to get them out of here before those clouds burst open and wash away any evidence.”

“That’s exactly why we need to get someone here now,” Maggie told him. “I think it’s important to examine them at the scene, especially with it being outside. It won’t matter how many photos we take. Has Cushman ever investigated a death?”

“Of course he has,” the sheriff said. “Beginning of summer. We pulled a woman’s body from the Middle Loup. That was a mess.”

“Homicide?”

“Accident.”

“I thought someone saw her jump from the Highway 83 bridge,” Donny said.

“It was ruled an accident.”

“What about homicides?”

“We haven’t had a homicide in Thomas County as far back as I can remember.”

“What about the State Patrol?” Maggie looked to Donny. “You must have someone who serves as a medical examiner.”

“We do in Scottsbluff.”

He had picked her up in Scottsbluff. From what Maggie remembered of the drive it seemed like an eternity and that was in daylight. She looked over her shoulder.

“We need someone now. There has to be someone closer. Someone in law enforcement with a medical background?”

“There is one person. Just outside of North Platte. She’s retired now. Lucy Coy.”

“No, not that crazy old Indian woman.” The sheriff tucked his thumbs in his belt, looking defiant.

“Lucy follows procedure,” Donny said. “We’ve never had a complaint.”

“Of course not. Anybody criticize, she’d probably put a curse on ’em.”

Maggie watched Donny’s jaw clench. She turned her back to the sheriff and asked Donny, “She has a medical background?”

“I don’t think she’s a certified MD, but she worked on death investigations with the State Patrol for years. Long before I joined. She taught several of our best investigators. Our course is a week long.”

“She probably taught them black magic, too.”

“She taught me, Frank.”

The sheriff held up his hands in surrender, shaking his head and smiling like he didn’t mean anything but indicating that he wasn’t really apologizing, either.

“How far away?” Maggie asked.

“Hell, I think her place is just south of here.”

“Call her.”

“It’d be better to take these kids in and let them get properly examined,” the sheriff protested.

“Call her,” Maggie repeated.

Donny pulled out his cell phone, checked for reception, and slipped it back in his pocket as he tugged his two-way radio off his belt.

“We could have a downpour at any minute,” Skylar still protested. “Everything will be washed away while you wait for Lucy Coy. And then just watch, she’ll be collecting spirit dust and lightning bugs. We’ll be here till dawn.”

This time Maggie pinned him down with a glare that made the man take a step back. Maybe he remembered this was the same woman who earlier pulled her gun on half the county elders.

“I’m still hoping that you’ll choose to be a productive part of this investigation, Sheriff.” She stopped there when she wanted to ask him to leave, but personal experience had taught her that co operation from the local law enforcement was vital to winning a community’s support. This sheriff could be her greatest asset or her worst liability.

Hank and one of his men returned.

“Hank, do you have some unused brown paper bags?” she asked.

“Yep. Up in the gift shop.”

“How about more tarps or rain pouches? Especially anything unused. And rope or twine?”

“I think we can find some.”

“We’re going to divide this area up into five sections,” Maggie explained, “and each of us will work a grid. That’s if you’re staying, Sheriff?”

They stared at the sheriff. He released a sigh then nodded, just as Donny called out, “Lucy’s on her way.”

TWELVE

Lucy Coy made her way down to the crime scene as Maggie heard the first drops of rain begin to hit the forest’s upper canopy. There was absolutely nothing about the woman that would have prompted Maggie to use or even think the words “old” or “crazy.”

She wore hiking boots, blue jeans, a white shirt with the untucked tails sticking out from underneath her rain jacket. Tall and thin, Coy carried herself like a dancer with an elegant but unassuming confidence. Adding to her mystique, there were featherlike wisps of silver in her dark hair that was clipped short. It stuck up in places and would have made anyone else look as if she had just gotten out of bed. On Lucy Coy it looked stylish.

Under the brash floodlights the woman’s face showed no distinctive lines, just smooth skin over high cheekbones. Her dark eyes focused on Maggie as introductions were made. The woman was sizing up the FBI agent who had summoned her from her warm, dry home, but with no hint of annoyance. Instead, Lucy Coy looked eager to understand exactly what was expected of her and get right to it.

If anything Maggie could understand the sheriff’s awe of Lucy. She seemed out of place with these men, but at the same time she fit in comfortably with these surroundings, almost at home in the middle of the forest. She didn’t appear to even notice the rain.

The men from the other side of the hill had brought and left at the perimeter the items Maggie had requested: digital camera, latex gloves, paper bags, markers, and several plastic coolers. Maggie had insisted on unused and sealed tarps to prevent introducing debris to the crime scene. Those were now strung from trees and hung above areas deemed important and waiting for closer inspection or possible casting.

The impact of what had happened to these teenagers was sinking in as each of the injured made their way to the triage area. The boy wrapped in barbed wire had sustained the severest injuries from what Maggie could tell, but that was only if they didn’t count the two left behind who waited for Lucy Coy.

Maggie noticed Lucy’s rich voice had a tone of reverence. She spoke in perfect rhythm with the breeze and the night birds, offering few words and listening intently.

“We’ve already taken all the photos we need,” Maggie told her. “I thought it was important for someone with a medical background to see the bodies as they were found, before they’re moved.”

Maggie followed Lucy, who followed Donny. The sheriff lagged well behind as if still pronouncing his annoyance. Yet he wouldn’t dare miss this, either.

When the rain had finally come it did so with little fanfare. A rumble of thunder periodically quaked through the trees and sometimes the sky above the canopy would brighten with a soft glow of lightning. But the violent electricity that had forked through the clouds earlier had seeped out somewhere on the horizon. Maggie was grateful and recognized the pitter-patter of the soft rain as a blessing compared to what she had expected. Even the cicadas and crickets agreed and had begun competing with the low hum of the gas generator left up the steep incline, its sound muted by the brush and easily forgotten except for the tentacles of orange extension cords that trailed down the slope.

As they passed under the dead owl still suspended from the branch, Lucy stopped. She stepped closer until she was directly underneath the bird.

“The wings are singed,” Lucy said.

Then she bent down to examine the ground beneath the bird. Several orange stakes marked where Maggie had stumbled over the boy wrapped in barbed wire.

“One of the injured was found here,” Maggie explained.

Lucy nodded as she swirled a finger in the sand between two areas stained with blood.

Maggie saw the sheriff glare at Donny. Out of the corner of her eye she could see him mouthing, “See, I told you so.” As if that wasn’t enough, he spun his index finger at his temple to emphasize that Lucy Coy was, indeed, crazy.

As she stood up Lucy stopped to examine one of the lower branches.

“There’s some kind of a thread here,” she pointed out. “It’s tangled but doesn’t look weathered. Can we bag this?”

Donny nodded.

“And the owl. Can we bag it, also?”

Lucy walked around the upside-down bird to look into the creature’s eyes. Ignoring the sheriff’s reaction to her she added, “Plains Indians believed owls carried the souls of the departed.”

“Is that why you want us to take it, because you think it might have captured their souls?” the sheriff asked, trying to keep a straight face.

Maggie was finding it difficult to control her anger at Skylar, and yet at the same time she hoped she hadn’t made a mistake asking this woman to join the investigation—a woman whose opinion could be influenced by her ancestors’ spirit world, a world that Maggie believed carried no weight in a criminal investigation; a world Maggie had little patience, interest, or respect for.

Lucy Coy, however, calmly went on to explain: “I believe whatever happened to these teenagers also happened to this owl. The way its talons are still gripping the branch”—she pointed to the bird’s feet—“along with the singed feathers tells me there’s a good possibility this owl was electrocuted.”

“Electrocuted?” Donny asked.

“That’s ridiculous,” the sheriff muttered.

But Maggie’s heart skipped a beat. That was exactly what she thought had happened to the boy wrapped in barbed wire and to the two dead victims.

THIRTEEN

VIRGINIA

Platt noticed the car following him soon after he pulled out of the diner’s parking lot. At first he thought maybe Bix had forgotten to tell him something and Platt knew the paranoid CDC chief would rather run him down than risk a cell-phone call being traced. But the vehicle following him, five car lengths back, was definitely not Bix’s compact rental car. The double headlights sat up as high as Platt’s Land Rover.

He took the ramp onto the interstate, goosing the accelerator. The double headlights followed. He switched lanes, crossing over two and watched in the rearview mirror. The double headlights followed, keeping a car in between. Traffic raced around them but the car stayed with Platt. He drove a few miles then crossed back to the right and at the last second swerved to take the first exit. Not so discreetly, now, his tail followed, provoking a horn blare from another vehicle that had to slam on its brakes.

Platt turned into a gas station and pulled up next to a credit-card-only pump. He didn’t get out. He waited, ready to floor it if the vehicle followed. It’d be impossible to pretend here, especially after pulling up to one of the pumps. But the double headlights, which he now saw belonged to a black Suburban with tinted windows, didn’t even slow down as it passed the station.

Platt sat back, released a sigh. Ran a hand over his face. Relaxed his jaw. Okay, so Bix’s paranoia was contagious.

He topped off the Land Rover’s gas tank, though he didn’t need it to get back home. Then he took several more minutes to wash his windshield, the whole time watching every single vehicle that pulled into the station as well as those passing by on the access road.

Back on the road Platt stayed off the interstate and wound his way through side streets where he could see if he picked up another tail. The amount of traffic surprised him for this time of night, but still, he believed he would notice a black Suburban with tinted windows. Finally deciding it was safe, he backtracked to his parents’ house.

They would be up, watching the late-night shows. They’d have Digger between them and all three would have a bowl of ice cream. They doted on the dog like he was one of their grandchildren. Platt’s mom would try to talk him into staying overnight, but he’d convince her that Digger would keep him company on the two-hour drive back to D.C. She’d pretend to pout but give him a peck on the cheek and his dad would tell him to call when he got home.

Platt parked and before going in took a few minutes to check his voice, text, and email messages. There were several but none from the one person he was hoping to hear from— Maggie. He knew her plane had landed safely in Denver without any delays. He checked the flight number online to make sure.

He slouched back into the leather seat and shook his head. He had been doing just fine before Maggie O’Dell came along. He had finally found contentment, burying himself in his work, coming home and sitting with Digger on the back porch. He tried not to spend too much time indulging in memories of his daughter, Ali, but Digger was a constant reminder.

In the beginning it was difficult to even have the dog around, but quickly Digger became Platt’s shadow, his buddy. He knew the dog missed Ali as much as he did. They had been inseparable or as Ali always said, they were “bestest friends.” Now Platt was grateful for the dog’s company and for reminding him of the best memories of Ali and not those dark weeks, months, years that followed her death.

Caring about Maggie was a luxury he hadn’t allowed himself since Ali’s death. Moments like this he questioned the wisdom of it. Being with Maggie, just talking to her— hell, just hearing her voice—made him feel like a college kid again. It was exhilarating. But not hearing from her could make him feel equally miserable. He hated the roller-coaster ride.

So what the hell was wrong with him? He wasn’t a kid. He was a colonel, a medical doctor in the United States Army. He was logical and practical and thrived on structure and discipline. He made decisions, solved problems. He went into war zones and hot zones. He had performed surgeries on soldiers while bombs rattled around them. He had treated victims with Ebola working from a tent outside of Sierra Leone. At only thirty-two years old he had seen and done incredible things. Yet nothing compared to the feeling of Maggie sitting on the sofa with him, sockless feet in his lap, while they spent a rare evening watching classic movies or an even rarer Saturday afternoon watching college football.

He looked down at his smartphone again. No new messages in the last five minutes. He pushed Contacts and keyed down to Maggie’s number. He clicked on Text Messages and tapped in MISS YOU. XXOO BEN. Then he paused before hitting Send.

Too much?

He tapped Backspace and erased XXOO BEN.

Hesitated again. Tapped Backspace and erased MISS YOU.

Flipping the phone shut, he said out loud to himself, “Coward.”

Just as he reached for the SUV’s door handle he saw it.

The black Suburban, its headlights off, was stopped at the corner. The vehicle’s occupant must have thought it was safe to pull this close, must have thought Platt had already exited his vehicle and gone inside. The Suburban stayed there for only a few seconds longer, just enough time for whoever was driving it to take note of the address. Then it rolled through the intersection. Platt watched it go a full block before putting on its headlights.

Great. Platt had taken some goons to the front door of his parents’ home.

He got out of the Land Rover and went around to the backseat to grab a duffel bag. It looked like he’d be spending the night after all.

FOURTEEN

NEBRASKA NATIONAL FOREST

The rain became a downpour just as they carried the last body bag over the hill. The wet grass and sand made the climb treacherous. Maggie nearly fell and she wasn’t even carrying a body bag. It was the last compromise she had relinquished to Donny—she let the men carry the bodies. To argue at this point would only be annoying, especially since she was totally and completely exhausted.

She had even given in and allowed the men waiting on the other side of the sand dune to enter the perimeter and help carry out equipment they had used to keep the paper evidence bags from getting soaked. Of course, that was only after Maggie sealed and tagged each bag herself.

The sheriff agreed to lock everything up safe and sound. They’d sort through what they had and decide in the morning where to send the important pieces. Maggie realized there wasn’t much of anything to explain what could have caused the teens’ injuries. Only one Taser was found in the pine needles. Although it had been fired, the probes were no longer attached to any target and not even close to the two dead boys.

Right now it was time to get out of the rain, find some warmth, and get some rest before morning brought another barrage of tasks. Yet Donny, Lucy, and Maggie stood in the rain as if mesmerized by the red taillights that bounced along the wet, glistening two-track path, now worn wider by more vehicles than it had seen in years.

Donny switched on his flashlight just long enough to glance at his watch. Flicked it off. They continued standing in the rain. Without the hum of the generator or car engines, the song of cicadas swelled around them.

“They must not mind the rain,” she said.

Neither Donny nor Lucy responded, but they seemed to understand what she was talking about.

Finally Donny said, “It’s after two. I’m not sure what to do with you.”

It took almost a full minute before Maggie realized he was talking about her. Originally she had planned to drive back to Denver after a quick examination of several cattle-mutilation sites. She had a room reserved at the hotel where the conference was being held. She was scheduled to teach her first class of the weekend early Saturday morning. She could have saved herself some time by flying directly into Scottsbluff if she didn’t mind getting on a twin prop. She did, however, mind very much.

“She’ll come home with me,” Lucy Coy said matter-offactly.

Donny nodded as if neither of them expected Maggie to have a say in the decision.

And oddly enough, Maggie didn’t protest. When they moved to leave, Maggie simply followed. She pulled her leather satchel from Donny’s vehicle. Her suitcase was still in the trunk of her rental car, left in the parking lot of a Scottsbluff mall.

“I’ll have someone get your rental in the morning,” he told her. “I’ll call our field office. Make sure the car and all your stuff is secured for the night.”

She wanted to tell him not to bother. There was nothing of value in the suitcase that couldn’t be replaced. Instead, she simply thanked him and got inside Lucy’s vehicle. Maggie took note of the wood paneling and soft leather seats and smiled. Finally something Maggie might have expected from the woman. Lucy drove a Jeep Grand Cherokee but one loaded with luxury and elegance. There was something comforting about that. Perhaps Maggie had not entirely lost her edge in profiling people.

As they bumped over the rough trail, Maggie stole a glance at the woman’s regal profile in the blue-tinted dashboard lights. Maggie was mentally and physically worn out. Her rain-soaked clothes stuck to her skin. Despite a good rubbing from the towel Lucy had offered, Maggie’s hair dripped into her eyes. The blast from the heater only emphasized the chill that had invaded her body. Never had Maggie trusted a stranger, let alone gone home with one she had met only hours before. Yet there was an undeniable comfort being in the presence of this woman.

Maggie shifted in her seat, pulling up her leg to tuck underneath herself. She thought about Platt and had the sudden urge to hear his voice. She checked the dashboard clock: 2:16. Just after three in the morning his time. She didn’t want to wake him. Instead, she sat back and closed her eyes.

FIFTEEN

NORTH PLATTE, NEBRASKA

Dawson Hayes opened his eyes. Plastic tubes shot out of his arms and nose. He startled and gasped and somewhere a machine hissed and gurgled. He’d been dreaming about birds with scalding white eyes perched over him in the tops of the forest’s highest pine trees.

He searched for the woman’s eyes—the soft brown—that held him above the pain and promised not to drop him. Where was she?

His eyelids fluttered despite his panic. He tried to keep them open. A shadow over him said, “I think he’s waking up.”

Two blinks means “yes.”

But Dawson couldn’t blink. He couldn’t hold his eyelids open.

Half a blink was all he could manage but it was enough to see the shadow insert a needle into one of the tubes.

“No, no … not,” he stuttered, his throat suddenly raw and dry. Something was stuck down it. He couldn’t swallow. It hurt to breathe. Unfamiliar hums and beeps assaulted his ears.

Then he saw the fiery red eyes across the dimly lit room. The creature had followed him. How was it possible?

He struggled and strained but couldn’t move. Something clamped him down. He opened his mouth to scream but the contraption in his throat choked him. He tried to open his eyes beyond the half shutters that blurred his vision.

Then he felt it, warm liquid sliding into his veins. But it was pleasant and soothing. Whatever the shadow had injected into the tubes had started to invade his insides. He felt it seeping into his brain and he imagined it racing along his arteries, replacing cold blood with soothing liquid warmth that made his mind fuzzy and his heart stop exploding.

Another shadow stood over him. This one leaned down and he caught the scent of pine needles and river mud mixed with sweat. Dawson felt hot breath on his ear as he heard the shadow whisper, “You’re gonna wish you hadn’t survived.”

SIXTEEN

“The sheriff’s a man who means well,” Lucy Coy said.

She handed Maggie a tray that held a bowl of steaming homemade chicken noodle soup, half a sandwich with layers of deli slices on a plate garnished with fresh strawberries and blueberries, and a mug of spiced tea. It took discipline for Maggie to wait for her host to get settled.

“He’ll make sure those teenagers are properly taken care of,” Lucy continued. “Even the dead.”

They sat on the screened-in porch off the second-floor loft of Lucy’s contemporary A-frame house that looked like something out of Architectural Digest. The porch looked into treetops and over Lucy’s backyard. When the moon broke through the clouds Maggie could see rolling hills dotted with pine trees, the landscape unbroken for miles by fences or another homestead.

The rain had turned to mist. Once in a while it came in on the breeze. But Lucy had turned on an electric fireplace in the corner and the outdoor room became a cozy retreat. Behind the sliding glass door was the loft with a queen-size bed waiting for Maggie. She felt too tired to sleep and when Lucy offered a bite before bed, Maggie gratefully accepted. She hadn’t eaten since morning, a banana and a Diet Pepsi on the flight from D.C. to Denver. She’d forgotten about crossing back and forth over three time zones. Her head and stomach were still set on eastern time. No wonder it felt like days.

Besides, for months now Maggie had been unable to shake a bad case of insomnia. As an FBI agent she had learned to compartmentalize her mind, carefully stowing away the awful images she had seen and all the brutal experiences she had survived. Lately those compartments had started to spring leaks and it usually happened after dark.

Nightmares played a loop in her mind, reliving the experiences, sometimes in freeze-frame, sometimes in high-definition. She hadn’t discovered a remedy. Nothing worked. Not warm milk or alcohol, exercise or quiet. The only thing that had ever worked—but only once—was Benjamin Platt’s strong, soothing fingers working the tension from her shoulders and back. Although it was only a massage and hadn’t led to anything more, just the memory of it still made her flush.

Two of Lucy’s dogs, a gangly retriever mix and a three-legged boxer, came in and curled up at their mistress’s feet. Earlier, a pack had met the Jeep and escorted it down the long driveway to the house. Lucy had explained that people kept leaving their castaways at the edge of her property, knowing she’d take them in and thereby assuaging their guilt by not turning them in to the pound for a sure death sentence. When the headlights swept the side of an out-building Maggie had seen a couple more snouts peeking out of the small doors crafted into the shed.

A black German shepherd nudged Maggie’s elbow for a handout.

“Jake,” Lucy scolded in her low, gentle voice and the shepherd lay down by Maggie. “Usually he’s not this friendly. He showed up about a month ago, but he comes and goes as he pleases. He’ll be gone for days at a time.”

“Maybe he has another home somewhere.”

“I don’t think so. He comes back scraped up and starving. Hank thought he saw him in the forest one night. Worries me because they’ve also reported seeing a cougar. No, I think ole Jake just hasn’t decided if he wants to call this home.” Almost on cue the dog laid his head on Maggie’s foot.

“I have a white Lab,” she said. “Harvey. He sorted of ended up on my doorstep, too.”

“So you rescued him.”

“I like to think we rescued each other.”

Lucy smiled, a first since they’d met, then she wrapped long fingers around her mug of tea and sat back in the wicker chair.

“What do you think happened out there tonight?” Maggie asked. “It couldn’t have been just a game of Taser tag, could it?”

“I’ve never seen Tasers do what we saw tonight,” Lucy said, then seemed to consider it as she sipped. “Things aren’t always what they seem. For years ranchers used barbed wire for fencing. Cattle respected the boundary because it hurt to cross it. Intruders respected it because the barbs look vicious and dangerous.”

Maggie listened patiently, remembering the woman’s explanation for bagging the owl. Perhaps this was how she answered classroom questions, with proverbs and folk tales.

“Now some ranchers use the electric fencing. Unlike the barbed wire, the electric wire looks quite harmless. You can’t tell if it’s hot, if it’s dangerous, until it’s too late.”

Maggie quietly sipped her tea. Reached a hand down and petted Jake who released a heavy sigh before flopping onto his side to expose his belly. Without looking over at Lucy, Maggie said, “So what the hell does any of that mean?”

To Maggie’s surprise Lucy laughed, hard and long. She had to wipe her eyes before attempting an answer. And when she finally did, she prefaced it with “I think you and I are going to get along just fine.

“It simply means don’t dismiss something that appears ordinary. Outsiders come here and they tend to see a simpler life, an uncomplicated people. But human nature is human nature. People out here are capable of the same things as people in cities. You might think it’s easier to hide the mistakes, the evil—if you will—in the city, but sometimes it’s just as easy to hide things in plain sight.”

Lucy set her mug down and reached into her jacket pocket, pulling out what looked like bib lettuce in a Ziploc bag. She held on to it, fingering it carefully.

“I think this is Salvia divinorum. They call it the sage of seers. The non-divinorum is the salvia you find in gardens and flower beds. This is a psychoactive species of mint. It grows mostly in Mexico and some southwestern states. The Mazatec people believed it had spiritual and healing properties. You dry it and smoke it, or you wad it up when it’s still green”—she held up the bag—“and chew it. They say its hallucinatory properties are more potent than LSD. It’s the newest rave for teenagers.”

She fingered the bag and then looked directly at Maggie when she said, “I found this under one of the dead boys when I was examining him.”

“And you put it in your pocket?”

“Sheriff Skylar is a man who means well. Possession, distribution, and sale of salvia is illegal in more than a dozen states. Including Nebraska. There was a young woman whose body was found in the river several months ago. Some say she was tripping on salvia. Thought she could fly and jumped from the Highway 83 bridge. That bridge is a hundred and fifty feet above the water.

“There were friends with her at the time. No arrests were made. There was no mention of drug use. It was said to be an accident. Sometimes it can be devastating for grieving parents to learn bad things about their dead child. I thought it was important that this didn’t accidentally get lost or misplaced because of good intentions.”

Lucy set the plastic bag on the side table between them, relinquishing it, handing it over to Maggie.

“I’ll understand if you no longer want me to participate in this investigation.”

Maggie left the bag on the table, sipped her tea, and considered what Lucy had done. In most cases it could be viewed as obstructing a federal investigation. Perhaps even tampering with evidence and certainly not following the chain of command. What was it that her old boss and mentor, Kyle Cunningham, would say? “Rules were made for the head to judge when the heart got in the way.”

Finally Maggie looked over at the woman and said, “I think you and I are going to get along just fine.”

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9

SEVENTEEN

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Mary Ellen Wychulis waited outside her new boss’s office. The undersecretary of Food Safety and Inspection Services hated tardy employees but obviously didn’t mind keeping them waiting. Mary Ellen crossed her legs and let her foot tap out her annoyance.

She was missing her son’s first official playdate. Her husband had emailed three photos—mostly blurs of babies surrounded by too many toys—but they were enough to make her ache. She had only been back at work three weeks and already she wished she had taken some extra time.

It didn’t help matters that she returned to a new boss; her old one, promoted up the ranks, had been kind enough to make sure her job was secure before he left. These days that was no small feat. And so she was grateful even if her new boss was obsessive-compulsive, an outsider who Mary Ellen believed was an obvious political pick.

Mary Ellen felt like she had spent the last three weeks teaching her the nuts and bolts of the job. But she held her tongue even when she realized her husband was, most likely, right. Had she not been pregnant, her previous boss would have recommended Mary Ellen for his old position. She didn’t like to admit that such bias still ran rampant in the federal government, especially at the upper levels. Had she been a man with the same qualifications, age, marital status, and even a new baby, she would, no doubt, be the new undersecretary.

The door to the office opened so suddenly that Mary Ellen startled. A man in a military uniform marched out then turned back.

“Keep me posted,” he said.

Mary Ellen could see that her boss, Irene Baldwin, had followed him to the door. The officer looked familiar but Mary Ellen couldn’t put a name to the face, although she realized he resembled too many military elite—thick-chested with steel-gray hair, a rubber-stamped scowl, and lifeless eyes.

She watched the man march all the way down the hall before it hit her. General Lorimer was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Off the top of her head she couldn’t think of a single project her boss was supposed to be working on with the Department of Defense. She wondered what brought him here.

“Wychulis. Good, you’re on time. Enter,” Irene Baldwin said with a wave of her hand then darted back into her office before her last guest had even reached the elevator.

Baldwin had changed the office so remarkably from its previous occupant that each time Mary Ellen walked in she had to remind herself she worked for the government, not a Fortune 500 company. But it was also a reminder that Baldwin not only had worked for a Fortune 500 company but had run one.

Where framed black-and-white photos of agricultural history had hung on the walls, there were now canvases in vibrant-colored oils with abstract images that on closer inspection could depict stalks of grain or bird’s-eye views of a forest. The new wall decorations looked like they belonged in a contemporary art museum instead of the office of an undersecretary in the Department of Agriculture.

“Sit,” Baldwin told Mary Ellen.

Her one- or two-word commands reminded Mary Ellen of dog obedience school.

Baldwin continued to stand behind her desk and pull file folders from a neat stack piled on the polished corner. The only other things on the desk were three pens and a legal pad.

“I have questions,” she said, sorting through the contents of a file folder.

Mary Ellen sat on the edge of her chair. Of course, she had questions. Every morning she had questions and she expected Mary Ellen to save her precious time by providing the answers. Mary Ellen kept her back ramrod straight, her feet flat on the floor, preparing for whatever Baldwin wanted.

“I have a request to continue”—Baldwin paused to put on a pair of reading glasses—“something called a mobile slaughter unit in Fort Collins, Colorado. What exactly is that?”

“It’s part of the ‘Know your farmer, know your food’ initiative. The unit travels from site to site and provides services to small regional producers at a host farm.”

“Services?”

“Yes.”

“Slaughter services.”

“That’s correct.” Mary Ellen refrained from any more details. One thing she had learned about Baldwin—and learned the hard way—was that the woman enjoyed making a game of what she believed were the agency’s “absurdities” or “foibles.” Despite Mary Ellen’s recent absence she had almost five years invested at the USDA and a loyalty to public service. She didn’t appreciate the sarcasm even if some of it was justified. Of course any agency had problems.

Baldwin came from the private sector. She had worked her way up the ranks of a large food corporation, ultimately becoming responsible for developing the research facility which was known worldwide for its cutting-edge labs. It was no secret that she was hired to bridge the communication gap between the Food Safety and Inspection Service and the private processors and distributors who provided the nation’s food supply. Her experience would give credibility to an agency that had the reputation of beating up on those same processors and distributors that it was supposed to work closely with, not just regulate to assure the safety of the nation’s food supply.

“Second question.” Baldwin pushed at the glasses that tended to slide to the end of her nose. “Why do I have a citizen’s petition from”—she paused again as she flipped pages—“a Wesley Stotter, who says these mobile slaughter units are, quote, being used for unethical and secretive government experiments, unquote?”

“I’m not familiar with that petition.”

“No?” Baldwin slid the file to Mary Ellen’s side of the desk. “Please read it. Stotter is a syndicated talk-radio guy. Looks like he has a rather significant audience, though a somewhat strange mix of antigovernment and UFO fanatics. Could be nothing. Could be a media headache waiting to explode into a migraine. Last question.”

Her curt, brisk style had Mary Ellen’s head spinning and stomach turning the first several days.

The woman pulled another file from the stack.

“What in the world is a ‘spent hen’ and why is there a pending review waiting for my confirmation?”

“Spent hens are old egg-laying birds, past their productivity. Most commercial buyers like fast-food restaurants or processed-food companies won’t buy them. The hens spend most of their lives caged while laying eggs so their bones tend to be brittle and can splinter.”

“Doesn’t sound like much of a review. Brittle bones would definitely be a food-safety issue. If no one wants to buy them, why is there a review?”

“Well, actually for the last decade the USDA has bought them. Millions of pounds, in fact.”

“What on earth for?”

Mary Ellen fidgeted with the pages in her lap. There was nothing else in the folder except the document asking for confirmation from Baldwin to continue the review. Mary Ellen wanted to kick whoever had put this on her boss’s desk in the first place. She didn’t want to hear her boss’s sarcasm and judgment, even if she agreed.

“Wychulis, I have only the request. Please enlighten me. Why in the world did the USDA buy millions of pounds of brittle-boned chickens?”

“For the National School Lunch Program.”

EIGHTEEN

NEBRASKA

Maggie had slept. Hard enough that she needed to remember where she was. The scent of brewed coffee and freshly baked bread wafted up to the loft, but when she looked over the side rail she didn’t see Lucy in the kitchen.

The woman had loaned Maggie an oversized T-shirt to sleep in. It looked new and had blocks of brightly colored train cars with a logo that read RAILFEST 1999. She found her clothes, which had been soaked and stained with blood and debris, now freshly laundered and stacked neatly on an upholstered bench by the stairs. Even her shoes had been cleaned, the mud scraped off and the leather polished. She wondered if Lucy had slept at all.

Maggie opened the sliding glass door to the porch and stepped out into the morning sunlight. Blue skies—not a patch of white cloud—stretched over miles of sandhills, the yellow and burnt-orange grasses waving so that the hills looked like they were actually moving.

Directly below—what Maggie had not been able to see last night—were a patio and landscaped garden with brick-paved pathways between berms of flowers. Colorful birdhouses hung from trees. A small fountain made of watering cans trickled a stream down onto rocks. Maggie could hear wind chimes and smell pine. And in the middle of this paradise was Lucy’s tall thin figure, arms stretched above her head, the wide sleeves of her shirt and the slow, graceful movements of her arms looking like wings of a bird.

Sheriff Skylar had mentioned Lucy’s Indian heritage and Maggie wondered if this was, perhaps, part of a silent tribal dance. Lucy saw her, completed the circle her arms had started, and then shouted up, “You’re welcome to join me for a little yoga before breakfast.”

Maggie was glad she was far enough away that Lucy couldn’t see her embarrassment. Yoga. Of course, it was yoga. What was wrong with her? She was as bad as Skylar.

“No, thanks. Do I have time for a short run instead?”

“That’s fine. Help yourself to whatever you can find in the closet and the bottom drawer of the bureau.”

Maggie found shorts and a sweatshirt. Thankfully Lucy wore baggie workout clothes. Her shoes were a bit long but Maggie fixed them by putting on two pairs of socks. In minutes she made her way out the long driveway with Jake, the black shepherd, following along.

Last night she hadn’t noticed that the road to Lucy’s place was hard-packed sand with only patches of gravel mostly in the middle. The rain had left crevices that ran like veins and crumbled the edges. Maggie stayed close to the center, not risking sliding into the rain-filled ditch.

At first the shepherd seemed confused by her behavior, on alert, looking for whatever danger had made her run. But he kept pace and soon stopped looking over his shoulder. It reminded her of jogs with Harvey. She liked having the company.

They hadn’t been at it for long when the dog’s ears pitched and he started herding Maggie to the side of the road, bumping her leg once and then a second time when she ignored him. The pickup came roaring over the hill from behind them. The tires sent a spray of sand at Maggie and Jake as it swerved to avoid hitting them. The dog crouched to his belly. The brakes screeched, spitting more sand and gravel. Taillights flared. The truck jolted to a stop about ten yards ahead of them.

Jake was back on his feet, his nose nudging Maggie’s hand, wanting her to follow him back to the house.

The engine idled then the driver shifted into reverse and slowly backed up. The window opened and a man poked his head out. He was young, mid-twenties with a sunburn and ball cap pulled low so that all Maggie could see were his mirrored sunglasses and a bushy mustache.

“Everything all right, ma’am?”

“Just out for a run.”

“A run?” His head swiveled around as if he were looking for someone else to explain.

“I’m jogging,” she said, noticing that her mouth and eyes were lined with sand.

He stared at her. Then finally said, “Oh sure. Okay. Just thought I’d better check.”

He shifted gears and slowly drove off. She could see him watching her in the rearview mirror and realized that it was curiosity more than remorse that had slowed his speed.

When she and Jake got back to the house, Lucy had the table already set for breakfast and had added the scent of bacon to the kitchen.

“You forgot to mention what an oddity I might be, out running in the road.”

Lucy didn’t look up from the counter where she slathered butter on bread, but there was a glimpse of a smile when she said, “I think you and I were meant to be oddities no matter where we are or what we do.”

NINETEEN

NORTH PLATTE, NEBRASKA

Light blinded Dawson. He jerked awake to find sunlight streaming through the blinds of his hospital-room window.

Sunlight. No laser beams or fireworks.

His dad sat up in the chair beside the bed and rubbed at the stubble on his face and the sleep in his eyes. Dawson wondered how long his father had been there. Had he seen the creature? Dawson frantically searched around the room.

“You’re in North Platte,” his father said, thinking he must not recognize his surroundings. “At the hospital. You got banged up pretty good but you’re gonna be okay.”

His dad looked tired. But he always looked tired. He worked ten-hour shifts at the meat-processing plant. Sometimes he pulled a double shift when one of the other security guards called in sick. He even worked part-time on his days off, couriering packages. He didn’t used to put in this many hours when he was a state patrolman. But he left that job years ago. Dawson didn’t know the details and he didn’t really care. It happened right about the time his mom left them. In fact he’d barely noticed that one day his dad was getting ready for work and holstering a Taser instead of a Smith and Wesson.

They didn’t even have dinner together anymore, let alone talk to each other. Except for when his dad felt it was necessary to tell Dawson how disappointed he was in him. Dawson figured this would be one of those times, especially if his dad had spent the night sleeping in that vinyl chair.

“What happened?” Dawson asked, hoping to preempt the lecture.

“You don’t remember?”

He stared at his father trying to decide whether he would even believe him. A creature with red eyes shooting electrical sparks out of its arms? His father mistook the confused look to be a loss of memory.

“The doctor said you might have short-term amnesia. You got an electric shock from something. He’s thinking it was strong enough to throw you into a barbed-wire fence. You ended up with it wrapped all around your body. You don’t remember anything?”

Dawson didn’t respond. His father was standing now. Not a tall man but from the bed Dawson felt as if the man towered over him. Then his dad did something totally unexpected. He put his hand on Dawson’s shoulder and for a brief moment Dawson thought he saw sadness in his eyes.

“You’re really lucky, kid. A couple of your friends are dead.”

It didn’t register. How could any of them be dead? They were just screwing around. Having some fun. Who was dead? Dawson didn’t get a chance to ask.

“Hey, Mr. H,” a voice called from the doorway and suddenly Dawson’s dad was smiling. The sadness was gone and so was his hand from Dawson’s shoulder.

“Johnny. How’s that throwing arm?”

“Sore, but I guess I can’t complain.”

Dawson thought Johnny B looked better than after a football game. What he couldn’t believe was how excited his dad looked, as if a celebrity had walked in, but then Johnny B was the closest thing there was to one in town.

“Is it okay for me to talk to Dawson?”

“Sure. I need to get home and change for work. I’ll leave you boys. Dawson, I’ll be back tonight as soon as I get off, okay?”

Johnny waited for Dawson’s dad to leave and even then, took a place beside the bed where he could watch the door.

“What did you tell him?” he asked.

“Excuse me?”

“What did you tell your dad happened last night?”

“Nothing. I didn’t tell him anything.”

“Did you tell him about the camera?”

“No.”

“What about the Sally-D?”

“Of course not.”

“You know we could be in a whole shitload of trouble if they found out where we got it.”

“I didn’t tell him.”

“They’d drop me from the team. All those scholarship offers will be gone if I end up not playing.”

“I didn’t say a word.”

“I’ll never go anywhere.” And then under his breath, “That’d make Amanda happy.”

Dawson had never seen Johnny like this—more scared than angry.

“None of it was my idea,” he said. “I go down, everybody goes down.”

“My dad said somebody died.”

Johnny stared straight ahead, somewhere over Dawson’s head. Then suddenly he gripped Dawson’s bandaged arm, digging his fingers into the wounds. Dawson wanted to scream from the pain. He saw fresh blood staining the wrap. He tried to jerk his arm away but Johnny tightened his grip, leaned down until his face was inches from Dawson’s, his breath hot and sour.

“Just keep your mouth shut.”

TWENTY

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Julia Racine wished she could stop thinking about how sticky the little girl’s hand was. She should be grateful that CariAnne wanted to hold her hand. Truth was, when Julia finally gave in to dating women, she thought that at least she wouldn’t have to deal with children. Too often the men she had dated wanted her to be instant stepmom to their weekend kids. Julia knew long ago that she didn’t possess that maternal gene. She realized that she never wanted to be a mother long before she even realized her preference for women.

She didn’t admit it to anyone, but children grated on her nerves. She didn’t have the patience for either their bouts of exuberance or, at the other end of the spectrum, their constant whining. Her new partner had recently suggested— after seeing how uncomfortable Julia seemed to be with her daughter—that perhaps Julia hadn’t gotten the chance to be a child herself and so she couldn’t relate. To which Julia had muttered, “Thank you very much, Dr. Freud,” but at the same time she remembered thinking, “Duh. You think?”

Julia was ten, just a little older than CariAnne, when her mother died. Her father tried to make Julia’s life as normal as possible and she absolutely adored Luc Racine for his efforts, but something broke inside Julia the day her mother left. She knew that then, although she didn’t understand it. But she had felt it, like fabric that had tugged and stretched then ripped at the seams. It had been a pain, an ache so real, so palpable that as a little girl she truly believed something— her stomach, her intestines, her heart—had surely been torn.

Her father claimed that one day she was climbing trees and the next day she was pulling up a chair to the kitchen sink to wash dishes, trying to do her mother’s chores herself.

“It just wasn’t natural,” Luc would finish off the story. Although these days Alzheimer’s prevented him from remembering his own daughter at times, let alone remembering that story or his long-gone wife.

Perhaps Julia’s lack of maternal instinct really did come from not having a real childhood. For years she blamed it for her inability to sustain a normal relationship. Only recently had it occurred to her that it might have something to do with playing on the wrong team. So here she was, trying again. Really trying this time. If someone was keeping track she should get mega points for this—picking up Miss Sticky Fingers from school and having to wait in the principal’s office for approval.

Needing to get the proper approval, even though her partner had filled out all the necessary forms, didn’t bother her. As a police detective, Julia appreciated rules that protected kids from perverts. It certainly made Julia’s job easier. But there was something about waiting for the principal, no matter what age you were, that was unsettling.

She glanced at the large institutional-size clock on the wall. Must be standard issue. Julia remembered a similar one from her elementary-school days. And she had spent plenty of time outside the principal’s office back then. Even as a kid she hadn’t had patience. Being too grownup at age ten—or at age thirty-one—didn’t seem to stop her from telling her peers how stupid they were. Except now that she wore a gun they tended to not argue back as often.

A woman came rushing into the outer office. She knocked on the principal’s door but didn’t wait for an answer before she opened it.

“I counted sixty-three lined up for the nurse,” she said, staying in the doorway. “That doesn’t count those still in the restrooms.”

A voice answered from inside but Julia couldn’t make out what was said. The woman’s head swiveled around, only now noticing Julia and CariAnne. She stepped inside the office and the door slammed shut.

Julia tugged her hand away from the little girl and quietly got up to glance outside the door. A line of kids snaked around the corner. Some were holding their bellies. Others were leaning against the wall. A few adults manned the line, feeling foreheads and offering whispered reassurances.

“Do you know what’s going on?” Julia asked CariAnne.

“A lot of us haven’t been feeling good since lunchtime.”

“You don’t feel good? You didn’t say anything?”

“I don’t usually have to. Mom just knows.”

Julia looked back out the door, thinking they sure had everything under control for all these kids not feeling good. But then all it took was one to start vomiting. The little boy barely made it to the trash can. Watching from the sidelines, Julia thought it looked like dominoes, one kid after another, bending, gagging, retching and the few adults like tops spinning from one end of the hallway to the other.

It was almost funny until Julia heard CariAnne behind her. The little girl was reaching for her hand again, holding her stomach, and pressing against Julia. In seconds she, too, was bent over and spraying Julia’s shoes.

TWENTY-ONE

NEBRASKA

Even without the barbed wire Maggie thought Dawson Hayes still looked fragile in the stark, white hospital bed. She felt an odd connection to him and couldn’t shake how his eyes had pleaded with her, depended on her.

This morning his arms were wrapped in blood-stained bandages. An IV tube snaked from the back of his hand to a machine. She and the sheriff were told that a gastrointestinal tube had been removed from his throat so he might be a bit hoarse. And that they shouldn’t push him to talk too much.

The scratches on his face looked raw against his pale skin. The bandage on his neck hid a wound that seeped. But the thing that bothered Maggie most was that the boy still looked scared.

Sheriff Skylar had insisted he direct the interviews with the teenagers. They were kids from his area. He knew many of their parents. They’d feel more comfortable talking to someone they knew rather than a state patrolman or an FBI agent. She agreed, letting him believe that in doing so, he had won a major concession, when in fact, Maggie didn’t actually have official approval to proceed as lead investigator.

She had left a message for her boss, Assistant Director Raymond Kunze, but she hadn’t heard back from him yet. She already knew what he’d say: “Hand it off to the locals. You have a conference to attend.”

The “locals,” Maggie had discovered in the meantime, would be either the FBI field office in Omaha, two hundred and eighty miles away, or the Forest Service in Chadron, which was two hundred miles away. Kunze wouldn’t comprehend that distance, nor would he care what difference losing the first twenty-four hours could make.

Besides, detouring her to visit the site of a cattle mutilation was, no doubt, only a favor he had been repaying, one of those courtesies that government officials gave each other. Maggie suspected Kunze hadn’t intended for her to give any of it more than a cursory look and write the obligatory report that would be his proof of repayment. If he had intended for her to actually create a possible profile of the cattle mutilators, he certainly would have included many more of the details in the file.

Truth was, it didn’t matter. Maggie didn’t want the case. She’d never been a lead investigator. Her job had always been to assist law enforcement agencies at their request. She was the outside observer, the specialist who could be objective and catch details that might otherwise be missed. She liked being the outsider.

Earlier she’d decided to stay long enough to make sure as many pieces of the investigation—especially the collecting and processing of evidence, including witness accounts— was placed in the hands of officials who could properly take over.

So she didn’t argue with Sheriff Skylar.

She didn’t like hospitals—who did? She wanted to be back at the crime scene. That’s where Donny Fergussen was. At Maggie’s request, he was meeting a State Patrol crime-scene unit. They’d go over the area again, widen the perimeter, cast several footprints, and collect any other remaining traces that the tarps hopefully had preserved. She would much rather be out there than with Sheriff Skylar. Witnesses were notoriously inaccurate, and a bunch of teens tripping out on salvia would probably be worthless narrators of what had happened last night in the forest.

But Maggie wanted—no, she needed—to see that Dawson Hayes was okay.

“Dawson, I’m Sheriff Skylar. Your dad used to work with me.”

Maggie studied the boy’s face, watching for signs of recognition. If he knew the sheriff there was no relief in seeing him. Was he worried about being in trouble?

Skylar didn’t wait. He pulled a chair from the corner and placed it beside the bed. As he sat down directly in the boy’s line of vision, he threw a thumb over his shoulder and said, “This is Agent O’Dell from the FBI.”

Dawson’s eyes swung up to hers then darted back. It was enough for Maggie to see his panic was real now.

She remained standing and stayed by the door where she could watch not only Dawson but Skylar as well. When Skylar told her he wanted to conduct the interviews, it was because the teenagers would be “less rattled” with someone they knew. So she was surprised when he began by saying, “We know about the Taser, son,” immediately putting the boy on the defensive.

Earlier the sheriff couldn’t wait to tell her he had already traced the serial number on the Taser back to Dawson’s father who used it for his job as a security guard at a meat-processing plant outside of North Platte. Skylar had explained that the gun was standard issue at the plant and all he had to do was check their database. Possession of the Taser seemed to be Skylar’s smoking gun, so to speak, though there was no evidence it had caused any of the injuries.

Maggie would quickly regret not changing the subject.

“Did you shoot any of your friends with the gun, Dawson?”

“No, absolutely not.”

“Come on, Dawson. I know it was fired. You might just as well fess up. We’re going to find out the truth soon enough.”

The boy’s eyes looked up at Maggie, to Skylar, then back to Maggie, staying with her for a beat longer, imploring her as though she might be the more understanding one.

“I shot at … something,” he said.

Instead of leaning in for the explanation, Skylar sat back and shook his head like he had heard this before and didn’t have the patience to hear it again.

“So what was it you think you shot at?”

“I’m not sure. I didn’t really get a good look. It had red eyes. Maybe a wolf.”

Now Skylar jerked forward, surprised.

“A wolf? You sure it wasn’t a coyote? Maybe a cougar? Hank said there’s a big cat of some sort in the forest. They’ve had sightings. But wolves? We haven’t had wolves in this area since I’ve been here.”

“I don’t know. I guess it could have been a coyote or cougar. It was big. And white.”

“White?” Skylar sat back and shook his head again. No longer interested. “A white wolf or cougar.”

“It pounced at me. I shot at it. I’m pretty sure I hit it.”

“There weren’t any animal tracks,” Skylar told him, his arms crossed over his chest.

The sheriff wore a flannel shirt this morning, a black-andred plaid that somehow made him appear bigger. Maggie realized the sidearm strapped at his waist probably had something to do with the appearance, too. Last night she hadn’t seen any weapon under his jacket.

The boy looked at Maggie again, but she had nothing to offer. There had been plenty of footprints all over the sandy floor of the forest but no animal tracks, at least none the size of a wolf or coyote or cougar. The pine needles could have disguised an animal’s presence, but a wounded animal would have certainly left prints.

Then Maggie remembered. The girl named Amanda had been bitten on her arm. Could it have been an animal? What did she say about it? “He bit me.” Last night Maggie hadn’t thought to ask. It seemed a minor issue compared to the girl’s shock and the other teens’ injuries.

“Dawson, I’m disappointed. I didn’t expect you to lie when two of your friends are dead.”

“It’s true. It was watching from the brush when the fireworks were going off. It had red eyes.”

“Fireworks. Right.”

Last night, while they were being treated, some of the others had mumbled something about fireworks or a light show. Hank had been within a mile of the teenagers’ campsite and hadn’t seen any display, nothing close to fireworks or a laser-light show like the teens described. It could have been the salvia.

At some point Maggie would need to fess up about the plastic bag Lucy had found. She was hoping to have it analyzed before handing it over with the other trace evidence. If Skylar had kept the existence of drugs a secret during a previous investigation, she wouldn’t risk him doing it again. She certainly didn’t expect any of the teenagers to offer up information about the drug.

Perhaps Skylar read her mind.

“What kind of drugs were you tripping on?” he asked.

“Excuse me?”

“You kids might think I’m an old man, but I’m not stupid. I know you weren’t in the forest at dusk sitting around drinking soda pop. Not the first time you’ve been out there either, is it?”

Maggie had to give the man some credit. Sometimes this type of interrogation opened a spigot when the subject felt guilty and just needed an extra push to spew out a confession or give up some vital information. But this would not be one of those moments. Maggie didn’t think Dawson Hayes looked guilty. He looked scared.

When the boy met her eyes this time, his eyes stayed on her. She saw the panic soften and give way to a spark of recognition.

“You’re the one who found me,” he said.

“Yes, that’s right.”

“You should have just let me die with the others.”

TWENTY-TWO

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Organized chaos. That’s exactly what Benjamin Platt saw when he arrived at Fitzgerald Elementary School. Police officers with whistles guided a line of cars with disheveled parents picking up the last of the children. A group of what looked to be school administrators and teachers were helping paramedics escort children to waiting ambulances. The frenetic energy spilled across the street to bystanders and into the neighborhood where people watched from their front lawns.

As Platt got out of his Land Rover a cable-TV camera crew started setting up. He recognized the well-dressed anchor-woman eyeballing him, trying to decide whether or not he was someone important. By the time he flashed his credentials at the first police officer, Platt could hear the newscaster calling out to him. Too late. He slid his messenger bag higher on his shoulder, strode on without a glance back.

He made it up the steps before another uniformed cop stopped him.

“Essentials only beyond this point, sir,” the cop told him.

Before Platt could respond he heard a woman from inside the doorway say, “It’s okay. He’s been cleared.”

Tall, lean, attractive but with a hard edge and a clenched jaw telegraphing don’t mess with me. Her short blond hair spiked up in places as if she had just come in from the wind, though there wasn’t a breeze. She wore street clothes: jeans with a tucked-in knit shirt tight across full breasts and a shoulder holster displaying her Glock nestled close underneath her arm, so that anyone who dared to admire her physique also got an eyeful of the metal, another warning not to mess with her. Her badge hung from her belt but Platt didn’t need to look at it. He recognized the District detective.

“Hello, Detective Racine.”

“CDC guy’s waiting for you. I’ll take you to him.”

“Thanks. I’d appreciate that.”

Not even five feet inside, Platt immediately smelled the sour vomit, splatters of it left on the floor. Otherwise the hallway was eerily quiet. Racine led the way, unfazed by the smell. Platt glanced into the empty classrooms. They rounded one corner and suddenly had to step aside for two men dressed in full SWAT gear.

He waited for them to pass before he asked Racine, “What the hell’s going on? I thought this was a food contamination?”

“Mr. CDC called in a domestic terrorism alert. Sixty-three kids puking up their cookies all in a matter of an hour. Tends to trip an alarm or two.”

“Any fatalities?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“Aren’t you homicide?”

“Yes.”

Platt stopped mid-stride to look at her.

“I was already here,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“Off duty. I was picking up my partner’s kid.”

He started walking again. “Picking up your partner’s kid, that seems beyond the call of duty,” he said, trying to lighten the tone.

“Not my professional partner. My personal partner.”

“Oh.” He didn’t know what to do with that tidbit of information. In the few times he had met her at Maggie’s house, he hadn’t picked up on the fact that she was gay. He chose to not comment. “Does Bix know you were here when it started?”

“Bix?”

“The CDC guy.”

“No. We’re here to secure the area. That’s all we bring to this party. He doesn’t much care what else we have to offer. FBI and Homeland Security have people here.”

Platt nodded. Sounded like Bix was getting all his ducks in a row, so to speak. But for a guy who wanted to keep things under wraps, he couldn’t be happy with the entourage of news media already setting up.

Earlier when Roger Bix had called Platt he only doled out scraps of information but had been adamant that this school’s incident was, in fact, related to the one in Norfolk, Virginia. When Platt asked how exactly he knew they were connected and what new information pointed to that—after all, just last night Bix didn’t even know what had caused the contamination in Norfolk—Bix would only say, “I have it on indisputable authority that these two incidents are, indeed, related.”

Obviously from the show of force Bix knew much more than he was willing to disclose. Platt wondered how the hell he could help if the man had already decided not to trust him.

“When I finish with Mr. Bix I’d like to talk to you about what you saw,” Platt told Detective Racine as they turned another corner. “Would that be possible?”

“Sure. I’m not going anywhere for a few hours.” She pointed to a doorway and added, “I’ll be out front.”

She turned and left him. Even after she disappeared around the corner he could hear her heels echoing down the hall. The only other sound came from beyond the open door, hushed voices giving orders. One of which Platt already recognized.

Two men in dark suits shouldered past Platt on their way out, leaving only three people in the small office. Bix had a cell phone pressed against his ear as he sat behind a desk with a nameplate that proclaimed it as Principal Barbara Stratton’s. Ms. Stratton, most likely, was the woman in a navy suit with long silver hair tied back. Platt wasn’t surprised to see the third person, Special Agent R. J. Tully.

The tall, lanky FBI agent had been leaning against a corner but stood straight when Platt entered. He offered his hand while Bix only nodded and continued to make demands to some poor soul on the other end of the phone line.

Platt had met Agent Tully on the same case that Bix had referred to last night. It was the same investigation where Platt had met Maggie O’Dell. Almost a year ago a madman had stuffed envelopes with the Ebola virus and sent them to what appeared to be random victims.

Maggie had been exposed and ended up in a USAMRIID isolation ward at Fort Detrick under the care of Platt. The case had taken a personal toll on Tully as well, resulting in his suspension during an internal investigation that eventually cleared and reinstated him. When Platt recommended Agent Tully to Bix last night, he did so knowing that Tully was one of only a handful of people Maggie trusted. For Platt that was justification that he met Bix’s criteria.

Platt exchanged greetings with Ms. Stratton then asked her to fill him in. She glanced at Bix as if looking for permission but only momentarily.

“At first I thought it might be some kind of prank. In my thirty-two years I’ve never seen so many children ill at the same time. It was awful. Absolutely awful. And it happened so suddenly. My secretary noticed a line to the nurse’s office and not fifteen minutes later the line had doubled. Then I heard children vomiting in the hallway. Some of them using the trash receptacles. Others holding their bellies and not able to get to the restrooms, which, by this time, were also backed up.”

“Did you notice any odd smell prior to the students getting sick?”

“What kind of smell?”

“Anything out of the ordinary.”

“We have a school full of children. There’s no such thing as ordinary smells.”

Platt smiled until he realized she wasn’t joking.

“I think Colonel Platt means something like natural gas.” Agent Tully stepped in. “Rotten-egg gas, perhaps, or any strong chemical smell.”

“Oh, heavens no. Nothing like that. You think a chemical could have caused this?”

Bix snapped his cell phone shut with enough of a clap to draw everyone’s attention. He stood up, sending Ms. Stratton’s desk chair smashing into the back wall. He ignored the scowl from the principal as he unleashed his outrage at her.

“You didn’t tell me one of your cafeteria workers was sick when she reported in this morning.”

“What? This is the first I’m hearing about it.”

“She’s at the front entrance babbling to the police officers that this is all her fault.”

“That’s not possible! We abide by the highest standards.”

“Right. Well, she came back after the evacuation. Appears she has a guilty conscience. Admitted she wasn’t wearing gloves today.”

“We require gloves on all our kitchen servers.”

“Well, it sounds like her gloves were a bother. She got tired of taking them off to blow her nose.”

TWENTY-THREE

NEBRASKA

The girl was lying.

Maggie tamped down her impatience. She was beginning to think these interviews were a waste of time. She glanced at her watch. Maybe the autopsies would reveal more. She leaned against the bedroom wall next to a bookcase topped with stuffed animals belonging to a much younger version of the girl they were now talking to, although her mannerisms seemed to slip into little-girl mode as the questioning progressed.

Sheriff Skylar’s kid-glove treatment of Amanda Vicks was in stark contrast to what he’d put Dawson Hayes through. Yes, Dawson had been in possession of a Taser, but there was no evidence, as of yet, to prove any of the teens had been shot with the gun. And Dawson had been severely injured. Amanda only had a bite mark on her forearm that she couldn’t seem to explain beyond her declaration at the scene that “He bit me.”

Now when Maggie asked, Amanda said she couldn’t remember where or when she was bitten. If it had been a wolf or cougar certainly she would have remembered, but Maggie didn’t press the matter. They had taken photos of the injury. She’d trust Lucy Coy to determine whether it was animal or human sooner than she’d trust the memory of a girl who had most likely been tripping out on a hallucinogen when the incident happened. And to Maggie, that was further evidence that this interview was probably worthless.

Maggie wondered if Sheriff Skylar knew the girl was lying. Perhaps that was why he was taking a gentler approach and using a different interrogation technique on her. However, earlier he seemed much too polite with Amanda’s mother, Cynthia Griffin, and the girl’s stepfather, Mike Griffin. On the drive over, Skylar had mentioned to Maggie that Mrs. Griffin’s family—the Vicks—owned several businesses in the area, including the meat-processing plant, a ranch, and two area banks. Maggie was sure she must have misunderstood about the banks—no one owned banks anymore, did they?

Skylar pulled up a chair, keeping a safe distance from the bed, unlike the menacing stance he had taken with Dawson. Whatever the sheriff’s intention, Maggie remained quiet. After her only question about the bite mark she stayed back out of Skylar’s way and out of the trailing vapor of Amanda’s annoying incense. She wanted to keep the girl off center and slightly outside her nice, warm comfort zone.

If it had been up to Maggie she would have questioned Amanda outside of her bedroom, another of Skylar’s decisions that she didn’t agree with, but not necessarily a bad one. Maggie decided to use it to her advantage. There was such a thing as a witness being too comfortable. Maybe she’d catch Amanda off guard with some of her own interrogation tricks, like simply standing instead of sitting. It made the witness have to keep track of two interrogators even if both weren’t asking questions. Being on different levels accentuated the effect. Sometimes the interrogated lost track of his or her story—or lie—needing to watch for a reaction from two people.

It appeared to be working.

The girl’s bloodshot eyes flitted from Skylar to Maggie and back to Skylar, trying to stay on the sheriff. She batted at her blond hair, pushing tangles out of her face. It looked as if she hadn’t brushed it yet today. She held on to a water bottle and absently took the cap off and screwed it back on, but Maggie noticed her coordination was off. Every few seconds Amanda stopped and gulped a few swallows like each sentence left her mouth dry.

“I know it’s not easy to talk about but can you tell us what you saw, Amanda?” Skylar’s questions came soft and gentle like he was coaxing a kitten out of a tree.

“It’s hard to describe,” she started to answer, eyes darting to Maggie. Her hands made the plastic water bottle crackle as she squeezed too hard and tightened the cap, then immediately started unscrewing it again.

“The lights came out of nowhere. We were, like, just sitting and talking. Then there’s this flash of light. It was like one of those big strobe flashes on a camera.”

She took a sip from the bottle. That was it. She was finished with her story. Maggie wanted to ask how soon had they seen the lights after they chewed on the salvia. She knew Amanda wouldn’t be confessing anytime soon to using any drug. Maggie also guessed the salvia wasn’t the girl’s first experimentation with drugs. Skylar had to see that, didn’t he? He’d questioned Dawson about drugs. Certainly he would ask Amanda.

“How about sound?” he said instead. “Did you hear anything unusual?”

“Oh yeah. It was really weird. Sort of like a hum. No, maybe more like a purr.”

“You mean a purr like an animal?”

Maggie could see the girl peeking out from behind a strand of hair, looking at Skylar as if waiting for him to give some hint as to the correct answer.

“I don’t think so. Then there was this sort of sizzle. You know like when you first throw a hamburger on the grill.”

Skylar winced at the comparison. If she wasn’t mistaken, Maggie thought the girl seemed pleased by his reaction.

“What made that sound?” Skylar asked. “Did it come from above? Did it seem like it was coming from the lights?”

This time Maggie had to stop herself from wincing. He was offering too much information. Why was he leading this girl?

Amanda simply shrugged and tried to put the cap back on the bottle. She missed. Looked down and tried again. Maggie noticed the girl’s hands were steady. There was no shake or tremble from ner vousness. She didn’t see any of the signs of fear in Amanda that she had seen in Dawson’s eyes. In fact there seemed to be nothing uncomfortable about recounting the incident, and Maggie realized it had nothing to do with her lack of coordination.

“Did you see what happened to your friends?”

This time she looked like she was actually thinking about the event for the first time.

“When the flashes went off, me and Courtney were sitting to one side. I got up and then I sort of pointed at the fireworks. It looks so pretty I can’t take my eyes away. I didn’t see Trevor and Kyle. Johnny was with us and he was sort of stumbling around because, you know, he’s looking up at the lights, too, and we’re all oohing and aahing.”

Maggie wished she had suggested they record the interview. She lost track of how many times the girl switched from past tense to present and back. Forensic linguistics was about as scientific as criminal profiling, but each had undeniable benefits. To find a probable truth in someone’s statement you analyzed not only their choice of words but also the tense. When describing an event from memory most people used past tense. If they switched to present at any time when telling the story, that part was more likely to be a fabrication than the truth. Amanda had switched tenses several times and without pause. She also managed to do so without giving them any details, so that her mingling of fact and fiction didn’t much matter.

“She needs to get some rest,” Amanda’s stepfather said from the doorway, and Maggie wondered how long he had been standing there. She hadn’t heard him come up the hallway. “Mandy wasn’t even supposed to be there last night.”

“That right?”

“She was supposed to be at Courtney’s studying. She’s been tired a lot lately. Too many demands on her time.”

Maggie watched Amanda while the men talked about her as if she wasn’t there. She caught the girl rolling her eyes. Both men missed it. Her stepfather seemed a bit too proud that Amanda was so popular that it would exhaust her this early in the school year. He sounded more worried about her overextending herself than about the fact that she had lied about her whereabouts. Either he didn’t know about her extracurricular activities outside of school or he didn’t want to know.

Griffin’s concern evidently was enough for Skylar. He flipped his notebook closed, satisfied to call it quits. When he stood up he saw Maggie still standing by the bookcase. He looked like he had forgotten about her.

“I think we’re done here. That is unless Agent O’Dell has any questions for Amanda.”

“Just one,” Maggie said and she patiently waited for Amanda’s eyes to flit back up to her. “Do you usually get high this early in the day?”

TWENTY-FOUR

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Velma Carter wiped her bloodshot eyes and couldn’t look at Platt.

“We were already short two people,” Carter explained. “I couldn’t call in sick another day.” She sunk her chin into her chest and shook her head. “Those poor babies. All my fault. I didn’t mean to make them sick.”

“But you didn’t think about that when you took off your gloves.” Roger Bix’s rage was brutal. He had been looking for someone to shred and now he believed he had found the culprit.

“Roger,” Platt tried to interrupt him.

“We’ll need to test you.” Bix was unrelenting. “See just what the hell you’ve been spreading.”

The woman started sobbing again. When Detective Racine brought her in the small office, the woman’s face was already red and blotchy. Racine hadn’t left and no one suggested she do so. She stood quietly aside, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. Platt didn’t think she was comfortable with Bix’s approach, either.

“What the hell were you thinking,” Bix continued and this time Platt stepped in between the two.

“Ms. Carter, I’m Dr. Benjamin Platt.” He left out the “colonel.” No sense in putting this poor woman more on edge. “We’ll need to take a couple of test samples from you. Is that okay?” They’d need both blood and stool samples, but he’d tell her that later.

She pulled a tissue from somewhere up her sleeve and blew her nose. He could hear the rattle inside her chest. But it sounded like typical cold or flu symptoms. Nothing that would give almost seventy children such immediate nausea and diarrhea.

Platt didn’t look at Bix. He wanted him to know he was cutting him off, but from the corner of his eye he could see that the man’s face was as bright as his orange hair. Platt couldn’t help wondering what had Bix wound so tight, much too tight. He was treating this woman like a terrorist with a bomb strapped to her chest. Yet last night when Platt had suggested a kitchen worker might be the culprit, Bix had dismissed the idea.

“I’m going to have someone come and take a few samples. Is that all right with you, Ms. Carter?” Platt waited for the woman to nod.

“Hell, I’ll take the samples myself.” Bix was at it again.

“No, Mr. Bix,” Platt said, leaning into Bix until the man had to look him in the eye. “We’ll send someone in.” He looked over at Racine. “I saw some paramedics earlier. Are they still here?”

“I’ll go check.”

“We’ll be right back, Ms. Carter. Can I get you anything?”

She shook her head as Platt grabbed Bix by the elbow and escorted him out of the room. He kept walking, pulling Bix along until they were halfway down the hall.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Platt asked. “Last night you told me this could not be a norovirus from improper food handling. You implied it had to already be in the food. Now you unload on that poor woman like she planted the bacteria in every lunch she served. What aren’t you telling me?”

“Doesn’t it make you a little mad when food handlers are so negligent?”

“So you feel better now after lecturing her? Because we both know that unless she has some highly contagious virus or sprayed contaminated body fluids over seventy kids’ meals, she did not cause this.”

Bix shoved at Platt’s hand, though Platt wasn’t even holding on to him anymore. He stood up straight, threw back his shoulders, stretched his neck, and stared at the ceiling. Then he released a sigh and looked at Platt. But still there appeared to be no urgency to explain.

Platt just shook his head. “You’re going to tell me later whether you want to or not. Right now we should start retrieving whatever we can. Before it’s gone.”

“Except we don’t know what we’re looking for at this point.”

“Yes, we do. Undoubtedly, these kids got sick after having lunch in the cafeteria. So let’s go see what we can find of today’s meal even if it means scraping it off the hallway floor and the bathroom stalls.”

TWENTY-FIVE

NEBRASKA

Maggie needed to get to North Platte for the autopsies, so this next interview would have to be her last of the day. That was if Skylar didn’t strangle her before they got there.

“What the hell were you thinking?” The red-faced sheriff had blasted her as soon as they got back to the car.

“The girl’s high. Probably marijuana. That’s why she has the incense burning. Her eyes are bloodshot and dilated. Her coordination is off. I can’t believe you didn’t see that.”

“She’s been through an incredible experience. Of course she’s not herself.”

“Why didn’t you ask her about drugs? You told Dawson Hayes that you knew why they were out in the forest.”

“Amanda’s not a suspect.”

“Neither is Dawson.”

“He had a Taser. A Taser that had been fired.”

“But we don’t have a victim who’s been shot with a Taser.”

“Not that we know of.” Skylar wouldn’t relent.

“Look,” Maggie said, calming herself and her tone, “next time you decide someone’s a suspect, please inform me.”

“Next time you decide to insult the daughter of one of our community’s most respected business owners, please inform me.”

She shook her head and left it alone for the drive to the Boshes’. It was thirty-five minutes away. The kids lived in different towns but all attended the same high school; one high school for the entire county.

The Boshes’ two-story Colonial, which sat on a huge lot that backed to the city park, predicted what Maggie could expect from this interview. She didn’t need to ask whether Skylar believed this boy was a suspect. Before visiting the Griffins’ house the sheriff had already told her that Johnny B had recruiters from five major NCAA teams at the last football game. But he was going to make them all proud by staying in Nebraska and playing for the Huskers.

“Might even start as a freshman quarterback,” Skylar had gone on. “He’s something to watch. Got an arm on him and man, that boy can scramble. He can get himself out of every kind of mess.”

So Maggie would need to either steel herself for another kid-glove interview or make a decision to take over this investigation.

Mrs. Bosh was waiting outside the front door when they got out of the sheriff’s SUV. She was an attractive woman with a pinched, worried face. She wore slacks, a white silk blouse, and leather pumps. Perhaps she had taken off work early or she had dressed for her son’s interview.

Before they reached the front steps she called out, “He isn’t here.”

Skylar turned to look at the red Camaro in the driveway but before he could ask, Mrs. Bosh continued, “He was here when I came home for lunch. I just got back a few minutes ago and I can’t find him anywhere.” She held up a cell phone. “I checked with a couple of his friends. They haven’t seen him today.”

Maggie realized she hadn’t been sympathetic enough. These kids just lost two friends. Here she was arguing with Skylar about whether they should treat them like suspects or witnesses, when all of them—until the evidence said otherwise—were victims.

Mrs. Bosh came down the steps rather than invite them in. She looked over her shoulder as if worried someone would see her.

“I’m worried he may have taken some of my pills.”

“What kind of pills?”

Another glance over her shoulder.

“Painkillers. For my back when my car was rear-ended last spring.”

“I doubt the boy would take something like that, Mrs. Bosh.” Skylar patted her arm.

“What kind of painkillers?” Maggie wanted to know.

She hadn’t worked narcotics but had read about teenagers raiding their parents’ medicine cabinets for drug parties. If these kids were using salvia and Amanda was high in the middle of the afternoon, there was a good chance they had been experimenting with other things.

“There weren’t very many left. I just noticed the empty bottle this morning.”

“Mrs. Bosh, do you remember the name of the painkiller,” Maggie insisted.

“Yes. It was OxyContin.”

Now Maggie was worried. Experimenting with OxyContin could be fatal. It was a time-release medication, but chewing or crushing it caused rapid release and a lethal amount of the drug could flood the system.

“What was Johnny like this morning? Did he seem depressed or upset about last night?”

“Agent O’Dell, Johnny is an athlete,” Skylar said before Mrs. Bosh had a chance to answer. “This is a kid who’s going to be a number-one recruiting choice.” He was giving her the same look he had when they left the Griffins’ house.

“He seemed really nervous and sort of jumpy.” Mrs. Bosh ignored Skylar and spoke to Maggie. Her eyes kept sweeping up and down the street. “He wasn’t himself.”

“Did he talk about what happened last night?”

“No. He wouldn’t talk about it. And my husband said we shouldn’t make him.” Then her attention got distracted and she tilted her head and walked to the edge of the sidewalk. “Do you hear that?” she asked.

They listened. Other than a train whistle in the distance, Maggie heard birds, a wind chime, nothing more. Then suddenly she did hear something. A soft whimpering.

Mrs. Bosh headed around the side of the house, hurrying through a flower bed instead of going around it. Maggie and Skylar followed. At the back of the house a dog laid on its belly, whining.

“Rex, what’s wrong?” But Mrs. Bosh didn’t go to the dog. Instead she stayed back, standing stock-still.

“Does he belong to you?” Maggie asked.

“The neighbor’s. He comes over and Johnny plays ball with him. They’ve been playing since Johnny was a boy.”

Maggie approached the dog carefully. He didn’t appear injured. He focused on something under the porch. Maybe a toy had gotten lodged or an animal was trapped underneath. But the dog’s whine sounded more urgent than playful.

“There’s a crawl space,” Mrs. Bosh said. “It goes all the way under the house but we put a board down there so animals couldn’t hide.”

Maggie pulled the penlight from her jeans pocket and kneeled down, coaxing the dog to move enough for her to take a look underneath the porch.

“Johnny used to crawl all the way under there when he was a little boy. He usually did it when he was in trouble and didn’t want to be found.”

That’s when Maggie noticed a small, torn piece of fabric snagged on a nail.

“What was your son wearing this morning, Mrs. Bosh?”

TWENTY-SIX

Maggie remembered that the reason she had a rental car, now stuck in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, was because she refused to get on a twin-prop airplane. She understood it wasn’t an actual fear of flying so much as a fear of being without control, which was often the crux of most fears. If you had control over a situation, there was nothing to fear. That’s what Maggie kept telling herself as she crawled through the dirt underneath the floorboards of the Boshes’ house, using her elbows to pull forward.

There was, at most, two feet from top to bottom, which kept her on her stomach. Some areas were tighter. Cords and cobwebs hung from the two-by-fours, getting tangled in her hair. A loose nail had already bit into her shoulder, tearing away a piece of skin and fabric just as it probably had with Johnny.

They had tried to shine a high-powered flashlight through the opening but support beams blocked their view. Mrs. Bosh called to the boy but no one answered. When Maggie suggested one of them go in after him, she swore she could see the color drain completely from Skylar’s face. Now, as the smell of mold and dirt filled her nostrils and dust mites floated in the flashlight streams, she questioned her own judgment.

The tightness squeezed around her, support columns scraping against her shoulders. Memories of being trapped seeped into her consciousness. This was not so much a memory as a distinct feeling that suddenly washed over her body. She had to stop, catch her breath. She tried not to panic when that breath filled her lungs with musty particles that threatened to block her intake of air.

It had been several years ago when a killer threw her into an empty chest freezer. She could remember clawing at the inside door, her fingernails broken, the tips of her fingers raw and soon numb. Most times the only overpowering memory was the cold, so deep and unbearable that her mind had shut down. Eventually her body, too, had collapsed from hypothermia.

She closed her eyes for a minute. Told herself to slow down.

Breathe through the mouth. Deep, steady breaths.

She couldn’t start hyperventilating or she would be in trouble. She shoved the memory aside. It was cold down here but not freezer cold. This was different. She wasn’t trapped. She had control.

She crawled and wiggled her way ahead. As the passage began to narrow, she started wondering how she would turn around.

Stop thinking about it.

Mrs. Bosh’s voice became more and more muffled.

Skylar had set up the high-powered flashlight at the opening under the porch, but the shaft of light couldn’t bend around corners or through support columns. At this point all she had was her penlight.

Something skittered on her left. Fur brushed her hand. Maggie jerked and cracked the top of her head against a two-by-four. It was just a mouse, she told herself. Too small for a rat. But she still shivered.

Not a rat. Stop thinking about rats.

She stopped and readjusted, giving her elbows a rest.

“Johnny? It’s Agent Maggie O’Dell. Do you remember me? From last night?”

She paused. Listened. Nothing. Except now she thought she heard a voice. Garbled but definitely coming from somewhere in front of her.

“Johnny. We’re just worried about you. You’re not in any trouble.”

Her penlight couldn’t show her what was beyond the next support column, this one thicker, the width of two rows of cement blocks. She must be at the center of the house. The sound came from the other side of this column.

She palmed the penlight and held up her fist so that she could see the path ahead of her as she crawled. There was more space here, at least an additional foot higher. The narrow stream of light caught glimpses of objects in the dirt. On closer inspection Maggie recognized discarded toys, a Star Wars action figure, candy wrappers, and crumpled soda cans.

She pulled herself even with the support column and rolled to her side. She realized she could actually sit hunched over. She leaned against the cold cement blocks and took a few seconds to bat the cobwebs out of her face and hair. One swipe with the penlight and she saw him.

He was sitting with his back to her, less than ten feet away, slouched sideways and leaning against another column. She could hear him mumbling.

“Johnny?”

No response.

If he was tripping on OxyContin or more salvia, he might be incoherent.

“Johnny?” She tried calling to him again.

She could move on hands and knees here as long as she stayed low. Still, her back scraped against wires stapled to the floorboards. Her shirt caught on another stray nail. This time she ignored the rip of fabric and kept going. She came up beside him but he didn’t acknowledge her presence. She put a hand on his shoulder, trying not to startle him as she dragged herself around.

In the halo from the penlight she saw his eyes and she knew immediately. She could see the earbuds and the dangling cord. The mumblings she had heard came from his iPod, not from Johnny.

They were too late.

TWENTY-SEVEN

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Julia Racine had never really understood what Maggie O’Dell saw in Benjamin Platt. He seemed too disciplined, too spit-and-polish, too much of a play-by-the-rules type of guy. Though she did have to admit he had a nice ass.

Of course, she still noticed stuff like that. When it bugged her partner, Rachel, Julia would usually say, “Hey, I’m gay, I’m not dead.”

Truthfully, she’d always imagined Maggie going for someone who was a bit more adventurous, a little unpredictable and passionate. Someone a little more like … okay, someone a little more like Julia.

She followed Platt out to the school parking lot after offering to help.

“At least there’s no camera crew set up back here,” Platt said while his head swiveled around to make sure. “I couldn’t believe they beat me to the scene.”

Julia actually could believe it. The vultures always somehow found their way. Now she was living with one of them. Just a year ago if someone had told her she’d fall for a card-carrying journalist she would have said they were crazy. And maybe she was nuts. For the second time in about an hour she caught herself hoping Rachel hadn’t been the one to tip off the vultures.

She followed Platt to the Dumpster in the corner of the lot. It was surrounded by a six-foot wooden fence, closed with a padlock.

Platt slapped at the lock. “How bad are things when we start locking up our garbage?”

“Makes it more difficult to dump dead bodies.”

He glanced at her like he hadn’t thought about that before. Funny, it was the first thing that popped into Julia’s head. Too many times she’d had to help fish some poor victim out of a Dumpster—usually a woman. Men rarely got thrown in with the garbage. In fact, one of the last cases Julia and Maggie had worked on together included a decapitated woman whose head Julia had found in the victim’s own kitchen trash bin.

“This is a little messier than you bargained for,” Platt said, giving her an easy out.

It made her smile. He definitely had no idea what kind of messes she had been exposed to in the past. But he did have a point. It was Julia’s day off. She didn’t need to do this. She didn’t even need to be here.

Maybe she was simply curious about Benjamin Platt. She used to have a big-time crush on Maggie but then somewhere along the line they had become friends. The two of them had more in common than either wanted to admit. Both had lost a parent during childhood. Both of them had to fight their way up the ranks of male-dominated careers. They trusted very few people and allowed even fewer in their lives, so friendship was not a term either threw around lightly. Fact was Julia respected the hell out of Maggie and maybe she wanted to see who this guy was that had snagged her attention.

Julia watched as Platt took off his jacket and carefully placed his wallet and cell phone in one of the jacket pockets before folding it and setting it on the concrete. She kept from rolling her eyes as he turned up the cuffs of his shirt in perfect folds that matched on both sides. Then he surprised her and scaled the fence in three moves.

Julia stood back, hands on her hips. Okay, so that was not expected. Maybe he was a bit more adventurous than she gave him credit for. But of course, he was athletic. You’d have to be blind to not notice his lean physique. She just didn’t expect him to get his trousers dirty or his polished leather shoes scuffed.

“I can toss some of the bags over,” he said.

“No, don’t bother.”

“Yeah, you’re right. They’ll break.”

She knew without looking that there would barely be room to stand between the fence and the Dumpster. She could hear him shoving open the lid and immediately smelled the garbage.

She took off her jacket and laid it next to his, not folding hers quite as nicely as he had. She decided to keep her shoulder holster on. Then she followed him over the fence, almost as smoothly except for the splinter that ended up in the palm of her left hand. Sharp and deep—it took biting her lower lip to keep her from releasing a string of expletives. She had been trying to watch her mouth around CariAnne, after the little girl kept riding her about her overuse of the “f-word.” Nothing like having a nine-year-old lecturing you on manners. After all, Julia could just tell her to fuck off like she would if it was anyone else.

“So what exactly are we looking for?”

She handed Platt a pair of latex gloves. She had grabbed several from the kitchen. Habit. Platt looked surprised to see them but immediately started putting on a pair.

“Anything from today’s menu.”

“They didn’t just leave us some leftovers in the fridge?”

“That’d be too easy.” He smiled as he yanked a piece of paper from his back trouser pocket and unfolded it. “They had something called a taquito. Any idea what that is?”

“CariAnne loves those. They’re her favorite school cafeteria meal. It’s sort of like a burrito but fried.”

“Beef or chicken?”

“Either, but she likes the ground beef better. They also have cheese, onion, some kind of sauce. We’ve tried to duplicate them at home but, according to CariAnne, there’s something we keep missing.”

“I forgot to ask, is she okay?”

“She puked all over my shoes, but she’s resting at home now with her mother who knows when she’s sick even without CariAnne having to tell her.” Silently Julia told herself to shut up. Why did it bother her that she hadn’t automatically seen that the little girl hadn’t been feeling well? She couldn’t be expected to know that, right?

“I guess that’s a special mother talent the rest of us don’t have,” Platt said, as if reading her mind, but he wasn’t joking. Instead, Julia thought he looked … if she wasn’t mistaken, she thought he looked sad.

“Do they make them or are they premade and frozen?” He was back to digging in the garbage.

For a second Julia had forgotten what they were talking about. “I don’t know for sure, but I’m thinking they’d have to be premade and frozen. No way they could make hundreds of those by hand in a morning.”

Platt looked at the list again. “They also had lettuce salad and oatmeal cookies.”

Julia’s stomach growled. Platt raised an eyebrow. The rancid smell had not dissipated, nor had the flies.

“Missed lunch,” Julia said without apology. Digging through garbage didn’t gross her out any more than scraping brains off a wall or watching a medical examiner crunch through a rib cage. When you’re hungry, you’re hungry. Except today she still couldn’t shake the smell of the kids’ vomit.

Thankfully Platt didn’t make a big deal of it. Instead, he grabbed one of the top bags and, keeping it inside the Dumpster, started unwinding the plastic tie.

Julia took a bag and simply ripped open a hole. She yanked out a handful and suddenly found her gag reflex starting to betray her. She hated that she actually had to swallow back the bile. Damn, she never got nauseated. Why now? Especially when she didn’t want Benjamin Platt going back and telling Maggie that her tough-as-nails friend flipped her cookies over a pile of schoolkids’ leftovers.

“Do you want any of the bags the lettuce came in?” She tried to concentrate on the task at hand. The discarded lettuce bags were the only things she was holding that she could recognize. Everything else was a mish-mash of brown sludge that already smelled bad.

“Yeah, that’d be great.”

Platt set aside his own garbage bag to take one of the lettuce bags.

“There are codes printed on the seam.” He pulled a bag apart and showed her. “The produce companies put these codes in place after the spinach recall in 2006. Let’s see if I can remember how this works. This bag’s code is P227A. The first letter identifies the processing plant, the 227 is the two hundred and twenty-seventh day of the year, and the last letter usually refers to which shift bagged it. Now they keep records at the plant so we can track which supplier and hopefully even which field provided that day’s lettuce.”

“We’ve got like forty or fifty empty lettuce bags here. Do you want all of them?”

Julia swore she saw his shoulders slump at the enormity of the project. He shoved his shirtsleeves up above his elbows not noticing that he had gotten some of the brown sludge on them. His eyes scanned the sky as if looking for answers.

Finally he shrugged and said, “We have to start somewhere.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

NEBRASKA

Maggie hadn’t thought about what she’d say to Johnny Bosh to convince him to leave his safe haven. She also hadn’t given much thought to how she would drag his six-foot, 180-pound frame back through the tight squeeze. Now none of that mattered, at least not to the point of urgency. She’d leave it to the paramedics or rescue crew to figure out.

She sat with him for a good ten minutes, all too conscious of the fact that she was more comfortable with dead victims than with the living. She hadn’t had a single answer for Dawson Hayes back at the hospital when he proclaimed that she should have left him to die with the others.

She should have predicted that after such a tragedy, the survivors would have a difficult time. If she hadn’t predicted it as a profiler of human behavior, she should have known from personal experience. How many times had she survived at the hands of a killer while others had died?

It wasn’t even a year ago that Kyle Cunningham had died after being exposed to the Ebola virus. Maggie had been exposed, too. Not a week went by that she didn’t ask herself why she had survived and Cunningham hadn’t.

The real professionals—like her best friend Gwen Patterson, who dealt with the psychological behavior of the living on a daily basis—were quick to identify it as survivor’s guilt: that constant tendency to question instead of accept or simply feel grateful. Maggie could understand that, but not suicide.

“What was it that made you do this?” she asked Johnny, sitting across from him, leaning against the cold cinder-block support column and staring into his dead eyes.

Dust motes floated in the halo from her penlight. The only sound came from the earbuds of his iPod, the tiny gadget tucked into his shirt pocket. It was hip hop or rap, more words than music. That’s why she had mistaken the sound for Johnny mumbling to himself.

Maybe he hadn’t intended to kill himself. It was possible he just wanted to escape, forget about everything and everyone for a few hours. She didn’t see any drug paraphernalia. There was nothing in the dirt surrounding him.

That’s when she saw the cell phone still clamped in his hand. Had he called someone?

She easily tugged the phone away. Rigor mortis hadn’t fully set in yet. With the penlight she looked for the On switch. Pressed it. Nothing. Pressed again and held it down, but the phone still didn’t come on. The battery might need recharging. She slipped it deep into the front pocket of her jeans.

Maggie finally turned herself around and started to leave. It would be easier getting out than it had been coming in. Less surprises. It would be good to breathe some fresh air, to stand up straight and stretch. And yet, she hesitated. She knew she was headed for more unfamiliar ground as soon as she crawled out from under this house. And that’s what made her hesitate.

She sat back on her haunches and looked at Johnny Bosh again.

“What the hell am I supposed to tell your mom?”

TWENTY-NINE

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Mary Ellen Wychulis didn’t have to wait this time. Irene Baldwin stood in the doorway and waved Mary Ellen into her office as she got off the elevator.

Inside, a television blared from a cabinet Mary Ellen had never seen opened. Her boss silenced the TV with a remote as she marched by and then dropped into her chair. There were no commands this time for Mary Ellen to sit but she took her usual place and stayed at the edge of her seat.

“Why am I hearing about a possible food contamination in one of our schools—one of our District schools—from CNN?”

“No one from the school notified us.”

“I’ve made half a dozen phone calls and no one seems to know what’s going on. Someone from the CDC,” she said as she flipped scribbled pages of her legal pad, “a Roger Bix, told me that he put in a request with us two days ago about another contamination in a Norfolk, Virginia, high school. He was told that we would have to assess the situation and get back to him. I don’t remember getting this request and I know I didn’t talk to this man. I would certainly remember such a condescending voice.”

Mary Ellen kept her hands still when her first impulse was to wring them in her lap.

“Did you talk to Roger Bix?” her boss asked.

Mary Ellen fielded dozens of calls and even more emails every day: requests, applications, complaints. Many of them were taken by her secretary. How could she be expected to remember every single one without first checking? But she remembered Bix.

“Yes, and I highly recommended that he speak to Undersecretary Eisler. His department oversees the NSLP.” She stopped, but then, because she knew Baldwin hated acronyms, quickly added, “The National School Lunch Program. I also forwarded him the paperwork necessary to determine whether or not this particular situation warranted an assessment by the Strategic Partnership Program Agroterrorism.”

“Agroterrorism? He called it an act of terrorism?”

“He insinuated that the contamination might be intentional.”

“So he called requesting our assistance for what he believed to be an intentional contamination in a public high school and you sent him forms to fill out?”

“It’s standard procedure for an assessment to be made. I also referred him to Undersecretary Eisler.”

Baldwin shook her head and Mary Ellen steeled herself for a lecture. Instead her boss said, “Can we simply pull the inspection records for these two schools? See if any of them have been cited or warned? Cross-check to see if they’ve used the same supplier?”

“We’d need to request the inspection records from the state of Virginia and the District of Columbia.”

“Isn’t the USDA responsible for inspecting school cafeterias and kitchens?”

“We oversee the NSLP, but we don’t actually have those records.”

“Okay, what do we actually have then?”

It was late. Mary Ellen didn’t have the patience for another round of her boss’s sarcastic remarks. She just wanted to go home to her beautiful baby and doting husband. That schoolkids had gotten sick was unfortunate but it happened. Kids were notorious virus magnets. Roger Bix sounded like a condescending prick. Even Baldwin thought so. Mary Ellen got tired of the CDC pushing their weight around, thinking they were superior to any other government agency.

“Wychulis?”

Mary Ellen realized she had waited too long to explain. It was a complex procedure, one she already knew her boss would not appreciate.

“The state keeps track of every district,” Mary Ellen began. “We require each school, in order to comply with the NSLP and be a part of the program, to have their facilities inspected twice a year. The states report the number of schools inspected but they don’t report the school names.”