Trophy Hunt

PART ONE

IN TWELVE YEAR OLD SHERIDAN Pickett’s dream, she was in the Bighorn Mountains in the timber at the edge of a clearing. She was alone. Behind her, the forest was achingly silent. Before her, a quiet wind rippled through the long meadow grass in the clearing.

Then the clouds came, dark and imposing, roiling over the top of the mountains in a wall. Soon the sky was completely covered, a lid placed on a pot. In the center of the clouds was a lighter cloud that seemed to be lit from within. It grew bigger and closer, as if lowering itself to the earth. Black spoors of smoke snaked down in tendrils from the cloud, dropping into the trees. In moments, the smoke became ground-hugging mist that coursed through the tree trunks like soundless, rushing water.Then it seeped into the ground to rest, or to hide.

As quickly as the clouds had come, the sky cleared.

In her dream, she knew the mist stayed for a reason.The purpose, though, was beyond her understanding.When would it emerge, and why? Those were questions she couldn’t answer.

Sheridan awoke with a start, and it took a few terrifying moments to realize that the darkness surrounding her was actually her bedroom, and that the breathy windlike stirring she heard was her little sister Lucy, asleep on the bunk beneath her bed.

Sheridan found her glasses where she had propped them on her headboard, and swung her bare feet out from beneath the covers. She dropped to the cold floor with her nightgown ballooning around her.

Parting the curtain, she looked at the night sky. Hard white stars, like blue pinpricks, stared back. There were no clouds, either dark or glowing.

1

It had been a god day of fly-fishing until Joe Pickett and his daughters encountered a massive bull moose that appeared to be grinning at them.

Until then, Joe, Sheridan, and seven-year-old Lucy had spent the entire afternoon working their way upstream on Crazy Woman Creek on a brilliant, early-September day. Maxine, their yellow Labrador, was with them. The tall streamside grass hummed with insects, hoppers mainly, and a high breeze swayed the crowns of the musky lodgepole pine forest.

They fished methodically, overtaking each other in wide loops away from the water, passing silently while the person they were passing cast at a pool or promising riffle. The water was lower than usual—it was a drought year—but the stream was clear and still very cold. Joe was in his late thirties, lean and of average height. His face and the backs of his hands were sunburned from being outside at altitude.

Hopscotching over dry river rocks, Joe had crossed the stream so he could keep a better eye on his girls as they worked the other side with their fly rods. Maxine shadowed Joe, as she always did, fighting her natural instinct to plunge into the water and retrieve fly casts.

Sheridan stood waist deep in brush upstream and was momentarily still, concentrating on tying a new hopper pattern to her tippet. Her glasses glinted in the afternoon sun, so Joe couldn’t tell if she was watching him observe her. She wore her new fishing vest (a recent birthday present) over a T-shirt, baggy shorts, and water sandals for wading. A sweat-stained Wyoming Game and Fish Department cap—one of Joe’s old ones—was pulled down tightly on her head. Her bare arms and legs were crosshatched with fresh scratches from thorns and branches she had crashed through to get closer to the water. She was a serious fly-fisher, and a serious girl overall.

But while Sheridan was the fisher, Lucy seemed to be catching most of the fish, much to Sheridan’s consternation. Lucy did not share her older sister’s passion for fishing. She came because Joe insisted, and because he had promised her a good lunch. She wore a sundress and white sandals, her shiny blond hair tied in a ponytail.

With each fish Lucy caught, Sheridan’s glare toward her little sister intensified, and she moved farther upstream away from her. It’s not fair, Joe knew she was thinking.

“Dad, come here and look at this,” Sheridan called, breaking into his rumination. He pulled the slack tight on his rod and looped his line through his fingers before walking up the bank toward her. She was pointing down at something in the water beneath her feet.

It was a dead trout, white belly up, lodged between two exposed stones. The fish bobbed in a natural cul-de-sac dark with pine needles and sheaths of algae that had washed down with the current. He could tell from the wet, vinyl-like sheen on the fish’s pale underside and the still-bright twin slashes of red beneath its gills that it hadn’t been dead very long.

“That’s a nice fish,” Sheridan said to Joe. “A cutthroat. How big do you think it is?”

“Thirteen, fourteen inches,” Joe replied. “It’s a dandy.” Instinctively, he reached down for Maxine’s collar. He could feel her trembling under her skin through her coat, anxious to retrieve the dead fish.

“What do you think happened to it?” she asked. “Do you think somebody caught it and threw it back after it was dead?”

Joe shrugged, “Don’t know.” On a previous trip, Joe had instructed Sheridan how to properly release a fish back into the water after he caught it. He had shown her how to cradle it under its belly and lower it slowly into the water so that the natural current would revive it, and how to let the fish dart away under its own power once it was fit to do so.

She had asked him about the ethics of eating caught fish versus releasing them, and he told her that fish were for eating but that there was no reason to be greedy, and that keeping dead fish in a hot creel all day and throwing them away later because they were ruined was an ethical problem, if not a legal one. He knew this is what she was thinking about when she pointed out the dead fish.

It wasn’t long before Sheridan pointed out another dead fish. It hadn’t been dead as long as the other one, Joe noted, because it floated on its side, flaunting the rainbow colors that gave the fish its name. It had not yet turned belly-up. This fish was not as large as the first, but still impressive.

Sheridan was righteously indignant.

“Something is killing these fish, and it makes me mad,” she said, her eyes flashing. Joe didn’t like it either but was impressed by her outrage, although he didn’t know whether her anger came from her outdoor ethics or if she was angry because someone was killing fish she felt she deserved to catch.

“Can you tell what’s killing them?” she asked.

This time, he let Maxine retrieve the rainbow. The Lab unnecessarily launched herself into the water with a splash that soaked both of them, and came back with the trout in her mouth. Joe pried it loose from Maxine’s jaws and turned it over in his palm. He could see nothing unusual about the fish.

“This isn’t like finding a dead deer or elk, where I can check for bullets,” he told Sheridan. “I can’t see any wounds, or disease on this fish. They may have been overstressed after being caught by someone.”

Sheridan huffed with disappointment, and strode upstream. Joe tossed the fish into a stand of willows behind him.

While he waited for Lucy to mosey her way closer, he reached behind him and felt the heavy sag of his .40 Beretta semiautomatic, his service weapon, hidden away in the large back pocket creel of his fishing vest. He also affirmed that his wallet-badge was there, as well as several strands of Flexcuffs. Although he wasn’t working, he was still the game warden, and still charged with enforcing regulations.

That morning, as he packed, he had taken the unusual step of adding another item to his fishing-vest arsenal: bear spray. He strummed his fingers over the large aerosol can through the fabric of his vest. The bear spray was wicked stuff, ten times more powerful than the pepper spray used for disabling humans. A whiff of the spray, even at a distance, brought men to their knees. Joe thought about the series of reports and cryptic e-mails he’d received regarding a rogue 400-pound male grizzly that was causing havoc in Northwestern Wyoming. For the past month, the bear had damaged cars, campsites, and cabins, but as yet there had been no human-bear encounters. The bear had originally been located near the east entrance of Yellowstone Park through a weakening signal from its radio collar, but he had not yet been sighted. When the “bear guys”—a team of Wyoming Game and Fish Department and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service bear specialists—tried to cut it off, the bear eluded them and they lost the signal. Joe couldn’t recall a runaway bear incident quite like this before. It was like the wilderness version of an escaped convict. He blamed the drought, as the biologists did, and the need for the grizzly to cover new ground in search of something, anything, to eat. It had not been lost on him that the damage reports indicated that the grizzly was moving to the east, through the Shoshone National Forest. If the bear kept up his march, he would enter the Bighorn Mountains, where grizzlies had not roamed for eighty years.

Joe disliked bringing his weapon and badge with him on his day off. He felt oddly ashamed that his daughters were seeing his day-to-day equipment as they caught fish and he cooked them over an open fire for lunch. It was different when he was out in the field, in his red chamois Game and Fish shirt and driving his green pickup, checking hunters and fishers. Now, he just wanted to be Dad.

Working their way upstream, they stumbled upon another party. Sheridan saw them first and stopped, looking back for Joe. He could see flashes of color through the trees upstream, and he heard a cough.

Joe noticed a strange odor in the air when the wind shifted. The odor was sickly sweet and metallic, and he winced when a particularly strong waft of it blew through.

Making sure Lucy was well behind them, Joe winked at Sheridan as he overtook her, and she fell in behind him as he closed in on the two fishers. He debated whether or not to show his badge before saying hello, and decided against it. Joe noticed the unpleasant odor again. It seemed to get worse as he walked upstream.

As he approached them, he felt Sheridan tug on his sleeve, and he turned and saw her point toward the water. A small brook trout, not more than six inches long, was floating on the top of the water on its side. It wasn’t dead yet, and he could see its gills working as it pathetically tried to right itself and swim away.

“The fish killers,” Sheridan whispered ominously at the man and woman in front of them, and he nodded to her in agreement.

The man looked to be in his late fifties, and was dressed as if he were a cover model for Fly-Fisherman magazine. He wore ultralight Gore-Tex waders and leather wading boots, a pale blue Cool-Max shirt, and a fishing vest with dozens of bulging pockets filled with gear. A wooden net hung down his back from a ring on his collar. A leather-bound journal for documenting the species and size of the fish he caught was on a lanyard on his vest, as was a small digital camera for recording the catch. The man was large and ruddy, with a thick chest. He had a salt-and-pepper mustache and pale, watery eyes. He looked like a hungover CEO on vacation, Joe thought.

Behind and off to the side of the man was a much younger woman with blond hair; long sunburned legs; and a fishing vest so new that the tag from the Bighorn Angler Fly Shop was still attached to the front zipper. She held her rod away from her body with the unease of someone holding a dead snake.

It was obvious, Joe thought, that the man was teaching the woman how to fish. Or, more accurately, the man was showing the woman what a fine fisherman he was. Joe assumed that the couple had stopped at the fly store on their way up the mountain and that the man had outfitted her with the new vest.

The man had been concentrating on dropping a fly into a deep pool but now glared at Joe and Sheridan, clearly annoyed that he had been disturbed.

“Jeff . . .” the woman cautioned in a low voice, attempting to get Jeff ’s attention.

“Good afternoon,” Joe said and smiled. “How’s fishing?”

Jeff stepped back from the stream in an exaggerated way. His movement wasn’t aggressive but clearly designed to show Joe and Sheridan that he wasn’t pleased with the interruption and that he planned to resume his cast as soon as possible.

“Thirty-fish day,” Jeff said gruffly.

“Twenty-eight,” the woman corrected, and Jeff instantly flashed a look at her.

“It’s an expression,” he said as if scolding a child. “Twenty-fish day, thirtyfish day, they’re fucking expressions. It’s what fishermen tell each other if one of them is rude enough to ask.”

The woman shrank back and nodded.

Joe didn’t like this guy. He knew the type: a fly-fisherman who thought he knew everything and who could afford all of the equipment he read about in the magazines. Often, these men were fairly new to the sport. Too often, these men had never learned about outdoor etiquette, or common courtesy. To them it was all about thirty-fish days.

“Keeping any?” Joe asked, still smiling. He reached into the back pocket of his vest, bringing out his wallet-badge and holding it up so Jeff could understand why Joe was asking the question.

“There’s a limit of six on this stream,” Joe said. “Mind if I look at what you’ve kept?”

Jeff snorted and his face hardened. “So you’re the game warden?”

“Yes,” Joe said. “And this is my daughter Sheridan.”

“And his daughter Lucy,” Lucy said, having caught up with them. “What’s that smell, Dad?”

“And Lucy,” Joe added, looking back at her. She was pinching her nose with her fingers. “So I would appreciate it if you watched your language around them.”

Jeff started to say something but caught himself. Then he rolled his eyes heavenward.

“Tell you what,” Joe said, looking at the woman—who appeared to be fearing a fight—and Jeff. “How about you show me your licenses and conservation stamps and I’ll show you how to properly release a fish so that there aren’t any more dead ones?”

The woman immediately began digging in her tight shorts, and Jeff seemed to make up his mind that he didn’t really want a fight, either. Still glaring at Joe, he reached behind his back for his wallet.

Joe checked the licenses. Both were perfectly legal. She was from Colorado and had a temporary fishing license. Jeff O’Bannon was local, although Joe couldn’t remember ever seeing him before. Joe noted that O’Bannon’s address was on Red Cloud Road, which meant he lived in one of the new $500,000 ranchettes south of town in the Elkhorn Ranches subdivision. That didn’t surprise Joe.

“Do you know what that awful smell is?” Joe asked conversationally as he handed the licenses back.

“It’s a dead moose,” Jeff O’Bannon said sullenly. “In that meadow up there.” He gestured through the trees to the west, vaguely pointing with the peaked extra-long bill of his Orvis fishing cap. “That’s one reason why we’re fucking leaving.”

“Jeff . . .” The woman cautioned.

O’Bannon growled at her, “There’s no law against the word fucking.”

Joe felt a rise of anger. “I think, Jeff, that I’ll see you again some time out here,” Joe said, leaning in close to Jeff. “Given your bad attitude, you’ll probably be doing something wrong. I’ll arrest you when you do.”

O’Bannon started to step toward Joe but the woman held his arm. Joe slipped his hand in the back pocket of his fishing vest and thumbed off the safety bar on the bear spray.

“Aw, to hell with it,” O’Bannon said, leaning back. “Let’s get out of here, Cindy. He’s already ruined my good mood.”

Joe watched as Cindy breathed a long sigh of relief and shook her head in bewilderment for Joe’s benefit, keeping out of Jeff ’s line of vision. Joe stepped aside as the man stormed past him, followed by Cindy.

“Bye, girls,” Cindy called to Sheridan and Lucy, who watched the two walk downstream. Jeff led the way, snapping branches and cursing. Cindy tried to keep up.

“Dad, can we leave, too?” Lucy asked. “It stinks here.”

“Go ahead and go downstream a little ways and get out of the smell if you want to,” Joe said. “I need to check this moose out.”

“We’re going with you,” Lucy honked back, still holding her nose. Joe turned to argue when he noticed that O’Bannon and Cindy hadn’t moved very far downstream after all. O’Bannon stood in a clearing, glaring through pine branches at Joe while Cindy tugged at him.

“Okay,” Joe said, knowing it was best to keep his girls near him.

he moose wasn’t hard to find, and the sight jarred Joe. A full-grown bull moose lay on its side in the ankle-high grass in the center of the meadow, which was walled on three sides by dark trees that continued in force up the mountain. The dead moose was horribly bloated to nearly twice its normal size, its mottled purple skin stretched nearly to breaking. Two black legs, knobby-kneed and surprisingly long, were suspended over the ground, like a chair that had been tipped over. Its face, half-hidden in the grass, seemed to leer at him with bared long teeth and a single, bulging, wide-open eye that looked like it was primed and ready to fire right out of the socket.

Joe turned on his heels and told his girls to stop so they wouldn’t see it. Too late.

Lucy shrieked, and covered her mouth with her hands. Sheridan stared, her eyes wide, her mouth set grimly.

“It’s alive!” Lucy cried.

“No it isn’t,” Sheridan countered. “But there’s something wrong with it.” “Stay put,” Joe said sternly. “I mean that.”

Drawing a bandanna out of his Wranglers, he tied it over his nose and mouth like a highwayman, and approached the bloated carcass. Sheridan was right, Joe thought. There was something wrong with it. And there was something else; he had a fuzzy, slightly dizzy feeling. For a moment, he was light-headed, and thought that perhaps he had moved too quickly or something. He blinked, and when he looked around he saw faint, slow motion sparkling in the air for a moment.

Shaking his head to try and clear it, Joe circled the carcass, never getting closer than a few feet from it. The animal had been mutilated. Its genitals and musk glands had been cut out, and its rectum was cored. Half of its face had been removed, leaving a grinning skull and long, yellowed teeth. He could see where the skin and glands had been cut away, and noted that the incisions were smooth, almost surgical, in their precision. He could not imagine an animal, any animal, leaving wounds like that. Where the skin had been cut away the exposed flesh was dark purple and black, speckled with tiny commas of bright yellow. When he stopped and stared, he realized that the commas were writhing. Maggots. Besides the incisions, he could see no exterior wounds on the carcass.

Turning his head for a big gulp of air, he strode forward and squatted and grasped one of the bony, stiff forelegs. Grunting, he lifted, using the leg as a lever. He shinnied around the obscenely smiling face and massive, inverted palm-frond antlers and pulled, using his legs and back, trying to turn the stiff carcass. For a moment, the sheer weight of the animal stymied him, and he feared losing his footing and falling over it. Worse yet would be if the leg pulled loose from the putrefied shoulder, leaving a long, hairy club in his hands. But with a sickening kissing sound the body detached from the ground and began to roll toward him. He pulled hard on the leg and jumped back as the carcass flopped over in the grass. Gasses burbled inside the carcass, sounding like something subterranean. He searched the grass-matted hide for external injuries. Again, he found none.

He expected to see the flattened grass black with congealed blood, as was usually the case when he found animals that had been poached. The entry wound was often hard to see but the exit wound would bleed and drain into the turf, leaving a black-and-red pudding. But there was no blood underneath the moose at all, only more insects, madly scrambling, running from sunlight.

Joe stepped back and looked around. The grass was lush and thick in the meadow, and he noticed, for the first time, that there were no tracks of any kind in it. When he looked back on the slope he had walked up, his own footprints were glaringly obvious in the crushed, dry grass. It appeared that the moose had chosen the center of the meadow to suddenly drop dead. So what could possibly have removed the animal’s genitals, glands, and face? And not left so much as a print?

He pulled the bandanna from his mouth and let it hang around his neck. His necropsy kit was in his pickup, which was a one-hour walk away. Dusk would be approaching soon, and he had promised Marybeth he would have the girls home in time for dinner and homework. Tomorrow, when he returned, he expected that with the kit and his metal detector he would find a bullet or two in the carcass. Usually, the lead caught up just beneath the hide on the opposite side of where the animal had been shot.

Joe walked back to where Sheridan and Lucy were standing. They had moved back down the hill from the meadow, close enough that they could watch him but far enough away that the smell of the carcass wouldn’t make them sick to their stomachs. Jeff and Cindy were nowhere in sight.

As they worked their way down the slope to Crazy Woman Creek, his girls fired questions at him.

“Who killed the moose, Dad?” Lucy asked. “I like moose.” “Me too. And I don’t know what killed it.”

“Isn’t that strange to find an animal just dead like that?” Lucy again. “Very strange,” Joe said. “Unless somebody shot it and left it.” “That’s a crime, right? A big one?” Sheridan asked.

Joe nodded, “Wanton destruction of a game animal.”

“I hope you find out who did it,” Sheridan said, “and take away all of his stuff.”

“Yup,” Joe agreed, but his mind was racing. Besides the mutilation and the lack of tracks around the animal, something else bothered him that he couldn’t put his finger on. But as the three of them walked downstream, he saw a raccoon ahead of them splash through a pool and vanish into a stand of trees. The raccoon had found one of the dead fish that Jeff had “released.”

Suddenly, Joe stopped. That was it, he thought. The bull moose had been dead for at least several days, lying in the open, and nothing had fed on it. The mountains were filled with scavengers—eagles, coyotes, badgers, hawks, ravens, even mice—who were usually the first on the scene of a dead animal. Joe had discovered scores of game animals, which had been lost or left by hunters, by the squawking, feeding magpies that usually marked a kill. But the moose looked untouched, except for the incisions.

As a big fist of cumulous clouds punched across the sun and flattened the shadows and dropped the temperature by a quick ten degrees, Joe heard a snapping sound and turned slowly, looking back toward the meadow where they had found the moose. He could see nothing, but he felt a ripple through the hairs on the back of his neck.

“What is it, Dad?” Sheridan asked. Joe shook his head, listening.

“I heard it,” Lucy said. “It sounded like somebody stepped on a branch or a twig. Or maybe they were eating potato chips.”

“Potato chips,” Sheridan scoffed. “That’s stupid.” “I’m not stupid.”

“Girls.” Joe admonished them, still trying to listen. But he heard nothing beyond the liquid sound of the flowing breeze through the swaying crowns of the pine trees. He thought of how, in just a few moments, the mountain setting had changed from warm and welcoming to cold and oddly silent.

2

It was a half hour before dusk when they arrived at their small, two-story, state-owned home eight miles out of Saddlestring. Joe swung the pickup off Bighorn Road and parked it in front of the detached garage that needed painting. Sheridan and Lucy were out of the passenger door even before he set the brake, rushing across the grass in the front yard into the house to tell their mother what they had seen. Maxine bounded behind them but paused at the door to look back at Joe.

“Go ahead,” Joe said, “I’m coming.”

Assured, the Labrador bolted into the house.

After putting the rods, vests, and cooler into the garage, Joe walked around the house toward the corral. Toby, their eight-year-old paint gelding, nickered as soon as Joe was in sight which meant he was hungry. Doc, their new sorrel yearling, nickered as well, following the older horse’s lead. Joe shooed them aside as he entered the corral, then fed them two flake sections each of grass hay. He filled the trough and checked the gate on his way out. While he did so, he wondered why Marybeth hadn’t fed them earlier, because she usually did.

As he opened the door at the back of the house, Sheridan stormed out of it in a dark mood.

“Did you tell your mom about the moose?” Joe asked her.

“She’s busy,” Sheridan snapped, “maybe I should have made an appointment.”

“Sherry . . .” Joe admonished, but Sheridan was out the back gate toward the corral.

He turned and entered the kitchen. Marybeth sat at the kitchen table wearing a sweatshirt and jeans, surrounded by manila files, stacks of paper, facedown open books, a calculator, and a laptop computer. Boxes of files were stacked on either side of her chair, their lids on the floor. She was concentrating on her laptop screen, and barely acknowledged him as he entered the kitchen.

“Hey, babe,” he greeted her and swept her blond hair away from the side of her face and kissed her on the cheek.

“Just a second,” she said, tapping on her keyboard.

Joe felt a pang of annoyance. It was obvious that nothing was cooking on the stove, and the oven light was dark. The table was a shambles, and so was Marybeth. It wasn’t as if he expected dinner on the table every night. But she had asked him to be home early with the girls, for dinner, and he had lived up to his part of the bargain.

“Okay,” she announced and snapped the screen down on her laptop. “Got it.”

“Got what?”

“The Logue Country Realty account is finally reconciled,” she said. “What a mess that one was.”

“Well, good,” he said flatly, opening the refrigerator to see if a covered dish was ready to heat. Nope.

“I don’t know how they stayed in business after they bought it, Joe,” she explained, filing bank statements and canceled checks into folders and envelopes. “The previous owners left them an unbelievable mess. Their cash flow was an absolute mystery for the last twelve quarters.”

“Mmm.”

There weren’t even frozen pizzas in the freezer, he saw. Just some rockhard packages of deer burger and elk roasts from the previous year, and a box of Popsicles that had been in the freezer as long as Joe could remember. “I thought we’d go out tonight,” Marybeth said. “Or maybe one of us could run into town to get something and bring it back.” He was surprised. “We can afford to?”

Marybeth’s smile disappeared. “No, we really can’t,” she sighed. “Not until the end of the month, anyway.”

“We could thaw out that burger in the microwave,” Joe suggested. “Do you mind grilling out?” she asked.

“That’s fine,” he said evenly. “Honey . . .”

Joe held up his hand. “Don’t worry about it. You got caught up in your work. It’s okay.”

For a second, he thought she would tear up. That happened more and more lately. But she didn’t. Instead, she bit her lower lip and looked at him.

“Really,” he said.

She scraped the grate of the barbecue grill in the backyard, Joe battled with himself over his disappointment that there was no dinner planned and his growing worry about Marybeth and their marriage. There was no doubt that the violent death of April, their foster daughter, last winter had severely affected Marybeth. Joe had hoped that the dawn of spring would help Marybeth heal but it hadn’t. Spring had only brought the realization that their situation in general was no different than it had been before.

Sometimes, he caught her staring. She would fix on the window, or sometimes on something that seemed to be between the window and her eyes. Her face would look slightly wistful, and her eyes softened. A couple of times he asked her what she was thinking about. When he did, she shook her head as if shaking off a vision, and said, “nothing.”

He knew their finances troubled her, as they troubled him. There was a statewide budget crunch, and salaries had been frozen. In Joe’s case, this meant he would make $32,000 a year as far ahead as he could see. The long hours he worked also meant that any kind of extra income was out of the question. The department provided housing and equipment, but recently the house, which had at one time seemed wonderful, felt like a trap.

After April died, Joe and Marybeth had discussed their future. They needed normalcy, they agreed, they needed routine. Faith and hope would return naturally, because they were strong people and they loved each other and, given time, they’d all heal. Joe had promised to look at other job options, or request a change of districts within the state. A change of scenery might help, they agreed. But he had not really researched the job postings recently, because in his heart he loved his job and never wanted to leave it. That reality shrouded him, at times, with secret guilt.

Marybeth was no longer working at the library and the stables, the two part-time jobs she had held. Even combined, they were too low-paying, and involved too much public contact, she told him. She was uncomfortable with library patrons who assessed her and asked her questions about April, and the events that had lead to her death.

But they needed additional income, and in the summer Marybeth had started her own business, setting up accounting, office management, and inventory control for small businesses in Saddlestring. Joe thought it was a perfect choice, with her education, toughness, and organizational skills. So far, her clients included Barrett’s Pharmacy, Sandvick Taxidermy, the Saddlestring Burg-O-Pardner, and Logue Country Realty. She was working hard to get established, and the business was close to being a success.

Which made him feel even more guilty that he had been angry with her about dinner.

“Tell me about that moose,” she asked after dinner, while they washed and rinsed dishes in the sink. Joe was surprised by the question, because Sheridan and Lucy had described the incident in such graphic detail while they were eating that Joe had asked them to stop. “What about it?”

She smiled slyly. “For the past fifteen minutes, you’ve been thinking about it.”

He flushed. “How do you know that?”

“You mean besides the fact that you’ve been staring off into space the entire time that we’ve been doing the dishes? Or that you’re drying that glass for the fourth time?” she said, grinning. “You’re standing right here but your mind is elsewhere.”

“It isn’t fair that you do that,” he said, “because I can never tell what you’re thinking about.”

“As it should be,” she said, giving him a mischievous hip-check as they stood side-by-side at the sink.

“The girls described it pretty accurately,” he said. “Not much I can add to that.”

“So why does it bother you?”

He rinsed a plate and slid it into the drying rack, pausing until he could articulate what he had been thinking about. “I’ve seen a lot of dead animals,” he said, looking over his shoulder at her. “And, unfortunately, some dead human beings.”

She nodded him on.

“But everything about that scene was, well, different—extremely so.” “Do you mean that you couldn’t figure out what made the wounds?” “That too,” he said. “But you just don’t find a dead moose in the middle of a meadow like that. There were no tracks; no indication that whoever shot it went to check it out afterward. Even the really bad poachers, the ones who leave the bodies on the ground, usually go check out the target.”

“Maybe it was just sick and it died,” she said reasonably.

Joe had turned and was leaning back against the sink with the towel still over his forearm.

He said, “Of course animals die of natural causes all the time. But you just never find them. You may find some bones if the skeleton hasn’t been too scattered by predators, but you just don’t happen upon animals that have died of old age. Or if you do, it’s damned rare. Dying animals tend to seek out cover where nothing can find them. They don’t just keel over in the middle of a meadow like that.”

“But you don’t know that it wasn’t shot, or hit by lightning or something,” she said.

“It wasn’t lightning. There were no scorch marks. It may have been shot; I’ll find that out tomorrow. But my gut tells me I won’t find any lead.”

“Maybe it was poisoned somehow?” Marybeth asked.

Joe was silent for a moment before answering, reviewing the scene in his head. He was pleased that Marybeth was so wrapped up in what had happened to the moose. She’d been so distracted by her new business that it had been a long time since she’d been interested in anything he’d been doing.

“Again, I think the bull would have sought cover to die. Unless the poison killed him so quick he just dropped, which doesn’t sound very likely to me. And those wounds . . .”

“You described them as incisions earlier,” Marybeth said.

“Yes, they were more like surgery than butchery. No animal I know of makes perfect cuts like that. And the parts that were cut away were removed from the scene, taken away. As if they were trophies of some kind.”

Marybeth grimaced. “I’d hate to see that trophy collection.” Joe laughed uncomfortably, agreeing with her.

“It’s almost as if the moose was dropped from the sky,” Marybeth said. “Aw, jeez,” he moaned. “I was hoping you wouldn’t say that.”

She prodded him hard in the ribs with her finger. “But that’s what you were thinking, weren’t you, Joe?”

At first he thought about denying it. But she was so damnably keyed into his thoughts that he didn’t dare.

“Yup,” he said.

“I can’t wait to hear what you find out,” she said, turning and reaching through the wash water for the plug. “Should I ask my mother what she thinks about it?”

Joe bristled, as Marybeth knew he would, and she laughed to assure him she was kidding. Her mother, the former Missy Vankueran, was soon to marry a local rancher named Bud Longbrake. In addition to getting remarried (she had four ex-husbands), and discussing exactly how Joe had stifled Marybeth’s potential, Missy’s top passion was reading books and watching television shows and movies about the paranormal. She loved to speculate about situations and events around Twelve Sleep County—and the world—and ascribe supernatural explanations to them.

“Don’t tell her, please,” Joe begged, exaggerating his please, but not really. “You know how I hate that woo-woo crap.”

“Speaking of woo-woo crap,” Sheridan said as she entered the kitchen from where she’d been eavesdropping, “did I tell you I had that dream again?”

3

The next morning, monday, Joe hiked up the Crazy Woman Creek drainage with his necropsy kit to discover that the grinning moose was no longer there. The absence of the dead moose in the meadow stopped him outright, and he stood still for a moment, surveying the crushed grass. He was thinking about Sheridan’s dream, which made him uncomfortable. Joe refused to believe in aliens or creeping mist or anything else he couldn’t see or touch. Had there been a time when he believed in monsters and things that went bump in the night? Nope, he thought. He had always been a skeptic. He remembered when neighborhood kids gathered around a Ouija board, and urged him to join them. Instead, he went fishing. When his friends stayed up late at night to watch creature movies, Joe fell asleep. Sheridan was different, though, and always had been. He hoped she’d outgrow the dreams.

Something had dragged, or carried, the carcass away. The trail was obvious; a spoor of flattened grass led across the meadow in a stuttering S-curve toward the northern wall of pine trees. Puzzled, he followed it.

The mature bull moose weighed at least 600 pounds, he guessed. Whatever had moved it had tremendous strength. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see a set of pickup or ATV tracks in the meadow, but they weren’t there. He wondered if it could be the grizzly. As he walked silently across the meadow in the flattened grass track of the moose, he tried to peer ahead into the dark trees and see into them. He listened intently for sounds, and noted the absence of them. There were no chattering squirrels in the trees, or calling jays. Except for the low hum of insects in the grass near his feet and the high, airy flow of a cold fall breeze through the branches, it was deathly silent in the meadow. Again, he felt a chill run up his spine, which raised the hairs on his neck and forearms.

He couldn’t explain the odd feeling he got again from the meadow. It felt as if something was physically pushing against him from all sides. Not hard, but steadily. The crisp fall mountain air tasted thicker than it should have, and when he breathed in, his lungs felt heavy and wet. He sensed a kind of shimmer in the air when he looked at the wall of trees and the granite mountains that pushed up behind them. He didn’t like the feeling at all, and tried to shake it off.

Joe slipped the strap of the necropsy kit over his head so that his hands were free. He drew his semiautomatic weapon and worked the slide, seating a cartridge in the chamber. With his left hand, he unclipped the large can of bear spray from his belt and thumbed off the guard. He cautiously approached the wall of trees, his weapon in his right hand and the spray in his left. All of his senses were tuned to high, and he strained to see, hear, or smell anything that would give him a warning before it was too late.

That’s when he saw the bear track in the center of the crushed grass. The huge paw was the size of a pie plate and had pushed down through the mat of grass into dark soil. He could see the heel imprint clearly; it was pressed into the dirt, as were the prints of all five toes. Nearly two inches from the end of the toe marks were sharp punctures in the ground, as if a curved garden rake had been swung overhead and embedded deeply into the earth. The creature that had made the tracks was the rogue grizzly bear, he was sure of it. None of the native black bears could leave a track that large. The odd thing, he thought, was that the track was pointed toward him, and not toward the wall of trees. Why wasn’t the track heading away from the meadow?

Then he answered his own question. If the bear was dragging the moose out of the meadow, he would have clamped down on the moose’s neck with his teeth and pulled it backward, like a puppy dragging a sock. The fact that the heel print was deeper than the claws indicated that the bear was struggling with the heavy carcass, backing up and digging deep into the earth for traction.

He glanced at the bear spray he carried and then at the .40 Beretta. Too small, he thought, too puny. Not only would he likely miss because he was such a poor shot with a handgun, but even if he hit his target it would probably do no more than make the bear angry.

He stood, thought, and shrugged, then plunged forward, toward the trees that lined the meadow. There was a hole in the brush where something—the bear?—had already blazed through. Branches had been bent and snapped back and broken. Entering the pool of shadow cast by the wall of pine trees, Joe squinted to see better. The forest was unnaturally dense and cluttered with wicked snarls of dry deadfall. The tree trunks were the thickness of the barrel of a baseball bat and extremely close together. Joe lowered his shoulder and pushed through.

The forest floor was dark, dry, and carpeted thickly with several inches of bronze pine needles. His boots sank with each step, and the earth was springy. The smell inside was a combination of dried pine, vegetative decay, and the sudden strong odor of the dead moose that for some reason Joe had not noticed until now.

As his eyes adjusted to the half-light filtering through the pine boughs, the carcass of the moose seemed to emerge on the forest floor right in front of him. The stench was suddenly overpowering, and Joe stepped back and thumped his shoulder blade against two tree trunks that pre-vented further flight. Holstering his gun, he held his breath while he dug a thick surgical face-mask from the kit, pulled the rubber band over the back of his head, and fitted the mask over his nose and mouth. He smeared Vicks VapoRub across the front of the mask from a small plastic jar in the kit to further block the smell. Then he approached the carcass and got to work.

The carcass had obviously decomposed even more. Blooms of entrails had burst through several places in the abdomen of the moose, where the hide had been stretched so tightly that it split. Again, he marveled at the surgical precision of the incisions that had been made. He could see no wounds that he had missed the day before, except for the gouged rips in the neck from the teeth of the bear that had dragged it from the meadow. Joe photographed the wounds from several angles using his digital camera. The photos, he thought, didn’t convey the dread and fear he felt. They looked clinical, and somehow cleaner than the real thing.

He put on thick rubber gloves and squatted next to the carcass with his kit open. Using dental charts, he noted the size of the pre-molars as well as their stain and wear and guessed that the bull was at least seven years old, in its prime. Pushing a stainless steel probe through the hide along the spine of the moose between the shoulders, then in the middle of the back, and finally between the haunches, he noted that the body fat of the animal was normal, even a little excessive. Joe thought it was unusual in a drought year that the moose seemed so robust and healthy. Whatever had happened to the moose, it was clear that it hadn’t died from either starvation or old age.

He ran a telescopic metal detector over the animal from its tail to the rounded end of its bulbous snout. No metal. If the animal had been shot, the bullet had passed through the body. But there was no exit wound. Conventional high-powered hunting bullets were designed to mushroom inside the body and do horrendous damage inside. But they were engineered to stay inside the body somewhere, not to exit. There was the possibility, Joe thought, that the shooter was using specialized armor-piercing type rounds that could pass straight through. But he doubted that scenario.

In fact, the more he studied the body, the less he could convince himself that somebody had shot it.

Using a razor, Joe sliced tissue samples from the places on the moose’s hindquarters, neck, and head where its hide had been cut away. He dropped the strips of meat into thick paper envelopes to send to the lab in Laramie. Plastic would spoil the samples, and he didn’t want his effort to go to waste. He duplicated the procedure with another set of envelopes he would send to another lab.

After he completed his work, he stood above the carcass and stared at it. If anything, the face stripped of its flesh seemed more gruesome in the dark silence of the forest floor. The smell of the decaying body was working its way through the mask, overpowering even the Vicks. Joe looked around, suddenly realizing that he had been so intent on collecting the samples and completing the necropsy that he hadn’t thought about the grizzly. Was he out there now, somewhere in the shadows? Would he be coming back?

Why would the bear go to all the effort of dragging the huge corpse into the trees and not feed on it? Moose was highly choice meat, for hunters and for bears. If the bear wasn’t hungry, why would he have worked so hard? If the bear intended to eat the moose later, why hadn’t he buried the carcass or covered it with brush as bears usually did?

Joe zipped up his kit and retraced his steps. Nothing about this dead moose made sense. His only hope to solve the puzzle, he thought, was if the lab boys could come up with something from the photos and the samples. But even if the moose died of some strange disease, how would they account for the incisions and the missing skin, glands, and organs?

As he neared the meadow, the light fused yellow, and when he emerged from the forest he had the same feeling a swimmer does as he breaks the surface from below. In the meadow, Joe turned. He listened closely for the sounds of a bear approaching or, for that matter, any sound at all. There was none. But there was still that shimmer in the air, and the closed-in feeling of density.

Maybe, Joe thought, somebody or something is watching me. Maybe that was why he felt so unnatural and out of sorts in the meadow. He swept the forest with his eyes, trying to find something out of the ordinary. A set of eyes, perhaps, or the glint of the lenses from binoculars. He turned slowly in the center of the meadow, not far from where the moose had originally lain. He scanned the three walls of trees, and the creek bed, even the high, slick faces of the mountains. He saw nothing unusual. But he was thoroughly and ashamedly spooked.

Still clutching his weapon and the bear spray, Joe walked across the meadow and dropped down into Crazy Woman Creek. As he walked downstream, he felt the pressure lessen. Eventually, he couldn’t feel it at all. The sun seemed warmer and brighter overhead. A raven cawed rudely somewhere on the opposite bank.

In the afternoon, Joe sat in his truck on the crest of a sagebrush-covered hilltop in the breaklands east of Saddlestring. Behind him, the terrain arched and transformed into the foothills of the Bighorns, where he had come from. In front of him were miles of blue-gray sagebrush plains cut through with slashes of red ravines. From his vantage point, the breaklands looked like the ocean caught in freeze-frame; wavelike rolls of undulation stopped in time. This was pronghorn antelope country but there were few hunters out. He had identified only two vehicles over the past three hours, distant sparkles of glass and steel over two miles away. Watching through his window-mounted spotting scope, he observed the four-wheel drives move slowly on BLM roads. Road hunters, Joe thought. He had heard no shots. After the first weekend of antelope season, hunting activity was minimal in the breaklands. Pronghorns were so plentiful and easy to hunt that serious hunters had harvested their game within hours of the season opening. Those still out were either stubborn trophy hunters looking for the perfect rack, or local meat hunters who felt no sense of urgency.

Joe sat back from the spotting scope and rubbed his eyes. Maxine sighed and rolled over on the passenger seat, still sleeping.

He had stopped in town and mailed the tissue samples of the moose. The packages should arrive at the lab in Laramie and his other source in Montana the next morning. He had called both recipients on his cell phone and left messages asking that the examinations be expedited. He promised to forward the digital photos of the moose via e-mail that evening, when he got back to his house, so they could see the source of the samples.

From his vantage point, looking out at the plains, he could see forever. He loved this particular time in the fall for many reasons, but one of the major reasons was how the air and light seemed to sharpen, and everything was in perfect focus. In the summer, waves of rising heat rose from the plains and limited his field of vision. In the winter, moisture in the air or wind-borne snow did the same thing. This time in the fall the air was crisp and fresh and clear, and the colors from the trees that filled the valleys gave the landscape a festive, celebratory quality. Yet, today, the spectacular view failed to fill him with the same sense of awe that it usually did. He just couldn’t stop thinking about the dead bull moose.

Even without the strange feeling he’d had in the meadow—which he now seriously doubted had come from anywhere other than his own imagination—the circumstances of the animal’s death made even less sense than they had the day before.

Joe shook his head. He hoped some answers would come from the Wildlife Veterinary Research Services, where he’d sent the samples.

Then something caught his eye—a glint—and he leaned into the spotting scope again and tilted it upward, past the breaks into the private ranch lands miles beyond. Focusing the eyepiece, he simultaneously tightened the mount on the window to steady the telescope.

The glint, it turned out, was not from glass but from water forming around a freshly drilled well. The drilling rig that produced it was surrounded by three large pickup trucks, all the same make, model, and color. Men moved quickly between the pickups and the well, splashing through the growing pool of water. Joe couldn’t see them clearly enough to make out their faces, or read the logos on the pickup doors, but he recognized what was going on. He had seen it dozens of times in the past year.

The trucks and rig were drilling for coal-bed methane in the basin. Judging by the rush of water to the surface and the urgency in the men’s movements, they had obviously found it once again.

Underground coal seams covered the concentrated natural gas like a blanket, which in the past had made it difficult to retrieve. Joe had read, however, that since the technology had been perfected to extract the gas 5,000 CBM wells had been drilled in the Powder River Basin. An additional 5,000 to 8,000 wells were planned. Gas was being found everywhere they looked, and locating the underground pockets was now a fairly easy thing for geologists to do. Methane that had once been vented and released into the air during oil exploration as waste was now funneled into pipelines bound for the Midwest, the West Coast, and beyond. The coal-bed methane boom was being called the largest new energy discovery in North America.

In less than two years, Northern Wyoming was unexpectedly awash in the two things that, prior to that, were rare: money and water. Although Joe only understood the details of the boom from what he read and the snippets of conversation he heard from developers and locals in town, the price of methane gas ranged from seventy-five cents to three dollars per million British thermal unit, or mmbtus, depending on demand. And from what the energy developers were claiming, the underground coal in Twelve Sleep County could hold trillions of mmbtus of methane gas.

The CBM boom had invigorated the economy, and the county population, for the first time in a decade, was increasing. And it was only the beginning.

Although local businesses were certainly benefiting from the CBM boom, the developers, energy companies, and people who owned the mineral rights to the areas where the gas was being developed stood to gain the most. Stories abounded of instant millionaires, as well as of landowners who, after selling off what they thought were worthless mineral rights to their lands years before, could now only stand by while millions of dollars in gas were being pumped from wells on their ranches. Marybeth had told Joe the story of the Overstreet sisters, who owned the Timberline Ranch north of Saddlestring. The ranch was for sale through Logue Country Realty, her favorite client, but there were no buyers. Six hundred CBM wells were planned. Walter Overstreet, the patriarch of the ranch, had sold the mineral rights years ago, before he died. Despite the wells, the Over-street sisters could be found in line for free lunch every day at the Saddlestring Senior Center.

But the controversial byproduct of CBM development was water. Far underground, water was trapped beneath the coal. Once a drill bit tapped the pocket, water rushed to the surface with great pressure. As the pressure eased, methane followed. Eventually, the water cleared out of the mix, and pure methane was produced. Although water had always been considered the single most precious commodity in the state, the effect of huge releases of underground water on the surface due to CBM wells was still unknown. Some tracts of land that had been parched for generations were now covered with standing water. Various landowners and many environmental groups claimed that CBM wells were depleting the aquifers, transforming the landscape and polluting the rivers with bitter water. The developers and other landowners countered that at last there was finally some water available for stock and wildlife. The battle raged on, although developers were now required to receive approval from state and federal environmental regulators before drilling.

Joe didn’t know which side he was on. On the one hand, residents of Saddlestring were practically giddy with optimism for the first time since he had lived there. A new school was being built, the hospital was in the process of renovation, and the small airport was expanding. New restaurants and retail stores were filling the empty downtown buildings that had been boarded up the year before. The nation lusted for clean burning natural gas.

But there was no doubt that the thousands of wells were a blight to the landscape, even though the country they occupied was flat, barren, and stark to begin with. If the CBM wells sucked up so much underground water that water wells went dry or surface land collapsed, that wasn’t good, either. And if the water being released to the surface was as mineralheavy and tainted as some people claimed, it could poison the rivers and reservoirs, harming both people and wildlife.

Joe shook his head. Twelve Sleep County, Wyoming, was usually considered to be behind the rest of the world in all things modern or progressive. But when it came to this new kind of energy development, it was ahead of everyplace else.

The breaklands seemed empty of hunters, and before Joe moved to patrol a different area, he scanned the channels on his radio. While he usually listened to the channel reserved for the Game and Fish Departments in Wyoming, which was shared by brand inspectors and state park employees, he liked to check out what was going on in other areas of law enforcement. He listened to a highway patrol officer flirt with the dispatcher 200 miles away from his lonely location south of Jeffrey City, and a local Saddlestring police department request officers to check out a domestic disturbance. Joe had noted more domestic disturbance calls with the influx of CBM workers.

When he switched to the mutual aid channel, used by all agencies to communicate with each other in crises or emergencies, he found it crackling with traffic.

He recognized the first voice as that of Sheriff O. R. “Bud” Barnum, the longtime sheriff of Twelve Sleep County.

“Come again on that one?” Barnum said to someone. Even hearing his voice set Joe on edge. Over the years, Joe had come to despise Barnum. The feeling went both ways.

“You aren’t going to believe this,” someone answered, and Joe recognized the voice as that of Barnum’s top deputy, Kyle McLanahan. “We’ve got a dozen dead cows on the Hawkins Ranch. It looks like they’ve been ... well, operated on.”

“What do you mean, operated on?” Barnum asked.

“ Jeez, it’s hard to describe,” McLanahan said. “Half their faces are gone. And, uh, their peckers are missing, it looks like.”

Joe felt a jolt of familiarity.

“Their peckers?” Barnum sounded angry.

“Well, if they had peckers,” McLanahan reported. “If they was females, then their female parts have been cut out.”

More trophies, Joe thought. He reached down and started his pickup. The Hawkins Ranch was an hour away on bad roads.

4

In the town of saddle string, behind a battered desk that came with the building, Marybeth Pickett shot her arm out and looked at her wristwatch. She had twenty minutes to finish up and print out the cash-flow spreadsheet she had been working on for Logue Country Realty, meet with the Logues, gather up her computer and files, and pick up her children from school. This is what it was like now, she thought. Her life was on the clock.

She had spent the morning meeting with the office manager of Barrett’s Pharmacy going over accounts receivable, then at Sandvick Taxidermy working with the owner to establish a new billing system. Once they wrapped up, Marybeth asked the taxidermist, Matt Sandvick, if he had ever seen an animal brought in with the kind of wounds Joe had found on the dead moose the day before.

“Yup, I have,” Sandvick had answered, his eyes widening behind thick lenses.

“Where?”

“On that show that used to be on. The X-Files.” And Sandvick laughed. After a quick lunch with her friend Marie Logue, co-owner of Logue Country Realty, Marybeth set up her portable office in a shabby back room at the real estate office and worked under a bare bulb. A small metal electric heater rattled to life whenever the temperature dropped below 60 degrees, and blew out dust-smelling heat through bent orange coils.

Of her three accounts, Marybeth preferred working with the Logues, although the account also presented the most challenges. While Marybeth did her best to straighten out the Byzantine finances of the business they had bought into, there was no doubt that the company and the Logues were in trouble. Despite this, she had come to like and admire them and wanted to do what she could to help them make the company survive, including undercharging for her time. She knew they couldn’t afford her full rate just yet.

But if Sheridan and Lucy were to progress to college, as they should, it would take two full-time incomes. Joe’s salary was barely enough to live on, considering Sheridan’s basketball, volleyball, speech and debate interests, and Lucy’s piano, dance, and Young Writers’ Club. The real estate license would potentially create the cushion they needed for their family. When it came to college for the girls, they would be considered a low-income family, a designation that affected Marybeth deeply. She tried not to blame Joe, because he loved what he did and was good at it. But it didn’t pay the bills.

Cam and Marie Logue bought what was then called Ranch Country Realty from its previous owner, a longtime local institution named Wild Bill Dubois. The purchase included the storefront on Main Street sandwiched between the Stockman’s Bar and Big Suds Laundromat. With their seven-year-old daughter, Jessica, they had moved from Rapid City the previous winter and leased one of the oldest Victorian homes in town with the goal of restoring it while they lived there. They changed the name of the business to Logue Country Realty and sincerely did their best to establish themselves in the small community. They joined the Presbyterian church, the chamber of commerce, the realty association, the PTO, and gave to the high school activities groups and the United Way. In a sleepy town like Saddlestring, where the population trend until recently was a net loss, the arrival of the energetic, optimistic Logues was a welcome deviation from the norm. Or so Marybeth thought, despite knowing that there would be the usual bitter clucking from the old-timers and third-generation types. These were the longtime residents of Twelve Sleep County who referred to Mayor Ty Stockton—who had arrived with his parents from Massachusetts as a toddler—as “that guy from Boston.”

Marybeth’s younger daughter, Lucy, and Jessica Logue became fast friends on the first day of school and were joined by a third girl, named Hailey Bond, to round out the trio. Lucy was much more social than her older sister, Sheridan, and the three quickly formed a new ruling triumvirate of the first grade. Lucy and Jessica schemed to have their parents meet each other during school orientation, and Marybeth and Marie struck it off immediately. Marie told her later, over coffee, that she saw in the Picketts a young, growing, struggling family much like their own. Marybeth agreed, welcoming Marie’s vitality and friendship and the fact that they were new to the area and had no preconceptions. They had discussed how similar they were; they had both gone to college the same year with goals of becoming professionals (Marybeth aimed for a law degree and Marie wanted an MBA in public administration). Marie had met Cam, and Marybeth had met Joe, and neither woman had applied for graduate school.

When Cam and Marie Logue approached Marybeth about looking into the accounts they had just bought, Marybeth agreed, even though Wild Bill Dubois had been known for comingling his funds and cooking his books. What she had found was even worse than she had anticipated. The Logues had bought a business that was a rat’s nest of bad deals, expired contracts, and unfiled documents. When she told them what she found, they stared back at her in white-faced horror.

But instead of giving up or suing Wild Bill, who had quietly moved to Yuma, they decided to make the best of it. With their backs against the wall, they made the decision to work hard and turn their business around. Cam became even more prominent, calling on property owners throughout the county, reminding them that he was there if they needed to buy or sell, trying to win their trust.

His hard work had paid off recently in the listing of the Timberline Ranch by the squabbling Overstreet sisters. If Cam were able to sell it, even at the drastically reduced price it was likely to get, his commission would turn the company around.

So, when Cam Logue stuck his face in Marybeth’s office, beaming a high-wattage smile she had never seen before, and asked if she could meet with him and Marie to hear some good news, Marybeth grinned and pushed back in her chair.

“Ladies,” Cam Logue announced once he had closed the door to his office, “we’ve got a secret client interested in the Timberline Ranch!” Marie, who was petite, dark-haired, and attractive in an open-faced way, clapped her hands together. Her eyes shone. Marybeth was very happy for her.

“So who is it?” asked Marie.

Cam laughed. “I just said it was a secret client, Marie.” “I know, I know . . .”

Marybeth asked, “How serious is he?”

Cam turned to her. Cam was handsome, with light, wavy hair and sharp, blue eyes. He was ambitious in a way that seemed to encourage others to root for him. At least it worked for Marybeth. Her impression of him was that he was straightforward and entrepreneurial, if a little combative. He wanted to succeed not only for his business and his family, but also to prove something. Marie had told Marybeth that Cam had grown up as the youngest on a ranch outside of Saddlestring. She said that Cam’s parents had doted on Cam’s older brother, Eric, literally mortgaging the ranch in order to pay for Eric’s medical school so he could become a surgeon. The Logue ranch was absorbed by the Overstreet sisters’ Timberline Ranch, and his parents bought a small place in western South Dakota, near the Pine Ridge Reservation. When cattle prices bottomed out, there was no money left over for Cam, who went to Black Hills State (where he met Marie) and later into real estate. Cam’s return to Saddlestring was a homecoming of sorts.

Yet if Cam recognized the irony of now selling the property he had grown up on, he didn’t indicate it to Marybeth.

“He’s serious,” he said, “but he’s doing due diligence. He’s no dummy.” “Due diligence?” Marie asked.

Cam nodded. “He knows all about those CBM wells, and all of the water they discharge. Even though he knows he won’t have the mineral rights, he wants to get that water tested to make sure it’s okay when it flows down the river. He’s afraid if something is wrong with the water the enviros or the downstream users might sue him as the landowner.”

“That’s smart,” Marybeth said. “He’s a pretty smart guy.”

Marie sat down in Cam’s desk chair. “What if there’s something wrong with the water?”

“There’s nothing wrong with the water, Marie,” Cam said, as if speaking to a child. “The water’s fine. It’s been tested before they sunk all of those wells, and it’s fine. It’s as sweet as honey.”

“Then why ... ?”

“Marie,” Cam’s reaction was sharp, “it’s complicated. All of the testing that’s been done has been piecemeal, before each new set of wells. By different companies at different times in the last couple of years. Our buyer wants water collected from all of those different well sites and tested again to make sure they’re okay. To make sure, I don’t know, that they haven’t hit any bad water since they tested the first time, I guess. But you don’t need to worry about it. The water’s going to be just fine.”

Marybeth thought Cam was a little more prickly than necessary. But she had never seen him this excited before.

“Our ... difficulties may be over soon,” Marie said as much to herself as to Cam or Marybeth. Cam beamed at her, then turned his full-force grin on Marybeth. As suddenly as a lightbulb going out, Cam’s face fell into a mask of seriousness.

“But we need to keep this absolutely quiet,” he said gravely. “It’s got to be kept in the strictest professional confidence.”

Marybeth nodded. The sale of property of this magnitude would electrify the valley, she knew. Other realtors would try to poach the secret buyer and try to get him to look at other ranches that might have more appeal or fewer wells. Property owners on the fence about selling may suddenly decide to try the market.

“It’ll be hard to keep this a secret,” Marie grinned. “But we can do it.” “Marybeth?” Cam asked.

“I’ll tell my husband,” she said, meeting their eyes. “We don’t keep secrets from each other. But it will go no further than that.”

When neither of the Logues spoke, Marybeth felt compelled to explain. “He tells me things that go on in his job that need to be kept confidential, and I do that. I’ve never breached Joe’s confidence, and he wouldn’t breach mine. Besides,” she said, “he doesn’t talk much as it is.”

Marie snorted a laugh and turned in her chair to Cam. “You remember meeting Joe, don’t you? At that back-to-school night? I think the only thing he said all evening when Marybeth introduced us was ‘Pleasure.’ That’s it. One word in three hours.”

“Okay then,” Cam said, clapping his hands once as if to dispel the hint of suspicion that had entered the room.

Marybeth glanced at her watch.

“Oh my goodness, I’ve got to go. The girls are out of school.”

Marie said, “Feel free to have Lucy come over to our house with Jessica. Hailey Bond is already coming. Those three have a great time together.”

“But . . .”

“Don’t worry. I’ll bring Lucy home later. Around five or five-thirty, right?” Marybeth nodded, and left them both in their giddy state.

As she left the office, pulling on her jacket, she noticed a man sitting in the reception area reading a magazine from the stack on the side table. He was lanky and in his sixties, with round, steel-framed glasses.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Do you need to see somebody?” Marie worked as the receptionist as well as the office manager, and she had obviously not been available.

The man looked up. He wore heavy boots, faded jeans, and a khaki work shirt. On his lap was a thick manila file. He had an experienced and kindly manner.

“I’m here to see Mr. Logue, but don’t worry, I didn’t have an appointment.”

Marie overheard the conversation and entered the room.

“I’ll let him know you’re here,” Marie said. She was bursting with cheerfulness, Marybeth thought, and for good reason.

Lucy Pickett and Jessica Logue were waiting at the pickup spot with Sheridan when Marybeth arrived. The playground was empty except for a few students on the swings. Marybeth felt guilty for being late.

Marybeth swung her minivan to the curb and the three girls piled in. Lucy and Jessica tossed their backpacks on the floor and immediately started telling Marybeth about their day in overlapping bursts, while Sheridan settled into the backseat alone and rolled her eyes. Lucy and Jessica were inseparable in a way that Sheridan never had been with another girl. Lucy and Jessica loved to dress up, do each other’s hair, talk on the telephone, and play together. They even looked alike, as much like sisters as Lucy and Sheridan did.

“Jessica, your mom suggested you and Lucy play at your house this afternoon instead of ours,” Marybeth said, pulling out into the road. “She’ll bring Lucy home later.”

“I hope dropping them off won’t take too long,” Sheridan interjected from the back. “I’ve got a falconry lesson in a little while.”

Marybeth nodded, again feeling guilty that she was late. Sheridan had been learning falconry from Nate Romanowski, a loner and Joe’s friend. He lived in a cabin on the bank of the Twelve Sleep River.

“It’ll just take a minute,” Marybeth said. “I’m sorry I’m running late.” “You seem to be running late a lot these days,” Sheridan said under her breath but loud enough that Marybeth heard her. Both Lucy and Jessica immediately stopped talking and waited for what they hoped would be an argument.

“Please don’t use that tone with me, Sheridan,” Marybeth said evenly, locking eyes with Sheridan in the rearview mirror. “We can discuss this later.” Sheridan broke the gaze and shrugged. Marybeth noticed that Lucy and Jessica had huddled together and shrunk out of view, no doubt trying not to giggle.

The Logue home was one of Saddlestring’s fading treasures; a classic Victorian, one of the original homes built at the edge of town near the river by an 1890s cattle baron. The faded house was hard to see behind the mature cottonwoods that towered around it. In addition to the old, magnificent house there was wooded acreage and a few outbuildings, including a carriage house. The house had sat vacant for fifteen years, in disrepair, until the Logues bought it last winter. Marie had walked Marybeth through the place recently, apologizing endlessly for its condition. Only two rooms had been modernized so far, the kitchen and a bathroom. The rest looked as it had in the mid-1980s, when the longtime county clerk of Twelve Sleep County died there in his seventy-eighth year. The rumor was that the county clerk used to store records in the house and the buildings and charge the county for rent.

Maybe now, Marybeth thought as she watched Lucy and Jessica skip away, Cam and Marie would have the means to accelerate the remodeling on the great old house.

“Mom?” Sheridan said from the backseat. “She’s getting bigger. You don’t have to wait until she gets in the house before we leave.”

“I’m just not used to this yet Sheridan,” Marybeth said. “You two have so many things going on these days. I struggle with letting you go.”

“Mom, my falconry lesson?”

As Marybeth pulled away and turned left on Centennial Street toward Bighorn Road, her phone chirped. It was Joe, telling her about the call he had overheard concerning mutilated cows. He told her he would likely be late for dinner.

Dinner, Marybeth thought, the guilt rushing back. She had forgotten to plan dinner.

5

The hawkins ranch was a checkerboard of private land and state and federal leases spread across the lee side of the foothills, and Joe had to cross through seven barbed-wire fence gates to get to it. Most of the ranch was blanketed with tall sagebrush and scrub oak, buffalo grass and biscuit root, except for several large fingers of heavy timber that reached down from the mountains through saddle-slope draws.

Joe pulled into the ranch yard, a packed-gravel courtyard surrounded by structures. The Hawkins place was an old-line working outfit, unlike many of the hobby ranches that were taking over the state. The largest buildings in the yard were vast metal Quonset huts that served as vehicle sheds, barns, and equipment storage. A maze of wooden-slat corrals bordered the small, white-framed ranch house. There were no adornments of any kind anywhere; nothing to suggest anything other than what the place was—the business center for a large-scale beef-and-hay operation.

Joe turned toward the small house and saw Mrs. Hawkins step out on an unpainted porch and gesture sternly to the mountains. There was no need to stop and visit, Joe thought, and he drove through the middle of the ranch yard until his wheels fell into the long-established ruts of a dirt road that pointed straight toward the timber five miles away. Ahead of him in the ruts were the fresh tread tracks of several vehicles.

Approaching the scene, Joe noted that two identical GMC Blazers belonging to the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff ’s Department, and a light-blue Ford pickup, were parked nose-to-tail on the two-track where the scrub thinned and the pine trees began. To the right of the vehicles were three figures in the middle of what appeared to be a glacial-boulder field.

As Joe closed in, the front of his pickup bucked suddenly and a cascade of maps fell from a clip on the sunshade. Maxine lost her footing on the dashboard and scrambled back to her place on the seat, looking at him for an explanation.

“Rock,” he said. “Didn’t see it.”

The figures turned out to be Deputy Kyle McLanahan, Sheriff Barnum, and a visibly upset Don Hawkins. What Joe had thought were boulders strewn across the ground were actually carcasses of cattle, at least a dozen of them. The sour-sweet smell of death filtered into the cab of the pickup through the vents, and Maxine sat up ramrod straight, her brow wrinkled with concern.

Even from this distance, Joe could see that Barnum was glaring at him. The old man’s eyes bored across the brush and through the windshield of the pickup. McLanahan stood to the side of Barnum with a 35-mm camera hanging from his hand, looking from Barnum to Joe’s pickup and back to Barnum. Don Hawkins wore a bandanna over his face and paced among the dead cows.

“Stay, girl,” Joe told Maxine as he parked to the side of the Sheriff ’s Department vehicles and swung out of his pickup. He fitted his gray Stetson on his head and skirted the Blazers. The smell of the cows was not as ripe as the smell of the moose had been, and he was grateful for that.

“Who called you out here?” Barnum asked. His deep-set eyes were cold, bordered by blue folds of loose skin. He lowered a cigarette from his lips and jetted twin streams of smoke from his nostrils.

“Heard it on the mutual-aid band.”

“This look like a Game and Fish matter to you?”

“I’m not sure what it looks like yet, Sheriff,” Joe said, walking among the carcasses, “but I found something similar done to a bull moose on Crazy Woman Creek.”

It had been months since Joe had seen Barnum, and that had been fine with Joe. He despised Barnum, knowing the sheriff was as corrupt as he was legendary. There were rumors that Sheriff Barnum was in his last term of office, that he would retire within the next year. The electorate that had supported him for twenty-eight years seemed to be turning on him for the first time. The local weekly newspaper, the Saddlestring Roundup had run a series of editorials in the spring saying outright that it was time for Barnum to go.

Deputy McLanahan said, “Your moose have his pecker cut off ?”

Joe turned his head to McLanahan. This guy was just as bad, Joe thought, if not worse. Although the deputy wasn’t as smart or calculating as Barnum, he made up for it with his cruelty. He was a loose cannon, and he liked to pull the trigger.

“Yup,” Joe said, dropping to his haunches to examine a heifer. “Something took off most of his face, as well as his genitals and musk glands from the back legs.”

“I ain’t never seen nothing like this,” Don Hawkins said, bending over one of the dead cows. “These cows are worth six, seven hundred bucks each. Something or somebody owes me nine thousand bucks, goddamit.” The reason the smell was not as bad, Joe realized, was that the cattle had been dead for at least two weeks. Although still somewhat bloated, the bodies had begun to deflate and collapse in on themselves in fleshy folds. The wounds looked similar to the bull moose’s, with some differences. Skin had been removed from most of the heads in precise patches. One heifer’s head had been completely denuded of hide, which made it look like a turkey buzzard with its thin neck and red head. In some cases, tongues and eyes had been removed, and oval patches were missing from shoulders. On the females, their bags had been removed. Half of the cows had missing rectums, showing large dark holes between their flanks.

Joe felt a distinct chill as he walked from body to body. This was like the moose, times twelve. It also meant that whatever had been doing this had been in action for at least two weeks.

“The blood’s drained right out of ’em,” Hawkins said, shaking his head. “This is crazy.”

“Are you sure about that?” Joe asked, looking up at the rancher.

“Look at ’em,” Hawkins cried, holding his hands palms-out. “You see any blood anywhere? How in the hell can you cut up a damned cow like that and not have any blood on the ground? Do you know how much blood there is in a cow?”

“Nope, I don’t,” Joe said.

“I don’t know either,” Hawkins said, flustered. “A shitload for sure.” McLanahan said, “No matter how much there is in a cow, there’s none of it on the ground. It’s like the blood got sucked right out of them.” “Oh, for Christ’s sake . . .” Barnum growled, turning his back to McLanahan. “Don’t start saying things like that.” “So what did it?”

“How in the hell should I know?”

“Maybe some kind of predator?” McLanahan asked. “A bear or a mountain lion or something?”

“There is a bear,” Joe said. “A big grizzly. I saw his tracks this morning. But I can’t believe a bear could do this.”

“That’s all I need,” Barnum said, his voice rising, “a bunch of mutilated cattle and a goddamned grizzly bear on the loose.”

“Not to mention space aliens sucking the blood out of domestic animals in the middle of ranch country,” McLanahan said dramatically. “It’s happened before, you know.”

“Stop that!” Barnum spat. “I mean it.”

Joe battled a smile and addressed Don Hawkins.

“When did you find these cattle?”

Hawkins was slow to answer, and when he did, it was with hesitation. McLanahan’s speculating had rattled him.

“My guy Juan found ’em a-horseback this morning. He called me at the ranch house on his radio.”

“Have you been missing these cattle?”

Hawkins nodded. “We moved most of our herd up to Montana where they have some grass. The drought here forced us to move our cows this fall. We knew we had stragglers in the timber, and Juan’s been looking for them and herding them down.”

“Did you see anything unusual? Hear anything?”

Something washed across Hawkins’s face. Joe waited. He could tell that Hawkins seemed a little embarrassed about something.

“This is stupid,” Hawkins said. “Juan told me a few days ago he was getting dizzy when he rode up here. He thought it was the elevation or something. I thought it was laziness. It’s easier to look for cows on flat ground than in the timber, so I figured he was angling for easier work.”

Joe didn’t say that he thought he knew the feeling. “Dizzy?” McLanahan asked. “Like dizzy how?”

“I don’t know,” Hawkins said, rolling his eyes. “He’s always complaining about something.”

“Anything else?” Joe asked. “Maybe a couple of weeks ago?”

Hawkins shook his head. “We were delivering cattle north to Montana. We weren’t even around.”

“In all your years, have you ever seen cattle that looked like this?” Joe asked.

“Nope,” Hawkins said, his eyes widening. “I once seen a badger make a den in the belly of a dead cow, but I never seen nothing like this.”

Joe said, “Have you heard anything from your neighbors? Have they called about missing cattle?”

Hawkins rubbed his stubbled chin, then gestured north with his hat rim. “That’s Bud Longbrake’s place, and I haven’t heard anything from Bud in a while. We both have a couple of cricks running through that we share in common, and our cows get mixed up in the bottoms sometimes. But like I said, he hasn’t called me about anything.”

Joe felt a twinge at the mention of Bud Longbrake. Marybeth’s mother, Missy, had already moved to his ranch and their wedding was looming.

Hawkins turned his head to the south. “That’s the Timberline Ranch that way,” he said, and a grin broke across his face. “Do you know the Overstreet sisters?”

McLanahan snorted from ten feet away and shook his head. “I know of them.”

“When they aren’t scratching each other’s eyes out or in court suing each other over something, they’re accusing me or rustlers of making off with some of their cows,” Hawkins said. “I bet the sheriff ’s been out here ten times over the years because one of those crazy Overstreet broads called and said they had cattle missing.”

“At least ten,” Barnum sighed. “Never found anything, and the sisters can’t produce records of any missing stock.”

The Timberline Ranch was the one for sale, Joe recalled. No wonder, he thought, if they couldn’t keep track of their cattle.

“So whatever they say is less than ... credible,” Hawkins said.

“If anybody saw a flying saucer up here it would have been them,” McLanahan said. “I’ll guarantee you that.”

“Shut up, please, Kyle,” Barnum said.

As Joe listened to the exchange, another question came to him. “Were there any vehicle tracks up here before the sheriff arrived?”

“Not that I could see.”

“What are you saying, that we messed up the crime scene?” Barnum asked.

“Not saying that at all.”

Even McLanahan glanced over his shoulder at Barnum.

“Well, you better not be,” Barnum said defensively. “This is my investigation and no one has requested you here.”

“The wounds are similar to my moose,” Joe said. “It’s likely the same thing. No predation, either, even though all that beef has just been sitting out here in plain sight.”

“That bothers me,” Hawkins said, shaking his head. “There’s just something real wrong with that. We should have knowed those cows were up here. There should have been big flocks of birds feeding on them. That’s how we usually find dead cows. And not one of these cattle has been fed on, or scattered.”

Joe had received calls from Don Hawkins the previous spring about mountain lions that had killed several calves. Joe had looked for the cats and not found them. When the calls stopped, he knew that Hawkins had found them. Nevertheless, the ranch was prime habitat for lions, coyotes, and black bears.

“Just like my moose,” Joe said. “Nothing will eat the meat. It makes you wonder why.”

“Tell you what,” Barnum said as he lit a cigarette and exhaled a blue cloud of smoke, “you worry about your moose and I’ll worry about Mr. Hawkins’s cows.”

“You’ve got jurisdiction,” said Joe. “You are correct.”

“So I guess you’re planning to talk with Juan then, as well as Bud Longbrake and the Overstreet sisters?”

“I know how to do my job, Pickett.”

Not that you’ve always done it before, Joe thought but didn’t say. But he knew Barnum was practically reading his thoughts.

“I sent tissue samples of the moose to the lab in Laramie,” Joe said, not mentioning where else he had sent them. “I asked that they expedite the analysis. When there are some results I’ll share them with you. You were going to get these cattle tested, weren’t you?”

Barnum’s eyes narrowed and he didn’t answer.

“Who is that?” McLanahan said, pointing down the road at an approaching vehicle.

They waited, watching, as an older pickup bucked and heaved up the washed-out road. Joe recognized her first. He had met her the winter before but couldn’t recall her name.

“Reporter,” Joe said. “Works for the Saddlestring Roundup. She must have been listening in on the scanner.”

“Damn it,” Barnum said, his face darkening. “I do not want this in the newspaper.”

“Too late,” McLanahan said.

“How in the hell are we going to explain this?” Barnum asked the sky. Joe wondered the same thing.

6

We’r e supposed to stay in my room,” Jessica Logue told Lucy Pickett and Hailey Bond. “My dad says we need to stay out of those old buildings out back. He says they’re unsafe for us to play in.”

Lucy and Hailey protested. One of the things the girls loved was exploring the old outbuildings in the thick trees behind the house. It was spooky back there, and dark.

“Can’t we play hide-and-seek?” Lucy asked.

“That’s what my dad said,” Jessica shrugged. “He said he’s afraid the buildings might collapse when we’re playing in them and he says he doesn’t have enough insurance if we get hurt.”

“Oooh,” Hailey said, widening her eyes. “Maybe the roofs will fall in and crush us. And there will be blood and guts all over, like those gophers that get squished on the highway . . .”

“Stop it, Hailey,” Jessica said. Hailey, who was dark-haired with big brown eyes, liked to talk about gore. She also liked scaring people. Lucy and Jessica had made her promise to stop hiding in the worst places out back and refusing to answer their calls. Several times, Lucy and Jessica were on the verge of panic when Hailey would suddenly jump out from a pile of lumber or from behind the door of an ancient shed and shout, “Now you die!” “There’s stuff we can do in here,” Jessica said, trying to make the best of it.

Yes there is, Lucy thought. Jessica had the best collection of cool old clothes she had ever seen. Both Lucy and Jessica loved to play dress-up in the old clothes, and loved applying makeup from an old makeup case Jessica’s mom had given her. Hailey sighed, but went along. Hailey, like Lucy’s older sister, Sheridan, seemed to think that the girl things Lucy and Jessica liked were boring. She would rather play hide-and-seek in the woods and scare the other girls. Just like something Sheridan would do.

The box of old clothes was wonderful, and the three girls plowed through it. There were formal ball gowns, high-heeled shoes, tiaras ( Jessica’s mom had once won the Miss Sunflower beauty contest as a girl in South Dakota), boas, bathrobes, and some men’s clothes.

Hailey unfolded a dark green set of surgeon’s scrubs with the name Logue stenciled over the breast pocket. “Are these your dad’s?” she asked.

“My uncle is a doctor,” Jessica said. “They used to be his.” “Is he still a doctor?”

“I think so,” Jessica said.

“Hey, this one’s pretty!” Lucy squealed, pulling a long, maroon velvet gown from the box. She felt the material and liked the lushness of it. And she liked the white fur trim of the collar. “This would look good on me with those shoes,” she said, pointing at a pair of spike heels.

“I want to go outside,” Hailey said, pouting. “Do you think you could ask your dad?”

“He’s not home yet,” Jessica said, fishing a small black hat with a net out of the bundle and putting it on. “I’ll ask him when he gets home, though.”

The three girls stood shoulder-to-shoulder at the mirror over Jessica’s dresser, their faces inches from the glass while they applied their makeup. They were dressed up; Hailey in the surgeon’s scrubs, Jessica in a white satin dress with fake pearls, Lucy in the velvet dress and spike heels and the Miss Sunflower sash hung across her chest.

Despite their giggling, they could hear an argument coming from downstairs, from the living room at the foot of the stairs.

“What are they fighting about?” Hailey whispered, leaning into mirror to apply the blush to her cheeks.

Jessica shrugged, “I don’t know.”

“Are you going to ask your dad if we can go outside?” “When we’re done. Lucy, you look beautiful.”

Lucy kissed at herself in the mirror, and the other girls laughed. Her lips were bright red with lipstick, and her eyelids were covered in blue shadow.

“Will your mom get mad if I wear her Miss Sunflower banner?” “I don’t think so. And it’s called a sash.”

Lucy was disconcerted by the loud voices from downstairs. It wasn’t like her parents never had an argument—they certainly did. There were times at dinner when she knew there had been a disagreement, by the silence, the lack of small talk, or the extra helping of politeness when one of them asked for the salt. But she hardly even heard them raise their voices to each other, even behind closed doors. Their arguments, whenever they occurred, happened someplace else or when no one else was home. Hearing the voices from downstairs, she thought it was better to argue away from the children.

They stood at Jessica’s upstairs window, looking, Lucy thought, like pretty hot young women. They had applied perfume—overdone it, actually— and the smell was overpowering. They were watching as two dark, late-model sedans pulled up the driveway and stopped near the front porch. “Who are those people?” Hailey asked, as both cars stopped and the driver-side doors opened. Two older women emerged from their separate vehicles. Each woman was tall, angular, and wearing a print dress that was out-of-date as well as out of season, Lucy thought. The women looked similar but different. Like sisters, maybe.

“I think their name is Overcast,” Jessica said. “Something like that.” “Are they sisters?” Lucy asked.

“Yes.”

“So they’re not married to anyone?” “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Look how they pretend the other one isn’t there,” Hailey said. “Isn’t that weird?”

Lucy had noticed. The two women had emerged from their cars, shut the doors, and proceeded to the front door without even acknowledging each other. They were now out of sight below, under the roof of the portico. “Overstreet,” Jessica said. “Now I remember their names. They own a ranch or something.”

“Both of them?” Lucy asked. “Without husbands?”

“I think so,” Jessica said. “I met them a couple of times but I don’t like them.”

“Why not?” Lucy asked.

Jessica shuddered. “They’re just icky. And they smell bad.”

Hailey laughed nervously. “Maybe now is a good time to ask about playing outside.”

The three girls looked at each other, knowing Hailey was right. There was no better time to ask parents to do something than when guests distracted them.

Lucy was the second down the stairs, after Jessica. There was a discussion going on between the Overstreet sisters and Jessica’s parents.

Jessica’s dad said, “Yes, I heard about those cows today.”

“And you know we’ve been losing stock that we can’t account for,” one of the sisters said.

“What will this do to the sale?” the other sister asked.

“I don’t know,” Jessica’s dad said. “But we may want to consider lowering the price to keep it attractive.”

“I knew you would say that.” “We’re against that, you know.”

“It’s just that . . .”

“Cam, we have visitors,” Jessica’s mother said, interrupting him.

Lucy watched as Mr. Logue and the Overstreet sisters paused and looked up toward the stairs.

“My, my,” one of the sisters said. “Look at them.”

Despite their dresses, the women looked hard, Lucy thought. There was no warmth in their stares. One of the sisters had blue eyes and the other green. Their eyes looked like old jewelry.

“They look like little tarts,” the other sister said, and received a glare from Jessica’s mom.

“What do you girls want?” Jessica’s dad asked.

“Can we play outside?” Jessica asked. “In the back?”

“Dressed like that?” the older Overstreet sister asked, smiling with her mouth only.

“We can change,” Jessica said weakly.

Jessica’s dad gestured toward Hailey. “Didn’t we agree to throw out those old clothes?” He looked upset, Lucy thought.

“It’s okay, girls,” Jessica’s mom said, standing up, not addressing Mr. Logue’s question. “You can go out back.”

Mr. Logue shot her a look, but didn’t intervene. The three girls fluttered down the stairs and across the foyer and out the back door.

“That worked,” Hailey said as soon as the door slammed behind them. “Did you smell them?” Jessica asked.

“I smelled something,” Lucy said. But even though they were outside and could play hide-and-seek, she wished she were home.

7

The next evening, after the dinner dishes were cleared, Joe entered his small office near the mudroom and shut the door. The office was cramped and poorly heated. It consisted of a metal government-surplus desk, two four-drawer filing cabinets, and bookshelves crammed with books of statutes, biology and range-management texts, the complete John McPhee collection, and spiral notebooks of department directives. A set of antlers from the first five-point buck he had ever shot hung from the wall behind him. Caps, hats, binoculars, and his gray, sweat-stained Stetson covered the tines. As he clicked on his desk lamp and booted up his computer, he glanced at the front page of the weekly Saddlestring Roundup that was delivered that morning.

THEY ’RE BAAAACK . . .mutilate d cattle discovered in county a bull moose another victim?

The photo on the front page that accompanied the article showed the carcasses on the Hawkins Ranch, with Sheriff Barnum standing in the middle of them. The story contained quotes from Don Hawkins, the sheriff, Deputy McLanahan, and Joe. Although the story was accurate, Joe winced while he read it. He could imagine Barnum doing the same. There was a disagreeable sense of unreality about it, he thought. It was the kind of subject matter he ignored with contempt when he saw something similar on the front of a supermarket tabloid.

At least a dozen cattle and a bull moose have been found recently in the county, bearing mutilations similar to those reported in the mid-1970s, according to Twelve Sleep County Sheriff O. R. “Bud” Barnum . . .

The article summarized the scene at the ranch, describing the dead cattle as “gruesome and unearthly” and calling the mutilations “inexplicable” before jumping to inside pages.

Joe read on:

. . . In the mid-1970s, a rash of cattle mutilations were reported throughout the Mountain West, primarily in Montana, Wyoming, and Utah.

Cattle, as well as sheep and some domestic livestock, were reported dead, with genitals and other organs missing. In most of the documented incidents, skin had been removed from the faces of the victims as well as eyes, tongues, ears, and glands. Blood was reportedly drained from the bodies . . .

. . . Speculation as to the cause of the deaths ranged from government experiments to cults, as well as extraterrestrial visitations. Despite local investigations, no definitive cause was ever determined, although an FBI report issued in 1978 seemed to conclude that the deaths were natural and that the “mutilations” were a result of predation and decomposition. A review of county records revealed that the cattle mutilations seemed to have ceased after the initial reports, and there is no record of additional incidents . . .

The reporter had interviewed several area ranchers who had reported cattle mutilations thirty years earlier, as well as the long-retired county coroner who recalled the cases but couldn’t locate his files on them. Joe noted the similarities with a rising feeling of unease. The mutilations indeed sounded similar. The removal of genitals and skin, the bloating, no evidence of predation, the lack of a logical conclusion. Several cattle, it had been reported, were found in what looked like craters of four or five inches in depth, making it appear as though they had been dropped from the sky. One blatant similarity was the precision of the cuts, which seemed to have been made by an extremely sharp and very precise instrument.

. . . “There is nothing to fear,” Sheriff Barnum cautioned. “There could be an easy explanation for this.”

When pressed, Barnum declined further comment.

“We don’t want the good citizens of this county gathering up their pets and searching the skies for aliens,” said Sheriff ’s Deputy Kyle McLanahan.

Joe smiled despite himself. He bet Barnum just loved that quote.

Launching his e-mail program, Joe scanned the incoming messages. Nothing yet from the laboratory in Laramie regarding the samples he had sent them.

One e-mail was from his district supervisor, Trey Crump, in Cody. The subject line said “???” He opened it.

“What in the hell is going on with these cows and a moose?” Crump asked. “And what is it with you and dead cows?”

Joe paused before responding. He ignored Crump’s jibe about dead cows. Two years before, an environmental terrorist, his wife, and another man were killed by cows strapped wtih explosives. Joe had inadvertently been involved in the case. In regard to Crump’s initial question, Joe didn’t want to speculate.

“It’s true,” he typed. “Tissue samples have been sent to Laramie for analysis. I’m keeping an eye on any future incidents, especially with the game population.”

Joe opened his browser, went to the Web site for the Roundup, and copied the link for the mutilation story to his e-mail, so Trey could read it for himself.

“There is probably an explanation,” Joe wrote. “I haven’t figured it out yet but I will try.”

He wrote that he had found massive bear tracks near the moose. “Could this be our rogue grizzly?”

Then he reread his e-mail, deleted the last line, and sent it.

Just as Joe was about to exit his e-mail program, a large file appeared in his inbox, and he waited as it slowly loaded. He recognized the return address as Dave Avery’s. Since the time years before, when samples he had sent for analysis had been “lost” at headquarters, Joe had never regained complete trust in the agency bureaucracy. So sometimes he chose to seek two opinions, one from the lab in Laramie and the other from Dave Avery, an old college roommate, who was now chief wildlife biologist for the Montana Fish and Game Department in Helena. Joe had been best man at Avery’s first two weddings, but had begged off when asked the third time last summer, claiming he might be bad luck.

There was no subject line, and no text, only six JPEG photos attached to the e-mail. Joe leaned back and waited for them to open, annoyed as always at his low-speed connection.

He scrolled down through the photos and felt the hair rise on the back of his neck.

The photos were of mutilated cattle in a meadow. He recognized the wounds, the bloated bellies, the madly grinning skulls. Joe wondered how Dave could have gotten a hold of these photos so quickly, but then Joe noticed something.

The sky in the top right corner of the second photo was dark and leaden. In the fourth photo, a skiff of snow could be seen in the foreground. The grass was yellowed, almost gray. These photos had been taken in winter. And they had been taken somewhere else.

Breaking the online connection so he could use the telephone, Joe found Dave Avery’s contact details and punched the numbers. His friend answered on the third ring.

“Avery.”

“Dave, this is Joe Pickett.”

“Joe! How in the hell are you?” “Fine.”

“I thought you’d be calling.”

“Yup,” Joe said, scrolling again through the photos on the screen. “I’m looking at these shots of mutilated cattle and wondering where they were taken.”

“Gee, Joe, ever heard of small talk? Like how am I doing these days, or how is the weather in Helena?”

Joe sighed. “So, Dave, how are you doing? What’s the weather like in Helena?”

“They were all taken outside of Conrad, Montana,” Avery answered, “last January. Do you know where Conrad is?”

“Nope.”

“Conrad and Dupeyer. Pondera County. Northwestern part of the state. East of Great Falls.”

“Okay . . .”

“Sixteen of ’em, from July through January of this year,” Avery said. “Maybe eight more, but we couldn’t be sure because the bodies were too old. So maybe two dozen cattle in all. They were found in groups of four to six, although there were a couple loners. No tracks, no reports of vehicles or lights in the area. Unfortunately, no one ever brought in a fresh one. All of the carcasses were bloated and old.”

“Any predation?”

There was a long pause, then “No.” “Was the blood drained out of them?”

“No. It just looks like that. Natural coagulation makes it look like they’re bloodless. Once you run some tests you’ll find that out.”

“Then you got the samples I sent you,” Joe said. “Got ’em at the lab.”

Joe waited. He could hear a Chris LeDoux CD playing somewhere in the background, and somebody—he guessed Dave’s new wife—singing along.

“And?” Joe finally asked.

“I haven’t dug into them yet, Joe, but I know what I’ll find.” “What’s that?”

“A whole lot of nothing,” Avery said. “Well, one thing, I guess, but I’m not sure it’s significant. Believe me, we’ve been analyzing tissue samples up here for nine months. My freezer’s full of cow heads and cored rectums in paper bags.”

“I hadn’t heard a single thing about cattle mutilations up there,” Joe confessed.

“I’m not that surprised,” Avery said. “Conrad’s pretty remote, even in Montana. Besides, they’re just cows.”

Joe smiled at that. He remembered a paper Avery had written in college, proposing that ninety percent of the cattle in the West be removed and replaced with bison. The paper had not been very well received at the University of Wyoming, home of the Wyoming Cowboys.

“Even so,” Avery continued, his voice rising with annoyance, “I got calls from kooks all over the place. The newspaper stories ran in the Great Falls Tribune, so of course they showed up on the Internet, and crazies from all over who are into this kind of thing took an interest. They’re like train buffs, Joe. You never know they’re even out there living among us normal people until some rare train comes through town and they rush the tracks.”

“What about wildlife?” Joe asked. “I found a bull moose mutilated in the same way.”

“Hmmm, no shit?”

“The samples I sent were from the moose.”

There was a pause. “I’ll take a look tomorrow,” Avery said in a serious tone.

“So there weren’t any wildlife deaths reported?” Joe asked again. He sensed that Avery had something to say but was holding back.

“Actually, there were a couple of reports, but they weren’t very credible.” “Who made them?” Joe asked.

Avery sighed. “Joe, there was a guy up here, a self-described expert in the paranormal. He just showed up out of the blue with a kind of laboratory-on-wheels. It’s a retrofitted RV with all kinds of equipment and shit inside. He claimed to represent some foundation somewhere in Arizona or New Mexico that funds him to do research. His name is Cleve Garrett”—Avery spat the name out as if it were a curse word—“and he practically camped on top of me all last summer. He’s got all kinds of theories about how these are alien abductions and how I’m engaged in a governmental conspiracy to keep it all quiet. The fucking dweeb. The moron.”

“So you don’t like him much?” Joe asked facetiously. “Hah!”

“Is he the one who reported the wildlife deaths?”

Joe heard Avery take a swallow of something before answering. “He claimed there were hundreds of cases of wildlife mutilations. He said they were all over the place—on the sides of highways, in the timber, all over. He said the reason we didn’t know about them was because we never thought to look. He said 25 percent of the deer killed on the highway were actually mutilated and dumped, but no one cared to notice. He loves talking to reporters and stirring this stuff up.”

Joe thought about that, his mind racing. How many dead deer, elk, moose, fox, antelope bordered the highways? Hundreds, perhaps thousands. Who would think to examine them? They were roadkill.

“He brought in a mule deer carcass once,” Avery said. “And yes, it did look like it had been cut on. But the body was too old to determine anything conclusive. Plus, I didn’t trust the guy not to have done it himself.”

“Is he still up there?” Joe asked.

“You know, I don’t think so,” Avery said. “I haven’t seen him in quite a while. I heard he had a following of like-minded kooks and had taken up with some young girl. He probably took her back to wherever he came from so he could practice alien probes on her or something.”

Joe didn’t know what to ask next. Then he recalled something Avery had said earlier.

“Dave, you said there was something about the tissue samples you looked at?”

“Oh, yeah. But like I said, don’t put too much significance in it.” “Yes?”

“One thing we found in the cattle that were the freshest—I think they had been dead a week or so—was an above-normal level of a compound called oxindole. Ever heard of it?”

“It sounds vaguely familiar,” Joe said, searching his memory.

“Probably from biology class. Oxindole is a natural chemical that can have a sedative effect. Cattle release it within their own bodies under stress. We found excessive amounts in the tissue samples, especially in the brains and in the eyeballs that hadn’t been removed already.”

“So it probably came from the cow itself ?” Joe asked, confused. “Well, probably, yes,” Avery said. Unconvincingly, Joe thought.

“The older cows, the ones that had been dead longer, did you find oxindole in them?”

“Some. But we think it dissipates with age.” “So why even mention it?”

“Because there was so damned much of it,” Avery sighed. “Maybe enough to literally sedate the cow, to knock it out. Much more than we know that a cow is capable of producing.”

Joe was silent.

“Look, you’ve got to keep it in perspective,” Avery cautioned. “We don’t know very much about the compound. We don’t know, for example, if maybe it doesn’t become concentrated, postmortem, in certain organs, and those were the organs we just happened to test. The compound may intensify due to a traumatic or stressful death, or it could be that the presence of it is triggered by a virus or something. We’re still researching it, but quite frankly we aren’t getting anywhere. We have real work to do up here, as you know. I’ve got a breakout of pinkeye in our mountain sheep population right now. So we can’t be spending too much time or energy on dead cows, especially since the mutilations seem to have stopped.”

“They stopped in Montana, anyway,” Joe said.

“Now you’ve got ’em,” Avery said, his voice heavy. “Maybe you’ll get my friend Cleve Garrett as well.”

Joe grunted. “I’m still a little surprised that this is the first I’ve heard of it. I’d think those ranchers would be demanding some kind of action.”

Avery laughed, which Joe thought was an odd response. “I don’t get it,” Joe said, annoyed.

“At first, they wanted to call in the National Guard,” Avery said. “A couple of ’em were on the phone to the governor right away. Then they realized how it looked.”

“What do you mean?”

“Cattle prices were at record lows at the time. Most of these ranchers barely scrape by as it is. They’re one bank payment away from losing their ranches. So they’re either trying to sell their spreads for big bucks to Hollywood celebrities, or selling their beef for a few pennies in profit. If word got out that the cattle are dying unnatural deaths, those landowners are shit out of luck. When they realized that, they pressured the governor not to do anything.”

“So, Dave, can I ask you something?” “Shoot.”

“What do you think this is? Not a scientific explanation, or your professional opinion. What does your gut tell you?”

Joe heard Avery take another sip of his drink. He heard another Chris LeDoux rodeo song.

“Joe, I don’t know what the fuck it is,” Avery said, his voice dropping, “but for a while there I was scared as hell.”

Joe asked Avery to contact him if he found anything unusual in the tissue samples. They talked for a few moments about game-management issues, and Avery reported what was happening in Montana with whirling disease in the rivers. Joe told Avery about confirmed findings of chronic wasting disease in mule deer in southern Wyoming. They agreed to keep in better touch.

Then Joe cradled the telephone and sat back.

He was still sitting there when Marybeth rapped on the door and opened it. She was in her nightgown; the short, black one he liked.

“Are you coming to bed?” she asked.

Joe looked at his wristwatch, surprised to see that it was 11:30. “I didn’t kiss the girls good night,” he said, alarmed.

“What have you been doing in here?” “Work. I talked to Dave Avery.” Marybeth smiled, rolling her eyes.

“I remember Dave being sober on his wedding day,” she said. “I realized I didn’t even know him. He was drunk almost all of college.”

“He’s a good biologist, though,” Joe said, “and a good friend.” “What did he say about the moose?”

Joe looked away, then back. “We may have a problem.” “What do you mean?”

“Are the horses in the barn or in the corral tonight?” Joe asked. Marybeth frowned. “They’re in the corral, why?”

“I think we need to start putting them in the barn at night,” Joe said, standing up and clamping on his hat.

8

Sheridan pickett stepped out of the shadowed gnarl of river-bottom cottonwoods. She looked up and searched the dull, gray sky in silence until she saw what she was looking for. She felt a small shiver of excitement, and dread. They were up there, all right.

As she had been instructed, she went no farther into the clearing. Behind her, on the other side of the thick old trees, was the Twelve Sleep River. The river was placid and low, the water in it clear and nearly still this late in the season. A rusted metal bridge spanned the river but was blocked off to vehicles, because it was old and unsafe. She had walked across it a half hour before, trying not to look down at the gaps between the wood planks where she could see the water. Her footfalls on the bridge seemed unnaturally loud as they crossed. Her breath came in puffs of condensation. It was a cold fall day, and the clouds that had pulled a blind over the wide-open sky looked like they could bring rain or even snow.

She was dressed warmly in jeans and her mother’s old, canvas barn coat with the corduroy collar and too-long sleeves. Her dad had insisted that she wear a pullover blaze-orange vest, since it was hunting season, and she did so, even though she felt a little like a human highway cone. A black headband held back her blond hair and had a dual use if she needed to pull it over her ears to keep them warm.

She waited, as she had been told to do. Before her was a clearing bordered by skeletal dark trees. Tall, khaki-colored grass furred the clearing, broken up by solitary sagebrush and a few young river cottonwoods. A lone, deep green pine—a perfect-sized Christmas tree, she thought— added the only real color. The tree was as out of place as she was, she thought. The clearing was eerily still. She felt a little scared.

The night before, she had the dream again. It was the same as before, with the mist pouring across the forest like water released from a small dam. But the dream continued on. This time, the mist stopped at the forest edge and proceeded no farther. There was something out there that stopped it, made it cautious. A standoff was taking place, but in the dream she couldn’t see what opposed the advance of the mist. Whatever it was had a solid presence, and it had traveled a long way to get there to mount a challenge. This time, she didn’t tell her dad about the dream.

After nearly a year of apprenticeship in falconry, which consisted mainly of the care and feeding of Nate Romanowski’s two peregrine falcons, and his almost whispered lectures concerning the philosophy of falconry, this was a special lesson. For the first time, Nate had brought her hunting. Hunting with falcons, Nate had told her, was a whole different thing than the kind of hunting she might be familiar with from her father, the game warden. In this instance the agents of the kill weren’t rifles or shotguns, but the birds themselves. Humans were there to flush out the prey like bird dogs, so the falcons could rocket down from the sky and kill what had been scared out into the open. Nate had told her that many times she wouldn’t even see the prey she had flushed until the falcon swept down and hit it.

“This is how mankind conceived of an air force,” Nate had said. “This is where it all started, the idea of striking targets from the air.”

“What are you talking about?” Sheridan had asked.

“Fire from the sky. Hell from the heavens,” Nate had said. “This is where it all began.”

“Huh?”

The lessons took place after school, unless she had basketball or choir practice or Nate was out of town. Her mom or dad would drive her out to Nate Romanowski’s cabin near the river, and Nate took her home afterward and often stayed for dinner. Her mom and dad seemed to have a special relationship with Nate, although they never really talked about it with her. They seemed to trust Nate, or they never would have okayed the lessons. After all, Nate was unmarried and solitary, and Sheridan was twelve. She knew there was something different about Nate, something serious. He was not like anybody she had ever met, certainly not like anyone her parents hung around with, like the Logues.

Nevertheless, her dad seemed oddly comfortable with Nate, like they shared some kind of old experience together, while at the same time she saw her father eyeing Nate coolly when he thought no one was looking. It was as if he were trying to decide something. Her mother, on the other hand, made special meals on Fridays, including salads and desserts. While this hadn’t meant much at first, it did now, since her mom had become so busy with her new business that regular sit-down dinners had become more infrequent. Sheridan had noticed an expression on her mother’s face at times when Nate was at their table. It was a look Sheridan had rarely seen before. It was a kind of a glow, the kind of look her mother sometimes had when she and Dad were going out somewhere—dinner or a movie—at night. The look reminded Sheridan just how attractive her mother was to some men. The expression didn’t last long but it made Sheridan uncomfortable and made her want to act out. Sometimes, Sheridan knew, she acted like a brat at the table when this happened, like picking on Lucy or demanding a second helping of something that was no longer there. She didn’t know why she did this, other than to divert attention. But there was something about the way her mom looked at Nate.Maybe that was why her dad acted so differently when Nate was around. There was something adult going on, Sheridan knew, but she wasn’t sure what it was. But she didn’t want to ask about it, or say anything. She didn’t want to give them a reason to question the propriety of the falconry lessons.

Not that the lessons were anything special so far. The first few months it seemed like all she did with the falcons was clean the mews where they lived and help feed them. The feeding was kind of gross, with the way Nate pulled freshly killed rabbits and pigeons apart to give to the birds. She was fascinated by the way the falcons ate—they finished off not only the flesh but the fur, feathers, and bone—but wondered when they would ever actually do some falconry. Nate had shown her the tools of the sport, such as leather hoods, jesses (strips of leather attached to their talons so he could hold them upright in his hand without them flying away), and lures made of duck wings or leather, which could be swung in a circle by a string to draw the birds’ interest. He had given her old books to read about the ancient sport, mostly written by dead Scotsmen. Some of the books had old black-and-white photos in them. What got Sheridan, though, was that in the old photos the only thing that looked authentic and real were the birds themselves. The falconers in the pictures were from another age. The men (she had yet to see a photo of a woman falconer) wore silly hats with short brims, and baggy knee-length pants, and they were smoking huge, drooping pipes that made her want to laugh out loud. They reminded her of Sherlock Holmes, except fatter. Luckily, Nate looked nothing like that.

She stood dutifully still, as Nate had instructed, and waited for him to break from the opposite tree line as he had said he would. He said he would come out once the birds had been successfully released to the sky and after they had climbed to the right altitude.

It had been six days since the mutilated cattle had been discovered on the Hawkins Ranch, and Sheridan noticed how something that had been a family thing—the dead moose in the meadow—had now become the subject of discussion not only in town but also in school. Her sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Morris, had even asked her to remain in her desk after school so he could ask her about it. Since she had thought his request was related to a history research paper she had practically copied off of the Internet, she had been relieved to find out he was only interested in the moose and the cows.

Sheridan had thought it was cool that her teachers asked her about things like this; things that her dad was in the middle of. She told Mr. Morris about finding the moose, and what the animal looked like. He asked about the cows, and she was coy, as if she knew more than she was telling, which she didn’t. She wished she had paid more attention to her mom and dad when they had been discussing it at dinner, but she didn’t say anything to Mr. Morris about that.

She heard the sharp snap of branches breaking, and looked around. Nate Romanowski emerged from the dense trees on the other side of the opening. Sheridan studied him. Nate’s movements were liquid and rangy and had a cautious, feline quality about them, as if he were ready to pounce on something or somebody in an instant if he had to. He was tall, with wide shoulders, and had a long, blond ponytail. His sharp, green eyes engaged hers. She had never encountered a stare like Nate’s. He was strange in that when he looked at her, his eyes never wavered. He was so direct. Sometimes, he unnerved her with his stare and she looked away. She had learned that he meant nothing by it. That was just the way he was.

For some reason, he was slowly shaking his head.

“Do you want me to go?” she asked, thinking that perhaps she had done something wrong.

“No.”

She noticed that he had tilted his face skyward. She followed and looked up. As she watched, the once-distant black specks were becoming more pronounced. The two peregrines he had released where diving back down. “Why are they coming down?” Sheridan asked, thinking—hoping—

that the birds were diving toward unseen prey.

Nate shrugged. “I don’t know.” “Did I do anything wrong?”

Nate looked across the clearing at Sheridan. His voice dropped apologetically. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You were perfect.”

“Then why are they coming down?” Nate took another step into the clearing.

Nate said, “I’ve never seen this happen before.” “You haven’t?”

“No,” he said so softly that she barely heard him. “I’ve had them take off when they saw a rabbit or something in a different clearing, or I’ve had birds fly away forever. But I’ve never seen peregrines just take themselves out of the hunt altogether.”

The falcons dropped as if they were about to strike targets—wings tucked, talons out and balled—but they suddenly flared at treetop level. She could hear the urgent whispering sound as their wings shot out and caught the air to slow them down. Seconds later, both birds flapped noisily and their feet outstretched before descending into the tall grass. She watched as Nate approached them. When he bent and lowered his thick, leather welder’s glove, the birds refused to mount it, and stayed hunkered down in the grass.

Nate said, “This is not normal.”

“Why don’t they come to the fist?” Sheridan asked.

“I don’t know,” Nate said. “It’s like they’re afraid to show themselves.” Sheridan walked slowly across the opening, toward where the birds had landed.

“Feel it?” Nate asked, his eyes narrowed. “There’s something in the air. Low pressure or something.”

Sheridan stopped again. Her heart was beating fast, and she did feel it, although she couldn’t describe what it was. It was like pressure being applied from above, from the sky. In a fog, she watched Nate bend over and physically place one of the peregrines on his fist. Usually, they were eager to hop up on it. He straightened up with the falcon on his arm, only to have the bird release its grip and drop to the side. The leather jesses that were tied to its talons were grasped in his fist, and the bird flopped upside down, shrieking and flapping violently. Sheridan felt a puff of air from them as the falcon beat its wings.

“Shit,” Nate cursed, lowering the bird to the ground. “He’s going to hurt himself.”

“Be careful with him.”

“I will, and sorry about saying shit.” “It’s okay.”

Nate met her eyes, then slowly looked up at the sky.

Sheridan also looked up, but could see nothing in the clouds. She felt the pressure on her face, a kind of gravity pull on her skin as if she were on a fast ride at the county fair.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Nate said, his voice thin. “It’s like there is something up there the birds are afraid of. They refuse to fly.”

9

An hour later and twenty miles away, a man named Tuff Montegue clucked his tongue to get his horse moving and pointed the gelding north, toward the timber. It was nearly dusk, and Tuff had the blues. He sang “Night Riders’ Lament,” his favorite cowboy song:

While I was out a-ridin’

The graveyard shift midnight till dawn, The moon was as bright as a reading light For a letter from an old friend back home. . . .

Despite his current profession, which was ranch hand for the Longbrake Ranch, Tuff despised riding horses. He had nothing against them personally, and enjoyed singing and listening to songs about them, but he preferred tooling around in a ranch pickup. Nevertheless, he was a cowboy. A real one. In his mid-fifties, he looked the part, because he was the real number. Droopy mustache that curled to jawline, sharp nose, weathered face, sweat-stained Gus McCrae hat, Wranglers that bunched on his boottops and stayed up as if by a trick of magic over his nonexistent butt.

He liked to tell people, especially tourists who bought him a whiskey in the Stockman’s Bar, that he was the only bona-fide cowboy left in the Bighorns that spoke American. It was sort of true, since most of the ranchers couldn’t find cowboys anymore except from Mexico, South America, or wannabes from former East Germany and the Czech Republic. Even when he left the profession, as he often did, he found himself coming back. Between stints at five different ranches in Park, Teton, and Twelve Sleep Counties, Tuff had been a satellite-dish salesman, a mechanic, a surveyor’s assistant, a cellular-phone customer-service representative, and a mountain man in a chuck-wagon dinner theater in Jackson Hole, where his job, every night, was to ride a horse into the tent where the tourists were and select a “wife” and toss her over his shoulder. This had resulted in a back injury when he stupidly selected a young mother the size of a heifer (she was one of those women who looked slim sitting down but had beer-keg thighs hidden under the table) and he had crashed beneath her weight. The injury had been a stroke of luck, because up until recently he had collected disability payments and didn’t have to ride horses or do much of anything except occupy a barstool at the Stockman’s. But the damned chuck-wagon dinner show, owned by a large family of Mormons, was disputing his injury. Apparently one of the owners had reported that he had seen him riding a mechanical bull in a saloon in Cody. Which was sort of true also, although Tuff wanted to know what a good Mormon had been doing in a bar in the first place. Until the matter was resolved, he had to once again seek employment.

But that was only part of the reason why Tuff had the blues. Another big contributing factor was that it was Friday night and he was stuck on the ranch and couldn’t go into town. Since his DUI arrest the previous week—his third in two years—his driving privileges had been revoked. The only other Longbrake employee, a Mexican national named Eduardo, was laid up in the bunkhouse with a broken leg from falling off a damned horse. Therefore, Tuff had no ride. That, and the fact that Bud Longbrake, the peckerhead, followed the letter of the law and refused to let Tuff use a ranch vehicle even within the ranch itself, where no law enforcement would ever see him. Tuff knew that if Bud Longbrake wanted to make a case about allowing him to drive only on his private roads, Sheriff Barnum and the highway patrol wouldn’t object. But Bud Longbrake, who seemed to care a hell of a lot more about the needs and wants of his fiancée, Missy, than the operation of his own place, had not made meeting with the sheriff a priority.

Shit.

Despite his predicament, Tuff smiled to himself. The weekend before had been something. It had almost been worth the DUI on the way home. The barmaid at the Stockman’s, Evelyn Wolters, had set up a threesome after the bar closed. Tuff, Evelyn, and Jim Beam in one bed. What a night that had been. He wished he could remember certain parts of it more clearly. It had been at her apartment, a studio over the VFW, within walking distance of the Stockman’s. Evelyn had been doing something besides alcohol, but he wasn’t sure what. Whatever it was, it was fine by him, because she had been a tigress. She was no looker—his age, skinny legs that were just skinny, not shapely, pendulous breasts that hung down and swung back and forth like oranges in tube socks—but she had been wild. It had been her idea to use the neck of the bottle that way once it was empty.

He had left Evelyn promising to be back in a week, and she had told him she was already looking forward to it. Tuff had said he was, too, but the truth was he was tired and drunk as hell. It would be several days before he had his energy, and his urges, back. He kept wondering if some of the things he recalled she had done—and let him do to her—were more a result of his delirium and fantasy than what had actually taken place. But the more he thought about it, and he thought about it often, the more he convinced himself that the acts had actually happened. It was the first time he had done some of those things since he’d been on shore leave in the navy. And then he had to pay for them. Evelyn, though, seemed to enjoy it. Which made him think: woo-hoo!

But now he was literally grounded. He had called and left messages for her at the bar, but she hadn’t returned them. No doubt she had heard about the DUI. It had been in the Saddlestring Roundup, that one with the cattle mutilations in it. He had hoped that maybe with all of the hullabaloo about the dead cows she had missed the weekly police-blotter. Unfortunately, the police report was usually the only thing in the paper everybody read. And she was probably at the Stockman’s now, damn it, targeting another lone drinker. Giving him a couple of whiskeys on the house, like she had done with him. Then, when the bar closed at two, she would grab his hand and a fifth of Jim Beam and take him up the street to her apartment. It should have been him, Tuff thought. He leaned forward in his saddle and hit his horse between his ears so hard that his hand stung. The gelding crow-hopped, but Tuff was prepared for it and had a good hold on the saddle horn. The horse recovered and resumed slow-walking to the dark timber, exhibiting no malice toward its abusive rider. Which was another reason Tuff disliked horses. They were stupid.

So, after a week of herding the cattle down from the mountains into the holding pens near the ranch, they had counted and come up with ten missing cows. Ever since the cattle mutilations had been reported on the Hawkins Place, Bud Longbrake had been acting paranoid. He ordered Tuff and Eduardo to ride the timber and see what they could find or spook out. Eduardo had found six strays the day before, prior to falling off of his horse. Tuff had found none. Bud had put the screws to Tuff, telling him that he wasn’t holding up his end.

“I want those cows found, Tuff,” Bud had said, leaning over the breakfast table with his palms flat on the surface. “Dead or alive.”

Tuff had said, Then go find ’em yourself, you pussy-whipped phony!

No, he hadn’t said that. But he had thought that. And someday, when he retold the story in the Stockman’s Bar, that was how it would be recalled.

Tuff wished he had more light, but the sun was now behind the mountains. He blamed the horse for delaying him. The gelding had a smooth ride, but was the damned slowest walking horse he had ever ridden. He could have walked up the draw faster his own self, he thought. And if he could have taken one of the ATVs, he would have been goddamned back by now and watching television in the bunkhouse with Eduardo.

Shit.

Tuff reached back on the saddle and unbuckled a saddlebag that was stiff with age. His fingers closed around the smooth, cool neck of a fifth of Jim Beam. He had his memories of Evelyn Wolters, and this brought them back. He cracked the top and drank straight from the bottle. It was harsh, but tongues of familiar fire spread through his chest and belly. Sometimes, he thought, his memories—and what he could do with them—were almost better than the real thing. But he needed that original foundation before he could embellish them to his liking.

He rode up the mountain slowly. He stared in resentment at the back of the gelding’s head, settling on the bony protrusion between the horse’s ears. He fired mental curses at the spot, hoping some would soak through into the gelding’s brain. Not for the first time, he wondered what a fencing tool would do to the skull of a horse.

He rode the fence line, just like the song. The reins were in his left hand and the bottle was in his right. It was turning into a cold night. There was a hint of moisture in the air—probably brought with the cloud cover—that accentuated the smell of dry, dust-covered sage leading up into sharp pine. He smelled his own breath. Not pretty.

The gelding was breathing hard as he climbed a rocky hill toward a stand of aspen trees. Not that the horse was moving any faster—he had only one speed, which was similar to four-wheel drive low—and Tuff was just about ready to call it a night. With no stars or moon, he would not be able to see whether there were strays on this saddle slope or not. And damned if he would use his flashlight. He wasn’t that dedicated.

He wished he could find the missing cows, though, to get Bud Longbrake off of his back.

The aspens stood out from the dark timber that climbed up the mountain into the sky. The aspen leaves had turned already, and were in that stage between yellow-red and falling off. The aspens soaked up what little light there still was, making the stand look like a tan brushstroke on the huge, dark landscape.

“Whoa.”

Tuff stopped the gelding and got his bearings. He slid one boot out of the stirrup so he could twist in the saddle and look around. It was easy to get lost up here, he had learned. But he wasn’t. Far below were the crystalclear blue lights of the ranch yard. Twenty-five miles farther, the lights of the town of Saddlestring shimmered in wavering rows.

He turned back, looking at the aspens. He saw movement in the trees. Or was it a drunken illusion? Tuff wiped his eyes with his sleeve and looked again. This had happened before, him seeing things while he was drinking. But this time there was something authentic about it, something that made his chest clutch. Movement again. Something, or somebody, moved from one tree to another. The form was thicker than the tree trunks, but once hidden it seemed to meld into the darkness. He heard a twig snap, and his horse, who suddenly pricked his ears, confirmed the sound.

He let his breath out slowly. Certainly, it was deer or elk. But game animals didn’t hide, they ran. Under him, his horse started wuffing, emitting a deep, staccato, coughing sound. He feared that sound—all horsemen feared that sound—because it meant trouble was imminent. His horse, his slow-moving, docile horse, was about to throw off hundreds of years of domesticity and become a wild animal again.

Suddenly, the gelding crow-hopped, nearly unsaddling Tuff. His balance was goofy because of his position and the bourbon.

“What in the hell is wrong with you?” he growled, taking an empty swing at the gelding’s ear with the flat of his hand.

Unlike before, the horse didn’t shrug off his action. In fact, the horse began backpedaling down the slope in a panic.

“Damn you, what’s the problem?” he shouted. The gelding was backtracking down the mountain much faster than he had walked up. Tuff tried to turn him, to face him away from whatever had spooked him in the aspens. Sloshing bourbon on his bare hand, Tuff tried to grasp the reins near the bit in the gelding’s mouth to jerk him around hard. The bourbon splashed out of the bottle and into the gelding’s eye, igniting the horse and making him explode into a wild, tight spin.

Tuff clamped down with his thighs and held on. His hat flew off. He let the bottle drop—not something he wanted to do—and found himself knocked forward in the saddle, hugging the gelding’s neck. He had lost the reins, and several things flashed through his mind. With the reins down, the lunatic horse could inadvertently step on them as he spun and jerk both of them to the ground, breaking their necks. He thought of his broken bottle of Jim Beam. He imagined what he must look like, spiraling down a rocky slope in the dark, hugging the neck of a horse. He thought of how unbelievably strong and powerful a horse—a 1,000-pound animal— was when fully charged, like now.

Even as he spun, faster and harder than he had ever spun before, even when he used to rodeo, he wondered what had made the horse spook. Bears could do it, he knew. The smell of a bear in the wrong circumstances could make even a good ranch mount go crazy. This horse is going to fall, Tuff thought, and I’m going to get hurt real bad.

And then the horse tripped on something, recovered momentarily, then bucked. Tuff was thrown through the air—he could feel the actual moment of release when no part of his body was in contact with the saddle or the horse—and time seemed to literally slow down as he went airborne until it fast-forwarded as he flew face-first into a cold, sharp rock and heard a crunch in his ears like a door slamming shut.

10

Joe was up and showered when the telephone rang at 5:45 a.m. With a towel around his waist but still dripping, he padded down the dark hallway toward their bedroom to find Marybeth sitting bolt upright in bed, rubbing her eyes, with the receiver pressed against her ear. From across the room, he recognized the voice on the other end of the phone as that of Missy Vankueran, Marybeth’s mother. He noted the highpitched urgency in Missy’s voice.

“Just a second,” Marybeth said to her mother, then clamped her palm over the speaker and looked up with wide eyes. “It’s my mother, Joe. They just found one of their hands dead on the ranch.”

“Oh, no.”

“They called the sheriff, but she’s wondering if you can go out there.” “Why me?”

“I didn’t ask her,” Marybeth said, a hint of annoyance peeking through. “She’s very upset. She wants you there, I assume, because you’re family.”

Joe had planned to get an early start. It was Saturday, and archery sea-son was in full swing, and an early deer rifle season was opening in one of the areas in his district. Hunters would be out in force. The death of a ranch hand was the sheriff ’s responsibility, or the county coroner’s.

“She says he’s been mutilated, like those cows.”

“Tell her I’ll be there in half an hour.”

Normally, he would have savored the fall morning as he hurled down the old two-lane state highway toward the turnoff for the Longbrake Ranch, Joe thought. The sun had just broken over the mountains and fused the valley with color. Lowland cottonwoods were bursting with red and yellow, and the moisture sparkled on the grass. It was clear and crisp and cloudless. Mule deer still fed in the meadows and had not yet retreated to their daytime shelter of the trees and draws.

He slowed and turned off the blacktop onto a red dirt road made of crushed and packed gravel, where he passed under a massive log archway. Sun-bleached moose, deer, and elk antlers climbed up the logs and across the top beam. A weathered sign—longbrake ranches, saddlestring, wyo.—hung from heavy chain attached to the beam. There were less than a dozen bullet holes in the sign, Joe noted, which meant that the sign had probably been hung just a year or two before. In Twelve Sleep County, older signs had many more holes in them.

The gravel road paralleled a narrow, meandering spring creek with thick, grassy banks. The fact that deer, coyotes, and ducks didn’t flush from the creek as Joe drove told him that he wasn’t the first to drive up the road that morning.

He thought: Missy must be wrong.

Although he had no doubt that a ranch hand had been found, Joe had trouble believing the man had been mutilated as well. Missy was inclined to let her imagination run away with her, and was prone to high drama. Joe hoped like hell that this would be the case. If a human was actually killed and mutilated like the moose and the cattle had been, it would be a whole new, and horrific, development.

he buildings that made up the headquarters of the Longbrake Ranch had an entirely different feel than the spartan and businesslike Hawkins Ranch. The main ranch house was a massive log structure with gabled upper-floor windows and a wide porch railed with knotty pine. It was a monument to the gentleman rancher Bud Longbrake aspired to be, as it had been the monument to his father and his grandfather before him. Guest cabins were tucked into the trees behind the home, and the bunk-house which at one time housed a dozen cowboys.

Joe felt a clutch in his stomach as he saw Missy Vankueran push a screened door open and emerge from the house. She waved him over.

Despite the events of the morning, Joe noticed, Missy had managed to do her hair and apply the exquisite makeup that made her look thirtyfive instead of her real sixty-one years. Her eyes shone from a porcelain mask featuring sharp, high cheekbones and a full, red mouth. She was slim and neat, and wore a flannel shirt covered with bucking horses, and a suede vest with Shoshone wild roses in beadwork on the lapels. She looked every bit the chic ranchwoman, Joe thought with grudging admiration.

Maxine bounded up in her seat next to Joe and whined to be let out. That Maxine, Joe thought. She liked everybody.

Joe told his dog to stay and got out. Missy met him near the front of his pickup. She was obviously distressed.

“The horse Tuff was riding showed up around three in the morning,” she began, dispensing with greetings. “Bud looked outside and saw the horse near the corrals, with its saddle hanging upside down. He thought Tuff must have fallen off in the mountains, so he got in his truck and went to look for him. Bud came back down a couple of hours later and said he found Tuff ’s body up there.”

Missy gestured vaguely toward the mountains. The sun had risen enough that a yellow strip banded the snow-dusted tops of the peaks.

“Did Bud say the body had been mutilated?”

Missy paused and her eyes widened almost grotesquely. “Yes! He said it was awful.”

“Is Bud up there now?”

“Yes, he took the sheriff up there to the scene.” Joe nodded.

“What does this all mean?” Missy asked.

Joe was thinking the same thing. First moose, then cattle, now possibly a man.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “If what Bud says is true then we really have a problem on our hands.”

“No, not that,” Missy shook her head. “I meant in terms of Bud. We’re working on plans for the wedding, and I don’t want him to be distracted.” Joe looked at her and fought an urge to ask, Are you really Marybeth’s mother?

Instead, he stepped back from her as if she were radioactive. “How far is the body?” he asked.

With one exception, the scene was eerily similiar to the scene on the Hawkins Ranch. Just below an aspen grove and before the slope darkened with heavy pine, the two Sheriff ’s Department vehicles were there again, as well as a ranch pickup, no doubt driven by Bud Longbrake. The addition to the group was the lone four-wheel-drive ambulance from the Twelve Sleep County Hospital.

As he approached in his pickup, he could see a small crowd of men bending over something in knee-high sagebrush. Bud Longbrake, in a gray, wide-brimmed Stetson, looked up and waved to Joe. Barnum straightened up and glowered. Deputy McLanahan and two EMTs made up the rest of the group. One of the EMTs, a squat bruiser with a whisp of tawny facial hair, looked pale and distressed. While Joe pulled up next to the Longbrake truck and swung out, he saw the EMT turn quickly and retch into the brush behind him. The other EMT walked over to his colleague and led him away by the arm, apparently for some air.

“Joe,” Longbrake said.

“Bud.”

“Missy call you?” “Yup.”

“She all right?”

Joe paused for a beat. “Fine,” he said.

Barnum snorted and exchanged glances with McLanahan.

“What do we have?” Joe asked, stepping through the sagebrush. The ground was spongy and soft, except for the football-sized fists of granite that punched through it on the slope.

When he saw what the men were standing over, Joe stopped abruptly. Although he had seen hundreds of harvested game animals as well as the moose and cattle, he was not prepared for what was left of Tuff Montegue. The body lay on its back, legs askew. One arm was thrown out away from the body, as if caught making a sweeping gesture. For a moment, Joe thought that the other arm was missing, but then he realized it was actually broken and pinned beneath the trunk. Tuff was disemboweled; his blue-gray entrails blooming out of a foot-long hole in his abdomen like some kind of sea plant in the corral. His Wranglers had been pulled down to mid-thigh—Tuff had bone-white skin—and his genitals had been cut out, leaving a maroon-and-black oval. Huge chunks of clothing and flesh had been ripped from Tuff ’s thighs.

Tuff ’s face was gone. It had been removed from his jawbone to his high forehead. All that was left were obscenely grinning teeth, wide-open eyes the size of Ping-Pong balls, a shiny, white wishbone protrusion where his nose had been, and a mass of drying blood and muscle. There was also the smell; a light but potent stew of sweet-smelling sage, spilled blood, exposed entrails, and the half-digested breakfast of the squat EMT. Joe gagged and tried to swallow.

He turned away, closing his eyes tightly and trying to breathe steadily. He heard Barnum snort behind him.

“Something the matter, Joe?” Barnum asked.

Then, damn it, Joe could no longer fight the wave of nausea and he threw up his morning coffee onto the soft ground.

Joe was there for most of the morning, keeping his distance as the hillside was photographed, measured, and tied off with yellow crimescene tape wrapped around hastily driven T-posts. Additional deputies had arrived from Saddlestring, as well as a Wyoming highway patrolman who had heard the chatter on his radio.

Sheriff Barnum seemed more distressed than Joe had ever seen him, barking orders at his underlings and marching up and down the hillside with no apparent intent. Several times, he climbed into his Blazer and slammed the door to work the radio channels.

Bud Longbrake stood near Joe, leaning against the grille of his pickup. Longbrake was a large man, with wide shoulders, silver hair, and thick ears that stuck out almost at right angles from his temples. His face was weathered, his eyes sharp blue, his expression inscrutable. He wore a starched, white cowboy shirt and a silver belt buckle the size of a softball that celebrated an ancient rodeo win. Longbrake watched the procedures carefully but dispassionately, as if trying to guess the conclusions of the investigators before they announced them.

“I ain’t never seen a body in that shape before,” Longbrake told Joe after nearly an hour of silence.

“Nope.”

“I’ve seen calves hamstrung and gutted by coyotes while they were still alive, and I’ve seen a damn wolf eat the private parts out of a calf elk while the elk bawled for his mama, but I never seen a man like that.”

Joe nodded, agreeing. The EMTs were trying to slide Tuff ’s body into a body bag without any of his parts detaching. Joe looked away.

“I never knew a bear could do that to a man,” Longbrake said. It took Joe a moment, then he turned toward the rancher. “What did you just say?”

Longbrake shrugged. “I said I never heard of no grizzly making cuts like that.”

“Grizzly?”

“Didn’t Barnum tell you?”

Joe kept his voice low so he wouldn’t be overheard. “The sheriff has told me exactly nothing.”

“Oh. Well, when I drove up here this morning in the dark I saw a bigass grizzly bear feeding on something. Caught him in the headlights from a long way away. He looked up with a big piece of meat in his mouth. When I drove up here I found Tuff.”

Joe was perplexed. This explained the horrible chunks of flesh missing from Tuff ’s legs, and maybe even his disembowelment. But . . .

“But how could a grizzly bear do that to his face?” Joe asked. Longbrake shrugged again. “That’s what I was talking about. I’ve never heard of such a thing. Maybe that bear just peeled it off. You know, like when you’re skinning an animal.”

Joe shivered thinking about it. For a second he imagined the two-anda-half-inch teeth of a grizzly bear tearing back human skin, like peeling a banana. He quickly shook off the vision.

Longbrake shook his head, then squinted. “And Jesus, to get your balls bit right off by a bear like that. Poor dumb Tuff. He was probably glad that bear finished him off after he did that.”

Joe didn’t respond. What he had seen of the body, as quick as it had been before he got sick, didn’t seem to fit the scenario Longbrake was suggesting. Tuff ’s face hadn’t been chewed off by a bear. It had been removed. Joe thought of how clean and straight the cut was. Same with his genitals, Joe thought. They weren’t ripped out. They were cut out. He felt a second wave of nausea and breathed deeply again, looking away. At least there was no more in his stomach to throw up.

There was a shout a hundred yards up the hillside, and Joe looked up. A deputy waved at Barnum from a spot nearly in the aspen trees. Barnum sighed, tossed his cigarette aside, and started climbing. Joe fell in behind him.

“Excuse me, Bud.” “Sure.”

Halfway up the hill, away from the others, Joe noticed that Barnum had stolen a look back at him to see if he was still there. Barnum was slowing down as he climbed, and Joe slowed as well. Not because he was wheezing, like Barnum, but because he didn’t want to walk beside the man. It was that bad between them, Joe thought.

“Why are you following me?” Barnum didn’t turn around. “I want to see what your deputy found. Same as you.”

Barnum climbed several more steps. When he spoke, his voice was strained with exertion. “I want you to stay the hell away. For once.”

Joe had been waiting for that.

“Sorry, Sheriff, I’m involved whether you want me to be or not. That first moose is my responsibility and if Tuff ’s death is connected then I need all the facts.”

“Save your breath,” Barnum growled.

“And Bud back there was telling me he saw a grizzly bear this morning.” Barnum stopped suddenly and Joe nearly ran into him. Barnum turned slowly. His face was red. Joe didn’t know if it was from the hike, or anger, or both.

“That’s right, we’ve got a grizzly bear up here,” Barnum hissed. “Your fucking bear. I don’t need or want any goddamn bears in my county. I don’t want any goddamn wolves, either. But you people keep chasing them here. Now we’ve got what looks like an outlaw bear killing my citizens. So what are you going to do about that bear, Pickett?”

Joe shook his head, incredulous at Barnum’s twisted reasoning. “You don’t really think a bear did that, do you?”

“What else? Fucking aliens? That’s what my idiot deputy keeps saying.” Joe and Barnum stared at each other, neither speaking. Joe looked into the eyes of the old man, and it reminded him of half a dozen reasons why Barnum couldn’t be trusted.

“Just stay the hell away, unless you want to bring me the head of that bear,” Barnum said.

Joe paused, not breaking the stare. “I won’t be staying away, and I won’t be bringing you the head of a bear,” he said.

Joe watched the veins on Barnum’s temples pulse.

“Then fuck you, Pickett. You’re useless.” Barnum turned. Joe followed.

The deputy was straddling a sharp rock that poked out from the ground. The rock was granite, and green in color because of the lichen on it. It was green except for the spatter of dark blood on its surface.

“Don’t touch it,” Barnum told his deputy, a man named Reed. Joe liked Reed.

“I haven’t,” Reed said, clearly miffed that Barnum had felt the need to tell him something so obvious. “As soon as I found it I waved down to you. It sure took you a while to get up here.”

“The sheriff and I were visiting,” Joe said. Barnum glared at him.

Deputy Reed said, “The way I figure it—based on the hoofprints up here—is that this is as far as Tuff got last night. As you can see, the prints stop right here. I figure the horse bolted and Tuff got thrown off, right on this rock.”

Tuff ’s hat was crown-down in sagebrush to the left of the rock. “Then how did he get all the way down there?” Barnum asked. “Either he walked a ways or something dragged him down there,” the deputy said.

“Like a bear,” Barnum said. “Maybe.”

“But unlikely,” Joe interrupted. “A bear would probably feed on him where he found him, or drag him into the cover up there on the mountain.” Joe pointed at the aspens, and both Barnum and the deputy followed his arm. “It wouldn’t be likely a bear would drag a body into the open and then start feeding on it.”

Barnum didn’t even try to hide his contempt. “So what do you think happened?”

Joe looked back. “I think the deputy’s right. Tuff got thrown right here. My guess is that he somehow got up and started walking toward the lights of the ranch down there. Then something stopped him.”

“The bear?” the deputy asked.

“Something,” Joe said. “I don’t think the bear came along until much later. Maybe just a few minutes before Bud Longbrake showed up this morning.”

The deputy nodded, mulling it over. He looked to the sheriff for confirmation.

“That’s a goddamned horseshit theory,” Barnum scoffed, shaking his head. “The bear did it.”

Barnum turned and started to trudge down the hill.

Joe called after him, “Did a bear kill my moose and mutilate it? Did a bear kill and mutilate a dozen cows?”

Barnum waved his hand over his head, dismissing Joe with the gesture. This time, Joe didn’t follow.

“The sheriff wants it to be a bear real bad,” the deputy whispered. Joe grunted.

“Because if it isn’t a bear, we’ve got a very, very bad situation here.”

When Joe returned to his truck, the ambulance was pulling away with the body. The deputies remained, scouring the scene. During breaks they drank coffee and speculated on what had happened. Joe overheard the word “aliens” from Deputy McLanahan. Another deputy suggested a satanic cult. A third advanced a theory involving the government.

Joe looked around for Barnum and finally saw the sheriff sitting in his Blazer with the door closed and the windows up. Barnum looked like he was yelling at someone on his radio.

“Did you hear?” Bud Longbrake asked, as Joe passed by him. “Hear what?”

Longbrake nodded his hat brim toward Barnum’s Blazer.

“They found another body. In Park County, about fifty miles away.” Joe froze. “Who was it?”

Longbrake raised his palms. “Didn’t get a name. Some older guy. They found him by his cabin.”

“Mutilated?” Joe asked. “That’s what I hear.”

PART TWO 11

Gentlemen,” County Attorney Robey Hersig said, “let’s convene the first-ever strategy meeting of the newly formed Northern Wyoming Murder and Mutilations Task Force.”

Sheriff Barnum said, “Jesus, I hate that name.”

It was 10:00 a.m. on Wednesday, four days after Tuff ’s body and the body of Stuart Tanner had been found. There were seven people seated around an oval table in the Twelve Sleep County courthouse, in a room usually used for jury deliberations. The door was shut and the shades were pulled.

Joe sat at the far end of the table from Robey Hersig, and for an instant they exchanged glances. Hersig, Joe thought, already looked slightly frustrated and the meeting had barely begun. Hersig and Joe were friends and fly-fishing partners. When the governor said he wanted a representative from the Wyoming Game and Fish Department on the task force, Hersig had fought for Joe’s inclusion, much to Joe’s, Barnum’s, and even the gov-ernor’s objections. The governor wanted a biologist on the task force, for forensic and scientific expertise, and Barnum wanted anybody but Joe— just because. Joe had told Hersig he preferred to work on his own, but a call to Joe from his district supervisor Trey Crump made it clear he would be the G&F’s representative on the task force.

The task force itself was Governor Budd’s response to calls to his office in Cheyenne from both the statewide news media and business interests in Twelve Sleep and Park Counties, where the murders had taken place. Brian Scott, who did a statewide radio broadcast out of KTWO in Casper, had begun a tongue-in-cheek “Mutilation Moment” update on his morning show, where he breathlessly read the body count of wildlife, cattle, and humans and contrasted it with the lack of response from the governor’s office. With his reelection campaign looming in less than a year, the governor reacted to the pressure quickly, announcing the creation of the task force. He did so after his chief of staff called Robey Hersig and Hersig confessed that the Sheriff ’s Department was stymied in their investigation. Knowing Barnum, Joe assumed that the sheriff viewed the formation of the task force as a personal slap in the face.

As Hersig circulated agendas and manila folders, Joe surveyed the room. In addition to Joe, Hersig, Barnum, McLanahan, and the Park County Sheriff Dan Harvey, there were two men from the outside whom Joe had met before: Wyoming Department of Criminal Investigation (DCI) agent Bob Brazille and FBI Special Agent Tony Portenson. Seeing Portenson again made Joe’s mouth go dry.

While Brazille was affable behind a jowly, alcoholic face, Portenson was dark, pinched, and had close-set eyes and a scar that hitched up his upper lip so that it looked like he was sneering. Portenson had already been seated when Joe entered the room, and had offered no greeting. Instead, he’d stared at Joe as if they shared a conspiracy.

“As you all know, Governor Budd has promised a swift resolution and justice in regard to these crimes,” Hersig said by way of introduction. “It’s our job to make that happen. I’ve given you each a file of what we’ve got so far, and I hope you’ll take a moment to review it with me.”

Joe had already begun. In the file were copies of the incident reports written by the Sheriff ’s Department on the Hawkins cattle as well as on Tuff Montegue’s body. His own preliminary necropsy report on the moose was in the file as well, and Joe was a little surprised that Hersig had obtained it from headquarters without mentioning this to him. There were dozens of pages of crime-scene photos that had been printed out in color and black-and-white, as well as maps of Twelve Sleep and Park Counties with circles drawn where the crimes had occured. A preliminary autopsy report was included from Park County on the body found there, as well as the autopsy report on Tuff Montegue. Both bodies had been shipped to the FBI laboratories in Virginia for further examination. Clippings from both local and national papers on the murders and cattle mutilations were also in the file.

It came as no surprise that the autopsy and necropsy descriptions were very similar, whether of the moose, cattle, or men. Skin had been removed from faces. Tongues, eyes, and all or part of ears had been removed. Udders were removed from female cattle. Genitals were gone, and anuses had been cored out. Cuts were described as “clean and made with surgical precision.”

The exception, Joe noted with a start, was in the autopsy report for Tuff Montegue. In his case, the cut on Tuff ’s face was described as a “notched or serrated mutilation cut similar to serrated cuts near the genitals and anus.”

To make sure, Joe thumbed back through the reports. The notes of “serrated cuts” were unique to the Tuff Montegue autopsy. It could just be an aberration, Joe thought, or a mistake. The county coroner did not do many autopsies. He spent more time in his fly-shop than the one-room morgue. Joe planned to ask about the discrepancy once the discussion got started.

There was something else. Or, rather, the lack of something else. There was no mention of oxindole, Joe noticed.

“Let’s start at the beginning,” Hersig said, sliding Joe’s report on the moose from the file.

Under Robey Hersig’s direction, the task force methodically reviewed the reports in the file. It was decided early on that the aspects of the investigation would be divided up among the principals; Sheriffs Barnum and Harvey would concentrate on the murders that took place within their counties, Agent Portenson would facilitate communication access between the local authorities and the FBI, Brazille would coordinate with the governor’s office and Joe would follow up on the wildlife mutilations and “anything out of the ordinary.” When Joe heard Hersig say that, he winced.

Hersig smiled back.

“Reports will be shared with my office, and we will serve as the communications center,” Hersig said, looking hard at each person at the table. “Nothing will be withheld from this office. Territory doesn’t matter, jurisdiction doesn’t matter. We’re all on the same team here.”

FBI Special Agent Tony Portenson seemed to have an agenda of his own, and Joe couldn’t yet determine what it was. Portenson paid cursory attention to Hersig, reviewing the documents in the order Hersig referred to them, but periodically rolling his eyes and staring at the ceiling. Joe wished Portenson wasn’t there, because Portenson brought back dark memories of the death of his foster daughter the winter before, as well as the death of a federal-land manager. When Joe looked at Portenson, he imagined that the agent was there to observe him, to possibly catch him at something. Joe vowed to be careful. Trouble was, Joe actually liked Portenson.

Sheriff Dan Harvey of Park County didn’t seem to agree that the attacks that had happened in Twelve Sleep County had any bearing on his interest, which was investigating the death and mutilation of the older man found near his cabin on the same night Tuff Montegue was killed.

Because Joe knew only a few sketchy details about this aspect of the case, he paid special attention to the Park County report. The sixty-fouryear-old victim was named Stuart Tanner. He was a married father of three grown children and CEO of a Texas-based water-engineering firm that had contracts in Wyoming doing purity assessments for the state De-partment of Environmental Quality and the CBM developers. Tanner’s family had owned the cabin and mountain property for over thirty years, according to people in Cody who knew him, and Tanner preferred staying at his cabin rather than at a hotel while doing work in the area. He was physically fit and enjoyed long hikes on his property in all kinds of weather. It was presumed that he was on one of his walks when he died, or was killed. His mutilated body was found in a meadow in full view of a remote county road. Someone had seen the body and reported it by calling the Park County 911 emergency number. The preliminary autopsy listed the cause of death as “unknown.”

As Hersig moved to the case of Tuff Montegue, Joe interrupted. It was the first time he had spoken.

“Yes, Joe?”

He turned to Sheriff Harvey. “The report doesn’t indicate predation of any kind. Did you see any?”

“You mean like coyotes or something eating the body?” Joe nodded.

Harvey thought, stroked his chin. “I don’t recall any,” he said. “I wasn’t the first on the scene, but my guys didn’t mention any animals and the coroner didn’t say anything about that, either.”

Joe nodded, sat back, and turned his attention back to Hersig.

Tony Portenson cleared his throat. “Before we go off in too many directions, I’ve got something here that might give you all a great big headache.”

From a briefcase near his chair, Portenson withdrew a thick sheaf of bound documents. Like a card dealer, he slid them across the table to all of the task force members.

Portenson said, “This stuff isn’t new, cowboys.”

Joe picked up the one-inch-thick binder and read the title: summary investigative analysis of “cattle mutilations” in wyoming, montana, and new mexico.

The report was dated 1974.

“I found this when the bureau was asked to assist on this investigation,” Portenson said, a little wearily. “Somebody in our office remembered seeing it back in the archives.”

Joe flipped through the binder. The report had been typed on a typewriter. There were dark photographs of cattle, much like the newer ones he had just looked at in the file Hersig had assembled. There were pages of necropsy reports, and transcripts of interviews with law enforcement personnel and ranchers.

“Shit,” McLanahan said, “this has all happened before.”

“Not exactly,” Hersig said quickly. Joe guessed that Hersig didn’t like the way Portenson had taken over the meeting and surprised him with the reports. “There’s no mention of what I’ve found about wildlife or human mutilations here.”

Portenson conceded the point with a shrug, but did it in a way that indicated that it didn’t matter.

“So what was the conclusion of the FBI?” Barnum asked. “Or do I have to read this whole goddamned thing?”

Portenson smiled. “A forensic investigative team at Quantico devoted three years to that report. Three years they could have been working on real crimes. But your senators and congressmen out here in the sticks insisted that the bureau devote precious time and man-hours to a bunch of dead cows instead.”

“And?” Sheriff Harvey prompted.

Portenson sighed theatrically. “Their conclusion was that this cattlemutilation stuff is a pile of horseshit. Let me read . . .” He flipped open the report to a page near the back he had marked with a Post-it. “I quote:

‘. . . It was concluded that the mutilations were caused by scavenging birds, pecking away at exposed soft tissues like eye, tongue, rectum, etc. The smoothness of the “incisions”—note the quote marks around that word, fellows—is produced as a result of postmortem gas production in the cattle’s bodies that stretched the tissues . . .’ ”

Portenson looked up from the report and his upper lip hitched into a sneer. “So how did the cattle die?” Joe asked.

To answer, Portenson found another marker in his report and turned the page.

“ ‘The cows examined died of mundane causes, such as eating poisonous plants.’ ”

Joe sat back and rubbed his face with his hands. Birds? That was what the FBI concluded? Birds? The report made him angry, as well as Portenson’s delivery of it. There was a long, uncomfortable silence.

Hersig broke it. “I guess I don’t see how a thirty-year-old report and our crimes here—including the deaths of two men—have anything to do with each other.”

Portenson shrugged. “Maybe nothing, I grant you that. But maybe you all need to step back a little and take a deep breath and look at the whole situation from another angle. That’s all I’m saying.”

“What other angle?” Brazille asked.

Portenson slowly looked at each person seated at the table. Joe noticed the brief hardness in Portenson’s eyes when they fell on him.

“Let’s say that the cattle died naturally. Maybe they got a virus, or ate some bad plants. Hell, I don’t know shit about cows. But let’s say that happened. So the cows died. Birds found them and started pecking at the soft stuff, like the report says. It could have happened that way here, gentlemen. After all, the carcasses weren’t really fresh when they were found.

“But in this atmosphere of near hysteria, a cowboy falls off of his horse in one county and an old man dies of a heart attack in another county. That’s a strange coincidence, but that’s maybe all it is: a coincidence. People die. Two men dying in the same night wouldn’t be a very big deal in any American city. No one would even make a connection. Only out here, where the deer and the antelope play and hardly any people live, would it be a big deal.

“So the cowboy gets pecked on a little while he’s on the ground and then he gets mauled by Joe Pickett’s grizzly bear. And the other guy gets found by birds and other critters that start eating on him. So what?”

Portenson stood up and slammed his report shut. “What you may have here, boys, is a whole lot of nothing.”

During a break, Joe stood in the hallway with Hersig as the others used the restroom, refilled their coffee cups, or checked their messages. Hersig sagged against the wall near the doorway to the deliberation room.

He winced and shook his head slowly.

“Portenson’s report sucked all the air out of the room,” Hersig said morosely.

Joe said evenly, “It’s not birds.”

“I don’t know what to think,” Hersig sighed. “Are we jumping to wild conclusions here, like he said?”

Joe shook his head.

“It’s going to be you and me, Joe.”

“I came to the same conclusion,” Joe said.

“Shit.” Hersig said, rolling his eyes. He had made no secrets about his own political ambitions. He wanted to be thought of when Governor Budd replaced the soon-to-be-retiring state attorney general. If the investigation floundered, so would his chances of moving to the capital, Cheyenne.

“I do admire you, Joe,” he said. “You don’t have much of a dog in this fight, but you seem to be the only guy in that room who wants to figure out what happened. The others are concerned with protecting their turf.” “I wanted to work on my own, anyway,” Joe said. “Looks like I’ll be doing that.”

Hersig smiled. “That wasn’t exactly the idea, you know.” “Yup,” Joe said. “What does Portenson want?”

Hersig folded his arms across his chest and frowned. “That I can’t figure out.”

“Me,” Joe said. “I think he wants me.”

“Think he’s got a hard-on for you and Nate Romanowski because of that bad business last winter?”

“Maybe so.”

Robey Hersig was the only man who knew enough about the circumstances surrounding the death of Melinda Strickland, a federal land manager, to legitimately suspect that Joe knew more about it than he let on.

But Hersig had never asked Joe anything about the incident, and Hersig’s silence in the matter told Joe everything he needed to know about his friend’s suspicions. Justice had been done, and Robey asked no questions.

When they got back to work, Hersig asked the members of the task force for additional theories on the crimes.