Trophy Hunt

He addressed the group. “We know what the FBI concluded thirty years ago, and we can’t discount that. But I think we’d be doing a disservice if we didn’t consider other possibilities. So fire away, gentlemen. The ideas can be off the wall,” Hersig urged. “Nothing is too crazy. Remember, it’s just us in this room. Who or what is killing and mutilating wildlife, cattle, and people in our county?”

“Your county,” Sheriff Harvey corrected, “the wildlife and cattle in my county are just fine, thanks.”

Robey stood up, approached a whiteboard, and uncapped a red felt-tip marker. He wrote birds.

“Gentlemen?”

No one spoke. Great, Joe thought.

“Maybe it’s some kind of cult,” McLanahan said finally. “Some kind of satanic cult that gets their jollies by collecting animal and human organs.”

Under birds, Hersig wrote cults on the board.

“Or just one or two sickos,” Sheriff Harvey said. “A couple of lowlifes who like headlines and attention. They started with the moose, then moved on to cows. Then they took a giant step to humans.”

Hersig wrote disturbed individuals.

“Not that I agree with any of this,” McLanahan said, sitting back in his chair and stretching out with his fingers laced behind his head, “but I’ve heard some things around town. Hell, I’ve heard ’em in the department.” McLanahan didn’t see Barnum shoot a glare at him for that, but Joe did. “One theory is that it’s the government. CIA or somebody like that. The thought is that they’re testing new weapons. Maybe practicing some counterterrorism tactics.”

“Maybe it’s the FBI?” Barnum said, smiling at Portenson.

“Fuck that,” Portenson replied sharply. “We’ve got enough on our plate.”

“Another theory I’ve heard is that it’s Arabs,” McLanahan said. Joe snorted, and the deputy turned slightly in his chair to scowl at Joe. His voice rose in volume as he spoke. “There was a report of a white van filled with Middle Eastern–looking men in town during the past week, Mr. Pickett. No one knows why they were in town.”

Since there was little color in Saddlestring other than Mexican ranch hands, Indians from the reservation who occasionally shopped in town, and only two black citizens, Joe wasn’t surprised that a van containing dark-skinned people would result in calls to the sheriff. But still . . . Arabs? Terrorizing Wyoming? Regardless, Hersig wrote arabs on the board.

“What about that bear?” Barnum asked, turning to Joe. “Longbrake saw a grizzly and Montegue was chewed up. Maybe we’ve got a crazy-ass bear on our hands that likes to eat faces and dicks? Maybe years of animal lovers coddling bears has turned one of them into a murderer.”

“I think the killer Arab theory makes more sense than that,” Joe said. Barnum angrily slapped the table. “I would like to know why Joe Pick-ett is on this task force. He’s a pain in my ass.” There, Joe thought. It was out.

“Because Governor Budd wanted a Game and Fish representative,” Hersig answered coolly. “And if I recall, Joe has been involved in some real big cases in this county.”

“Bring it on, Sheriff,” Joe said, feeling his neck get hot. “Let’s get this on the table right now.”

Barnum swiveled in his chair and acted as if he were about to argue but he apparently thought better of it. Instead, he glared at his coffee cup.

To divert this unexpected turn in the discussion back to the subject at hand, Hersig wrote government agents and grizzly bear on the board. “Maybe a virus of some kind?” Brazille offered. It was the first time he had spoken during the meeting.

“There’s one more, and all of you know it,” McLanahan said, slowly sitting upright. “But since no one wants to say it, I will.”

Hersig was writing even before McLanahan said the word.

Aliens.

We’ve even got some guy calling the department offering his expertise in extraterrestrials mutilating cattle,” McLanahan smiled. “He says he’s got experience in the ‘field of the paranormal.’ ” “Who is it?” Hersig asked.

“Some guy named . . .” McLanahan searched his spiral notebook for a moment, “Cleve Garrett.”

Joe sat up. That was the name Dave Avery had mentioned. The “expert” who had shown up in Helena.

“Apparently, he’s in town because he heard about the mutilations. He came down from Montana and set up shop at the Riverside RV Park.”

“Have you talked with him?” Hersig asked. “Are you kidding?”

“I’ll talk to him,” Joe volunteered. “He’s yours!” McLanahan laughed.

“You get the nut cases,” Hersig said, assigning the job to Joe.

Joe briefed the room on what he had learned from Dave Avery. He noticed that even Barnum’s eyes got wide when he heard that other mutilations had taken place in Montana the winter before. And he saw Brazille and Barnum write the word “oxindole” in their files as he told them about it.

“We’ll need that in a report, Joe,” Hersig said. “I’ll write it up.”

Hersig said, “Agent Portenson, can you request that chemical analysis of the blood and tissue be done on the two human victims in Virginia to determine if there is oxindole or anything else unusual in their systems?” “I’m sure they’ll cover that,” Portenson said. “But yes, I’ll make the request.”

fter the meeting had finally drawn to a close Joe walked across the parking lot from the county building. He was confused. He needed time to sort out all he had heard today. The puzzle had, in his mind, suddenly mushroomed into something bigger and murkier than it had been before. Portenson’s explanation—if that’s what it was—had unsettled him. As he approached his pickup, he looked back at the county building. Portenson stood in the doorway with Sheriff Barnum. They were having a heated discussion, but Joe was too far away to hear what it was about. Joe watched as Portenson and Barnum stepped closer to each other, still talking. Suddenly, Portenson turned and pointed at Joe. Barnum’s face turned to Joe as well.

What were they saying? Joe wondered.

Portenson left Barnum in the doorway and made his way across the parking lot.

Joe stepped around the front of his pickup to meet him. He felt a flutter in his stomach as he did. Portenson obviously had something to say.

“The sheriff and I were just agreeing that it would be best if you took a backseat in this investigation,” Portenson said.

Joe didn’t hide his annoyance. “I don’t know what your problem is,” Joe said. “The FBI was exonerated last year. You guys did an investigation of yourselves and determined that you were a bunch of heroes.”

Portenson grimaced. “Officially, yeah. Unofficially, it’s different on the inside with my fellow agents. I’m a fucking leper. Because I helped you and didn’t support my brethren.”

“You did the right thing.”

“As if that had anything to do with anything. Tell that to my office, okay? I’m going nowhere fast. I don’t want to be stuck here for the rest of my career. I really don’t.”

“Unless you redeem yourself to get promoted out of here,” Joe said. “Unless you do something big.”

“Like if I figure out how you and your pal Nate Romanowski were in-volved in the suicide of a federal-land manager.” Portenson said the word “suicide” with dripping contempt.

Joe said nothing. He knew this would always hang over him, always weigh him down. And it should, he thought, it should. He tried to think of something to say.

“Birds?” Joe asked. “What?”

“Do you really think birds are the answer to the mutilations?” Portenson got close to Joe, his face inches away. Joe could smell coffee and tobacco on his breath.

“It’s as good as any other theory in that room and better than most of them.”

“It wasn’t birds,” Joe said.

12

On the otherside of town, Marybeth Pickett glanced into her rearview mirror to check on her passengers. Lucy and Jessica Logue were huddled together on the middle bench seat, and Sheridan occupied the rear seat of the van. Sheridan sported an expression that shouted: I AM EXTREMELY BORED!

Lucy and Jessica had once again made plans to play at the Logues’ home after school.

“Why does she have to be so social?” Sheridan asked Marybeth.

“I can hear you, you know,” Lucy said over her shoulder to Sheridan. “Maybe it’s because I have good friends.”

“She’ll probably be a cheerleader, for goodness sake.”

“That’s because I’ll have something to cheer about and won’t be crabby all the time, like some people.”

Which caused Jessica to giggle. “Put a gag in it, Lucy.”

“Girls . . .” Marybeth cautioned.

Driving down Second Street, Marybeth smiled to herself. Although Sheridan participated in plenty of activities at school and church, she had never felt the need to fill her social calendar beyond that. She didn’t get many calls at home, and rarely made any to classmates. Sheridan’s best friend, Marybeth thought with a gulp, was probably Nate Romanowski.

Marybeth turned into the winding, tree-shrouded driveway out of habit and nearly rear-ended a stopped vehicle. She slammed on her brakes, the van did a quick shimmy, and they avoided hitting the pickup with a camper in the back of it by less than a foot.

“Cool,” Sheridan said. “Nice maneuver.”

Marybeth blew out a breath and sat back. That had been too close. It was her fault. She had assumed the driveway would be empty the way it always was.

“Everybody okay?”

They all said they were, and then Lucy and Jessica were scrambling for the door handles.

Because the van was designed to automatically lock all the doors when it was in gear, Marybeth had to hit a toggle switch to open them. She hesitated as she reached for the switch to let the girls out.

The camper pickup she had almost slammed into was old, red, dented, and splashed with mud. It listed a bit to the side, as if one of the shocks was bad. The old truck had dirty South Dakota plates.

“Do you have visitors, Jessica?” Marybeth asked, turning in her seat. Jessica gave up on the door and looked up nodding. “My grandma and my grandpa are here.”

“Well, I’m sure that’s nice for you,” Marybeth said, trying to think if either Cam or Marie had mentioned their company at the office. If they had, she couldn’t remember it. The atmosphere in the office had been tense all week, with lots of closed doors.

“Yeah,” Jessica said without enthusiasm. “They’re from South Dakota?”

“Um-hmmm.”

“Will they be staying with you very long?”

Marybeth saw Sheridan look up at her with an exasperated expression. She wanted to go home, not listen to her mother pry for information.

“I don’t know.”

“How long have they been here?” “A week, maybe more.”

Maybe that’s why Cam has been so irritable at work, Marybeth thought. It was bad enough with the mutilations in the news, the stubborn Overstreet sisters causing problems, the poor financial conditions in general for the Logues—and now his parents were visiting. Cam’s dark moods seemed to make a little more sense.

“Lucy, maybe it would be best to skip it tonight if the Logues have company,” Marybeth said.

Both Lucy and Jessica howled in protest. “You’re sure it’s okay?”

“Yes!” Jessica insisted.

“And you’re sure your mom said she’ll bring Lucy home tonight?” “YES!”

“Okay, then,” Marybeth said, pushing the toggle to unlock the doors. Lucy bolted forward and gave Marybeth a quick kiss on the cheek.

“See you, Mom.”

Marybeth watched both girls skip around the pickup and toward the house. Sheridan sighed from the back. Marybeth started to put the transmission into reverse, then halted. Something didn’t seem right to her. Nothing logical, nothing she could articulate. But when it came to her children, she always let her feelings hold sway, and she did that now.

“Mom? Are we leaving?”

Maybe it was simply because Marie had not said anything to her, Marybeth thought. They shared everything, Marie and Marybeth, things she knew Joe would blanch at if he overheard. They discussed wants, needs, ambitions, sometimes like schoolgirls. Marybeth knew, for instance, that Cam had not been interested in sex since he got the Timberline Ranch listing. This troubled Marie, especially since they had agreed to try to get pregnant again. Marybeth was more guarded with her secrets, although 106C. J. BOX she had poured out her frustration on the disheartening state of the Pickett family finances.

The arrival of a fatherand mother-in-law was a big event, Marybeth knew. How could Marie have failed to mention it? Or had Marie said something and Marybeth, in the nonstop rush her life had recently become, simply not heard?

“Okay,” Marybeth said, as she began to back out of the driveway. She saw Sheridan slump back into her seat in over-obvious relief. “I just . . .”

“. . . have trouble letting go,” Sheridan finished for her.

Marybeth backed out of the driveway and onto the road and started back through town toward the Bighorn Road.

13

There’s something outside I’ve got to show you that will scare the pants off Hailey Bond,” Jessica Logue told Lucy Pickett as they entered the house.

“Are you sure it’s okay?”

“Of course it’s not okay, Lucy.” They smiled at each other.

Because Jessica’s parents weren’t yet home from work, Jessica and Lucy dropped their backpacks in the living room and went straight through the house toward the back door. Lucy heard the sound of a television from the darkened family room, and as they passed by she saw the blue glow from the screen.

“Jessica, honey,” someone called.

“Hi, Grandma,” Jessica said but didn’t slow her stride. “Come in here so we can see you. Who is your friend?”

Jessica stopped abruptly, then turned to Lucy and rolled her eyes. She led Lucy into the dark room.

It took a moment for Lucy’s eyes to adjust to the darkness. When she could see, she could make out two people in the gloom. They were lit softly by the light of the television, which reflected in two pairs of oldfashioned, metal-framed eyeglasses.

“Lucy, this is Grandma and Grandpa Logue.”

“Hi,” Lucy said. Jessica’s grandparents were small, thin people. Her grandmother wore an oversized sweatshirt with a heart embroidered across the front of it. Her hair was dull gray and cropped close. Jessica’s grandfather looked like something out of an old movie about farmers: flannel shirt buttoned to his chin, wide suspenders, baggy, stained trousers, and heavy work shoes. They were watching a talk show about bad families.

Lucy saw that Jessica’s grandmother had a pile of knitting on her lap, and could see the glint from the metal knitting needles. How could she even see what she was doing?

“Why don’t you have the lights on?” Lucy asked.

“Why waste electricity?” Jessica’s grandmother asked back.

“We don’t waste electricity in our family,” Jessica’s grandfather said with a high twang. “Don’t waste water, either.”

Lucy didn’t know what to say to that.

“We’re going to play,” Jessica said, and Lucy was grateful to her changing the subject.

“You be careful,” Jessica’s grandmother cautioned. “Stay close to the house. Nice to meet you, little girl.”

“Nice to meet you too,” Lucy said.

Outside, Jessica widened her eyes and gestured “follow me.” They were in the heavy trees behind the house. It was cool and still, and the curled cottonwood leaves crunched beneath their feet. Lucy was glad to be outside, away from Jessica’s grandparents.

Lucy thought how old Jessica’s grandparents seemed to be, especially compared to Grandmother Missy, who was now out on that ranch. Grandmother Missy seemed years younger. Lucy sometimes wished she was more like a real grandmother, but Jessica’s grandparents took being old a little too far, she thought.

They were a long way from the house. “Jessica . . .”

“I know. We’ll take a look at it and get right back to the house before my mom and dad get home.”

Lucy nodded. What, she wondered, was “it”? She was frightened, but a little thrilled. She reached between the buttons of her jacket with the palm of her hand, to see if she could feel her heart beating. She could.

“Now, whatever you do, don’t look up . . .” Jessica whispered. Both girls laughed, and it broke the tension for a moment. “Don’t look up” had become a comic mantra at school ever since the news of the mutilations had come out. Sixth-graders, some from Sheridan’s class, said it to scare the little kids on the playground. When the kids did look up, usually with a fleeting, half-terrified glance, the sixth-graders would lunge forward and either tickle the youngsters or push them backward over a co-conspirator who was on their hands and knees behind them.

he funniest thing to have happened so far though was when two boys in their class had started selling foil-covered baseball caps for seven dollars apiece. One of the boys had stolen the caps from his father’s collection, and the other had borrowed a large roll of aluminum foil from his own mother.

“Why get mutilated?” They cried out like carnival barkers. “Protect yourself with these babies ... only seven dollars each or two for twelve dollars. . . .”

ow much farther?” Lucy asked. They must be near the edge of the property, she thought. They had never been this far from the house before.

“It’s right up here,” Jessica said. “Man, wait until the next time Hailey comes over. We’ll ditch her right here. It’ll serve her right for always trying to scare us.”

Nervous, but giggling, they ducked under a low-hanging branch and pushed through tall, dried brush. Lucy froze when she saw the dark building in front of her. She looked it over. It wasn’t as large as she initially thought it was. In fact, it was more of a shack. It was old, unpainted, with one window that still had glass in it. The other front windows were boarded up. There was a sagging porch with missing slats where yellowed grass had grown through and died. The roof was uneven, and an old, tin chimney was black with age.

“Wow,” Lucy said. “When did you find this?” “Yesterday,” Jessica said.

Lucy looked over at her friend. Jessica smiled and raised her eyebrows expectantly. Lucy wasn’t sure she liked this, even a bit.

“You want to look inside?” Jessica asked. “Maybe we should go back now.”

“Don’t you want to know what’s inside?”

Lucy folded her arms across her coat. “I’m not going inside of that place.”

Jessica looked disappointed, but not as disappointed as she could have looked. This made Lucy feel a little better, knowing that Jessica was scared too.

“How about if we just look in the window?” Jessica said.

Lucy weighed the idea. Her first impulse was to go back to the house. But she didn’t want to show she was afraid and give Jessica something to tease her about later.

Lucy quickly nodded yes. She chose not to speak, because she was worried her voice would betray her fright.

The two girls walked tentatively to the shack. Lucy could see that the window would be too high to look in without standing on her tiptoes. Jessica was an inch or two taller, maybe tall enough that she could see into the window without extra effort. Lucy wished it wasn’t overcast, and thought that everything might feel different if the sun was out.

They approached the window silently. The bottom sill was gray and warped, and Lucy reached up and closed her fingers around it to help her stretch higher. Lucy strained, balanced on the toes of her shoes, and pulled herself up so her nose touched the top of the sill.

There was just enough light inside the building that they could see. They both suddenly gasped.

What terrified them wasn’t the pile of dirty bedding, or the opened food cans and cartons, or the pile of books on the floor. It was the sound of rustling from somewhere in the shadows out of view, and the thump of a footfall as if something was trying to get away.

They ran back to the house, screaming all the way.

14

After the task-force meeting, Joe Pickett drove his pickup through the breaklands into the foothills of the mountains. He pulled off the road, on a steep overlook to eat his lunch—a salami sandwich, and an apple—while surveying the vast valley below. The day was cloudless and cool, the eastern horizon limitless. Below him, several miles away, was a small camp of three vehicles and a pop-up camper near the brushy crux of small streams. He glassed the camp through his spotting scope recognizing a group of antelope hunters he had checked a few days before. They had asked him if he thought they were in danger from the sky. He didn’t know how to answer the question then, and he still didn’t.

Despite the new task force, Joe still had a job to do. Pronghorn antelope season was open, as was archery season for elk in the high country. Deer season would open in two weeks, and for a short, furiously busy time, all of the big game seasons would be open simultaneously. Joe hoped that the task force would have reached some conclusions by then, or his absence in the field would be noted. Most hunters were dutiful, but the criminal element—the lowlifes who would try to take too many animals or leave the wounded in search of a bigger trophy—would keep close track of his comings and goings.

Portenson’s presence, and threat that he was going to look deeper into Joe and Nate’s roles in the federal-land manager’s death last winter wormed through his thoughts. When he saw his reflection in the rearview mirror, he saw a man with a tense, worried scowl.

Joe got out of his pickup and sat down on the tailgate, flipping open his notebook to his notes from the meeting.

· CULTS · DISTURBED INDIVIDUALS · GOVERNMENT AGENTS · GRIZZLY BEAR · ARABS (stupid)

· UNKNOWN VIRUS · ALIENS · BIRDS (FBI theory)

1. Tuff Montegue / Twelve Sleep County / Contusions mutilation / Grizzly breakfast / Oxindole?

2. Stuart Tanner / Park County (50 miles away) / No predation /

911 call / Oxindole?

3. Cleve Garrett / Paranormal guy / Riverside RV Park 4. Portenson / Happened before in the 1970s / BIRDS???

He reviewed the theories and shook his head. If there were cults of any kind in the area, they operated in complete and total anonymity, because he hadn’t heard anything about them. Obviously, from the lack of reaction at the table, no one else had either.

In his mind, he classified “Government Agents,” “Unknown Virus,” “Aliens,” and “Birds” into the “most improbable” category. It was conceivable that the government might conduct secret experiments on animals with new weapons, but only in a weird X-Files kind of way. How did the deaths of Tuff Montegue and Stuart Tanner fit in? He didn’t believe the government was murdering and skinning old cowboys to test new weapons.

He conceded that it was remotely possible that a virus of some kind killed the animals and humans, although it made no sense to him that the virus could operate externally as well and cause the kinds of mutilation he had seen.

“Aliens” were a possibility he refused to seriously acknowledge. The word itself produced an instinctive inner scoff. Was he being closed-minded, he wondered, or was he scared to examine the possibilities? He didn’t know the answer to that question, but thought that it was likely a combination of both. And, he reasoned, if the cause of the murders and mutilations were alien beings, then there wasn’t going to be much the task force, or anybody else, could do about it.

Birds?

“Birds?” He said aloud. “How idiotic is that?”

Joe wanted to toss aside the “Grizzly Bear” theory as well but couldn’t. The fact was that a bear had been present at both the bull moose and Tuff Montegue locations. Joe had seen the tracks in the meadow, and determined that the bear dragged the moose into the trees. The savage wounds on Montegue’s torso, aside from the mutilations, were undoubtedly caused by a bear. But had it appeared the bear had shown up only after they were dead. The grizzly had happened by and checked out two bodies already on the ground, Joe thought, choosing not to sample the moose but having no objections to feeding on the old cowboy.

Joe also couldn’t discount the bear theory because bears were his responsibility. Because once the grizzly had left its federally protected enclave in Yellowstone, it was now the responsibility of the Game and Fish Department. With responsibility came liability, and if it turned out that the bear was the cause of the crimes, Joe’s agency would be blamed. If so, blame would cascade downhill, pooling around Joe Pickett’s boots.

If the radio collar on the bear hadn’t malfunctioned, the bear biologists tracking it could either clear—or implicate—the bear. As it was, they had no better idea of the bear’s location than Joe did.

“Disturbed Individuals” merited more consideration, he thought. He drew a star next to it. The likelihood of a nut—or nuts—with cutting tools was the most likely prospect of all, he thought. Perhaps the bad guy had been practicing on animals for months or years without suspicion. He had started, maybe, with small animals or pets, and perfected his technique. Then he moved up the food chain; an antelope or deer for starters, then a single cow or horse. Without the atmosphere of suspicion that now existed, the lone deaths of single animals would not have aroused any notice. A mutilated carcass that wasn’t found immediately—predation or not—wouldn’t appear all that different from a natural death if the discovery was a month or so afterward. Maybe, Joe thought, this had been going on for years in the area. How many animal bodies had he seen himself over the years on the sides of highways, in ditches, in the landfill? Hundreds, he thought.

But then, for some reason, the animals weren’t enough, so the killer moved on to human beings. Not just one, either. He went after two people in one night in a bloody explosion of . . . something.

Both men were killed in isolated locations accessible by either private dirt roads, in Montegue’s case, or remote county roads, in Stuart Tanner’s case. Joe wondered how long it would take to drive from one crime location to the other, and guessed an hour and a half without stopping. Which meant, if this theory played out, that the killer was local and knew his way around.

What kind of person is capable of this? Joe wondered, trying to picture a face or eyes. Neither came.

Joe’s mind spun with questions.

Was this the same person who had mutilated cattle in the 1970s? If so, why had the killer stopped for over thirty years before beginning again? Had the killer, in the meanwhile, contented himself with the death and mutilation of wildlife, like the bull moose Joe found, or perhaps the cattle mutilations in Montana?

And whoever it was, why had the killer chosen to escalate the horrors to a new level? Since Joe and the task force had virtually no leads of any kind—despite what Barnum might tell the public—what was to stop this person?

Joe looked up and stared out at the breaklands. The dull headache that had started behind his left ear an hour ago had become a full-fledged skull-pounder. The more he thought about the killings, the worse it got.

This is a job for somebody a hell of a lot smarter than I am, he thought.

The sun was still two hours from dropping behind the mountains, but the sagebrush flats and red arroyos were beginning to light up. Pockets of cottonwoods and aspen pulsed with fall color. He loved this time of the evening on the high plains, when it seemed like the dying sun infused the landscape with every last pulse of color and drama before withdrawing the favor.

He shoved his notebook into his pocket, climbed into the cab of his truck, and drove farther up the mountain into the trees, peering out from behind his headache.

oe cruised slowly, with his windows open. As it darkened, he had switched on the sneak lights under his front bumper, illuminating only the road surface directly in front of him. With his headlights off, he was almost invisible to a hunter or another vehicle until he was practically on top of them.

A half mile from the turnoff to Hazelton Road, in the low light of timber dusk, two camouflaged hunters stepped out of the trees onto the road.

When the hunters saw him, he could tell from their body language that he had surprised them. They consulted with each other, heads bent together, as he approached them. He waved, eased the pickup to a stop, clamped his Stetson on, and swung out of the truck. Before he closed his door, he reached in and turned his headlights on full, bathing the hunters in white light. It was a tactic he had learned over countless similar stops; approaching armed men on foot with his headlights behind him.

Joe quickly sized up the men as elk hunters out for the archery season. Their faces were painted in green and black, as were the backs of their hands. Each carried high-tech compound bows with extra arrows at-tached by side quivers. Their eyes, in the headlights, blinked out from their face paint.

“Are you doing any good?” Joe asked pleasantly, although he’d noted that neither was spotted with blood from a kill.

“It’s too damned warm up here,” the taller hunter said. “It’s too dry for any stealthy movement.”

His voice sounded familiar to Joe, although Joe couldn’t place it. “See anything?”

“Cow and a calf this morning,” the shorter hunter said. “I missed her, damn it.”

The shorter hunter’s quiver was missing an arrow, Joe noticed. “Couldn’t find your arrow, I see.”

The shorter hunter shook his head. “Nope.”

“I hope you didn’t wound her,” Joe said. Although archery hunting was certainly more sporting to the prey than rifle season, too many inexperienced or overexcited hunters often wounded game animals and then lost track of them. He had seen too many crippled elk, deer, and antelope in the field with errant arrows stuck in them.

The shorter hunter started to speak. “I don’t think . . .”

“. . . He missed her clean,” the taller one interrupted, annoyance in his voice. “He just fucking missed her, all right?”

Joe was now close enough to see their faces and to recognize the taller hunter through his face paint.

“You again,” Joe said to Jeff O’Bannon, the belligerent fisherman he had met before on Crazy Woman Creek with his daughters. “I hope you’ve learned how to release a fish since then.”

O’Bannon’s eyes flashed. Joe thought they looked bigger behind the face paint.

“What’s this about?” the shorter hunter asked O’Bannon. “Never mind, Pete,” O’Bannon said through clenched teeth.

“Can I please see your licenses and conservation stamps?” Joe asked, still polite.

“You’ve already seen my stamp,” O’Bannon said. “Yup, but not the elk tag.”

O’Bannon rolled his eyes and sighed, clearly annoyed.

While the hunters set their bows aside and dug for their wallets, Joe waited with his thumbs hooked into the front pockets of his Wranglers.

“Have you heard anything lately about those murders?” the short hunter asked, giving Joe his license.

“Like what?” Joe asked, checking it over. Pete was a state resident from Gillette. His license and stamp were okay, so Joe handed it back.

“Have there been any more sightings around here? Any more, you know, incidents?”

O’Bannon chuckled when he heard the question.

“Not since last week,” Joe said. “I’m sure you heard about that.”

“No little green men?” O’Bannon asked, smiling so that his teeth glinted in the headlights.

“Nope, just hunters.” Joe said, looking over the license. “You need to sign this,” he told O’Bannon, pointing toward the signature line.

“Jesus,” O’Bannon sighed, shaking his head “I knew you’d find something to hassle me over.”

I told you I would, Joe thought.

“I’m glad things are quiet,” Pete said. “I almost didn’t come over here to go hunting when I read about them murders. Jeff had to work hard to convince me to come hunting with him.”

Joe nodded, wondering how many hunters were thinking twice about traveling to his district.

“Jeff said he’d take care of those little green bastards if they showed up.” Joe had started to turn toward his pickup when he stopped.

“Really, how?”

He could see the blood drain from O’Bannon’s face, even through the face paint.

“Pete . . .” O’Bannon whispered.

“Show him, Jeff,” Pete said enthusiastically. “Show me, Jeff,” Joe said, raising his eyebrows.

O’Bannon didn’t move. Pete looked at Jeff, and slowly realized what he had done.

“Show me, Jeff,” Joe repeated.

“Shit, it’s for self-protection only. Self-protection!” O’Bannon said, raising his voice. “When people are getting cut up in the woods by something, it only makes sense!”

“Show me, Jeff.”

Sighing, O’Bannon pulled back his camouflage coat to reveal a heavy, stainless-steel revolver in a holster on his hip.

“What’s that, a .357 Magnum?” Joe asked. O’Bannon nodded.

“I used to carry one of those myself,” Joe said. “I couldn’t hit anything with it. Well, once . . .” he let his voice trail off.

“Jeff ’s won some trophies in open-range pistol shoots,” Pete volunteered, trying to ease the situation.

“That’s good,” Joe said, reaching for the ticket book that he kept in his back pocket, “but it’s archery season, fellows. Archery. Bows and arrows. When you carry a handgun, you’re violating regulations as well as the whole spirit of the season.”

“I told you it was for self-protection only,” O’Bannon said. “I didn’t even shoot it!”

“I understand,” Joe said, flipping the ticket book open. “And in other circumstances—like if you were somebody else—I would likely issue you a strong verbal warning. But, Jeff, you’re special.”

Thumbing through his well-worn booklet of regulations, Joe found the page he was looking for and read out loud from the light of the headlights: “Statute 23-2-104(d). No person holding an archery license shall take big game or trophy game animals during a special hunting season while in possession of any type of firearm.”

Joe wrote the ticket while O’Bannon glared at his former friend. “You’re also in violation of the concealed-weapons statutes unless you have a valid permit signed by Sheriff Barnum,” Joe said. “If I remember correctly, you could be looking at six months or so in jail. Do you have a permit?”

“I’m contesting this,” O’Bannon said, snatching the violation sheet from Joe and wadding it into his front pocket. “I’ll see you in fucking court!”

“Yes, you will,” Joe said. “In the meantime, I’d advise you to stay home for a while. It’ll play better with Judge Pennock if you show some remorse, even if you’re just faking it.”

O’Bannon looked like he was about to have a stroke. His eyes bulged and his jaw was thrust forward. His hands had clenched into meaty fists.

Joe tensed and laid a hand on his gun as a warning. He felt slightly ashamed for taking the frustration of the day out on Jeff O’Bannon. But only slightly.

Pete looked from O’Bannon to Joe, and back to O’Bannon. “Can I get a ride to town with you?” he asked Joe.

Joe smiled. “Jump in.”

After dinner—takeout again that Marybeth grabbed from the Burg-OPardner on her way home from work—Joe checked his messages. Nothing from the lab on the samples he had sent, nothing from Trey Crump on the bear, nothing from Hersig on any progress in the investigation.

Marybeth came into the office and shut the door behind her. “Did you notice anything odd at dinner tonight?” she asked.

Joe grimaced. He studied her quickly. No new haircut, her clothes looked familiar. Something else, then.

“When Cam brought Lucy home earlier, she was pretty upset. Cam had asked the girls not to explore the outbuildings at their place, so guess where they went after school?”

“Is she all right?”

Marybeth nodded. “She’s fine. She’s upset that she got in trouble, though. She said Cam was pretty angry with them and told Jessica she couldn’t play with Lucy for a while.”

“Nobody hurt, though?”

“No. I told Lucy it was her job to listen to Cam and Marie when she was at their house, and to follow their rules.”

Joe nodded.

“You didn’t notice that Lucy never said a word during dinner?” “Sorry, my mind was elsewhere.”

“So how did your task-force meeting go?”

Joe leaned against his desk and filled her in. She made faces as he described the meeting, and laughed when he told her about McLanahan’s theory about Arabs.

“I bet you wish they would have forgotten about you when it came to naming the members of that group,” Marybeth said.

“I’ve got Trey and Hersig to thank for that.”

She stood in silence, studying Joe. “Do you think Portenson will be trouble for us?”

Joe nodded. “I’m sure he’ll be watching me closely. He also mentioned Nate.”

“I’m sorry, Joe.”

He shrugged, as if to say we knew this was possible.

Anxious to change the subject, he asked about her day.

“Cam’s listing more homes and ranches every day. Ranchers are talking to each other and singing his praises. But those mutilations are big news . . . no one wants to buy right now. Cam’s trying to get them to lower their prices. It’s a little tense around the office right now. But if things go well, he asked me if I’d be interested in going full-time, Joe. As a realtor.” She beamed.

Inwardly, Joe moaned and guilt washed over him. “That’s great, honey.”

“That’s not really what you think, is it?” she asked, smiling slightly. “Of course it is. We need the money.”

“Joe, I like the Logues. I admire them. And you know I’d be a hell of a good realtor.”

“Yes, you would. You are good at everything you do.” “Damn straight,” she said.

He smiled and reached out for her. If only he could provide enough for the family. He silently vowed that as soon as the task force investigation wrapped up, he would start exploring his options in earnest.

“Don’t forget that we’re having dinner with Mom and Bud Longbrake tomorrow night,” Marybeth said, dashing his mood further.

n overnight envelope lay in the in-box on his desk. When he saw that it was from the forensics laboratory in Laramie, he anxiously ripped it open and pulled out the documents. It was the toxicology report on his moose. He fanned through the pages listing the details of the analysis and found the conclusion in a memo at the end.

The lab had found no unusual substances, and no abnormal levels of natural substances. He scanned the pages for the word “oxindole,” but it simply wasn’t there.

“Damn,” he said, and threw the report on his desk.

Sheridan was snoring, but Lucy was still awake when Joe came into their bedroom to kiss them good night. The room was small and there wasn’t much space between the two single beds. He sidled between them and sat down on Lucy’s bed, smoothing her blond hair. “I heard what happened,” Joe said softly.

Lucy nodded, “Did Mom tell you about that shack we found?” “No,” Joe said, “she didn’t.”

“Somebody was living out there. We saw where he slept and we thought we heard something. We were so scared, Dad.”

Joe wondered why Marybeth hadn’t told him about this, but figured that probably it wasn’t the issue. He assumed that a transient was using the shack, which alarmed him. Who knew how long ago somebody had been there? The house had been unoccupied for years before the Logues bought it and began restoration. Had Cam called the sheriff ? He would need to ask Marybeth.

“You need to stay out of those buildings, Lucy,” he said firmly. “There are strange people in town because of what’s going on. You need to listen to Mr. Logue and to us.”

Lucy nodded, her eyes wide.

She climbed the stairs, he thought: My wife the realtor, imagining a photo of her face at the bottom of an advertisement in the Roundup real estate section.

15

The next morning, Joe headed out to the Riverside RV Park to pay a visit to Cleve Garrett, self-proclaimed expert in the paranormal. Joe prayed that his mother-in-law would never find out about this. He cringed just thinking about the multitude of woo-woo questions she’d have for him. The RV park was located on the west bank of the river and was surrounded by three acres of heavily wooded and seriously overgrown river cottonwoods.

As Joe nosed his pickup onto the ancient steel bridge, he thought that the RV park looked like the aftermath of a giant garbage can tipped over in the wind. Bits of glass, metal, weathered plywood, and old tires looked like they were caught in the spidery silver trees that had just lost the last of their leaves. On closer inspection, however, he saw that the trash was actually a number of aging mobile homes tucked into alcoves among the trees. The old tires had been placed on the tops of the mobile homes to keep the roofs from blowing off in the wind.

Under the bridge, he noticed a single fisherman in the water below, and smiled. It was the man known as Not Ike, who since his arrival in Saddlestring, had become the single most dedicated fly-fisherman Joe had ever seen. Not Ike was the “slow” cousin of Ike Easter, the county clerk. Because Ike Easter had been the only black face in Saddlestring for ten years, when his cousin the fly-fisherman moved to town he found himself being called Ike everywhere he went, so he had a sweatshirt printed up that said i’m not ike. But instead of being called by his actual name, which was George, he became known as Not Ike.

Along with a couple of retired local men named Hans and Jack, Not Ike worked the pocket waters near the two bridges that crossed the Twelve Sleep River for trout, and Joe had seen him out there in every kind of weather. Because Not Ike couldn’t yet afford an annual nonresident license, he bought cheaper, threeand five-day temporary licenses, one after the other, as they expired, so he could keep fishing. At least Joe hoped Not Ike was still buying the licenses, and made a mental note to check him out later.

As he reached the other side of the bridge, Joe turned left and passed under a faded hanging sign announcing his entrance to the Riverside Resort and RV Park.

Although once conceived as a “resort,” the Riverside RV Park had declined and amalgamated into a sort of idiosyncratic hybrid. Most of the spaces were occupied by permanent residents; retirees from the lumber mill, service workers for the Eagle Mountain Club, transients, and now CBM crews. A few new model mobile homes with strips of neat landscaped lawn sat next to sagging, dented trailers mounted on cinder blocks, with out-of-plumb wooden storage sheds occupying every foot of the property. From the entrance, the road branched into three lanes, with mobile homes lining both sides of the lanes.

Joe had been to the Riverside two years before, following up on an anonymous poaching tip, so he was somewhat familiar with the layout. He had caught two employees of a highway construction crew skinning pronghorn antelopes hung from trees behind a rented trailer, and he had arrested them both for taking the animals out of season. The RV park had changed very little since then, although due to the influx of CBM workers, it now looked as if most of the spaces were occupied.

He stopped at the first trailer, the one with resort manager in sculpted wrought-iron above the gate. The trailer had been there long enough that the silver skin of the unit had oxidized into pewter. A basket of frosted plastic flowers hung from a sun porch near the door.

Leaving his truck idling with Maxine curled and sleeping under the dashboard heater vent, he swung out and clamped on his gray Stetson. It was a cold, still morning, and the park was silent. He zipped his coat up a few inches, and thrust his hands into his coat pockets.

He could smell coffee brewing and bacon frying from inside the manager’s office as he approached the door. The doorbell rang, and he stepped back on the porch and waited, wishing the bright morning sun could find him through the trees and warm his back.The interior door clicked and opened inward, then the manager pushed the screen door open.

“Good morning, Jimbo,” Joe said.

Jimbo Francis had been the manager of the Riverside since Joe had moved to the Saddlestring District. He was a big man with a massive belly. His face was as round as a hubcap, with protruding ears and a band of wispy, white cotton under a bald dome that expanded into a full mustache and beard stained with streaks of yellow. Jimbo had once been a government trapper, in charge of eradicating predators in the Bighorns and valleys by shooting, trapping, or poisoning them. When federal funding was withdrawn, he had taken the job of managing the “resort” temporarily, until funding for the program was restored. That was twenty-five years before, and he was still waiting. Jimbo was also a self-proclaimed patron of the arts, and was the chairman of the Saddlestring Library Foundation. He had once told Joe and Marybeth that his passion in life was “reading books and eradicating vermin.” Now that he was in his late seventies and his eyes were failing—he had been instrumental in creating the books-on-tape section in the library—both of his passions were waning. As was his sanity, Joe suspected.

“And a good morning to you, Vern Dunnegan!” Jimbo boomed.

“Joe Pickett,” Joe corrected. “Vern’s been gone for six years. I replaced him.” Vern’s in prison where he belongs, Joe thought but didn’t say. No reason to confuse Jimbo further.

“I knew that, I guess,” Jimbo said, rubbing his hand through his hair. “Of course I knew that. I don’t know what I was thinking. Vern was here so damned long, I guess, that I still think of him. That just goes to show you that a man shouldn’t open his door in the morning until he’s had his first three cups of coffee. I knew Vern was gone.”

“Sure you did,” Joe said, patting Jimbo on the shoulder.

“Is Marybeth still working at the library?” he asked, as if trying to further prove he was lucid.

“Not anymore, I’m afraid.”

“That’s too goddamn bad,” Jimbo said. “She was a looker.” Joe sighed.

“You need some coffee? You’re here pretty early, Joe. I’ve got breakfast started. Do you want some eggs and bacon?”

“No thanks, Jimbo. I need to check with you on a new renter.” “We call them guests.”

“Okay. On a new guest. The name is Cleve Garrett.”

Jimbo rolled his eyes into his head, as if trying to find his mental rental list. Joe waited for Jimbo’s eyes to reappear. When they did, Jimbo said, “It’s a cold morning. Do you want to come in?”

“That’s okay,” Joe said patiently. He remembered the interior of Jimbo’s trailer from before. The place was claustrophobic, books crammed among Jimbo’s collection of coyote, badger, beaver, and mountain lion skulls, empty eye sockets of dozens of predators looking out over everything. “If you could just tell me what space Cleve Garrett is renting, I’ll be off.”

“He’s got a girl with him,” Jimbo said. “Skinny little number.”

Joe nodded. He could have simply cruised the lanes, looking for the new RV. But he’d wanted to clear it with Jimbo first. Now he was regretting his choice.

“He’s here, then.”

“He’s here, all right,” Jimbo said. “Been a parade of folks through here lately, all asking about ‘Cleve Garrett, Cleve Garrett.’ They’re all starstruck. He’s some kind of big expert in the paranormal, I guess. He’s giving lectures on it. I plan to attend a couple. Maybe we can get him to speak at the library while he’s here.”

“Maybe,” Joe said, his patience just about gone. “Which space is he in?” “Lot C-17,” Jimbo said finally. “You know, I’ve seen him before, but I can’t figure out where. Maybe on television or something. These mutilations in our community are weighing heavily on my mind. You want a strip of bacon to go?”

Chewing on the bacon, Joe drove down lane C. He tossed the second half of the strip to Maxine.

Cleve Garrett’s trailer was obvious before Joe even looked at the lot numbers. It couldn’t have been more out of place. Joe fought an urge to laugh out loud, but at the same time he felt an icy electric tingle shoot up his spine. The huge trailer stood out as if it were a spacecraft that had docked in a cemetery. A bulging, extremely expensive, gleaming silver Airstream—the Lexus of trailers—bristled with antennae and small satellite dishes. A device shaped like a tuning fork rotated in the air near the front of the trailer. The Airstream was unhitched, and the modified, dual-wheeled diesel Suburban that had pulled it was parked to the side. Joe stopped his truck briefly behind the Suburban, jotting down the Nevada license plate numbers in his notebook before pulling to the other side of the trailer.

A Formica plate was bolted to the front door. It read:

DR . CLEVE GARRETT iconoclast society re no, nevada Joe turned off his motor and shut his door when the Airstream door opened and a smiling, owlish man stepped out.

“Cleve Garrett?”

“Dr. Cleve Garrett,” the man corrected, pulling an oversized sweater around him. Garrett was in his late forties, thin, with a limp helmet of hair that gave him a disagreeably youthful appearance. His mouth was wide, with almost nonexistent lips, and it turned down sharply at each corner. His nose was long and aquiline, and his big eyes dominated his face, appearing even larger through thick, round lenses.

“Joe Pickett. I’m the game warden and a member of the task force investigating the mutilations.”

Garrett tilted his head back, as if looking at Joe through his thin nostrils. “I was wondering when someone was going to show up. I’m a little surprised they sent a game warden.”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” Joe said, although he wasn’t.

Garrett waved it away. “Never mind. Come on in, I’ve been waiting. Everything is ready.”

Joe hesitated. Everything is ready? He pondered revealing to Garrett that he had some background on him, and his “work” in Montana, courtesy of Dave Avery. Joe chose not to say anything yet, to let Garrett do the talking.

“Iconoclast Society?” Joe asked. “What’s that?”

Garrett’s large eyes widened even further, filling the lenses, unnerving Joe. “Iconoclast,” Garrett said. “Breaker of images. Burster of bubbles. De-nouncer. Decrier. Without passion. I’m a scientist, Mr. Pickett.”

Joe said, “Oh,” wondering why he had volunteered to Hersig to take this part of the investigation.

“Let me show you what you people are up against,” Garrett said. Stepping into the Airstream was like stepping inside a computer, Joe thought. On three of the four walls were shelf brackets that held stacks of electronic equipment and gauges, monitors, and keyboards. There was the low hum of high-tech equipment and the hushing sound of tiny interior fans. Wires and cables bound by duct tape snaked through the equipment and across the ceiling.

On the back wall of the room was a closed door that obviously led to the rest of the trailer. On either side of the door were stainless steel counters and sinks, littered beakers, and glass tubing. The pegboard walls near the door displayed medical and mechanical tools.

Joe folded himself onto a stool on one side of a small metal table stacked high with files, folders, and printouts. Garrett took the other stool and started arranging the folders in front of him.

“Quite a place,” Joe said, removing his hat and looking around.

“The trailer was modified to be a mobile lab and command center,” Garrett said brusquely, as if he’d explained it a thousand times to others and wanted to get it out of the way quickly so they could move on with things.

“A million and a half dollars worth of the latest hardware, software, and monitoring devices. The lab takes up the front half of the trailer, living quarters take up the back. We’ve got an interior generator, although I prefer to pull into a place like this,” he gestured vaguely toward the outside, referring to the Riverside Park, “so I can plug in. All of our data and findings are synched via satellite to our center in Nevada, where half a dozen other scientists analyze it as well. I can be totally mobile and on the road within two hours to get to a site. I was here in Saddlestring, for example, within forty-eight hours of the first discovery of the mutilated cattle.”

Joe nodded. “Who pays for all of this?”

“We’re totally, completely private,” Garrett said. “We accept no corporate or government funds at all. Therefore, we’re not compromised. We’re a completely independent center devoted to impartial scientific research into paranormal activities.”

“So,” Joe asked again, “who pays for all of this?”

Garrett showed a hint of annoyance. “Ninety-eight percent of our funding comes from a single source. He’s a highly successful entrepreneur named Marco Weakland. You’ve probably heard of him.”

“I haven’t,” Joe said.

“Among his many ventures, he has a particular interest in paranormal psychology and science. It fascinates him. He uses a very small part of his fortune to fund this project and to employ some of the best alternative scientists in the world. Our job is to get to the scene of unexplained activity and analyze it in pure scientific terms. Mr. Weakland doesn’t trust government conclusions, and frankly we’ve disproved and debunked more phenomena as hoaxes than found actual evidence of paranormal or su-pernatural activity. And we’ve found completely natural explanations for most of the phenomena we’ve investigated in the three short years we’ve been in operation. Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Weakland sincerely believes in the possibility of alien beings, civilizations, and incursions, as do I. But he wants them proven, scientifically, before he brings them to light. What I don’t quite understand, Mr. Pickett, is why I’m explaining all of this to you when I already went into it in some detail with the Sheriff ’s Department.”

Joe had a mental image of Deputy McLanahan listening to Garrett over the telephone while doing the crossword puzzle in the back of the TV Guide.

“The deputy communicated very little of your conversation,” Joe said, not liking to make excuses for McLanahan.

“Well,” Garrett said, looking annoyed, “then that explains why I wasn’t asked to participate in your task-force meeting.”

Joe looked at Garrett blankly.

“In fact, if you people were really interested in getting to the bottom of these mutilations and murders, you would appoint me cochair of the task force.”

“You’d need to talk to the county DA about that,” Joe said. “His name is Robey Hersig.” Joe made a mental note to call Hersig as soon as he could and warn him that Dr. Cleve Garrett would be contacting him.

or thirty minutes, Garrett spoke nonstop and Joe listened. Cleve Garrett showed Joe photographs of mutilated cattle, sheep, horses, and goats that had been taken over the last four decades in the United States and Canada, and throughout South and Central America. Mutilated dairy cattle had been reported in the United Kingdom and Europe in the 1960s, often at the same time alleged crop circles were discovered. Official explanations for the mutilations were as varied as their geography, but most in-volved birds, insects, or cults.

The photos and case files—many of them ancient carbon copies and several written in Spanish and Portuguese—piled up on the table in front of them. The last few case files held photos and names of places Joe recognized. Conrad, Montana. Helena, Montana.

“Last winter, mutilated cattle were discovered in Montana,” Garrett said. “Someone up there was familiar with our group and called us. Unfortunately, they called us three weeks too late. By the time I got there, the local yokels had completely tromped all over the crime scenes, and they refused our assistance.”

Joe listened silently, not letting on that he had heard Dave Avery’s side of this story.

“We were able to obtain the heads of several of the cattle, but they were nearly two months old at that point. We shipped them to our facility in Reno for technical analysis.”

Garrett dropped a thick file of necropsy photos on the table. Joe opened the folder to see the skinless head of a cow with the top of its skull cut off. Someone probed a flat metal tool into the cow’s withered brain in a gesture that looked uncomfortably like the act of scooping peanut butter from a jar with a butter knife. Gently closing the folder, Joe felt his morning coffee burble in his stomach.

“What we found were levels of a chemical in the brains and organs in excess of what should be there naturally.”

Joe thought oxindole, but said: “What was it?”

Garrett started to answer, pulled back, and said coyly, “I’ll save the results for the task-force meeting.”

“So we’re playing games here?”

“I don’t play games. I just don’t want to show all of my cards until we’re in an official setting and I’ve been given some standing in the task force.”

Joe nodded. “Go on.”

Garrett continued, “Some of the trace chemicals discovered were absolutely unknown to our scientists. You understand? Unknown! Poisons or sedatives not of this world were found in the brain tissue of Montana cattle. Not only that, but the incisions had been performed by ultra high temperature laser instruments—instruments available only in leading sur-gical hospitals, not in the field. Certainly, this type of procedure could not have been done in the elements outside of Conrad, Montana.”

Joe was intrigued. He looked up, needing a break from the photos, which, in their quantity alone, were numbing.

“So what did you determine?” Joe asked.

Garrett sighed. “What we determined was that we were too late to do proper on-site analysis. We kept waiting for fresh incidents in Montana, but they never came. We were very disappointed. Our scientists were begging for fresher tissue to study before natural decomposition occurred. But whatever had mutilated the cattle had moved on.”

“Here to Twelve Sleep County,” Joe said.

“YES!” Garrett shouted, nearly upsetting the table. His sudden exclamation sounded like a gunshot in the silent room. “Now we’re right in the middle of it, right where it’s happening. Not only cattle and wildlife, but perhaps, for the first time, human beings! This is why I need to be on the task force. Why I need to be involved, and to be kept informed. You people have a resource here,” he thumped his chest, indicating himself, “that you can’t ignore, that you shouldn’t ignore. Look at the equipment in this laboratory. Can you even imagine a more fortuitous circumstance?”

Joe looked up. “I can’t speak for the task force.”

“From what we can determine,” Garrett said, plowing ahead as if Joe hadn’t spoken, “wildlife and livestock mutilations aren’t random at all. What we’re beginning to believe is that the mutilations are ongoing, and perpetual, and have been for at least forty years.”

“You lost me,” Joe said.

“You lost yourself,” Garrett snapped. He had been getting more and more animated as he spoke, and was now highly agitated. His hands flew about as he spoke and his eyes, if possible, had become even wider.

“What we’re saying is that the mutilations are like the worldwide circulation of the flu bug. They never really stop, they just keep moving around the earth. There are blank spots in time—years, in fact—where there are no reported incidents, but that’s because we don’t have information from places like Africa or the Asian continent or Russia. And we certainly don’t have data about the hundreds—or thousands—of incidents that are never even discovered or recognized for what they were. Do you know what this means?”

“What’s that?” Joe asked, knowing he sounded doltish.

Garrett rose and leaned forward on the small table. His damp palms stuck to papers and files, puckering them. “It could well be that beings are conducting full-time research on our planet. Whether they’re doing it for genetic or physiological reasons, we don’t know. But they’re digging rather aggressively in our own Petri dish, trying to discover, or confirm, or create something.”

Garrett let his words hang in the air, obviously hoping that Joe would understand their significance “If they’re here now, we have the best opportunity we’ve ever had of contacting them directly. We can let them know we’re on to their little game, and maybe offer to assist them. Perhaps we can start to build trust, exchange ideas. What is happening out there right now may be one of the most important opportunities to happen in our lifetime!”

Or not, Joe thought.

“What about the human victims? Where do they fit into your theory?” Joe asked.

Garrett stifled a smile. Actually, a mad grin, Joe thought.

“This is where things get interesting,” Garrett said, his voice nearly a whisper. “They’ve obviously stepped up their research in one bold stroke.”

“Why now?” Joe asked. “And why two men, for that matter?”

Garrett shook his head. “That I can’t quite figure out, although I have some ideas on it. One of my ideas you’re not going to want to hear.”

He said it in a way that led Joe to believe that Garrett couldn’t wait to continue. Joe responded by raising his eyebrows.

“At least one of the two men was killed by other means,” Garrett said quickly for maximum impact.

Joe felt his stomach churn. He would have to get out of the trailer soon, he thought.

“What makes you say that?”

Garrett raised his hands, palms up. “From what I understand, the two men were killed at least fifty miles apart on the same night. Both were mu-tilated in similar fashion to the cattle and wildlife. But one of the men was dragged from the murder scene and fed on by a bear and the other was found in pristine condition.”

Joe nodded.

“Obviously, something is wrong here. One of the primary characteristics of cattle and wildlife mutilations has been the lack of predation. I’ve got hundreds of photos to prove it. But a predator fed on the corpse of one of the murdered men only hours after he was killed. Doesn’t this strike you as odd?”

“Yes,” Joe admitted.

“There’s more, much more.” Garrett said, his hands flying around like doves released from a cage.

“Yes?”

“I’ll save the rest for the task-force meeting.”

Joe noticed something different in the room, smelled something, and turned his head.

The door at the end of the room near the sinks was ajar. He hadn’t heard it open, but the odor he smelled was cigarette smoke.

As he watched, the door pushed open and a woman stepped through it. She was young, pale, and thin, with straight, shoulder-length blond hair parted in the middle. She wore all black—black jeans, Doc Martens boots, long-sleeved turtleneck. Her lips were painted black and her dark blue eyes were bordered by heavy mascara. She is not beautiful, Joe thought. Without the statement in black, she would be unremarkable.

Garrett turned as well, angry. “Deena, what have I told you about letting smoke in here with my expensive equipment?”

Deena fixed her eyes on Joe, and when she answered she didn’t shift them. “I’m sorry, Cleve. I heard loud voices, so I . . .”

“Please shut the door,” Garrett said sternly. As if talking to a child, Joe thought.

Joe looked back. Her eyes and expression were remarkable in their lack of content. But it seemed as if she were trying to connect with him in some way, for some reason.

“Deena . . .” Garrett cautioned.

“Bye,” Deena said in a little-girl voice, and stepped back through the door, closing it.

Joe looked to Garrett for an explanation. Garrett, again, looked agitated. His dramatic monologue had been interrupted.

“Deena’s been with me since Montana,” Garrett said, his eyes icy. But Joe noticed a flush in his cheeks, as if he were embarrassed to have to explain anything. “She’s a hanger-on, I guess you’d call her. My line of work attracts people who are a bit on the edge of the rest of society. I’m doing what I can to help her out with her journey.”

“Is she even seventeen?” Joe said coldly.

“She’s nineteen!” Garrett hissed. “More than legal age. She knows what she’s doing.”

Joe simply nodded, then pushed his stool back. “What, you’re leaving?”

“I’ve heard enough from you for today, I think.”

Joe stood, picked up his hat, and turned for the door. Garrett followed. “I think I know what’s happening out there, Mr. Pickett. I’m so close to it I can almost shout it out! But you’ve got to give me access to the task force and your findings. I need to see the case files, and the investigative notes. And you must make sure I’m notified immediately in the instance of another discovery.”

“I gave you Robey’s name, right? You’ll have to call him for all of that,” Joe said over his shoulder as he stepped out of the trailer.

“I need you to vouch for me,” Garrett pleaded. “I beg of you, sir!”

Joe opened the door of his pickup, hesitating for a moment. Garrett stood near the front of his Airstream, palms out, pleading.

“I’ll talk to them,” Joe said. “I need to settle on exactly what I’m going to say.”

“That’s all I ask,” Garrett said, his face lighting up. “That’s all I ask.”

e saw her in the heavy trees before he made the turn to leave the Riverside Resort and RV Park. It was a glimpse through the passenger window; amidst the tree trunks were her eyes, framed by dark makeup.

Joe checked his rearview mirror. Cleve Garrett had returned to his trailer, and the front window of the Airstream was obscured by overgrown branches that reached down from the side of the lane. Garrett would not be able to see him.

He stopped and got out. “Deena?” “Yes.”

He walked across the gravel lane into the soft mulch on the floor of the tree stand. She leaned against a massive old-growth river cottonwood trunk. She had no coat, and her face was even paler than he recalled from a few moments before. She hugged herself, her long, white fingers with black painted nails gripping opposite shoulders.

He asked, “Were you trying to tell me something back there?” She searched his face with her eyes, trying to read him.

“I guess so.” Her voice trembled. “Maybe . . .” Was she cold or scared? She wondered.

Joe stripped his jacket off and fitted it over her shoulders.

“What year were you born, Deena?” he asked. As he suspected, he saw a twitch of confusion as she tried to do the math. Did she know that Garrett had said she was nineteen?

Deena gave up, not even trying to lie. “Please don’t send me back to Montana. There’s nothing I want to go back to. There’s nobody up there who wants me back.”

“What did you want to tell me, Deena?”

Joe searched her face, looked her over. Beneath the cover of foundation was a road map of acne scars on both cheeks. A smear of shiny, black lip gloss dropped from the corner of her mouth like a comma.

“I didn’t hear very much of what you two were talking about,” she said in a voice so weak he strained to hear it, “but I know there’s more to Cleve than meets the eye. And there’s less, too, I guess.” She looked up and smiled hauntingly, as if sharing a secret.

Unfortunately, Joe didn’t know what she meant. “You don’t understand, do you?”

“Nope.”

She looked furtively over her shoulder in the direction of the Airstream, as if calculating how much time she had.

“Do you have an e-mail address?” she asked Joe. He nodded.

“I’ll e-mail you, then. I don’t think we have the time to get into all of it here. I have an e-mail account Cleve doesn’t know about.”

“Deena, are you being held against your will?” he asked. “Do you need a place to stay?”

She grinned icily and shook her head. “There’s no place in the world, in the cosmos, that I’d rather be than right here, right now. I’m no prisoner. Cleve will help make things happen, and I want to be here to see it. To experience it. The other stuff doesn’t much matter.”

“What other stuff ? And what will Cleve make happen?”

She shifted away from the trunk she was leaning on, stepping back from Joe.

“I can handle Cleve, don’t worry,” she said, smiling provocatively. “I can handle most men. It’s really not that tough.”

Joe started to speak, but she held up her hand. “I’ve got to go. I’ll e-mail you.”

He wrote his address on the back of a Wyoming Game and Fish business card and handed it to her.

“Thank you for the coat,” she said, before shrugging it off and turning back to the Airstream.

As he pulled it back on, he could smell her inside of his coat. Makeup, cigarette smoke, and something else. Something medical, he thought. Ointment, or lotion, he thought.

When he looked up she was gone.

s he crossed the bridge, Joe glanced over the railing. Jack, the retired guy, was fishing upstream near a sand spit. Not Ike was still down there, completing a long, looping fly cast into ripples that flowed into a deep pool. There were some big fish in the pool, Joe knew. Twenty-two-to twenty-four-inch browns, three to four pounds, big enough to be called “hogs” by serious fishermen. Not Ike looked up, saw Joe, and waved. Joe waved back and made another mental note to check out his license. Later, though, after he sorted out what had just happened in the Riverside Resort and RV Park. Later, when he could get back to being a game warden.

16

I bet cam ten dollars I could get you to say three words tonight,” Marie Logue told Joe between courses that evening at the Longbrake Ranch.

“You lose,” Joe said, deadpan.

Marie at first looked disappointed, even a little shocked, then she shared a glance with Marybeth and both women whooped. Joe smiled.

“He’s been waiting for years to use that line,” Marybeth laughed. “You offered the perfect setup. Calvin Coolidge said it first.”

“Good one,” Cam said gruffly from across the table. “I’ll have to remember that one.”

“It’s not like you’ve ever had a problem talking,” Marie said through a false smile. “Except to me. Lately, especially.”

Cam rolled his eyes and looked away, dismissing her.

Uh-oh, Joe thought. They’re not kidding. He noticed that Marybeth caught it, too. She had mentioned the increasing tension at Logue Country Realty to him recently, saying that despite Cam’s success in listing ranches, homes, and commercial property, nothing was selling.

Dinner at the Longbrake Ranch had become a twice-monthly event since Missy had moved in with Bud. In addition to Joe and Marybeth and the grandchildren, Missy often invited a number of other people, all of them influential: ranchers, business owners, the editor of the Roundup, and state senators and representatives. Tonight, however, it was just the Picketts and the Logues. Missy was, Joe grdugingly admitted, an excellent hostess. It was something she was born to do and she thrived at it. The events typically began with drinks beneath the canopy of old cottonwoods out back or in the huge living room when it was cool or windy, then moved to the dining room for dinner and wine, and ended up with the men in Bud’s cavernous study and the women in the living room. Missy moved graciously from guest to guest, asking innocuous questions, showing them the renovations she was supervising in the old ranch house, laughing at their jokes, discussing her wedding plans, urging them to top off their drinks. Her face assumed a luminescence that made her truly beautiful, if one didn’t know any better, Joe thought.

Joe had made halfhearted attempts to get out of the dinners before but hadn’t succeeded. Marybeth felt obligated to attend, she said, and made the case that it was important for their girls to have a good relationship with their grandmother. Joe suspected that Marybeth enjoyed the socialization and discussion, although she claimed it didn’t matter that much to her. Sheridan and Lucy, Joe guessed, leaned more toward his point of view than their mother’s. Rarely were there other children at the dinners.

May we be excused?” Lucy asked. She sat with Jessica Logue and Sheridan. She was asking on behalf of all three girls.

Marybeth looked to Marie, and both mothers nodded. Lucy and Jessica had not played with each other since they got in trouble and both were transparently pleased that the dinner had brought them together again.

“Should they go outside?” Marybeth asked Joe.

“They’ll be within sight,” Missy broke in, dismissing her daughter’s concern. Then whispered: “Nothing has ever happened out in the open, honey.”

“Stay close to the house,” Marybeth called after them as the three girls thanked Missy for dinner before scrambling away from the table and out the front door.

“We’re just going to see the horses,” Sheridan called out as the screen door slammed.

After dinner, talk turned to the mutilations and the death of Tuff Montegue. Bud Longbrake questioned Cam Logue about the economic effects the crimes had had on the valley, particularly in regard to land values. “We can only pray it’s temporary,” Cam said. “But it’s reduced land values and home values at least twenty percent, by my guess. Twelve Sleep County is radioactive.”

He shook his head. “In one case, I’ve got a willing seller and a willing buyer, but the buyer has decided now to hold out a little longer for a price reduction. The sellers are battling among themselves whether to reduce the price a little or not. Meanwhile, nothing is happening.”

Bud smiled knowingly. “I think I know the ranch you’re talking about. Those crazy sisters. They’d be rich if their daddy hadn’t sold the mineral rights to the place. Nobody ever used to think that much about it. Everyone figured if there wasn’t oil on their land—and there never was—that selling the mineral rights was just free money from suckers. I hear the plan is to put two thousand CBM wells on the land.”

Cam nodded vaguely. He obviously felt uncomfortable talking about the specifics of the ranch or the terms. But Bud liked to needle and pry, and was good-natured about it.

“It’s been crazy,” Marie said, shaking her head.

“Marybeth mentioned that on top of everything else you have company right now,” Missy said to Cam and Marie.

Cam laughed and ran his hand through his thick, blond hair. “Yes, it’s not exactly the best time in the world to have my whole family here for a visit.” “It never is,” Missy cooed sympathetically. This from the woman who camped out in his house for a month and a half before moving in with Bud Longbrake, Joe thought sourly.

As the talk turned back to more mundane topics, Joe’s thoughts drifted away from the table. He kept replaying the morning at the Riverside Park and his conversation with Cleve Garrett. He still could not shake his discomfort. The point Garrett had made about the differences in the deaths of Tuff Montegue and Stuart Tanner had eaten at him all afternoon. Yet again, nothing seemed to make sense or connect as it should.

Joe?” Marybeth said, her voice breaking into his thoughts. “Bud is talking to you. Are you going to answer his question?”

Joe looked around and realized that Missy had paused in midserve of dessert and was looking at him expectantly. Cam and Marie were silent, waiting for the answer to the question that Joe hadn’t heard. The conversation, which a few moments before had been lively and flowing around him, had died. He could hear the clock tick in the next room. Marybeth looked exasperated, as she often did when he lapsed into what she called “Joe Zone.” It particularly annoyed her when he did it in front of Missy because Marybeth thought it made him look ignorant.

Joe cleared his throat. “I’m sorry,” he said. “What was the question?”

The three girls lined up outside of the corral looking at Bud Longbrake’s horses in the last moments of dusk. They leaned forward and rested their arms on the rails, peering inside at a dozen stout ranch horses. Roberto, the remaining ranch hand, broke open bales and tossed hay to them over the fence. Sheridan cocked a foot on the bottom rail. She found the grumm-grumm sound of horses eating extremely soothing.

Sheridan said, “I heard Grandmother Missy say that Mister Bud brought all of his horses in from the mountains and put them in the corral because of the aliens.”

Lucy looked up at her with wide eyes. “Did she really say ‘aliens’?” “Yes, she did. I heard her tell Mrs. Logue that.”

“Man, oh, man.”

Behind them, in the ranch yard, the sensor on the light pole hummed and the light clicked on as the sky darkened. Although it really didn’t make sense that it could get colder from one moment to the next simply because the sun dropped behind the mountains, Sheridan gathered her coat closer around her. It had to do with the altitude and the thin air, her dad had told her.

Jessica said, “If we’re going to be out here, maybe we should have bought those aluminum-foil hats those boys were selling in the cafeteria.” “What are you talking about?” Sheridan said, and Lucy laughed. They told Sheridan about the caps. Then they said they thought it was unfair that their parents had not allowed them to play together after school for the last week because of their visit to the “haunted shack.” Sheridan needed to see it, Lucy said. The shack would scare her, as it did them.

Maybe they would see who lived there.

“It’s probably a poor homeless guy,” Sheridan said.

“Or . . .” Jessica said, pausing dramatically, “it’s the Mutilator!” “Jessica!” Lucy exclaimed. “Stop that. You’re acting like Hailey, trying to scare everyone.”

Jessica giggled, and after a short pause, Lucy joined in. Once their giggles had stopped, the two girls changed the subject to a mutual friend’s upcoming birthday party. While they chattered, Sheridan watched the horses in the corral. Something seemed wrong. She knew from their own horses that once the hay was tossed out the horses were single-minded about eating for the next few hours until it was gone. It was odd, she thought, that the horses hadn’t settled into their eating routine, but continued to mill about in the corral. They ate for a few minutes, then shuffled restlessly.

“Don’t the horses seem nervous?” she asked.

Lucy and Jessica had been in deep conversation about things that had happened in school that day, and how Hailey Bond had gone home sick.

“What about them?” Lucy asked.

“I don’t know anything about horses,” Jessica said. “Ask me about something I know about, like piano lessons.”

Sheridan dropped it. “Girlie girls,” she said, dismissing them.

But she was sure that something was wrong in the corral. One of the horses, a dun, broke from the herd and rushed toward the girls, stopping short just in front of them and causing all three to step back momentarily. The dun faced them, his nostrils flared and his eyes showing wild flashes of white. His ears were pinned back. Then just as suddenly, the horse relaxed and bent his head down for a mouthful of hay.

“What did she want?” Jessica asked Sheridan.

“He’s a he,” Sheridan said. “He’s a gelding, do you know what that means?” “No.”

“Then I won’t tell you. But I don’t know what he wanted. Horses shouldn’t do that when they have dinner to worry about. Something’s wrong.”

Tuff could be a pain in the ass,” Bud Longbrake said over a snifter of afterdinner brandy in his study, “but no one deserves to die like that.”

Cam murmured his agreement and sipped his own drink. Joe had passed on the brandy and poured bourbon into his glass.

All three men were now in the book-lined study.

“Most employees can never be counted on,” Bud said. “Loyalty lasts as long as the next paycheck. They all feel like they’re owed a damned living, like they’re entitled to it. That’s why I like hiring guys like Roberto, who know they’re getting a hell of a fair shake. But Tuff worked here at least five times over the years. Twice I fired his ass, but the other three times he quit to do something else. He was a surveyor’s assistant for a while, then a cell phone customer cervice rep. Imagine that—a cowboy service rep.

“Then after being a fake mountain man in Jackson Hole for a while, old Tuff was back in this very office with his hat in his hand, begging for his old job back. Now he’s gone.”

Joe had looked up sharply as Bud talked; something had tripped a switch. “Bud, did you say Tuff worked with a surveyor?”

“Yup. Why?”

“I’m not sure,” Joe shrugged. “It’s just interesting.”

Joe noticed that Cam Logue was looking him over closely, apparently trying to figure something out. He met Cam’s eyes, and Cam looked away. “Tuff did lots of things,” Bud said, laughing. “Did I tell you the story he told me about trying to lift some woman at a chuck-wagon dinner theater for tourists? When he was playing a mountain man?”

While Joe listened, he refreshed the ice in his glass from a bucket on Bud’s desk. The curtains on the window were open, and it was dark outside. It was getting late. He could use this as a reason to move Marybeth on, he thought. There was school tomorrow, after all.

Outside, he could see his daughters and Jessica Logue in the dim cast of the yard light.

“Something’s definitely weird with the horses,” Sheridan said to Lucy and Jessica, interrupting their debate over who was the cutest boy in the sixth grade.

It was getting too dark to see individual horses in the corral but the herd was a dark, writhing mass. Occasionally, a horse would break loose like the dun had earlier, charge and stop abruptly, and she could see its shape against the opposite rails. But, like the dun that had bluff-charged them, the stray would inevitably return to the herd. The footfalls of the horses were distinct, and muffled in the dirt, as was the sound of them eating.

“Maybe it’s the Mutilator,” Jessica said.

“Stop it,” Lucy said sharply. “I’m not kidding.” “I agree,” Sheridan said. “Knock it off.”

“I’m sorry,” Jessica said in a near whisper.

Then, from the corner of the corral, within the dark herd, a horse screamed.

Inside the house, Marybeth jumped. “What was that?”

“Just the horses,” Missy said, wearing her hostess smile and filling coffee cups on a silver tray. “Bud brought them down to the corral.”

“Mom,” Marybeth asked, “why did he bring them down?” The tone in her voice caused Missy to frown.

“You know,” she said, “since Tuff was killed, Bud’s been a little nervous about the stock.”

Marybeth cursed. “The girls are out there.”

Marie covered her mouth with her hand.

Marybeth was halfway to the front door when Joe suddenly strode out of the study and over to her. Cam appeared at the study door with a drink in his hand, watching Joe with concern.

“Did you hear that?” Marybeth asked him.

“I did,” he said.

he deep bass drumming sound of horses’ hooves filled the night and reverberated through the ground itself as Joe ran from the porch toward the ranch yard and called aloud. “Sheridan! Lucy! Jessica!”

Grabbing a flashlight from the glove compartment of their van as he passed, Joe thumbed the switch. No light. The batteries were dead, damn it. He thumped the flashlight against his thigh and a weak light beamed. He hoped the dying batteries held.

Looking up toward the corral, he could see a kind of fluttering across the ground that made his heart jump. The fluttering, though, turned out to be his daughters and Jessica Logue who were running across the ranch yard toward him from the corral with coats, hair, and dresses flying.

Thank you, God, he whispered to himself as they neared. “Dad! Dad!”

They met him at the same instant that the outside porch lights came on and the front door opened. He could hear a rush of footsteps behind him as Sheridan and Lucy flew into him, hugging him tight. Jessica veered toward the house and buried her face in her mother’s waist.

“Something happened with the horses while we were out there,” Sheridan said, her words rushing out. “They just went crazy and started screaming.”

“It’s okay,” Joe said, rubbing their backs. “You two seem all right.”

“Dad, I’m scared,” Lucy said.

Marybeth came down from the porch and both girls released Joe and went to her. Joe looked up to see Bud Longbrake filling the door, a .30-.30

Winchester rifle in his hands. He was looking toward the corral.

“Do you have a flashlight, Joe?” Bud asked, walking heavily from the porch.

“Yes, a bad one,” Joe said.

“Bring it,” Bud said, passing the van and walking across the ranch yard toward the corral.

Joe nodded, even though he knew Bud couldn’t see him in the dark. He wished he had brought his pickup, with his good flashlight as well as a spotlight, instead of the van. His shotgun—the only weapon he could hit anything with—was nestled behind the coiled springs of his pickup bench seat.

As they approached the corral, which was still exploding with the fury of pounding hooves and the whinnies and guttural grunts of spooked horses, Joe felt rather than heard someone close in next to him. Cam.

“Okay, calm down, goddamit!” Bud shouted to his horses in the corral. Joe lifted his weak beam through the railing. Horses shot through the dim pool of light as they ran and thundered through the corral. He caught flashing glimpses of wild eyes, exposed yellow teeth, heavy, blood-engorged muscles flexing under thin hide, billowing nostrils, flying manes and tails.

Joe, Cam, and Bud climbed the rails and dropped into the soft turf of the corral.

“Take it easy, take it easy,” Bud sang, trying to calm them. They walked shoulder-to-shoulder through the corral. Horses swirled around them. Joe could feel the weight of the animals shaking the ground through his boot soles. A horse ran too close, clipping Cam and spinning him around.

“Shit, he hit me!”

“Are you all right?” Joe asked.

“Fine,” Cam said, turning back around and joining Joe and Bud.

Then with a mutual, collective sigh, the horses in the corral stopped running. It was suddenly quiet, except for the labored breathing of the animals who looked at them from shadows in each corner of the corral.

“Finally,” Bud said.

Joe could see a few of the horses, who moments before had been in a frenzy, drop their heads to eat hay.

“How strange,” Cam said. “Remind me never to get any horses.” Joe smiled at that.

Bud lowered his rifle and whistled. “Whatever got them going is gone now.”

“Could have been anything,” Joe said, knowing that something as innocuous as a windblown plastic sack could sometimes create a stampede within a herd.

“Probably one horse establishing dominance over another one,” Bud said. “Administering a little discipline within the herd. Or maybe a coyote or mountain lion came down from the mountains. Or Joe’s damned grizzly bear.”

Why is it always my bear, Joe wondered, annoyed.

He moved his light beam across the horses. Most were now eating calmly.

“Okay, fun’s over,” Bud declared. “Thanks for the help, boys.” Cam chuckled. “I think this is enough action for one evening.”

No one said what Joe knew they were all thinking: that somebody, or something, had attacked the herd. And the girls were right there, he thought as a shudder rippled though him.

As they turned to go back to the house, Joe shone his light into a tight grouping of four horses drinking from the water trough. He could hear them sipping and sucking in water by the quart. The light bounced from the rippling surface of the water on the velvety snouts of the animals, and it reflected in their eyes as they drank. As he raised the flash, he saw something.

He felt a blade of ice slice into him. “Bud.”

Joe held the faltering light steady on the second horse from the left, a blue roan. Bud and Cam were starting to climb the railing to get out of the corral.

“BUD.”

Bud stopped as he straddled the top rail, and turned back to Joe.

“What is it?” “Look.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Bud Longbrake whispered. Cam said, “My God,” his voice cracking.

The horse Joe shined the flashlight on raised its head from the trough. Excess water shone on its thick lips with growing beads of bright red. A thin stream of blood ran from the chin of the animal into the trough, changing the color of the water to pink. The eyes, much larger than they should be, bulged obscenely from the sides of its head. They were lidless.

Most of the roan’s face had been cut away, and it hung in a strip from its jawbone, looking like a bloody bib.

n their way home, Joe listened in as Sheridan and Lucy described what they had seen, felt, and heard at the corral. He knew it was important for them to talk it out, even though they had told him everything after the mutilated horse was first discovered.

Bud had been kind enough to put the rifle back in the house until the Picketts were down the road, Joe had observed. When they were gone, the rancher would destroy the injured animal before it bled to death, out of the sight of Missy’s grandchildren. Joe appreciated the gesture.

Bud hadn’t said whether he planned to call Sheriff Barnum or Hersig before the morning.

“Dad, I just thought of something,” Sheridan said from the back. “What’s that?”

“Remember that feeling we had when we found the moose in the meadow?”

“Yes,” Joe said cautiously.

“I felt the same thing during my falconry lesson with Nate, when the falcons wouldn’t fly.”

“Okay.”

“Well, this time I didn’t feel anything at all. What do you suppose that means?”

Joe drove for a few miles but couldn’t come up with an answer.

n the driveway, he waited outside until Marybeth and his daughters were inside. Then he leaned against the hood of the van and crossed his arms, looking up. The sky was clear and milky with stars. It didn’t look threatening, but it did appear endless and immensely complicated. There was a sliver of a moon. Over the mountains to the west was the fine chalkline of a jet trail. He saw nothing else up there that shouldn’t be there. He didn’t know what exactly he was looking for, or what he would do if he saw anything unusual.

This thing was beyond him, he thought.

Unless . . .

Marybeth opened the front door and looked out. “Joe, are you coming in?”

“Yup.”

Later that night, at 3:30 a.m., Joe was jolted awake when Marybeth suddenly sat up in bed.

“Are you all right?” he asked her.

She was breathing deeply, trying to calm down.

“I had a bad dream,” she said. “I heard that horse screaming again and again.”

“Are you sure it was a dream?” he asked. “Yes,” she said. “Positive.”

“Do you want me to check our horses?”

She eased back down into bed. “That’s not necessary. I know it was a dream.”

He pulled her close and cupped her breast beneath her nightgown. He could feel her heart thumping. He held her until the beating slowed and her breathing flattened out. When she was asleep, he untangled himself from her and slid out of the bed.

Pulling his boots over his bare feet, clamping on his hat, and cinching the belt on his robe, Joe went outside to check the horses. He took his shotgun with him. The horses were fine, and he sighed in relief.

He was wide awake when he came back into the house. He entered his small office and closed the door, leaning the shotgun against the wall. It was so quiet in the house that he flinched at the noise his computer made as he booted it up.

Opening his e-mail program, he sat back and waited while mail flooded his inbox. Directives and press releases from the Cheyenne headquarters, spam, a message from Trey Crump with the subject line “How’s it going?,” nothing from Hersig or Dave Avery, nothing from the lab, and a very large file that took a few moments to download.

There was no subject line in the large e-mail. But the return address was “deenadoomed666@aol.com.”

He clicked on it.

As the e-mail opened, Joe felt his breath stop. “Oh, no,” he whispered.

17

Ready and waiting for Joe Pickett . . . it said in a stylized color font.

Beneath the header was a digital photo. As he scrolled down, Joe noticed how cold he suddenly felt, and cinched his robe tighter.

The photo was of Deena. She was posed on top of the metal table in the Airstream he had sat at with Garrett that morning. She was nude except for thick-soled Doc Martens boots. She sat on the table with her legs spread open, smiling coyly. She had a light blond wisp of pubic hair, and her vagina was pink and slightly parted. Her breasts were small and her nipples were pierced with silver rings and erect. Her skin was so white it hurt to look at it, except for the tattoos on her inner thighs and upper arms, and the bruises that mottled her ribs and neck. There was a compress bandage the size of a hand on her left shoulder. The bandage looked moist, the skin around it glistening. The ointment he had smelled in his coat, he thought. Across her abdomen was a tattoo that said abductee.

“Oh, no,” he said again.

She looked so young, so unbearably thin and unhealthy. He was not aroused. He was sickened.

Beneath the photo was another stylized caption.

Strong, tall, and silent, he tries to save her. But she doesn’t want saving. She wants him inside of her like an animal. She wants him to know he can do anything to her. . . .

I’m not that strong, not that tall, not that silent, Joe thought, feeling his face flush.

A second photo. On her hands and knees on the table, her buttocks aimed at the camera, her face peering back at him with a grin.

Whatever he wants, however he wants it, she is agreeable. There is nothing he can do to her that hasn’t been done. She likes his hat and wants to wear it. . . .

Another photo. This time, she is clothed. Standing outside of the Airstream wearing all black except for blood-red lipstick. She’s mugging for the camera, head tilted forward, mouth parted, trying for a seductive come-hither look.

He knows where she lives, and he can’t stay away. She won’t be there forever, he knows. She will be gone soon, permanently out of here. She knows things, and she does things. . . .

Then, of all things, a graphic of a garish, yellow, smiley face.

Will he write back soon?

oe slumped in his chair. The air in his office seemed oddly thin. He could hear the clock ticking in the living room, and Maxine snuffling outside the door to be let in.

What, he wondered, could create a girl like this? What had happened to her that resulted in this? Deena wasn’t that much older than Sheridan, but she was so different.

What had caused the horrible bruises, or the wound? Had Cleve Garrett hurt her? Or were the injuries self-inflicted? Joe shook his head. He didn’t understand why she had approached him this way. Is this what she thought all men wanted?

He rubbed his face hard with both hands, inadvertently knocking his hat off. His hat. She liked his hat.

“Joe?”

He nearly pitched out of his chair.

“Joe, what are you doing in here?” Marybeth asked, squinting from the light but looking at his computer screen.

He turned in his chair toward her. “It’s not what you think,” he said.

“And what is it I think, Joe?” Her voice had a sharp edge. “That I’m looking at pornography.”

“Well?” She jutted her chin toward the screen, her arms crossed in front of her chest.

“Come here, Marybeth,” he said. “Remember that girl with Cleve Garrett I told you about?” “Sheena something?”

“Deena. Sheena would be the jungle girl.” “Yes, what about her?”

“This is from her. I guess it is pornography though. In the very worst kind of way.”

Marybeth stood beside Joe and he showed her the message. He watched her face as he scrolled through the e-mail.

“That’s disgusting,” she said.

“Yup, it is. I don’t know what she’s thinking.”

“She’s thinking this will get you hot and bothered, Joe. It’s like she’s trying to lure you back there in the worst kind of way. Like she’s desperate.”

Joe nodded, sighed. “It just makes me, I don’t know . . .”

“It’s pathetic, isn’t it?” Marybeth agreed. She leaned into Joe and he held her, pressing her hip into his chest.

“You need to stay away from her,” Marybeth said. “She’s trouble. It looks like she’s been severely abused.” She paused for a moment, before continuing. “Do you think she took the pictures herself ?”

That jolted him. “I assumed she did.” “But what if she didn’t, Joe?”

His mind spun. What if Cleve had taken the photos and the whole thing was his idea to lure Joe back out there? To get something on him, to get some leverage Cleve could use to get into the task force? If so, Joe thought, it was despicable to use Deena in this way. Unless, of course, she was in on it as well.

“This is too much right now,” Marybeth said, giving his shoulder a good-bye squeeze. “Tonight was bad enough without adding this on top of it. I’ll meet you in bed. We need to try and get some sleep.”

Joe sat there for a few minutes. He wasn’t sure what to do with the e-mail. Should he show Hersig? Call someone? He couldn’t help thinking Deena was in trouble, that Garrett was abusing her in terrible ways. Even if she let him—and Joe found that very likely, given her age and situation—that didn’t mean she didn’t need saving. But what could he do? Rush out to Riverside Park with his shotgun, create the Wyoming version of the seminal scene in Taxi Driver?

Finally, he closed down the e-mail program and shut his computer off.

ack in bed, Joe stared at the ceiling and waited for the alarm to ring. It took two hours, and he shut it off immediately when it sounded. Marybeth sighed and turned over toward him, her warm hand finding his chest. He moved to her, but his thoughts were elsewhere.

Nate Romanowski. He needed to find Nate and talk to him, get Nate’s take on everything.

Joe slipped from the bed. Marybeth stirred. “You’re up early,” she murmured.

“I’ll make coffee,” he said.

“While you were gone last night, did you check the horses?” she asked. “Yup.”

“Are they okay?” “They’re fine.”

She opened her eyes. “Joe, are you okay?” He hesitated. “Dandy,” he lied.

The phone rang, jarring them both. Joe grabbed it from the bedstand. “Joe Pickett.”

“You the guy that’s on that task force?” It was a man, and he spoke in a rushed, no-nonsense way.

“Yes, I’m on the task force.”

“I asked because I called the sheriff, and the dispatcher said the sheriff is out at some ranch investigating a mutilation. A horse this time, she said. Anyway, she suggested I call you. She said you were on the team.”

“What can I help you with?”

“Well, it’s not as bad as a murder or a mutilation,” the man said. “I’m glad to hear that.”

There was a pause. “You ever heard of a crop circle?” It took Joe by surprise. He said, “I think so.”

“Well, I think I’ve got one out in my pasture. I found it this morning.”

18

David thompson, the rancher who called, had a 200-acre place adjacent to the exclusive Elkhorn Ranches subdivision in the foot-hills of the Bighorns. Like the Elkhorn tract, Thompson’s “ranch” had been carved from the much larger V Bar U Ranch once owned by deceased lawyer Jim Finotta. By Wyoming standards, Thompson’s place was not really a ranch, Joe thought as he drove there. It was a nice house with a really big lawn.

Nevertheless, Thompson had clearly paid a good deal of money for the knotty-pine sign that announced bighorn view ranch that Joe passed by. The road curved up and over a sagebrush hill and descended into a green, landscaped pocket where the newly built home had been nestled among pines and young cottonwoods.

On the drive out to Thompson’s ranch, Joe tried to recall what he knew of crop circles, and concluded that it wasn’t much. He remembered that when he was young, he’d read some kind of “Believe It or Not” book with blurry black-and-white reproductions of aerial photographs in En-gland or Scotland of sites where the grass had been blown flat into perfect O’s. There had also been photos of fields where intricately cut designs had supposedly appeared overnight, usually amid reports of cigar-shaped flying objects.

Jeez.

This made him grumpy, and anxious to discount whatever he found as quickly as he could.

Joe pulled into the ranch yard to find David Thompson was waiting. Thompson was a dark, trim man in his early sixties who had supposedly cashed out of a dot-com in Austin months before the company had crashed. With his new fortune, he had purchased a home in Galveston, Texas, for the winter and the Bighorn View Ranch for the summer. He raised and showed miniature horses. Joe didn’t like miniature horses. He thought they were silly, in the same way that hairless cats were silly.

Thompson was wearing a crisp canvas barn coat and a cap that said bighorn view miniatures. He opened the passenger-side door of Joe’s truck and Maxine scrambled toward the middle to make room.

“Want me to show you where it is?” Thompson said, swinging into the seat.

“Might as well,” Joe said, “since you’re already in my truck.”

Joe’s sarcasm didn’t register with Thompson, who appeared flushed with excitement over his discovery.

“Don’t you want to ask me when I found it?” Thompson said. “You told me it was this morning.”

“I did?” “Yup.”

“Take that road,” Thompson gestured, indicating an old two-track that ascended out of the pocket and over a hill. “I don’t use this road very much. My corrals and miniatures are the other way. But when I got up this morning to feed the horses I just had this strange feeling urging me to go down the other road. Like a premonition, you know? Like somebody or something was willing me to take the other road.”

Joe nodded.

“It’s a lucky thing I found it,” said Thompson. “Usually by this late in the fall I’ve already moved down to Texas. And especially this year, with all of the supernatural crap that’s been happening around here, I had plenty of reason to leave early. But I wouldn’t leave without my horses, and my goddamned unreliable horse hauler got waylaid up in Alberta somewhere. He should be here any day, and when he comes, brother, I’m out of here. I’ll leave the aliens to the locals, baby.”

“We thank you for that,” Joe said, deadpan.

“I was thinking of selling the place anyway, you know? Moving back and forth to Texas with my minis is getting to be a drag. I might look for somewhere in New Mexico or Arizona, where it doesn’t get so damned cold, you know? And where it isn’t spooked. Problem is I’m not sure I could sell the place for what I’ve got into it, you know? I hear land prices are in the toilet, thanks to what’s going on. I went to list the place at Logue Country Realty and the realtor there said appraisals are coming in at 20 percent lower than what they should be. Fire-sale prices, damn it.”

Joe kept quiet. Thompson didn’t seem to need a response in order to keep talking.

“When I saw that crop circle I thought to myself, why me? Why now? Why my ranch? But now when I hear that there was another mutilation last night, it all seems to make sense,” Thompson said, talking fast. “Do you think it’s all related?”

“I don’t know,” Joe said.

Thompson shot Joe a perturbed look. “Aren’t you on the task force?” “Yes.”

“Aren’t you intrigued by my discovery, then?”

Joe shrugged. “I don’t know yet whether I’m intrigued. I haven’t seen it.”

“Well, it’s just over this hill.”

hey cleared the hill and Joe stopped his truck.

“Voilà!” Thompson said, sweeping his hand as if presenting what was behind door number three.

Joe looked. Below them, on a sagebrush flat, was a perfect circle cut into the buffalo grass. Joe estimated that it was eighty feet in circumference. Joe rubbed his jaw, ignoring the look of triumph on David Thompson’s face.

“Just like I told you, eh?” Thompson said. “It’s a circle, all right,” Joe agreed.

“A crop circle.”

Joe continued to size up the scene. “Don’t you need crops for a crop circle?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” “I was just kidding.”

“I,” Thompson said slowly, “am less than impressed with your investigative technique, Mr. Pickett. Maybe I should have waited for the sheriff.”

Joe arched his eyebrows. “Maybe. But let’s go down there for a closer look.”

He eased the pickup down the hill and parked it on the left side of the circle. Joe and Thompson climbed out. While Thompson leaned against Joe’s pickup, Joe paralleled the ring on the outside, studying it. The ring cut through the buffalo grass turf to bare ground. It did not look singed on the edges, or ripped out. There were no pieces of broken-up turf along the edges. He was reminded of the ring of moisture a sweating, cold drink made on a countertop. He walked a full rotation around it until he was back at the truck.

Thompson looked expectant, his eyebrows raised as if to say, “See? What did I tell you?”

Joe turned, looked again at the circle, squinting.

“When was the last time you used that road we just took?” Joe asked. “Oh, a few months, I suppose.”

“Are you sure? Can you remember the last time you came down here?” Thompson’s eyebrows fell a little. “Why are you asking me this?”

Joe stuffed his hands into his Wranglers and rocked back a bit on his bootheels. “I’m trying to establish how long this thing has been here.”

“I told you about that premonition I had . . .”

Joe nodded. “But that doesn’t mean that because you just found this thing it was made last night. You see, if you look close at the dirt in the ring you can see that it’s been weathered. There’s old pockmarks from rain in it. This circle has been here quite a while—at least a month, and probably longer than that.”

Thompson looked puzzled for a moment, obviously doubting himself, then rebounding, as Joe knew he would.

“What difference does it make if the crop circle was made last night or a month ago? It’s still a damned crop circle.”

Joe shook his head. “Don’t you have caretakers who live here in the winter when you’re in Texas?”

“A woman stays here,” Thompson said impatiently, trying to figure out where Joe was going. “Heidi Moos. She stays in the guest house and watches over the place.”

“I know Heidi,” Joe said. She was an attractive, dark-haired woman who had moved to Wyoming from Alabama. “She moved here with her horse a few years ago. She’s a horse trainer, right? I mean real horses.”

Thompson puffed up. “I resent that, mister. Miniatures are real horses.” Joe raised his hand, palm up. “Calm down, that’s not what I meant. I should have said ‘full-sized’ horses. My point is that she’s a horse trainer. This is the only flat ground on this side of the hill. It’s the best place to set up a portable round pen. You know what a round pen is, right?” “Of course I do,” Thompson said. “I’ve got one by my corral.”

“My guess is that Heidi set up her round pen right here last winter and spring,” Joe said, soldiering on. “I’ve seen how horses running in a controlled circle eventually cut right through the turf like this. I’ve got a couple of these ‘crop circles’ next to my own corral, where my wife, Marybeth, works our horses.”

Thompson’s face was red. “That’s how you want to explain it away?” “Yup.”

“You think I’m overreacting? That what we’re looking at is where Heidi set up her round pen?” “Yup.”

“Well for Christ’s sake,” Thompson said, shaking his head. “No wonder you people haven’t figured out these mutilations yet, if this is how you work. . . .”

“Why don’t we call Heidi?” Joe said. “And ask her where she set up her round pen?”

Thompson stared, his eyes boring into Joe. He clearly was not a man who was used to being questioned.

oe thought about David Thompson’s so-called crop circle—round pen—as he drove down the highway toward the turnoff to Nate Romanowski’s house. David Thompson was not stupid, and, despite his faults and his miniature horses, he was a serious man. Yet the atmosphere in Twelve Sleep County was now such that when Thompson saw a ring on the ground he didn’t think “round pen,” he thought “crop circle.”

This thing was warping the mindset of the valley, Joe thought. Football practice was being held indoors. Out-of-state hunters had cancelled $3,000 trips with local outfitters. A public meeting that was supposed to be held at the Holiday Inn by the Wyoming Business Council had been switched to Cody. Livestock was being housed in barns and loafing sheds. Schoolchildren were wearing aluminum foil over their caps as they walked to school.

Despite the CBM activity, Saddlestring was being squeezed economically. Residents had assumed a siege mentality, of sorts, and tempers flared more quickly. Marybeth had told him of a fistfight in line at the grocery store.

The task force was getting nowhere. There had not even been another meeting, because no one had anything to report.

But for a reason he couldn’t quite articulate, Joe thought that there was an answer to what was happening. Whatever the answer was, it was just sitting there, obvious, waiting for Joe or someone to find it. He just hoped it could be discovered before any more animals, or people, died.

19

As joe rumbled down the rough dirt road that led to Nate Romanowski’s stone cabin on the bank of the Twelve Sleep River, he searched the sky for falcons. The sky was empty.

Nate’s battered Jeep was parked beside his home, and Joe swung in next to it and turned off his engine. “Stay,” he told Maxine, and shut the door. If let out, she would have been drawn straight to the falcon mews, where Nate kept two or three birds, and she would upset them by sniffing around.

Joe knocked on the rough-hewn door, then opened it slightly. It was dark inside, but it smelled of coffee and recently cooked breakfast. Joe called for Nate but got no response. This wasn’t unusual, because Nate often went on long treks on foot or horseback in the rough breaklands country surrounding his house. Joe checked the mews, then the corral. No Nate.

Nate Romanowski had a habit of vanishing for weeks at a time. He took clandestine trips to surrounding states—Idaho, mostly—although he sometimes went overseas. Joe and Sheridan fed his birds while he was gone. Nate told Joe little about the purpose of his journeys, and Joe didn’t ask. He was involved in things Joe didn’t want to know about, and their short history together already had too many skeletons in the closet as it was. Their relationship was unusual, but oddly comfortable, Joe thought. Nate had pledged his loyalty to Joe in exchange for proving his innocence in a murder, and that was that. Joe hadn’t asked for the pledge, and was a little surprised and awed that Nate had remained steadfast, even extending his protection to Joe’s family. Joe and Marybeth never discussed what they knew about Nate Romanowski—his years with no record when he worked for a mysterious federal agency, the murder of two men sent to find him in Montana, the death of a corrupt FBI agent, and his involvement in Melinda Strickland’s suicide the winter before. Sheridan worshipped the man, and was learning falconry from him. Sheriff Barnum, his deputies, Agent Portenson—even Robey Hersig—feared Nate, and were suspicious of Joe’s friendship with him. That was okay with Joe.

With the strange things that had been happening in the valley, Joe looked for Nate with a niggling feeling of dread forming in the back of his mind. The image of the defaced horse at the Longbrake Ranch had not yet left him. It bothered him more than anything he had seen, including the remains of Tuff Montegue.

“Nate!” His shout echoed from the deep red wall on the other side of the river. It was still, and the echo returned twice before it faded away.

He thought he heard a faint response, and he stood and listened. The sound had come from the direction of the river.

“Nate, are you down here?” Joe called as he walked. He scanned the near banks and followed the river downstream until it S-curved out of sight, but saw no one. He cocked his head and looked up—something he had never felt the need to do before—and saw nothing unusual in the clear blue sky.

When he looked down he saw it. A thin plastic tube broke the surface of the river in a calm back eddy ten feet from the bank. As he approached the water he could make out a dark form below the water, and long blond hair swirling gently in the current like kelp. Nate was underwater, breathing through the tube.

Joe shook his head and sat down on a large curl of driftwood. He removed his hat and ran his fingers through his hair. He noticed that in the hollow of the log was Nate’s massive .454 Casull handgun in its holster, within quick reach if Nate needed it.

“Nate,” Joe said, “do you have a minute?”

Nate tried to talk through the tube. It came out in a nasal gibberish. This was the sound Joe had heard earlier when he called.

“Should I come back?”

After a beat, the water puckered and Nate sat up, breaking the surface. He looked at Joe through strands of wet hair that stuck to his face. Nate was wearing a full-body wet suit that gleamed in the morning sun. He removed the tube with two fingers as if taking a cigarette from his mouth.

“Should I even ask?” Joe said.

Brushing his hair from his face, Nate grinned, fixing Joe with his hardeyed stare. Nate had an angular face with a bladelike nose separating two sharp, lime green eyes.

“It’s amazing what you can hear under the surface,” he said. “I’ve been doing this since the river warmed up. I thought it would be relaxing, but there’s a lot going on under the surface. The river looks calm but things are happening in it all the time.”

Joe just nodded.

“It’s like being one with the earth, as stupid as that probably sounds,” Nate said. “When you’re below the surface, you’re out of the air and wind and everything is solid, connected to some degree. That’s why you can hear and sense so much.”

His eyes widened. “I’ve heard river rocks dislodging and rolling down the bed of the river in the current. They sound a little like bowling balls going down a lane. I hear fish whooshing by, going after nymphs. I heard you drive up, get out, and walk around. If I concentrated, I could even hear your footsteps from underneath walking toward the river.”

Joe thought about it. It wasn’t something he would want to do, but this was Nate.

“Pretty cool,” Nate said.

Nate brewed more coffee in his house while Joe told him everything that had happened with the murders and mutilations. Nate listened in silence, but was obviously paying attention. He served two large mugs and sat down across from Joe.

They were on their third cup when Joe finished.

Nate leaned back and laced his fingers together behind his head. He stared at the ceiling, his mouth set. Joe waited.

“I think you’re thinking too much like a damned cop,” Nate finally said. “You’re letting the events steer you. You need to get out of your cop mode and look at everything with a fresh eye, from a completely different angle.”

“What angle would that be?” Joe had expected something like this from Nate, although he had hoped for more. Like an answer. Or at least a theory. “I think you’re assuming that everything is connected. That’s a logical, coplike approach. But maybe everything isn’t connected. Maybe there are a bunch of different things going on, and they just happen to be culmi-nating around us.”

“You sound a little like Cleve Garrett,” Joe sighed.

Nate’s eyebrows shot up. “Just because he’s a weirdo doesn’t mean he might not be on to something. But from what you told me, I disagree. Cleve Garrett is trying to attribute it all to one thing, aliens or whatever. What I’m saying is that maybe the connections really aren’t there. That there are different threads running.”

Joe sat up, tingling with recognition. This was what he had been speculating. “From what you’ve heard, can you pick out any of the threads?” “Maybe. When was the last time there were credible reports in this area about cattle mutilations?”

“Thirty years ago,” Joe said. “In the early and mid-seventies.” “What was going on then?”

“I don’t know. Gas lines, recession, Jimmy Carter.”

Nate smiled coldly. “But what was going on here, on the land around us?” Joe thought, and he felt another glimmer of recognition. “Oil and gas development gone wild,” he said. “It was the last big energy boom.” “Right,” Nate said. “At least until today. It was a little like what we’re seeing now, wouldn’t you say?”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Joe confessed.

“Of course not. You’ve been thinking like a cop. You need to think bigger, look at everything fresh.”

“There are a lot of roughnecks here,” Joe said. “They come in from all over the country to work the CBM wells and lay the pipe. The last time there were this many people around was the last time this area had a boom.”

Nate said, “Right. I bet that makes you wonder if any of them were here before, doesn’t it? Or maybe—and I already know what you’ll think of this angle—somebody or something gets mad whenever we start drilling into the ground.”

Joe moaned. “That’s too screwy, Nate.”

“It’s fresh thinking, is what it is,” Nate countered. Joe was silent for a moment. “Anything else?”

Nate solemnly shook his head. “I’m worried about the bear. I had a dream about a bear the other night.”

“What?”

“In my dream, the bear was sent here for a reason. He has a mission,” Nate said, narrowing his eyes and whispering conspiratorially.

Wincing, Joe looked away. What was this? First Sheridan had ominous dreams, and now Nate. Was it something in the air? Had the two of them discussed this?

“So what are you saying, Nate?”

He shrugged. “I’m not sure. It’s just that I have a feeling that the bear plays a central role somehow. Like I said, I dream about this bear.”

Joe said nothing. Nate simply thought differently than anyone Joe had ever met. To Nate, anything was possible.

“One other thing,” Nate said. “Have you considered the possibility that the two human murders have nothing to do with the cattle and animal mutilations?”

“Actually, yes I have,” Joe said. “Have you pursued it?” Nate asked.

“Barnum and Portenson are in charge of the murders.” “And you trust them?”

Joe drained his mug and stood up. His head was spinning.

As he walked out to his pickup, Nate followed. “I’ve got a special connection with that bear because of the dreams. I would like to meet the bear, get into his head,” Nate said. “Will you call me if there are any more sightings?”

Joe said that he would. He didn’t even pretend to understand what Nate was talking about.

“Start fresh, is my advice,” Nate said as Joe climbed into his truck. “Fuck Barnum and Portenson. They’re cops. They either want an easy explanation or they want the whole thing to just go away.”

Joe started the engine and Nate leaned into the pickup, filling the open driver’s-side window. “Call me if you need some help. Backup, or whatever.”

“The last time I did that you cut off a guy’s ear and handed it to me,”

Joe said.

Nate was right about one thing, Joe decided. Although a couple of the things he threw out seemed unlikely—a bear on a mission, for exam-ple—what Nate had said about thinking differently made some sense.

Joe plucked his cell phone off of the dashboard and speed-dialed Robey Hersig’s office. Hersig was in. “Robey, Joe.”

“Hey, Joe.” Hersig sounded tired. “Anything of note from the task force?”

There was a long sigh. “Your notes from your interview with that Garrett guy have been quite a source of amusement, as you might have guessed.”

Joe thought about telling Hersig about the e-mail from Deena, and decided against it for the moment. He hadn’t decided how he should reply and he needed to reply, to keep her talking to him. Although he hoped she’d cool it with the digital photos of herself.

“Anything in regard to Tuff or the other guy?” Joe asked.

“Nothing of significance,” Hersig said. “I know Barnum and Portenson have been interviewing people who knew them, that sort of thing. Standard procedure. But if either of them have anything, they haven’t told me yet. The investigation is stone cold, and although I hate to say it, we’re just sitting around waiting for another corpse, or a lucky break. But there’s nothing so far. That’s why I haven’t called a new meeting.”

“Robey,” Joe said, “given the situation I want to widen my part of the investigation.”

“You mean investigate the murders?” Hersig sounded hesitant. “Yup.”

“That’ll piss off Barnum, for sure.” “I can live with that.”

Hersig chuckled uncomfortably. “I’m not sure I can authorize that, Joe.” “You don’t have to. I’m independent. I’m a game warden; they have no authority over what I do or don’t do.”

“Aw, Joe . . .” Then: “What’s your angle?”

“I’m not sure I have one. But I can’t see how it could hurt to look at the murders from another perspective. Maybe we can compare notes at a task-force meeting and find some discrepancies in our information. That might lead us somewhere.”

Hersig didn’t reply. In his mind, Joe could see Hersig sitting forward in his chair, elbows on his desk, concern on his face as he thought it through. “Alright, alright,” he said. “But out of courtesy I’ll need to advise Barnum and Portenson.”

“Fine.”

“And that sound you’ll hear will be the explosion when Barnum gets the news,” Hersig said.

“Hey, those guys are welcome to go talk to Garrett or zoom around with their sirens on looking at crop circles that aren’t crop circles,” Joe said. “Maybe they’ll figure out something I missed.”

“As if they’d do that.” “Well . . .”

“Good luck, Joe.”

“Thank you,” he said, rolling toward town. Here’s where we start to make people angry.

PART THREE

20

His starting place would be the site of Tuff Montegue’s murder, Joe decided. For reasons he had trouble articulating even to himself, he felt that Tuff ’s death was the key to cracking things open.

After grabbing a quick lunch at the Burg-O-Pardner on the edge of town, Joe passed through the small downtown toward the bridge over the river. Not Ike was fishing again, looping a fly-line through the air. Joe pulled off the road on the other side of the bridge and got out. Maxine joined him, and he cautioned her to stay close. He had just about broken her habit of wanting to retrieve artificial flies that landed on the water.

Not Ike was a huge man with large, yellowed eyes, a quick smile, and a barrel chest so stout that his fishing vest strained to stay buttoned over the tattered i’m not ike sweatshirt. When he saw Joe, the smile flashed, and he waved. Joe waited at the edge of the river, watching Not Ike’s graceful cast play out. Not Ike placed a dry fly perfectly inside the muscle of a current, and mended his line back so the line wouldn’t overtake the fly in the current. The dry fly drifted over the top of a dark, still pool. Joe saw a flash beneath the surface of the water, heard the ploop sound of the trout taking the fly, and watched the fly-line tighten and rise out of the water to the tip of Not Ike’s rod, which bent in the shape of a boomerang.

“I got one!” Not Ike laughed. He had a booming laugh that made Joe smile.

Not Ike retrieved the trout patiently, not horsing it in, and eventually netted it. He held it up for Joe to see, and the sun flashed on the bright rainbow sides of the cut-bow trout—a hybrid of a native cutthroat and rainbow trout—and the beads of water that glistened on the net.

“Three for me!” Not Ike proclaimed.

Not Ike always claimed he had caught three fish, whether the actual number was one or twenty.

“Nice fish,” Joe said, when Not Ike reached the edge of the riverbank. “Nice fish, nice fish,” Ike repeated, then looked up, his brow furrow-ing. “What you need? You need to check my license again?” “You know it,” Joe said.

“All right, all right, gimme a minute.” Joe watched as Not Ike walked back out a few feet, eased the net into the water, removed the fly, and released the fish. Joe could see the trout hover for a moment below the surface, then with a powerful twist it shot out of sight. The man knows how to release a fish, God bless him, Joe thought.

Not Ike waded noisily toward the shore, still grinning. “Three for me!” Ike Easter had told Joe that his cousin had once been lucid, if a little mean, and that he had become mixed up with the wrong crowd in Denver. He’d gotten involved in gangs and drugs, and was in the middle of it during the Summer of Violence when he had taken three .22 bullets in the back of his head, was dumped in the Five Points district and left for dead. When he finally recovered three years later, he was a different man. Easter said Not Ike now had the day-to-day intelligence of a fiveor sixyear-old boy, and so Easter had agreed to become his legal guardian. Soon after he arrived in Saddlestring, Robey Hersig had taught Not Ike how to fish. Fishing gave Not Ike a purpose, and as far as Joe knew, fishing was what Not Ike did. Which was another reason for not coming down too hard on the man for having an improper license.

While Joe checked the license Not Ike handed him, the big man loomed over him with the blank but brilliant smile. The license had expired the week before. “Jeez, what would it take for me to drive you over to Barrett’s right now and stand there with you while we bought you an annual fishing license?” Joe asked.

“Ain’t got the money for the big one,” Not Ike said.

“You say ‘big one’ like it costs a fortune. It’s only fifteen dollars.”

“Ain’t got fifteen dollars, Joseph.” Not Ike was the only person who had ever called Joe “Joseph.” Joe didn’t know why.

“Look, I’ll buy you one,” he said. “You don’t even need to spend your own money.”

Not Ike took this as a personal affront, and scowled. “Don’t want your charity, Joseph. Never have, never will.”

Joe sighed. He had offered to buy Not Ike a license before, and Not Ike had refused him then also.

“Maybe I should talk to Ike about it.”

“Won’t do no good,” he said, shaking his head as if sharing Joe’s frustration. “He knows I won’t take charity.”