Trophy Hunt (5 page)

Sheridan broke the gaze and shrugged. Marybeth noticed that Lucy
and Jessica had huddled together and shrunk out of view, no doubt trying not to giggle.

T
he Logue home was one of Saddlestring’s fading treasures; a classic Victorian, one of the original homes built at the edge of town near the river by an 1890s cattle baron. The faded house was hard to see behind the mature cottonwoods that towered around it. In addition to the old, magnificent house there was wooded acreage and a few outbuildings, including a carriage house. The house had sat vacant for fifteen years, in disrepair, until the Logues bought it last winter. Marie had walked Marybeth through the place recently, apologizing endlessly for its condition. Only two rooms had been modernized so far, the kitchen and a bathroom. The rest looked as it had in the mid-1980s, when the longtime county clerk of Twelve Sleep County died there in his seventy-eighth year. The rumor was that the county clerk used to store records in the house and the buildings and charge the county for rent.

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

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

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

“Mom, my falconry lesson?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Rock,” he said. “Didn’t see it.”

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

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

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

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

“Heard it on the mutual-aid band.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I ain’t never seen nothing like this,” Don Hawkins said, bending over one of the dead cows. “These cows are worth six, seven hundred bucks each. Something or somebody owes me nine thousand bucks, goddamit.”

The reason the smell was not as bad, Joe realized, was that the cattle had been dead for at least two weeks. Although still somewhat bloated, the bodies had begun to deflate and collapse in on themselves in fleshy folds. The wounds looked similar to the bull moose’s, with some differences. Skin had been removed from most of the heads in precise patches. One heifer’s head had been completely denuded of hide, which made it look
like a turkey buzzard with its thin neck and red head. In some cases, tongues and eyes had been removed, and oval patches were missing from shoulders. On the females, their bags had been removed. Half of the cows had missing rectums, showing large dark holes between their flanks.

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

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

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

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

“Nope, I don’t,” Joe said.

“I don’t know either,” Hawkins said, flustered. “A shitload for sure.”

McLanahan said, “No matter how much there is in a cow, there’s none of it on the ground. It’s like the blood got sucked right out of them.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake . . .” Barnum growled, turning his back to McLanahan. “Don’t start saying things like
that.
”

“So what did it?”

“How in the hell should I know?”

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

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

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

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

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

Joe battled a smile and addressed Don Hawkins.

“When did you find these cattle?”

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

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

“Have you been missing these cattle?”

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

“Did you see anything unusual? Hear anything?”

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

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

Joe didn’t say that he thought he knew the feeling.

“Dizzy?” McLanahan asked. “Like dizzy how?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

McLanahan snorted from ten feet away and shook his head.

“I know of them.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Shut up,
please,
Kyle,” Barnum said.

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

“Not that I could see.”

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

“Not saying that at all.”

Even McLanahan glanced over his shoulder at Barnum.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’ve got jurisdiction,” said Joe.

“You are correct.”

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

“I know how to do my job, Pickett.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Too late,” McLanahan said.

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