by Mark Hall
too, but the crowd he runs with are all the same kind of boys. Never any trouble. I don’t know.” Cory answered.
“Motivation”, Chris added. “We need to find out what motivated him. This isn’t just a bunch of guys riding around and deciding to go play matador. If he had a bucket with feed in it, he planned on being out here.”
“I already know why” Cory answered. “Take a look at that bull”.
“He’s huge” I said.
“Look closer, around his neck.”
FOUR
Chris and I were already around the wooden fence of the corral so we stepped up on a rail and looked over in the pen. Unfortunately, all we had a view of was the opposite end of his neck. Cory motioned for one of the farm hands to turn him, which meant he jumped down in the corral with him and walked around the fence. The bull followed him around then pivoted around until he faced us. Once he did, it was easier to see the thin string, probably not more than a quarter of an inch round, looped around his neck. Dangling from the bottom of the string was a tube that looked like one of those old film canisters.
Chris leaned way out into the corral; so far I thought he might fall over in there.
“We need to talk to the owner” he said.
“That’s Mr. William Sullivan over there” Cory motioned back toward a truck that was backing a cattle trailer up to a gate in the corral. We walked over to Mr. William as he got out of the truck.
“Pull the gate to the trailer, Jimmy” he said to a farm hand. “We don’t have a head gate wide enough for him to get through but we might can load him on the trailer and get him in the front section and hem him up a little in there. You see there is a section gate about halfway down”.
Chris asked, “You ever have anything like this happen before?”
Mr. William looked over Chris, I am sure wondering what fit he was in all of this. I shook hands with him and introduced Chris to him then he turned to me to answer the question.
“Never” he said, “especially not toting a bucket. Every once in a while someone will get the idea to go tip them over at night but that just about never happens. We have a bigger problem with folks shooting deer from the road. Is sure am sorry for what happened, Cory.”
“Wasn’t anything you did, Mr. William”, Cory replied, “or your bull. I guess it was something to do with him trying to get that thing off his neck there.”
“I suppose” Mr. William said.
“Has this bull been corralled recently where someone could get to him?” Chris asked.
“No, sir. He’s been out in either this pasture or the lower pasture for the past,” he took a long breath while he thought, “I think the past two or tthree months. We’ve rode out and checked on the cows and brought the hay to them – checked on the calves, you know, the usual stuff. Me nor none of my boys have noticed that thing around his neck. I’ll be danged if I know how it got there.”
By now the farm hands were loading the big bull onto the trailer and he went right on up without too much trouble. The trailer and the truck shook as he stepped into the trailer. Guys on the outside then swung the inside gate and he went on to the front. With the second gate inside the trailer shut, he barely had room to turn around and we could get a good look at his neck and what was hanging from it.
It appeared to be a piece of nylon string looped just wide enough to get around his neck and behind his ears. At the bottom of the string was a small canister and the string ran through the top of it. It was metal and not plastic as I first thought.
“Well, reach on in there and grab it” I said to Chris. He looked at me as if he might disagree with my suggestion. If you’ve ever seen the front end of a bull, you’d know there was a lot of snot and slobber there.
We were saved that discomfort as Mr. William reached in with his pocketknife and cut the rope and the canister fell to the wooden boards. They opened the gate and the truck and trailer shook again as the big bull exited. Mr. William reached in and picked it up and passed it to Cory. When he twisted open the cap, he reached into it and pulled out a single slip of paper. He looked at it then passed it to me. I read the series of letters and numbers that were printed on the paper: FTFS1024543. We passed it around Chris held it last. He held it up to the sunlight and turned it in different directions. He even smelled it.
“Does it smell like cow?” Mr. William asked.
Chris grinned and pushed his hair out of his eyes. “It does”, he said. “But there is something interesting about this paper and this code.”
“Code?” Cory asked.
“Certainly a code. It must be something that means something to another person other than Landon and it is very deliberate, this entire plan. Somebody got close enough to this animal to put this around his neck. Before that, this was thought out and this code was determined to communicate something – like an award. You know when you open a soda and there is a code under the cap? Or when you get your receipt at a restaurant and the receipt comes with a code to enter for a prize or something. There is definitely an intention for Landon or someone to get this capsule from his neck and do something with the code.”
“That’s why he had the bucket”, I added. “And don’t say soda” I whispered.
“Exactly. A few things we have to figure out without Landon’s help because he isn’t able to talk to anyone and might not be for a while. First, what this code might mean – if it means anything – and how or when that got around his neck and who did it.”
“Mr. William, is there any idea when this got around his neck?” I asked.
“Not a one, Mark. I know we brought them all in the barn back in January when it got to sleeting for a couple days but since then, I don’t know. I know I’ve seen him up here by the trough a time or two when we feed them during this last month but didn’t notice that thing around his neck and I think I would have. Last time he was up was last week, on Thursday, I think.”
I asked, “Maybe Landon was the one putting it on there? Maybe that’s why he had the bucket – not to take it but to place it?”
“I don’t think so” Chris answered, “but does this remind you of anything, Mark? That business up at High Falls?”
They were similar, I thought. A reasonable young man in a place he should not have been, going after something.
Chris continued, “I bet that a similar canister was placed in that river somewhere and John Schlottman died trying to find it. Both of these boys had been scouts, you said?”
“That’s right” Cory answered, “Landon was, yes, but this isn’t scout behavior?”
“That’s true but that might be the link between the two that helps us figure this thing out”.
We talked with the others for a time then decided to head over to the office at my house in Warner Robins and we picked up supper from Georgia Bob’s on the way. My office at home was essentially a folding table, a desk with a laptop and a few bookshelves. Chris got online to try to find the code listed on a website at some site. Apparently, that code is the part number for a water pump on a Kubota tractor, but that was not what we were after. In between bites of pimento cheese sandwiches, I tried to work out the connection.
“Ok, what do boy scouts do that might lead them to this” I thought out loud, “they spend a lot of time outdoors. They learn to build fires, read maps, shoot firearms. What else?”
Chris grinned. “That might be it” he said.
“What might be it?” I asked, “building fires is related to chasing bulls and walking through a flooded river?”
“Get on the phone and get the internet history from John Schlottman’s smartphone. We can ask Landon when he wakes up but I think we might find what we need on Schlottman’s. It was torn up but the history should still be recorded.”
I knew the history had been retrieved already which is a standard procedure in a case like that. A half hour or so later, we pulled up the email attachment with the internet history. Chris scanned through i
t for a few minutes and plugged in a few of the websites listed.
“There we go” he said after several minutes.
“What have you got?” I asked.
“Geocaching” he replied.
FIVE
“A what?” I asked.
“Geocaching. Schlottman was involved with geocaching, you know where someone plants a container of some kind then posts the general location with GPS, then a hint about where the container might be”.
“Am I stupid if I don’t know?” I asked.
“You’re stupid whether you know or not”, Chris grinned, “but let me show you how it all works”. He pushed his hair out of his eyes. I was sure when he did that it was a stab at me for not having hair and not knowing what he was talking about.
I walked over to the laptop and saw a map of Warner Robins. There were dozens of little icons on the map and when Chris hovered over each of them with the mouse, a message appeared.
Chris explained, “each of these has a name, see? ‘What a drag!’, ‘Dunk on it’, ‘The Car Doctor’. When I click on one of them, you see it gives me the GPS coordinates and other information about the cache. This one named ‘What a drag!’ is listed as low difficulty, and easy terrain.”
“That’s over there by the high school where the old drag strip used to be” I said, pointing at the screen, “oh, I get the name now. So people just drive out there and walk all in the woods looking for…what?”
“Not exactly. Part of the unspoken