“Still worried about the Decker woman?” Thurman asked.
“She’s obviously no hunter. What’s she doing here?”
“Maybe just what she told us. Her husband is out of the country, she intercepted the invitatio, and decided she’d bring home a trophy just to get his goat. It’s the last hunt; we’ll be out in the open in a just a few months. Another time I’d have been worried. Not now. Why does she bother you so much?”
“Just that we didn’t have time to check her out. If we’d known she was coming instead of her husband before she showed up at the gate …”
“We got her advance. The check cleared out of her account. She probably didn’t think it mattered which of them showed up as long as we got paid. Were we really going to turn away a million dollars? Now?”
Helen sighed, still not satisfied. “I’m still responsible for our list of clients. You do know I’m running a background check regardless?”
“I do. And your attention to detail is why I can sleep so well at night. The woman’s a ditz and a fashionista — we’ll put Lim Chiou in the pen with her, make sure she gets her kill, then send her home with a promise she can show off her trophy to her hubby in Orlando at Christmas. She’ll be gone. End of story.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” Helen conceded. “Only she’s not scheduled to shoot for another four days. We’ll have to deal with her till then.”
“Correction,” Thurman said with a wink, “you’ll have to deal with her till then. I have real hunters to entertain.”
Helen didn’t take the bait. Her tone was serious. “You know that isn’t all. The other hunters, they’ve been here before. She hasn’t. You let her in, knowing what could happen. We agreed only to let in clients who have already been exposed.”
“We agreed to invite only clients who have been here before. It was her bad luck to circumvent that intent. Turning her away at the gate — who knows what would have happened? Her husband’s an attorney — corporate law. We couldn’t have her running home crying foul. Certainly not before she’s scheduled to leave. Capiche?”
“I only want what’s best for the company, too.” Damn. The words came out harsher, more defensive than Helen wanted them to. With everyone else, she was the one in control. Only Thurman, with nothing more than the logic of his thinking and the charisma of his job title, could put her off her game like this.
She scowled inwardly at his smooth, practiced smile and flung silent curses at his retreating back when he turned and headed for a last look into the animal compound before retiring for the night.
CHAPTER 19
THE HOTEL ROOM MIKE SHAFER WOKE up in was nice in that nondescript, tasteful, chain-hotel signature way. The extra pillows and 400-threadcount sheets that were a definite upgrade from his apartment in Atlanta had made the night pass comfortably. Still, they were not enough to keep him lingering in bed beyond 6:00 a.m., especially since he was still functioning an hour ahead on Eastern time.
Updates on ASS would be an hour away yet, so Mike took his Pad-L down to the hotel restaurant for a long breakfast while he waited for the next data feed from the central U.S. regions. Over an English muffin, eggs and coffee he plotted his route to the Rocking Sun Ranch just across the Missouri in McKenzie County. From there, it looked like he could hit three or four large dairy ranches also in the vicinity and conduct some preliminary interviews with the employees before the end of the day.
It didn’t escape the statistics analyst that he had avoided ordering any breakfast meats or milk this morning. The decision hadn’t necessarily been a conscious one, but it certainly had been a cautious — and predictable — one. At 35, Mike had long ago outgrown his wild oats days and had settled into an easy-fitting singles life. About the only thing he had retained from his 20s was his sense of humor. These days he stayed home on Saturday nights, downloaded his movies and books, and drove the speed limit. When he thought about it, which wasn’t often, he knew he was allowing his work to define him and to dictate his lifestyle. In the future, he realized that should maybe alarm him. For now, though, complacency seemed rather comfortable and treading the middle road appropriate.
Halfway through breakfast he received a text message from the nursing home where his mother now lived. The momentary alarm that gripped him when he saw who the message was from gave way to relief as he read the courtesy reminder that she had an appointment with her neurologist today. The staff would see her safely there and back.
Sixteen years ago, his mother, Tonya, had divorced his father, who had left for the West coast and obscurity. Two years ago, at 65, her memory started failing. With no one else to watch after her once she had started wandering the neighborhood and forgetting her way back to her house, Mike had little choice but to place her somewhere with skilled aides to help her when she couldn’t remember how to care for herself and security to alert them if she attempted to wander on her own. Tonya had been in the home nearly a year now, and Mike had watched the Alzheimer’s progress to the point she rarely remembered him when he visited. At first, Mike cringed in distress when his mother merely blinked at him, not recognizing the son she’d raised. To save himself the heartache, he began visiting less often; every other day soon turned into every other week. Guilt over how he was avoiding her was strong. But the anxiety he felt in her presence was stronger yet. He wanted to be a good son — and certainly he loved her still — but the distancing was necessary for his own sanity. And sadly, with every message about her he got now, he expected to hear the worst.
But today others were taking care of her needs and he could dismiss her from his thoughts and concentrate on why he was in Williston.
The fresh data feed started promptly at 7:00 as Mike sipped his second cup of coffee. Surprisingly, the hotel, likely near one of the few telecom towers in the area, offered a decent download speed. Mike studied the charts.
Three more kids and two adults had presented with the same symptoms in the target area over the last 24 hours. Whatever it was, it was on its way to becoming an epidemic, and the reporting hospitals still couldn’t identify a probable cause. The CDIC rep had apparently triggered the hoped-for yellow-plus alert late yesterday: computers in the region would be talking to one another now, and hospitals and clinics across the tri-state area would be on the lookout for similar symptoms in patients. Case doctors would be in team discussions when any new cases presented and their results would feed back to the national database in near real time.
It wouldn’t be long, Mike knew, before the media would get involved. The alert wasn’t high enough yet to trigger a public health concern, but news of this sort couldn’t help but be leaked. Whether it was the case doctors or the CDC field reps coming up with the answers, they would need something soon to respond to the barrage of questions reporters would soon be asking. When it came to health concerns, people tended to demand instant gratification and, if they couldn’t get immediate satisfaction, tended to start making accusations — as if threats and pressure were needed to spur health organizations into action.
We like to think of ourselves as civilized, Mike thought, until we’re faced with a crisis. Panic tends to bring out the flight-or-fight instinct in even the best-intentioned.
He took a final sip of coffee, packed up his Pad-L and headed out, intending to find some of the answers today.
CHAPTER 20
DONNA BAILEY RUBBED THE BACK of her neck trying to soothe the tension there that was shooting bolts of pain into her head. Next stop, she promised herself, she’d raid the drug cabinet for something stronger than the two aspirin she’d taken that morning.
The last months had been relentless. Every other animal on her ranch calls, it seemed, had some form of neurologic disorder. With the first ones, she’d been convinced if she’d just been called out sooner she could have mitigated escalation of the animals’ motor dysfunction and neural degeneration and prevented their ultimate deaths. She’d secretly blamed the farmers and ranchers for trying to scrimp on veterinary
costs and for prioritizing profit margins over the animals’ welfare.
As more animals started to present with the same symptoms, though, she realized the fault lay not with the owners — whom she had to absolve — but with her profession’s collective lack of knowledge. In a way, that realization made things worse, not better. It was far easier to be angry at a negligent owner. Far easier to berate someone else for not doing right by an animal that depended on them for its every breath than it was to berate herself and her colleagues for not being able to identify the pathogen and provide a known treatment.
Ethically, she was torn, not just over how to go about treating the animals but what to charge her clients. Vets in nearby counties who were dosing patients with large amounts of steroids or bromide or phenobarbitol had been met with limited success. A lessening of symptoms for a day or two, then a resurgence that negated any short-term benefit produced. Yet, because they had nothing else in their arsenal, they continued to ply stricken animals with drugs that weren’t working under the assumption that owners expected some course of treatment. That it was their obligation to never walk away from a patient without dosing it with something.
That meant the vets could experiment at will with little consequence to their bottom line no matter the outcome. They put the business risk in the owners’ pockets, not their own. The owners gambled with their own money over the life and death of their animals, while the vets pocketed their fees whether those animals lived or died.
Some of Donna’s colleagues bragged that business in the summer had never been this good.
In the beginning, when Donna could put the burden of blame on the owners, writing out bills for animals who got no better hadn’t much bothered her. There would always be times when, based on her training and knowledge, she’d do her best and animals would still worsen and die. Now though, she was faced with a dilemma of conscience. Did she experiment with other people’s dying animals, trying to find a drug that would reverse their symptoms, and charge the clients when these experiments failed because she couldn’t afford to treat them for free? Or how was she to justify not charging clients for telling them that she couldn’t do anything when equipment and building loans still demanded to be paid monthly?
She plunged her fingers deeper into her neck and shoulder muscles wishing for a companion in the cab to distract her from thoughts that were making her head feel worse right now. But Chad, the stoic cowboy, had taken a few days off to shake whatever he’d come down with, and Alfie had simply refused to get in the truck this morning. Smart dog. Probably sensed my mood and knew to steer clear.
Plus, the horse she’d just seen didn’t help things. Jill Newcombe’s pretty little Arabian mare had been attacked in her pasture almost two months ago. By what, it had been hard to tell as the mare only had a single, very deep and very messy bite that had ripped a chunk out of her haunch. Likely her hard, heavy hooves had dissuaded her attacker from further damage.
Jill had found the horse in the barn soon after the incident and Donna had flushed the wound and stitched it up as best she could. Missing skin and muscle made it a difficult wound to treat, and the mare was going to be left with a permanent large dimple in her rear quarters. But Jill had been diligent about caring for the wound and after a couple of weeks of downtime had been excited about getting the mare back in condition for barrel racing in the fall. It was clients like Jill who loved their animals and worked with them daily and took full partnership in the healing process that made Donna glad about her profession.
The mare was her first call this morning, and Donna was expecting a quick recheck and to approve the mare for more vigorous exercise. What she wasn’t expecting was a horse stumbling over her own feet and crashing repeatedly into the corral bars.
Jill had been in a panic. “I tried to keep her up in a stall, but she put her head under the wall and nearly strangled herself. It’s not rabies, is it? From when she was bitten? Oh God, please tell me it isn’t rabies.”
Donna watched the horse for a long while, pretending to study it, buying time before she had to tell Jill the inevitable truth. “I don’t think it’s rabies.” The instant relief on the cowgirl’s face made Donna wince. “But I do think it’s something just as bad for the mare.”
Together, she and Jill made the painful decision to put the mare down. Donna had wished desperately for Chad’s help then so Jill wouldn’t have to be party to the euthanasia, but Jill expertly roped and secured the mare and through her tears held the horse’s head still as Donna injected the pentobarbitol. The cowgirl sang the mare a lullaby, her voice breaking again and again, as the mare sank to her knees, rolled to her side and took her final breath.
Jill knelt beside the mare and bowed her head, her long hair hiding her tear-streaked face.
“I’ll call someone to come collect her,” Donna had said, and Jill simply nodded, not moving, her grief palpable under the warm summer sun.
She was still sitting there when Donna, driving off, looked back in her rearview mirror before turning on the road to her next appointment at the Rocking Sun Ranch.
CHAPTER 21
IF MIKE SHAFER HADN’T SEEN the stylized sign over the entrance announcing the name of the ranch, he probably would have driven right past it. The houses and barns sat back off of the FM road, hidden among the rolling hills. And for dozens of acres to either side of the entrance to the cattle ranch, there was not a cow to be seen. Plenty of barbed wire and plenty of open fields, but no cattle.
It was only about half a mile down the driveway that Mike, in his rented SUV, understood why. Cows, probably a hundred of them, all a deep, glistening black, stood packed into two lots — one on either side of the drive — near two huge metal barns.
Were they waiting to be moved or shipped out? Mike wondered. Or waiting to be fed or wormed or slaughtered?
As he neared the pens and slowed, he could see something else. A third lot into which cattle were being chuted, a handful of cowboys culling the two herds and prodding the occasional steer along. There were already about 25 or 30 head in the third lot and it didn’t take a practiced eye to see that those steers had issues. Several lay on the ground, moaning loudly. A few teetered around the pen like drunks, tripping over the ones lying on the ground. The rest were shaking their heads or pacing up and down on stiff, unbending legs.
The sound of a horn behind him made him jump. He rolled the remaining distance to the pens, then pulled his SUV off to the left side of the drive. The driver in the truck behind him pulled off to the right. McKenzie County Animal Clinic. He read the magnetic sign on the door, then watched as two booted legs in snug boy-cut jeans slid off the seat and out of the truck. The door closing revealed the rest of the driver. An auburn-haired lady in her early 30s in a plaid shirt that looked remarkably like the shirts the cowboys were wearing — only it draped better on her.
She started toward the pens and one of the cowboys was already coming out to greet her. The cowboy said something Mike couldn’t quite catch then looked over at the SUV and nodded at it with his chin. The lady vet shook her head, and that’s when Mike realized he was the subject of their conversation and that he hadn’t even turned the vehicle off yet. He grabbed his voice recorder and camera and tried to strike a pace that was somewhere between hurrying and a professional business strut as he made his way to them.
“May I help you?” The cowboy’s tone was polite, yet his face was anything but welcoming. Clearly he felt Mike was interrupting some important business.
“I’m Mike … Mike Shafer.” He stuck out his hand. Slowly, reluctantly, the cowboy reached out to shake it. “Do you mind if I ask you some questions about what’s going on out here?”
“Do you mind if I ask you why you think it’s any of your business?” The man’s voice was calm, as if he were simply discussing the weather. But Mike knew better. The man looked to be in his late 50s, and was tanned and muscled from working 50-plus of those years outside. Quiet confidence. Mike envied how neatly he was
able to pull it off. Standing there alone, he would have actually been intimidated. But he’d brought credentials with him.
He slid his wallet from his pocket and flipped it open, hoping the card inside the vinyl sleeve flipped out rightside up. As a statistics analyst and not a field agent, it wasn’t a move he’d really practiced. “I’m with the CDC — and it looks like you have some sick cattle.”
The cowboy slid a long look at the vet.
“I assure you, Mr. Taylor, I didn’t call him.” The vet rounded on Mike. “I’m Dr. Donna Bailey. Do you mind telling me what interest the CDC has in these cows?”
“I’m simply following a lead. We’re seeing a number of emergency room visits in the area, and beef from this ranch has come under suspicion.”
“Food poisoning?” The cowboy showed real concern. Whether for the business or the patients, Mike couldn’t yet be sure.
“Not exactly. More along the lines of neurological disorders. Tremors, involuntary muscle movement, memory loss, seizures —”
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