“Odd,” Maresol nodded.
“Any idea why?” Seth asked. Maresol shook her head.
“Is Ava going to help us?” Maresol asked.
“Us?”
“This is a family matter,” Maresol sniffed. “The few of us from Colorado need to help each other to solve our own Colorado problems. The government will just lie. You need to give the people of the San Luis Valley an honest answer.”
“The Amish, too?”
“Don’t start,” Maresol sniffed. “I’m not prejudiced. I just don’t like them.”
“Fair enough,” Seth said.
“Ava’s going to help?
“Ferg, too,” Seth said. “If we find one, we get CBI help with crime-scene analysis. All guaranteed by our new State Attorney.”
Maresol’s face soured.
“What?” Seth asked.
“You heard he treated Éowyn like a common whore,” Maresol said in Spanish. She spoke Spanish when she was angry.
“Which time?” Seth asked in Spanish.
“Very funny,” Maresol said. “Switch is furious.”
“Switch is in love,” Seth said in English.
“That is true,” Maresol said in English. She smiled and turned right on Eighth Avenue.
“You think it’s aliens?” Seth asked.
“I think it’s the military, but I know we will only argue if I say that,” Maresol said.
Seth smiled.
“You know how I hate to argue,” Maresol said.
Seth laughed, and Maresol smirked at her own joke. They drove down Eighth Avenue until they got on the Sixth Avenue Highway. Maresol sped around a truck, and Seth started counting the vehicle’s safety features.
“Why would the military want to mutilate cattle?” Seth asked.
“How should I know?” Maresol asked. “You’re the one with all the connections. Have you asked them?”
“I haven’t,” Seth said.
“We can stop to see Everest on our way home,” Maresol smiled. “Everest would know.”
“How did you know I needed to talk to Everest?” Seth asked.
“Ava,” Maresol said. “We are very close, you know.”
Seth shuddered at the idea of his new wife joining forces with Maresol to run his life. She glanced at him and laughed.
“Why do you think it’s the military?” Maresol asked.
Seth turned to look at her. She shrugged her shoulders, and he looked away.
“Eyewitness reports, mostly,” Seth said. “Black helicopters, loud mechanical sound that lasts for hours, vibrations that rock houses, low lightning storms—it sounds military to me. Plus . . .”
Seth swallowed hard and stopped talking. Maresol glanced at him. She knew him too well to force him to speak. Whatever he had to say, he would get around to it eventually. He didn’t speak again for miles. He cleared his throat.
“Let’s just say that I’ve seen something like this before,” Seth said.
“Mutes?” Maresol asked.
“Sort of,” Seth said. “Mitch and I were in . . . Vietnam; there was a guy—or, I should say, we thought it was one guy. He would work his way through a battalion of sleeping soldiers.”
Seth snapped his fingers.
“They looked . . .” Seth said.
“Like mutes?” Maresol asked.
“Yes,” Seth said. “It’s not an uncommon story. There are reports of the mutilation of soldiers in parts of Africa, the Chechen war . . . Almost any war where you pit neighbor against neighbor, this kind of crap shows up.”
Maresol nodded. They drove the 285 for more than an hour before Maresol felt compelled to ask about the man Seth and Mitch had seen in Vietnam.
“The guy?” Maresol asked. “Who mutilated those soldiers? Was he from the US?”
“No. I don’t think so. Maybe. I don’t know. Really, I do not know,” Seth said. “Officially, it’s a team of Viet Cong. That’s what the file says, but . . .”
Seth fell silent again. They drove for another hour before Maresol glanced at him.
“You ready to tell me?” Maresol asked.
FIVE
“Nothing to tell,” Seth said. “Just a feeling. I haven’t felt it since that day.”
“Which is?” Maresol asked.
“We were Tunnel Rats, right?” Seth asked.
“I remember,” Maresol nodded.
“And young,” Seth said. “Mitch had just turned eighteen, and I was still seventeen, and . . .”
Seth nodded and fell silent. After five minutes, he looked at Maresol.
“This is not a very nice story,” Seth said.
Maresol nodded.
“You sure?” Seth asked.
“My youngest brother has lost a lot of cows to this thing; that makes me a part of the team,” Maresol nodded. Seth shrugged with his eyebrows and looked away. “You always say that you have to tell your team everything.”
Maresol nodded, but Seth was staring out the window.
“We had these weird schedules,” Seth said to the passenger window. He turned to look at her. She gestured for him to continue. “Tunnel Rat schedules. We’d go down here, and come up there, or over there, or . . .”
Seth winced.
“We ran into Americans, usually, sometimes Viet Cong,” Seth said. “We had our war underground; everyone else moved above ground.”
“What happened in your not-nice story?” Maresol asked. “You’re avoiding the story by telling me stuff I already know.”
“I am,” Seth said.
“You remember that your mother and I were the ones waiting at home for you,” Maresol said.
Seth nodded. He watched the road for a few minutes before diving into the story.
“We came out just before dawn one morning,” Seth said. “It was summer, so it was light early in the morning. Hotter than hell. Humid. Bugs the size of your fist—everywhere. We’d had a particularly bad night. Lost a Rat. Had to kill a couple guys to get his body back. When we did, he was . . . Let’s just say they had to cremate him. We were dirty, covered in blood, bone tired, hungry . . .”
“Mitch was horny,” Maresol said.
“You knew him well,” Seth smiled.
Maresol laughed.
“I miss him. He would have loved this case,” Seth said. Imitating Mitch’s voice, he said, “The State’s going to pay us to look into nature’s freak show? Does it get better than this?”
Maresol smiled, and they drove for a while in silence. They reached the Gunsmoke store and gas station on the outskirts of Buena Vista. Seth filled the tank at the pumps while Maresol went inside the store. He parked the car and went in to pay for the gas and whatever groceries she’d bought.
“What happened?” Maresol asked, when they were settled back in the car.
“When?” Seth asked. He opened the packet of small donuts she’d bought for him and took a long drink of watery coffee.
“You’re not very funny,” Maresol said.
Seth sighed, and Maresol waited.
“We’d had an awful night underground,” Seth said. “Probably the worst we’d had. Ever.”
“That’s saying a lot,” Maresol said.
“Yes,” Seth said. “We came out in this field. No one was around. Like I said, we were filthy, covered in blood. We were supposed to meet up with a team of Rangers, spend the day with them, and head back down twelve hours later. But we were late—not a lot—but enough to be worried that they had moved on.”
“We had to hike a mile or so to meet them,” Seth said. “It wasn’t far on paper, but a long way in our condition. I remember feeling like I had at least an inch of dirt and muck all over every inch of my body, and I was starving. It was a weird combination.”
Maresol nodded.
“We were on a path,” Seth said. “More like a foot trail, really. We’d gone a ways when we ran into this little guy. He seemed surprised to see us, and frightened. We could tell he was Viet Cong, but we were too tired to care. Plus, we
were Tunnel Rats. It wasn’t our job to kill them above ground.”
“Sure,” Maresol said.
“At the time, I felt like we were warriors crossing paths,” Seth said. “We acknowledged that he could easily kill us; he acknowledged that we could kill him. We were too tired to kill him, and he looked exhausted. It was a kind of a meeting of human beings on the vast plain of a violent war.”
Seth nodded.
“Why was this different?” Maresol asked.
“We got to where we were supposed to meet the Rangers, and we . . . Well, they . . . and . . .”
“You do know that you’re not saying anything,” Maresol said.
Seth smiled.
“Go on,” Maresol said.
“The Rangers were mutilated, like Luis’s cattle and also not like his cattle,” Seth said. “Tongues missing, anus cored out, some eyes gone, no blood. I hadn’t seen a mute since I was a kid. It was the first thing I thought—‘Aliens’—but Mitch . . . He had this way of knowing. He just knew it was the guy we’d seen. Sure enough, the CIA appeared out of nowhere to clean up the whole thing. I found out later that they had an entire file on the guy. I don’t think Mitch ever forgave himself for not killing him. It was one of the things he said on his deathbed, ‘We shoulda killed that VC bastard.’ You remember.”
Maresol nodded.
“But, we didn’t kill him, and the VC guy disappeared.”
“Did he . . . uh . . . hurt other people?” Maresol asked.
“Yes,” Seth said. “The official word was that it was a team of guys. I guess I said that. The CIA team that day told us it was just the one guy.”
“What happened to the VC guy?” Maresol asked.
“He was recruited to work for the US,” Seth said. “I saw him at the Vietnam Memorial right after Mitch died.”
“What was he doing there?” Maresol asked.
“No idea,” Seth said. “He’s some kind of diplomat now. At least I think so.”
“He saw you,” Maresol said. “Did he recognize you?”
“We kind of stared each other down,” Seth said.
“How long ago was that?” Maresol asked, her voice laced with worry.
“How long has Mitch been dead?” Seth asked.
“Ten years, eight months,” Maresol nodded. “You haven’t heard from this man since? Seen him?”
“Nothing.”
Maresol nodded. They fell silent again.
“Did you find cattle mutilated like those Rangers?” Maresol asked. “In those pictures.”
“Mmm,” Seth said.
Maresol glanced at him, and he was nodding. They drove along the bottom edge of the snowcapped Collegiate Peaks. These jagged mountains rose out of the valley to tower at more than fourteen thousand feet above sea level. They were stunning, and magnificently intimidating.
“Are the mutilations done by people?” Maresol asked.
“No,” Seth said. “Birds, foxes, insects, predators are responsible for the majority of them. Often the ranchers don’t come upon the cattle for a few days. The blowflies have done their work, and it all looks clean.”
“Predators, that’s what the FBI told our grandfather in the 1970s,” Maresol said. “We didn’t believe them. So the mutes are caused by human sickos and predators?”
“And something else,” Seth said.
“Any ideas?”
“I know you think it’s the military,” Seth said. “I still say that the military could have a hundred thousand head of cattle that they could do whatever they wanted to with, and we would have no way of knowing it.”
“Maybe their cattle aren’t as good,” she said with a smile.
“Anything is possible,” Seth said.
“You think it’s aliens?” she asked.
“For this?” Seth asked. “Chupacabra is more likely.”
“Otch.” Maresol gave a violent shake of her head. “Don’t even think its name.”
Seth smiled at her superstition. The chupacabra was a legendary hairless beast that drained the blood of goats. He was about to remind her that it was most likely that the chupacabra was a coyote with mange, when he saw the terror on Maresol’s face. He decided it was best to leave it alone. They turned onto the 17, which ran down the center of the caldera that was the San Luis Valley. The Collegiate Peaks gave way to the even more impressive Sangre de Cristo mountain range. They drove for another hour before Maresol turned off the 17 and onto a small, two-lane highway toward the more that fourteen thousand foot tall Mount Blanca, the center point of the Sangre de Cristos.
“Luis thinks it’s aliens,” Maresol said. “Is he right?”
“I have no idea, honestly,” Seth said. “There are also a set of them that seem to have some mixture—human and predator, alien and human, or all three.”
“This is a complicated case,” she said.
“Impossible,” Seth said.
“You think that new State Attorney wants to screw you?” Maresol asked.
“I think he wants to screw Éowyn,” Seth said.
Maresol laughed in spite of herself.
“Why do you think you have this trouble with another State Attorney?” Maresol asked. “Ava’s father, I get that. You caught him stealing another man’s wife and framing her husband for murder. But this one?”
“No idea,” Seth said.
“Did you catch him doing nasty business?” Maresol asked.
“Not yet,” Seth said.
“That’s right,” Maresol said. “This definitely puts him on your radar.”
“That’s exactly right,” Seth said. “So you have to ask yourself . . .”
“Why does he want to be on your radar?” Maresol nodded.
Seth nodded in turn. She drove through and turned off at the driveway to her brother’s ranch.
“You think that guy you didn’t kill in Vietnam is here? In Colorado?”
“God, I hope not.”
As if to punctuate his wish, Luis’s dogs ran out of the house to surround the car with their excited barking. Maresol pulled up to the house and waited. A few minutes later, Luis and his wife, Marta, appeared from the back. Seth smiled and got out of the car.
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SIX
Luis slowed his All-Terrain Vehicle to make the turn up ahead. Seth shot around him, and Luis laughed. After a late lunch, Luis had gotten up from his chair at the head of the table and gestured toward the door. Seth followed him out to the ATVs. Before Maresol or Luis’s wife could comment, they were heading out onto the ranch.
“Over here.”
Luis pointed. Seth slowed to let him lead the way. Luis had been born two years after Maresol had started working for Seth. Since Maresol’s husband, Manuel, had been killed in a car accident the same year, Seth had always played the role of Luis’s uncle. Seth was the godfather to a couple of Luis’s children. He’d helped Luis buy out the interests of his siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, and all of the other relatives, so that Luis owned what was left of the land grant given to his family by Spain in the 1500s. As the world warmed, Luis found that he needed a cooler summer pasture. He’d purchased acreage on the slope of Mount Blanca with Seth’s help. The cattle mutilations had occurred on the new acreage.
They went up a tight canyon between the hills. The canyon opened out onto a wide pasture with a stream running through it. Abram Miller’s hand-hewn fence went around the outer edges of the east side of the pasture. Miller’s auburn Herefords and Luis’s jet-black Angus mixed as they grazed. Luis stopped at a large white granite boulder near the middle of the field. Seth pulled his ATV in behind Luis. Miller’s fence angled along the west side of the boulder.
“You see the ground,” Luis pointed.
There was a wide twenty-foot-wide circle of dried grass next to the boulder. The grass in the center of the circle was light green, almost chartreuse, while the outer rim of the circle was brown, dry grass. The grass in the rest of the pasture was deep green
by the stream, yellow, and a light sage color.
“The cattle won’t come near here,” Luis said.
“Miller’s too?” Seth asked.
Luis shook his head. Seth bent down. He took a glass test tube from his pocket and scooped up some of the rocks and debris from the dried-grass circle. He took a sample of the grass near the center and stuffed it in an evidence bag.
“How did you find her?” Seth asked.
“Miller,” Luis said. “We trade off coming up here. He and his sons come up in the early mornings. I check in the evening. They saw her and called me.”
“How long had she been here?” Seth asked.
“I was out in this field that evening,” Luis said. “Maybe eight or twelve hours before they found her.”
“Not twenty-four hours?” Seth asked. “Couple of days?”
“That’s the big question, right?” Luis tipped his wide cowboy hat up to scratch his balding head. “If it’s been a couple days, then it’s probably birds, coyote . . . predators. Right?”
Seth nodded.
“The first one?” Luis asked. “Maybe. But this one was less than a half day. I was here, right here, that day.”
“Why did you come out here?” Seth asked.
“After I lost the first one last summer,” Luis pointed to another round dried-grass circle with light-green grass in the center about ten feet away, “I checked everything, every day. The people at the grange say the Amish are doing this to run us off the land. I told them that my uncle Seth says he’s seen it all his life. I told them. I said, ‘He’s old as dirt and don’t lie.’”
Seth laughed, and Luis smiled.
“You like Miller?” Seth asked.
“He’s been fair. They seem . . .” Luis looked around to see if anyone was near. “Nice, honest. They’re different from us. Their oldest took Maria out for a while when they were in high school. He was nice. She liked him but didn’t want to be Amish.”
Luis shrugged.
“There was a Ute at the meeting,” Luis said. “You know, the Indians? He said Utes have old stories of this same mutilations happening all the way back. Navajos have stories too.”
Seth leaned in to get a better look at the ground. From the pictures on his board, he knew that this was where Luis’s four-year old Angus had been found. Her internal organs were missing. Her udders, anus, pituitary gland, and one of her eyes had been taken. Her blood had been drained. Unlike some, she looked like she had fallen over in this spot.
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