by C. J. Box
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.
On 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.
In 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 chalk-line 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 “[email protected].”
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?
Joe 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.
Back 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 foothills 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 England 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.
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.”