Maggie found herself taking two steps to his one, sweating despite the sudden chill. The sinking sun was quickly stealing all the warmth of the day and she wished she hadn’t left her jacket back in Donny’s pickup. The impending nightfall seemed only to increase Donny’s long gait.
At least she had worn comfortable flat shoes. She’d been to Nebraska before so she thought she had come prepared, but her other visits had been to the far eastern side near Omaha, the state’s only metropolitan city, which sprawled over river valley. Here, within a hundred miles of the Colorado border the terrain was nothing like she expected. On the drive from Scottsbluff there had been few trees and even fewer towns. Those villages they did drive through took barely a few minutes and a slight decrease of acceleration to enter and exit.
Earlier Donny had told her that cattle outnumbered people and at first she thought he was joking.
“You’ve never been to these parts before,” he had said rather than asked. His tone had been polite, not defensive when he noticed her skepticism.
“I’ve been to Omaha several times,” she had answered, knowing immediately from his smile that it was a bit like saying she had been to the Smithsonian when asked if she had seen Little Bighorn.
“Nebraska takes nine hours to cross from border to border,” he told her. “It has 1.7 million people. About a million of them live in a fifty-mile radius of Omaha.”
Again, Donny’s voice reminded Maggie of a cowboy poet’s and she didn’t mind the geography lesson.
“Let me put it in a perspective you can relate to, no disrespect intended.” And he had paused, glancing at her to give her a chance to protest. “Cherry County, a bit to the northwest of us, is the largest county in Nebraska. It’s about the size of Connecticut. There are less than six thousand people in nearly six thousand square miles. That’s about one person per square mile.”
“And cattle?” she had asked with a smile, allowing him his original point.
“Almost ten per square mile.”
She had found herself mesmerized by the rolling sandhills and suddenly wondering what to expect if she needed to go to the bathroom. What was worse, Donny’s geography lesson only validated Maggie’s theory, that this assignment—like several before it—was yet another one of her boss’s punishments.
A couple of months ago Assistant Director Raymond Kunze had sent her down to the Florida Panhandle, smack-dab in the path of a category-5 hurricane. In less than a year since he officially took the position, Kunze had made it a habit of sending her on wild-goose chases. Okay, so perhaps he was easing up on her, replacing danger with mind-numbing madness.
This time he had sent her to Denver to teach at a weekend law enforcement conference. The road trip to the Sandhills of Nebraska was supposed to be a minor detour. Maggie specialized in criminal behavior and profiling. She had advanced degrees in behavioral psychology and forensic science. Yet it had been so long since Kunze allowed her to work a real crime scene she wondered if she would remember basic procedure. Even this scene didn’t really count as a crime, except perhaps for the cows.
Now as they continued walking, Maggie tried to focus on something besides the chill and the impending dark. She thought, again, about the fact that there was no blood.
“What about rain?”
Almost instinctively she glanced over her shoulder. Backlit by the purple horizon, the bulging gray clouds looked more ominous. They threatened to block out any remaining light. At the mention of rain, Donny picked up his pace. Anything more and Maggie would need to jog to keep up.
“It hasn’t rained since last weekend,” he told her. “That’s why I thought it was important for you to take a look before those thunderheads roll in.”
They had left Donny’s pickup on a dirt trail off the main highway, next to a deserted dusty black pickup. Donny had mentioned he asked the rancher to meet them but there was no sign of him or of any other living being. Not even, she couldn’t help but notice, any cattle.
The rise and fall of sand dunes blocked any sign of the road. Maggie climbed behind him, the incline steep enough she caught herself using fingertips to keep her balance. Donny came to an abrupt stop, waiting at the top. Even before she came up beside him she noticed the smell.
He pointed down below at a sandy dugout area about the size of a backyard swimming pool. Earlier he had referred to something similar as a blowout, explaining that these areas were where wind and rain had washed away grass. They’d continue to erode, getting bigger and bigger if ranchers didn’t control them.
The stench of death wafted up. Lying in the middle of the sand was the mutilated cow, four stiff legs poking up toward the sky. The animal, however, didn’t resemble anything Maggie had ever seen.
CHAPTER 2
FIVE MILES AWAY