“Well, why didn’t you bring him in?” She looked at me and I looked at her until finally she said, “You gonna tell me about that bull or are we just going to stare at each other the rest of the day?”
I pulled off my hat, a wide-brimmed Stetson I’d purchased in Billings when I’d first come to Montana to learn how to cowboy. I scratched my head, then plopped the hat back aboard. “He’s dead,” I said.
Jeanette didn’t react with much surprise. “The winter killed him. I swear those big old bulls are just overgrown babies.”
“Winter didn’t kill him. Somebody did.” I hesitated, still unable to completely comprehend what I’d found out there. “His throat was cut. Somebody brained him first, looks like, then sliced him open from ear to ear with, I don’t know, a hunting knife or something.”
Jeanette’s expression was one of disbelief. “Who would do a thing like that?”
“A bad man, I figure,” I said. “A really bad, bad man.” I hesitated again, but there was no way not to tell it. “Somebody also cut our fence. In three places.”
Jeanette chewed all this over. “Doesn’t make sense,” she concluded. “Who could sneak up on that bull to whack it in the head? It’s been running loose out there for months without us being able to catch it and, anyway, a bull’s got a skull harder than concrete. And who would cut our fences?”
“I’m just telling you what I found, Jeanette,” I said.
“When do you think all this happened?”
“The blood looked pretty fresh to me. An hour, two hours, something like that. Flies were just starting to collect.”
“You see that fossil hunter out there?”
“Nope, I looked around a bit and tried to call him. No answer.”
Jeanette appraised the angle of the sun, then rubbed the back of her neck. Even dirty, I thought it was a pretty neck but I was too tired and upset for that particular fantasy. “Dark in an hour,” she said. “We’ll wait for morning to track him down.”
“You think he did this?”
“No, Mike, I don’t think he did it. Or if he did, I’ve sure lost the ability to judge a man. I peg him for a tree-hugger and a lover of all God’s creatures, et cetera. I’m just hoping he doesn’t meet up with whoever killed our bull.”
“It sure seems a coincidence that this happened the same time that fossil hunter went out there,” Ray said, coming over from the holding pen.
“Well, if you hadn’t done that paper on your daddy’s fossils,” Jeanette said, “we wouldn’t be worrying about him, would we?”
I could tell Ray had already gotten an earful from his mom about his homework. When he hung his head, Jeanette provided an exasperated sigh, then said, “What’s done is done but, hell, I was afraid of this. All the work we got to do and now we got to go look for that fellow.”
Ray said, “Nick could use some exercise. I could saddle him and go out tomorrow first thing.”
Since the next day was Saturday, Ray had the time, and Jeanette thought his proposition over. “Carry a pistol,” she concluded.
Another reason I love Montana so much. Where else does a mother tell her teenager to carry a gun and nobody thinks a thing about it? Nobody but an import like me, that is.
“Anybody who kills an animal like that has to be crazy,” Jeanette said, turning to me. “Mike, you ever run across somebody like that in your former line of work?”
The “former line of work” Jeanette was referring to was the twelve years of employment I’d had in the Los Angeles Police Department including seven years as a homicide detective, my career cut short by a bullet, followed by a year of recuperation and three years as a private dick. It was not a time I recalled with much nostalgia. In fact, it was exactly why I was in Montana. I sorted through what I knew, most of which I was still trying to forget. “Lots of murderers get their start killing animals,” I allowed.
“Really?”
“Serial killers, especially.”
“Oh.”
“You might want to lock your door tonight.”
She gave that some thought, then said, “It would be the stupidest thing in the world to break into a house out here on Ranchers Road.”
Considering everybody on the road had lots of guns and knew how to use them, she had a point. I recalled a sign I’d seen on a rancher’s front porch. It featured a cartoon of a pistol with the words: WE DON’T CALL 911. Still, based on my cop years, I knew sometimes things happen in ways nobody can predict. “I don’t like the idea of Ray going out there by himself,” I said.