“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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