“You know we could be in a whole shitload of trouble if they found out where we got it.”
“I didn’t tell him.”
“They’d drop me from the team. All those scholarship offers will be gone if I end up not playing.”
“I didn’t say a word.”
“I’ll never go anywhere.” And then under his breath, “That’d make Amanda happy.”
Dawson had never seen Johnny like this—more scared than angry.
“None of it was my idea,” he said. “I go down, everybody goes down.”
“My dad said somebody died.”
Johnny stared straight ahead, somewhere over Dawson’s head. Then suddenly he gripped Dawson’s bandaged arm, digging his fingers into the wounds. Dawson wanted to scream from the pain. He saw fresh blood staining the wrap. He tried to jerk his arm away but Johnny tightened his grip, leaned down until his face was inches from Dawson’s, his breath hot and sour.
“Just keep your mouth shut.”
TWENTY
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Julia Racine wished she could stop thinking about how sticky the little girl’s hand was. She should be grateful that CariAnne wanted to hold her hand. Truth was, when Julia finally gave in to dating women, she thought that at least she wouldn’t have to deal with children. Too often the men she had dated wanted her to be instant stepmom to their weekend kids. Julia knew long ago that she didn’t possess that maternal gene. She realized that she never wanted to be a mother long before she even realized her preference for women.
She didn’t admit it to anyone, but children grated on her nerves. She didn’t have the patience for either their bouts of exuberance or, at the other end of the spectrum, their constant whining. Her new partner had recently suggested— after seeing how uncomfortable Julia seemed to be with her daughter—that perhaps Julia hadn’t gotten the chance to be a child herself and so she couldn’t relate. To which Julia had muttered, “Thank you very much, Dr. Freud,” but at the same time she remembered thinking, “Duh. You think?”
Julia was ten, just a little older than CariAnne, when her mother died. Her father tried to make Julia’s life as normal as possible and she absolutely adored Luc Racine for his efforts, but something broke inside Julia the day her mother left. She knew that then, although she didn’t understand it. But she had felt it, like fabric that had tugged and stretched then ripped at the seams. It had been a pain, an ache so real, so palpable that as a little girl she truly believed something— her stomach, her intestines, her heart—had surely been torn.
Her father claimed that one day she was climbing trees and the next day she was pulling up a chair to the kitchen sink to wash dishes, trying to do her mother’s chores herself.
“It just wasn’t natural,” Luc would finish off the story. Although these days Alzheimer’s prevented him from remembering his own daughter at times, let alone remembering that story or his long-gone wife.
Perhaps Julia’s lack of maternal instinct really did come from not having a real childhood. For years she blamed it for her inability to sustain a normal relationship. Only recently had it occurred to her that it might have something to do with playing on the wrong team. So here she was, trying again. Really trying this time. If someone was keeping track she should get mega points for this—picking up Miss Sticky Fingers from school and having to wait in the principal’s office for approval.
Needing to get the proper approval, even though her partner had filled out all the necessary forms, didn’t bother her. As a police detective, Julia appreciated rules that protected kids from perverts. It certainly made Julia’s job easier. But there was something about waiting for the principal, no matter what age you were, that was unsettling.
She glanced at the large institutional-size clock on the wall. Must be standard issue. Julia remembered a similar one from her elementary-school days. And she had spent plenty of time outside the principal’s office back then. Even as a kid she hadn’t had patience. Being too grownup at age ten—or at age thirty-one—didn’t seem to stop her from telling her peers how stupid they were. Except now that she wore a gun they tended to not argue back as often.
A woman came rushing into the outer office. She knocked on the principal’s door but didn’t wait for an answer before she opened it.
“I counted sixty-three lined up for the nurse,” she said, staying in the doorway. “That doesn’t count those still in the restrooms.”
A voice answered from inside but Julia couldn’t make out what was said. The woman’s head swiveled around, only now noticing Julia and CariAnne. She stepped inside the office and the door slammed shut.
Julia tugged her hand away from the little girl and quietly got up to glance outside the door. A line of kids snaked around the corner. Some were holding their bellies. Others were leaning against the wall. A few adults manned the line, feeling foreheads and offering whispered reassurances.
“Do you know what’s going on?” Julia asked CariAnne.
“A lot of us haven’t been feeling good since lunchtime.”
“You don’t feel good? You didn’t say anything?”
“I don’t usually have to. Mom just knows.”
Julia looked back out the door, thinking they sure had everything under control for all these kids not feeling good. But then all it took was one to start vomiting. The little boy barely made it to the trash can. Watching from the sidelines, Julia thought it looked like dominoes, one kid after another, bending, gagging, retching and the few adults like tops spinning from one end of the hallway to the other.
It was almost funny until Julia heard CariAnne behind her. The little girl was reaching for her hand again, holding her stomach, and pressing against Julia. In seconds she, too, was bent over and spraying Julia’s shoes.
TWENTY-ONE
NEBRASKA
Even without the barbed wire Maggie thought Dawson Hayes still looked fragile in the stark, white hospital bed. She felt an odd connection to him and couldn’t shake how his eyes had pleaded with her, depended on her.
This morning his arms were wrapped in blood-stained bandages. An IV tube snaked from the back of his hand to a machine. She and the sheriff were told that a gastrointestinal tube had been removed from his throat so he might be a bit hoarse. And that they shouldn’t push him to talk too much.
The scratches on his face looked raw against his pale skin. The bandage on his neck hid a wound that seeped. But the thing that bothered Maggie most was that the boy still looked scared.
Sheriff Skylar had insisted he direct the interviews with the teenagers. They were kids from his area. He knew many of their parents. They’d feel more comfortable talking to someone they knew rather than a state patrolman or an FBI agent. She agreed, letting him believe that in doing so, he had won a major concession, when in fact, Maggie didn’t actually have official approval to proceed as lead investigator.
She had left a message for her boss, Assistant Director Raymond Kunze, but she hadn’t heard back from him yet. She already knew what he’d say: “Hand it off to the locals. You have a conference to attend.”
The “locals,” Maggie had discovered in the meantime, would be either the FBI field office in Omaha, two hundred and eighty miles away, or the Forest Service in Chadron, which was two hundred miles away. Kunze wouldn’t comprehend that distance, nor would he care what difference losing the first twenty-four hours could make.
Besides, detouring her to visit the site of a cattle mutilation was, no doubt, only a favor he had been repaying, one of those courtesies that government officials gave each other. Maggie suspected Kunze hadn’t intended for her to give any of it more than a cursory look and write the obligatory report that would be his proof of repayment. If he had intended for her to actually create a possible profile of the cattle mutilators, he certainly would have included many more of the details in the file.