Besides, for months now Maggie had been unable to shake a bad case of insomnia. As an FBI agent she had learned to compartmentalize her mind, carefully stowing away the awful images she had seen and all the brutal experiences she had survived. Lately those compartments had started to spring leaks and it usually happened after dark.
Nightmares played a loop in her mind, reliving the experiences, sometimes in freeze-frame, sometimes in high-definition. She hadn’t discovered a remedy. Nothing worked. Not warm milk or alcohol, exercise or quiet. The only thing that had ever worked—but only once—was Benjamin Platt’s strong, soothing fingers working the tension from her shoulders and back. Although it was only a massage and hadn’t led to anything more, just the memory of it still made her flush.
Two of Lucy’s dogs, a gangly retriever mix and a three-legged boxer, came in and curled up at their mistress’s feet. Earlier, a pack had met the Jeep and escorted it down the long driveway to the house. Lucy had explained that people kept leaving their castaways at the edge of her property, knowing she’d take them in and thereby assuaging their guilt by not turning them in to the pound for a sure death sentence. When the headlights swept the side of an outbuilding Maggie had seen a couple more snouts peeking out of the small doors crafted into the shed.
A black German shepherd nudged Maggie’s elbow for a handout.
“Jake,” Lucy scolded in her low, gentle voice and the shepherd lay down by Maggie. “Usually he’s not this friendly. He showed up about a month ago, but he comes and goes as he pleases. He’ll be gone for days at a time.”
“Maybe he has another home somewhere.”
“I don’t think so. He comes back scraped up and starving. Hank thought he saw him in the forest one night. Worries me because they’ve also reported seeing a cougar. No, I think ole Jake just hasn’t decided if he wants to call this home.” Almost on cue the dog laid his head on Maggie’s foot.
“I have a white Lab,” she said. “Harvey. He sorted of ended up on my doorstep, too.”
“So you rescued him.”
“I like to think we rescued each other.”
Lucy smiled, a first since they’d met, then she wrapped long fingers around her mug of tea and sat back in the wicker chair.
“What do you think happened out there tonight?” Maggie asked. “It couldn’t have been just a game of Taser tag, could it?”
“I’ve never seen Tasers do what we saw tonight,” Lucy said, then seemed to consider it as she sipped. “Things aren’t always what they seem. For years ranchers used barbed wire for fencing. Cattle respected the boundary because it hurt to cross it. Intruders respected it because the barbs look vicious and dangerous.”
Maggie listened patiently, remembering the woman’s explanation for bagging the owl. Perhaps this was how she answered classroom questions, with proverbs and folk tales.
“Now some ranchers use the electric fencing. Unlike the barbed wire, the electric wire looks quite harmless. You can’t tell if it’s hot, if it’s dangerous, until it’s too late.”
Maggie quietly sipped her tea. Reached a hand down and petted Jake who released a heavy sigh before flopping onto his side to expose his belly. Without looking over at Lucy, Maggie said, “So what the hell does any of that mean?”
To Maggie’s surprise Lucy laughed, hard and long. She had to wipe her eyes before attempting an answer. And when she finally did, she prefaced it with “I think you and I are going to get along just fine.
“It simply means don’t dismiss something that appears ordinary. Outsiders come here and they tend to see a simpler life, an uncomplicated people. But human nature is human nature. People out here are capable of the same things as people in cities. You might think it’s easier to hide the mistakes, the evil—if you will—in the city, but sometimes it’s just as easy to hide things in plain sight.”
Lucy set her mug down and reached into her jacket pocket, pulling out what looked like bib lettuce in a Ziploc bag. She held on to it, fingering it carefully.
“I think this is Salvia divinorum. They call it the sage of seers. The non-divinorum is the salvia you find in gardens and flower beds. This is a psychoactive species of mint. It grows mostly in Mexico and some southwestern states. The Mazatec people believed it had spiritual and healing properties. You dry it and smoke it, or you wad it up when it’s still green”—she held up the bag—“and chew it. They say its hallucinatory properties are more potent than LSD. It’s the newest rave for teenagers.”
She fingered the bag and then looked directly at Maggie when she said, “I found this under one of the dead boys when I was examining him.”
“And you put it in your pocket?”