“Oh, Sam, Xander Moon, there you are. You guys took forever getting here. Stop off for a quickie on the way?”
McReynolds was lounging against the wall of the conference room, arms crossed on his chest and one cowboy-booted heel flat against the wall. He looked like a very tall, very tan crane. “Lord, Carly. They’re going to think you don’t know your stuff you keep after him like that. Hush and let’s talk about cow innards.”
She blew her husband a kiss and stood in front of the board while Sam and Xander took seats at the table.
Satisfied she had everyone’s attention, she addressed Sam directly.
“Have you ever necropsied a cow?”
Sam shook her head. “I’ve never had the pleasure, no.”
“Damn hard work. Cows have a lot inside of them. The rumen itself takes forever to get through. You have to pick them up out of the fields with a crane. I was in luck, when Gerhardt’s stock went down, the NTSB had their portable crane they call Godzilla here in the mountains dealing with a plane crash. They came and helped us. We were able to use it to move the cows up the hill so we could do the necropsies behind Gerhardt’s barn. Level ground there, a nice wide concrete slab.”
She pointed at the first of the pictures. Sam saw the pasture running downhill, and the dead cows dotting the green grass like gigantic black-and-white spotted mushrooms. It wouldn’t have been an easy feat to move them. She imagined herself, grimly prepared to necropsy the cows, marching off down the hill with purpose, and her respect for Carly upped a notch.
“How many died?” Sam asked.
“Five. Four cows with new calves and a newly weaned winter calf.”
“And your findings were consistent with grass tetany?”
“Honestly, that was the only thing that made sense.” She started moving down the line of photographs. Sam got up to see better. The first was of a cow on its side, then wide open, on its back, its legs splayed wide as if the cow had spun out on some ice and landed upside down.
Carly continued a painstakingly detailed recitation on the dissection, walking Sam through every step with her on the photos. She was a good teacher, though once you got past the rumen, things were pretty self-explanatory. Hearts were hearts and lungs were lungs and guts were guts on mammals.
“See this? The rules on an animal this size are easy—if it’s hollow you lay it open, if it’s solid you cut through it. Once I got into the rumen, I started opening things up, and found there were lesions in the abdominal track, as well as blood in the lungs and more lesions on the snout and tongue. It stood to reason it was something they ate, and their magnesium levels came back as low. We gave the herd supplements in some fresh grain and that seemed to fix the problem. We didn’t lose any more.”
“Are the samples you took still available?”
“I seriously doubt it. We sent it all to the lab at Colorado State, and since it wasn’t a herd disease, something communicable that could spread across the stock, there was no reason to keep it on hand once we made the diagnosis. Tetany is dangerous, but only to the cows that aren’t getting the right nutrients. I take it you think I’m wrong?”
“I do. But damn if I know how to prove it.”
“So what do you think caused their deaths?”
“Abrin. Most likely in their grain. Cows are four to eight times the weight of an average man. The killer would want to be sure the dosage was enough to kill. If it would take down a cow, it would take down a human, without a problem. Personally, I’d have tested on pigs, they’re closer to humans point for point. Cows seem overkill, honestly.”
“Not a lot of pig farms up here, though.”
“Maybe he had a vendetta against Gerhardt,” Xander offered. “Reed, did the old man have any threats against him, or problems with people?”
“You know Gerhardt, Xander Moon. He had problems with everyone. But no one wanted him dead as far as I knew.”
Carly was walking along her line of photographs, thinking aloud. “Gerhardt could have just been a wrong place, wrong time casualty. If the poison was in the grain, anyone who fed those cows could have gotten sick. The dust that comes up when you pour it out of the carrier is bad. Jeez, I fed the stock myself when he was laid up—it could have been me just as easily. Assuming the killer was testing things.” Her hand went to her throat and her china-blue eyes grew wide, and Sam remembered, drama lessons.
“What about poachers?” Sam asked.
“You’re thinking about how they could get on his land unseen?” Xander asked.
“Yeah.”
Reed shrugged. “They’re out there, but we don’t have too many problems in this area. We mostly have fools who are fishing without licenses and taking a buck out of season rather than people trying to get at the mountain lions and brown bears without a care. It’s been known to happen, but it’s rare.”
Carly was watching her husband. “What about the bandit, Reed?”