Jem nodded.
For a moment, Tean’s gaze softened, like he was seeing something else.Finally, his attention fixed on Jem again, and he said, “Do you think this was Kazen?”
“I don’t know.”
“The person who—the person you saw, could he have been Kazen?”
“Maybe.It was dark, and everything happened fast; I didn’t really get a good look at him.”Frustration tightened Tean’s expression, and Jem reluctantly added, “He was small.”
“That could be Kazen.Or—” Tean broke off.
But Jem heard what he hadn’t said, and he finished the thought.“Or a woman.Shit, I didn’t think of that.Yeah.But—” He paused, tried to think of a way to say it, and finally settled on, “I mean, a woman?Who?Lucy?”
“No,” Tean said—but too quickly.“I don’t know.”
The sounds of the river rippled through the dark.
“I guess you were right,” Jem said.“It wasn’t Ammon.”
Tean gave him a considering look, but he didn’t respond.
“Any idea what Daniel was doing out here?”Jem asked.
A patrol car radio squawked, the words indistinguishable.
“I guess we’ll have to ask him,” Tean said.
Jem nodded.He swung a leg over the bike and settled himself.
“Jem,” Tean said.But then he stopped.His hands opened and closed at his sides, and then he smoothed them down the front of his jeans like he was drying them.When he spoke, his voice had an uncertainty that Jem remembered from what felt like a long time ago.“Why didn’t you tell me what you were doing?”
He hesitated.“I was just going to take a look.I didn’t think it was a big deal.”
Distant sounds of highway traffic made the air vibrate.
Jem looked away first.He started the bike, pulled on the helmet, and left Tean behind him in the lot.
15
Sunday morning, Tean let himself into the empty DWR building.The world had a gritty clarity that was a combination of the sleepless night and—andsomething.Something Tean couldn’t put his finger on, something from when he’d woken to that terse call from Jem, and the flash of panic at not knowing what was happening, not knowing if Jem was okay, and the terror of seeing Jem cornered by that SBI agent.Something that Tean kept trying to suffocate, and then, when he forgot about it, flared back up again.
He wasn’t angry.
In the locker room attached to the necropsy suite, Tean changed into a pair of spare clothes he kept for this kind of work.And anyway, anger was a secondary emotion, so that wasn’t even the point.He pulled on a pair of coveralls and a rubber apron, found his eye protection and gloves, and grabbed a mask and face shield.He set up the camera and the voice recorder.
It didn’t matter if Tean was angry.
The necropsy lab was a hard, bright place, and it seemed like an inside-out version of his mind that morning: stainless steel, tile, glass, light.From the refrigerator, he retrieved the carcass that Neff had sent for examination.He stared at hundreds of pounds of dead muscle and bone on a rolling cart, and for a moment, it was like all that tile and steel became mirrors, and the light bounced back and forth until it was shining on the back of Tean’s eyes.
This was stupid.
The voice was somewhere between his and Jem’s.
This was sofuckingstupid.Nobody sent cattle to the state lab to be necropsied—nobody.If you needed a necropsy, you did it on a concrete slab at the ranch or the farm, and then you disposed of the carcass and disinfected the slab, and everybody went on with their lives.Every rancher knew how it was done.Hell, for that matter, plenty of ranchers would do most of the work themselves—document the carcass, take samples, and send everything off to the lab rather than wait for somebody from the state to show up.
Neff, on the other hand, sent a whole cow wrapped in poly tarps.
It took some work—and some maneuvering—to get the carcass out of the refrigerator and onto the necropsy table.But it warmed Tean up, and that sense of something shining at the back of his eyes faded as his body settled into familiar rhythms.
