Sector C (12 page)

Together, she and Jill made the painful decision to put the mare down. Donna had wished desperately for Chad’s help then so Jill wouldn’t have to be party to the euthanasia, but Jill expertly roped and secured the mare and through her tears held the horse’s head still as Donna injected the pentobarbitol. The cowgirl sang the mare a lullaby, her voice breaking again and again, as the mare sank to her knees, rolled to her side and took her final breath.

Jill knelt beside the mare and bowed her head, her long hair hiding her tear-streaked face.

“I’ll call someone to come collect her,” Donna had said, and Jill simply nodded, not moving, her grief palpable under the warm summer sun.

She was still sitting there when Donna, driving off, looked back in her rearview mirror before turning on the road to her next appointment at the Rocking Sun Ranch.

IF MIKE SHAFER HADN’T SEEN the stylized sign over the entrance announcing the name of the ranch, he probably would have driven right past it. The houses and barns sat back off of the FM road, hidden among the rolling hills. And for dozens of acres to either side of the entrance to the cattle ranch, there was not a cow to be seen.
Plenty of barbed wire and plenty of open fields, but no cattle.

It was only about half a mile down the driveway that Mike, in his rented SUV, understood why. Cows, probably a hundred of them, all a deep, glistening black, stood packed into two lots — one on either side of the drive — near two huge metal barns.

Were they waiting to be moved or shipped out? Mike wondered. Or waiting to be fed or wormed or slaughtered?

As he neared the pens and slowed, he could see something else. A third lot into which cattle were being chuted, a handful of cowboys culling the two herds and prodding the occasional steer along. There were already about 25 or 30 head in the third lot and it didn’t take a practiced eye to see that those steers had issues. Several lay on the ground, moaning loudly. A few teetered around the pen like drunks, tripping over the ones lying on the ground. The rest were shaking their heads or pacing up and down on stiff, unbending legs.

The sound of a horn behind him made him jump. He rolled the remaining distance to the pens,
then
pulled his SUV off to the left side of the drive. The driver in the truck behind him pulled off to the right.
McKenzie County Animal Clinic
.
He read the magnetic sign on the door,
then
watched as two booted legs in snug boy-cut jeans slid off the seat and out of the truck. The door closing revealed the rest of the driver. An auburn-haired lady in her early 30s in a plaid shirt that looked remarkably like the shirts the cowboys were wearing — only it draped better on her.

She started toward the pens and one of the cowboys was already coming out to greet her. The cowboy said something Mike couldn’t quite catch then looked over at the SUV and nodded at it with his chin. The lady vet shook her head, and that’s when Mike realized he was the subject of their conversation and that he hadn’t even turned the vehicle off yet. He grabbed his voice recorder and camera and tried to strike a pace that was somewhere between hurrying and a professional business strut as he made his way to them.

“May I help you?” The cowboy’s tone was polite, yet his face was anything but welcoming. Clearly he felt Mike was interrupting some important business.

“I’m Mike … Mike Shafer.” He stuck out his hand. Slowly, reluctantly, the cowboy reached out to shake it. “Do you mind if I ask you some questions about what’s going on out here?”

“Do you mind if I ask you why you think it’s any of your business?” The man’s voice was calm, as if he were simply discussing the weather. But Mike knew better. The man looked to be in his late 50s, and was tanned and muscled from working 50-plus of those years outside.
Quiet confidence.
Mike envied how neatly he was able to pull it off. Standing there alone, he would have actually been intimidated. But he’d brought credentials with him.

He slid his wallet from his pocket and flipped it open, hoping the card inside the vinyl sleeve flipped out rightside up. As a statistics analyst and not a field agent, it wasn’t a move he’d really practiced. “I’m with the CDC — and it looks like you have some sick cattle.”

The cowboy slid a long look at the vet.

“I assure you, Mr. Taylor, I didn’t call him.” The vet rounded on Mike. “I’m Dr. Donna Bailey. Do you mind telling me what interest the CDC has in these cows?”

“I’m simply following a lead. We’re seeing a number of emergency room visits in the area, and beef from this ranch has come under suspicion.”

“Food poisoning?”
The cowboy showed real concern. Whether for the business or the patients, Mike couldn’t yet be sure.

“Not exactly.
More along the lines of neurological disorders.
Tremors, involuntary muscle movement, memory loss, seizures —”

“My God.”
Donna stared at Mike. “It’s happening to
people
?”

Mike nodded. “That’s how I felt when I saw your cows. I don’t know what I expected.
Just not this.”

“Why here?
These cows?”
The cowboy’s confident air had left him. “We haven’t sold any of them in six months. Certainly not since
this
started.” He nodded toward the third pen where steers continued to stagger.

“We have reports that beef from this ranch may have been donated to a school party in Williston.”

“A school —?”
That was weeks ago to celebrate the end of the school year. Yeah, we slaughtered a steer.
A healthy one.
What we didn’t donate we kept.”

“You kept it?” Mike tried to contain his excitement.
“For your personal use?”

“Well, yeah —”

 “Do you still have any of that meat?”

“Probably.”

“Mr. Taylor, we’ll have a lab team on the ground here tomorrow. You’ll need to turn over whatever you have left of the steer to them.”

“So you know what it is?” Donna held her breath in anticipation of the answer.

“What it —?” Mike looked a bit sheepish. “We don’t really know if there’s even a link. Or we didn’t know until today. Seeing these cows pretty well confirms it. Your truck says you run the McKenzie
County
Clinic — are you seeing any more animals like these in the area?”

“Why?” Donna was fiercely protective of her clients; she wasn’t going to implicate any of them prematurely.

“Because the kids at school aren’t the only ones affected.
We think there may also be some dairy connections.
Or possibly pigs or chickens.
Like I said, we’re just following the dots right now. Some of the ideas, I hope, will turn out to be deadends. If we can at least narrow whatever it is to just one species, that’ll give us something solid to go on.”

“That’s a lot of dots, Mr. Shafer.” Donna forced herself to speak calmly even though she could feel a panic building in her chest. “How are the kids doing? I wouldn’t think the CDC would be out here if it wasn’t something serious.”

“We just sent an alert out for Montana and North and South Dakota. We’ve got 37 kids affected — three of them dead.”

The cowboy sagged back against a fence.

“None of your school kids, Mr. Taylor.” Not yet at least, Mike added mentally, but the guy was obviously shaken enough already. “We have some spikes in adults showing neurological symptoms, too, but it’s harder to separate out stroke victims and early-stage Parkinson’s and other adult-onset disorders. A lot of the patients, though, are toddlers, just going off the bottle and onto cow’s milk, so we want to look at the local milk supply.”

“You said there’d be a lab team here tomorrow?” Donna asked. “Then send them to the clinic. We’ve run just about every test imaginable on milk, blood, urine, muscle tissue, you name it. My colleagues and I have been trying to isolate this pathogen for the last two months. Whatever it is, it’s new.
Or a form of something known that’s been so mutated our normal tests don’t recognize it.
Beef cattle, dairy herds, goats, sheep, alpacas — I’ve seen individual animals and groups in all these species with it. I just put down a horse with it this morning.” Donna hadn’t had a chance to take anything more for her headache and it was getting harder to think and process through the pain. But, like Mike had said, there were connections that needed exploring, and one of them jumped out at her, prompted by the flow of the conversation. “Pigs, too, you said?”

“There’s a locally made hotdog brand — Dakota Dogs.
Seems to be popular among the kids.”

Donna nodded. “Some of my clients supply them. Most of them are small piggeries that grow their own feed. Then they supplement that feed with whey and other surplus from the dairies. If this thing started with cows, that’s a possible transmission route.”

Mike cocked an eyebrow. “You obviously know a lot about a disease that seems to be running rampant out here, Doctor. Did you not think to inform anyone about what’s going on?”

“If you mean did I inform anyone beyond the State Board of Veterinarians, communicating with numerous colleagues in this region, sending hundreds of samples and detailed reports to state and national laboratories, and consulting with area universities, then no, I did not. This has all been one big coverup and now you’re here to expose the scandal and, oh, I’m running scared.” More than just the headache was making her touchy now.

“You’ll find we’re mostly honest business folk out here, Mr. Shafer. No one wants to sell diseased animals or tainted milk that’ll affect any downstream consumer, whether it’s a person or another animal. But most pathogens are very host specific. I need proof of the transmission route before I can even think of shutting down hundreds of businesses.

“Believe it or not, I welcome your lab teams, and my clients will welcome them as well. My sources have come up dry and we need to know what this is so we can stop it now before it gets worse, and then we can start over fresh if we have to. In fact, if the CDC gets involved, the ranchers may even get some government relief money to offset any losses. So don’t start making accusations, Mr. Shafer, before you know a few of the facts.”

Mike threw up his hands in mock surrender.
“Just doing my job here, lady.
Getting everything out in the open so we can get to the truth as fast as possible.”

“The truth, huh?
The truth.
Do you know why I’m out here today, Mr. Shafer? Do you know what those men are doing?” She pointed to the cowboys still culling cattle, but who were also obviously keeping an eye and ear on the conversation going on outside the cattle pens.

“Looks like they’re separating out the sick cattle?”

“That’s right. And do you know what’s going to happen to those sick cows?”

Mike’s forehead furrowed a bit. At gut level he knew, but how to put it into words?

“I’m going in there and, one by one, I’m going to kill them. There’s what — 30 or 40 in there now? Not so many when you think
there’s
a few thousand cows in this county and a few million in this state. But that’s 20 or 25 percent of Mr. Taylor’s herd. How much does a steer sell for on average, Mr. Taylor?”

“’Bout a dollar a pound, more or less.”

“So that’s something like 25 thousand dollars in that pen. Maybe 15 thousand of that is profit Mr. Taylor and his
family expect
to live on.
Those cowboys?
They’re neighbors come to help Mr. Taylor round up his cows. When they need help, Mr. Taylor will go out to their ranches same as they’ve come here. Because that’s what you do out here to keep costs down. No one in McKenzie County is a rich cattleman. Every cow is relied on to earn a living. Those cows I’m about to kill don’t just represent lost sales. They represent lost profit. He’s losing their overhead costs: vaccinations, parasite control,
supplemental
feed, fencing and just plain time.

“And because Mr. Taylor is an ethical businessman and we
don’t
know what we’re dealing with, he’s not going to sell those dead cows. Not even to a dog food plant. He’s going to burn their carcasses at the back of his property and every time he rides by that site, he’s going to see the charred remains of his son’s college fund or the ashes of the medical insurance he’s thinking he and his wife may
be needing
to look into now that they’re almost 60.