Chapter Four
“LARGEST EVER” MANHUNT IN NEVADA DESERT TURNS UP GRUESOME RESULT: Partial Body Found, Feared to be Shawna, Awaits Identification [CNN.com breaking story alert, 3/17/05]
One look at the blood on Nilla’s shirt and they put her in an examination room right away—really just a cubicle, hemmed in by mobile partitions, barely big enough for her narrow bed. Outside the moans of the injured and the sick never stopped. Shadows crossed the fabric of the partition, the acoustic ceiling tiles above her head. A nurse in a jacket decorated with panda bears came in and attached a plastic clip to her finger but didn’t have time to turn on the attached machine before she was called away. The back of her jacket showed a bloody hand print.
She heard screaming a minute later and what had to be a gunshot. An orderly in a white uniform opened her partition and stormed inside. “I’m really sorry about this, Ma’am,” he said. He spoke with a West Indian accent, syncopated and musical. He had a shaved head and he looked exhausted. Draped across his arm were countless thick loops of thick black nylon. He tore one open by its Velcro closure and started feeding it through the tubular frame of her bed.
“That’s not necessary,” she insisted as he fastened the loop around her left wrist. A rivulet of icy cold ran down her back and her body twitched. Her head was pounding.
He just shook his head. “Lots of people get them, Ma’am, I’m just doing my job.” He bit his lip before securing her right wrist, perhaps wondering if she was going to fight him. The thought hadn’t crossed Nilla’s mind until then. “It’s rabies, we think.”
“Rabies? What the hell is going on? I haven’t even seen a doctor yet!” Fear rattled inside of her emptiness, desperation at being imprisoned. This was a hospital, goddamnit! They were supposed to help her. “Get away from me!”
“Ma’am, you’ve got a textbook pattern of bite marks on your shoulder,” he said quietly, with infinite delicacy. “Ma’am, I have a gag here, too. That you don’t have to get, if you cooperate.”
It was a second gunshot, though, that convinced her. Together they looked up—and then their eyes met and she knew he was deadly serious. Something was happening outside, something very bad, and the orderly didn’t know any more than she did but he intended to complete his task one way or another. He tied down her ankles and then turned to go. “Thank you, Ma’am,” he whispered, as if he didn’t know what else to say.
“Tonight the Sixteenth Street pedestrian mall is closed to foot traffic. Police cars blockaded the popular shopping destination after reports of dangerous animals on the loose. Our action reporting team is on the way to downtown right now. Here’s Chip with local pro team action. Chip?” [9News (Denver) Evening Broadcast, 3/17/05]
The air turned the color of burnished metal, growing so thin Dick was panting by the time he crested the slope. Up top no trees grew at all, just scattered patches of lichen like greenish doilies glued to the rock. Thankfully the track went over the ridge just ahead and started downhill again, heading for a narrow valley below so thickly packed with pine trees that when the wind stirred them the valley looked like a bowl filled with shimmering green water. There were buildings tucked away amongst the trees, modest clapboard structures of a kind that had been built in the mountains for over a century—split-wood shingles over roof beams weathered by the sun until they were grey veined with silver and as dry as bone.
Dick paused at the ridge line to drink some water from his day pack and phone in to his field office. He reached a teenage intern who swore he was writing down Dick’s GPS coordinates but who was probably just doodling on NIH stationery. Dick didn’t suppose it mattered too much. It was standard practice to report one’s position on a regular basis—the best way to die up in the mountains was to have nobody know where you were—but he was no more than a quarter mile from the road and even if a snowstorm came through in the next few hours he was certain he could make it back alright. He’d lived through some bad scrapes in the Rockies and always he’d come through alright. “Do we have a phone number for my next interview?” he asked, pretty sure the answer would be no: there were no phone lines or satellite dishes attached to the buildings down in the valley, his next destination.
“Uh, uh, no,” the intern replied after paging inexpertly through Dick’s own calendar. “Mrs. Skye, right? Yeah, uh, she said she, uh, I can’t really read your hand-writing but it looks like she walked into town to use a payphone.”
Dick nodded and hung up. He remembered now—he’d received the message himself from the field office’s voice mail system. This was a scrapie call. Scrapie was becoming the lion’s share of Dick’s business. Scrapie: a fatal and nasty disease of sheep and sometimes goats named for its victims’ habit of scraping their skin off against trees and rocks. Most ranchers never bothered to report it when they saw it—the disease wasn’t traditionally infectious, spreading over a span of generations instead of months. By the time a shepherd finally panicked and called for help the illness had usually compromised an entire flock.
Those calls were coming more and more frequently, which was truly scary to someone like Dick who knew the numbers. Nearly ten per cent of Colorado’s sheep were potentially infected, and that was just the known cases. Mad Cow disease, a related illness, had decimated the livestock population in England a few years back and he fully expected a similar disaster in American sheep within the decade.
Dick knew enough to assume the worst and he expected to find that Mrs. Skye’s sheep would have to be destroyed and the carcasses incinerated. He didn’t exactly skip down the path into the sheltered valley. It was tough to be grim on that track, though, with the sunlight streaming down through the branches in long dusty shafts, with the musty smell of pine needles baking in the warmth of spring mingling with the fresh winter smell of powdery snow. He had a smile on his face when he approached the main house. “Hello!” he called while he was still a hundred yards away. “Hello there!” In this part of the West, in such a secluded spot, you made a point of announcing your presence well before you arrived. You had to assume that everyone you visited was heavily armed and unfond of intruders. “Hello! Mrs. Skye?”
The house had seen better days. Its clapboard walls looked sturdy enough but its windows had been broken in several places and replaced with butcher paper and duct tape. Pine needles littered the covered porch where a cord of fire wood had collapsed and spilled out into the yard. Broken and rusted farm implements hung from the porch rafters—sickles and mallets and hoes as well as some nasty bits of iron specific to sheep herders, like a mulesing saw and a tooth grinder. The tools look hand-made. “Hello!” Dick shouted, as loud as he could.
A woman holding a hatchet came around the side of the house and squinted at him. She wore a tie-dyed quilted jacket and her long white hair played around her shoulders in thin strands. Her face looked like a contour map of the mountains around her, filled with lines and blotchy shading. “You,” she called out to him. “You from the Health department?”
“Dick Walters, NIH,” he agreed.
“You do me a favor, Walters. You run over to that tree and back.”
Dick laughed but then he looked at her hatchet. The sharp edge was filthy with blood and hair. This was a farm, and animals on farms got slaughtered all the time. Still the sight of it made him uneasy. He swallowed and dashed over to the tree, then ran back to where he had originally been standing.
The old woman nodded. “Fair enough. They don’t move that fast.” She dropped her hatchet on the carpet of pine needles and stomped into her house, her boots crunching in the snow. The door had no lock. Not knowing what else to do Dick followed her inside.
