“Well, it’s not as bad as a murder or a mutilation,” the man said. “I’m glad to hear that.”
There was a pause. “You ever heard of a crop circle?” It took Joe by surprise. He said, “I think so.”
“Well, I think I’ve got one out in my pasture. I found it this morning.”
18
David thompson, the rancher who called, had a 200-acre place adjacent to the exclusive Elkhorn Ranches subdivision in the foot-hills of the Bighorns. Like the Elkhorn tract, Thompson’s “ranch” had been carved from the much larger V Bar U Ranch once owned by deceased lawyer Jim Finotta. By Wyoming standards, Thompson’s place was not really a ranch, Joe thought as he drove there. It was a nice house with a really big lawn.
Nevertheless, Thompson had clearly paid a good deal of money for the knotty-pine sign that announced bighorn view ranch that Joe passed by. The road curved up and over a sagebrush hill and descended into a green, landscaped pocket where the newly built home had been nestled among pines and young cottonwoods.
On the drive out to Thompson’s ranch, Joe tried to recall what he knew of crop circles, and concluded that it wasn’t much. He remembered that when he was young, he’d read some kind of “Believe It or Not” book with blurry black-and-white reproductions of aerial photographs in En-gland or Scotland of sites where the grass had been blown flat into perfect O’s. There had also been photos of fields where intricately cut designs had supposedly appeared overnight, usually amid reports of cigar-shaped flying objects.
Jeez.
This made him grumpy, and anxious to discount whatever he found as quickly as he could.
Joe pulled into the ranch yard to find David Thompson was waiting. Thompson was a dark, trim man in his early sixties who had supposedly cashed out of a dot-com in Austin months before the company had crashed. With his new fortune, he had purchased a home in Galveston, Texas, for the winter and the Bighorn View Ranch for the summer. He raised and showed miniature horses. Joe didn’t like miniature horses. He thought they were silly, in the same way that hairless cats were silly.
Thompson was wearing a crisp canvas barn coat and a cap that said bighorn view miniatures. He opened the passenger-side door of Joe’s truck and Maxine scrambled toward the middle to make room.
“Want me to show you where it is?” Thompson said, swinging into the seat.
“Might as well,” Joe said, “since you’re already in my truck.”
Joe’s sarcasm didn’t register with Thompson, who appeared flushed with excitement over his discovery.
“Don’t you want to ask me when I found it?” Thompson said. “You told me it was this morning.”
“I did?” “Yup.”
“Take that road,” Thompson gestured, indicating an old two-track that ascended out of the pocket and over a hill. “I don’t use this road very much. My corrals and miniatures are the other way. But when I got up this morning to feed the horses I just had this strange feeling urging me to go down the other road. Like a premonition, you know? Like somebody or something was willing me to take the other road.”
Joe nodded.
“It’s a lucky thing I found it,” said Thompson. “Usually by this late in the fall I’ve already moved down to Texas. And especially this year, with all of the supernatural crap that’s been happening around here, I had plenty of reason to leave early. But I wouldn’t leave without my horses, and my goddamned unreliable horse hauler got waylaid up in Alberta somewhere. He should be here any day, and when he comes, brother, I’m out of here. I’ll leave the aliens to the locals, baby.”
“We thank you for that,” Joe said, deadpan.
“I was thinking of selling the place anyway, you know? Moving back and forth to Texas with my minis is getting to be a drag. I might look for somewhere in New Mexico or Arizona, where it doesn’t get so damned cold, you know? And where it isn’t spooked. Problem is I’m not sure I could sell the place for what I’ve got into it, you know? I hear land prices are in the toilet, thanks to what’s going on. I went to list the place at Logue Country Realty and the realtor there said appraisals are coming in at 20 percent lower than what they should be. Fire-sale prices, damn it.”
Joe kept quiet. Thompson didn’t seem to need a response in order to keep talking.
“When I saw that crop circle I thought to myself, why me? Why now? Why my ranch? But now when I hear that there was another mutilation last night, it all seems to make sense,” Thompson said, talking fast. “Do you think it’s all related?”
“I don’t know,” Joe said.
Thompson shot Joe a perturbed look. “Aren’t you on the task force?” “Yes.”
“Aren’t you intrigued by my discovery, then?”
Joe shrugged. “I don’t know yet whether I’m intrigued. I haven’t seen it.”
“Well, it’s just over this hill.”
hey cleared the hill and Joe stopped his truck.
“Voila!” Thompson said, sweeping his hand as if presenting what was behind door number three.
Joe looked. Below them, on a sagebrush flat, was a perfect circle cut into the buffalo grass. Joe estimated that it was eighty feet in circumference. Joe rubbed his jaw, ignoring the look of triumph on David Thompson’s face.
“Just like I told you, eh?” Thompson said. “It’s a circle, all right,” Joe agreed.
“A crop circle.”
Joe continued to size up the scene. “Don’t you need crops for a crop circle?”
