he caught glimpses of the form as it flashed through his field of vision. Portly, solid, arms cocked out to both sides, legs spread in a V—it certainly
Was it a real body? Joe could imagine workers hanging a dummy or mannequin in some kind of prank. How was it possible for someone even to get up there, much less get caught up in a chain attached to the shaft of a blade? How long had it been up there?
Then he linked the area, the horse without a rider, the location of the wind turbines, and Missy’s frantic phone calls the day and night before.
“Oh, no,” he said aloud, while he plucked the mike from his dashboard and called dispatch in Cheyenne. He’d hold off calling Marybeth, he decided, until he could confirm the flying body belonged to the former Earl of Lexington.
En route to the wind turbine with the form spinning on the blade, Joe passed the antelope hunters and exchanged waves with them—they were locals he recognized from town, and ethical hunters who took good care of their game meat—and he bounced along past them on the two-track to the Lee Ranch fence line. As he drove, the towers rose above him into the sky. Tube awoke and strained forward in the cab and peered out the front windshield as well, determining the direction of Joe’s interest if not the object of it, and scanned the sky for birds. That was the Lab in him. So was the penchant for sudden salivation, which strung from his tongue and pooled around the air vents on top of the dashboard.
Joe had called in the situation to Cheyenne dispatch, and they’d relayed the message via SALECS (State Assisted Law Enforcement Communication System) to the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department and all relevant law enforcement agencies. As he drove, he heard the exchanges, and he could only imagine what Sheriff Kyle McLanahan was thinking. And he wondered how quickly and how far the word would spread beyond the local law network. Plenty of citizens in Saddlestring monitored the police band, and rumors shot through Twelve Sleep County like rockets. He hoped Marybeth—or Missy, for that matter—wouldn’t get hit with speculative phone calls until he knew for sure what the situation was.
He braked at the gate between the Lee and Alden ranches, perplexed at what he found. The Earl had replaced the old chain and lock system with a ten-foot electronic gate. This was one of the issues locals had raised over the last few years, how The Earl had shut off access to and across his holdings to people who had used the roads for generations. Joe knew Alden had every right to secure his property, but questioned the need to do so. It was like rubbing his wealth and power in the nose of those who had short supplies of both. And the gate in front of Joe was a monument to the controversy.
Instead of calling Alden Ranch headquarters for the keypad sequence, since that would alert Missy, Joe simply parked his pickup to the right of the gate where it joined with the four-string barbed wire fence and got out, leaving the motor idling. He climbed into the bed of his pickup and rooted through his metal gearbox until he found his bolt cutters. As he walked toward the fence, he could hear a cacophony of voices from the radio. Dispatchers talked to dispatchers, and sheriff’s department deputies, highway patrolmen, and local police officers all weighed in. He ignored them as he clipped through each strand of barbed wire on the fence top to bottom. He wanted to be the first to the scene.
Like the gate itself, the fence was perfect and new, stretched tight. His bolt cutters bit cleanly through the shiny metal wire. Each strand snapped back into a curl until he had clearance for his vehicle. He was surprised what pleasure it gave him to break through the fence.
Joe was familiar with the layout of the wind farm, although he had never approached it from this direction. The rough two-track gave way to a smooth, graded, and banked gravel road that was part of the development, and he was able to switch from four-wheel drive to two and increase his speed. He roared toward the slowest turbine.
The rapid development of the installations across Wyoming and the West had created new wildlife and environmental concerns. Wind turbines required a significant footprint on the land, at least fifty acres per structure, or three rotor distances apart from one to the other. Alden’s huge project of one hundred units stretched across five thousand acres of his land, not counting the well-engineered roads connecting them all. As yet, no transmission lines coursed over the horizon to export the electricity to downstream substation transformers.
Because wind companies obviously chose open areas with plenty of wind, they were often located in untrammeled terrain where there had been no previous impact and no person in his or her right mind would want to build a home. Unfortunately for the wind developers, many of these locations brought out concerns regarding impacts on the winter range of big game animals and their migration routes. The impact on the sage grouse population—strutting, flinty native game birds about the size of chickens—was of immediate concern. Since half of all the sage grouse in existence in North America were located in Wyoming and the population of the game birds had been declining for years, the introduction of wind turbines on their habitat was an issue with environmentalists, hunters, and the Game and Fish Department, as well as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
One of Joe’s new directives was to assist in monitoring the sage grouse activity in areas where wind development was occurring and send memos of his findings to Cheyenne. Although he couldn’t honestly link one to the other on his forays into the wind farms, he had noted a number of dead birds (not sage grouse) and even more bats crumpled up dead at the base of the towers. Bats, apparently, had their natural radar fouled by the air pressure of the spinning blades and they’d become disoriented (so the theory went) and fly headlong to their death into the steel of the towers.
As he approached the first row of turbines, Joe noted another vehicle coming fast in his direction. He thought it might be the first of the sheriff’s deputies to the scene until it got closer and he recognized it as one of several of The Earl’s company pickups by the Rope the Wind logo on the door. Rope the Wind was Alden’s newest enterprise. He’d shown Joe and Marybeth a mock-up of the logo, expecting their enthusiastic approval at a dinner they’d attended with their girls at the ranch. He said he’d bought the company and the name recently, anticipating the wind energy boom. The logo was a drawing of a large cowboy straddling the nacelle of a three-megawatt turbine. The cowboy’s hat was bent back by the oncoming wind, and he was tossing a lariat into it.
Joe had said he liked it just fine, but apparently not with enough enthusiasm. The Earl had huffed and rolled up the design and stomped away. He was a man who valued those who agreed wholeheartedly with him, and discounted those who didn’t. Joe had been discounted.
The company pickup arrived at the base of the tower at the same time Joe did. The driver swung out and faced Joe with his hands on his hips. He was in his mid-twenties and beefy, with a full red beard and a crisp new jacket
