The cowboy was really only a part-time rancher and he was worried about plutonium triggers for nuclear bombs. The investigator was in fact a part-time professor called in by the cowboy on the advice of a friend who'd heard about his expertise in the diseases of goats. Expenses paid, a small fee, at worst it was a vacation. The investigator had never been out West. But as soon as the investigator got off the plane in Denver and started talking to his host, Jim Vaca, it turned out there'd been a misunderstanding.
Vaca had heard the investigator worked at a branch of Cornell's famous Veterinary School, but it seemed he was doing research at the Cornell Medical School in Manhattan, and that he was a Ph.D. not a D.V.M., and that his investigations ranged from divorce snooping to literary sleuthing and that his special interest was disease and the supernatural in Edgar Allen Poe and he was an expert on ghosts. Not goats.
Embarrassment. Confusion. The investigator wondering about the next plane back. Then, to his surprise, renewed hospitality. The offer stood. How come?
"I'm not a rich man," Vaca in the cab of the rusty green pick-up, he could have been Mr. Marlboro but the look was more chiseler than chiseled. Crafty. Heading west and north, white peaks sawing into washed blue matched his eyes. "Just a part- time cowboy with a ranch up toward Wyoming, and a part-time auto mechanic with a restoration business in Boulder. But my heart's in the ranch, I got about a hundred head and expanding, I got a lot of money in it and I just leased some more land, when the cows started dying. That's why I was thinking of getting some goats, like a friend of mine is trying. I thought maybe they'd be immune. Or llamas, which is getting big, there was a bunch the last stock show in Denver. Believe it or not."
"Immune to what?"
Vaca didn't answer. Then, "That's the problem. I don't know." Uncomfortable. "Oh, I've had the experts out. Profs from the vet college at Fort Collins even."
"What do they say?"
Vaca sort of grinned. "What don't they say? Do a lot of talking anymore but don't say much at all. Meanwhile I got eleven head dead to here."
"It's not the mutilations?" On the plane a native had mentioned it genre tall story.

"You heard about that," Vaca. "Maybe, if you believe the stories." Looking uneasy. "But it makes as much sense as the vets. One of them profs was thinking Mad Cow Disease. Worms rot the brain, they got it in England. No, far as what I can see they could've just as likely been scared to death all I know. Ever seen a spooked cow?"
"No."
"You don't want to," Vaca.
"By what?"

He squinted, pulled stained stetson down, pulled the sun visor down, needed a shave. Blond five o'clock shadow. Jeans, silver and turquoise buckle, fleece lined denim vest, he looked like the real thing. About three in the afternoon, sun something ferocious from the west. The urban knot unraveled into small spreads, horse ranches, ponds, cottonwoods, black cattle grazing grassy sprawl, mesa slit by zig-zag ravines, hog back formations, layers of sliced stone, gold/brown prairie dipping away, breaking waves of rock running up to thrust of foot hills.

Vaca picked up a CB mike, "Vaca, coming home, any calls?"
"Vet called about the post mortem," from a speaker.
"What they find?"
"Nothing. Ears and tongue gone but could have been scavengers." "Damn. Anything else?"
"Looks like you got something on that radiation study and a little girl's been kidnapped and killed in her own home."
"How can she be kidnapped in her own home?"
"That's the question. They're waiting on the post mortem."
"See you in five," hung up.
"I thought maybe their immune systems, what with all the plutonium at Rocky Flats. The nuke plant," Vaca. "Though cows around here are doing okay. Aside from glowing in the dark." A kind of shy grin. Highway edged with prairie dogs upright at their holes, tiny fire hydrants guarding miniature volcanoes. A life-size giraffe peered at the mountains from a roadside roof.

"Taxidermist with a sense of humor," Vaca. "They say his house has two stories, the first and the tall. We'll pass the nuke plant, you won't see it but if it was night time you might see them cattle lit up. Some say that's why the cattle mutilations. To figure how much radiation was getting out."

On the plane the investigator heard how for years on and off they'd been having episodes of dead cows found with ears, nose, tongue and genitals surgically removed, nobody really knew the why what or how. But frequent reports of mysterious black helicopters. Way it was told could have been a joke.

"Yeah, some say ky-oats," Vaca, "but those aren't bites, they're incisions, and I never seen a ky-oat went to medical school. Some say it's a weird germ. Others say E.T.s, which is about as likely. It's a complete white-out to here. But anyways, the cows is just the beginning of the story."

"What's the rest?" the investigator.

"I heard para-military macho initiations, I heard federal research teams, I heard satanic cults with pedophile sex rituals, I heard drugs, I heard just about everything," pushing his hat back, scratching his scalp. "That's what we're trying to find out."