Death From a Clear Night's Sky

DEATH FROM A CLEAR NIGHT’S SKY

By Leroy Stradford

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This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Some locales are real but fictionalized, others are completely fictional. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

Copyright 2014 Leroy Stradford

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DEATH FROM A CLEAR NIGHT’S SKY

By Leroy Stradford

CHAPTER ONE

The Dog Star had been glaring down on the broad canyon lands south of the Luera Mountains for just a little more than an hour when the sun came charging over the horizon. It had not been a lingering dawn. In just moments the myriad stars were banished from the immense brightening sky and the warm, voluptuous night gave way to a sere New Mexico day. It was mid-August. It would not be the hottest day of this long summer, but it would be hot enough. By blazing noon every living being on these high tinder-dry plains would stop moving and seek the safety of shade. Nothing would move again until dusk. For endless miles in every direction there would be nothing but hot stillness. Soon heat would ripple up from the ground and drip down from the sky like sweat, and the reality of still terrain would blur into the desert fiction of mirage. Sentience would have no choice but to seek the comfort of shadows and the respite of afternoon sleep.

The morning light spread quickly across the canyon floor and illuminated an alcove in the nothingness that sheltered the remote but modern ranch house that belonged to the Johnson family. The awakening of the day seemed to have missed this house on this morning. There was a strange kind of stillness about the house and its environs. It was a stillness unrelated to the lethargy that the heat would bring later in the day.

Some twenty yards from the ranch house, a steer lay in the rigor mortis of death. The occasional dead animal was commonplace in this near-wilderness, but as the sun began heating the hide of the dead bovine it became obvious that this death was not routine. The nostrils of the dead animal were flared open as if the beast had been gasping for breath when it died, and now a thick syrup-like stream of body fluids had begun to ooze from the nasal openings.

Ordinarily flies and other insects would be congregating on these fluids and would be opportunistically surveying the carcass, but there were none. This morning nothing moved. The eye of the steer that would have gazed upward to the heavens when it died seemed to be missing. It was as if it had exploded from the eye socket and burst in the air. The eyes of a carcass in the wilderness often made a quick meal for scavengers, and carrion eating birds, but no birds circled above this prize. The belly of the steer had swollen in death and at some point in the pre-dawn the gut had ruptured and internal organs had erupted out onto the ground. A small string of intestine had been pulled a few feet from the carcass by an enterprising coyote, but this evisceration was left unfinished. The coyote’s meal had ended abruptly, and the coyote too, lay dead just a few feet from the steer. The belly of the unfortunate scavenger had not yet exploded, but it appeared as if that event was imminent.

In front of the ranch house, Greg Johnson sat motionless behind the wheel of the new club-cab pickup truck that the family had purchased just this summer. The keys to the truck were in the ignition, but the rancher had not had time to turn the engine over before he died. Johnson sat motionless with one arm dangling out the open window of the truck. His face was twisted out of shape, and his obscenely swollen tongue pushed his jaw down and to the left His eyes, like those of the steer, had tried to lurch from their sockets. One eye now hung down on the rancher’s face and the other stared wildly at the rear view mirror as if Greg Johnson had seen the grim reaper himself approaching from behind the pickup truck. Also, like the steer, Johnson’s belly had ruptured and his internal organs had sloshed onto the floor of the truck, covering the toes of his steel-tipped boots.

The rancher’s ten-year-old son and the family dog had both followed Johnson from the house when he had made his run for the pickup truck. The boy had reached the edge of the porch and the dog had gotten part way down the front steps when their bodies had collapsed in unseemly death. The two small forms were almost unrecognizable as bodies, looking more like horrific piles of body parts and organic matter.

Inside the ranch house death had come more softly to the rest of the Johnson family, but only slightly so. The twins, sweet six-year-old girls who had made Greg Johnson’s heart sing with joy, sat at the table in the breakfast nook. They both sat with their faces down on the table, resting on their arms, looking as if they had been napping or saying their prayers when they died. Their bodies were swollen but intact. In the kitchen, not far from where the girls sat waiting in death, their mother lay motionless on the still-cool linoleum floor. The box of Cheerios that Linda Johnson held in her hand had spilled wildly around the kitchen floor when she collapsed. Her pretty face was twisted with pain and her tongue was terribly swollen, but her features were still recognizable. Her soft brown eyes protruded grotesquely, but they, at least, had remained where they belonged on her face. They now stared blankly at the ceiling, and in the background the sounds of country-western music floated down upon the horror of death. She had turned on the radio in the kitchen, very quietly, when she had come down just before first light to prepare the family breakfast. Like the girls, her body was terribly swollen but had not burst. As if death were making a cruel mockery of life, Linda Johnson looked in death as if she were about to give birth.

Greg Johnson had stumbled down from the upstairs bedroom, feeling more ill than he had ever felt in his life, to find his wife prostrate on the kitchen floor and to see his girls motionless at the breakfast table. His mind had been clear enough at that moment to realize that there was nothing he could do but to go for help. He had been only vaguely aware of his boy and the dog behind him as he went out the front door of the ranch house. He had managed to put the keys into the ignition of his new pickup truck, but then consciousness had left him entirely.

Now the ranch house was a macabre still life; nothing moved. The sun climbed in its arc across the sky and the day grew hot, but nothing moved. All around the ranch the odor of death began to rise up into the air mixing with quiet strains of honky-tonk tunes and the midday news. Nothing moved. The day drifted silently through its scorching progress, oblivious to the ranch house scene below, and at last merciful dusk began to shade the horror the day had revealed. As darkness began allowing clear blue stars to regain their dominion of sky, nighthawks and swallows that nested in the far red cliffs began to flit through the air above the ranch house. Flies, unnaturally delayed, finally began ministering to the dead. Beneath nearby Juniper trees, grasshoppers buzzed and crickets began their lovelorn singing. At last the canyon was mercifully graced with blessed darkness.

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About an hour after daybreak of the following morning, a fine curl of dust, like a column of thin smoke, could be seen on the dirt road that twisted and turned off of State Road 163 and lead eventually into the canyon where the Johnson ranch house nestled. A battered old blue pickup truck bounced merrily along headin’ for the Johnson place.

CHAPTER TWO

Catron County Sheriff Randall Wayne Harrison pulled his white and brown squad car onto the gravel surrounding the Datil Café. It was not quite sunup. Several pickup trucks, in from local ranches, and a couple of work crew trucks from the road repair project out on west Highway 60 were parked in a row in front of the café. Randall could also see Socorro County Sheriff George Martinez’s squad car parked at the end of the row. Martinez’s car was almost identical to his own, except it was painted in blue and white and had the Socorro County emblem on its side. The two sheriffs had agreed to get together to look into a number of recent reports from local ranchers concerning missing and mutilated cattle. There had been problems of this sort for many years up in northern New Mexico, problems that were still unresolved, but there had not been anything like that around here before.

Harrison was pondering the logistics of the day’s activities as he climbed out of his car. It was a serene and quiet summer’s morning and the crunching noise of his boots on the parking lot gravel seemed strangely loud. The sweet morning air outside the café was wonderful, and the sheriff paused briefly on the wooden steps just to enjoy the smells of the new day. The perfume of dry grass flowed down with the cooler air from the alluvial slopes of the nearby mountains and blended with faint gaseous road fumes. These odors swirled on the café porch mixing with the heavy steam of strong coffee and the scent of sweating bacon sizzling on the grill inside. Randall pulled off his hat but was almost reluctant to go inside the café. He loved the tranquility of this time of day. The old wood and glass door of the café rattled loudly as the sheriff entered the florescent-lit diner.

The door shut with a bang. Harrison was greeted by the bustling morning sounds of the café, and these noises too made Randall happy to be alive. As much as he loved the calm and solitude of early morning, he also loved the rumbling sleepy talk of men as they slowly accepted the day’s reality of work. The morning sounds of working men, the dawn scent of nature, and the breakfast aromas in the café, all joined to assure the sheriff that all was as it should be in God’s world.

Mornin’ George, said Sheriff Harrison.

Sheriff George Martinez looked up from his breakfast; eggs, hash browns, and sausage, smothered in salsa; and gestured at the empty space in the booth.

Randall, answered George.

This problem with mutilated cattle and lost livestock was not something either sheriff would ordinarily deal with. Such trivial problems were usually delegated to deputies. In rural counties like Socorro and Catron, problems with animals were commonplace. Deputies would be sent out to deal with kids using the neighbor’s heifer for target practice and such, but this case required the personal attention of the two sheriffs for several reasons. The cattle mutilations that had gone on in northern New Mexico for many years were believed by scientists to be the result of an as yet unidentified virus, but in sensational newspaper stories and in local mythology the animals had died at the hands of aliens performing weird other-worldly rituals. The ‘fact’ that strange lights and hovering space ships were supposedly seen in the night skies near where dead animals were found only served to enrich the fabulosity of the rumors.

UFO sightings were not uncommon in Socorro and Catron counties. Most sightings were explained away as aircraft or test activities at the nearby White Sands Missile Range, but a few ‘alien visits’ had not yielded to easy dismissal and had evolved into local legend. It was a Socorro County Deputy, in fact, who had made one of the most famous UFO sightings back in 1964. He had gone to investigate a strange light near a dynamite storage shack when he observed small beings around a strange silvery vehicle. He had been nearly knocked to the ground by the mysterious craft when it rose into the air and quickly vanished. His story had never been debunked nor explained. The military had declined to comment, one way or the other, about the deputy’s report. The deputy was known to be a sober and honest man, and for this reason his story had been accepted as fact by most local residents.

The local belief in flying saucers was one of the reasons Randall Harrison and George Martinez felt the need to handle the current cattle mutilation problem personally. They wanted to avoid the potential publicity such stories would bring to their communities. Tourist business aside, no good could come from it.

Another reason was that the mutilations would require a cooperative effort between the Socorro and Catron County sheriff’s departments, and unfortunately such cooperation could not be taken for granted. Randall Harrison and George Martinez got along fairly well, but the same could not be said for their employees.

Martinez selected his deputies without interference from the county personnel office so long as the paperwork was immaculate. He sometimes received urging from prominent citizens to hire this friend or that relative, but everyone in Socorro knew better than to try to dictate to Sheriff Martinez. The majority of his deputies were Hispanic, but George’s girlfriend, Mary Lou Farmer, had convinced him to hire at least one Anglo officer. He hired Deputy Pike, who became his most trusted subordinate.

George had not been hard to convince. He had already learned something about the nuances of racial politics. A few years earlier he had hired a Navajo man to serve as liaison officer to the Alamo Indian Reservation, in order to get his hands on some federal money. It was what the feds had called a demonstration project, but when the funding came to an end George had kept the man on. To his pleasure, George had discovered that having the Navajo man on the force brought him cooperation in the Indian community that he had not enjoyed previously. More importantly the move had guaranteed him a majority of reservation votes every election year. It was Sheriff Martinez’s wife, Consuelo, who had convinced him to begin hiring women police officers. She was the only person alive who could insist that George do anything.

It wasn’t exactly coincidence then that, long before any notions of political correctness had evolved in Socorro County, George’s department more closely resembled the demographics of his community than any other government entity in the state. George’s little department had in fact gained some notoriety as a showcase agency when the rest of New Mexico government had become the target of federal investigations. The social experts from the urban East had somehow convinced themselves that discriminatory hiring practices were rampant in the rural Southwest.

Federal concerns aside, however, Sheriff Randall Harrison’s department was very different from George Martinez’s. Catron County continued to be one of the most remote in the United States. It was separated from the rest of the world by both time and space, and because of this isolation, power in the county was entrenched and absolute. Sheriff Randall Harrison came from an old and prominent family, and three years ago his re-election to a second term was never in doubt. His family, while not wealthy, was well-to-do, and was not the only family possessed of power in the county.

County government was the private domain of only a few wealthy families, and the hiring of county personnel moved forward only with their approval. Because of this, Sheriff Harrison had little control over who became deputies. His department was all white and all male. Most of the deputies in Randall Harrison’s department accepted his authority as Sheriff, but a few gave him little or no recognition. These same few did little to earn their pay. He actually considered it a blessing that these gifts of nepotism rarely showed up to work. Only about half of his deputies could be counted on to do actual work. He felt lucky that at least some of them were good at police work and were dedicated to their jobs.

The Socorro county sheriff’s department and the Catron county sheriff’s department were very different from one another, and it was because of these differences that the two sheriffs felt they needed to handle this investigation of the cattle mutilations personally. Sheriff Randall Harrison had, as a child, learned to believe in the goodness and equality of all people, and he prayed daily for greater insight. Sheriff George Martinez, for his part, did not abide racist attitudes among his deputies and kept his own fairly well under control, except when they were directly aroused by some drunken redneck, or a similar aggravation. The two men could work together amiably even if their deputies would not.

Martinez watched silently as Harrison ordered wheat cakes for breakfast and said nothing as he ate them with only minimal adornments of butter and syrup. Randall had once chided George about the cholesterol content of his usual bacon-and-eggs breakfast and the discussion had almost become heated. Since then, by mutual agreement, each man ignored the dietary habits of the other.

Let’s take your car, said Randall as he finished up his breakfast. Sheriff Martinez had already asked the waitress to fill his thermos with coffee. I’ve had a few reports of dead cattle down by the Johnson place.

Okay by me, said Martinez. The Johnson place was just a few miles inside the Catron county line. The family ranch was only about forty miles away, but more than thirty miles of that distance would take them through Socorro County. It made sense for George to drive. He knew that it would take them at least an hour and a half to get to the Johnson place. Most of the roads they would be using were unpaved, and were infrequently maintained.

As the two men left the café, each noted that the cool of early morning was already giving way to the enveloping heat of August. Both readied themselves for a long, hot day, a day of sweat and road dust.

Martinez pulled his squad car out of the café gravel and up onto the sweltering black asphalt of U. S. Highway 60. The narrow strip of highway seemed insignificant as it stretched out across empty valleys and into endless piñon covered hills. The road hardly seemed to deserve the title of highway. George headed east from Datil, and soon the men were gazing out across the sprawling body of the Very Large Array radio telescope. The VLA made its home on the floor of a magnificent expanse called the Plains of San Agustin. The giant radio dish towers were spread across the plain in a great pattern too vast to be discerned. To the two peace officers the array looked to be at once out of place and perfectly placed. The few ranch houses and corrals that also dotted the vast expanse of plains looked today much as they had a hundred-fifty years earlier, and the high tech array seemed incongruous next to them. At home in the timeless plains, the great towers looked as if they could live nowhere else in the world.

They still tryin’ to send messages into outer space with those things, said George, as they drove past the array.

No, said Randall. I don’t think they actually ever sent messages. They were using the radio dishes to listen for possible radio messages from space, but I think their money for that ran out or it’s about to run out. Anyway, I think the array’s being used for astronomy only these days.

Suits me, said George. I don’t believe in spacemen, and I don’t see using tax money to look for them.

So you’re positive that these cattle disappearances and mutilations have nothing to do with UFOs, said Randall. There’s a lot of folks in your county, and in mine too, who are convinced we’re dealing with rustlers from outer space.

I don’t care what people believe, said George. Whatever’s killin’ the cattle’s not from outer space. Don’t tell me you believe in flying saucers.

I just try to keep an open mind, said Randall. As he was speaking, George turned the squad car south on a smaller road that took them along the eastern perimeter of the VLA facility. One of the best documented UFO sightings was made by a Socorro police officer, you know.

Yeah, I know, said George. I know what old Lonnie Zamora says he saw and I know him, he’s no liar, but that don’t convince me of nothin’. Socorro County’s just outside several secret military facilities, and we were in the middle of the cold war when Lonnie saw whatever it was. I’ll just bet it was some kind of test plane and we’ll hear all about it when everything’s declassified. It was probably some kind of first-generation stealth jet or one of those vertical takeoff planes like the English built.

You’re probably right, said Randall. I just wonder sometimes, you know, about what might be out there.

George didn’t respond. He just scowled and drove as if he had to concentrate on the familiar road. For some time the men travelled in silence. Because of the growing heat of the day, they rode with the car windows open in spite of the road dust. The air conditioning in George’s squad car hadn’t worked for a couple of years. He could have had it repaired, but the county paperwork seemed to be too much trouble and the car would have had to be out of service longer than George could put up with. Heat he could tolerate.

So what do you think is cutting up the cattle? asked Randall after a while. They