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start thinking that I’m funny.
    “I’ve been thinking about a search-and-rescue sheep squad.” I picked some of the dried shit from my pants and flicked it from my fingernails. “The way I figure it, the sheep would work up a damn storm and never raise any hell about working conditions. Might even get rid of some of this leafy spurge.” I looked around at the frosted milky-yellow plants that had been half eaten by the baahing attending witnesses we had corralled at the base of the hill. I had been here for nine hours, and the sun was beginning to scatter the gray blocks that made up the eastern horizon. The crime scene was a slight depression at the middle of a wreath-shaped ridge. “What do you think?”
    T.J. raised an eyebrow from her clipboard. “Cody Allen Pritchard.” She returned the eyebrow to the hunting license and wallet that were clipped to the official forms. “DOB, 8/1/81. Kind of has a ring to it.”
    Cody had looked better. Whoever had dispatched the young man had done so with a smooth and consistent pull-off as center shot. From the back, it looked as though someone had drilled a perfectly round hole between Cody’s shoulder blades; from the front, it looked as though someone had driven a stagecoach through him. The body was lying facedown, all the limbs arranged in a normal fashion, arms at the sides with palms turned to the lemon-colored sky. I was tempted to see if Cody’s lifeline was abnormally short, but his hands had already been bagged. A green John Deere hat with an adjustable strap in the back had been carted off with the unfired Model 94 Winchester 30-30 that had been found at his side. His clothes were in bad shape, even for a person who had had more than ten cc’s of lead pushed through him at approximately twenty-five hundred feet per second. The sheep had done a number on him. The orange vest was torn where they had tried to eat it, the sleeves of his flannel shirt were shredded, and even his work boots looked as though they had been nibbled on. They had slept on him, gleaning the last energies of the late Cody Pritchard as his body cooled. Finally, much to the dissatisfaction of the crime lab people, they had shit on him.
    I gestured to the sheep down the hill. “I’m assuming that you’re going to want to question all the witnesses.”
    T.J. Sherwin had been the director of the Division of Criminal Investigation’s lab unit for seventeen odd years. I had always called her the Little Lady, as opposed to many of the other nicknames that periodically circulated through Wyoming’s law enforcement community: Bitch on Wheels, the Wicked Witch of the West, and Bag Lady. The last referred to the Division of Criminal Investigation’s home away from home, a converted grocery in Cheyenne, commonly tagged as the Store. Hence, DCI lab personnel were routinely called Bag Boys, and criminal investigators were Cashiers.
    When I first met T.J., she had informed me that I was just the kind of dinosaur she was going to make a personal career of eradicating. As the years passed and we worked numerous cases together, I remained a dinosaur, but I was her favorite dinosaur. “So, what do you think?” She had finally lowered the clipboard.
    “He doesn’t look like a deer.” I gave Cody another study.
    “Walt, let’s drop the aw shucks bullshit. This is one of the boys that was involved in that rape case two years ago.” T.J. had held my hand through the Little Bird rape investigation, introducing me to the world of secretors, medical swabs, and gynecological exams.
    “Yeah, well, I’ll follow up on the home front; he wasn’t any angel. We’ll go through the licensees, and, hopefully, find some poor, dumb bastard from Minnesota that got a little trigger happy.”
    “You don’t think it was an accident?”
    I thought about it. “Like I said, he wasn’t an altar boy.”
    “You have a feeling about this?”
    I started to give her the old