tidy but not beautiful pen that enclosed maybe a quarter of an acre. The side of the fence nearest to the driveway had been cut open.
There were four sheriff’s vehicles parked next to a miniature-goat-sized barn that was painted blue with white trim. Five deputies stood near their cars and watched me drive in. About twenty yards from the deputies was a small and well-kept house with a big, friendly wraparound porch. There were four people on the porch: a woman, a child, a man, and a giant-sized man who looked as though he ate locomotives for lunch.
I parked in between the house and the sheriff’s cars.
“Face-off,” said Mary Jo before she opened her door and got out.
She was right. It was impossible to miss the implied hostility in the empty space between the deputies and the people on the porch. For that matter, there was some hostility between the deputies, too.
“First the sheriff’s office, then the civilians,” I murmured to Mary Jo.
I hung back and let her take the lead with the law enforcement. One of the deputies had misstepped with the civilians, I thought, watching the aggressive stances. He’d gotten some blowback and they were split three to two. I was betting, from his clenched shoulders, that the man with the runner’s build was the culprit. But it might be his stocky buddy. He’d been reprimanded and it had stuck because he was hanging back and letting the others talk.
Body language shouts louder than words in most cases.
I half listened to what they had to say, because most of it was just a repeat of the information I’d gotten on the initial phone call. Once I had the deputies analyzed, I studied the people waiting on the porch without looking directly at them.
Family and family friend, I thought—the giant was noticeably not Hispanic.
The farm belonged to Arnoldo Salas; the goats had belonged to his ten-year-old son. Arnoldo wasn’t hard to pick out.
An extremely fit man in his midforties, he stood in the center of the porch, one hand on the shoulder of a teary-eyed boy while his other arm was wrapped around a woman who looked to be his wife, who wasn’t in much better condition than the child. He watched me with hostility.
Maybe he didn’t like werewolves.
Mary Jo’s voice broke into my concentration. “Why in the world would someone make zombie goats?”
“I don’t know,” I told her. “Let’s see what we can find out.”
We headed toward the house, the deputies trailing after us.
According to what I’d been told, the Salas parents spoke only a little English. The giant—who looked even more hard-bitten up close, an impression not detracted from by the Marine tattoos he wore—stepped forward.
“Mr. Salas did not call the werewolves in,” he said.
I weighed a dozen responses, glad I had Mary Jo with me and not Ben. I could count on Mary Jo to let me take point.
“There are zombie goats running around,” I said. “We can deal with them without getting hurt. It would help to know as much as possible.”
“They were my goats,” said the boy in a soggy voice. “I milk them and breed them for money to pay for college.”
The Marine reached back and rubbed the boy’s head.
“Mercy is one of the good guys,” the boy said. “She killed the troll on the Cable Bridge. I saw it on TV.”
Not me, but the pack.
The man looked at Salas. The boy said something in Spanish.
Salas met my gaze and held it. Then his wife patted his arm and said something to the Marine.
He nodded respectfully to her, and when he turned back to me he dropped most of the hostility. “They were his idea. His pets. Some”—he changed the word he was going to use at the last moment—“jerk killed them all. He found them at feeding time, about seven at night last night.”
“It took the sheriff’s office this long to get here?” I asked.
He glanced around at the uniformed people behind me and hesitated. Finally, he said, “Arnoldo thought they would wait until morning, ma’am. They thought they would ask their neighbors if anyone saw anything.”
“The police have important things to do,” said the boy. “Maybe dead goats, even twenty of them, would not be important.”
The hostile deputy snorted, the one with the runner’s build. “If your parents are both legal, why wouldn’t they call the police?”
And the figurative temperature shot to the ceiling.
“With an attitude like that, I wonder why they didn’t call you in,” the big Marine standing next