Martin “Bugs” Garcia laid a practiced hand on the top strand of barbed wire, tightened his grip, and vaulted over the fence. The posts were aged juniper, and the rusty wire creaked and sagged under his weight. But he was young and agile and had no trouble. The trouble, if any, would be coming from town and not from that old fence. He’d said some foolish things back there, in front of a bunch of strangers, and he knew right away it had been a mistake. He’d left town in a hurry, watching the whole way in his rear-view mirror. Nobody seemed to be following, but still he was scared. Not scared enough to quit, but scared enough to be careful.
Martin looked for signs he was being tailed, but there were no dust trails except the single gray ribbon that had just finished billowing out from behind his own vehicle. All he heard was the sound of wind in the grass and the thin buzz of a grasshopper sparrow singing somewhere out in the sagebrush. Nothing moved except a lone paint horse grazing a hundred yards off to the north. It was late afternoon, warm and cloudless. He cast a long shadow as he walked out onto the rolling prairie that stretched before him to the eastern horizon.
The steppes of eastern Colorado could be a brutal place. Winter swept down from the Arctic, freezing the ground and driving the snow sideways into the sage plants, where it accumulated in sparse patches that lingered for months. Summer was only a little better, when drought and relentless sun scorched the land and dried the grasses into brittle sticks. But in between there was spring, and this year it had been a good one, with plenty of rain. The sage was in silver bloom, and the bluestem grass grew up to his belt.
Because Martin was Hispanic, many people assumed his nickname was gang-related and they treated him as such. They were way off the mark, but sometimes his life had been hard. He knew first-hand that the dry country east of the Rockies could be harsh and unforgiving, and it seemed to him that some of the people who lived there took on the character of the land. But still, his heart soared in anticipation of what he expected to find on this particular afternoon, on the other side of that old fence.
* * *
Two days later, about the same time that vultures were making a gruesome discovery out on the prairie, Sheriff Percy Conway was at his desk on the second floor of the Bridger County Courthouse. He was contemplating an accumulation of untended paperwork. His wife Thelma, who managed the office, had been nagging him about it for more than a week. Even so, he just couldn’t get started. He tipped back in his chair, propped his boots up on the desk, and looked past them down at the bedraggled and dying main street of Hercules, Colorado. Half the buildings were empty, having succumbed to the lure of big box stores in places like Denver and Fort Collins. Hercules was the county seat and his hometown, but not much else. Bridger County itself was large but sparsely populated. The oil boom going on north and west of the South Platte River had not yet impacted the area for which he was responsible. Crime was relatively infrequent, which was the reason the commissioners had provided him with only two deputies. Most of the time it was adequate.
The Sheriff heard the telephone ring in the outer office, and Thelma answered. He could not make out what she was saying, but in a little while she came to his door. “Sorry to interrupt your paperwork, but there’s a caller wants to speak with you. I think you might want to take it.”
He got the jab about his work habits, but decided to ignore it.
“Who and what about?”
“Says his name’s Otto Schwalbe.” Thelma consulted her notepad. “He’s a professor over at the University of Northern Colorado, in Greeley. It’s about a missing student.”
Percy picked up the phone. “Sheriff Conway speaking. How can I help you?”
“Yes, uh, thanks. This is Otto Schwalbe, and I teach over at UNC? And look, this may be nothing, but a student of mine, Martin Garcia, seems to have disappeared. I think he might have been working out in your area over the weekend, and I wondered if maybe you knew something. Like maybe there’s been an accident?”
“We haven’t had any accidents reported around here. Perhaps you could give me a bit more information?”
“Sure. Martin is working on his Master’s degree. He didn’t come to my lecture yesterday morning, which was unusual enough. But it wasn’t until the afternoon that I really got concerned, because he was supposed to teach the lab and he didn’t show up, and that’s just not like him. I called his house, and his roommate said he hadn’t seen him since Friday. There was no answer on his cell.”
“What about family?”
“He’s from Pueblo. I called his parents, but they said they hadn’t heard from him in over a week.”
The Sheriff wasn’t particularly alarmed. There could be all sorts of explanations. But still, the man sounded worried. “Can you give me a description?”
“He’s about five foot seven, medium build, in good shape physically, with short dark hair. And he drives a black Mini Cooper, fairly new I think.”
The Sheriff took some notes. “Do you by any chance know the plate number?”
“No. Sorry.”
“Have you contacted the Greeley police?”
“Oh sure, I already did that. Turned in a missing persons report, but I haven’t heard anything back. They acted like it was no big deal.”
Percy heard the frustration in the man’s voice. “People choose to go off the radar for all sorts of reasons, Professor. He’ll probably turn up in a day or two. What is it exactly that Mr. Garcia was doing out here?”
The professor hesitated. “Well, uh, here’s the thing. Martin is doing field research on a species of moth called the prairie sphinx, one of the rarest in North America. The scientific name is Euproserpinus wiesti. Nobody knows much about it, except that it has to lays its eggs on a plant called the evening primrose. The caterpillars can’t eat anything else. The reason he’s working out in your area is that there’s lots of these flowers in the sage country south of the Platte River.”
“Is this moth some kind of endangered species?” The Sheriff was all too familiar with how some of the locals felt about such things.
“The feds are dragging their feet as usual, so not yet. But Martin has discovered something that may leave them no choice. You see, known specimens of the prairie sphinx—and there’s only a handful—they all have pale yellow hindwings. Martin has found some in your area with iridescent golden wings. So, we could be dealing with a unique local population that almost certainly would qualify as endangered.”
“Uh-oh.” The Sheriff immediately regretted the slip and tried to cover it up by asking the professor how to spell Euproserpinus wiesti, though he couldn’t imagine why that would turn out to be important.
Schwalbe gave him the spelling. “I know just what you’re thinking. And I must say I tried to discourage Martin from pursuing this particular project. You know, a young Hispanic boy, out there by himself and all that. But I’ve got to tell you there’s been some amazing support for his work.”
“What kind of support?”
“Well, Martin has been interested in butterflies and moths since junior high school, and he’s an active member of the Colorado Lepidopterist Club. He gave a talk last month at their meeting down in Denver, about his discovery of the moths with the golden wings. I guess the place pretty much went crazy. A couple of days later their president, Helen Brantley, whom I’ve known for many years, she came up to Greeley, right into my office, and wrote a personal check for $20,000 to support the work. Now, all of a sudden, the university brass is excited, because they like any project that brings in outside money. Martin has become something of a campus celebrity.”
Percy Conway was dumbfounded anybody would pay that much money for somebody to study a moth, but he decided to change the subject. “Do you know specifically where Mr. Garcia might have been working?”
“No, sorry. I did go out in the field with him a couple of times last year. At first we tried getting permission from some of the local ranchers, but we didn’t have any luck. Then we got a map showing the locations of state land sections where anybody can go as long as it’s next to a public road. I think he’s been working in those areas.”
“Do you recall the names of any of the ranchers you talked to?”
“No, I’m afraid not. I do remember that two of them had ranches right next to each other. The men looked alike, and I wondered at the time if they might be twins.”
Sheriff Conway was almost certain that would have been the Felger brothers, Otis and Elvis. “Is there anything else you think I should know?”
“No, I guess not.”
“Well, okay. I’ll make some inquiries and have my deputies watch for his vehicle. We’ll let you know if we find anything.”
Conway hung up the phone and walked through to the outer office.
Thelma looked up from her desk. “That sounded interesting.”
“Maybe. I’d like you to do a couple of things. First, check with DMV and see if you can find the plate number for a late model black Mini Cooper registered to a Martin Garcia, probably with either a Greeley or a Pueblo address. Then get a hold of Barney and George and ask them to keep an eye out when they’re on patrol.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going on break.”
Thelma raised an eyebrow. “Must be the stress from all that paperwork.”
The Bridger Café was the only place left to eat in Hercules, and it was a popular spot for farmers and ranchers to stop in for coffee and gossip. Lots of the regulars were in their usual places when Percy Conway came in. He nodded to the owner, Mavis Perkins, placed his standard order for black coffee and one cake donut, then made his way toward the back of the restaurant. Mavis, short and wide with a pleasant round face, acknowledged his order with a simple nod. The Sheriff wedged his 63 year-old six foot frame into the only space left in a corner booth already occupied by four local ranchers: Bill Travis, Lamont Jennings, and the Felger twins.
“What’s new in the mom and pop cop shop?” Lamont Jennings asked.
Percy was getting tired of this. Two years ago a Denver TV station had aired a story about the tiny Bridger County Sheriff’s Department. The reporter had described it as a “Mom and Pop Operation,” because exactly half the personnel were a husband and wife team.
The Sheriff sipped his coffee, had a bite of donut, and listened for a while to the usual rancher talk: the price of beef (“lousy”), the condition of the range (surprisingly good, “but it ain’t gonna last”), and the corruption of government at all levels (which he stayed out of).
“Any of you boys seen a black Mini Cooper out your way? Or a young man named Martin Garcia who might have been driving it?”
It got real quiet in the Bridger Café. The Sheriff had more of his donut, and waited. Eventually the conversations around the room started up again. Somewhere against the general background noise he picked up the word “Mex.”
“What in hell’s a Mini Cooper?” asked Lamont Jennings. The other ranchers just shrugged.
The Sheriff finished his coffee, then walked up to the cash register and laid his money on the counter. He was on his way out the door when Mavis Perkins called him back.
“Wait a minute, Percy, let me get your receipt.”
In all the years he’d patronized her place, never once had Mavis Perkins offered to give him a receipt. But he caught her look, and accepted a slip of paper when she handed it to him. He read the note on his way back to the office: “Come back and see me after everybody’s left.”
Thunderheads were building to the west, and a stiff wind bent the scraggly Chinese elms that lined Main Street. Percy felt a chill, even though it was the middle of June.
* * *
Deputy George Tanaka was on patrol when he got a call from Thelma to be on the lookout for a 2018 black Mini Cooper, Colorado tag 7KL 44N. Shortly after that he spotted a bunch of vultures circling above a low hill. Normally he wouldn’t have given it a second thought, but he was pretty sure the land belonged to one of the Felger brothers, and they were notoriously casual about keeping track of their livestock. It was possible the vultures had found a dead or dying cow, so he decided to have a look.
* * *
Meanwhile, Sheriff Conway was back at the empty lunch counter talking to Mavis Perkins. “Got your note. You know something about this guy Martin Garcia?”
Mavis wiped her hands on a dishtowel and she eased her substantial frame down onto the stool next to his. “Maybe. At least he said his name was Martin. He’s been coming in for a milkshake every Saturday or Sunday, sometimes both, for the last month or so.”
“Has there been a problem?”
“The kid talks too much for his own good.”
“How do you mean?”
Mavis hesitated. “Look, I’m not real comfortable with this. I depend on regular customers for most of my business, and mostly they’re my friends, too.”
“What is it? What happened in here?”
“Two things. First, there’s a new girl working for me on weekends. Name’s Trisha Tanner. She’s a sophomore over at Greeley, home for the summer. Anyhow, she tends to hang around Martin’s table when he’s in here, and a couple times I saw them together afterwards, out by his car.”
“Why is that a problem?”
“I don’t suppose it would be, except that he’s—well, you know, Mexican—and she isn’t. Now I’ve got no problem with that personally. But Trisha has a boyfriend named Art somebody-or-other. He saw Martin and Trisha together in here one day, and he made a remark about wetbacks.”
“Huh. What else? You said there were two things.”
“The other is the part about how he talks too much.”
“About what?”
“About what he’s doing around here. About some moth. Like it’s super rare, I guess, but now he’s found it and he’s really excited.”
“Who besides you heard him talk about this?”
“Just about everybody, I suppose.”
“Including some of the ranchers?”
“Yep. And the other day after he left it got sort of ugly in here.”
“Ugly how?”
“There was all this talk about how things were bad enough in the cattle business—the usual bellyaching—and now this kid comes along and finds some endangered bug and pretty soon the state and the feds will be all over us. You know how those boys can get.”
Sheriff Conway definitely knew how those boys could get. He liked most of the local ranchers. They lead honest and hard lives, but in his opinion they were overly prone to conjuring up conspiracies that mostly didn’t exist.
* * *
The body was lying face-up in a shallow depression that probably was an old buffalo wallow. Vultures circled overhead, waiting for the corpse to bloat and burst. Deputy Tanaka extracted a wallet from the man’s left hip pocket, and examined its contents. The driver’s license was for a Martin Garcia. He called headquarters.
It took Percy about 30 minutes to get there. He brought along the department’s crime scene kit plus Doc Blevins, the long-time Hercules family physician who doubled as county coroner and medical examiner. Doc knelt down next to the body, examined it, and took photographs. The dead man’s brown eyes stared blankly up at the wide blue sky. Blevins rolled the body over. There was a large bloody indentation on the back of the skull. It matched a jagged boulder lying next to the body.
Doc Blevins probed the wound as the Sheriff bent over the corpse.
“Was that enough to cause death?” Percy asked.
“Seems likely. And there’s some hair and blood on that rock, which probably was the murder weapon. You should get samples.”
“Any guess as to time of death?”
“Given the state of decay, I would say somewhere between two and four days ago.”
Percy turned to Deputy Tanaka. “What else have we got in the area? Any sign of a Mini Cooper our victim was supposed to have been driving?”
“No vehicles around when I got here. The rain last night didn’t help any, but there’s something you need to see in addition to a bunch of washed-out footprints.”
The deputy led them to a spot about 20 yards west of the body, behind a clump of sage. It was an empty backpack, along with a variety of objects scattered around in the dirt. “Looks like scientific equipment doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, but I’m no expert. Hey Doc, you majored in biology, right? Come take a look over here and tell me what you think.”
After a brief inspection, the doctor gave his opinion. “Looks like the sort of stuff that an insect collector would take in the field. There’s a butterfly net, a killing jar, forceps, vials, a fancy camera with a big lens, and a voice-activated recorder.”
“Okay, good. That fits what the victim supposedly was doing out here. George, I want you to stay here with Doc. Get photos of everything, including any footprints. Label and bag all this stuff, and be careful because we’ll want to test all of it for fingerprints. Then call for an ambulance. Have Thelma contact the next of kin so they can make a positive ID. I think the professor knows how to reach the boy’s family. God, this is going to be awful for them.”
“Where will you be during all this?” The deputy realized he might have stepped over a line. “I mean, in case we need to get hold of you.”
“I’m going to pay a visit to the Felger brothers.”
* * *
Elvis Felger, a lifelong bachelor, was sitting on his front porch when Percy drove into the ranch compound. The old man was lean and leather-skinned from better than a half-century working outdoors. His two-story clapboard house needed paint. Out in back were corrals, a barn, a couple of smaller sheds, and a creaking windmill that was pumping a trickle of water into a rusted stock tank.
The Sheriff got out of his cruiser and said hello.
“Howdy, Sheriff. What’s up? Want some coffee?”
“Not this time, thanks, but I do have a problem we need to discuss.”
“What’s that?”
“My deputy found a body this morning. A young man. It’s on your land.”
Elvis Felger slowly put down his coffee cup. “Who?”
“Looks like it’s that Martin Garcia I was telling you about this morning.”
The rancher shrugged. “Don’t know anything about it.”
“So you have no idea what he might have been doing on your ranch?”
“Didn’t say that. I expect he was out there looking for some god-dam moth. And he shouldn’t have been on my property, because him and an older guy came around here last year asking permission and I didn’t give it. Neither did Otis. Guess I forgot to mention that back at the café. Sorry.”
“Me too. Anyway, I think he might have been on one of your state leases, which means he had a right to be there.”
“That could be, but it still pisses me off.”
“Are you sure you don’t know anything about this?”
“That’s what I just said.”
It was then that Percy noticed some narrow tire tracks leading through the yard and ending at the barn door. “You mind if I take a look around?”
Elvis Felger shifted in his chair. “Yeah, I guess I do mind. Makes it seem like you don’t trust me or something.”
“I think I’ve gotta look anyway.” Conway was half way to the barn when the rancher stopped him.
“Okay, okay, just hold on a minute. Now I didn’t have anything to do with that boy dying, I swear. Hell, I had no idea he was even out there. That little car was along side the road, sat there for two days. Finally I looked inside. Found the keys under the floor mat. So I just took it. If somebody’d showed up I would have given it back to ‘em.”
“That doesn’t quite work, Elvis. There must have been registration papers in the glove box, so it’s not like you couldn’t have done anything. I think we need to go back to town.”
* * *
By the next morning Elvis Felger had been arraigned on a charge of auto theft, but the judge released him on his own recognizance because there was no evidence linking him directly to the body of Martin Garcia. The Sheriff thought it was a weak excuse, and said so. Unfortunately, there was nothing useful on either the camera or the voice recorder found at the scene. The recorder was blank, and the only images on the camera were two shots of Trisha Tanner standing next to Martin’s Mini Cooper, with the café in the background. They’d sent photos of the fingerprints to a lab in Denver for analysis, but so far the only match was for the victim.
Trisha told the Sheriff that she and her boyfriend Art Gunderson, who lived over in Sterling, were students together at UNC. She acknowledged that he was a hothead, but swore there was no way he would ever kill anybody. She was sorry to learn that Martin Garcia was dead, but they hadn’t really known each other all that well except that he’d been her teacher in a biology lab.
The Sheriff decided to send Deputy Barney Swold over to Sterling to find Gunderson and get his story. Thelma had accepted the grim task of calling the parents of the deceased. They were shocked and devastated, and they couldn’t think of anyone with a motive to kill their son.
Percy and Thelma were in the office when George Tanaka came in off patrol. She was curious. “So it looks like either Elvis or this Art guy might have killed that young man?”
The Sheriff nodded. “Assuming it wasn’t an accident. We still don’t have Doc’s report on that. But both had a possible motive, so we need to keep after them. Barney is looking at Art Gunderson. George, you take Elvis Felger. See what you can find out about where he was this past weekend. Might as well include Otis too.”
Thelma wanted to know more. “What are you going to do, Percy?”
“There’s some things I’ve been checking out on-line. Once that’s finished I’m gonna drive over to Greeley for an in-person chat with this Professor Schwalbe. I think maybe there’s something he’s not telling us.”
* * *
Percy Conway found Otto Schwalbe in his office on the second floor of the biology building. The place was filled with so much clutter that Schwalbe had to clear a stack of papers off a chair just so the Sheriff could have a place to sit. The man was tall and thin, with a narrow face and thick glasses. He seemed incredulous. “My god, I just can’t believe this. Are you sure it was murder?”
“No, we’re not, but it seems likely.”
“Any ideas who might have done it?”
“We have some possible leads, but I’m not at liberty to discuss those. If you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you a few more questions about Mr. Garcia’s project.”
“Of course. Anything I can do to help.”
“First of all, you mentioned that this moth might be rare, and that it’s gold-colored, right?”
“Only the hindwings. Like all Lepidoptera, sphinx moths have two pairs of wings. The upper ones usually are fairly drab. When the moth is at rest those are the only ones you can see, because the hindwings are folded underneath. It’s when the moth is flying that the hindwings are exposed. Martin tells me they practically glow if the sun is right.” The professor caught himself and sighed. “Told me, that is.”
To the Sheriff, all of this was pretty much beside the point. “What I want to know, would a specimen of this moth be valuable to anybody?”
“If it represents a unique genotype, it would be extremely valuable from a scientific viewpoint.”
“But would it have monetary value? I mean, if somebody got a hold of one, could they sell it?”
“Oh, indeed. There are collectors who would pay dearly to have one.”
“How much?”
The professor thought about that. “Well, for an ordinary specimen of Euproserpinus wiesti, I suppose it might be worth several hundred dollars, depending on the condition. But for one of Martin’s gold-winged variety, it’s hard to say. Certainly a whole lot more.”
“Like how much more?”
“Probably in the thousands. Some of these collectors are real fanatics. We call it the possession obsession. They’re driven to have at least one of every known variety. And to have something nobody else has—well, that would be the ultimate.”
“Do you think Martin Garcia might have been selling some of these moths?”
The professor did not hesitate. “Lord, no. You don’t understand. He wouldn’t even collect one. I don’t have one. I’ve never even seen one, just the photographs he’s taken. Martin was a passionate conservationist. I once explained to him that should we decide to give his moth a new scientific name, we would need a specimen for verification, to be housed in a museum someplace as a sort of official reference. But he still wouldn’t budge. He said either people could accept his photos as evidence of the moth’s existence, or they could just forget about it.”
It was on the drive home that the Sheriff thought maybe he’d figured something out.
* * *
The next morning Percy Conway gathered everybody together in the office. Doc Blevins’ autopsy report had come in. The conclusion was homicide.
“Okay, Barney and George, there’s been a change of plans. Beginning today, I want you to spend as much time as possible out at the crime scene, especially in late afternoon and early evening. Take turns. But only go when somebody can drop you off, so there won’t be a vehicle around. And stay low when you’re out there.”
George Tanaka had been listening carefully, and he caught a key detail of the Sheriff’s orders the others might have missed. “Why do you especially want us out there in the afternoon and evening?”
“Oh, just a hunch.”
“Huh,” said Thelma, who over the years had learned a great deal about his so-called hunches.
* * *
Two days later, George Tanaka spotted a middle-aged woman walking across the prairie. It was late afternoon, and she was less than fifty yards from the place where they had found Martin Garcia’s body. She was carrying a butterfly net. The deputy hunkered down behind a grassy knoll to keep out of sight, and called the Sheriff. “What do you want me to do?”
“Hold her ‘til I get there.”
Mrs. Helen Brantley, President of the Colorado Lepidopterist Club, was outraged that anyone would accuse her of murder. She insisted she was just out on a collecting trip. It was a complete coincidence that she happened to be anywhere near the place where Martin Garcia had died. The Sheriff was skeptical and said so, at which point Mrs. Brantley stopped talking.
* * *
It was an expensive trial. Helen Brantley was wealthy and moved in the elite social circles of Denver. She assembled a high profile and very skilled legal defense team. But there was a critical piece of forensic evidence. The insect killing jar found at the crime scene had Brantley’s fingerprints all over it, but not one from Martin Garcia. This caused the defense to claim the whole thing had been an accident, that Mrs. Brantley and Martin Garcia had met by chance and fought over a moth he had captured and was about to release. She claimed that the boy had fallen during their ensuing struggle for possession of the moth, and hit his head on a rock. She panicked and ran. Doc Blevins testified that more force than a simple fall probably would have been necessary to create such a deep and deadly wound. In the end, the jury didn’t buy it, and convicted Helen Brantley only of criminally negligent homicide. Percy Conway thought it was a bit light.
* * *
On a hot afternoon in late August, Thelma and the Sheriff were in the office having iced tea. The trial had been over for three days.
“How did you know it was her?”
“I didn’t know for sure until George caught her out there.”
“I know, but what made you even suspect?”
“Partly it was a process of elimination. Elvis Felger and Art Gunderson may have had reason to feel threatened by Garcia, but somehow I just couldn’t see their anger rising to the point of murder.”
“But what led you to the Brantley woman?”
“It started when I got on the computer and began to do some research on the prairie sphinx, and more generally on the unscrupulous practices of some amateur collectors of butterflies and moths. It’s amazing what some people are willing to do or pay to get their hands on something rare.”
“How much would one of those sphinx moths have been worth?”
“I suppose close to a thousand dollars for one of the ordinary kind. But that golden-winged variety that Martin Garcia discovered? Dr. Schwalbe suggested it could be worth ten, maybe twenty times that much.”
“But I thought this Brantley woman was wealthy. Why would she need to sell somebody a moth?”
“Oh, this wasn’t about making money. It was about having something nobody else had. It’s called the possession obsession, and lots of fanatic collectors are afflicted with it.”
“You mean like those people that can’t stop going to garage sales even when they’ve run out of places to put their stuff?”
The Sheriff laughed. “I guess so, except that sort of thing usually doesn’t lead to murder.”
Thelma clearly wasn’t satisfied. “But couldn’t Mrs. Brantley just have bought one of those moths from Martin? Why did she have to kill him?”
“Ah, now that is what first tipped me off. I learned from Professor Schwalbe that Martin Garcia wouldn’t collect any of the moths. It was then that something about the crime scene started to bother me.”
“What was it?”
“The killing jar.”
“What is that?”
“It’s a simple glass jar, but with some sort of volatile poison infused into plaster on the bottom. You put the insect in, and it dies. There is no way Garcia would have had one with him, since he had no intention of ever collecting one of the moths. Then, of course, after the arrest we were able to match the fingerprints on the jar to the Brantley woman.”
Thelma still wasn’t satisfied. “Okay, so she killed Garcia and took his moths. But why didn’t she take the killing jar with her, and why was she back out there the afternoon George found her?”
“Martin didn’t have any of the moths for her to take, except the one he was handling when Mrs. Brantley found him, and apparently it got away while they were fighting. His fatal mistake was showing photos during his talk in Denver. Brantley had seen the golden wings, and she became obsessed with adding one to her collection. She found out what kind of a car he drove, and she followed him out there. Then, even after he died, and she must have known the risks, she couldn’t help going back to the area in hopes of finding one of the moths on her own. I expect she forgot the killing jar in her original state of panic.”
“Sort of adds a new twist to the old saying about a killer returning to the scene of the crime. And you sent George out there in the afternoon. Why?”
“That was easy. Turns out the prairie sphinx flies any time, but the plant they depend on, the evening primrose? It blooms at night, so I thought the odds would be better that a knowledgeable collector would go out late in the day.”
“It’s tragic that Martin Garcia had to die just because of a moth. From what I can tell he must have been an extraordinary young man.”
“I think he was.” The Sheriff rummaged around on his desk until he found the single sheet of paper he was looking for. “It may be some consolation to his family that Dr. Schwalbe plans to name his discovery the Golden Sphinx, with the scientific name Euproserpinus garciae.”
“That’s nice.”
“Yeah, but there’s a problem. Apparently the professor can’t give it a name until there’s at least one specimen to put in a museum somewhere, as official documentation that the moth even exists.”
Thelma watched as the Sheriff stood up, put on his hat, and headed for the door.
“You going over to the café?”
“No, I think maybe I’ll take a little drive. Want to come along?”
“I’d like that, but somebody’s gotta stay here and run the department while you’re wandering around out on the prairie with a butterfly net. And I hope nobody local sees you. Something like that could ruin your reputation as a tough guy.”
“Who said I was going out on the prairie?”
Thelma said “huh,” and turned back to her paperwork so he wouldn’t catch her smile.
__________________________
Authors’ Bios: Carl and Jane Bock are retired professors of biology at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Carl is a conservation biologist, while Jane is a botanist specializing in the use of plant materials in solving criminal cases. They have published four full-length mystery novels, two set in the grasslands of southern Arizona and two in the Florida Keys. Since retirement, they have been spending their time between Colorado, Arizona, and Florida, writing, fishing (Carl) and fighting crime (Jane). Please visit them at carlandjanebock.com
