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Out on the Missouri prairies, an odd collection of lawmen hunt modern-day cattle thieves.

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He explained to Pope that what he'd learned doing drug busts wasn't going to work in cracking down on cattle thefts. "I'm gonna show you an easier way," Rector told him. Rector favored waiting for thefts to happen, then using CSI-style tactics to lift fingerprints and evidence. He uses theft patterns to anticipate which areas will be hit next and to develop a roster of suspects.

Most herds in Missouri — the country's No. 2 beef producer after Texas — are owned by commuter farmers, leaving the livestock largely unprotected. This spring, the price of cattle has reached near-record highs. Price can fluctuate within a few hundred dollars based on each animal's breeding and health, but a six-to-ten-month old calf might net upward of $700. And farmers have been reluctant to protect their investment with the use of brands or the computer chips used by veterinarians for household pets. Ken Disselhorst, a field representative for the Missouri Cattlemen Association, estimates that only about 10 percent of cattle in the state carry brands and only 2 percent to 5 percent are catalogued by electronic identification tags.

After Pope's failed stakeout, the Cattle Theft Task Force members began funneling tips and incident reports to the Missouri Informational Analysis Center, a post-9/11 operation in Jefferson City that works to identify patterns in criminal operations. The data showed that stolen trucks and trailers were often ditched across county lines, meaning cattle thieves might steal from one county and sell in another. The amount of stolen gear showed that urbanites were getting in on the action — farmers lifting cattle would have had their own tools. They also catalogued detailed descriptions of individual missing animals so they could be identified by sight at auctions. They learned how to read auction house receipts to determine who was selling cattle, where the checks were being sent and where the cattle were going. "It sounds kind of boring, but the best way to catch these people is a paper trail," Nash says.

Prior to the Cattle Theft Task Force, there was no statewide accounting system for cattle thefts. Since January 2006, the team has arrested eight suspects. But authorities are secretive about the details in those cases. "Because these guys are not convicted yet and they are suspects, I can't release any details on those active investigations," says Sgt. Jason Clark, a Missouri State Highway Patrol spokesman. Clark says 300 cattle, worth about $400,000, have been located and returned.

Nash estimates that thieves usually unload their goods within 72 hours, no farther than 100 miles away from where the animals were stolen. Much of the stolen cattle ends up at the state's 123 auction barns. The don't-ask-don't-tell atmosphere of many auction houses opens the market for cattle rustlers.

On a recent Monday afternoon, men in denim, fatigues and Carhartt coats squeeze into four rows of blue bleacher seats and an upper deck cramped with folding chairs inside the Callaway County Livestock Center in Kingdom City. Some chew tobacco and spit it across the concrete floor. Inside the corrugated metal walls, fans circulate stale air that reeks of manure, body odor and astringent. Today, the weekly sale will last 10 hours as 2,100 head switch hands.

The farmers face a small, wire-rimmed arena resembling a boxing ring. Above it, part-owner and auctioneer John Harrison is clad in flannel and a wide-brimmed suede Stetson. At his signal, handlers swing open a large door and two huge black heifers barrel out. The ring men prod and zap the animals with cattle prods to keep them moving. Then the men duck behind metal ladders positioned like barricades as the beasts turn to charge.

Men raise their hands. Harrison counts up the bidding in a monotonous cadence into a microphone. When he shouts "sold," the specifics of the transaction flash on a wood-framed digital scoreboard listing vitals: head count, average weight, total weight, bid price and buyer number. Buyer No. 404 has purchased the two half-ton heifers for $950 a piece.

Behind the scenes, auction operators don't often ask for proof of identification for sellers and buyers. There's little that could help investigators track stolen cattle.

Workers in the chutes say they don't ask too many questions. "If someone pulls up here in the middle of the night with a load of stolen cattle, we have no way of knowing," says 25-year-old Travis Woodworth. He's in charge of corralling sold cattle, which are driven by men on horseback into cages that extend in a giant maze the size behind the main building. Asked if he's been moving stolen cattle, Woodworth chuckles. "Hell," he says, "I wonder that sometimes myself."

When Harrison takes a break from auctioneering, he heads to the house cafeteria of yellow laminated tables and orange plastic chairs. He enters the room as Dale Davis, a heavyset, ruddy, 66-year-old retired farmer from Bellflower is complaining about the state of thievery. Davis wears a mesh cap that advertises his favorite brand of farm product. "It has been worst really the last two years," Davis says. "It happens here. Hell, it don't take no time to unload them." Davis spots Harrison and clams up.

Harrison adds powdered creamer to a Styrofoam cup of iced tea and exits the cafeteria down a wood-paneled hallway. When asked if his barn is handling hot cows, he looks down the hall both ways. "I don't think there is as much of that as there was," he says of cattle rustling. "We pretty much know where they are from. It hasn't happened in a long time."

He pauses, taking a long swig of his tea.

"If we are suspicious, we check into it."

Sixty-eight-year-old Ralph Mika leans against his pickup truck, watching the sun set over his 82-acre farm. The long winter cold has finally snapped on this day in late February, and melting snow streams in wide channels across his muddy pasture. The yard is thick with the smell of wet hay and thawing cow patties.

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