C Box - Blood Trail

“Then why did you leave your friend?”

“He wanted to help. What, did you want to leave Robey up there all by himself while you and Buck Lothar went on your little walkabout?”

“So why did you leave?”

“I told you,” Pope said, his eyes settling on Joe’s forehead. Despite the cold inside the cabin of the plane, tiny beads of sweat had broken out across Pope’s upper lip. “I’ve got an agency to run. I can’t run it and communicate with the governor while I’m out running around in the woods.”

“Something’s not making sense to me here,” Joe said.

Pope squirmed in his seat and his face flushed red. “Wally Conway was one of my oldest and best friends.” Pope’s eyes misted. “I don’t have that many friends anymore.”

The admission startled Joe. Pope had never confided anything personal to him before.

“There’s something I want you to see,” Pope said, digging into the pocket of his coat and producing a small digital camera. He turned it on and an image appeared on the screen. He handed the camera to Joe with a hand that shook. “That’s Frank Urman’s head spiked to the wall of my room.”

Joe cringed and looked away.

“Look at this one,” Pope said, advancing the photo. “You can see the head of the spike he used to pound it into the wood. And here’s a close-up…”

Joe couldn’t bring himself to look.

“Disturbing, isn’t it?” Pope said. “I’m finding it real hard to get that image out of my mind. It’s hard to concentrate and think on my feet. I keep seeing that head on the wall.”

“We’re beginning our descent into Cheyenne,” the pilot drawled over the speaker. “Make sure you’re buckled up.”

Joe returned to his seat chastened. In the last few hours he’d accused his boss of getting two men killed and also tried to strangle him. Maybe, Joe conceded, what Pope said about him was true.

As the plane eased out of the sky and the landing gear clanked and moaned and locked into place, Joe closed his eyes and once again gripped the headrest in front of him as if the harder he squeezed it, the safer he would be.

But he still wondered why Randy Pope had brought Wally Conway into the mountains and left him to die.

CHEYENNE WAS cool and windy and Joe clamped his hat on his head as he followed Pope down the stairs of the plane to the tarmac. A white Yukon with state license plate number one was parked behind the gate next to the general aviation building and he could see two forms inside the smoked glass. Joe recalled that the last white Yukon he’d been assigned from the state ended up a smoking wreck in Yellowstone Park. He doubted they would want him to drive this one.

Whoever was at the wheel of the Yukon blinked the lights on and off to signal them. Joe followed Pope, who walked briskly as if to signal to the people in the car he wasn’t actually with his subordinate, but simply traveling in the same plane with him.

A highway patrol officer, likely assigned to the governor’s detail, got out and opened the two back doors while a state aeronautics commission staffer unlocked the gate. Joe took a deep breath of the high-plains air. It was thin at 6,200 feet, and flavored with sagebrush and fumes from the refinery at the edge of the city. As he glanced to the south, the golden capitol dome winked in the sun over the top of a thick bank of cottonwood trees turning yellow and red with fall colors.

As they approached the gate, Pope said, “Try to keep your comments to a minimum when we talk to the governor.”

Joe said, “I work for him.”

“You work for me .”

Joe shrugged. He climbed into the backseat of the Escalade next to Pope and the doors shut, instantly killing the howl of cold wind.

She turned around in the front seat, said, “Hi, Joe.”

“Hello, Stella.”

Stella Ennis was ivory pale, with piercing dark eyes and full dark lipsticked lips. She wore a charcoal skirt suit over a white top with a strand of sensible business pearls. Her hair seemed richer and even more auburn than Joe remembered, and he guessed she was coloring it to hide the strands of gray. She looked at him coolly, assessing him in one long take that seemed to last for minutes although it really didn’t, and he couldn’t read what she concluded.

“I’m Randy Pope,” Joe’s boss said to her.

“I know who you are,” she said, not looking at him.

Joe saw Pope and the trooper exchange glances. Joe nervously fingered the wedding ring on his hand, something he’d done without realizing it the first time he met Stella in Jackson.

Stella said, “The governor wants to see you two immediately. As you can guess, there’s going to be an investigation by DCI to determine what happened up there, and no doubt there will be questions by the media and some members of the legislature. Governor Rulon wants to make sure we’re all on the same page before the shit hits the fan. There may be charges brought, so be prepared.”

“Charges?” Pope blanched.

“One never knows,” she said. “When three people are killed in an operation, there are always those who insist on some kind of accountability, someone to blame. Not that we want any scapegoats. But we think we can head off anything like that happening if we can get out in front of it.”

“We’ll work with you however we can,” Pope said, trying to get her eye. She finally broke her gaze with Joe and her eyes swept over Pope as if he were out-of-place furniture as she turned back around.

“Let’s go, Bob,” she said to the officer.

Stella said, “Word about what happened last night is tearing across the state like wildfire. We are very, very lucky the legislature isn’t in session, or it would be a sensation on the floor. This is the first time in the state’s history a governor has closed down state lands to hunting. And our understanding from the Feds is that they will follow suit this afternoon. We’re already getting e-mails and constituent phone calls saying Governor Rulon is a dictator and much, much worse.”

“I can imagine,” Pope said, but the words just hung there when she chose not to respond to him.

Stella said, “We called a press conference for three-thirty. The governor plans to let everyone know what’s happened and what measures he’s taken. It’s important that we have our story straight and our plan in place.”

Joe checked his watch. An hour and a half before the press conference.

As they traveled down Central to downtown, toward the gold dome, Joe looked out the window at the stately houses on the avenues.

Stella Ennis was still attractive and sensual and familiar. But she was also still a murderer, and only Stella and Joe knew it. This time, unlike the first time he’d met her, there was no zing.

For which he was grateful.

“PARDON MY FRENCH,” Governor Spencer Rulon said after Joe detailed the events of the day and night before, “but it sounds like a classic clusterfuck.”

“It was,” Pope sighed, leaning away from Joe as if to distance himself both literally and figuratively.

Rulon asked Pope, “Did you come to that conclusion from the comfort of your hotel room after you cut and ran like a rabbit?”

They were crammed into Rulon’s small private office in the capitol building on Twenty-fourth Street, as opposed to the public office and conference room where Rulon could generally be observed by constituents and visitors touring the building. Rulon’s private office was dark and windowless with a high ceiling and shelves crammed with books, unopened gifts, and what looked to Joe like the governor’s eccentric collection of fossils, arrowheads, and bits of bone. Also in the room, in addition to Pope, who sat next to Joe facing Rulon across his desk, and Stella, who sat at Rulon’s right hand but managed to defer to him with such professional determination that she became an extension of him rather than his chief of staff, were Richard Brewer, director of the state Department of Criminal Investigation, and Special Agent Tony Portenson of the FBI. Joe and Portenson had exchanged scowls, and Rulon cautioned them, saying, “Now, boys…” They went back six years. Portenson was dark, pinched, and had close-set eyes and a scar that hitched up his upper lip so that it looked like he was sneering. The last time Joe had seen Portenson was in Yellowstone Park, as the FBI agent set up a scenario to betray Joe and lead Joe’s friend Nate Romanowski away in cuffs.