Blood Trail - C. J. Box [56]
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