Blood Trail - C. J. Box [57]
“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.
16
“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.
Everyone was so tightly packed around Rulon’s desk that it was both intimate and uncomfortable in equal measures, and Joe guessed that was exactly the atmosphere Rulon wanted to create. The governor was the only one with room, with the ability to wave his arms or pounce across the desk like a big cat to make a point. To Joe, Stella’s silence and stillness only seemed to make her more conspicuous. Or at least it did to him.
Pope was obviously flustered by Rulon’s question, and he once again withdrew his digital camera from his coat, turned it on, and handed it across the desk to the governor.
“This was in my room,” Pope said gravely.
Rulon leaned forward, saw the image of Frank Urman’s head, and winced.
Pope handed the camera to Brewer, who turned white when he saw it. Portenson looked at it and rolled his eyes