Long Range (Joe Pickett Book 20)(14)

The fact that he could have easily been with them haunted him as well.

He paused on the landing and slowly turned around. He saw where the vehicle with the shooters had been on the street. He remembered the photos of scores of brass casings from the weapons on the asphalt.

Joe tried to shake the images of those photos from his mind. He couldn’t.

So he went inside.

*

STOVEPIPE, THE EX–RODEO contestant and stock contractor who’d manned the metal detector in the county building for as long as Joe could remember, stood up from his stool to greet him. He wore his usual black cowboy hat and purple scarf, but his face was ashen.

“Did you hear about Miz Hewitt?” Stovepipe asked.

“I did,” Joe said as he emptied his weapons, phone, cuffs, keys, and other metal into a basket. “That’s why I’m here.”

“It’s a terrible, terrible thing,” Stovepipe said. “That poor lady.”

Stovepipe wiped tears away from his eyes with the tips of his cowboy scarf as he motioned Joe through the machine.

“Are you okay?” Joe asked Stovepipe. “Did Sue . . .”

“No, no,” Stovepipe said. “She’s still in critical condition. But she’s been so kind to me. She brings me cookies and brownies, just to be nice. I’ve seen her a lot more in the last couple of months and it’s just hard to believe that she got shot like that.”

“I agree,” Joe said. “I think we’ll find that shooter.”

Joe gathered his gear on the other side. He was allowed to retain his equipment if he wasn’t going to court. The security exercise was pointless and it had always been so, but Joe had quit objecting to it because he never got anywhere. Not only that, but the metal detector only worked about half the time.

“I hope you do,” Stovepipe said. “But more than that, I hope Sue makes it through all right.”

“Me too, Stovepipe.”

*

DUANE PATTERSON WAS loitering in the hallway outside the door to Judge Hewitt’s chambers. Patterson looked up when he heard Joe’s boots coming down the tile floor.

“I’m glad you finally got here,” Patterson said. “I’ve never seen him so pissed off.”

“That’s saying something,” Joe replied.

Duane Patterson was gaunt and bony with a round baby face and a closetful of suits that didn’t really fit him. He’d been the public defender for years and had endured more than his share of courtroom abuse from Judge Hewitt. Despite that, he’d been as surprised as anyone when the judge recommended him to the county commissioners to fill out the term of County Prosecutor Dulcie Schalk after she’d been incapacitated by the shooting on the courthouse steps.

Joe had been impressed how quickly Patterson had adapted to the job. Because he had been on the other side so long, he was experienced in the strategies, rhythms, and occasional tricks played by prosecutors toward defendants and their counsel. He knew which buttons to push, because Dulcie had been pushing his for years.

“Why’d you take so long to get here?” Patterson asked Joe. He was obviously annoyed.

“I was in Jackson Hole.”

“I think we could have done this without you, but the judge didn’t agree.”

“Sorry.”

“I’ll let him know you’re here.”

Joe nodded. He opened the door to discover that a state trooper, the chief of police of Saddlestring, and the new county sheriff were impatiently waiting for him as well. Joe removed his hat and nodded at the others.

“About time,” the trooper grumbled. “Why we was waiting for a game warden is beyond me.”

The highway patrolman’s name was Tillis, and Joe recognized him immediately. He’d met him in Jackson a couple of years back, when Tillis had refused to let Joe past the checkpoint of an exclusive gated community even though a crime was taking place.

Tillis was a big man with a square head and a crew cut dashed with silver. His aviator sunglasses hung from his collar and his flat-brimmed hat was on his lap. Tillis, like a few other troopers Joe had encountered, had a territorial bias against game wardens. He assumed Joe and his colleagues spent the bulk of their time hunting and fishing while real peace officers like himself were exposing themselves to drug dealers and other outlaws on the highways. Joe thought of Tillis as a blunt object.

Joe nodded to the state trooper and sat down. There was no point engaging with the man, he thought.

Chief Williamson of the Saddlestring Police Department sprawled on a plastic chair and greeted Joe with a wave of his hand. Williamson had been fired by the city council the year before for overzealously citing tourists for speeding and parking violations, but he’d since been rehired because his replacement had made it a policy to shoot stray dogs in town, not realizing that one of them belonged to the mayor.

The new county sheriff, Brendan Kapelow, sat ramrod-straight in a hard-backed chair with his wide silverbelly Stetson clamped low and hard on his head. His eyes flitted to Joe as he entered but shifted back toward the door where Judge Hewitt would emerge from his back office.

Joe didn’t know yet what to think about Sheriff Kapelow, although he hoped his first impressions of him would turn out to be wrong.

Kapelow was in his early thirties, a marine who’d seen combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, who was new to the sheriff’s department and had surprised everyone when he decided to run for the office after Sheriff Reed had been gunned down. Reed’s senior deputies, Ryan Steck and Justin Woods, had long been thought to be the likely replacements, but the once-close friends had turned on each other when the campaign heated up. They’d accused each other of being lazy and corrupt, and the race had gotten personal and nasty in a way very few Wyoming local elections—except sheriff’s elections—ever did. Joe had kept his distance during the campaign season and he’d been disappointed in both Steck and Woods for going after each other, because he liked and respected them both.