“Can I talk with you after the service?” Joe whispered. Tassell stared at Joe for several beats, then said, “Sure, if you have to.”
Joe turned back around. Because he seemed to be the opposite of either Barnum or the brandnew Sheriff McLanahan, Joe had assumed Tassell would be more approachable. A phrase he’d overheard Sheridan tell Lucy floated through his mind—“When you assume you make an ass out of ‘u’ and me.” He smiled wryly.
The reverend took his place behind the altar and said, “We will sorely miss Will Jensen. . . .”
Joe hadn’t seen Stella Ennis come into the chapel, but when he glanced over during the service she was there. She had slipped in alone and now sat two rows ahead of Joe on the opposite side of the aisle. When he leaned forward, he could see her more clearly.
She was younger than he had thought the night before. She was also more beautiful, and he studied her profile— a strong jaw, pert nose, thick lips painted a darker color than the night before, smooth, firm cheeks, slightly almondshaped eyes under thick auburn bangs. She looked straight ahead, at the altar. As Joe watched, her shoulders began to tremble. She bowed her head forward so that her hair obscured her face. She stayed like that for several moments, and when she looked over at him, her eyes were glistening with tears.
Their eyes locked for a moment Joe could only describe as electric. In her eyes he thought he saw sadness, confusion, and, strangely, pity. Then, as if she realized she was transmitting her feelings, she looked away from him quickly, breaking it off.
Why, Joe wondered, was Stella Ennis at the funeral? And why was she crying?
Twelve
Do you notice the same thing I notice about the food here?” Pi Stevenson asked Joe at the reception, which was held in a small meeting room at a chain hotel near the funeral home.
He hadn’t realized she was behind him in line. “What?” Joe said.
“No meat,” she said, raising her eyebrows with a sense of triumph.
Joe looked at the table and then at his small paper plate. Crackers, cheese cubes, celery, carrots, dip.
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“These are the things I pick up on,” she said. “There’s cheese, though. So this isn’t a vegan spread.”
Joe hmmmm’d, and took a small paper cup filled with red punch. He sipped it, disliked it, and looked for a place to put it aside.
“I heard a rumor that before Will killed himself, he gorged on meat,” Pi whispered to Joe. “That’s probably why they don’t have it here. Did you hear that rumor?”
“No.”
“That’s what I heard,” she said again.
“I heard it too,” Birdy said, eavesdropping.
Joe had no idea how to respond, or if he even wanted to.
Pi and Birdy seemed to be drawing some kind of connection between what Will ate and what he later did.
At the far end of the room, Susan Jensen was surrounded by wellwishers. Joe waited for the crowd to part in order to have a word with her. Her boys were with their grandparents, trying to stand in one place and behave properly. But they were boys, and they were fidgeting.
Joe noted that Smoke hadn’t come to the reception, and neither had Stella Ennis. Sheriff Tassell was there, however, with his deputies, who were loading up their plates for the third time.
When he looked back, Birdy was offering him a business card: wildwater photography. His full name was Trenton “Birdy” Richards.
“I help him out at the shop,” Pi said, pointing at the card.
“I appreciate how you treated us yesterday,” Birdy said.
“It was, like, civil. So if you’re ever on the river, like, if your family is with you or something, and you want a nice shot of you in the whitewater, just let me know. I’ll give you, like, a deal.”
Joe pocketed the card. “You stand on the bank and take pictures of rafters?”
Birdy snorted. “I used to do that, like, when I first got started. Not anymore. I’ve got a fullauto setup now. Photocells on the rafts signal the camera, and I just download the digital images every afternoon. The pictures are ready when the rafters get off the water.”
“Interesting,” Joe said, making conversation.
“Pretty slick, is what it is,” Birdy said, pleased with himself.
“Excuse me,” Joe said, seeing the sheriff and taking leave of Pi and Birdy.
...
Sheriff Tassell looked up as Joe approached, but continued to eat a cracker with a cheese cube. His animus was palpable. Joe assumed that Tassell was being territorial, like every county sheriff Joe had ever met, but he forged ahead anyway.
“I’d like to be able to get into the Game and Fish house later today if I could,” Joe said. He pointedly did not say Will Jensen’s house. “I couldn’t find any keys at the office. I assume you’re done inside.”
Tassell didn’t look directly at Joe, but continued to chew.
“I don’t know what you might hope to find in there that we haven’t already looked at.”
“I’m not sure you understand,” Joe said, his voice patient. “That’s where I’m expected to stay while I’m here.
The department doesn’t have the budget to put me up in a hotel while their house sits empty.”
Hotel rooms in Jackson were by far the most expensive in the state, Joe knew. He was keenly aware that he had already overspent his per diem and the overage would need to come out of the family budget, stretched as it was.
Tassell met Joe’s eyes for a moment, then looked away again. “I figured you were checking up on us.”
Well, Joe thought, that too.
“I’ll visit with my team and make sure they’re through,”
Tassell said with no enthusiasm. “I need to run it by the ME also. I think he got the place all cleaned up, but I’m not sure about that. A .44 Magnum going through soft tissue makes a hell of mess on the ceiling and walls.”
Joe said quietly, “I’ll bet it does.”
“I think his personal effects have been pretty much cleaned out and given to the wife.” Tassell looked toward Susan Jensen. “Just a bunch of boxes. Clothes and stuff like that.”
Joe wondered if he should ask to see them at some point.
“Do you know if there were any spiral notebooks in there?” Joe asked.
Tassell shrugged. “I don’t remember any, but I didn’t personally pack up everything or really look it over myself.”
Yes, Joe would need to look inside the boxes. “Do you have his truck keys at your office? His truck’s locked up.”
“I believe we do,” Tassell said woodenly.
“Can I—”
Tassell cut Joe off with a hard glare. “Look, I’m busy this afternoon. I can’t just drop everything and cater to you.
I’ve got a diversity training workshop scheduled for my officers that I’ve got to be at, and we need to meet with the Secret Service to set up the security for the vice president, who’s coming in two weeks. I’ll get to this stuff when I get to it.”
Joe stepped close to Tassell, looked right at him. “Sheriff, we seem to have started off on the wrong foot, and I’m not sure why. But I’d rather work with you than against you.
All I’m asking for is keys to the statehouse and truck.”
Tassell didn’t step back. “Bud Barnum was a legend among sheriffs in this state. He was old school, and I can’t really call him a friend, but sheriffs tend to stick together.”
Now Joe understood. “What happened with Barnum was his own doing,” Joe said. “He can blame everyone else, but Barnum did himself in.”
“That’s not his version.”
“I’m not surprised,” Joe said.
“In his version, he doesn’t blame everyone else. He blames you.”
Barnum had cut a wide swath across northern Wyoming, Joe thought.
“I can’t help that,” Joe said.
“He says you get into the middle of things you should leave alone. That you press too damned hard into areas where things are best left to the professionals.”
“Do you think that’s why I’m here?” Joe asked.
“Aren’t you?” Tassell asked back.
“I’m here to fill in during hunting season, and then I’m sure I’ll be sent back home. I’m curious about Will, I admit that. It doesn’t make sense to me that things were so bad that he took his own life.”
That seemed to mollify Tassell slightly. He said, “Will may not have been all you seem to think he was, Joe.”
Joe cocked his head. “What do you mean?”
“Will started losing it over the past six months or so.
Even before the wife took the kids and moved out on him.
He was becoming a public embarrassment, and we don’t like embarrassments here in Jackson.”
“What do you mean?” Joe felt a coldness growing inside.
“He was arrested twice for driving drunk. That was after a half dozen warnings. He spent a night in my jail when he was so blitzed he couldn’t even get out of his own truck. He was arrested again just a couple of weeks ago for threatening one of our local business leaders.”
“Will?” Joe asked, incredulous.
“Will. I arrested him myself out at the ski resort, where he was having the argument. Bet you didn’t know that?”
“No,” Joe said, “I didn’t know that.” He doubted that Trey did either, or he would have told Joe.
“Will just kept getting worse. I could see it coming.”
Tassell gestured toward the room. “And so could anybody who knew him. He was in a death spiral and it was only a matter of time.
“The ME concluded that Will’s death was suicide,” Tassell said. “There’s no doubt about it at all, if that’s what you were thinking. He got drunk, ate dinner, and shot himself at his table. Simple as that. There was a photo of his family on the table, which was probably the last thing he looked at. His fingerprints were the only prints on the gun.”
“Is it true that all he ate was meat that night?”
Tassell looked at Joe quizzically. “Where did you hear that?”
“Just a rumor.”
“Yeah, it’s true. He cooked himself up quite a bunch of meat that night. All of the frying pans were dirty, and there was meat still on his plate when he died. It smelled pretty good in there, actually. But so what?”
“I’m not sure,” Joe said.
“It’s not that unusual, is it?” Tassell asked. “Hell, I do it myself. I ask the wife about once a month for what we call ‘the Meat Bucket’ dinner. Steak, pork, elk sausages. Maybe a piece of bread. She doesn’t like it—she’s a healthfreak type—but she cooks it up.”
“There wasn’t an autopsy?”
Tassell shook his head. “No need. The cause of death was clearcut. We don’t do autopsies in Teton County when the cause of death is obvious. We have to watch our budget too.”
Of course—so you can afford diversity training workshops, Joe thought but didn’t say. He wondered how many murders there had been on Sheriff Tassell’s watch. Joe couldn’t recall hearing of any recently in Teton County.
As if reading Joe’s mind, Tassell went on, “We lose a couple of people a year here, but not because of crime. A tourist or two may drown in the whitewater, or a skier might crash into a tree, or a ski bum will overdose on a slick new designer drug. But just because we don’t have major crime doesn’t mean we’re not trained to handle it. This is a tight little community, and there are important people here with lots of money and influence. They don’t like things happening that take place in bad country and western songs, you know? Those things should be left to the rest of the state. And they don’t like bad news, either, because this is their special playground.”
Joe watched Tassell carefully. What exactly was he getting at?
“This place is special,” Tassell said. “We’ve got the highest per capita income than any county in the U.S., because of all the millionaires and billionaires. There are people here who don’t think they need to play by the rules.
And you know what,” the sheriff said, arching his eyebrows, “they don’t. They don’t like a sloppy suicide happening in their town. Neither do I.”
“I’m confused,” Joe said.
Tassell looked away. “What’s done is done. I don’t want it dredged up again.”
“You think I’m going to do that?”
“Maybe. That’s what Barnum said you’d do.”
Joe paused before responding. Tassell was obviously warning him off, but was it because there was something to hide or simply because a further inquiry would look bad and attract unwanted attention? Joe guessed the latter.
“Don’t worry,” Joe said. “It doesn’t seem like you’ve got anything to fear from me.”
“Let’s hope not,” Tassell said with finality. “Let’s hope not.”
Then he excused himself, saying, “I want another hit of that cheese.”
“About those keys,” Joe said.
“Come by the office around five,” Tassell said. “We should be done with our workshop by then.”
Joe watched as Randy Pope gave Susan Jensen a long hug. Joe thought Pope held the clench three beats too long, moving it into the category of inappropriate behavior. Susan didn’t appear to be hugging back.
Finally, Pope said something sincere to her and took his leave. As he passed Joe, Pope looked up.
“On behalf of the department, right?” Joe said.
“Don’t you have work to do?” Pope snapped, his face flushing pink.
Susan Jensen worked her way through a group of wellwishers and walked purposefully up to Joe and said, “May I have a few minutes, please?”
“Of course,” he said, following her through the room and into the hallway.
“I need a drink,” she told him, as if apologizing.
Joe didn’t need one, but didn’t say so. The lounge was at the end of the hall, and Susan looked inside before going in.
“All clear,” she said. She took a seat on a stool at the empty bar and ordered a glass of white wine. Joe liked her, and had from their first meeting. She was ebullient, smart, and a little caustic. Like Marybeth, Susan Jensen was a gogetter.
“Just tonic for me,” Joe said to the bartender, who was young, fit, and sunburned—the Jackson look.