Serda Tibbs was a sophomore and new student at Saddlestring High School. Her parents had recently moved from the Deep South, and her father was out of town on a roughneck crew. Under questioning, she said she could barely remember what had happened to her after she’d left after school with a group of local boys who said they were going to show her around the county. The boys were popular and well known, all of them athletes and older than her. Her blood alcohol level indicated she’d been drinking heavily, but she said something had happened to her beyond that. The medical tech at the hospital suspected she’d been slipped a date-rape drug although the testing was inconclusive. They did confirm, though, she’d been assaulted and left on the side of the county road. Because she was new and didn’t know where she was, she had walked the wrong way to get back to town.
Four boys were arrested, all members of the football team. Joe had no involvement in the investigation, but he knew how the crime rocked the community. The boys eventually confessed and the two younger perpetrators were sent to a juvenile facility and the older two to the state prison in Rawlins. Serda Tibbs withdrew from high school and her family moved to Oklahoma.
“How does Dallas figure into this?” Marybeth asked Joe.
He said, “Serda never named all the boys involved, because she was so damaged by it, but Deputy Reed told me he suspected it was five of them, not four.”
Reed was now the sheriff of Twelve Sleep County.
“He always thought the fifth was Dallas Cates,” Joe said. “Dallas wouldn’t admit to it, and the other boys didn’t name him. Reed said he thought they were scared of what he would do to them, and he could never make a case. Dallas was the big shot at the school then, if you’ll remember. That’s when he was winning the high school finals and state wrestling. He had an ability to intimidate his competition then, and he still does. Reed suspected he intimidated those other boys to keep their mouths shut.”
“My God,” Marybeth said. “And he was in our house.”
Joe nodded. “We need to keep him away.”
“Should you tell April?”
Joe nodded.
Marybeth was still for a long time. Then she said, “Do you think it will make any difference?”
“I’m not sure,” Joe confessed.
He hadn’t slept well the rest of the night, and was at the airport looking at the sky for Rulon One an hour before he needed to be there.
“Magic city of the plains dead ahead,” the copilot announced through the open accordion door. “Welcome to Cheyenne — the three hundred fifty-fourth most populous metropolitan area in the United States.”
Joe nodded grimly and gripped the armrests.
“As I said, it’s likely to be a little bumpy.”
“I’m getting used to it,” Joe said, as much to himself as to the copilot.
That morning, before leaving his house, he’d stuffed Sheridan’s winter coat into his backpack.
The director of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, Lisa Greene-Dempsey, was inside the cinder-block state terminal to greet him. Joe was surprised. Director LGD, as she preferred to be called, had been in her job for a little over a year, and her philosophy and policies were beginning to take effect throughout the agency. Her goal from the beginning was to “modernize” the agency, turning it from what some called the Wyoming “Guts and Feathers” Department into a more progressive body that embraced diversity, wildlife appreciation, and environmental stewardship. Nearly a dozen longtime game wardens and fifteen percent of the headquarters administration had retired.
Director LGD was wiry, fidgety, and wore rimless glasses that made her eyes look bigger than they were and gave her a perpetually startled look. She had short, straight brown hair parted on the center-left and a habit of waving her fingers like a pair of flushing birds when she talked.
She strode up to Joe as he entered the terminal and grasped his hand with an exaggerated motion and said, “How are you doing, Joe?”
“Fine, boss,” he said warily as she pumped his hand.
“When I heard you were coming today, I thought I’d take the opportunity to ride with you to the capitol.”
He nodded politely.
She grasped his arm and steered him through the terminal toward a waiting green departmental SUV. Her administrative assistant, named Brandi Forgey, was at the wheel. LGD climbed into the backseat with Joe.
“Brandi,” LGD said, “take us to the capitol and use the scenic route, please.”
Forgey nodded and put the SUV into gear. The ride to the governor’s office normally took less than ten minutes.
“We don’t have much time before we get there,” LGD said, leaning toward Joe. He fought an urge to recoil.
“I need you to give him a message for me.”
“Does this mean you’re not going to be in the meeting?” Joe asked her.
LGD shook her head abruptly and forged on. “I haven’t been asked. This arrangement the governor has with you is very unusual, and I can’t say I like it. The governor doesn’t seem to honor our system of chain of command and structure. Neither, frankly, do you.”
Joe shrugged with a what-can-I-do? gesture.
“We’re not close, the governor and I,” she said, looking away from Joe. “I’ve been instructed to communicate with the governor’s staff via email. He prefers it that way.”
“Oh?” This was news.
“He’s a busy man. Anyway, our agency desperately needs a new appropriation the next fiscal year to open our pilot WAC.”
Joe looked back, puzzled. “WAC?”
“Wildlife Appreciation Center,” she said with irritation. “Haven’t you been keeping up with my ‘Memos from the Director’?”
He was caught. Since taking over, Director LGD had been sending out electronic memos to all employees about her plans for modernizing the agency. Joe had stopped reading them months ago.
“Sorry,” he said. Then: “But I did finally retrieve that pickup from the top of the mountain…”
She dismissed his sentence with a wave of her hand. “Not now, Joe.”
“I thought that was important to you,” Joe said.
“Not as important as the WAC program,” she said. “Anyway, we sent the proposed language to the governor’s office six weeks ago so he could request the funding from the legislature and put it in his State of the State address. He hasn’t even responded. We really need him on board with this.”
Joe shook his head. “So you’re asking me… what?”
She bore in. “To urge his support for the program. We can’t expand our mission beyond blood sports unless the governor is behind it.”
He cringed. Joe hated when hunting and fishing were called “blood sports.” Most of the hunters and anglers he knew, both male and female, did so out of tradition or for subsistence or taste for wild game. Blood was a by-product. Plus, a growing number of anglers practiced catch-and-release.
“Oh, look,” Brandi Forgey said as she eased to the curb in front of the gold-domed capitol building. “We’re here already.”
Something dark passed over Director LGD’s face, and she turned toward her driver.
“You were supposed to take the scenic route.”
“Sorry,” Brandi Forgey sang.
“Well, I had better be going,” Joe said. As he did, he saw a twinkle in Brandi Forgey’s eye reflected in the rearview mirror. It was in that little signal that occurred silently between staffers that they recognized that neither had much respect for their mutual boss. Joe tried not to wink back.