She stood. She was not much taller standing than she had been sitting down. “Mary Seels. We expected you five days ago.”
“Hello, Mary. I was helping my supervisor with a bear.
You should have gotten word from dispatch that I’d be late.”
She assessed him. He thought he saw a slight smile on her mouth, as if she were hiding her amusement. “I’ve heard about you.”
He nodded again, not taking the bait, not saying, What have you heard ? But he thought he already had her figured out, simply by the way she looked at him, with the same dispassionate sharpness of one of Nate’s falcons, and by the way she projected her innate territoriality. Mary was the one who ran the place, he thought. She appraised him as if he had walked into the building hat in hand looking for the last bed in town, and she had the power to give it to him or turn him away.
“Will said you were a good guy,” she said.
“I’m glad to hear that. I thought quite a bit of Will.”
“If Will says you’re a good guy, you’re a good guy,” she said, more to herself than to Joe. “I suppose you want to use his office?”
Inwardly, Joe cringed. He had not parked in Will’s space because he felt he was encroaching.
“How many offices are in this building?” he asked.
She ticked her head from side to side like a metronome as she silently counted. “Twentysome. We’ve got biologists, habitat specialists, fisheries guys, and communications people. Plus a library and a conference room. There’s a corral out back. Will’s four horses are kept there.”
“Twenty offices,” Joe repeated. “In my district I work out of my house. In a space about as big as your counter here.”
“That’s interesting,” she said, her tone dismissive. “I hope you don’t get lost here.”
“Me too,” he said.
There were a few beats of silence as Joe and Mary looked at each other.
“Are you going to move in or not?” she asked finally.
“Any empty rooms?”
“A couple. But they have the lousiest furniture, if they have furniture at all. People raid the empty offices for what they want all the time. You’ll need a desk, won’t you? A computer that works?” She was still testing him. “You know you want Will’s office, so just take it.”
He started to protest, but thought better of it. “Okay, ma’am.”
“You can call me Mary,” she said, again with that ghost of a smile, “but if you call me ma’am you’ll get a hell of a lot better service around here.”
He smiled at her.
“The office is upstairs,” she said, and sat down to answer a ringing phone. “All of his files and records are up there.
I’m sure you’ll want to look at them.”
“Yup.”
Joe gathered his briefcase and pack from her counter and began to climb the wide stairs to the second floor.
Mounted elk, deer, and bighorn sheep heads watched his progress with glasseyed indifference, as if they’d seen the likes of him before.
“Hey, Joe Pickett,” Mary called out from her desk.
He stopped on the top step and turned to her.
She lowered the phone and cupped her hand over the receiver. “You might have a call here in a minute. Someone is saying there are some people pitching a tent out in the middle of the elk refuge. You might have to go check that out and kick them off.”
He hesitated. “Okay . . .”
“And you have several messages from your wife. She didn’t sound very happy.” Mary smiled for the first time. It was a smile of pity.
“She didn’t get the dispatch message either,” he said.
“Welcome to Jackson Hole,” she said.
Will Jensen’s nameplate was still in a fake brass slider next to the third door on the left. Joe hesitated, looking up and down the hallway, then cautiously opened the unlocked door and let it swing slowly inward. The miniblinds covering the window were closed but bled laddered light. He waited a few beats before stepping inside. He couldn’t help feeling voyeuristic, and a little ghoulish. Joe didn’t want to be seen entering, didn’t want anyone saying later that he had just barged into Will’s old office like he owned the place. He reached inside the doorway, found the switch, and turned on the lights.
Joe’s first impression was that Will had left the office planning to return to it. Papers fanned across the desk. An open can of Mountain Dew was on a coaster. A ballpoint pen, cap off and to the side, sat on the top of a large, thin spiral notebook. The fan on Will’s computer hummed, indicating that it was sleeping and not turned off.
Joe stepped inside, leaving the door open, and dumped his briefcase and daypack in the chair opposite the desk.
