Then he thought,
For the first time in his twenty-five-year career, Randy Pope drew his weapon from its holster somewhere other than the shooting range in Cheyenne. He’d fired the .40 Glock because of the departmental requirement to recertify, but it felt heavy and unfamiliar in his hand. He tried to remember where the safety switch was, and only then recalled it didn’t have one. He simply needed to rack the slide and it was armed. He did so, loudly, signaling to whoever was inside his room that he meant business. He braced himself, and fought an involuntary quiver in his lower lip.
There was no sound, no reaction, from inside. Should he call the sheriff? Why should he, the head of an important state agency, a man whose hourly and daily decisions steered a multimillion-dollar department through the storm-tossed waters of state bureaucracy, risk his own life when he had dozens of less-valuable employees and local law enforcement available to do so on his behalf?
But what if it was nothing? Could he risk the embarrassment of calling the local sheriff if the housekeeper had simply forgotten to lock the stupid door to his suite? The gossip afterward would be vicious.
The room looked to be in order. Nothing out of place. The garbage near the door had been emptied. A quick glance into his bedroom revealed the bed had been made, which meant the housekeeping staff had been there.
But had he left the light on in the sitting room? He couldn’t remember leaving it on that morning.
He rounded the bar, his weapon out in front of him. There was a smell. Definitely an odor, he thought. Like something had died.
Then he saw it. The mounted elk head that had been over the fake fireplace was lying on the floor. The black glass eyes of the mount reflected the light from the hallway. Its mouth was pursed into a permanent, silent bugle. But why would it smell?
His eyes shot up the wall to where the mount had been, and Randy Pope screamed, dropped his gun, and backpedaled across the carpet until he tripped and fell backward onto the faux-leather couch.
Frank Urman’s severed head was spiked into the wall where the elk head mount had been that morning.
13
IN HER third-hour social studies class at Saddlestring High School, Sheridan Pickett idly drew sketches of smiling faces, flowers, and falcons in the margin of her notebook while waiting for class to begin. Her teacher, Mrs. Whaling, an attractive, doe-eyed blonde from the Northeast who, to Sheridan, infused the mountain West where she now lived with too much Disneyfied romance, had announced earlier with breathless glee that there would be a “very special guest speaker” that morning. When she did, several boys including Jason Kiner and Sheridan’s on- again-off-again boyfriend Jarrod Haynes (a dream to look at but a nightmare to have a conversation with) moaned with audible disdain and their reaction was met with an icy glare from their teacher. Sheridan kept her head down.
Mrs. Whaling was fond of guest speakers. She was also fond of showing movies during classtime that stretched over several days, silent reading, and hour-long forays into topics that had nothing to do with the curriculum. Sheridan found the class a waste of time, but couldn’t transfer out because she needed the requirement. She did her best to feign interest, read the textbook even though she wasn’t sure Mrs. Whaling had looked at it in years, and try not to laugh at Jarrod’s mumbled stupid jokes. He could be funny in an irreverent, sophomoric way, she had to admit.
Today was worse than most days already, though, because of what had happened at home the night before and that morning. A sense of dread had enveloped her before she entered the building that morning and she had trouble shedding it or pushing it aside. She’d not been able to concentrate on anything at school because her head and heart were at home, with her mom, with her dad.
She almost didn’t notice when Mrs. Whaling opened the door to the hallway. A big man with flowing blond hair and a barrel chest and a thousand-megawatt smile came in trailing a dark, pretty woman pushing a stroller.
“Kids,” Mrs. Whaling said beaming, grasping her hands together in thrall in front of her bosom, “this is Klamath Moore.”
SHERIDAN HAD been awakened by the telephone ringing at five-thirty that morning, a sound she normally would have slept right through. But it was the way her mother answered it out in the hall and talked—with such emotional earnestness and gravity—that connected with Sheridan’s semiconsciousness in a primal mother-daughter way and jerked her awake. She lay there for a few moments in the darkness, hearing snatches of conversation as her mother paced up and down the hall the way she did when a situation was serious:
Sheridan wrapped herself in her robe and found her mother sitting at the kitchen table looking pale, her eyes hollow and staring at nothing at all, her hands and the cordless phone on her lap as the coffeemaker percolated on the counter.
