Chapter 40
When Jojo realized what she’d signed up for, she very much regretted telling Conor and Will Hansford, the FBI supervisory agent running the show on their end of the case, that she would take the place of facial recognition software for the Amish.
The FBI had accumulated a mountain of forensic evidence—shell casings, bullet fragments, fibers from the shooter’s coat sleeve caught on the broken glass of the chalet door—and video shot at Royal Oaks that night.
That included security camera footage from inside the lodge at the dinner, mostly of the three men who owned the companies responsible for the event, each standing up in front of the crowd promising to be brief and breaking their promises.
There was footage from the parking lot and some focused on the crowd at the base of the mountain, but most of the outside security cameras were useless as soon as it started snowing.
Added to all of the security camera footage was the amateur footage that had been turned over to the FBI.
As soon as it was known the FBI wanted to see all the videos and still pictures shot on cell phones that night, people were eager to help, glad to give copies of the selfies they shot in the ski lift or video they’d taken of little Joey in his adorable Buzz Lightyear snowsuit.
The FBI had intended to catalog those who attended the event using facial recognition software, and driver’s license photos—or mugshots if there were any—of the crowd.
They immediately ran into snags. Facial recognition software required that you be able to see the face, and in many cases at Royal Oaks, faces were so obscured by the ski equipment you couldn’t see anything.
And there were no driver’s license pictures of the Amish, or any other photographs of them.
So Jojo had volunteered to look at all the footage and identify the Amish and make sure she hadn’t missed anybody on the lists she’d given to Conor.
When she’d first pulled out her iPad to peruse the downloaded videos, Uncle Jonas had made it clear he didn’t approve of her bringing “an electronic” into the house.
Amish rules and regulations only applied to the Amish, and she wasn’t, so he had no right to complain.
And besides, her uncles were New Order Amish.
Old Order Amish were strict and authoritarian.
No electricity from power lines, no indoor plumbing, no air travel, buggies only and light from lanterns.
Though they relented on “modern” toilet paper, it was used in an outhouse.
New Order Amish allowed some battery-powered devices, phone shacks, indoor toilet facilities with septic tanks (not the flush variety), refrigerators and stoves powered by gas, and more modern travel—you could ride in a car but not own one, same went for buses, boats, ships and airplanes.
The problem, of course, was that her uncle might have been a New Order Amish, but he was an old order human being, a crotchety elderly man set in his ways.
She was spending the evening after she and Conor talked to the final Whitman brother the same way she’d spent every other evening for a week—looking at video footage.
She sat in the big platform rocker that had been built by hand by Uncle Jonas.
Her mother had made the cushions for it.
And her aunts had provided the wonderful patchwork quilts that she had bundled around her.
The weather seemed to have broken, and the days were actually warm, but the nights were still frigid.
Jojo’s face was lit by the light on the screen of the iPad as she watched the videos, but at least the light in the rest of the room wasn’t restricted to kerosene lanterns or coal oil lamps.
Her uncles had propane-fueled wall lamps.
Rebecca, Uncle Jonas’s daughter, had provided dinner tonight. She’d brought a pot roast and was in the kitchen getting things ready when the ruckus began.
“Oh, no!”
Jojo heard the cry and immediately recognized the look-what-Rascal-has-done-now tone of voice. Her cousin stood in the doorway of the living room holding … what was that … strips of?—?
“Toilet paper,” Rebecca said miserably. “He’s torn up a whole roll!”
Jojo put the iPad down and reluctantly got out from under the warm blankets to help Rebecca clean up the mess.
The little brown dog sat watching, his tail wagging, and appeared to be right proud of what he’d done because he was “smiling from ear to ear.” It was true.
The dog could smile. This was not the case with a Belgian Malinois.
Trident had never had a look like that on his face a single second in his life.
But this shaggy little bernedoodle somehow smiled, and he had a way of cocking his head to the side when he did it that was what Jojo considered TCFW, too cute for words.
He was doing that now, sitting happily outside the bathroom door.
Jojo quickly got down on her hands and knees with Rebecca and started picking up the remains of an entire roll of toilet paper torn to shreds, to confetti.
“If Papa sees this …” Rebecca said, as she hurriedly grabbed little pieces of paper.
Uncle Jonas didn’t much like Rascal. No, truth was, Uncle Jonas couldn’t stand the little dog, did not understand why his brother wanted to have the creature around, and went off on scripture-laden tirades at the “little beastie” whenever the dog misbehaved … which was just about all day every day.
Uncle Levi wandered past the bathroom door, stopped and came back to look in to see what Jojo and Rebecca were doing on their hands and knees.
“Rascal, right?” Uncle Levi said.
They both nodded.
His face lit up. “Imagine how much fun he had doin’ it.” When he saw the look of disdain on Rebecca’s face, he shook his head. “Lighten up. He’s just a puppy.”
Rebecca ground her teeth at the “just a puppy” remark—Uncle Levi’s blanket excuse for any mischief the dog got into, and they managed to shove all of the toilet paper into a trash basket seconds before Uncle Jonas came in from outside.
Jojo went back to where she’d been bundled up in quilts, snuggled back in, picked up the iPad … and there he was.
She was looking at a piece of the outdoor security camera footage, grainy from lack of light and spotted by falling snow. On the lower right-hand side, the camera had captured images of the protesters and their signs.
There stood Ethan Cole.
She started the segment at the beginning, watched carefully.
And there he was again. He had turned directly toward the camera, and a look of rage so distorted his face, she might not have recognized him without the distinctive light blue toboggan hat with the incongruous red ball on the top. That was definitely Ethan.
Then he turned and got something out of the trunk of a car, some kind of case with a handle, long and thin.
It was so grainy and indistinct it was impossible to be sure, but it was the right size and shape to carry a rifle.
She had seen only glimpses of the protesters in other videos, since they were almost out of range of the security cameras.
When she looked at the time stamp on the video, her heart sank.
The stamp read 8:35:41.
At eight-thirty, Jojo was riding a sled down the slope with Miriam.
… and the shooter was popping off one victim after another out of the ski lift chairs.
There was no way Ethan Cole could have been the shooter.
Jojo’s shoulders slumped and she sighed.
In her mind, Cole was the prime suspect.
He was a certifiable lunatic, an angry, threatening, violent man who knew his way around a deer rifle and who had run from the law.
She’d had no trouble at all imagining him setting a dangerous bull free to run her down or taking a shot at her as she drove home.
She couldn’t imagine how anyone could have come up with using Mylar as a murder weapon, but he was as likely a candidate as anybody else.
Reluctantly, she pulled her cell phone out of her pocket. She needed to tell Conor to call off the BOLO. Ethan Cole was no longer a person of interest in a murder case. Somebody else out there had shot all those people on a ski lift. And somebody else was trying to kill her.