Chapter 33
Jamie
Back at the motel Jamie paces the room. His ride with Wes Drake rankles him. He had truly hoped that he would have been able
to navigate Nightjar without anyone knowing who he was. How wrong he’d been about that.
For years, Jamie regarded Wes as some sort of mythical hero for saving him, but in the end, he is just some arrogant rich
guy who thinks Jamie owes him something. And he is a possible murderer. The photos from the party don’t lie. Wes went into
the barn just after Johanna and just before the explosion, and Jamie doesn’t buy what he said about wanting to fire Johanna
for not having her midwife credentials up-to-date. That will be easy enough to check. He shoots off a text to Greta, asking
her to check on Johanna’s licensing and to dig more deeply into her past.
Will do. And check your email.
Jamie navigates to his email and opens the message from Greta.
I widened my search, and there’s a mom-and-pop hardware store in Snowcap, ID, and they have record of double-headed nails, duct tape, ball bearings, zinc wire, and PVC piping being purchased within a month by the same individual, but not on the same day.
Bad news is we don’t know who bought them—they were paid for with cash.
Working on getting a search warrant so we have access to surveillance.
Snowcap, Idaho, is less than two hours from Nightjar. Smart, Jamie thinks. If this is the guy, he purchased the bomb-making material out of
state using cash, which makes things a bit more difficult to suss out. Too bad the perpetrator didn’t realize that most stores
keep track of the exact items sold and when. Now they need that surveillance footage.
He is restless but can’t make a move until he has that arrest warrant in hand. He pops a few aspirin and stares down at the
school yearbook and the black binder that holds Juneau’s case file that he brought in from the car. Which one to open first?
Both will release a Pandora’s box of memories, all unwelcome. He hears Juneau sigh in his ear. What’s the point? she asks. It’s been too long. Aren’t you tired, J. J.?
He is. But he also needs to know what happened to his sister.
Jamie takes a seat at the small Formica table and opens the black binder. On the first page is a plastic sleeve that holds
a large photo of Juneau. Her final school photo. She’s looking into the camera with her large dark eyes, a slight smile on
her face that shows her dimple. Ugh! Juneau says. I hate that picture!
Jamie smiles, showing his own dimple. Juneau hated every single photo taken of her.
He thinks this one is a good one. He flips the page and is thrust into a familiar world of police reports and interview transcripts, and there are hundreds.
Sheriff Colson and the other officers were thorough, this much is clear.
They interviewed teachers, classmates, business owners, guests who stayed in the hotel—no one remembered anything of note.
Then came the interview with his mother.
The notes were nearly incoherent; his mother was so grief-stricken, so scared, that she was little help to the investigation.
There are photos of the blue Lynx station wagon sitting abandoned on the gravel road.
Jamie reads through the forensic report: Jamie’s fingerprints and his mother’s were found in the car.
He had forgotten about that, getting his fingerprints taken for comparison purposes.
There were two other sets of partial prints also found in the car, one set thought to be Juneau’s, the other unknown.
The same goes for the DNA found, but to date there have been no matches.
Jamie turns the page and is met with the image of his swollen, disfigured face. He winces at the memory, runs his tongue over
his dental implants, put into place when he was eighteen and his jaw had fully developed. Up until then he wore a removable
retainer with prosthetic teeth that never quite fit his mouth. He doesn’t linger long on the photo and flips the page to his
interviews. There were at least a dozen of them, most conducted by Sheriff Colson who was a deputy at the time, but in each
he said the same things: He didn’t know who took Juneau; he didn’t know who beat him up; he didn’t see or hear anything. The
exception was in the final interviews he gave before he and his mother moved away—a last-ditch effort to squeeze any additional
information out of him. It took place in their motel room, and Sheriff Colson sat across from Jamie at this same table, his
mother sat on the sofa, looking anxiously at them both, willing Jamie to remember something, anything.
And then, miraculously, Jamie did remember something.
He was lying in the ditch, pain radiating through his hip, his heart nearly pounding out of his chest, listening to the crunching of feet coming toward him through the grass.
There was a bright light, a flashlight maybe, making it impossible to see the face of who was coming toward him—he was big, monstrously tall, and broad-shouldered—all of which he mentioned before.
Then he remembers the flashlight catching a glint of silver.
The silver tip of a fawn-colored cowboy boot with elaborate stitching.
Of what? Jamie remembers his twelve-year-old self squeezing his eyes tightly shut trying to picture the design. “An owl?” Jamie said it as a question.
“An owl?” Colson repeated.
“Yes, an owl. It had wings and eyes, but it didn’t look like a real owl, more like . . .” Jamie hadn’t been able to quite put it into words.
“More like the suggestion of an owl?” Colson had asked, and he had agreed.
Jamie looks up from the binder. He had all but forgotten about this detail. After he told Colson about the boots, he and his
mother moved away, and he’d never heard another word about it. But Colson clearly had not forgotten. He had printed off pages
and pages of pictures of boots that might have matched Jamie’s description. Now, he examines each, but none of them are quite
right.
The rest of the binder chronicles tips that have come in over the years and the follow-up conversations that Colson and other
deputies had; nothing came from any of it.
Jamie closes the binder and sets it aside, and a dark cloud of melancholy settles over him. It’s his own fault. He knew stepping
back into this world would be painful. He reaches for the yearbook and skims through the pages until he finds Juneau’s school
photo, the same one that’s at the front of the binder, then finds his own and shakes his head. He thought he was so tough,
so much better than his classmates. He wonders what could have happened if he’d tried a little harder.
He finds the photo of Laura Holt with her smattering of freckles and wishes he remembered her.
He flips through the pages until he comes across the spread dedicated to the football team.
There’s a group photo of the team together, decked out in their gear, standing in rows shoulder to shoulder, but there is also another photo that causes Jamie to sit up in his seat.
It’s a picture of Wes Drake with seven other boys.
They are dressed in their football jerseys but are wearing jeans and cowboy hats and holding—unbelievably—shotguns.
That sure wouldn’t fly in this day and age.
The caption reads “Senior gridders take aim at a state title.” The photo credit is listed as Juneau Archer.
Jamie pulls the book close to his face to get a better look at Wes who is a head taller than and twice as broad as his teammates.
He’s certainly slimmed down over the years, Jamie thinks, and that’s when he notices what Wes is wearing on his feet: metal-tipped cowboy boots.
But everyone else on the team is wearing boots too. Every single person in Nightjar probably has at least two pairs in their
closet. His cell buzzes, and Jamie looks at the clock. It’s nearly ten thirty. He considers letting the call go to voicemail
but thinks twice. It might be Greta or one of the deputies with some info for him. He flips the phone over, and it’s a number
he doesn’t recognize. “Hello,” he says cautiously.
“Agent Saldano, this is Laura Holt. I’m sorry I’m calling so late, but I just wanted to tell you I remembered something. About
Juneau. It’s probably nothing . . .”
“No, no, that’s okay. What is it?” Jamie asks, trying not to get his hopes up.
“I completely forgot about it, and I never mentioned it to the police, but I did see Juneau about a month or two before she
disappeared. It was at the Dairy Ranch. She was behind the building, eating an ice cream cone.”
“Was she with anyone?” Jamie asks, his pulse quickening.
“Not at first,” Laura says. “Like I said, it probably doesn’t mean anything, but she was behind the building, and then someone
came up to her.” Laura pauses, as if hesitant to continue. Jamie wants to hurry her along, tell her to just say it, but doesn’t
want to scare her away.
She takes a deep breath, then continues. “They talked for a minute, and then they started kissing. I think it was Wes,” Laura
says. “Wes Drake.”