Chapter 49
Jojo’d loved puzzles as a child. The big ones, with five hundred or a thousand pieces, were passed around from one Amish family to another, but the hardest puzzles weren’t necessarily the ones with the most pieces.
The most difficult puzzles were those that’d been passed around so often they were no longer in the original box with a picture on the front of the completed puzzle.
With no idea what the result looks like, it’s way harder to get all the pieces to fit together.
Those puzzles were a good metaphor for police investigations.
Since Conor and Jojo had gone out at the crack of dawn to bring in the man who wasn’t really Adam Cruz, by noon, the case against him as the shooter had come together snug, and by late afternoon, the “wrapping things up” process had already begun.
There were still some pieces missing, like ballistics reports on his rifles—he had more than one—forensics reports on a whole slew of fibers collected on the roof of the chalet and around a tree at the end of Long Bottom Road, and the boot-to-boot-print comparisons, but the pieces they did have fit.
The man Conor had killed that morning with a T-Zone shot was not Adam Cruz.
Turns out he wasn’t Spencer Mason, either.
He started life as Jake Hadley and he grew up near the Tongass National Forest in Alaska—seventeen million acres of wilderness.
He learned to hunt and trap there, learned how to survive on his own in a wilderness … and how to vanish in one.
Fast forward to West Virginia in 2015 where Jake Hadley had gone through a caterpillar-into-a-moth transformation to become Bradley Wilcox.
He hunted and trapped (read that: poached) in the million acres of the Monongahela National Forest, and did odd jobs, including helping neighboring farmers with livestock, which is where he crossed paths with Jojo Kaufmann and Roosevelt the bull.
Mr. Wilcox ran afoul of the law in Franklin, West Virginia shortly after his encounter with Jojo and Roosevelt.
Police there suspected he murdered his girlfriend for cheating on him, but before they could make an arrest, he vanished into the wilderness of the national forest. Another forest, another transformation, and he became Spencer Mason in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.
In 2018, he was suspected of beating a man to death with a pipe wrench for screwing his girlfriend.
But before police could bring Mason in, he vanished into the half million acres of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
He emerged from the Smokies as Adam Cruz, who met and married Cynthia Lawrence in Nashville in 2019—because she had houses and land in the Laurel Highlands of Pennsylvania.
After he killed seven people on a ski lift because one of them, David Blackburn, was having an affair with Cynthia, he was packing his gear to vanish yet again, into the nearby wilderness area of the Laurel Ridge State Park.
But Conor McCaffrey killed the caterpillar. There’d be no more Jake Hadley moths.
Jojo and Conor sat in his office, silently drinking black coffee. They’d filed all the necessary reports, the mountain of paperwork required in an officer-involved fatal shooting, and they were waiting to catch a second wind. Jojo’d been up since 4:30. Conor’d never gone to bed at all.
“You really don’t remember bumping into the guy at Royal Oaks?” Conor said, his face beginning to show the weariness he was finally allowing himself to feel now that it was over. Jojo loved those four words.
“I remember that I bumped into a big guy who caught my arm so I wouldn’t fall down.
But Miss Observant here didn’t notice a thing, didn’t make a single connection.
” She shook her head. “And that man spent ten days trying to kill me so I wouldn’t tell what I didn’t even remember.
I did notice that his ski case was remarkably short for such a tall man.
Of course, there were no skis in the case. He was packing a .30-06 hunting rifle.”
“Jake Hadley had a sweet deal here with Cynthia bankrolling him, living his best life hunting and fishing and trapping, didn’t have to look over his shoulder for the police.
Then David Blackburn put a crack in his pretty little snow globe.
He had to kill Blackburn, but he didn’t want to have to run again, so he killed a bunch of other people—hoping we’d think it was a random mass shooting, or at the very least, we wouldn’t know for sure who was the intended victim.
He figured eventually he’d become one of a whole herd of suspects, but his identity as Cynthia Cruz’s husband was solid.
There was only one little fly in that buttermilk—Jojo Kaufmann.
He thought you recognized him that night at Royal Oaks.
You had to be eliminated. Only you could connect him to West Virginia, and he couldn’t let the police go poking around there. That would have set the dogs on him.”
“You heard that part?”
“Yeah.”
There was companionable silence between them. Then Jojo said, “Listen, Conor, I?—”
“Don’t. This is the thank-you-for-saving-my-life speech and all it’ll do is make us both feel awkward. Let’s just pretend you already gave it and move on.” He didn’t let her think about that, just changed the subject. “When are you going to have a talk with Annie Miller’s mother?”
So far, they’d managed to keep the arrest bottled up. The press hadn’t caught on yet and maybe the feeding frenzy wouldn’t start until tomorrow.
“Monday evenings are sewing circle so Martha’s busy tonight. I’ll go tomorrow.” Jojo was really dreading it. Martha Miller believed catching the man who “shot out her little girl’s heart” would make her feel better. Jojo knew it wouldn’t.
Conor dragged himself to his feet. “I’m going home,” he announced. “Sleep in my own bed. What a concept.”
“I’m going to hang out here with Trident for a little longer.”
“I’m really sorry?—”
“It’s better than the damned animal shelter.”
After Conor left, Jojo fluffed up the pile of blankets that he had put in the corner to be Trident’s bed and then walked Trident out to chat for a few minutes with the dispatcher, Linda Carter.
“Oh, he’ll be a lot of company to me,” she said, reached over and scratched Trident behind the ears.
Trident wasn’t the kind of cuddly dog that wanted to be scratched behind the ears. Rascal loved it. Rascal’s eyes rolled back in his head every time you touched him. Jojo suspected that Trident was probably annoyed by the ear scratching but accepted it stoically.
“I’m sure he’ll just curl up in that corner where Lieutenant McCaffrey made him a bed and I won’t hear a peep out of him.”
“I’ll take him out for a potty break before I leave.
And I’ll be here tomorrow morning.” She paused.
“I’d like to come get him first thing, but unfortunately, Chicago is in central time.
And I’ll probably have to wait until about ten o’clock in the morning before I can call the veterinarian’s office and get a digital copy of Trident’s rabies certificate. ”
Linda just smiled. “We’ll be fine here.”
Jojo wasn’t really all that concerned about Trident. She was the one who wouldn’t be fine.
After she walked him around the little bit of grass that grew beside the courthouse and let him do his business, she thought about taking him for a walk. He needed some exercise. But she had put on a jacket because the weather had warmed.
Now that it was getting dark, the temperature had dropped, and the jacket wasn’t enough.
Then it occurred to her she could walk the dog around inside the courthouse, lots of space and hallways.
She strolled back into the building and circled the first floor.
Then she went to the third floor, where the FBI and the ATF technicians were boxing up their equipment.
Each piece of forensic evidence in the case, tagged in its own plastic bag, sat in boxes beside the door.
She smiled at the technician who smiled back. He was a small Indian man with very thick glasses and an accent almost as thick.
As soon as he saw Trident, he lit up. “Oh, may I please pet your dog?”
“Sure.”
He leaned over and stroked the top of Trident’s head lightly. That was all. He didn’t do the scratch-behind-the-ears routine or the do-you-want-a-belly-rub routine. She appreciated that he respected the dog.
The man returned to loading the evidence.
As soon as he had it boxed up, he would call a deputy to escort him downstairs and be a witness to the chain of evidence when it changed hands.
There were the shell casings, of course, that said, LOO and Payback’s a bitch, some fiber samples that they’d gotten in the woods where the piece of Mylar had been stapled to a tree, some foot impressions, and then her glance caught something bigger.
It was one of the black rental helmets from the ski resort.
“What’s this helmet doing here?”
He reached over and flipped on a black light and instantly the top front part of the helmet showed a large red circle in some kind of glowing ink. But she could see nothing inside the circle.
“What is that encircling?” she asked.
“A mark on the top of the helmet.”
“What kind of mark?”
“Just a random thing. We analyzed the mark. It was only a streak of ChapStick. And what girl doesn’t use ChapStick when she’s going out into the snow?”
Jojo smiled, started to turn, then turned back. “Girl? What girl?”
“This is the helmet that was worn by that Amish teenager.”
ChapStick.
Jojo stared at the smear on the helmet and her mind answered the agent’s question, though she didn’t say the words out loud.
“What girl doesn’t use ChapStick when she’s going out into the snow?
” An Amish girl, that’s who. They didn’t use ChapStick.
All the helmets were brand new. Like the ski jackets, the gloves and the goggles, they were fresh out of the box.
No one had ever worn that helmet except Susanna Borntraeger.
So how did a streak of ChapStick get on the front of an Amish teenager’s ski helmet?
Looking at the helmet, an image formed in Jojo’s mind. She’d been standing in line waiting to get Miriam a black ski jacket. And she looked over at the line dispensing helmets and saw Susanna Borntraeger. It was the last time she ever saw Susanna alive.
She called the memory up and examined it in as much detail as she could.
The person who handed her a helmet was Jason Crawford.
He had asked her, “Where’s Jakob?” and the girl said something like, “He didn’t want to come.
” The boy’s response, “Aw, that’s a shame,” was so syrupy it sounded mocking and sarcastic.
Then he told her, “Have fun tonight.” And Susanna looked awkward and embarrassed.
Why would Susanna have responded that way?
Jojo paused and thought, remembering what Susanna had told her in Coffa Cupee months ago. “Oh, I’m not in love, but I’m dating this English boy, and he is.” Jojo let those thoughts percolate, stew around a bit. Another phrase surfaced. “He wants me to run off with him.”
There was something strange about the boy named Jason Crawford, something …
creepy. Susanna had seemed uncomfortable, self-conscious around him.
Jojo remembered seeing him among the other teenagers outside Susanna’s house at the wake—English kids who’d been Susanna’s friends when she’d gone on rumspringa.
He’d said, “She wouldn’t be dead if she hadn’t gone back.”
As far as the FBI could determine, there was no identifying mark on any of the rental equipment—ski jackets, helmets, gloves, none of it, except for the mark on Susanna’s helmet.
“Tell me something. What would this streak of ChapStick look like under the LED lights on the ski slope?”
“It wouldn’t look like anything.”
“You wouldn’t be able to see it?”
“No, you could see it—if you were looking for it. But you wouldn’t notice it with a casual glance because it would just look like a glossy spot on the matte surface.”
She asked a couple of other questions and then walked slowly back down the stairs.
Jojo needed to have a conversation with Jason Crawford. She wouldn’t be able to let it go until she talked to him. Yeah, the man they’d identified as the shooter was dead, but the FBI agent’s words kept clanging in her head like one of those gongs on a mountainside in Tibet.
“What girl doesn’t use ChapStick when she’s going out into the snow?” An Amish girl.
Jojo took Trident back and put him on the pile of blankets where he was to sleep. She called Conor and was glad when the call went to voicemail.
“This is so far out I’m glad I don’t have to actually explain it in person.
It’s a gut thing. I know we got the bad guy, but did we really?
That teenager, the boy who showed you where his grandparents’ house had been broken into, I think, I don’t know, but I think he might have been the English boy Susanna Borntraeger was dating on rumspringa.
She told me an English boy wanted her to run off with him.
I encouraged her to think hard before she committed to something like that, and apparently, she did, because she joined the church and got engaged to an Amish boy.
I saw that Crawford kid handing out ski helmets.
He gave one to Susanna, and the FBI found a streak of ChapStick on her helmet.
Not something you’d notice with the naked eye, but magnified in the scope of a rifle, it would be visible.
A ChapStick smear isn’t exactly ‘X marks the spot’ on a pirate map, but somebody smeared ChapStick on the helmet, and Amish girls don’t use it.
I’m sure I’m just imagining things, but I’ve decided to have a talk with the boy.
I’ll let you know what I find out.” She paused.
“And enjoy sleeping in your own bed tonight.”
Jojo asked Linda Carter to find a landline phone number for Jason’s parents, but when she called, his mother said he wasn’t home. He was at his Uncle Harold’s farm milking the cows.
If Jojo wanted to talk to Jason Crawford, she’d have to go out to the farm.