After Jet leaves my office, I have no desire to wait for my reporters to find excuses to come in and ask what she was doing here. By now the whole staff knows she’s defending Max. Before they start filtering in, I grab my keys and phones and head out early for my coffee at Constant Reader.
After starting the Flex, I try to find something calming on Sirius. As I tap the preset button, my eyes are drawn to an irregular line on my steering wheel. I jerk back, thinking it might be a roach or something. But it’s not a roach.
It’s a flash drive. A black USB thumb drive, 64 GB.
Someone has affixed it to my steering wheel with Scotch tape. The drive is a Lexar, available at any Office Depot. Taking out my iPhone, I text Nadine at the bookstore: Have you replaced your computer yet? I need to borrow one.
While I wait for a reply, the hair rises on my neck and arms. The Flex was locked when I came outside. I had to use my key fob to get in. That means somebody broke into my vehicle, left the flash drive, then locked the Flex again so nothing would seem odd as I climbed in. This is like the cracked safe at Nadine’s store last night. Too smooth by half.
My iPhone pings. Nadine’s reply reads: I have a laptop here.
I feel confident that her laptop will be an older model with at least one full-size USB port. I’ll see you in a couple of minutes, I type.
Come in the back door, she answers. Late breakfast crowd still here. Hostile to u and ur staff. I’ll bring ur coffee to the back.
Understood. I add a thumbs-up emoji and a coffee cup. Juvenile, maybe, but effective. This is what American communication has come to: adults sending each other cartoons.
Nadine’s office at Constant Reader is between the customer area and the back, where she stores inventory and café supplies. But when I slip through the back door off Barton Alley, I find a silver MacBook sitting on a large Formica-topped table, surrounded by stacked and flapped copies of A Land More Kind Than Home, by Wiley Cash. The North Carolina author must be coming to autograph books in the next day or two.
As I sit at the laptop, a door opens and shuts to my right, and Nadine appears with a steaming mug of coffee. She’s wearing black capri pants and a tight-fitting navy top.
“You have a power outage at the paper or something?” she asks. “Why do you need my computer?”
I take the flash drive out of my pocket and hold it up. “Somebody left this taped to my steering wheel. In my locked SUV. I didn’t want to go back into the office to open it.”
“Why not?”
“Jet stopped by to see me this morning. She represented Max at his arraignment. I didn’t want people questioning me about her reasons.”
“I already heard. It’s all over town. What are her reasons, by the way?”
“Family.” I sigh. “Let’s just leave it at that for now. I still can’t get my head around it, to be honest.”
Nadine watches me for a while before commenting. “Max’s murder trial is going to be the biggest circus this state has seen in years. It’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Mississippi style.”
I shake my head, shoving that image out of my mind. “Let’s see what the flash-drive fairy left in my ride.” I slide the drive into the USB socket, then take a careful sip from my coffee mug. “Oh, I needed that.”
“I’ve got to get back up front,” Nadine says. “Big crowd this morning.”
“They’re pissed about our story on Buck?”
“They’d tar and feather you if they could get away with it.”
“I don’t know who would stop them.”
She gives me a quick smile. “That’s why I told you to come back here. See you in a minute.”
This courtesy is typical of Nadine. She’d give her eyeteeth to see what’s on the flash drive, but she’s going to let me check it first.
The Lexar appears to contain only a single file: a JPEG image. With my fingertip poised over the track pad, I freeze, suddenly certain that I’m about to open a digital photo of Jet leaning against the balcony rail of the Aurora Hotel, her dress hiked over her waist. Or worse, sitting astride me on the steamer chaise on my back patio. Anybody standing in the woods could have shot such a picture with a cell phone, though they would have had to zoom the hell out of it. With a smartphone, they could’ve shot video of the whole act. If I wait any longer to check, Nadine will reappear. Better to find out now.
I tap the track pad and wait the fraction of a second it takes the image to coalesce on Nadine’s screen. I’m not sure at first what I’m looking at. It appears to be a night shot, a low-resolution image like those I’ve seen taken by wild game cameras. Hunters and curious landowners fasten these motion-triggered cameras to trees to keep track of nocturnal game movements on their property. Old friends from high school have shown me shots of huge bucks as well as coyotes and even a black bear captured on the devices.
Enlarging the image a little, I see two adult men facing each other across three feet of empty space. They’re not centered in the frame, but stand to the right. With a couple of clicks, I zoom the image more, then move it laterally to center the faces.
A chill goes through me. The man on the left is Buck Ferris. Even in the pixelated low-res image, I see his ponytail hanging down his chest. The other man is shorter than Buck and more heavily built. Zooming the picture another 20 percent, I get only marginal improvement. I’m at the limits of the camera and the viewing program. Staring intently at the second man’s features, and the way his head sits on his shoulders, I recognize the face of one of the men with the Poker Club guys at the groundbreaking ceremony. He was standing just outside the Prime Shot tent, drinking a beer from a bottle. It’s Dave Cowart, the contractor Jet got sent to jail for a year. Cowart works for Beau Holland, the man who tried to assault me on the roof of the Aurora Hotel last night.
“Thank you, whoever you are,” I murmur, wondering who could have broken into my vehicle and taped the drive to my steering wheel. I search the background of the image for landmarks but see none. Only darkness.
Then I go still. The image has a time and date stamp in its bottom left corner. Because I’ve always seen these on game camera photos, I didn’t think anything about it. But on this photo, it means everything. This photo was shot two nights ago, at 1:17 a.m.
Buck was murdered two nights ago.
“Don’t tell me,” Nadine says, backing through the door with a box of books. “Some local hottie left you nude selfies.”
“Take a look,” I say, leaning back to give her room. “A lot better than selfies.”
She leans forward and studies the screen for fifteen seconds.
“That’s Buck,” she says softly. “I see his ponytail!”
“Yep.”
“Who’s the other man?”
“Dave Cowart. The contractor Jet sent to jail for rigging bids. He works for Beau Holland. And that time stamp says this was shot on the night Buck was killed.”
Nadine turns slowly to me, her eyes flickering with excitement. “What are you going to do?”
“Copy it onto your hard drive first, if that’s okay.”
She nods. “After that?”
“Make about ten more copies, then give one to the police.”
“They won’t do a damn thing with it.”
“Probably not. But I have to give it to them.” With a couple of clicks I save the image to Nadine’s desktop.
“Are you going to print it in the paper?” she asks. “That’s what I want to know.”
“Oh, I think you can count on that.”
“Who the hell shot that picture?”
“I think it was captured on an automatic game camera. A trail camera. Someone must have put some up to cover the mill site. I didn’t see any last night, but then I didn’t see much but dirt and bricks.”
“So there could be pictures of you from last night? Of us?”
A ripple of fear goes through my chest. “There could be.”
Almost of its own accord, my right forefinger moves toward the image, then hovers, moving up and down. Something’s coming to me . . .