“They’ve raised the reward?” This was the first Nic had heard of it.
“Yeah, they told that blonde reporter on Channel Four about it this morning. Five hundred thousand dollars if she’s found alive. They got some of the dad’s business friends to kick in, and took out a second mortgage on their house. You can imagine what that’s going to do to the volume of tips. I just didn’t know some girl would rat out her own brother just for cash.”
“It’s her stepbrother,” Nic corrected. Thinking of the distance in the girl’s gaze, she added, “And maybe she had her reasons. Maybe she really thought it was true. Maybe she knows her stepbrother is capable of doing bad things.”
She turned on her heel and went back up the stairs, leaving a startled Leif gaping after her. The girl was sitting on the porch now, her head in her hands. As Nic walked past, she squeezed her shoulder.
Later that day, the task force released a statement. “All indications are that Michael Cray received those injuries at a time well before Katie Converse’s disappearance.”
MARK O. HATFIELD UNITED STATES COURTHOUSE
December 23
The two grand juries met for two days on alternate weeks in a large room located on the third floor of the federal courthouse. This particular group, twenty-three private citizens from all over Oregon who received a whopping forty dollars a day from Uncle Sam, had already worked through eleven of the eighteen months they would ultimately serve together. Over the past year Allison had watched them become friends and comrades, celebrating birthdays, handing around photos of pets and babies, swapping paperbacks. At breaks they gathered in the kitchen to share snacks and make tea and coffee.
As she hurried into the grand jury room, Allison’s nose was assailed with the smell of greasy leftover pizza. Swallowing her queasiness, she put her things on the prosecutor’s table and turned toward the grand jurors’ expectant faces. The group never knew what they might be asked to investigate—domestic terrorism by extreme environmentalists, hate crimes against a local synagogue, men using the Internet to meet teenagers for sex. By now they had heard over a hundred cases.
The grand jury was Allison’s—and any prosecutor’s—investigative arm. Even when they weren’t in session, in their name Allison could issue a search warrant or a subpoena compelling a witness to testify before them.
“Good morning,” Allison said. “Today I’m going to bring you a case about a missing girl. We want to find out if there was foul play. The girl’s name is Katie Converse.”
As she spoke, she held up the poster of Katie and saw several nods of recognition. Grand jurors weren’t banned from watching the media, which meant they often had a passing familiarity with any headline cases she brought them. But now that they knew they would be considering the case, they would have to stay away from any fresh news about it. And no matter how high-profile the case, they were sworn to keep secret what went on inside the grand jury room.
While a grand jury might consider dozens of cases over the course of a year, they never saw a single one through until the end. Instead, they served only to investigate various criminal cases and formally indict any suspects. In some cases, they voted not to indict. Because they weren’t asked to determine guilt or innocence, only decide whether charges should be officially filed, their standards were looser than those of a trial jury. And the grand jury didn’t even need to be unanimous: only eighteen of the twenty-three needed to agree.
“I’d like to call to the stand FBI Special Agent Nicole Hedges.”
After being brought in from the anteroom and sworn in by the court reporter, Nicole explained to the grand jurors who Katie was, how the page program worked, and what steps authorities had already taken in their efforts to find the girl.
“We recovered a computer that belonged to Katie,” Nicole said, “and found that Katie had been keeping a blog, which is like an online diary. In the blog, Katie talked about a boy from either the House or Senate page program, but that relationship ended several months before her disappearance. She seemed to be having a tumultuous relationship with someone, but we don’t know who. As time went on, she talked more and more about someone she called Senator X. Senator Fairview was Katie’s sponsor in the page program. We believe that there is a good chance that he is actually Senator X.”
“Do you have any questions for Special Agent Hedges?” Allison asked the jurors. She liked to hear what regular people wanted to ask. If there had been foul play—and she prayed that there hadn’t—then the grand jurors’ questions could help shape Allison’s approach to any future trial. And sometimes the jurors even thought of angles she had missed.