Page 22 of The Perfect Hosts

“What are you up to today?” Jamie asks, as he watches a mule deer and her fawn cross the asphalt parking lot.

“The same thing I’ve been doing for the last two months. Looking for a job. But wait, that’s right. There are zero jobs in consulting right now. Especially in Wyoming,” Tess says irritably. “But you knew that already because I told you this would happen.”

“Tess,” Jamie says wearily. “Come on...” His voice is loud in the morning quiet, and the sound startles the deer and fawn, and they scurry away.

“Yeah, got it,” Tess says, her voice thick with tears. “You don’t really want to know what I’m doing today, just want the credit for asking.”

“I’ll call you later,” Jamie says. “We’ll talk about it when I get back to my motel. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah,” Tess sniffs. “Me too.”

Jamie disconnects. He knows it’s been hard for Tess, but she agreed to move to Cheyenne. He didn’t force her, and at the time she had some job leads. It wasn’t his fault they fell through. He had wanted to tell Tess about seeing Wes Drakeafter all these years, wanted her take on things. They used to be able to do that, talk about everything.

As Jamie pulls out of the parking lot and drives toward the Drake ranch, he tells himself that things with Tess will sort themselves out. They’ll work it out. They always do. But he can’t help but kick himself for not identifying himself to the Drakes. His presence at the site of an explosion involving the man who once saved his life could easily and understandably be misconstrued. No matter how fastidiously he investigates, even the whiff of favoritism could blow a potential murder case and sully Jamie’s reputation as an ATF agent. He has to make this right. He’ll have to say he didn’t make the connection at the hospital. It has been twenty-seven years after all, and the Drake name is common in the area.

Thirty minutes later, he turns onto the road that will take him to the ranch. In a recently mowed stretch of the meadow are a dozen vehicles. The guests and hired workers must have parked here for the party. Grimly, Jamie knows the remaining cars probably belong to the injured and dead.

Today Jamie is dressed for the crime scene. Lace-up waterproof boots, jeans, an ATF windbreaker, and service revolver at his hip. Using his cell phone, he pauses to snap photos of the vehicles and their license plates, hoping that local law enforcement will have already done so. Still, at some point he’ll speak with the owners. He leaves his car parked on the side of the road and begins the trek toward the house and the explosion site. The guests would have made this same walk after parking their cars, or more likely, the Drakes would have had an ATV or golf cart handy to bring them the rest of the way to the house.

The Drake home, made of stone, lumber, and glass, looms large against the rugged landscape. Jamie guesses with itsthree thousand acres, the property has a price tag of upward of around twenty million.

The Drakes were well-known in Woodson County when Jamie was a kid. Wes’s father was one of the biggest landowners in a county where the number of acres you own means everything. Jamie didn’t meet him until after Juneau disappeared and Jamie was out of the ICU. Mr. Drake wanted to meet the young man his son had rescued and express his condolences. Jamie remembered Wes’s dad as a large man, with a sun-craggy face and sharp blue eyes. He was warm and kind and said goodbye to Jamie’s mom with a lingering hug.

After Jamie was released from the hospital, he and his mother tried to get on with life in Nightjar, but it was too hard. The sky was too big, their motel room strangely too small without Juneau. At night, after his mother passed out from the sleeping pills the doctor prescribed, Jamie would sneak out of the house and find himself limping along the gravel road where his sister disappeared, searching. Without fail, Deputy Colson would end up on the same stretch of road, flashing his truck’s brights to let Jamie know it was him.

“Aren’t you nervous being out here by yourself so late at night?” Colson asked one night after cajoling Jamie into his truck.

“Not really,” Jamie said dully, looking out the passenger-side window. “Why would he bother killing me now? It’s obvious I didn’t see anything.” Colson didn’t have anything to say to this but tried to fill the silence with small talk while he drove Jamie home.

Juneau’s case grew cold, and just before Christmas, his mother told them they were moving on. They argued bitterly, and Jamie vowed to stay behind. “How can you give up?” he would shout. “How can you leave, knowing she’s out there somewhere?”

“Because she’s not,” his mother said, tossing their meager possessions into plastic tote boxes. “She’s gone, Jamie.” She paused to look at him, her eyes uncharacteristically clear. “She’s dead and never coming back.”

Now in the light of day, the ranch is abuzz with law enforcement. Crime-scene techs dressed in their protective gear sift through the rubble of the burnt-out barn. Another cluster of techs are standing around a large crater in the meadow just beyond the stables. It appears there are two explosion sites. Not unheard of, but they are so far apart with no apparent destruction in between.

“Thanks for coming,” a voice behind him says. Jamie turns to find a man dressed in coveralls and a hard hat. “Dave Ostrenga, Wyoming State Fire Marshal,” he says sticking out his hand. “Glad you could come out so quickly. This one’s got us a little stumped.”

“Jamie Saldano,” Jamie says, taking the marshal’s hand. It’s cold and calloused. “Glad to be of help. I spoke briefly to the homeowners last night at the hospital. Sounds like a gender reveal gone rogue.”

“Yeah, at first glance.” Ostrenga starts walking toward the meadow, and Jamie falls into step next to him. “Apparently, Wes Drake got it in his head to pack an old Dodge with Tannerite and blow it up in front of a crowd of two hundred.” The two walk through a meadow littered with chunks of metal and stop in front of a charred hole carved into the dirt. Tannerite is a mixture of ammonium nitrate and ammonium perchlorate—not explosive on their own, but when combined and ignited by a high-speed bullet, the result is a booming explosion. Mix it with pink or blue powder and you’ve got a gender reveal in a mushroom cloud. Mix it with gunpowder or gasoline and you get an IED.

“How much Tannerite did he use?” Jamie asks, surveying the crater.

“Wes says four pounds,” Ostrenga says, shaking his head. “But from the looks of things, I’m guessing someone added something to the mixture.”

“That would explain this mess,” Jamie says. “But it doesn’t look like the debris went any farther than over there.” He points to a gnarled hubcap.

“Yeah,” Ostrenga says, taking off his hat and running his hand across his balding head. “The witnesses I talked to say that the explosions happened almost simultaneously.”

“Wes and Madeline Drake thought there was a second or two in between the blasts. Could one explosion have triggered the other?” Jamie asks.

Ostrenga shrugs. “Too early to tell, but I doubt it. There’s a good football-field distance between the two blasts. The debris fields will tell us more. Weird coincidence, though, and the Drakes aren’t exactly a low-profile outfit.”

“Arson?” Jamie asks.

“I’d like to find out what caused the second blast before I start speculating,” Ostrenga says.

“Any reason to believe the homeowners would be involved?” Jamie asks.