Page 76 of The Perfect Hosts

“We’ll sort through it, but for now lie facedown. Do it!”

Lucy complies but continues to talk. “He wouldn’t stop. He was so angry. I grabbed his gun. I told him to stop, but he wouldn’t listen.”

“Stop talking,” Jamie says. He snaps a pair of handcuffs around Lucy’s wrists, then rattles off her Miranda rights and asks if she understands.

“Yes,” Lucy says, her words muffled by the floor. “Madeline? Madeline? Are you okay? Is she okay?”

Madeline is still crying, gasping for air and unable to speak, and Jamie takes a closer look at the injuries around her neck. Her trachea and face are swollen, and small crescent-shaped abrasions line her neck where he imagines her fingernails dug into her skin hoping to loosen the belt. “Madeline,” Jamie says, “the ambulance is on its way. It’s going to be okay. Is that what happened? Did Wes try to kill you?”

Madeline looks up at him. Her gaze is unfocused, and smallred pinpoints dot her eyes and lids. Broken blood vessels from the attempted strangulation.

She gives a slight nod. “Johanna,” she rasps. She winces as if she just swallowed broken glass. “She knew,” Madeline says hoarsely, each word an effort. “I think he did it. I think he killed Johanna. There are pictures of what Wes was doing to me. Johanna was the one who took them.”

Jamie runs the scenario through his mind. Initially, he thought that Wes and Johanna were having an affair, but this makes sense. What had Wes texted Johanna?Johanna, come on. You know me.And Johanna had responded,No more secrets.The secret wasn’t an affair, it was domestic abuse.

“The baby,” Madeline rasps through her damaged vocal cords. “I think it’s coming.”

“No!” Lucy cries, struggling against her restraints. “No! You have to help her. It’s too early.” Jamie helps Lucy to her feet and leads her to a corner of the bedroom.

The sound of approaching sirens fills the air, and within minutes EMTs flood the room. They are loading Wes and Madeline onto stretchers when Lucy asks, “Is he dead?” Her words are lost in the chaos of the scene. Jamie knows Wes is probably dead, and if he isn’t, he’ll never be able to open his eyes or speak again. He also knows that whatever secrets Wes Drake had, he has taken them to the grave.

Hours later, back in his motel room, Jamie lies on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. He and Sheriff Colson spent the last several hours interviewing Lucy Quaid, who repeated everything she had said to him earlier. She entered the room to find Wes choking Madeline, she tried to stop him, and when he wouldn’t she was able to grab his handgun and use it against him. Though the bullet struck him in the shoulder, Wes kept coming, turning his rage on Lucy and knocking the firearmfrom her hand. There was a struggle, with Madeline coming up with the gun and firing the final bullet.

Colson asked Lucy if Wes was so intent on killing his wife, why didn’t he just shoot her with the gun he had with him? Why slip off his belt and try to strangle her? Jamie thought he knew the answer—domestic abusers liked to inflict pain, liked the control they had over their victims, and besides, strangling was quieter than a gunshot. In the end, they let Lucy leave the station. Her story made sense given the evidence. They found the pictures documenting Madeline’s abuse in the desk drawer in the stable office and the originals on Johanna Monaghan’s home computer. From where they sat, the shooting was justified.

And for now, in Jamie’s mind at least, Wes is still the main suspect in the murder of Johanna. Between the photos of him entering the barn behind her just before the explosion, the threatening text messages, and the fact that she knew about the domestic abuse, it’s their best bet, though there are some loose ends he needs to tidy up.

And then there’s the second murder now linked to Wes, though Jamie hasn’t voiced this suspicion aloud. He got there too late. Wes Drake was brain-dead before Jamie had the chance to ask him about Juneau, before he could beat the truth out of him, and now he’ll never know what happened to his sister. The thought makes him want to break every piece of furniture in this hellhole of a room.

He reaches for his phone. He expects the call to go to voicemail, but Tess picks up on the third ring.

“Jamie?” she asks groggily. He glances at the alarm clock on the bureau. Five in the morning. He finds he can’t speak. Grief has coiled itself around his vocal cords. “Jamie?” Tess repeats, this time on high alert. “What’s going on? Are you okay?”

“I just wanted to hear your voice,” he manages to say finally.

“Well, you picked quite the time to hear it,” Tess says, not meanly, but her words aren’t filled with the warmth he’d hoped.

He wants to tell Tess about Nightjar, about walking down the dark mountain roads, about the man who took Juneau, but all he can say is “I’m almost done here. Just a few more days and I’ll be able to head home. I’ve got a lot to tell you.”

“Good,” Tess says. “That’s good.” Silence stretches between them, and Jamie wants to lie here with his phone pressed against his ear listening to Tess’s breathing until he falls asleep. “But don’t wait until you get home,” Tess says. “Call me tonight. I want to hear all about it.”

Chapter 40

Jamie

One week later, Jamie once again wakes up in his room at the Grandview. Something still isn’t sitting right with him about the case. Tess says she understands, but Jamie isn’t so sure. Their late-night phone conversations are becoming more and more stilted, and it feels like they’re right back where they started.

Jamie crawls from the bed and slips on his shoes and a sweatshirt. He wheels his bike from the room and down the metal steps and begins to ride toward the mountains.

In the dark his head begins to clear, and he thinks about the three women in Wes’s life he was determined to silence—Johanna, Madeline, and Juneau. Wes is now a proven domestic abuser. Madeline had the injuries to prove that. The latest update is that she is still in serious condition, and the doctors are doing their best to stop her labor. Juneau, though her remains have never been found, most likely faced a similar ordeal at the hands of Wes. Jamie was beaten so badly by the person who had taken Juneau that he had been unrecognizable.

It’s Johanna’s death that doesn’t fit the pattern. Wes was a hothead who used his fists and his feet to get his point across, so why had he planted an IED? Wasn’t Wes more likely to isolate Johanna and make her disappear as he did Juneau?

By the time he finds himself back at the sheriff’s office, he’sno closer to answering those questions. He should feel good at being able to close two cases at once, and probably a third, but something doesn’t quite fit. He begins to read through Wes’s financials that Greta sent.

After two hours, the numbers are blurring, and all Jamie knows is that that the Drakes are obscenely wealthy. Tucked within the documents is one sheet of paper with the letterhead of the Woodson County Courthouse at the top. It’s a quitclaim deed that shows the transfer of property from an LLC called Mustang River Ridge to Lone Tree Ranch. He finds the signatures at the bottom of the deed. For some reason, Dix Drake has deeded millions of dollars of land to his brother.

For the last week, he’s been spending hours each day reviewing security-camera footage from the hardware store in Snowcap where the PVC piping, duct tape, and double-headed nails were purchased. Today’s no different, and for the next six hours he watches the footage until he thinks his eyes are going to start bleeding. Finally an image appears on the screen. The video isn’t the best quality, but it clearly shows the items being purchased and who is buying them.