“So what happened next?”
“By the time Corbett got there, he found the bulkhead door open. He said there were new tracks leading from the basement off into the trees. He wanted to pursue, but I told him to stay put until I called you.”
“You want me to go over there?”
“I have more confidence in your finding him. My guys aren’t trained to look for a kid in the woods. Besides, you already have a relationship with the boy. Just remember, he may be armed.”
“I need to ask Rivard.”
“With the snow coming, he’s about ready to suspend the search. He thinks you would be better off looking for the boy.”
I felt like a prehistoric animal that had fallen into a tar pit. No matter how much I struggled, I couldn’t extricate myself from the mess the Sewalls had created. “I need to stop by the jail first,” I said.
The suspicion in Rhine’s voice came through the receiver. “Why?”
“To talk with Jamie. Something tells me that she might know where Lucas went.”
The opportunity to see her again was no small incentive, either.
32
From the outside, you might have mistaken the Washington County jail for a new building, but inside, the ceilings hung low and the air had the stuffy chill of a mausoleum. The brick walls were the color of curdled cream and showed signs of having been painted innumerable times for the sole purpose of keeping inmates busy. Men had died in this building, and it didn’t take much of an imagination to sense their presence in the flickering lights and the sudden drafts that moved through the halls.
The grizzled captain who ran the jail met me at the door, along with a couple of slack-jawed guards who seemed to have nothing better to do. The sheriff had a meeting with the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency, the captain said in a tone that suggested the discussion would be an unpleasant event for everyone involved.
Jails tend to be loud, clanging places filled with shouts, echoes, and the slamming of metal doors. The guards made me secure my service weapon in a wall-mounted lockbox before they led me into the visitation room. The room smelled of disinfectant sprayed over every possible surface. A Plexiglas barrier running down the center of a table divided the inmates’ side from the visitors’. There was an intercom-type contraption in the glass to speak through.
“No sign of Prester?” the captain said.
“Not yet.”
“First the brother, now the sister.” He gave me that familiar world-weary expression that all law-enforcement officers eventually adopt. “Quite the family, them Sewalls.”
“Quite the family,” I agreed.
A lock clicked loudly, and the door opened on the visitors’ side of the barrier. A stout blond woman in a khaki uniform led Jamie into the room. She was wearing a jumpsuit the color of a moldering tangerine. The guard guided her, not ungently, into a chair facing me through the glass.
Jamie’s eyes were threaded with veins, her skin looked bleached, and her hair was a rat’s nest.
I recalled the seductive woman who had shown up at my motel door, the one with the soft curves who had curled against me in bed and confessed her desire to escape her depressing life for some tropical paradise. She was nearly unrecognizable as the suffering person seated across from me, and I was left to wonder what, if anything, had been real between us.
“Fancy meeting you here.” Her voice sounded like she’d been gargling with sand.
“You look like you’ve had a hard night.”
“Gee. Do you think?”
“If you’d needed a ride, you should have called me rather than driving drunk.”
“I wasn’t drunk.”
“The trooper who arrested you says you were.”
“I was buzzed.”
Her hands were trembling-either from nervousness or withdrawal from substances unknown. I realized I could smell the alcohol on her breath through the holes in the glass.
“What about the Adderall the trooper found in your purse?” I asked. “Did that get in there by accident?”
“Those were Tammi’s. She has a prescription. I picked them up for her at Rite Aid.” She lifted her cleft chin and showed her teeth to the assembled deputies. “Can we have some privacy here?”
I nodded to give my consent, and the men filed out.
I motioned to the wall-mounted camera above my head. “They can still see us, you know.”
“Just as long as I don’t have to look into their stupid faces.” She pushed a strand of greasy hair back over her ear. “You don’t have to be such an asshole, you know? I didn’t do anything to hurt you. You shouldn’t treat me like I did.”
“I’m sorry.”
Her voice quavered. “Have you found Prester yet?”
“We’re still looking.”
“Let me know when you do, please.”
I felt sorry for her in her intoxication and her grief and that pathetic jumpsuit, but I was still angry. “If you didn’t want to talk with me, couldn’t you have just gone to a meeting or called your sponsor last night?”
“Why? So she could talk me out of it? I wanted to get drunk. I wanted to get high. Is that so fucking hard to understand?”
I wasn’t entirely sure where to begin. “Jamie, you’re in serious trouble.”
She began to blink back tears. “Don’t you think I know that!”
“If you’re found guilty and sent to prison, the state is going to remove Tammi and Lucas from your house.”
“They can’t do that!” Her voice broke as she spoke the words.
“They can, and they will.” I needed to tell her that Lucas had run away, needed to find out where the boy might have gone, but one unanswered question kept pushing its way to the front of my brain. “If I’m going to help you,” I said, “I need to know the truth about something.”
She narrowed her eyes. “What?”
“I went to Wyman Hill last night, over in Township Nineteen. Do you remember how I told you I saw a snowmobile out on the Heath the night Randall was murdered? I know whose sled it was now.”
She brought her hands together in a praying motion but remained silent.
I leaned forward. “Mitch was the one Prester and Randall were meeting on the afternoon of the blizzard, wasn’t it? He was buying drugs from them.”
She looked up suddenly. “That’s not what happened.”
“So tell me the truth.”
“I can’t.”
“Do you want Prester to be remembered as a murderer? Is that what you want for your brother?”
“Mitch is Lucas’s father.”
“That won’t stop me from taking him down.”
“Mitch didn’t kill Randall. I swear to God he didn’t.” Tears streamed down her face. “This is all my fault. Everything that happened is all my fault.”
She had said these same words before, and I had assumed she meant it in the sense of bad karma plaguing her for past misdeeds. “What happened?”
She wasn’t so stoned that she didn’t give a glance at the wall-mounted camera. “Randall beat up Lucas. He knocked him to the ground and bruised the whole side of his face. I thought he might have broken his arm, too. I asked Prester to do something about it-be a man for once-but he wouldn’t because he was too afraid of Randall. So I said, ‘Couldn’t you just lure him somewhere where Mitch could kick the shit out of him?’ He knows karate, and if he took Randall by surprise… I just wanted Mitch to beat Randall up.”
