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