“When they found his body, birds had pecked out his eyes.”
“Gruesome,” Jeremy said, sounding almost impressed or maybe pleased. “Over here.”
He lightly tapped her arm, indicating she should follow him to a picnic table. She sat on the bench, and he sat across from her, the file folder from her backpack between them.
When she’d first started digging into her half sister’s disappearance, she’d found a profile of Jeremy in Esquire magazine. “The Patron Saint of Lost Girls,” the article was called—the unbelievable true story of a former missing boy who found missing girls. In one photo, Jeremy posed on a reservation road with two Lakota teenagers. He stood with his arms crossed, his black T-shirt showing off his biceps for the cameras. The girls looked small beside him but lovely, proud, and defiant. They’d been abducted by white men from a nearby pipeline worker camp. Tribal police had no luck finding them. State police wouldn’t bother looking, saying they’d likely run away from home. The family had called Jeremy. Thirty-eight hours later, he found them locked in the back room of a trailer. As the article stated, they were only two of the dozens of women and girls he’d rescued over the years.
And if he wouldn’t help her, no one else could.
“All right, what’s her name?” Jeremy asked.
“Shannon. Shannon Katherine Yates. But the first thing you should probably know,” Emilie said, though it was the last thing she wanted to tell him, “is that…I sort of never met her.”
“All right. You have my attention.”
It began with her mother dying of breast cancer in June. It had always been only the two of them, and they’d liked it like that. Emilie always knew she was adopted. That was never a secret, but her mother had asked her to stay away from DNA and ancestry websites, which Emilie never questioned, but maybe she should have. Emilie loved her mom, and her mom loved her. When her mother said, “Maybe don’t do that,” Emilie wouldn’t do it.
So, no looking up relatives on Ancestry or 23andMe. Until her mother died, and she was so lonely she went fishing for family.
“Sorry about your mother,” he said.
“Thanks.” She would’ve said more, but she was trying to get through all this without crying. “Um…anyway, so I did one of those DNA tests—”
“Bad idea?”
“Well…I learned pretty fast why Mom warned me off those sites.”
Emilie had always known the truth about her birth parents. Nobody knew who her father was, and her biological mother suffered from alcohol and drug addiction before her death in a car accident years ago. Sometimes Emilie had wondered about her birth family, but she’d never felt any particular connection to them. Not until her sister.
“So you had your DNA tested and found a half sister?” Jeremy asked.
“The only hits on my DNA were two distant cousins and someone listed as ‘Unknown/Close Relation.’ But there was no info, no one to contact. I was about to give up on the whole thing when I got a private message from a West Virginia homicide detective. He asked me to call his number. I thought it might be a scam, but no—real detective working on cold cases. That ‘Unknown/Close Relation’ was my half sister. He said they wanted to get all my info in case her body was ever found. They could use my DNA to identify her. I didn’t even know I had a half sister. The day I found out about her was the day I found out she’d been kidnapped and murdered.” Emilie ran her fingers through her hair. “I spit in a tube to get my DNA on that site. They got hers from the blood in the trunk of his car, where she’d cut up her hands trying to escape.”
“Wow,” Jeremy said. She was perversely proud of herself for having a story that made the guy with an almost mystical ability to find missing people say Wow.
“Right? I found some old newspaper clippings and stuff about her kidnapping.” She pointed at the file. “Age thirteen, kidnapped by a known sex offender on a Friday after getting off the school bus. By Monday, they’d found his body in the woods. Never found hers.” She took a breath. “My mom’s buried near my house. I walk there every single day. I want to bury Shannon there too. Have a real funeral or something? Even if no one shows up but me, she deserves that.”
Emilie already had the tombstone engraving planned—Shannon Katherine Yates. She deserved a better world than this one.
“Why is this so important to you? Because if the answer is that you think finding her body will help you deal with your mother’s death…I promise you, you’ll be wasting your time and money.”
“I have plenty of money to waste,” she said. “Seriously, I don’t blame you for thinking that. Mom died, and within a week, I’m looking for relatives? And maybe that was true when I started, but…” She took a long breath. “But when that cop got me on the phone, the first thing he said was ‘I need to talk to you about your sister.’ It’s stupid, I know, but there was this split second when I was so happy. I had a sister? Nobody had ever used that word with me before. The first time I felt anything other than completely alone since Mom died. Well, except for Fritz.”
“Fritz?”
“My pet rat. Named after Stevie Nicks’s first band. You didn’t need to know that. Sorry.”
“Look, Emilie—”
“Please, please, please don’t say no. Mom left me a lot of money, so I can pay you a lot. And I can help. It’s not like I have a job.”
“I wasn’t going to say no. But the forest can be a beautiful resting place,” he said. “And after twenty years, you need to understand there might not be much left of her body to find.”
She appreciated that he wasn’t trying to get his hands on her money, wasn’t trying to give her false hope. That made her trust him even more.
“I used to work as a vet tech before Mom got sick, and I quit to take care of her. One day, this guy came in with his daughter’s pet fancy rat. He said he was fighting his new cage-mates, so he wanted to euthanize him. We refused to do it. That evening I took the trash out like usual. He’d thrown the rat away in the dumpster. I mean, at least he hadn’t killed him. But still, you don’t throw living things away like that, like trash. And if somebody does, the least you can do is go and find them, right? I wouldn’t leave a rat in a dumpster, and I’m supposed to leave my thirteen-year-old sister’s body in the woods? Would you?”
He didn’t answer at first but then nodded slowly.
“All right. Let me see what you have.”
“Oh my God, thank you,” she said as she pushed the file across the table to him. He reached for it and started to open it. “I should tell you something before you open the file, though. My sister went missing in the Red Crow State Forest.”
He looked up at her.
“In the Crow?”
“Yeah, five years before you and Ralph Howell went—”
“Sorry. I can’t help you.”
“What? Why?”
“You can guess,” he said and stood up.
“Look, I’m sure you’re pretty traumatized and everything but—”
“I have a flight to catch tonight. Wish I could help, but I can’t.” He started to walk away.
