Yellow Bird by Sierra Crane Murdoch

Author:Sierra Crane Murdoch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-02-24T16:00:00+00:00

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THE SUMMER OF 2013 settled on the prairie, turning everything a languid green. Lissa and Jill were speaking again—Jill had written an apology, Lissa gave her a call—although they spoke less often and less intimately than before. Jill called Lissa whenever she had news or heard from Steve Gutknecht, the Bureau of Criminal Investigations agent in Williston. Investigators had completed an analysis of James’s and KC’s phone data, finding that on the morning KC disappeared, his phone had been active until it entered the vicinity of James’s phone, at which point KC received messages and calls but no longer answered or made them. That same afternoon, the phones moved in tandem toward Watford City, where they remained until that night, when both traveled to Williston. There, KC’s phone had been deactivated.

The analysis made investigators more certain of James’s culpability but did little to build their case. It was not a crime for a phone to follow another. To indict James for murder, they needed much more than the analysis—a body or, at the very least, a witness.

Lissa was beginning to think their only hope was finding KC, but as the summer wore on, this was seeming even more difficult. She wanted to organize a search of the reservation with support from the tribal council. One councilwoman, Judy Brugh, replied to her inquiry, suggesting that Jill draft a letter requesting assistance from tribal police and a speaking slot at a council meeting. Jill drafted two letters—one to the council and another to Tex asking permission to search his property. Neither the council nor Tex responded.

Lissa urged Jill to come on a search anyway, but Jill considered the trip a waste of time. She had asked Gutknecht for a copy of the phone data, hoping it would suggest a specific location, but he would not give it to her. “I just can’t break the law and get myself in trouble,” he wrote. “Rest assured if there…was a good place to search and not just blind searching it would have been done long ago. Sorry I can’t be of more help with a place to search but if I had that I’d be searching it.”

Lissa disagreed with his suggestion that searching was futile. She knew the chances of stumbling upon KC were low—“Finding a body in the badlands is harder than finding a needle in a haystack,” she often said—but this was beside the point. If they had one good reason to go on searching, Lissa thought, it was to show James that the case had not languished. There was still the possibility that a witness would come forward—that by a tip or a fluke, KC would be found.

Lissa arranged for a professional search team to meet Jill in North Dakota in late June. Jill said she could not come. She believed they should be more “realistic” about their prospects of finding KC, she said, and she was tired, still fighting the defamation suit. Sarah had updated the complaint:

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