Three weeks passed. There was nothing.
—
## The Phone Call and the Prior Contact
Among the investigative records developed in the Papini case, the significance of phone contact between Papini and James Reyes in the days before her disappearance was fundamental to how investigators eventually reconstructed what had happened.
Reyes was not a stranger. He was a man Papini had dated before she married Keith. He lived in Southern California — Costa Mesa, about nine hours by car from Redding. By all available accounts, he had maintained his connection to Papini across the intervening years.
What the phone records showed: contact between Papini and Reyes in the period before November 2, 2016. The nature of that contact — what was discussed, what was arranged — was described by Reyes to investigators in August 2020 when he was interviewed after the DNA match to him was confirmed. His account: Papini had told him that Keith Papini was abusing her. She was, she said, afraid. She needed help. She needed a place to go.
Reyes believed her. He agreed to help. He arranged a rental car through a friend rather than in his own name and drove approximately nine hours to Redding, where he picked her up on or around November 2, 2016 — the day she was reported missing.
The preparatory communication between them — the phone calls, the plan — was conducted, in Reyes’s account, using prepaid phones. The use of prepaid phones to arrange the pickup was a specific operational detail that, along with the rental car arranged through a third party, suggested prior thought and planning on Papini’s part. The investigative record does not establish that Reyes understood he was participating in anything other than helping a woman flee a domestic situation. He had no criminal history. He was not charged with any crime. Everything he did, as the investigation ultimately found, was consistent with the account he gave: he believed an abused woman needed help, and he provided it.