Page 19 of The Murder Between Us
“Clearly. That was obvious Thursday night. Even more so today.”
Noah went ghostly pale. His eyes clenched shut as his hands balled on top of the steering wheel. “At least take your food?” He held out the McDonald’s bag. It trembled.
Cole snatched it and turned away. The hotel’s glass doors slid open.
“I’ll pick you up at seven?”
Cole waved over his shoulder and didn’t look back. The doors closed behind him, cutting off anything Noah might have said.
7
The morning was cool,the humidity of the previous day pushed back by the night. It would return with a vengeance, according to the weather report. Cole watched the local news in the hotel lobby as he ate a plate of buffet eggs and wilted pancakes. Hayes was on, speaking to the media about the return of the Coed Killer.We have put all of the FBI’s resources into finding this killer, he said.The FBI is working closely with the sheriffs and police departments in the area, and we are all committed to catching this monster and ending his streak of terror.
At 7a.m. on the dot, Cole headed out to the parking lot. Noah was already there, parked under the hotel’s overhang. He leaned against the driver’s door of the same black SUV with two paper cups of Starbucks coffee in his hands. He held one out to Cole. “Morning.”
“Morning.” He took the coffee and walked to the passenger side, climbing in.
A pile of single creamers, clearly from Noah’s house, and packets of sugar cluttered the center console. “I didn’t know what to get you,” Noah said. “Or how you wanted your coffee.”
You would have if you’d stuck around.But that wasn’t fair. Noah had been called back to Des Moines when the Olsons bodies were found. He didn’t have a choice about leaving.
But he did have a choice about calling Cole, or texting. Saying something instead of vanishing. Which he would have done if he’d felt even an ounce of what Cole had felt.
Cole poured every creamer into his coffee, all seven of the individual tubs Noah had grabbed. He frowned. “Do you have any more creamer?”
“How much more do you want?”
“Do you know that gross color everyone painted their homes fifteen years ago? That beige, off-white, cream color?”
A tiny smile curled the corner of Noah’s lips. “Sounds like the walls at my house.”
Who do you live with in that house?Cole bit down hard on his tongue. He didn’t need to know that. He didn’t need to know anything about Noah. Not anymore. “Well, that’s how I take my coffee.”
They pulled away from the hotel in silence. Noah took them past University and turned into a Starbucks, pulling up by the front doors. “Want to fix it?”
“Yeah. Sure.” Cole hopped out and headed in. At the cream-and-sugar station, he poured enough half-and-half into his coffee to turn it nearly milk-white. Looking up, he caught Noah’s gaze through the window. Noah was watching him, his expression haggard and exhausted. After a moment, Noah turned his head to stare out the driver’s side window.
Whatever. He didn’t have time for Noah’s misery. He was here to do a job. Cole snapped the lid back on his coffee and headed out to Noah’s SUV. “Are we going to the crime scenes today?”
Noah nodded as he backed out. “Do you want to go to the office first?”
“No. I want to see the scenes.”
Silence. Noah merged onto the I-35 on-ramp and headed north. Des Moines passed them by, and then the suburbs, and then the burbs petered out to rolling fields of wheat and corn, endless miles of crops that stretched from horizon to horizon.
It was amazing how quickly the country arrived out here. In less than twenty minutes, they were turning onto a two-lane road heading straight for the horizon with corn bracketing them on either side. A TV transmission tower rose ahead, reaching so high it seemed to hold up the cloudless blue sky. If Cole drove twenty minutes away from his condo in D.C., he’d still be sitting in traffic in D.C.
“Kimberly and her father lived in Alleman. It’s a small farming community north of Ankeny, north of Des Moines. About four hundred people live here.” Noah slowed to a stop at a four-way intersection. Farmland spread in every direction. An old farmhouse, possibly built when Iowa was first settled, sagged on its foundation to the right. They turned left, heading toward a small cluster of turn-of-the-century homes on narrow asphalt streets. All the streets led to the county’s combined primary, middle, and high school. Athletic fields wrapped around the downtown, and beyond the soccer and football pitches, more corn spread out in wide, wandering fields.
It was the kind of place where flowers were planted around the base of the wooden power poles and every house had an American flag flying. Rocking chairs swayed in the morning breeze on the wraparound porch of each home they passed. Kids roared by their SUV, screaming as they chased each other on bicycles and tricycles. An adult followed on foot, keeping a wary eye on the children and staring down Noah and Cole as they drove by.
“Suspicious people,” Cole said.
“The first murder in town will do that.” Noah turned again, pulling them out of downtown and onto an unpaved gravel road that wound into the fields. Ahead, an older, tired home squatted amid the corn, paint peeling on one side, the porch railing splintered on the other. A storm cellar hugged the side of the house, and an oak tree scattered shade and dappled sunlight across the front yard. Rose bushes in desperate need of pruning lined the steps leading to the front door. Crime scene tape, faded from the sun, was still taped across the entry.
Noah put the SUV in park. “This is where Kimberly and Frank Foster lived. She went to the county high school back in town. She earned a full-ride scholarship to Faith Baptist College.”
“What was her major?”
