Page 41 of The Murder Between Us
“Agent Downing?”
A crime scene tech, a tall Black woman with her long braids pulled back in a high bun, approached. She had her cell phone to her ear. “Sir, I’ve got an urgent call from the crime lab. They said to tell you they reswabbed for DNA on Jessie Olson’s face. They got a hit.” She grimaced. “On her lips.”
“Who? Who is it?”
She stiffened. “The hit came from the controls, sir.”
The controls… Oh, fuck. The controls were donated DNA from law enforcement officers, used to calibrate the machines against known samples. Which meant—
“The match is to Deputy Andy Garrett.”
Noah’s gaze whipped to the tumbler half full of bourbon. Garrett drank bourbon at the last Christmas party. And at the BBQ over Memorial Day. They’d been here, at John’s house. John wasn’t just the head of the Des Moines FBI, he’d been practically paternal to all of the law enforcement officers in the region. John and the older sheriffs had been the wise men, smoking their cigars and flipping burgers while the younger agents and officers chased each other with water guns or threw their kids in the pool or had cannonball contests and tried to splash the wives. He could see it all perfectly, that last party: Bart telling him about how great Jessie was doing in college. Garrett standing beside him, listening with rapt attention as Bart hugged Jessie one-armed and kissed her temple.
Garrett, staring at Jessie, a glass of bourbon in his hand.
“Get those glasses fingerprinted,” he growled. He grabbed his radio. “All units, be on the lookout for Deputy Andy Garrett, Boone County Sheriff’s. Find him,now, and bring him to the FBI office.”
Silence over the radio for half a minute. Nothing but static and the whiz of white noise, pops and clicks and radio affirmations. Then, “Sir, we responded to a vehicle fire out on U Ave, up near Dallas Center, about half an hour ago.”
Dallas Center was a small, rural farming community about thirty miles northwest of Des Moines.
Ten miles away from John’s home.
“We found a truck burning off the side of the road, almost in a cornfield. Fire department managed to put it out before the field went up. Sir, the license plate says it’s Garrett’s truck.”
Noah looked at Cole. “He could be running.”
“Any sign of Garrett?” Noah said into his radio as he headed for the basement stairs, storming out of the blood-choked horror.
Garrett. Andy Garrett. Staring at Bart. Why? Andy Garrett, who’d been so angry, so despondent. Andy Garrett, crying in the hallway. “Was he in the truck?”
“No, sir. No one was in the truck. There are some bloody footprints leading into the field.”
“Stay there. Hold a perimeter. I’m going to get a bird in the air. We’ll be there in ten minutes.”
13
Andy Garrett was a mess.
Blood covered his hands and arms, stained his white T-shirt in a tie-dye of gore. He had a cut running down one cheek. Through the blood they’d wiped from his arms for a DNA swab, they’d spotted older cuts, scabs that were healing.
He sat slumped in the single metal chair inside the interrogation room, staring listlessly at the far wall. He’d shown no emotion since the deputies had hauled him out of the cornfield, thrown him facedown in the dirt, cuffed him, and shoved him into the back of Noah’s SUV.
Agents were tearing Garrett’s life apart, down to the molecules of his existence.
Evidence was being processed as quickly as it could be. The fingerprints on the glasses at John’s house had come back: Garrett’s and John’s.
So were fingerprints on John’s basement handrail and on the barstool that had impaled him. On the kitchen counter near Melinda’s body.
Garrett’s nine-millimeter service pistol was missing. It wasn’t on him, and it wasn’t in his truck. Melinda, Evan, Carter, and John had been shot with a nine mil.
Cell phone records had been pulled. In the last six months, Garrett had called Jessie Olson over three hundred times. Almost twice a day.
There were no return calls from Jessie to Garrett’s number.
“What do you think?” Cole asked Noah. They were side by side in the dark observation room. Usually, they’d be watching the suspect squirm, but Garrett hadn’t so much as twitched since he’d been shoved into the chair and had his wrists locked in the shackles binding him to the room’s sole table.
Exhaustion made Noah’s brain slow, even as his mind was sparking, a thousand thoughts trying to ignite and failing, crushed under the revolving images of John and Molly and Bart and Jessie. “His DNA is on Jessie’s lips, and it would have to be put there extremely close to when she died, if not at the moment of her death. And, it looks like he’s got a motive, too.” Noah sighed. “But why kill Molly and John, and their whole family?”
