Page 40 of The Murder Between Us
A broken barstool lay on its side next to him. Based on the blood covering the legs, the killer had used it to beat John, smashing it over his back and his legs and his head until his skin had split and his skull had caved in. Bits of bone were mashed into his brain. Pieces of skin and gray matter stuck to the remaining legs of the stool. His body lay facedown in an ocean of blood.
If John hadn’t drowned in his own blood, the barstool’s leg sticking out of his back, staked all the way through him, would have finished the job.
Still, one of John’s hands reached for Molly. His fingers almost brushed her painted toenails. The skin of her foot was gray and cold.
“Is this escalation or disintegration?” Noah turned to Cole, trying to blink away the images. Cameras flashed over the bodies, capturing every angle, every aspect of their agony. Light burst on the edges of his vision, carving John and Molly’s last moments into the vitreous humor of his eyeballs. Into the gray matter of his own brain.
Cole’s sigh burned over his cheek. “I’m not sure. There’s elements of both here.” Another deep breath. “Extreme violence. Loss of control.” He nodded to the destruction. The blood spattering the walls, the furniture. Arcs looped almost to the ceiling. “You see this in serial killers who spiral out of control. Ted Bundy’s final victims were extremely brutal kills. He was still methodical enough to gain entry to the sorority and to abduct the teen girl, but the killings themselves were…” He trailed off, watching as the crime scene tech measured the bruises ringing Molly’s neck.
“The killer cut the phone lines on his way in. They couldn’t call for help on the landline. It’s demonstrably slower calling 9-1-1 on a cell phone. The seconds it takes to unlock the device, pull up the phone app…” Noah pushed through the tightness in his throat, the scream that wanted to rise. “There were no signs of forced entry. No signs of a struggle upstairs. The neighbors didn’t report any screaming. No one heard gunshots.” The bodies hadn’t been found until Jacob drove to John’s house, searching for their missing boss. “Did they know their killer? Did they invite him in?” Cole turned back to the basement stairs. He frowned at the bloody handprints.
“He didn’t take his time with the people upstairs. He wasn’t after any of them. Molly was his target,” Cole said. “I don’t understand the viciousness toward John, though.”
Noah’s eyes closed. His throat went tight. “John was a father. What do you think he was doing?”
Images crashed through his mind, terrible images. What if it had been him? What if it had been him and Katie? What if the killer cut his phone lines, broke into his house in the middle of the night, and went after her? For a moment, he imagined himself in John’s shoes, bleeding from the stomach, trying to hold in his own intestines as he stumbled after his daughter. Listening to her scream, and then not scream as her air was choked off and the killer’s hands closed around her—
His eyes wandered the edges of John’s blood pool. There was so much blood. John was drowning in it, for God’s sake. His face was lost in the puddle. Would they find froth in his lungs? Had he aspirated? Had it filled his throat, slid down his airway, until—
Fuck, now he understood Garrett. He understood that hard-edged glare he’d had looking at Bart’s body. Seeing someone you knew, someone you respected, dead. Not just dead, but destroyed.
What were John’s final seconds like? His agonized final breaths? He’d been reaching for his daughter…
Stop. Focus.He turned away from John’s corpse and walked to the bar. Tried to breathe through the kaleidoscope of after images burned into his eyeballs.
Evidence tags squatted next to the tumblers on the bar. Fingerprints circled the cut glass, crowding the rim, as if someone had downed shot after shot.
John didn’t drink bourbon. He was a gin man. “These could be the killer’s prints.”
Cole stopped too close to him again. “It would be a major sign of disintegration if he left behind fingerprints.”
“Are you saying he’s spiraling?”
“He could be. He could also be gaining confidence. He successfully killed Frank and Bart, on top of Kimberly and Jessie. Success breeds confidence, which breeds further success.”
“How does killing Bart lead him tothis?”
“He might be thinking, ‘How many can I kill before I get to what I really want?’ Molly was still his fixation.” Cole turned, taking in the basement. “Everything in this house leads to her.”
Even John. Especially John. His hand, reaching for her pink toenails. He’d been staked to the ground to stop him from reaching his daughter. Noah rubbed his palm over the center of his chest. He could almost hear the crunch of bone, of ribs snapping, as the wooden leg went through John’s chest.
“This reminds me of BTK and the Otero murders. Rader broke into the Otero home when a majority of the family was there. His fixation was on the young girl, Josephine. He didn’t care about the others. He killed them all quickly, then took his time with the young girl. This feels similar. Upstairs, the quick dispatch of the mom and the boys. Even shooting John upstairs. There’s no destruction up there. No devastation. But here…”
“Escalation,” Noah said softly.
“Tell me about Molly?” Cole slid in front of Noah, blocking his view of Molly and John.
“Molly was John’s pride and joy. They’d always been close. Hiking together, hunting, fishing. As she got older, they became even closer. She’d earned a full scholarship to the University of Iowa. She was prelaw. She wanted to come back and intern with the DA’s office next summer. She was working as a paralegal this summer.”
“An accomplished, beautiful young woman.”
“She was in the paper a few months ago, during the spring semester. It was supposed to be a profile of John, but he spent so much time bragging about her and the rest of his family that they pulled in everyone. Molly shone.”
“Fits the profile perfectly.”
“But how did he get in? How did the killer get into the house without any forced entry, without any surprise? He shot those boys in the back of the head. Shot John in the stomach.”
Cole’s lips thinned.
