Page 58 of The Murder Between Us
Shrugging, Garrett shifted. Looked away. “Couple months ago. Maybe six. We met at that BBQ, the one your boss threw.”
It was Noah’s turn to be silent. He waited, counting down from one hundred until his throat unclenched. “Special Agent John Hayes. My boss. One of my close friends.”
“Yeah. Him.” Garrett’s eyes skittered away from Noah’s.
One thing at a time. Noah took a deep breath. Thought of Katie. Thought of Cole.
“Is that why you’ve been calling Jessie nonstop for months?” He pushed the call records forward, flipping through the pages for Garrett. Nearly all of his calls were to Jessie. The rest were calls for pizza and Chinese delivery, calls to the Boone County switchboard, and two calls to a sex chat line.
“That was our system.”
“Your system?”
“Yeah. See, Jessie’s dad didn’t want us talking, so we developed a system. He kept an eye on her phone and her calls out, so she couldn’t call me. But I could call her, especially if I didn’t let it ring past one ring. So that’s what I did. She’d get to see that I called, that I was thinking of her.” He smiled again.
“That sounds a little bit creepy, Andy. It kind of sounds like you were stalking her.”
Storm clouds reappeared on Garrett’s face. He scowled at Noah, leaning forward, hands clenched into fists. “We had a system,” he growled. “She couldn’t call me, but she was a computer whiz, you know? Her minor was in computer science. She wanted to get into IT services for ag business, revolutionize the industry and the way they use computers. Smart stuff. Way smarter than I could understand.”
Noah’s gaze flicked to the one-way mirror. Was any of that true? He didn’t know what Jessie Olson’s minor at Iowa State was.
Garrett kept going. “She had a little website set up. Just her and me used it. The system was, I would call her, let her know I was thinking of her, and she would post on the website. Messages to me. Things like that.”
“What kind of messages?”
“Things like she was thinking of me. That she loved me. That she wanted to see me.”
“She loved you?”
“Yes. And I loved her.”
Noah nodded. “Was this how you arranged to see her the night she was murdered?”
Scowling, Garrett nodded. He said nothing.
“You see,” Noah said, exhaling, “the thing is, we haven’t found any website Jessie made. We haven’t found any evidence of any website you guys could exchange messages on. We’ve been through her laptop and her dad’s computer, and there’s nothing. Nothing at all that backs up your story. We went to the site you gave us, and there’s nothing.”
Garrett shrugged. “She used her phone. And it was set to disappear. We were trying not to be found out.”
They hadn’t recovered Jessie’s phone. It wasn’t with Jessie when she died, in her bedroom, in the house, or in the yard. Or in a five-hundred-yard perimeter of the Olson home. And it hadn’t sent out a ping or a GPS signal since five thirty the morning Jessie and Bart were murdered, when it suddenly went dead inside their home.
Garrett knew they didn’t have her phone.
Either he was telling the truth, or—
“Tell me about you and Bart Olson.”
Another dark glare as Garrett looked beyond Noah.
“Tell me about the fight you had outside Luther, by the Des Moines river.”
“He didn’t want me anywhere around Jessie. He thought I wasn’t good enough for her. I wasn’t a college graduate, or anything like that.”
“But you did go to college, at least a little bit. Didn’t Bart know about that?”
Garrett set his jaw and glowered at the wall.
“You must be pretty mad at Bart, huh? Getting in the way of you and Jessie?”
