Page 71 of The Murder Between Us
Was that it? The bond between parent and child, the total responsibility for another life that a parent takes on? The way a child’s life is laid into your hands, and every moment of every day from then on is spent caring for that child. Keeping them alive, yes, but also nurturing their soul. Growing their mind. Shaping their life.
Like Noah with Katie, and how good he was—
Groaning, Cole flopped backward, dropping the photos as he pressed the heels of his palms against his closed eyes.
He’d thought about parenthood maybe three times, ever, before this week. He’d noticed a hot young father on the National Mall once. Had thought,Do I want to have a baby? And decided no.
And that was it. That’s all he could scrape out of his memories.
Now he was mired in a case defined by murdered daughters and the shattered fathers left behind. John’s hand reaching for Molly’s toes, never reaching her. Deputy Venneslund, carrying on after finding his daughter dead. Six agonizing years—and then realizing his colleague, his coworker, was responsible. Bart, fighting his way to Jessie’s bedroom, trying to save her. What had he thought, coming face to face with his own deputy and Jessie’s corpse?
Why did Garrett risk being caught by Bart?
Escalation. The thrill of a secondary kill. The rush, the elation he’d felt after getting away with killing Frank. He could take another life, beyond Kimberly, beyond Jessie, and get away with it. He could take Bart’s life. The intoxication, the frenzied need of that, must have been intoxicating.
Or was it purely revenge, rage, lashing out at Bart, the man he thought kept him and Jessie apart?
But why did he decide to attack Jessie? Why had he decided to finally attack Monica, for that matter? How did the object of Garret’s fixation become his target?
Garrett had reinvented himself after Monica, after Stacy Shepherd and Kyle and Shelly Carter, like he had when he fled the University of South Dakota. Was there a new target in the Marines he’d somehow fixated on? The closest Marine Corps base was over a thousand miles away from Des Moines. No, it wasn’t a change of target or a new fixation. Garrett had truly fled.
They’d have to pull his Marine Corps records, see where there were unsolved murders on or near the bases he’d been assigned to. There had to be at least one. Garrett didn’t stop murdering six years ago and then suddenly pick up again with Kimberly and Frank.
But why did Frank come back to check on Kimberly? Cole held the photo in front of his face, trying to see through the celluloid as if he could see through time. Noah would check on Katie. He would check on her if he was feeling parental, or if he was missing her. Or if he called out to her and she didn’t respond. If he heard a threat.
Cole blinked. He turned the photo. Stared.
There was a lot of broken glass on the ground. The shattered mirror. Large, silvered panes of glass reflecting the camera flash in a thousand directions. If Frank had punched the mirror, scrabbling against it as he tried to fight Garrett off, the shards would have rained down on and around him as he struggled. Would have fallen largely intact, in big sheets, as they had broken.
Why were there shards that seemed smaller? As if they’d been ground down, stepped on, multiple times? As if… as if Frank had ground his heels against the broken glass while he struggled and fought for his life. As if the glass was already broken when he walked into the room.
As if he’d come to check on Kimberlybecausehe heard the glass break. As if he’d been lured into her bedroom.
It wasn’t an interruption.
Cole grabbed the case files, flipping through and pulling out the Olson photos. Jessie, dead in her bed. Blood smears in the hallway, handprints. Bart’s prints. The fingerprint smears pointed both left and right, as if there had been a brawl. As if Bart had confronted Garrett in Jessie’s bedroom and discovered the murder had just taken place, and the two had fought and struggled and almost died in that hallway.
The question wasn’tWhy did you risk being caught by Bart?
No, it wasWhy did you wait for Bart to come home?
To show Bart what he had done. To show him to his face.
He laid out the hallway photos again, his heart pounding, his hands shaking. Five thirty, Bart arrives home. He walks in. They’d all thought Bart had gone to check on Jessie right away, found her body, fought his way to the living room, and suffered his final beating there. But what if that was the wrong way around?
Bart walks in. Garrett, hidden in the darkness, springs forward, beating Bart with the crystal sheriff’s award. He incapacitates Bart, cracks his skull, breaks his fingers, his jaw. Broken, bleeding, in agony, Bart tries to scream for help, but Garrett drags him by the hair down the hallway. Bart tries to stop, puts his hands out—there, there, and there—but he’s dragged on, all the way to Jessie’s door. Bart knows, he knows what he’ll see, and he tried to fight it, but—
But Garrett wanted to show him. He wanted to show Bart what he’d done to his daughter. He made him see it, made him feel his daughter’s death, see her corpse laid out on her bed.
And then he dragged him back to the living room—handprints there and there, the other direction—and finished Bart off. Beat him until his face caved in and his skull collapsed, until there was nothing left of him except his bruised body and his uniform shirt.
Rage. Incomprehensible, unquenchable rage. But not the rage of being interrupted, the psychopath’s overreaction to an intrusion on his fantasy. No, these fathers werepartof his fantasy. Showing them. Making them see. Making Frank and Bart see what he’d done to their daughters.
And, Jesus, John Hayes. Fingers reaching for painted toes but never making it. The swiftness of the execution upstairs, the mom and the twin boys gunned down with such efficiency. The slowness, the agony of John’s wounds. Gut shots, when Garrett had just cleanly executed two boys and their mother.
He’d wanted John to follow him.
Stumbling downstairs. Blood on the handrail. The walls. The floor, where John fell. Hands and knees, crawling across the basement, across the shattered glass, the TV Garrett had ripped off the wall and thrown in his path, struggling to get to—
