Page 65 of The Grave Between Us
Midmorning, Cole led a convoy of search vehicles south on US Route 65, past Des Moines’ outer suburbs, past sprawling open fields, past the small towns that dotted the roadways. Rural farmland opened up, miles of empty fields stretching to a spilled-milk sky, cloud cover and fog obscuring the horizon. Bare tree branches poked up from thick brambles, choked clusters of winter-dormant trees and underbrush that, from a distance, looked like a child’s squiggly fingerpaint swirls.
They were heading for the thickest of those gnarled woods: Banner Lakes at Summerset State Park. Cole was taking the lead on one of the larger search operations, in a park that seemed to whisper to him, dragging his attention back whenever he looked away. Banner Lakes felt like Ian, even just looking at the paper map.
The closer they drove, the more the whispers grew. He could feel Ian in the air, feel him hovering in the fields and the fog as if he was watching them. Watching Cole.
It seemed overwhelming when they arrived. How were they ever going to search the entirety of the park, all the finger lakes, all the undergrowth spread among the dense woods? No wonder they hadn’t been able to find Ian’s victims, if he always buried them in areas like this. They could search for a year and never find a thing.
And he had thought he’d done well to narrow the possibilities to 108 parks. One hundred and eight, and they were looking for a needle buried in all these forests. He tried not to let despair pull him down as he parked at the north parking lot and waited for the rest of the search team to arrive.
Cole gave a quick briefing to the search commander. “It’s possible we could still find Mr. Kerrigan alive,” he said carefully. “But with the suspect we’re looking at—”
“After seventy-two hours, it’s likely we’re on a recovery and not a rescue mission,” the search team commander said with a nod. He was attached to the sheriff’s office, and he had the bulked-up, geared-out look of a former military man. Even in his midfifties, he still had a high and tight, faded now with salt in his dark hair. He wore yellow-tinted glasses to better see distinctions in the ground cover, and he had patches on his bomber jacket from search and rescue missions that spanned the globe. “At this stage, ideally we can find a fresh grave, before the soil has a chance to settle.”
The commander turned his words into a much more technical briefing to his teams, and by lunchtime, they were off. Three teams scoured the park, starting in a west-to-east direction, led by three search dogs. Cole stayed with the northernmost group, working through the thickest, densest section of the park.
It was slow going, cold and miserable. The damp air clung to his lungs and sank into his body, chilling his bones with every inhale. He trudged after the searchers, listening to the radio chatter from the teams as his eyes scanned the forest floor. He searched for the signs of a fresh-dug grave: lumps or depressions in the ground. Disturbed earth. Misplaced rocks. Underbrush that had been moved or turned over. Churned-up moss. Worm activity. Animals digging at the ground.
He heard the dogs first. Barking, then baying. The sound of excitement, working dogs finding what they were trained for. He veered off his search path and followed the sounds, right as his radio crackled, “Search teams, be advised, dogs are indicating at the following grid coordinates…”
By the time he arrived, the search commander had already cordoned off the area, looping crime scene tape around a cluster of basswood and sugar maple growing in a circle. Between the trunks, Cole could make out freshly turned earth, dark and wet, and broken twigs sticking out of a lump of soil. The dogs were sitting nearby, panting and staring at the grove with obvious interest as the search team’s grave identification specialist, a volunteer forensic anthropologist from Iowa State University, probed the loose earth.
The dogs leaped to their feet and bayed as the bloom of death flowed up out of the probe hole. “We’ve got human remains,” the anthropologist said. He spoke softly, his voice heavy. “The dogs are a double indicator. They’re cadaver dogs. They only indicate off human remains.” He held up his own soil gas indicator, which he held over the probe. “And this confirms it.”
Cole hung his head as the search commander called in the find. Michael was two teams away, searching the south end of the park, but he texted Cole as soon as the commander was finished relaying the information over the radio.I’m on my way.
When he arrived, he waited with Cole, uncharacteristically silent.
Ian’s voice echoed in Cole’s mind as the recovery teams got to work gridding out the grave and marking its outer boundaries. The loose soil was one indication of size, and the probes and ground gas readings were another. They quickly had the area staked out, string outlining the edges, overlaying what looked like shovel marks in the forest floor.
Think about the significance: the last person to touch these men was me, and the next to touch them could be you.
Forensic photographers took photos of the grave, of the shovel marks, of the turned dirt and the gas probes, as tarps were laid nearby and labeled with soil layers. Level one. Level two.
If you open up my graves, we’ll be together forever.
It was just like eight years ago in West Virginia, when he’d tracked Ian’s unwavering gaze into the woods and found the man he’d dumped in the ground. Now he and Noah were tracking Ian himself, again to a grave hidden in the woods.
He watched and waited as the grave was opened, each layer of soil taken to a tarp and sifted through, inch by painstaking inch. The photographer took photos of every layer, photos of the sides of the grave, places where tree roots had been broken by the sharp edge of a shovel. Places where dead leaves and twigs that should have been on the surface were four inches in the ground.
And then they uncovered the hand.
Fingers came first, the skin so pale it was almost translucent. The nails were caked with dirt, the knuckles bent, as if he’d clenched his fingers in his final moments, tried to make fists like he could fight back. A few inches down, they found the restraints that bound the wrists together and behind the broad, naked expanse of a man’s back. The recovery team brushed the dirt away slowly, exposing each knot of the man’s spine, all the way up to his shoulder blades, his neck. Autolysis had already begun, and the body was starting to turn black and blue around the waist. A delicate sheen appeared on his exposed skin, up his spine and the back of his neck. The first stage of decay. The carbon dioxide trapped in Kerrigan’s tissues had turned his body acidic. Cells throughout his body had burst, the inner enzymes starting to digest and decompose his organs. He was being consumed from the inside out by death. The fascia and tissue connections beneath his skin were disintegrating, and his flesh was starting to slip.
They kept working, exposing Brett Kerrigan’s face, slack and limp in death. His lips were blue, and there were deep, vivid bruises around his throat, including five near-perfect ovals against the soft tissues beneath his jawbone and his ear.
“It’s him,” Cole said. “That’s our missing man.”
More photos, taken silently, as the team stood by, watching with a careful, pensive reverence. The search commander spoke a few whispered words over Kerrigan’s remains before they began to excavate him further.
“Check his face and hands for Drano?” Cole asked. “There’s some history of our suspect using it in the past.”
“Are you talking about a serial?” The forensic anthropologist’s eyebrows rose.
Michael jumped in, answering before Cole could. “That’s not up for discussion. And you’re not a part of this investigation.”
Cole shoved his hands in his coat pockets as the anthropologist and the search team leader shared a long, silent look. The anthropologist bent down, twisting at his waist to peer into Kerrigan’s still face. One of Kerrigan’s eyes was visible, open and milky, dirt spackled across the dull sclera. “I don’t see any caustic agents on his skin,” he said. “No burn marks from lye or sodium hypochlorite. His hand wasn’t burned, either.”
“Damn,” Michael breathed.
