Page 13 of The Grave Between Us
“This doesn’t feel like a gang-style hit, and meth dealers don’t ambush on highways—”
Katie wailed into Cole’s chest. Her fingers dug into Cole’s sides, bruising the skin over his ribs. The doorbell rang again. “Sophie, that’s the trooper. We’re leaving.”
“I’ll see you at the hospital.”
He hung up, took Katie’s hand, and ran to the front door.
* * *
Noah wasas pale as a funeral shroud when they walked into his hospital room. He lay propped up on a mountain of pillows, one arm wrapped in a thick bandage and lying across his chest on another thick pillow. Dark circles hung beneath his eyes, and bruises marred half his face. Blood clung to his hairline and matted his dark hair. His heart monitor beeped steadily.
Katie threw herself against her dad’s side, burying her face in his uninjured shoulder and grabbing his hand as she sobbed against his chest. Cole followed, one hand on Katie’s back and the other joining Katie’s iron-strong hold on Noah’s hand.
No one in the world could cry like a sixteen-year-old girl. Katie cried like her life was ending, like she was taking every fear she’d ever had and letting them all out, giving voice to all the days and nights her dad had said he had to go, had to work, had to sit a stakeout or serve a warrant. Moments that were risky but that he’d always come home from.
Who would have thought a drive home on a quiet backroad, empty but for the frozen ground and the decaying cornstalks, would bring Noah all the way to death’s gentle kiss?
Cole pulled a chair to Noah’s bedside, as close as he could get. Katie plopped herself down on top of his legs, not caring that she was too old to sit in his lap. They held Noah’s hand together, one hand on either side of his palm, fingers laced in a thick three-way braid, knuckles white and trembling. Katie leaned her head against Cole’s, the ends of her hair sticking out from her bun and tickling his cheek.
Noah’s heart monitor merged with the soft susurration of the oxygen piped through the nasal cannula. Noah was so still Cole almost couldn’t see his chest rise and fall, couldn’t see him breathing. If not for the monitors, he would have laid his head on Noah’s chest, rested his cheek over his heart, and stayed there, listening to his heart beat and his lungs fill until Noah’s eyes opened.
Shot. He’d been shot. Jacob, shot through the windshield. Noah, shot as he took cover by the car on the side of the road.
Sophie had texted him as they roared to the hospital, lights and sirens blaring.Looks like a hunting rifle. Still waiting on ballistics to confirm. The sheriff out there is digging bullets out of the SUV’s interior.
A few millimeters’ difference, and the graze Jacob suffered would have been an obliterating head wound. Another trooper had brought Holly and Brianna to the hospital.
Nothing so far on digging through their case files, Sophie said.
This was Iowa. Sure, there was crime, and it wasn’t all soybeans and meth, but Cole had seen more viciousness during his commutes on the DC Metro than he’d seen in six months working out of the Des Moines field office. His most serious case so far had been an interstate kidnapping. Murder happened everywhere, of course—he knew that more than most. Murder wasn’t just for the cities or the darkness. It happened on summer days and in suburban houses, in quiet neighborhoods, in basements and kitchens and cornfields. Predators were everywhere.
But… what were the chances that two FBI officers were shot at random, in their not-subtle-at-all government SUV? Blacked-out windows, blacked-out paneling, like Noah was some Secret Service agent escorting the president around Iowa’s backroads. On an empty, isolated stretch of road.
What was the antigovernment crowd like here? What was the militia movement like? There were conspiracy theorists everywhere who ranted about black helicopters and refused to pay taxes and thought the Constitution was the next best thing to the Bible, and they were especially prevalent where drug use was high and education was poor. Shoot-outs with the feds were great, until one of the shooters needed an ambulance. Then it was “Thank you medevac” and “Thank you Henry Ford” and “Thank you oil companies for the black gold powering the combustion engine.” And “Thank you government for transporting my loved one to the hospital.”
Could one of them have lain in wait for Noah and Jacob? There hadn’t been any reports of unusual chatter. It was a live-and-let-live philosophy for the most part, with the local sheriffs and police and even the feds taking a hands-off approach. No need to kick the hornet’s nest. So why would anyone start a war with the FBI by targeting two agents coming back from a soybean deposition in Sioux City?
Who knew about the deposition? Well, anyone who could read a court calendar and was interested in the case, he supposed. Anyone who followed the news and saw that Noah Downing had been the case agent on the illicit soybean blend bust, and that the case was slowly clunking its way toward trial.
Back to where he’d begun. The shooter could be anyone. Cole squeezed Noah’s hand and watched the fractional rise of his chest, the spike and dip of his heart monitor, as Katie’s storm of tears subsided to quiet sniffles and whimpers.
* * *
Two days later,they were no closer to answers.
Iowa 141 had been swept of its molecules in a thirty-mile radius from the crash site. They collected the dirt from around Noah’s car, inspected the mud for footprints and fingerprints. Lifted the SUV out of the ditch, set it in exactly the same position on the back of a flatbed, and carted it all the way to Omaha under armed escort.
No prints. No fingerprints on the car, or on Noah’s clothes, or on the shattered bullet fragments they pulled out of the frame of the SUV behind Jacob’s head. No footprints in the mud and frozen ground, other than Noah’s and a smear that could have been something wiped away or could have been Noah stumbling and falling.
Noah and Jacob had been shot with a .30-30 Winchester, a common rifle round in a region of the country where guns were as common as rolling pins. Maybe more common. Hunters abounded, and there was no way to search for and find one .30-30 rifle in all of Iowa. From the impact on the windshield and the damage to the SUV, it seemed to have been fired from about the limit of its range, two hundred yards. Two hundred yards from the crash site, there was nothing but asphalt, not even an oil drop on the old pavement. Search teams and dogs had scoured the fields and the highways, but the only trail anyone managed to scout ended right there, at the two-hundred-yard mark, as if someone had fired and then driven away, taking their scent with them.
But if the dogs could track the shot from the crash to that point, that meant the shooter had gotten out of his car. Walked to Noah and Jacob. Stood over them, maybe even gotten down in the mud and the snow with them.
Smeared boot prints, or Noah stumbling and falling? Cole stared at the crime scene photos for hours, trying to divine ridges out of the muck: heel strike impressions and tread patterns. He knew Noah’s shoes like he knew his own, saw them kicked off under the coffee table or on the floor beside the bed. Was that divot in the mud his lover’s wear pattern, or that of the man who had shot him?
And then there was Noah’s gun. Or, more accurately, there wasn’t.
It was missing. When Noah and Jacob were brought to the hospital, the police had secured Jacob’s gun, but Noah’s holster was empty. No matter, they thought. It was probably still at the scene. They’d radioed back to the crime scene unit to find and secure Agent Downing’s weapon.
