Page 57 of The Grave Between Us
The woman looked like she’d starting sucking lemon rinds at dawn. Her eyes were flint hard already, probably thanks to Cole and the news he’d brought about Brett Kerrigan, but turned to granite when she saw Noah. The man from yesterday, her husband, sighed, long and loud, and shook his head. “So you really were a fed,” he said. Defeat stained his voice.
“It’s a federal crime to impersonate an FBI agent.” Noah stood in the office doorway. Cole hadn’t looked up from the computer screen. “I’m very sorry to inconvenience you both again. We want to do everything we can to find Brett Kerrigan.”
“Those damn paper cranes.” The woman turned to the window and glared. It was overcast again, the world perpetually gray. “They were a part of this?”
“It’s possible,” Noah said carefully. “There are indications that they may have been part of a signal from someone we think might be responsible for Mr. Kerrigan’s abduction.”
“Noah,” Cole said softly. His eyes flicked from the screen to Noah and then back. “I think I have something on the surveillance cameras.”
Noah came around the desk and stood behind Cole. He set his hand on Cole’s shoulder. Cole was shaking, as tight as a bowstring.
“This is the parking lot,” Cole said, pointing to the upper right box on a four-split video screen. “Kerrigan is about to enter the frame. He gets into the Nissan sedan. Watch the man who moves in the right corner of the frame.”
“I see him. He’s keeping to the edges of the camera.” The man was more of an outline, a shadow. Middle height, middle weight, wearing what looked like jeans and a hoodie with a canvas jacket on top. He had on a ball cap, too, pulled low, obscuring his features. No profile view to snatch and blow up, run through the facial recognition databases.
“I’ve found him on three more cameras, moving around the main barn and then into the bar. He always keeps to the edges of the surveillance cameras, as if he’s purposely avoiding them. Keeping an eye out and keeping to their outside range, without being obvious about it.” Cole pulled up an exterior shot of the barn, the man walking obliquely by the camera. Another inside the bar, taken from behind the register, from the point of view of the bartender. The same unknown man kept to the edge of the bar, turned away from the camera. He was watching something, staring intently toward the front of the barn. Toward the restaurant.
Noah saw children flicker in and out of the frame, running too fast for the clipping snapshots of the low-budget camera. His stomach turned to lead. He gripped Cole’s shoulder. “What time was this?”
“Eleven forty-seven a.m.”
If Cole pulled up the surveillance footage of the restaurant area, the two of them would be front and center, flicking through the binders and sipping champagne.
“He was right there,” Cole breathed. “Right there.”
“That’s Brett Kerrigan at the bar.” Noah pointed to a couple, a man and a woman, sitting close together a few barstools down from the hidden man. Kerrigan fed his wife-to-be cheese slices and berries by hand. She kissed his fingertips before taking a sip of her wine. “Can we see a copy of their receipt? I want to know what they ordered.”
The woman nodded and turned to a different desk, rummaging through receipts and sales records. She brought a credit card slip to Noah and then took up her silent post by the window again.
The receipt had an itemized order list on it. Kerrigan and his fiancé had shared a wine flight, then ordered a bottle of wine to split, along with a cheese board. They’d been there for a couple of hours, arriving just after eleven and Kerrigan leaving first, a little after one.
“Why did Kerrigan leave without his fiancé?”
“Ms. Wenger had an appointment with our wedding planner. They were going over flower arrangement options. It’s not unusual for the brides to take the lead on those kinds of things.”
What kind of flowers did he and Lilly have at their wedding? He couldn’t remember. Maybe they were orange? Lilly had put together so much of the wedding, telling him all he needed to do was show up on time and cleanly shaved. They’d laughed about it back then.
It was unimaginable to him now, not wanting to make the choices about his wedding with Cole. Where they married, what kind of flowers they had… If he closed his eyes and envisioned their wedding, he pictured… color. Lots of color, vibrant color, like the saturation of the world had been dialed up. Katie’s hair, long and loose, burnished mahogany and gleaming in sunlight. Cole’s eyes, worn leather and brandy, fathoms deep. He had no idea what the names of the flowers were, but he could see them all over, peppering the scene with so much color.
He had no idea what he was imagining, but hewasimagining it. He wanted it. Kerrigan and his fiancé looked happy on the surveillance camera, as happy as he and Cole had been at the same time, cuddling thirty feet away at their own table. But Noah wouldn’t leave Cole to pick out flowers on his own.
Maybe it was age. He had over a decade on Brett Kerrigan. Maybe it was experience. Maybe it was the failure of a first marriage, the crumbling of what he’d thought, when he was that young, forever looked like.
He had the chance at a new forever with Cole, and, damn it, he wanted everything. There wasn’t a single moment in their life when he ever thought,You know, I don’t need to be here for this.
I wish you’d stayed to pick the flowers, Mr. Kerrigan.
“What time does Kerrigan head out to the parking lot?” Noah’s voice was tight. He cleared his throat.
“About 1:05.”
They’d already been kicked out by then. At that time, Cole was spilling his guts on the side of the road and Noah was trying to right his capsized reality, listening to his steadfast lover come apart in sobs and distilled horror as he spoke about opening hidden graves and a serial killer who drew hundreds of naked portraits of him.
“Pull up the parking lot footage again, Cole. Sir, ma’am, do you have cameras set up around your parking lot, or is this the only angle you have?”
“There’s a camera at the turn in from the highway. You can see the cars that head up and down our drive,” the husband said.
The driveway to Oak Haven Meadows was a long, meandering gravel road that passed three fields before rising over a gentle hill and crossing an old, rusted cattle guard. That was a long time to go without video surveillance. But if it was all they had… “Let’s see it.”
