Page 59 of The Grave Between Us
Cole chuckled and nodded. He turned back to the atlas, and his smile vanished.
Noah thanked Jacob again and hung up. He pulled up a satellite map on his phone and compared it to the atlas spread between their laps. “Kerrigan had two routes he could have taken home. He could have gone north and picked up the interstate, taken that all the way through Des Moines. Or he could have taken this county highway”—Noah traced a route that paralleled the interstate to the south by twenty miles—“and wiggled his way home on the backroads. This stays two-lane all the way until it intersects with I-35. He could have picked up 35 and headed south until he hit Route 5, then taken that across to the east side.”
“The interstate is the most direct route.”
“It is, but”—Noah held out Kerrigan’s receipt from the bar—“he’d been drinking. Half a bottle of wine in a couple of hours wouldn’t put a man of his size over the limit, but a lot of Iowans will stick to the backroads when they’ve had a few. They think they can avoid the highway patrol, and they take their chances on the county sheriff’s being anywhere else.” He ran his finger along County Highway F90, the southern route back to Des Moines. “I think he went this way.”
Cole gnawed on his lower lip and followed the path of Noah’s fingers with his own. The southern outflow of the Raccoon River veered toward the county road. He traced the winding waterway eastward to Raccoon River Park, threading between Walnut Woods State Park and Blue Heron Lake. “Ian likes lakes and rivers. And woods. We’re pretty sure he buried the remains of his victims near bodies of water.”
“Like that body you told me about finding.”
“Right. He tried to misdirect us into the lake. It was a game to him. If we searched the lake and never found the grave in the woods, he had the satisfaction of knowing he put one over on us. If we did find the grave, then he’d get to see his victim again when we brought him up. He, uh…”
Noah waited.
“He liked how the grave smelled. He liked how the decomp smelled. Especially on me.”
Cole’s hands trembled on the atlas, his fingernails scratching against the paper. Noah wrapped both his hands around Cole’s, curling Cole’s fingers into his palms.
He didn’t know what to say or what to do. If the situation were reversed, Cole would have some perfectly timed insight, some psychological wisdom that would calm him down, reorient him in the now, pull him out of the whirlpools of the past. Noah wasn’t that smart, and he never seemed to know the right thing to say, especially when he never seemed to know the right thing to say when it mattered the most.
The only thing he knew how to do was be there for Cole.
And he knew investigations, the boots-on-the-ground legwork that solved cases. Soybeans or suspects, he knew the questions to ask, the paths to tread that carried an investigation from an initial inquiry to a collar narrowing around a prime suspect.
Ian Ingram might be a monster from Cole’s past, but he was Noah’s suspect now.
“We’ll find him.” He squeezed Cole’s fingers, and Cole squeezed back. “Let’s drive F90 and see if we can find any sign of Kerrigan’s car, or any sign that he and Ingram might have interacted on the highway. How did he attack other drivers? Did he run them off the road?”
“No, he would blitz attack. Come through their driver’s side window. Break the glass and incapacitate them. He had a few different ways to abduct men, but when the abductions involved cars, more often than not, they were blitz attacks.”
“To do that, he’d have to get in front of Kerrigan, then stop and somehow lie in wait for him. There’s no stop signs between where Kerrigan picked the highway up and the I-35 interchange. If Ingram came at him the way you’re describing, he had to get Kerrigan to stop his car.”
Noah studied the atlas, compared it to the satellite view on his phone. Ingram needed time to speed ahead of Kerrigan. That meant a long stretch of open road, along with a few bends for Kerrigan to lose sight of him. For an attack, he’d need a ruse. Something to make Kerrigan stop his car.
Kerrigan was the kind of guy who would stop to help a stranded motorist. He zoomed in on the map, moving fifty feet at a time as he studied the roadway, the shoulder, the embankments in the satellite view. Fields and clustered trees, thick with tangled undergrowth. There was a train coming south alongside the highway, and the Raccoon River curled in a loop-de-loop, teasing the road and then veering north before coming south and crossing beneath a bridge—
“Cole, look.” Noah pointed to the atlas and held out his phone. “There’s a boat ramp south of the highway.”
A gravel road, jogging off F90 and snaking into the dense underbrush and trees along the riverbank. It went straight into the river, an old country ramp stamped out of hard-packed gravel. Noah could see the ruts from years of use. Locals used it, taking out fishing boats or small craft. It was quiet, out of the way, and hidden.
“That is definitely something Ian would be interested in,” Cole said softly.
“Let’s start driving.”
* * *
Brett Kerriganand Ian Ingram came face to face between the railroad tracks and the boat ramp. There was an eleven-foot-long strip of burned rubber on the highway, as if someone had braked hard and skidded. Based on the widths of the tires, it was a sedan that had slammed on its brakes. At the end of the tire tracks, shattered safety glass lay in a puddle on the asphalt. Judging by its placement on the roadway, it had come from the sedan’s driver side window.
They both parked on the shoulder, watching the road as Noah popped open Jacob’s trunk and pulled out an evidence collection kit. He passed a pair of gloves to Cole after he put his own on. They hadn’t seen a car pass by in over five minutes. “Keep an eye out while I take photos,” Noah said. He stood in the road, using his phone camera to snap shots of the skid marks, the broken glass, the empty highway.
He had to call the Dallas County Sheriff, too. Sheriff Clarke was an old-school sheriff, the kind who’d been elected and reelected for decades. He had a barrel chest and a white walrus mustache. He was beloved by his department, and for all the immediate assumptions someone could make about Sheriff Clarke, he was one of the best local law enforcement partners Noah had ever worked with. A year before, he’d led one of the investigative teams on the Coed Killer case.
“Sheriff Clarke, it’s Noah Downing. I’m out on County F90 near the Booneville boat ramp. And I’m pretty sure I’ve got a crime scene for your missing man, Brett Kerrigan. Skid marks, broken glass. If you run the tire tracks and the glass, I think you’ll find it’s a match to Kerrigan’s Nissan Maxima. You’re going to want to send a deputy out here to process this.”
Sheriff Clarke was quiet for a long moment. “Does the FBI have an interest in Brett Kerrigan? Is there an indication he’s been abducted and taken out of state?”
Abductions were the FBI’s jurisdiction when the abduction happened on federal land or the abductee was transported across state lines. “There might be an intersection with one of our cases,” Noah said carefully. He was on thin ice, dancing across a blurry boundary. Brett Kerrigan’s disappearance was, jurisdictionally, a Dallas County Sheriff investigation. King hadn’t told Sheriff Clarke the FBI had taken over, and they were supposed to share information—as much as they legally could—with their local partners.
