Page 73 of The Grave Between Us
They had driven into Omaha at the crack of dawn. The Des Moines RA was too small to run its own FBI lab, and Noah’s team either relied on local police and sheriffs or sent evidence to Quantico for analysis. Michael was far too impatient for Quantico.
Cole had spent the night on a rollaway bed in Michael’s hotel room, tossing and turning, alternating between self-castigation and silent tears. He hadn’t had any sleep, and he felt like day-old shit. Looked like it, too.
“The glass you recovered from the road is definitely a match to a 2018 Nissan Maxima, which, as I understand, is the victim’s car. And the tire tread marks are a match to the wheel and axle width of the Maxima, so, again, a match to your vic’s car. Now, the car the sheriff towed out of the river, that was a 2015 Honda Accord. Looked like a college car. There was a lot of ISU junk and old fast-food receipts shoved into the cupholders.”
“Any of those receipts dated more recently than Friday?”
“No.” The tech riffled through a folder, then passed Cole a set of photos of the receipts, dried and pinned to a black backing and laid out in chronological order. “They were all older, and all from Ames and the ISU campus.”
“Damn,” Michael said. “Could have gotten lucky if he’d left a receipt for his drive-through for us. I want to get eyes on this son of a bitch so badly.”
“What about forensics from the grave site?” Cole asked.
“Treasure trove of information there. Fingerprints galore on the Polaroids, all matching the same individual: Ian Ingram. I tried to pull his info from IAFIS, but—”
“The record was sealed,” Michael interrupted. “We know.”
The tech eyeballed Michael, then turned back to the folder. “Well, whoever your suspect is, he’s pretty careless about his fingerprints. We pulled prints from the Polaroids, from the folds of the paper crane, and from the victim’s skin. Since it was so damp outside and the grave itself was fairly humid, we were able to pull a nice set of latents off Kerrigan’s throat, jaw, and cheeks. I think it’s pretty slam dunk that your Ian Ingram killed Mr. Kerrigan.”
“We already know that. We need to find Ingram. Did you find anything else? Shoe impressions, tire impressions? Anything on CCTV cameras going to or from the state park? Anything we can use to track him?”
“Nothing,” the tech said. “He’s careless with his fingerprints, but other than that, your guy is smart. He probably chose that park because there’s not a lot of surveillance on the drive in. No gas stations, no strip malls, no drive-throughs. It’s a whole lot of nothing. The closest camera we were able to pull footage from was ten miles away.”
“Let’s talk about forensics from the home invasion,” Michael said. His voice had changed, gone almost soft. The back of his hand shifted against Cole’s.
The tech swapped folders, flipping the second one open and laying out photo spreads from the scene processing unit.
Their house, their home, torn apart. Ian was everywhere, his touch on everything. He’d opened their fridge, torn through their kitchen. Ripped photos from the walls, spent time punching Noah’s face out of each one. Destroyed Katie’s bedroom. Their bedroom. Desecrated their bed.
“Fingerprints, again, all over the place. Same guy. Your suspect is busy. We think we know how he got in, too.”
“How?” Cole snapped. “The alarm was only going off at the end of the B&E. Why?” He hadn’t heard the alarm over the phone when he was talking to Ian. And if the alarm had gone off when Ian entered, he wouldn’t have had time to do what he’d done before the police got the call.
“Cole,” Michael said. There was a warning in his voice.
“It looks like he entered the code on the alarm panel. He guessed wrong the first time, and then the second time, got it right. One-two-zero-nine is the correct code. He tried zero-nine-one-two first.”
Michael turned to Cole, his eyebrows raised.
“Our birth months,” Cole said. “Mine, then Noah’s. He tried Noah’s first, then flipped them around.”
“Got lucky,” Michael murmured.
“Got smart. Damn it, we should have picked something else. Google would have given him our birthdays.”
“He deactivated the alarm on his way in, coming through the garage door, we think. The side door to the garage was busted open. He did his business in the house, reactivated the alarm, and broke the back sliding glass door as he left, which triggered the alarm and called the police.”
“And upstairs?” Cole’s voice shook.
“Fingerprints, again, everywhere. Fingerprints on the origami crane left on one of the pillows in the main bedroom. DNA profiles from three men were pulled from the bedsheets—”
“We know who two of the men are, and so do you.” Michael was losing his patience. “Did you confirm the identity of the third profile?”
“Your suspect,” the tech said. He passed over the DNA report from CODIS. “Ian Ingram. We’re still processing trace from the bedsheets, but it looks like he stripped naked and rolled around in the bed, then masturbated—”
Cole turned away, pacing to the far wall. He was going to burn the sheets. Burn the mattress. Burn the bed frame. Jesus, Ian had been in the bed Cole and Noah made love in. That was their island, their place of sanctuary and safety. Theirs.
“He left over the back fence, most likely. We were able to pull a partial boot print from the wood slats. Looks like a Wolverine, size 13. Pretty common.”
