The Murder Between Us by Tal Bauer

Author:Tal Bauer [Bauer, Tal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance, Gay / Lesbian / LGBT
Goodreads: 56786433
Published: 2021-01-27T23:00:00+00:00

13

Andy Garrett was a mess.

Blood covered his hands and arms, stained his white T-shirt in a tie-dye of gore. He had a cut running down one cheek. Through the blood they’d wiped from his arms for a DNA swab, they’d spotted older cuts, scabs that were healing.

He sat slumped in the single metal chair inside the interrogation room, staring listlessly at the far wall. He’d shown no emotion since the deputies had hauled him out of the cornfield, thrown him facedown in the dirt, cuffed him, and shoved him into the back of Noah’s SUV.

Agents were tearing Garrett’s life apart, down to the molecules of his existence.

Evidence was being processed as quickly as it could be. The fingerprints on the glasses at John’s house had come back: Garrett’s and John’s.

So were fingerprints on John’s basement handrail and on the barstool that had impaled him. On the kitchen counter near Melinda’s body.

Garrett’s nine-millimeter service pistol was missing. It wasn’t on him, and it wasn’t in his truck. Melinda, Evan, Carter, and John had been shot with a nine mil.

Cell phone records had been pulled. In the last six months, Garrett had called Jessie Olson over three hundred times. Almost twice a day.

There were no return calls from Jessie to Garrett’s number.

“What do you think?” Cole asked Noah. They were side by side in the dark observation room. Usually, they’d be watching the suspect squirm, but Garrett hadn’t so much as twitched since he’d been shoved into the chair and had his wrists locked in the shackles binding him to the room’s sole table.

Exhaustion made Noah’s brain slow, even as his mind was sparking, a thousand thoughts trying to ignite and failing, crushed under the revolving images of John and Molly and Bart and Jessie. “His DNA is on Jessie’s lips, and it would have to be put there extremely close to when she died, if not at the moment of her death. And, it looks like he’s got a motive, too.” Noah sighed. “But why kill Molly and John, and their whole family?”

“The question isn’t why. There’s never a good answer to why, not with sadists and psychopaths and serial killers.”

“How far back does this go, Cole? Garrett is a local. He was here during the first six murders.”

“That’s not enough to call him a killer.”

“He’s only been a deputy for two years. What was he doing before that?”

Cole said nothing.

“Kimberly’s, Jessie’s, and even Molly’s murder all have the Coed Killer’s signature. They match his MO. The FBI and local law enforcement held back that the victims weren’t sexually assaulted. How rare is it to have a strangulation without some form of sexual assault?”

“Rare,” Cole said.

“It was the defining feature of the Coed Killer’s MO, both with the first six, and again with Kimberly, Jessie, and Molly.” He scrubbed a hand over his face, over the start of a five o’clock shadow. What time was it, even? They’d been going for hours. “Now we have Garrett, who looks like he’s good

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