The water hit him like a wall of ice and concrete, driving the air from his lungs and pulling him under in a current that had no interest in human intentions. He kicked hard, broke the surface and gasped. The cold was immediate and total, seizing his muscles, turning his limbs into something heavy and foreign. The river dragged him downstream through the channel and he fought against it, scanning the white water for Samuel.
He caught sight of him twenty feet ahead. Face down. Arms out. Turning slowly in the current like something the river had already claimed. Not swimming. Not moving. Noah put his head down and swam.
The current was brutal, slamming him against submerged rocks, pulling at his legs, filling his mouth with water every time he turned to breathe. He'd grown up swimming in the rivers and lakes of the Adirondacks and he was strong in the water but this was something else. This was the river trying to take him too.
He reached Samuel in the calmer water below the main falls, where the channel widened and the current slowed enough to let him grab the back of Samuel's jacket. He hauled him sideways toward the bank, kicking with everything he had, his boots dragging against the riverbed when the water finally got shallow enough to stand. He pulled Samuel up onto the rocksat the river's edge, both of them streaming water, Noah's chest heaving, his hands shaking from the cold and the effort and the adrenaline that had nowhere left to go.
He dropped to his knees and turned Samuel onto his back.
The wound was above the right ear. Close range. The river had washed most of the blood away but the damage was unmistakable. Samuel's eyes were open and they were looking at nothing. Noah didn't need to check for a pulse. He already knew.
He hadn't faked it. He hadn't jumped. He'd put the gun to his own head, said his last words, and pulled the trigger while standing close enough to Noah that Noah had felt the concussion of the shot without understanding what it was.
He sat back on his heels. Water ran off him in streams.
The river roared beside him. The mist settled over both of them, the living and the dead, and the gorge walls rose on either side like the walls of something that had been built to hold things in.
Noah knelt there for a long time. His clothes were soaked. The Bronco was up top in the parking lot with the keys still in the ignition. He'd have to climb back up and find a signal. Call it in. Wait for the teams to arrive with their lights and their radios and their questions.
But for now he knelt on the bank beside the man who had held a gun to his head, confessed to one thing, denied everything else, and then turned the barrel on himself before Noah could stop it. Before Noah even understood what was happening.
Guilty of something isn't the same as guilty of everything.
Noah heard it in the dead man's voice and he would keep hearing it for a long time. Because it was true. And because it meant the killer was still out there, and the board had just been wiped clean, and the only suspects left were a man in the wind and a case full of ghosts.
He stood up. His legs were unsteady. He climbed the bank, pulling himself up by roots and rocks, water streaming from his clothes. He reached the gravel lot and stood beside the Bronco, dripping, shaking. His phone was dead, soaked through. He climbed into the driver's seat and reached for the radio with numb fingers. Water pooled beneath him on the seat. The radio crackled to life and he called it in.
28
Noah was under the microscope.
Callie and McKenzie stood in the observation room at the State Police barracks in Ray Brook, watching Noah through the one-way glass. He sat at the interview table across from two BCI detectives, one asking questions while the other took notes. Noah's clothes had been replaced with a dry set from his locker but his hair was still damp at the edges and the skin around his eyes had that hollowed-out look that came from adrenaline leaving the body with nothing to replace it.
The door behind them opened and Ray stepped in.
"I arrived as soon as I could," he said, moving to the glass. "How's it going?"
"Noah was lucky he had the internal and external cameras running inside his vehicle," Callie said. "Samuel used Noah's own weapon to shoot himself."
McKenzie leaned against the wall with his arms crossed. “Aye, it was like it was his last screw-you to law enforcement. He must have figured Noah's Bronco wasn't set up like a regular cruiser and there'd be no way to prove Noah didn't shoot him."
"They pulled the data from the mobile data video recorder and they're going over the conversation Noah had with Samuel before he pulled the trigger," Callie continued. "The whole drive. Audio and video from the internal camera. You can see the gun on Noah the entire time." She shook her head. "What kind of guy steals a cop's gun, kidnaps him, and then kills himself?"
"The guilty kind," Ray said.
Through the glass, one of the BCI detectives slid a tablet across the table showing Noah a freeze frame from the MDVR footage. Noah studied it and answered something they couldn't hear through the soundproofed glass.
"Any luck on the processing of Samuel's home, agency, or car?" Callie asked.
Ray nodded. "He'd tried to clean up with bleach. But traces of blood were found at the agency that match Hailey Benton. And the injury on Samuel's scalp matches what his makeup artist described about him holding his head and bleeding that night."
"So we figure he managed to get Hailey Benton after she left the hospital and killed her," McKenzie said.
"Without her body it's hard to know," Ray replied.
Callie folded her arms. "And by the sounds of the confession on that footage, he doesn't admit to sexually assaulting the girl in Colorado or Hailey. His version is that Hailey attacked him when she got the wrong idea."
"And we can't confirm that because she's missing," McKenzie said.
