Chapter 27 #2
"Then help me prove it. Come back with me. Talk to the DA. Give us everything you know about the girls who came through the agency. The Three Pillar Community. Derek Hollis. Everything."
"And spend the rest of my life in prison for Hailey? For Colorado? For things I didn't do and one thing I..." He stopped. "One thing that wasn't what they'll say it was?"
"You said Hailey came to you. If that's true, tell it in a courtroom. Let a jury decide."
"A jury decided in Colorado. Before they decided, my life was already over.
" The gun shifted against Noah's skull, sliding from the back to just above his right ear.
The barrel pressed into his temple. Noah's breath stopped.
His hands hung at his sides. Every muscle in his body locked tight. "I'm not doing that again."
Samuel stepped around to Noah's side. Noah could see him now in his peripheral vision. The gun still leveled at Noah's temple, inches away. Samuel's face was slick with mist and sweat. He looked like someone who had arrived at a place he'd been heading toward for a long time without knowing it.
"Do me a favor," Samuel said.
Noah waited. He could feel his pulse in his throat.
"If you find Hailey, tell her I never meant for any of this to happen."
"Sure," Noah said. "I will."
The mist was heavy between them now, the sound of the falls so loud that Samuel's next words were almost swallowed by it. Almost.
"You know, being guilty of something isn't the same as being guilty of everything."
The crack split the air open.
Noah flinched so hard his knees buckled. His hands flew to the side of his head, instinct, his body reacting to what his brain hadn't processed yet. He shuddered, braced, waited for the pain. But there was no pain. No impact. No bullet.
He was alive.
He opened his eyes and turned. Samuel was gone.
The space beside him was empty. The rock where Samuel had been standing was wet with mist and something darker.
Noah looked over the edge and saw the body hit the water, a shape swallowed by the white churn of the falls, there for a second and then pulled under and swept downstream.
He didn't know. He'd heard the shot but hadn't seen it. Samuel could have fired into the air and jumped. Could have faked it and dove. Could be alive in the current, letting the river carry him away, banking on the cold and the chaos to cover his escape.
Noah didn't think. He went in after him. If Samuel was alive and running, Noah couldn't let him disappear into the river. If he was dead, Noah needed the body. Either way he was going over that edge.
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 rocks at 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.