Page 23 of The Grave Between Us
He looked at his watch. Ran his tongue over his teeth. “I turned the audio off, but they’re still watching, so I guess I should look like I’m talking. With you. But the truth is, this isn’t some kind of moment.” He screwed up his face. Shrugged. “Local guys don’t catch that many serial killers, so they always think they have someone special when they do—but me?” He shook his head. “Honestly, you’re boring. You’re just like all the others.”
Ingram’s eyes widened. His nostrils flared. Cole watched his pulse jump above the collar of his jumpsuit.
“I mean, I’m sure you think you’re not, but look at it from my perspective. I study serial killers every day. Hundreds of them. After a while, you see the truth: What you guys do isn’t black magic and Satan. It’s all just statistics. When it comes down to it, no serial killer is unique. Statistically, you’re going to be like the others.”
Ingram hadn’t blinked since Cole began speaking.
“You strangled your victims. Big deal, over 70 percent of serial killers do. You dump the bodies, obviously. Okay, 60 percent of serial killers do that. You use Drano or manipulate the bodies to hide forensic or probative evidence. Gotta tell you, of the killers that make an attempt to hide their victims’ bodies, almost 90 percent take those steps, too. See? You’re not unique. I took one look at your file and I already knew you.”
A slow, careful exhale as Ingram’s pulse pounded.
“Where you dumped the rest of your victims, how you tried to hide their remains, why you’re the way you are, how you got started.” Cole spread his hands in front of him. “Statistically, I can tell you the answers to all those questions, and there’s better than an 85 percent chance I’ll be right. We popped you with a dead body in your trunk, your DNA inside him, and you assaulted a state trooper with a witness, so you’re going down anyway. Maybe the agents out there”—he gestured at the door—“want the notoriety of interrogating a serial killer, or the feather in their cap that comes from catching one, but to me, you’re about as basic as they come. And I just want to go home.”
Cole slapped his hands on his thighs and stood. “I think that about does it. I’m going to go out there and give the other agents a rundown of your psychology, and we’ll get you back over to the prison. I think the marshals are getting coffee right now, so it might be an hour or so. You don’t mind sitting for a while, right?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. He breezed toward the door, checking his watch as he went. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ingram’s brown eyes track him, follow the line of his body up his long legs and linger over his throat. Ingram’s index fingers were pressed so tightly against each other his knuckles had turned white.
Cole stepped out and shut the door behind him.
Five furious FBI agents waited for him, including Hillary and Pressman. He closed his eyes. Counted the seconds as he reached into his pants pocket and fished out his cell. It rang before he got to four, and he answered without looking at the display. “Michael—”
“What the fuck was that in there?” Michael roared. “Did you know Director Harper was watching that little fucking charade? I told him I sent my best and brightest to question one of the most dangerous predators the FBI has ever captured, and he came down here, on his own, to watch you work. Do you have any idea what it’s like to watch the FBI director march out of your office in disgust? I’m going to have to justify to him why you’re even working for the Bureau! In fact, why the fuckareyou working for the Bureau?”
“Michael, you know, better than anyone, what I was doing in there.”
“Nothing that you did in there was any kind of professional profiling. You just took a shit all over profiling, in fact. Whatever rapport the other agents had built with him isgone. Were you trying to bad cop your way through that? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a worse attempt. That wasn’t bad cop, that was lazy fucking cop. That wasI want to lose my jobcop.”
“There wasn’t any rapport building going on down here before I arrived.”
“Where did you pick that up, anyway? Was that a glimpse of how you really feel?”
Five raging pairs of eyeballs stared him down, pinned him to Ingram’s interrogation room door. “Of course that’s not how I feel. I love my job.”
Michael snorted.
“I made a call, and if I’m wrong, I’ll answer for it to Director Harper myself. Or you can fire me, even. I know I’m gambling—”
“You’re Goddamn right,” Michael roared.
Pressman paced away, her hand on her forehead as if she had a migraine.
“If I’d told you what I was planning, you would have pulled me.”
“You bet your ass I would have. You may have single-handedly ended our chances of getting anything out of Ingram. Forget explaining yourself to Director Harper. How about you explain yourself to the victims’ families? Oh, that’s right, we don’t know who they are, because now we won’t be able to identify the victims only he knows!”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Sorry doesn’t cut it,” Michael snapped. He exhaled, hard and harsh. Over the line, Cole heard him sink into his desk chair. “Jesus… What did you do, take every psychological approach study we have and decide you knew better? The great Cole Kennedy knows all?”
“He’s a narcissist—”
“And narcissists love totalk. You give themopportunitiesto talk, you make them feel larger than life. You make them feel superior. You let them think you’re basking in their brilliance, that no other killer has ever been as cunning as they have. You don’t call them boring, or ordinary, or a Goddamn statistic. Ingram might try and pull a stunt against the marshals or the prison guards now to prove he isn’t average. He’s going to have to fix that wound you just inflicted on his psyche.”
Cole tipped his head back.
“I want you gone,” Hillary growled from across the hallway. “Today. Now. You tell your boss—”
The door to the operations room opened, and an agent, the greenest one in the office, who had pulled the short straw to man the observation room, poked his head out. “Uh, sir? Excuse me, but… there’s something happening in there.”
