Page 28 of The Grave Between Us
Ingram’s eyes narrowed.
“Are you angling for some kind of reward for talking? That hasn’t been your style. What, you want a cup of coffee or a sandwich? A porno mag for your cell at night?”
Ingram laughed. His whole face lit up when he did, like he was truly enjoying himself. “Absolutely not. No porno can come close to what I’ve experienced.”
“Then what do you want?”
“Nothing.” Ingram leaned forward, his chains going taut as he tried to move closer to Cole. “I want nothing. I don’t care what you offer me. I’m not your fucking monkey to dance because you clap some cymbals. You said there’s a family that wants closure? Good for fucking them. I don’t want to make them feel better or give them answers. Iliketheir pain. Tell me more about how anguished they are. Are they crying? Screaming? Wailing? I like when they make those videos, begging for their loved ones to come home. And when they start crying on camera? Oh, I like that a lot.”
It was Cole’s turn to be silent.
“Everything I’ve done, every man I’ve taken, every man I’ve killed, I did it because I wanted to. I don’t feel bad about it, and the family’s grief isn’t going to move me to spill anything. I took him. I tortured him. I killed him. And Ilovedit. Tell them that.”
Cole blinked. “So, what I’m hearing is, you’re absolutely full of shit?”
Ingram reared back.
“You were caught with Nelson Miller’s five-day-old corpse naked in the back of your truck, your DNA all over him, and enough blood inside the cab to convince a judge and jury that you killed another man, too. We’ve got you dead to rights on those charges, whether you plead guilty or not. Most men in your position would shut their mouths, try and fight for their freedom, but you’re not doing that. You’ve admitted you’re a murderer, and you say you have ‘many graves’ and that you like to take and torture and kill men. But you’re not willing to provide any more names or admit to any significant details. You’re talking in generics and generalities. Are you repeating lines you heard on TV? Is this some big jack-off fantasy for you? Do you think if you create a big enough buzz around your name, you’ll have a different jail experience?” Cole studied Ingram, took him in slowly. “You know what I see when I look at you? I see someone who’s saying everything they can to try and appear big and bad but still wiggle out of the federal death penalty. That big house, that big chair scare you, Ingram?”
“You can’t manipulate me into talking.”
“You’re talking to me right now.”
Ingram’s eyes flashed. His gaze went down Cole’s body and then back up. “I am.” His voice had dropped, gone husky. “I’m sure your big…braincan figure out why.”
“Then forget Nelson Miller’s family. Or anyone else’s family. Tellmewhat you’ve done.”
He watched Ingram’s pupils dilate like he’d just taken a hit of cocaine. His nostrils flared and his chains jangled.
Serial killers knew, when they stepped outside the boundaries of humanity, that what they were doing was wrong. They simply didn’t care. It took a special kind of narcissism to do that, to separate that fully and live in the darkness. They secreted their behaviors in order to continue doing what they loved, because they knew, on some level, how horrific they were. But even the ugliest wanted to be known. Media attention was one way to achieve that. Succumbing to an interrogator’s press for information was another. That pull to be understood was like gravity.
In the end, all narcissists wanted the same things: Praise. Acknowledgement. Veneration.
“Show me who you are,” Cole said.
Ingram looked away, his eyes gliding to a corner behind Cole. “You’ll never know me.”
“I know your work. I know theafterthat you leave behind.” Nelson Miller, and what had been done to him. “I see the results of your actions, and I can imagine how you did certain things. But imagining isn’t the same as knowing, and I wonder, could you be satisfied if I only ever have my own idea of what you’re capable of? Would you be satisfied at my banal interpretation of what you did to Nelson Miller? Or do you want me to picture it all? Every moment of terror that he suffered, the light fading from his eyes as he realized you were the last thing he’d ever see. I can finger-paint that picture, enough for a court report and a conviction, sure. But is that what you want?”
“You’re good, Cole. Your little psychological ploy works, on some level. Like I said, you’re the only agent who’s walked through those doors who was worth talking to.” Ingram stared. “You really want to know me?”
“I do,” Cole said simply. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, chest and chin pointed right at Ingram. Open body language, for the very first time. “I want to hear it. From you.” What Ingram did to Miller was a window into his mind and into his method. How he targeted the men he abducted, and what he did with them after. With that, they could begin to work backward and maybe, hopefully, start tracing the lives Ingram had destroyed.
Ingram mirrored Cole’s pose. His chains jangled, the loops of his handcuffs and his belly chain falling between his knees, the fabric of his prison jumpsuit taut where it clung to his muscled thighs. His eyes burned into Cole like black holes, sucking the oxygen out of Cole’s lungs.
“You think you know killers,” Ingram purred. “With your pie charts and your bar graphs and your Venn diagrams. Bed-wetting and bad daddies. Interviews with psychologists, and all your questions. But you don’t really know.”
“I’ve seen more than few corpses after someone like you gets through with them. I know what it took to get from alive to what was left behind.”
Ingram grinned. “There is no one like me.”
“I don’t know that. You’re asking me to take you at your word, but I don’t.”
“There’s only one way to know me.”
“I’m listening.”
The final days of Nelson Miller’s life took four hours for Ingram to describe, in minute, exacting, Technicolor detail. Every whimper, every scream. Every moment, from his abduction to the remote campsite Ingram took him to, and what he subjected him to there, in the woods. How he rested as he burned Nelson’s belongings, then hid the car. Had his fun with Nelson’s corpse, over and over again, until it was time to go. Snow was moving in, and he needed to dump the body and get gone. But he’d been greedy for just one more time, and that final desecration put him back an hour and led to the black ice and the snowy embankment and the friendly state trooper lending a hand.
