Page 41 of The Grave Between Us
EIGHT YEARS EARLIER
Damp fog,the color of dust and bone, clung to the mountains and the tangled woods. The cold hit Cole like a slap. The mist was sharp, icy needles pricking the exposed skin on his face, his cheeks and nose and forehead. It had been a beast getting up Beury Mountain, hauling the team and all their equipment up rutted dirt tracks and animal trails to the lake Ian had identified. Off-road trucks ringed the lake, parked as close as they could get without sinking into the black earth.
Cole waited at the lake’s edge, his boots sucking up mud, and watched the dive team prepare to enter the water. They’d spent the past few hours getting ready beneath a white tent, first setting out a mobile morgue, complete with receiving table and waiting body bag, and then dressing in dive suits. Other FBI agents waited in boats at anchor, scanning the murky darkness with small underwater cameras. The dive support team and evidence recovery team waited inside the mobile morgue.
Everyone watched the still, mirror-black surface. Three divers waded in up to their waists, then dropped forward, moving slowly, carefully. The lake swallowed them, and silence enveloped the woods again. Even the radios were quiet, their static muffled in the fog. Cole watched, his breath billowing before him. His whole body trembled, like there was an electric current thrumming nearby and vibrating his bones.
He glanced back at the prison truck he’d ridden up in. Ian sat in the back, shackled and restrained. He wasn’t allowed out of the truck. Back in Virginia, Ian had slyly suggested he might be useful on their grave hunt, when they were wandering around in the backwoods—a place he knew intimately. Powers higher than Cole had decided to bring him along.
Ian stared at Cole through the window, smiled, and then turned away. Cole followed Ian’s gaze, his eyes turning to the trees. Not the lake. Cole frowned. From where they’d parked by the water’s edge, the woods surrounding them looked almost like a beckoning tunnel.
The divers kept searching. Ripples rose and spread, tiny waves sloshing against the mud near Cole’s boots. Radio chatter back and forth, water slapping against fiberglass hulls. Overhead, a flock of birds crossed low and slow over the clearing. Long, spindly forms; single, echoing calls. Cranes.
Cole looked from the lake to Ian.
He headed back to the truck, climbing into the heated interior. Heads turned, watching him. The slam of the door was like a gunshot.
“Ian,” he said, watching him in the rearview mirror.
“Hello, Cole,” Ian purred. He kept staring into the woods. “I’ve been thinking: you would be a fantastic killer.”
“Excuse me?”
“The way you can get inside someone’s mind. Your ability to connect so quickly. How you can open them up like an oyster, get them to reveal that delicate little pearl. In some ways, I think you’re even better than I am at getting under someone’s skin.” His eyes flicked to Cole’s in the mirror. “In a manner of speaking.”
“I have no interest in killing people.”
“You have no idea what you’re missing.” Ian sounded wistful, his voice tinged with longing. “You have no idea the heights you can go to. The intensity you find on the other side of death. There’s a shroud between life and death, and when you pierce that, when you can move back and forth, you open up whole new planes of existence. Of reality.”
It was when Ian opened up that Cole got a whiff of his truest thoughts. His inner mindscape came out obliquely, like peering at a Rorschach and seeing only death.
“That doesn’t matter,” Cole said. “I’m not a murderer. I have no desire to kill anyone.”
“Desire…” Ian said. His voice was almost a growl. “Is it desire, or is it hunger?”
“What do you hunger for?”
“For what I need,” Ian breathed. “You still want to know, with your questions, but you don’tgetit. We’re not here because this murder was a moment in time where I lost control and hid my mistakes. This, right here,isme. I was born to be this man.” He stared at Cole before turning back to the woods. “Maybe we were born to cross paths.”
Ian’s breath fogged the window in front of him, his face so close to the glass his reflection was life-size, undistorted by distance. His eyes shone back as black diamonds, holes in the window.
Cole pushed open the truck door and jumped out. He slammed the door, then circled the truck, standing directly in front of Ian.
Ian looked through him as if he wasn’t there.
Cole turned and set off in the direction of Ian’s gaze. A narrow game trail cut through the thick underbrush and the gnarled tree trunks. It was a ragged dirt path covered in moldering leaves, unfurling like a hidden ribbon in the shadowed forest. Ahead, the trees grew denser, and the slope of the mountain angled upward, the incline reaching for the peak. He moved slowly, heel to toe, scanning the damp earth. With every step, Cole felt that same thrum in his bones.
A body in a grave, left to decompose, became a giant interruption to nature. Any grave digging would have disturbed the soil, turned over plants on the surface, brought clay and rocks up to the top. Even after years, there would be disturbances. Grasses and plants growing at different heights, pebbles where there shouldn’t be any. A depression in the ground as soil settled. Something that would stand out.
He dragged his gaze across the underbrush and the cluttered forest floor. Searched the dirt, looking for color changes, consistency changes—
There, holy shit,there. Tucked beneath a copse of ivy, under the gnarled roots of an old-growth tree. Rain had washed the earth away from the roots on the eastern side of the tree’s base, runoff rushing down through the fallen leaves into a ragged gully. Halfway up the gully, about four feet beneath the overhang of the exposed roots, was a long patch of discolored earth. Darker than the surrounding dirt, mixed with threads of clay and with more rocks peppering the surface. Ivy grew in meandering chains around the tree, draping across the forest floor except in that spot. There, the ivy was shorter, stubbier. As if the roots were slamming into something underground that stopped their growth. It was like looking at a cross section of the earth, seeing geological stratifications that hinted at the macabre.
His stomach plunged, like he’d stepped into an elevator that had changed floors too quickly. He stumbled, falling to his knees as he tried to climb the loose earth of the gully to the grave. His radio spat static, the divers reporting another negative grid search in the dark waters.
It’s not in the lake.
He slid, fell forward, and braced himself with both hands. Wet dirt squelched through his fingers. A worm popped out of the soil, running over the back of his hand before falling back into the dead needles and moldy leaves that covered his boots. He shook himself and pushed forward, climbing the unsteady earth faster than it shifted beneath him.
