Page 42 of The Grave Between Us
There was a body here. He knew it. Could almost feel the scream of the bones.The last person to touch these men was me, and the next to touch them could be you.
We’ll be bonded forever.
Cole scraped at the soil, fingers sliding through the black dirt. His breath fogged in front of his face, puffs that kept time with his frantic pants. Mist hung between the thick tree trunks, slid beneath his jacket’s collar, and dripped down his spine.
His fingertips hit something hard. Something cold.
He stilled, breath sliding from him like the blade of a knife.
His trembling hand brushed the loose earth away. He thought he’d see a face—disfigured, perhaps, dirt-covered, locked in a tortured scream. The haze of death clouding a man’s eyeballs. He had no idea how old this grave was. How recently Ian had killed this man.
An empty orbit from a human skull peered out of the dirt. This man didn’t have a face anymore. He wasn’t going to look up at the sky ever again.
He brushed a little farther, exposing the zygomatic bone, the nasal orbit, the maxilla. He traced the alveolar process, dug his finger into the infraorbital foramen. Pushed dirt away from what used to be the man’s jaw, all the way up to the temporal process of the zygomatic arch. Human. Definitely human. The palm-sized exposure of sweet, oily bone stuck out like chipped porcelain in the dark mud.
Something colorful caught his eye. Something red and flecked with orange, faded and dulled but still visible. He brushed more earth away. The blunted tip of an origami wing poked out of the corpse’s jaw, the edges sliding through the gap where decayed flesh and tissues had loosened their hold on the lower mandible.
Ian, setting a paper crane delicately in the center of his palm. Ian, tucking paper cranes inside the mouths of his victims before he buried them.
I make my own wishes come true.
He backed away, stumbling down the slope and losing his footing. He tumbled ass over head until he landed in the wet trickle at the bottom of the gully. Rocks dug into his spine, a sharp, sudden pain, and he lay still for a moment, looking up into the gauzy fog. It hovered over his face, obscuring the trees, the branches, the rest of the world. It was a shroud, Ian’s shroud, carving off the world of the living from the world of the dead.
Cole dug his radio out of his jacket pocket. “Base, Kennedy.”
“Go, Kennedy,” the voice came back, lined with static. The search team commander sounded ragged, frustrated with the hours of work behind them with nothing to show for it and the prospect of coming up empty-handed at the end of the day.
“I’ve got a body,” he croaked. “In the woods. Shallow grave dug into the side of a gulch.”
Static. “Repeat your last.”
It was the FBI equivalent ofWhat the fuck.
“I’ve got a body in a grave. Ian wasn’t interested in the lake recovery. But he loves his corpses. He wouldn’t look away if there was a chance you were going to bring up one of his victims.”
“He told you where the body was?”
“No.” Cole swallowed. Expectancy crackled over the radio. He heard water splashing from the lake. Divers coming up. Boats heading to shore. “No, I found it based on behavioral cues he gave.”
There was a beat, a moment of judgment, and then, “Roger. We’re redeploying resources now. Stay at the site until we get there.”
He clicked to affirm, then dropped the radio in the dead leaves and stared at his dirt-black fingers. There was a smell coming off his hands, something deeper than the earth. Something sharper, sweeter, stickier. The smell of decaying bone.
Cole watched the recovery team probe the earth carefully, searching for the edges of the grave. It was a rough four-foot oval in the side of the gully, hidden beneath the tree roots. If Cole hadn’t been looking for it, guided by Ian’s unwavering stare, he would never have spotted the signs. Even with the evidence flags and the grid lines outlining the edges, he had to squint to see the grave at all.
The recovery team scraped away the dirt in half-inch-thick layers, piling each on a separately labeled tarp before moving on. The grave opened up in slow, methodical stages.
Death bloomed from the earth ahead of the body, a pungent aroma that clung to Cole’s skin and clothes. It oozed down his throat, smeared the inside of his nose and lungs, swirled on his tongue.The sense of smell is the recognition of particulate matter, his mind recited as he watched the team work.I’m smelling his death.The victim’s body was inside Cole, going deeper with every inhale. Crawling inside him, into his brain, into his lungs.
Cole stayed until the man’s bones were uncovered. The man had been buried with his hands bound behind him, his body folded in half, one leg beneath him and the other straight, as if he’d been dumped carelessly. There were no clothes, no personal effects. He’d been buried nude. Bits of leathery tissue clung to the joints and the middle of the long bones. The man’s skull was bare, but his pelvis and spine still had gristle attached, long, stringy fibers that got lost in the dirt. Pieces of hair and what looked like leather were scattered in the dirt around the corpse. Parts of the body that had fallen off during decomp and then stayed lodged in the earth. Soaplike sludge wound like threads through the dirt beneath the bones. Liquified tissues. Whoever Ian had put in the ground had decayed and molded and melted into the earth, everything about him sinking into the darkness, until only his bones remained.
Cole had to bite down on his tongue, dig his fingers into the meat of his palm until he felt the sting of tiny half-moon cuts.
Strobe lights flashed, crime scene photographers moving in to do their part. Forensic techs milled in the background as the lead evidence recovery agent spoke into a handheld recorder. “One unknown adult skeleton, appearing intact, presumed male, buried folded at the waist, upper body prone, lying along a north-south line. Skull is turned to the side and facing west. The body lies approximately four feet down and eighteen inches into the side of a gulch.”
The man was buried close enough to the side of the gulch that, when Ian revisited the grave, he probably put his hands in the earth and reached for the bones, then masturbated over the soil as he relived the murder.
Cole lurched back through the tangled woods toward the parked trucks. The lake was glass, every agent relocated to the grave site. His footsteps sounded overly loud, cracking twigs like bones snapping beneath his boots, leaves rustling around him like moans. His chest was tight, the fog choking him, and he couldn’t get that scent, that death aroma, out of his nose. He was freezing, chilled down to his core, and he lurched toward the truck, tore open the door, clambered into the front seat—
