Page 85 of The Grave Between Us
Noah picked up the phone. The caller was an older man, the owner of a contracting business, who sometimes hired day laborers. Six months ago, he’d hired Charles to do some roof work, and then for some construction work, and he’d liked him so much he decided to keep him on. Charles told him he was working under the table to avoid having to pay alimony to his “bloodsucking bitch of an ex,” and the caller, who had two ex-wives and was working on a third, sympathized. He’d had no idea, he said, his voice trembling, no idea at all, that Charles was a murderer.
He was more than willing to turn over everything he had on Charles, including his address, even driving it to the FBI office. He couldn’t get rid of it fast enough, like the paperwork itself was radioactive.
An hour later, Noah, Jacob, and the rest of the office served a search warrant at the address Charles had used. It was a run-down single-wide trailer parked on a worn-out piece of land, nothing but dirt and emptiness, between Bayard and Jefferson. The landlord was an old woman who lived in Davenport, who’d accepted cash mailed to her once a month. She didn’t know nothing about nothing, she’d told the Davenport police officer who went to her door. She made $200 a month from that trailer, but that wasn’t worth the headache of the police on her doorstep. They could do the hell they wanted with the thing, as far as she was concerned.
Cole had been staying within arm’s reach of Noah all morning, but he waited in the SUV while Noah and Jacob broke down the door. “You don’t need to come inside,” Noah had said.
“No, I don’t,” Cole had breathed.
Pencil sketches papered the trailer’s interior walls and ceiling. Hundreds of drawings, all of the same subject.
Cole in every pose imaginable, from the professional to the perverse. Cole as an object of desire, Cole as a victim. Cole alive, Cole dead, Cole in a grave. Cole decaying and turning to a skeleton. Noah plucked that one from the wall and tore it to shreds.
“This scene is closed to Cole,” he told the team. “Do not show him these drawings. Do not show him the photos you take.” He waited for each of his people to meet his eyes and nod. “After you photograph this place, bag up every drawing of Cole in one envelope, seal it, and give it to me.”
He’d burn those drawings. They weren’t taking Ian to trial. Evidence could be misplaced. Lost forever.
Hidden behind the drawings of Cole, Dale and Miya found other images, men they couldn’t identify. Sophie thought one looked like Lane Boyer, the missing national guardsman from North Dakota.
When the search of the trailer was complete, they had 107 drawings of unidentified men. Noah overnighted them to Director King at Quantico, along with a copy of the scene processing report.
Cole never asked what was inside the trailer. Noah’s silence was enough, it seemed, for him to know the edges of the truth.
* * *
North Dakota’scrime lab called a few days later. They’d run the DNA against a sample they requested from the Department of Defense. The remains from Grahams Island were a match to Lane Boyer. And the sketch Ian had drawn was an eerily accurate representation of how he’d looked the month before he’d disappeared.
FBI headquarters spun up a new task force: the Ian Ingram Graves Recovery Task Force. They ran the sketches against the missing persons databases. They matched 102 of the drawings to men who had vanished from areas where Ian Ingram was known or suspected to have been, both in the original sixteen years he was active and in the eight years following his escape.
The task force used Jacob’s search algorithm, too, calculating a maximum distance from abduction site to probable grave location. Twenty-five miles seemed to be a lock, no matter where Ian was active.
Once the FBI knew where to look, Ian’s graves opened out of the earth like corpse flowers, blooming for the first time in years.
* * *
Cole came back slowly.Noah measured his days in broadening smiles and decreasing silences. Cole was present more of the time, no longer staring into the distance, gazing into an abyss only he could see. He was there for homework and dinner, staying with Noah and Katie throughout the length of conversations. Holding Noah’s hand as they ate. Humming as they did the dishes side by side. He sat with Katie, helping her salvage her shattered makeup palettes, learning how to mix the colored powder with rubbing alcohol to form a paste that they transferred into new tins and then dried in the oven. He and Katie painted her bedroom, and Noah found them painting each other before they were done, rolling the paint up and down each other’s backs and over their hair. He escaped before they tag-teamed him, shutting the door on them and holding it closed as they laughed and shouted.
There were nightmares. Nights when Cole was seized by terror, when he screamed and screamed and Noah couldn’t shake him awake, no matter how hard he tried. Nights Cole woke up gasping, dizzy, choking for air. Hyperventilating. Nights he clung to Noah and wept silently, and it was all Noah could do to hold him and let his tears fall. Cole would listen to Noah’s heartbeat as Noah kissed his brow, and they’d spend hours in silence, waiting for dawn.
Those nights became fewer, and more and more often they fell asleep holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes, and stayed that way until the sun rose.
They bought a new bed, an extravagant, king-sized sleigh bed. The night it was delivered, Cole put Noah on his belly and had him grip the footboard with both hands. He ate Noah out until Noah was trembling, until his bones were jelly and he couldn’t even moan anymore, and then he pulled Noah to his knees and slid his cock all the way to Noah’s heart.
Noah looked over his shoulder, watching Cole watch him as they made love, reaching back to hold Cole’s hands. Cole pulled out and rolled him over, then slid back inside. Noah wrapped his arms around Cole’s shoulders and buried his hands in Cole’s hair. Cole held him close, moving inside him tenderly. He kissed Noah’s cheeks and his eyelids, his forehead. “I love you,” Cole breathed. “Thank you for staying with me. Waiting for me.”
“I’ll always be here with you,” Noah said, moving with Cole. Rocking together, his hips and Cole’s moving faster, Cole sliding in and out until Noah was arching his spine and tipping his head back and he grabbed the footboard with both hands as he shuddered, as he breathed Cole’s name and came all over himself and Cole buried his face in Noah’s chest and spilled inside him.
They stayed up all night, talking quietly, making love every other hour. Reconnecting in a way they needed to, down to the molecular level. Noah traced the veins on Cole’s arms, and Cole drew patterns on Noah’s back, kissed a path up and down Noah’s hairy thighs and the backs of his knees until Noah giggled and snorted. Noah gave him a long massage, until Cole was a loose-limbed pile of muscles and bones mumbling Noah’s name in between deep groans.
As the sun rose, Noah grabbed his phone and pulled up a web page he’d saved a week earlier. “I have another idea for our wedding.”
Noah laid his head on Cole’s chest while Cole scrolled through the site. He heard Cole’s heart speed up. Felt his breath come faster.
“How soon can we do this?” Cole asked.
“I can buy plane tickets right now.”
Cole kissed him deeply, tossing the phone to the carpet. He pushed Noah into the mattress, tangled his fingers with Noah’s. His cock was hard and heavy against Noah’s hip. “Let’s do it,” he breathed against Noah’s mouth. “I don’t want to wait any longer. I want to be yours.”
