Page 20 of The Grave Between Us
Failure sank like lead inside him, dropping into an oily ocean of shadows. He’d already pulled that crane from between Noah’s lips, at least in the festering spaces of his nightmare. And he already lived in a totality of fear, in a paralyzing terror that lasted the eternity between his heartbeats.
Ian’s ecstasy, his triumphal orgasms, had always been rooted in tasting his victims’ perfect, exquisite fear. In their suffering. He was a sadist, and to him, that wasn’t as simple as getting off on inflicting pain.
Criminal sexual sadism relished the suffering, taking a person down to their primal, base terror, without regard for that person’s life, or their desires, or their wishes, or their pleas. It didn’t matter if someone said “stop” or “please” to Ian. Desperation, his victim’s loss of control, brought him to the apocalypse of highs, the supersonic orgasms. His ecstasy was in anguish, in watching another person come apart all the way down to their atoms. Because of him.
Ian had known, mailing those photos to the BAU, that they’d get to Cole. That Cole would see what Ian had done, how he’d had Noah’s life in his hands. And wherever he was, near or far, he was orgasming in white-hot joy as he imagined Cole’s terror, his fear.
He’d already won.
Chapter Seven
EIGHT YEARS EARLIER
He’d just helped closea string of child murders in Spokane and was two days back from the West Coast when his boss appeared at his office door, bedraggled and unshaven and looking like he hadn’t slept in a week.
“Cole.” Michael sighed, sagging into the doorjamb. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I need you to drop everything.”
Cole blinked. Michael had given him three cases to review as soon as he’d gotten back to DC. If Michael wanted him to drop everything, he would, but what was he dropping two serial arsons and a kidnapping for? “How can I help?”
Michael’s gaze pinned him to his office chair. “Does the name Ian Ingram mean anything to you?”
He shook his head. “No. Why?”
“Good. Then the Bureau has kept a lid on things. I don’t know how much longer we’ll be able to. We’re poking into every corner of the country and asking a lot of questions. Someone is going to start asking questions in return.”
Cole had heard something, excited gossip from a colleague over text, right before Spokane police had brought in their main suspect for interrogation. Something about some guy being picked up in the Appalachians. A state trooper stopped to help a motorist who had skidded on black ice and ended up half in a snowbank. Everything was going great, and they’d wrestled the pickup truck back onto the highway, and they were sharing a cigarette together before they went their separate ways when the trooper spotted a naked, corpse-pale human foot and a naked leg dangling out of the truck’s tailgate.
The trooper had one second to react and draw his weapon before the driver came at him. There was a fight, and the trooper ended up on his back, the driver on top of him, fingers around his throat. Then there was a huge mountain man of a trucker swinging his fist at the back of the driver’s head. He went down on the black ice and slid into the center of the road, unconscious, on his belly.
Wow, Cole had texted. Then the child murdering suspect had walked in and he’d slid his phone away, and he’d never heard another word from his colleague. For a while, he thought he’d imagined the story. How could something so dramatic go silent? He texted his colleague for more info but never heard back. Oh well, he’d thought. He had tons of work to do, and they were probably buried in their own cases, too.
Things made a little more sense now. “Who is Ian Ingram?”
Michael never choked up. He was harried, he was rushed, he was irritable. He was annoyed. He was tired. But he was never scared. He was never bothered by a case. Whatever part of Michael might once have felt those tender emotions was walled away, hidden behind three divorces and two teenagers who didn’t speak to him.
It had been Michael who recruited Cole to the FBI when he began his doctorate. Cole had already made a name for himself with his master’s thesis, and Michael wanted Cole on his team. Cole dreamed of Hollywood moments, the adrenaline rush and clenched-throat excitement of slapping handcuffs on a bad guy, perp-walking the creep in front of the television cameras with his FBI jacket fluttering in the breeze.
Michael had seen the stars in his eyes and laughed. He’d pointed to Cole’s drink, a sour ale imported from Belgium. Cole liked unusual beers, enjoyed undiscovered microbreweries and off-the-beaten-path mixes of wheat and yeast and barley.
“Give it three years,” Michael had said, “and you’ll be drinking what I drink.” He’d lifted his glass. Whiskey, double, straight, whatever was in the well, he’d told the waiter. “I can’t explain what it’s really like,” he’d said. “But I can tell you you’ll move from beer to hard liquor in the first year. After that, you won’t care what you pour when you walk away from your desk.”
Cole drank a bottle of tequila, hold the glass, six months to the day after he joined the BAU. Michael let him puke his guts up and ride out his hangover without comment for the rest of the week.
So when Michael looked Cole dead in the eye and swallowed hard, the hairs on the back of Cole’s neck rose. What felt like spiders’ feet slithered up his arm bones.
Michael gave him the facts in a monotone. He stood in front of Cole’s desk and stared at the laminate, tracing the edge with his index finger as he spoke. The general story matched what Cole had heard over text, before his colleague must have been ordered to shut up. Michael had more details, though.
Ian Ingram, white male, thirty-six. Picked up in the Virginia Appalachians after attacking a state trooper who’d helped him get his pickup out of a snowbank. He’d turned on the trooper when the trooper noticed a human foot dangling from his fallen-open tailgate. A passing trucker incapacitated Ingram before he was able to murder the man.
In addition to the body in the truck bed, there were bloodstains on the jump seat in the pickup’s cab. The blood was not a match to the body. The corpse in the truck bed belonged to a missing white male, age forty-one, from North Carolina. Nelson Miller was a married father of three who had gone to a guys’ weekend in West Virginia. Sometime after leaving his buddies to drive home, he’d vanished. Police had taken his wife’s missing persons report and put out a bulletin, but, as with most missing middle-aged men, not much investigative effort was put forth. He’d taken his wallet and packed a bag when he left for the weekend, and it wasn’t a huge leap to imagine he’d kept on driving, had decided he didn’t want to mow the lawn or unload the dishwasher or trip over Lego bricks any longer.
Miller had been sexually assaulted, tortured, strangled to death, and sexually assaulted again. When he was pulled from the back of Ingram’s truck, he’d been dead for over five days and was starting to slip.
The blood on the jump seat belonged to a Hispanic male. Identity unknown.
There was also a perfect middle fingerprint on the underside of the truck’s passenger-side headrest, as if someone had grasped it while seated in the passenger’s lap. The print belonged to a missing Navy petty officer, a man who vanished from Norfolk before deployment and had been written off as AWOL six months before.
Semen DNA profiles from an additional two men were pulled from under the floor mats, and another indicator for blood—but no recoverable DNA—from under the glove box.
