Page 25 of The Grave Between Us
“Not everyone.”
“The FBI sent their best, didn’t they?”
Cole snorted. It was his turn to tip his head back and laugh. “Are you trying to appeal to me? Butter me up for something? I’m hardly the FBI’s best. I’m still in school.”
“The FBI doesn’t hire students, especially not into the BAU. You’re working on your doctorate, not your bachelor’s degree. You can pretend to be a student all you want, but if I look up your name at the prison law library, I’m going to find research papers with your name on them. Accolades. Awards.”
Cole’s lips thinned.
“There’s a reason they sentyou. You’re young, about the age that I like my men, but you’re not an idiot, Cole Kennedy. The little stunt you pulled to get my attention proves that. I’ve been here two weeks, and not a single agent who walked through that door before you understands even a fraction of what I am. You do, partly.”
“What is it that I understand?”
The room fell quiet as Ingram stared Cole down. He’d gone preternaturally still, a predator in tall grasses, lying in wait. Even his breathing seemed to hesitate. His eyes gleamed. Cole’s gaze dipped to Ingram’s pulse. It was pounding, quickening beneath his tanned skin as Cole watched. He dragged his eyes back up to Ingram’s.
Ingram was right. Cole understood.
Ingram was a predator. Every moment of his life, he hungered: to possess, to dominate, to extinguish. Every cell of Ingram’s body was locked in an endless scream, fueled by incandescent rage. An inferno that never guttered. He visited that rage on his targets, relishing their cries and the chill of their flesh cooling beneath his savage touch. He dug his graves by hand with a smile. He hunted, and hunted, and hunted, day in and day out. He loved what he did. He loved to kill.
Cole hunted, too. He hunted Ingram and the monsters like him. Cole’s hunger was wreathed in statistics and covered by a badge—and he didn’t stalk victims, he stalked behavioral patterns, plucked personality profiles out of the detritus left behind when a murderer moved on, discarded his victim and his scene, and slunk away. But there was still that craving inside him, a hunger that echoed Ingram’s. He wanted to catch the Ian Ingrams of the world.
“I’m right,” Ingram breathed. “I was waiting for you.”
“I’m not here for you.”
“No?”
“I’m here for your victims. The people you’ve killed have loved ones waiting for them, desperate for answers.” A light flashed in Ingram’s eyes. He liked that. He liked the families’ suffering. Cole shifted tactics. “I’m here to pull information out of you, nothing more than that.”
“Tell me about my victims, then. Tell me about my crimes.”
There was that plurality again. Multiple victims. Multiple waiting families. How much suffering had this one man been responsible for?
This was the wrong way around. Cole always worked in the other direction, looking at victims and murder scenes and putting together the shape of the man who created those horrors. Serial killers were driven by compulsion, their inner desires unleashed upon the world. They worked in cycles, repeating the same rituals time and again, creating a pattern that revealed their psychology. Method was the key to their motivation, signature the hint to their cravings. The victim, too, was part of the manual to the killer’s mental landscape. Each victim was significant. The victim must be a brunette, or must have large breasts—or no breasts—or have pierced ears. Must have highlights and be sweaty after yoga class. Must be a middle-aged man with a paunch, softness to his hips. Or young, too young.
Serial murder was the hardest to track, because the killer and victim were often strangers. The FBI used to call these murders “motiveless,” but that wasn’t true. There was a motive. It was simply locked inside the malignant mind of the murderer. Only he knew how and why his compulsion came to fruition in that place, at that time, with that victim. Until someone like Cole cracked the killer open in the interrogation room, and he spilled his secrets for them to pore over.
Ultimately, serial murder was rage and hunger and a center-of-the-psyche scream, all rolled into one. The killers were screaming at the way their own souls had been obliterated. At the father or mother who beat them senseless, at the teacher or guardian who put a hand over their mouths and another down their pants and told them to never, ever tell. Rage and hate and discordant pathology, wires crossed in the mind. Isolating, violent fantasies repeated on obsessive loops, usually in too young a mind, reinforced by a sideways craving for the obscene. Broken neurology, head injuries. Shattered fragments buried inside their DNA. Mix it all together, and what could come out, when those boys grew into adults, were men who killed in search of better, more intense orgasms, to match the intensity of their childhood anguish.
Patterns drove killers. Patterns drove Cole, too. Patterns were how he unlocked predators’ minds. Understand their methods, understand their drives. Read the signature, know the fantasy. Look at the victim, see what they represented to their murderer.
What did he do here, with a killer who wouldn’t talk? Ingram implied multiple victims and a lengthy history that the FBI was already frantic over. “You finally caught me,” he’d said. “There are many graves.” But that’s where the information stopped.
How did Cole work in reverse, take a confessed killer with only one body and extrapolate backward, find the other victims he’d secreted away?
Start from the beginning. Like he always did.
“When you close your eyes and masturbate, you see men,” Cole said. “You always have. You’re both attracted to and frustrated by men, and you’re frustrated by the attraction itself. Someone—either someone close to you or society or both—told you that wanting men, wanting sex with men, wasn’t right. You crave men, and you hate that you do. It’s one of the seeds that sprouted into your rage at the world.”
Ingram smiled.
“You’ve only killed men. You don’t care about women. They aren’t relevant to your life. You don’t consider them one way or another. They don’t even occur to you as victims. You wouldn’t get any satisfaction out of killing a woman.”
“I wouldn’t. You’re right.”
“They’re not your fantasy.”
“Not at all.”
