Page 26 of The Grave Between Us
“You like adults. Children don’t do anything for you. Maybe you don’t care if they’re eighteen, as long as they look like grown men. That’s what you want.”
“No interest in children,” Ingram said, shaking his head. “I’m not that much of a monster.”
Cole swallowed. Child predator or murdering necrophile, which was worse? There were unanswerable questions in life.
“Men aren’t missed the same way that missing children or women are. There might be a flyer put up in a local Walmart and a gas station, but a missing middle-aged man won’t make the news. If you covered your tracks well, and there was no connection between you and him, there was a high statistical likelihood that you would never have been caught.”
“Do you know, that was one of the most surprising things I learned? Early on, I used to be so paranoid. Murder is an obsessive kind of ritual, isn’t it? Paranoia dovetails well into obsession.”
Early on. Cole forced his breath to stay steady, in and out.
“I would follow up on the men I took. Check the news and see if there was any big search. Any massive media outpouring. And you know what I found?”
“Not a lot.”
Ingram shook his head. “Nothing at all, in most cases. Men can disappear and barely anyone will blink, other than the families. It made it all so much more satisfying.”
“Satisfying?”
“No one ever thinks a grown man will become a victim, certainly not to someone like me. What’s more likely, in everyone’s mind? That that loving father of two-point-five children, husband to a PTA mom, was abducted, sexually assaulted, and strangled to death? Or that he found a younger woman at a bar, did a line of coke off her tits, and followed her out to California?”
“I imagine the men you took were shocked that they were in that situation.”
“Every man I ever took was so… surprised.” He grinned. “So surprised that they, right then, right there, had been chosen. Out of everyone in the world, I had looked at them and said, yes, you. It never crossed their mind that they’d end up like that. They had no idea what to do.”
“How many men are we talking about?”
Ingram’s grin turned wolfish. He didn’t answer.
Cole’s foot bounced lightly as he pursed his lips. He was still playing the uninterested angle. “I’m trying to decide if you were only in it for the sex, or if there was a symbolic aspect to your victims. Fathers, strong men in the prime of their life, are usually symbols of stability and solidity. Did you ever see your father cry when you were young?”
Ingram’s eyes went dark—inverting, it seemed. No longer gleaming, but turning into twin eclipses. His expression, his body, even his breathing went still.
“So,” Cole said. “Daddy issues.”
A muscle in Ingram’s jaw clenched and released.
“Serial killers have a need, a very specific hunger they’re trying to satiate. That leads to a specific type of victim and a specific type of signature. Often ones that tie back to experiences in childhood, when you felt victimized yourself. Powerless. When rage began to build, with no outlet. It doesn’t matter how much you try to hide that going forward. It’s always there. It drives everything you do, whether you realize it or not.”
“There is nothing as exquisite as watching a man, a man convinced of his invulnerability and his place in this world, shatter. No one can suffer like a man does when all his assumptions, all his fantasies of safety, are ripped away. It’s…” Ingram tipped his head back, mouth open, eyes fluttering closed, enraptured. He exhaled.
Cole’s gaze strayed down to Ingram’s crotch. Yep, there it was. An erection. Ingram was ticking all the boxes on the sexually sadistic serial killer checklist. He loved what he did. Loved it to the point of arousal, even in memory.
His eyes flicked up, but Ingram had caught him looking at his lap. He grinned, wicked and wide eyed. “What ever happened to those plans of yours for tonight?”
Cole sighed, a put-upon, aggrieved, over-the-top huff. He was still trying to play Ingram, keep him unbalanced. Keep him from seeing a full picture of Cole. “Well, I guess they’re ruined now.”
A bottle of tequila and his cell phone, maybe a few hours jacking off. Those had been his plans. In the stillness of his condo, behind double-deadbolted doors.
He wasn’t going to be jacking off for a while, though. Not after this. Desire vanished for days, weeks, sometimes months during an investigation. The pathways of the mind, the channels dividing sex and death and violence, were tangled in the predators he tracked. His own psyche responded by putting an ocean between himself and arousal. That was his own psychology driving his behavior. Creating patterns that he circled.
Ian kept going. “Were you going to meet up with a man? How do you like your men, Cole? A little bit older?”
Cole’s breath hitched.
“I’d take you home with me if we met in a bar,” Ingram purred. “Oh, I would.”
There was a knock on the door, loud enough that it made Cole jump. He squeezed his eyes shut, gripped the arms of the chair for a second. Tried to drag the fragments of his composure back together through force of will. He stood, avoiding Ingram’s gaze, and headed to the door.
