Page 47 of The Grave Between Us
“Yes, ma’am.” Noah tugged at Cole’s elbow, hard. “Come on.”
“Give my kid back his bird,” the dad growled. “And don’t go around touching any more kids. Your badge doesn’t give you the right to be a predator.”
Cole almost lunged at the father, almost laid him out with a punch across his ugly pug nose. He gritted his teeth and shoved the paper crane toward the kid, letting go before the boy had his hands on the bird. It fluttered down, and the kid leaped for it, then ran away to rejoin his friends.
The kids’ playful shouts echoed through the silent barn, the only sound accompanying Cole and Noah’s long, horrible walk to the exit. Eyeballs followed them as if every patron wanted to make sure Cole and Noah were thrown out.
His gaze drifted back to their table and their empty champagne glasses, the half-eaten appetizer. The binders, open to the photos of beautiful weddings. The images went off like depth charges in Cole’s mind. Noah had wanted to marry him there.
He trudged to the parking lot, jogging ahead of Noah to get the passenger door for him. Noah was solid ice, refusing to even look at Cole. He didn’t say a word until they were on the highway.
“What was that?” Noah’s voice was hard. Brittle. “Why did you accost that kid about his origami?”
“I didn’t accost—”
“Cole.”
He gripped the steering wheel so hard his hands shook.
“You said it was related to an ongoing investigation. What investigation? I don’t know about anything you or the rest of the office is working on that involves origami.”
Muddy fields flew past the SUV, emptiness that could hide so much. Hide graves. Even hide a man, if he wanted to disappear. Ian had walked away from civilization eight years ago, it seemed, and there hadn’t been a single sighting of him in all that time, until he’d chosen to reveal himself when he tried to kill Noah, take him away from Cole.
How many times in the past eight years had Cole seen a paper crane?
When was a paper crane just a paper crane, and when it was the signature of a serial killer stalking his life?
His vision blurred, and he hissed, rubbing his palm over his eyes as he let his foot off the gas. He fumbled at the dash and found the emergency blinkers, guiding the SUV off the highway and onto the gravel shoulder. It was flat here, an extension of the road, not like the ditch Noah had been forced to crash into when Ian—
Silence. Noah waited, his ragged breaths audible in the stillness.
Cole closed his eyes. “I haven’t told you the whole truth about your shooting, Noah.”
Chapter Fourteen
EIGHT YEARS EARLIER
Cole didn’t talkto Ian for over three weeks, after Beury Mountain.
He checked out of his hotel and went back to Quantico. Spent a week working through his inbox, the reports and emails he’d let pile up in his absence, in his complete devotion to Ian Ingram. At night, he went home to his empty apartment. He drank beer at first, but when the silence filled up with Ian’s voice, he switched to whiskey. He slept with the lights blazing in every room. He woke up several times a night, checking the locks on his doors and windows, even though he was on the third floor.
Darkness crept into his life, like tar oozing through cracks. He felt the weight of it, the heavy presence of evil.
He kept his earbuds in, kept his phone cycling through music playlists and podcasts. He needed noise to fill up his brain. To push out the smooth cadence of Ian’s voice, the words he whispered in Cole’s unconscious. Ian’s voice had taken over Cole’s inner monologue, as if Ian had stepped inside Cole’s brain and was thinking for him. Ian had made a home for himself in the space between Cole’s neurons.
He was like the dark matter of the universe. Invisible to the naked eye, but suffusing reality with weight and terror.
Eventually, the requests started coming in, first from McHugh and then from SAC Hillary. Ian was asking to talk to Cole again. They’d offered to have another agent speak with him, but he’d refused. He’d only speak to Cole. And only in person.
Ian could rot in his cell until he decomposed like one of his victims for all Cole cared. He could sit and wither away, his skin melting off and then turning to leather, his tissues fraying and evaporating until his bones collapsed and he was nothing but a pile of dust that the rats chewed on and the worms crawled over.
But the FBI disagreed, and Michael ordered him back down to the RA. “We need his statement on the body we uncovered. We need him to give us something. A confession, ideally, detailing exactly what happened and how that man came to be buried in that spot. Are there more bodies up there? We’ve scoured the place, but we haven’t found any more graves. Are we missing something? Why did he lead you to that grave?”
“I don’t know,” Cole murmured. He bounced a pencil on his desk, sitting slumped forward, his spine curled. “I can’t read his mind, Michael.”
“You’re pretty damn close,” Michael snapped. “You’re the only profiler or FBI agent who was able to get into his head, and because of that, we’ve got solid leads on finding his victims and bringing them home. You’re doing that. Be proud of that.”
He nodded. Was he getting inside Ian’s mind, or was Ian getting inside his?
