Page 48 of The Grave Between Us
He drove down the next morning, taking backroads and driving under the speed limit. An hour outside the RA, he pulled over at a gas station and sat for forty minutes in the parking lot, staring at his dashboard. He could still feel Ian’s touch on the back of his neck. Ian’s breath ruffling his hair. Could still smell death on his skin, sweet vinegar decay, like he’d left soy sauce and rose petals boiling on the stove.
When he arrived, he went straight to the task force ops room. McHugh was at the duty desk, flipping through a giant stack of paper. His sleeves were rolled up and his hair was a mess, and he hadn’t shaved in three days, it seemed.
“Well,” McHugh snorted. “Cole Ingram decided to grace us with his presence.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“You’re his favorite, aren’t you? The only one he’ll talk to. The only one he’ll draw.” McHugh tossed a handful of the pages he held on the table in front of him. Crayon drawings of Cole spread like playing cards, covering the desk. “He’s moved on from portraits. He’s into nudes now.” Drawings of Cole naked, jacking his obscenely massive cock, lying in ever-more-seductive poses, looking at the artist with lust and longing.
“Is he drawing me as a victim? Any of the drawings put me in the victim’s position?”
“Ingram is drawing you naked, hundreds and hundreds of times”—McHugh fisted more pages in his hands—“and that’s what you ask? How he’s posed you?”
“I already know he’s obsessed with me. That’s not news. He’s drawing me naked to get attention, which it looks like you’re giving him.”
McHugh’s face reddened.
“There’s a big difference, psychologically, between him drawing a sexualized image of me and him drawing me as if he’s fantasizing me as one of his victims. If he’s drawn me restrained, or bound in bondage, or helpless. Or him in a position of power over me, or him hurting me, or me in any kind of pain. In one, he’s fetishizing me. In the other, he’s fetishizing the fantasy of me as his victim. I still have power in the first scenario. I can still work him in the room.”
McHugh’s scowl deepened. “I’ve looked at a lot of naked pictures of you,” he growled. “More than I fucking want to. But no, it doesn’t look like he’s cast you as a victim in his mind. At least, not yet.”
Cole nodded. He sank into one of the conference chairs, scrubbing his hands over his face.
“He has another request,” McHugh choked out. “He sent it over this morning. He said…” He shook his head. “He said when you come back to see him, make sure you’re wearing something you wore on the mountain when you dug up ‘his’ body.”
“Christ,” Cole muttered.
“He’s one sick bastard,” McHugh growled.
“Yes, he is.” Cole pushed himself to his feet with a weary sigh and made his way to the coffee pot along the wall. He needed caffeine to get through this. There was a carton of cream in the minifridge under the folding table, and he grabbed it, dumped enough in the coffee to turn it almost white. Sand-tan, the color of the walls. Hopefully that would be enough to keep his stomach calm when he faced Ian.
“I mean, you’ve done laundry since the mountain, right?”
“Yes, I have.” Not that it mattered. Cole could smell the scent of decomp under his fingernails and in his hair, on his T-shirts and his pillowcases, no matter how many times he did laundry, boiling his clothes, he washed them in such hot water. It was all in his head. But maybe not, if Ian thought he could smell the grave on him again. How long did death cling to the living? “We haven’t found his father’s body yet, have we?”
“No. Montana is a big place. We’re not sure what woods he’s even referring to. There are over a dozen within a hundred miles of the trailer he grew up in. We’ve got nothing.”
“Well, call him over from the prison. Let’s get this over with.”
* * *
Ian looked supremelyself-satisfied when Cole walked into their interrogation room. His nostrils flared, and he tipped his head back, inhaling deeply, as if he was scenting the finest meal prepared by world-renowned chefs.
“I didn’t wear any clothes from the grave site.”
“That doesn’t matter. He’s all over you. I can still smell his corpse mingling with your skin and hair. You opened up my grave, and I told you we’d be together forever when you did. This is just one of the many, many ways we’re connected now.”
Cole blinked as he sat at the table, setting down his padfolio and his pencil and his coffee. “Tell me about the man in the grave.”
“I think you should be the one telling me. Like you told me about Shane DeGrassi.”
Cole shook his head. “I need your statement. You told us to go to Beury Mountain. You told us to find him—”
“Ahh,” Ian cautioned, holding up a finger. “I told you to search the lake. I told you to bring your bathing suit. I didn’t tell you to go hiking in the woods.”
“It became obvious, once we were there, that the body you were leading us to wasn’t in the lake.”
“Obvious? To whom? The entire FBI team was focused on the lake. Not a single person was looking at the woods. Other than you. Why were you?”
