Page 51 of The Grave Between Us
They used McHugh’s car. Hillary took a shotgun from the weapons locker and walked behind McHugh and Cole as they led Ian out. Ian was quiet and calm as he was put in the back seat, for once not trying to talk to Cole or get his attention. He simply stared at Cole, ignoring Hillary and the shotgun as McHugh buckled him in, looping the seat belt over and then under his hands, restrained in front of his waist.
“See you tomorrow, Cole,” McHugh said as he slid into the driver’s seat. Hillary climbed into the passenger seat, the shotgun between his legs.
“Call me after you unload him at the prison?”
“Sure.” McHugh gave him a two-fingered wave before he put the car in gear and drove out of the parking lot.
Ian twisted around, watching Cole as they pulled away.
* * *
Cole was finishinghis report on the day’s interrogation when his cell phone rang. McHugh’s name flashed on the screen, and he swiped one-handed to answer, putting the call on speaker in the empty conference room. “Did you guys get him all tucked into his cell?”
“Cole!” McHugh screamed. There was a sound like fire racing across a meadow or water rushing over a waterfall. Then a bang, like the sound of a building collapsing. Or a shotgun firing at close range. “Cole!” McHugh’s voice was filled with terror, with horror come to life. As if something had reached inside him and plucked the strings of his deepest fears. “Jesus Christ!”
The line cut out.
Cole stared at his phone.
He heard an explosion of radio static from down the hall, bursting out of the operations room. The intercom buzzed overhead, a woman’s frantic voice shouting a distress code. Running footsteps. Slamming doors.
He didn’t remember getting in his car, but suddenly he was driving, his dashboard lights flashing and sirens wailing. He joined up with three other police cruisers as they turned onto Mountain Pass Road, heading through the foothills that cut from valley to valley between the FBI RA and the prison. His radio spat static and terse voices, and then a barked order for radio silence.
He drove the last seven miles with only the burr of his tires on the asphalt and the echo of sirens from his impromptu convoy. Red and blue lights flashed, painting the trees by the side of the road like fluorescent paint.
He came around a turn and slammed on his brakes, skidding and almost hitting the cruiser in front of him. He veered right and stopped just before going over into the ditch.
He was out of his car and running when his cell phone rang. Running toward the parked state highway patrol cruisers, angled to block anyone from getting closer. Running toward the police tape strung across the road, looping from trunk to trunk. Running toward the Bureau car flipped on its roof, the trunk and all four doors thrown open, shattered glass spread like raindrops.
The car was empty.
Lying on the asphalt were two bodies.
Death was immediately recognizable, he’d realized during his first case. The dead were so still, so perfectly still. All the electrical impulses and muscle twitches and tiny spasms of life absent. The dead were nothing but sacks of bones and flesh, raw meat going bad.
He recognized the long wool coat Hillary wore, the collar turned up. It had leather patches on the elbows, and it made him look professorial. It flared across the pavement like spread wings where he’d fallen. He’d taken a shotgun blast to the face. There wasn’t much left.
McHugh lay farther up the road, as if he’d tried to run. He had the classic look of a strangulation victim: bulging face, protruding tongue, petechial hemorrhages on his skin and in his eyes, and the broken-doll tilt to his neck. His eyes were wide, and his hands seemed to be reaching for his stomach, where Ian had taken a shard of glass and sliced him from crotch to collarbone, then reached inside andpulled. Yanked anything he touched. There was more of McHugh on the roadway than inside him.
Cole’s phone kept ringing, again and again, and he fumbled to answer as he turned away, leaned against the highway patrol cruiser.
“Cole!” Michael shouted as soon as he picked up. “Ian’s escaped! He broke out of his transport. Where are you?”
“I’m at the scene,” he choked out. “I heard it on the radio.”
“Is there any indication of where he went? Any trail at all?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know, Michael. It’s bad. It’s fucking bad. He murdered Hillary and McHugh.”
“How did this happen?” Michael bellowed. “What the fuck happened?”
“I don’t know.” He was babbling, repeating himself over and over. “I interrogated him this afternoon, and then they were going to take him back to the prison. The marshals couldn’t take him. I watched them shackle him into the back seat. Everything was fine. I don’t know what happened.”
“Was there anything different about today’s interrogation? Anything out of the ordinary? Anything unusual?”
“He was trying to get under my skin. He was being more obsessive than usual. I got him to ID the Beury Mountain victim—Brenden Roundhouse—and he was getting off on being overly descriptive. Then he offered to cut that out if he could sit next to me. He’d write down how he tortured Brenden, as long as I sat beside him. I stayed beyond his reach—”
“Write it down how?”
