Page 71 of The Grave Between Us
“We need to know everything,” he concluded. “We need the Ingram case file if we’re going to find and stop him.”
Jacob whistled. “A classified file isn’t something you can ‘accidentally’ swap out of the digital vault, Noah. Those files aren’t even stored on the same servers.”
“Luckily, we don’t have to go to headquarters to get it. I’m sure Director King has a copy of the file on his laptop.” He nodded to the conference room, which was still empty of King and his team. He’d changed the locks and then promptly vanished. Asshole.
“You want to steal Assistant Director King’s laptop?” Sophie’s eyes bulged. “The head of the BAU? There’s all kinds of classified, compartmentalized information on there.”
“I’m only interested in one file.”
“I’m sure OIG will be comforted by that when you’re explaining yourself to them.”
“I’m doing this,” Noah said. “You have no obligation to stay. If you feel like you need to report me, I understand.”
Sophie snorted. Jacob said, “Tell us how we can help.”
Sophie kept watch while Jacob picked the conference room lock that King had changed. Noah was the one who took the laptop, and he was the one who ripped the hard drive, creating an exact duplicate—minus the security settings—of King’s files onto a clean drive. The rip took thirty minutes, and he used the time to arrange for Katie to spend the night at her best friend Evelyn’s house.
“But I wanted to see Cole,” she whined when he called to tell her where she’d be staying, and that he wasn’t going to be home that night. “I thought we were all going to have dinner together again, finally. Cole hasn’t missed dinner with us since he moved here,” she groused. “Why didn’t he come home last night?”
“I’m sorry, K-Bear—” His throat closed, and he leaned his forehead against his office window. Hard drives whirred in the background. “There’s some stuff going on.”
“Dad… Are you and Cole okay?”
“Of course.” He tried to force lightness into his voice. “Of course we are, K-Bear. It’s work stuff, that’s all.”
“Dad, you’re lying to me.” Katie’s voice trembled. “What happened? What’s wrong? Why didn’t he come home last night? It’s not just work, is it?”
“Katie…”
She started to cry, little whimpers that sliced his heart open. “Dad, you guys are supposed to get married.”
“We are, K-Bear, we are.”What if you never find him?That flinch, the way Cole wouldn’t meet his eyes. “This is just a bump in the road. We’ve got to work some things out, that’s all.”
“Promise?” She sniffled. “Promise it will be okay? Promise we’re still a family?”
“I promise.” He dug his forehead into the cold glass. His breath fogged the pane when he spoke. “I promise, K-Bear. I love you. Cole loves you.”
“You guys still love each other, too?”
“Of course we do.” He swallowed. “Maybe… maybe we love each other too much sometimes.”
“That doesn’t make sense, Dad.”
“I know, K-Bear. But I promise, everything is going to be okay.”
She was still sniffling and crying, and she didn’t want to get off the phone, but Noah finally got her to say goodbye as King’s hard drive finished copying over. He took the laptop back to the conference room and plugged it in, and Jacob relocked the door behind him. It was like they’d never been there. They hadn’t even needed to turn the laptop on.
Noah plugged the ripped hard drive into his own computer and waited for it to spin up.Everything is going to be okay, K-Bear, when I find this son of a bitch.
“Okay,” he said when the drive initialized. “We’re in. Let’s learn everything we can about Ian Ingram.”
He divided the case file into thirds, each of them taking a section. For hours, there was no sound in his office save for the scratching of pens as they took notes and the occasional mumbled “Jesus” or “Holy shit” as they read deeper, learned the truth about Ian and his murders. The scope and scale of the original investigation took Noah’s breath away, made his palms sweat. Murder investigations were challenging to begin with. The only witness, most times, was the victim. Heat-of-the-moment murders were generally easier to solve, with more opportunities to uncover links between the victim and their killer. Premeditated murder was harder. Someone who thought their crime out took steps to hide their activity. Serial murder was the hardest of all to investigate. The killings were, a vast majority of the time, stranger-on-stranger crime, and the ties that bound the victim to the killer were tenuous, ephemeral, sometimes only existing within the killer’s mind. Motivation, too, complicated the investigation. It was easier to uncover the jealous rage that motivated a husband to bludgeon his wife than it was to untangle the Gordian knot of a serial predator’s mind. Noah had struggled to understand the Coed Killer’s psychology, the twisted reasons why he’d strangled young women. Now here he was again, trying to identify another man’s fatal obsessions.
Cole had tried and failed to understand Ian. What hope did three agents from an Iowa RA have?
Noah shoved that dismal thought away. He had to do this.
He learned more about his lover’s past that evening than he’d learned in eight months. Cole as a young man, all spitfire and determination, with a brilliant mind that eclipsed others around him. That brilliance was muted now, still there but dulled by life and the pain of experience. Cole as a younger man had shone a unique light on the world. Was it any wonder that someone like Ian Ingram had fixated on that glow?
