Page 75 of The Grave Between Us
Cole closed his eyes. Rewound the nightmare, backing out of the woods and the fog and Noah screaming for Cole to save him. Rewound through the drive, all the way to the moment Ian abducted Noah. “Blitz attack,” he whispered. “Noah is too smart to fall for a ruse or a manipulation. He won’t stop for a stranded motorist. Not now, while Ian is out there.”
“Where is Noah when this happens?”
“By his car,” Cole whispered. “Ian likes to attack at the victim’s car. He’ll use the car to transport them, then ditch it. He’ll attack Noah when he’s at his car. In the parking lot or the driveway. Someplace quiet with no one around. Noah shouldn’t work late, or come in early—”
He ducked his head and choked back a sob, because what Noah shouldn’t do was exactly what Noah would do, and Michael wouldn’t warn him. No, he’d want Noah to open himself up, make himself a target, so Ian had every opportunity to attack.
The love of his life, bait for a serial killer. A killer they’d captured and lost. A killer who’d proven how resilient, how slippery he was. Dread filled Cole, an ocean of it. Inside he was screaming, screaming, screaming.Not Noah, anyone else but Noah. Not him.
“Where does he take Noah?” Michael asked.
The tears came in a hot flood, bursting out of him like his soul was hemorrhaging. He sobbed, tried to drag in oxygen. He tasted salt on his lips and buried his face in his hands.
He could smell the grave, the sticky-sweet bone and decomposition. Wet earth and fog.
His fingers sliding through cold, dark earth, uncovering Noah’s pale, still face, stained with tears.His lips trembling as they pressed against Noah’s, blue and locked in rigor. He could smell Ian, smell where he’d touched Noah—
“The woods,” Cole gasped. His tears made a lake in his hands. “The woods, next to a lake. He buries him in the woods.”
Chapter Twenty-One
“I’ve got something,”Jacob rumbled. His collar was unbuttoned and his sleeves were rolled up, and his voice sounded like he’d gargled broken glass. Noah had made him take a nap on the couch in Noah’s office while he and Sophie powered through the night, sitting on the floor in the bullpen and spreading out the case files they printed off. When the sun rose, they’d moved everything back into Noah’s office, hiding their project from Dale, Miya, and Megan. If—when—they were pilloried for this investigation, Noah wanted to keep the collateral damage as contained as possible.
And he wanted to stay under Director King’s radar as long as possible, too. Luck seemed to be on their side, at least that morning. King hadn’t shown his cheery face, nor had any members of his entourage.
Neither had Cole.
Noah rubbed his tired eyes. His hands were shaking, too much caffeine and not enough sleep. He grabbed his coffee mug and took a sip. The liquid had gone cold sometime in the past hour. But it was caffeine, so he took another deep swallow.
Sophie looked the best of them all, like an all-nighter was no problem to her. Her long hair was up in a pencil bun, and even though exhaustion clung to her, she looked fresh and ready to charge ahead into another eight hours of case files.
Noah felt like he’d died and been resurrected sometime around four a.m., and he figured he probably looked worse than he felt. “What is it, Jacob?”
Jacob grabbed the globe they’d stolen from the filing cabinet across from Dale’s cube. It was their makeshift US map, since King had taken all the maps in the office into the conference room. Pushpins stuck out of the globe’s surface, dotted around the US. Each of them had put several in as they worked through their respective investigations.
“Human remains recovered from a shallow grave in North Dakota, in Grahams Island State Park. Grahams Island is in Devils Lake, near the Spirit Lake Reservation, northwest of Fargo.”
“Sounds remote,” Sophie said.
“Very. The remains were discovered by a camper and his dog three years ago. The dog was exploring in the woods and brought back a human bone. State police searched the park and found the grave, partially dug up by other animals and then by the dog. The remains were skeletonized, and nothing was found in the grave with the bones. No clothes, no personal effects.” Jacob eyed Noah. “Except. There was red-and-orange paper residue on the teeth they recovered. As if some kind of paper product had disintegrated inside the mouth.”
Noah drew in a long, slow breath. Sophie whistled. “Sounds like our son of a bitch,” she said. “Did they ID the vic?”
“No. They were able to say the bones belonged to a male, between the ages of twenty and forty, that he was Caucasian, and that he died from strangulation.”
“Still fits,” Noah said softly.
“Based on the state of the remains, they think the PMI”—the postmortem interval, the time that had passed since a victim’s death—“was two years. Which gives us a likely missing persons window of five years ago.”
Jacob flipped through his papers and pulled out a missing persons report showing a young national guardsman named Lane Boyer. He was fresh-faced, young, and smiling in his uniform. “There were ten men reported missing in North Dakota five years ago. Some seem to have been lost to the elements—last seen walking out in snowstorms, that kind of thing. A few might have run off to start new lives. There are three who I think best fit Ingram’s profile. This man”—Jacob tapped the printout—“was reported missing after failing to return home from his weekend drill with the National Guard at Camp Grafton five years ago. Camp Grafton is across the lake from Grahams Island.”
Noah’s eyebrows rose.
“And his car was found parked at Wurgler National Wildlife Refuge, with the driver’s window broken.”
“Holy shit,” Sophie breathed. “Jacob, you found one of his victims.”
“Maybe,” Noah cautioned. “Have they run DNA on the remains found on Grahams Island?”
