Page 83 of The Grave Between Us
Finally, his own tears fell, and he wept against the back of Cole’s neck. Cole still smelled like the river and adrenaline, like terror and nightmares. Noah wrapped his hand over Cole’s forehead and buried his face in his lover’s hair. “I love you,” he breathed. “I love you, Cole. I love you so much.”
* * *
It wasall over the news that evening, Sophie briefing the media from Raccoon River. Jacob sat down with a police sketch artist and described the older, changed Ian, and soon, every station was showing the police sketch, Ian’s former booking photos, and his grainy profile picture taken from the Oak Haven Meadows driveway surveillance camera on wall-to-wall coverage. They had the FBI Des Moines office number on a crawl that ran over every TV show. Anyone who had any information about that man should call in, Sophie said. No matter how big or small their information seemed to be, the FBI wanted to know.
* * *
Noah,Cole, and Katie went home, and they told Katie the truth of the past two weeks—and eight years—in the driveway, sitting together in the back seat of Noah’s SUV. There was still crime scene tape across their front door, and Noah thought, for a moment, that it was just like last summer, when he couldn’t even drive past his old house without getting sick and needing to pull over. He worried about Katie, too, seeing their front door taped shut again.
But she was the strongest of them all, it seemed, and she led the way into the house, then started grabbing garbage bags and filing them up. She swept up the broken glass, threw away the shattered dishes. Tossed the spoiled food. Picked up her bedroom and scrubbed at the carpet, piling her broken makeup palettes next to her bathroom sink. “I’m sorry,” Cole whispered when he saw the pile of wreckage. Colors spilled across the counter, busted powders and broken pans trailing ruined rainbows behind them.
“You can fix cracked eye shadow palettes. I’ll show you how. We can do it together,” Katie said.
Noah and Cole taped a tarp over the broken back door, and then the three of them hauled Noah and Cole’s mattress out to the curb. Noah took a crowbar and a sledgehammer to their bed frame, and Katie and Cole carted the pieces down to the trash. The bin was overflowing by the time they were done, but Ian had been exorcised from their house.
They all slept together that night, the three of them in a nest of blankets on the family room carpet. The lights were on throughout the house and Noah had built a fire in the fireplace, but Cole still shivered, even though he was under three blankets and Katie was pressed against his chest like a koala, snoring. Noah held Cole’s hand atop Katie’s hip, both of them on their sides and gazing into each other’s eyes with Katie between them.
“How did you find me?” Cole asked. “I thought I was dead. And I thought he was going to kill you when he was done with me. I was so sure of it. I thought I’d failed you. I thought he was going to kill you—”
“You didn’t. I’m alive. I’m okay.” He held Cole’s hand as he revealed in whispers what he’d done, from the devastation he’d felt as Cole pulled away from him to his volcanic certainty that he wasn’t going to let Cole go.
He told him how, late the night before, poring through the case file, he’d finally understood the shape of the darkness Cole was trying to save him from—understood, in some way, the depth and breadth of the horror. And how Jacob and Sophie stayed by his side, and by the morning, they had a workable hypothesis on a profile.
“You and King were looking at where Ian had been, physically and psychologically,” Noah said. “You had a bias that you couldn’t see, so you didn’t think to examine it, to wonder whether his victimology might have changed. Jacob and Sophie and I, we were coming at him with nothing. We worked him like we’d work any case, moving from the present backward. You guys were working in the past, I think, and trying to move forward. But Ian wasn’t operating like he had back then.”
“He was hunting me.” Cole’s expression cracked, and he buried his face in his bicep. “How many men were murdered because of me?”
“Don’t do that.” Noah reached for him and turned his face back up, toward the firelight. “What he did is not your fault.”
“It is. I let him escape—”
“You didn’t let him do anything. You didn’t put those pencil shards in his hands or put the idea of how to escape into his mind. You didn’t tell him what to do or how to do it. You’re not responsible for what he decided or how he acted.”
Cole was quiet.
“You taught me that,” Noah said. His thumb stroked down Cole’s cheek. “You, last summer. You told me it wasn’t my fault that bad men do evil things, and it wasn’t my fault that they got away with what they did. That evil men are experts are what they do, and at getting away with it, and that they excel at making people like us doubt ourselves. You were the one who told me, who convinced me, that I wasn’t responsible for those girls’ deaths. You still think that, right?”
“Of course. You’re not responsible for what the Coed Killer did—”
“And you’re not responsible for what Ian did. Not his murders. Not his escape. Nothing.”
It was a singular experience: being responsible for the death of another human being. Responsibility, blame, cause. Hunting a serial killer meant people died. Victims died, and every day the killer wasn’t caught was another day someone’s life was on the line. Noah had taken ownership of that loss before. He’d owned the victims’ deaths like he was responsible for ending their lives. Cole had been the one to show him where the blame truly lay. Not with him, but with the killer.
Easy to say. Harder to believe, Noah knew. Harder still, he imagined, when the victims looked like mirror images of yourself, and when the killer’s past had been enmeshed, entangled with your own. But that still didn’t make Cole responsible for the deaths of Ian’s victims.
He felt Cole swallow, felt his eyes shift toward the darkness. He watched as Cole rolled to his back and stared out the window overlooking their backyard. The clouds had broken, and the night sky was spread from horizon to horizon. They were far enough from Des Moines to get a hint of the Milky Way, for the stars to shine like diamonds pouring out of a jeweler’s bag.
“I never looked up at the stars until I was with you,” Cole said quietly.
“I guess you can’t see many in DC.”
Cole shook his head. “People die at night. Most of the victims I’ve studied were murdered at night, outdoors. Ian’s victims were all killed outside. I used to think about the last things they saw. Whether they looked into the eyes of the man who was murdering them, or whether they tipped their heads back and tried to look farther. Did they try to see the stars before they died? There’s more darkness in the world than light,” Cole whispered. “You just have to look up at the night sky to see that.”
“You’re wrong,” Noah said. “I can take you to places where, when you look up at the sky, it’s so big and bright and full of stars it looks like daytime. I can take you out to the boondocks, to fields where the night sky looks like an ocean beach. Where you need to shield your eyes to look up. I can take you to where there’s nothing and no one, and the night sky is as bright as the morning sun. The darkness doesn’t outweigh the light, Cole. Sometimes it feels that way, but it’s not true.”
Tears spilled out of the corners of Cole’s eyes, sliding down his cheeks and his temples. They looked like falling stars, and Noah made a wish on each that Cole would find a path back to his side. He was on the edge of himself, looking into an abyss, but Noah was there, waiting for him.
“I know you’re struggling.” Noah squeezed Cole’s hand and didn’t let go. “I can see how lost you are. I can see you struggling to find your way. And I know there are things you’ve been through that I can never understand. I had an academy instructor who said, ‘There’s a big difference between thinking about shit and putting your hands in it, holding it up to your face, and taking a big whiff.’”
