The Grave Between Us by Tal Bauer

Chapter Eleven

Noah was dischargeda few days later, to a standing ovation by what felt like the entire Des Moines law enforcement community—including Jacob, who’d gone home two days earlier. A parade of police and sheriffs’ cruisers escorted Noah, Cole, and Katie home. Sophie drove, leaving the SUV in the driveway for Noah before hitching a ride back to the office with the sheriff.

Noah was embarrassed, and the whole production wore him out. Katie insisted on making him dinner, and she shooed Cole out of the kitchen to “take care of Dad” while she worked. Cole almost went to check on her at least three times, when the clangs and crashes seemed overly loud, but she always shouted, “I’m fine!”

She’d made a fettuccini mac and cheese, something that Noah recognized on sight. It must have been a comfort food between them. Noah beamed as she served him, and the smile she gave him in return could have put the sun to shame. She held Noah’s hand as he ate, then cleared the table and did the dishes while Noah fell asleep in Cole’s arms on the couch.

He put Noah to bed, tucking him in and running his fingers through Noah’s hair until Noah was snoring before slipping out of the room. They’d converted their third bedroom into a shared office. It was set up like an old-school police bullpen, with desks facing each other and bookshelves lining the walls. It was a place to pay bills and read email, order things from Amazon and eBay, and track Katie’s grades and school announcements. Normally they didn’t bring their work home, but he wasn’t going into the office and leaving Noah’s side.

He couldn’t do this in front of Noah, either. He’d been on pins and needles all evening, the thought of what he had to do growing inside him, dark, rank, and foul. He smiled throughout dinner, laughed in all the right places at Katie’s exuberant stories about class and her friends and the cheer squad. He’d squeezed Noah’s thigh under the table, while his own leg had bounced and jittered out of control. He’d held Noah tighter than usual on the couch, until his shoulders were shaking. Whatever it takes. I’ll keep you safe.

Noah’s eyelashes had fluttered against his skin as he slept.

Cole opened a secure VPN to the FBI servers and then downloaded the case files Michael had unearthed from the Director’s Eyes Only vault. He had to work through forty pages of red-banded notices, classification alerts, and warnings that, should he read any further, he was subject to criminal prosecution. He clicked and clicked, and then, suddenly, there it was.

Ian’s booking photo was right on top.

He’d forgotten, somehow, how intense Ian’s eyes were. Brown, yes, nothing unusual to their color. But the power behind his stare, the shine to his gaze. The gravity of his presence. Cole almost tipped forward at his desk, eight years and a thousand miles away from where Ian’s photo had been taken, drawn into those eyes again.

He clicked forward, and more photos came up. Photos the cleanup team, sent by Director Harper, had taken of the conference room in Virginia before they’d torn everything down and boxed it away. The map McHugh had put together, working nonstop for days. Pushpins still covered the surface: black, red, orange, and a lone pin tied with white ribbon in West Virginia. Their one found grave.

More photos: Their whiteboard and the lists of potential victims. He remembered the way they’d categorized the missing men, reflected in stacks of file folders along the edge of the conference table: probable victim, fits the outline, need more information, and ruled out.

He was supposed to work through the probables with Ian, go through them one by one. Empty his graves somehow, someway, even if he had to dig with his bare hands.

His stomach turned, and he scooted back in his desk chair and hunched over, burying his hands in his hair as his vision swam and he sucked down a deep breath. Black dirt between his fingers. He’d scrubbed and scrubbed, but it felt like he could never get that ring of dirt and blood out from around his fingernails. Like he’d dipped his own hands in the same blood Ian had, like they were connected—

He forced his mind to blank. Forced himself to think of blue sky and golden fields. Oak trees in meadows and water towers in the distance. Horizons so far away he saw the curve of the earth. Not a mountain to be seen, not for miles and miles and miles. No corpses hidden in the woods, no skulls waiting to peek out from the earth and stare at Cole from their tortured graves.

Noah, in the sunshine, turning around and smiling at Cole. Holding out his hand.

He mentally took Noah’s hand. This was his life now. Sunshine and happiness. A good man who loved him.

Cole clicked through the rest of the photos of the conference room. The reports he’d written, the FD-302s he’d typed up day after day after day, came next. His impressions of each interview, his insights. A separate file contained the transcripts and video files of every interrogation. Then on to the reports the rest of the team had written. Evidence recovery, search teams, the forensic auditing of every aspect of Ian’s past. The timeline they’d built of his life, down to every Taco Bell, gas station, and video rental receipt. Parallel processing, the effect of a group of dedicated FBI agents against one evil man.

He clicked into the next subfile. Crayon drawings appeared, four to a page, shrunk to fit. They were Ian’s early ones, when he was still drawing Cole’s face. Cole dragged the slider forward, skipping a hundred pages in the file.

Crime scene photos. Yellow tape fluttering in the foreground, the dive team suiting up inside the white tent in the background. The mountain lake wreathed in winter fog, wet and sharp in the lungs. Ian’s voice in his ear, his breath on his neck. Dirt between his fingers—

He clenched his hands into fists over the keyboard. In the end, this was all they had, thanks to him. All those names, those stacks of file folders, the weeks and weeks of agonizing work, and they only brought one of Ian’s men home. The others were still out there, their bones restless in the dark earth. Waiting, waiting, desperate to come home. But they weren’t coming home, thanks to Cole. He’d let them all down.

He’d let so many people down.

How many more men had Ian taken? Who had he hunted, once he was free? After months in prison, he’d been starving for a kill. Who was dead today who would have been alive, if not for Cole’s mistake?

He scrubbed his hands over his face and backed out of the file, reversing until he had Ian’s profile pulled up.

Victimology. The men who caught Ian’s eye, who he couldn’t resist taking. The men he hunted. The men whose lives he stole.

Cole called up the missing persons database. He held his breath as he typed in the search criteria. Men reported missing within the past eight years. Over age eighteen. Ian had never taken anyone remotely close to being a minor. For the time being, he left the search open geographically to the entire United States. He needed to follow Ian’s victims to find the man, and this was the first net he had to cast.

How many men would it be?

How many lives was Cole responsible for? Every man Ian had taken since then was on him.

How could they find Ian’s victims? The men he’d taken since his escape were as lost to the world—and the FBI—as the men he’d taken before his escape. Cole had thought he’d been so close back then, but he was an idiot. He’d never really understood Ian.

I’ll find you, somehow, he whispered to himself, and to Ian’s men. I’ll bring you home.

He held his breath and hit Search.

When the number came back, he closed his eyes and bowed his head again.

The FBI had trusted him. The public had trusted him. Those men had trusted him—if not directly, they’d at least trusted in his office, in his badge and his gun and the power of the FBI to keep them safe. Noah, now, trusted him. I’ll keep you safe.

He’d let everyone down. But damn it, he wasn’t going to let Noah down. Whatever it takes, Noah. I swear.

* * *

Noah tooka week off to recuperate, and Cole followed suit. He spent his days at Noah’s side, their mornings filled with the rituals of breakfast and getting Katie to school. After, they went home and watched TV or read together, legs entwined on the couch as they cuddled close and held hands. Noah had physical therapy appointments to work on restrengthening his lung and his shoulder muscles, and Cole drove him there and back every day.

In the afternoons, they picked Katie up from school and brought her home, and then it was homework and making dinner and hanging out together as a family. They played board games in the dining room, watched TV in the living room. Katie made an effort—sometimes successful—to put her shoes away and do her homework without complaining.

Every day, Cole put his face on like a mask. Something inside of him felt like it had dropped into the center of a deep pool, plunging further and further away. He felt like a worried thread coming loose, like part of him was unraveling.

But he buried that feeling each morning as he stared into the bathroom mirror. Sometimes it felt like there was a darkness creeping in on the edges of his vision, and he looked, trying to see if it really was there or if he was falling backward again. He’d crawled out of the pit once before. He remembered what it was like, staring up at the world, the edges of reality blurry and swollen, tunneled down to almost nothing.

Not again. He gripped the edge of the sink. Forced a smile to his face as Noah came up behind him. “Morning,” he said, kissing Noah’s neck, inhaling his scent. He let his eyes close for a moment. Opened them again. Took Noah’s hand and led him to the shower.

It was easier around Noah. Easier to try to dig himself out. Easier to push away the fog that tried to encircle him, wind around and around him like a trap, like a restraint, like hands that grabbed him and wanted to hold him down. He was desperate for sunlight, the summer warmth that Noah had always been to him. Golden fields, blue skies.

He poured himself into each day with an almost fevered intensity, trying to recreate exactly what he’d done before Ian had touched Noah and cast his shadow over their happiness. Had he joked over breakfast? Kissed Katie on her hair while she drank her tea? How tightly had he held Noah’s hand? How wide was his smile, before? Fake it till you make it, or until it comes back. If he wished for all the sunlight in the world to burn away the shadows, maybe it would come true.

If nothing else, damn it, Noah was going to be happy. The darkness wouldn’t get him. Noah wasn’t going into that hole.

So Cole smiled, and he laughed, and he drove Noah to physical therapy and Katie to school, and he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and chewed the edges of his fingernails until his skin cracked and bled. Noah ran his thumbs over Cole’s fingers when they drove, and he took Cole’s hands at night on the couch. Cole bounced his knee instead, then, until Katie snapped at him that he was shaking the coffee table while she was trying to do her homework.

Noah took his hand and kissed his palm, in the same place where a paper crane made out of a dead man’s photo once rested.

When Noah went to sleep, it was like he’d taken the sun with him, and while he snored and pressed his face into Cole’s neck, the world around Cole became colder and darker. The moon was a cold coin, a spotlight that seemed to crawl across their bedroom floor as if it was searching for him. “Here he is,” he imagined the moon saying on his third night without sleep. “I’ve found him for you.”

He tried to stay with Noah. It was easier in the day, though. It was easier when he could hear Noah’s voice, see into his eyes. When Cole didn’t feel like the darkness was ready to leap out at him.

The light of his computer monitor beckoned, like the false glint of light at the bottom of a pit making him dig deeper instead of turning toward the sky. He slunk from their bed to the office every night, turning on his computer and opening up the case files again. Missing men stared back at him from the monitor. Have You Seen This Man? Scanned and tattered flyers, old family photos, photocopies askew.

James Carmichael, vanished from the Salmon Run trailhead. Darryl Winthrop, last seen walking along a rural highway. Juan Gonzaga, whose sedan was found parked behind a strip mall, his driver’s side window broken and an inch of rain in the footwell.

And on and on and on. Faces and names vanished from the earth. Whenever he closed his eyes he heard screams, saw men on their knees begging for their lives. Please, please. Saw his own fingers trailing through the dirt, brushing against something cold and firm.

He stumbled back to bed and collapsed against Noah around four every morning, only to be awakened by nightmares soon after he’d closed his eyes, dreaming for only a scant few minutes before his heart tremored with panic and ripped him out of sleep. He’d wake with a jolt, grabbing Noah. When the sky shifted, lightening in wavering lines of spilled paint, he’d sit up and watch Noah sleep, let his fingers play in Noah’s sleep-mussed hair, lean his thigh against Noah’s warm, solid back. Noah was there, with him. Alive.

Ian was out there, but Noah was here.

One hundred and twenty-seven missing men in Arizona. Four hundred and thirteen in Illinois.

Whenever Cole closed his eyes, he seemed to fall backward, tumbling forever in slow motion. It was all he could do to reach out and sink his hands into the side of the pit, try to slow how he was being pulled into the darkness. He scraped, and he fought, and he screamed, and he tried to claw his way back toward the light.

Toward Noah.

* * *

Noah watchedKatie twirl in her dress, beaming as she ran her hands over the flowery, gauzy fabric. She knocked the heels of her boots together, struck a pose. “See, Dad? It’s a good dress.”

“It is, K-Bear.” He took her hand and spun her gently, like he had when she was a Girl Scout Brownie and they’d gone to the Daddy-Daughter Sock Hop together. She’d danced on his toes all night back then. Now, she was the better dancer, and he’d need to dance on her toes to keep up. “You look beautiful.”

Cole smiled at him from Katie’s bedroom doorway. “I think we did good,” Cole said.

“Okay, Dad,” Katie said, dragging him toward her bathroom. “You have to learn about makeup and eyeshadow palettes. I’m going to teach you.”

He endured an hour of Katie’s makeup demonstration, nodding along as she laid out a dozen brushes and more makeup than he saw in the grocery store. He uh-huh’d along with the primer and foundation, watched as Katie dotted on contour like she was an extra in Braveheart. He closed his eyes when she went at herself with the eyeliner pencil, certain she was going to poke her eye out, and then gamely played along when Katie said “See? Totally different,” and pointed to her eyebrows.

“Absolutely, K-Bear.”

Cole laughed quietly beside him, leaning his shoulder into Noah’s as they perched on the edge of Katie’s bathtub. When she was done with her makeup, Katie asked Cole to help with her hair, and they gossiped about what Pria and Evelyn were going to be wearing that night and whether Trevor was coming to the dance. Noah glowered as Katie and Cole found each other’s gazes in the mirror and giggled. They loved to gang up on him. Luckily neither had a poker face when it came to teasing him, it seemed, and they usually broke into laughs almost before he realized they were poking fun at him.

He’d play indignant all evening long, though, if it meant Cole laughed like that, or put that smile on Katie’s face. She tipped her head back and closed her eyes as Cole brushed her hair and gathered it between his fingers. Where had Cole learned to French braid? He’d never asked. Noah had been a master of the ponytail back when Katie was young enough to let him do her hair. Once she learned Noah’s skills ended at scrunchies, she’d done her own hair. Until Cole and his French braids.

Cole’s gaze found his eyes in Katie’s mirror. Noah smiled, blew his lover a silent kiss. Cole blew him a kiss back.

It was almost—almost—enough to distract Noah from the dark smudges beneath Cole’s eyes or the ragged skin circling his fingernails.

Cole was there and not. Near and far. Holding Noah’s gaze and holding his hand and holding up his end of the conversation. He hadn’t left Noah’s side since they’d gotten home from the hospital. He whispered “I love you” in Noah’s ear and wrapped his arms around Noah’s waist and held him every night until Noah fell asleep. And every morning the bags beneath his eyes were larger, the skin around his nails picked raw and bleeding.

After last year and what happened to Katie, Noah had had his share of nightmares, both waking and overnight. He’d wrestled with his own memories, relived the washes of terror and horror and certainty that this was it. He’d needed time after that to find his way. Time, but not space, and he’d clung to Cole like Cole was his security blanket.

The way Cole looked at him this week, maybe Cole was holding on to him the same way.

It was the waiting that had been the worst, last year. Waiting. Watching. Watching Katie. Her every breath, every moment, suspended in time. Watching the tears slide down her cheek in slow motion as the rope creaked. Those twenty minutes had felt like ten lifetimes to him.

Noah didn’t remember anything from his and Jacob’s shooting or the crash. He’d traveled through time, it seemed. One moment he and Jacob were driving, and the next, he woke up to Cole’s tear-soaked face and gut-wrenching sobs. He’d been unconscious for almost three days, Cole had said.

What had three days felt like to Cole? The relativity of anguish, the time dilation of unknown nightmares.

He didn’t know if he should give Cole space or rush in, arms open. Uncertainty stilled him, made him hesitate to open his mouth and ask. Cole was near and far at the same time, present with his touch and distant with his gaze, looking somewhere far beyond their living room wall, the few times Noah caught him staring at the middle distance.

He’d felt like this before: frozen across the room from Lilly, not knowing how to overcome the glacial divide between them. Not knowing what to say or how to say it, and she’d spun farther and farther into her own orbit until they were distant planets circling Katie. Eventually, resentment had been the only gravity holding them together.

Was this the first step down a road that led to the end? Was this how it began? He couldn’t remember how it had started with Lilly. The fluttering in his chest had shriveled, and then one day curdled and died, and he hadn’t felt alive again until his first date with Cole.

Were he and Cole swinging apart? Beginning the arc that would take them away from the closeness they had now? He never wanted to know what life was like without Cole at his side, in his life in such an immutable way. But how did he stop Cole from drifting if he’d already started? How did he arrest the slide? Inertia had been too powerful a force to stand against in the past. He was afraid of getting bulldozed if he stood in the way.

He needed to do something for Cole. Some gesture, some sign, some statement that he was all in. Something that was bigger than his fumbling words, greater than the sum of his fears. Something that felt like forever.

After they dropped Katie off at the dance, Cole kissed his hand and told him he had a surprise for him, then drove Noah out to one of his favorite hole-in-the-wall dives. It was a Cajun place, the owner transplanted from the bayou, a tiny sliver of a counter-service restaurant tucked in the middle of a strip mall. The lighting was dim, the floor was sticky with sweet tea, and the spice was so strong the air burned the inside of Noah’s sinuses. He loved it, and he loved Cole for taking him there so unexpectedly. Maybe they weren’t swinging apart.

He and Cole shared hush puppies and étouffée and a sweet tea. Cole sat next to him in a cramped booth against the wall, one hand laced through Noah’s as they ate. His head was on a swivel for almost the entire meal, his eyes bouncing from Noah to the front door to the kitchen entrance and then back to Noah. Darting again to the front door whenever someone walked in. Flicking to the back whenever a server walked out from there.

Katie texted and asked to be picked up early so they could hang out, just the three of them, for the rest of the night. As they left the restaurant, Cole searched the shadows and the puddles of darkness beyond the streetlights, his hand a vice around Noah’s, nostrils flared, eyes cold and hard as he scanned the parking lot. He didn’t exhale until he was back in the driver’s seat beside Noah.

“Hey.” Noah reached across the center dash and squeezed Cole’s knee. “I’m with you. I’m safe.”

Cole flinched. Noah frowned—

Cole turned to him, his smile big and bright, and leaned in to kiss him softly. Threaded his fingers through the short strands of Noah’s hair. “I’m going to keep you safe,” Cole whispered against his lips. “I promise.”

“I know,” he whispered back. “You do.”

Cole’s gaze slid away. He cleared his throat as he started the SUV.

Noah had no idea what to say. Cole was near and far.

They picked Katie up and made it home uneventfully. Noah let Cole precede them into the house, let him flick on the lights and check the corners, search the upstairs and the bedrooms. Katie washed her face and changed into her sweats, and then she tromped back downstairs and herded them onto the couch while she made milkshakes and pulled up Netflix.

Noah fell asleep before the end of the movie, nestled on Cole’s chest, the steady beat of Cole’s heart pulsing against his cheek.

The next thing he was aware of was Cole’s arms around him and a feeling of weightlessness, and then the soft embrace of their bed. He heard Cole’s exhale, felt his deep breaths. Had Cole carried him upstairs? Sure, Cole was stronger than he looked, but carrying Noah from the bathroom to the bed in the heat of passion was different than lugging him all the way up the stairs. Noah nuzzled into the blankets, pushed his cheek against the pillow that smelled like Cole. He was awake, but only barely, clinging to consciousness until Cole sank onto the mattress beside him. He wanted to fall asleep with his lover’s heartbeat beneath his cheek again. Wanted Cole’s arms around him when he cratered back into sleep.

But Cole was turning away. Noah reached blindly behind him, grabbing onto Cole’s jeans and the back of his knee. “Stay with me,” he whispered. “Please.”

His heart was in his throat as the seconds dragged, but then Cole climbed into their bed and curled around Noah, burying his face in the back of Noah’s neck. His breath trembled, and his lips were wet when he kissed Noah’s skin. “I love you,” Cole breathed. His voice was so soft Noah barely heard it, barely felt the short hairs Cole was nestled against shift. “I love you so much, Noah.”