The Grave Between Us by Tal Bauer
Chapter Nineteen
Noah flewacross town as soon as Jacob asked, “Hey, boss, the police scanner is reporting a B&E in progress at your address. Know anything about that?”
He arrived along with Sheriff Clarke but behind the West Des Moines police, and behind Director King as well. Crime scene tape was already strung across his porch and over his front door in a giant X. King stood on his front porch, glaring down at his phone.
Noah took the porch steps two at a time. He charged the front door, shouting, “Cole! Cole, where—”
“Downing!” King’s arms wrapped around his waist. He hauled Noah back, dragging him away from the front door before Noah could break through the tape. “You’re not authorized inside! Back off!”
“That’s my house!” Noah snarled. “That’s my fucking house! Get your hands off me!”
“It’s an active crime scene. You can’t go inside. You know that, Downing!” King dragged him down the steps and out to his front lawn.
Cole’s car was parked feet away, his bumper almost in their dormant rose bushes. His driver’s door was open. No broken glass. Noah’s heart pounded. “Where’s Cole?”
“He’s inside.” King shoved him back to the driveway, his palm against Noah’s chest. “He’s fine. Ingram broke in, but Cole wasn’t home. No one was home. Your daughter is still at school. I’ve got the local PD keeping an eye on her. You’re going to have an officer keeping an eye on you, too, from now on.”
“What?” Noah shook his head. He sank his fingers in his hair, tried to get his thoughts to line up in order. “What are you talking about? What about Cole? Where is he?”
“I’m talking about a protective unit on you and your daughter until this is over. Cole is insisting on it, and given the circumstances, I think he’s right.”
“But what about Cole?”
King said nothing.
Finally, Cole appeared at their front door, ducking beneath the police tape as he made his way out. His eyes darted to Noah, then skittered away.
Noah’s heart nearly burst out of his chest. He tried to move forward, but King pushed him back again, palm flat on his sternum. He shoved King away, balled his hands into fists, pulled back to let fly—
“Noah.” Cole was there, his hand on Noah’s waist as he guided Noah to him. “Michael, leave us alone.”
“Find me when you’re finished,” Michael grunted.
“Finished? What the hell does that mean? What happened here? Ingram broke into our home? He knows where we live?”
“Ian is following me,” Cole said softly. He took Noah’s hands in his own and squeezed. He wouldn’t look Noah in the eyes. “He’s followed me everywhere. To our house, to the office. He must have followed me on Saturday, too. Noah… it’s my fault Brett Kerrigan is dead.”
“No, it’s not, it’s Ingram’s fault—”
“And Ian is free today because of me. Ian is here now because of me. Ian is following me, and he’s targeting the people in my life, people I care about. He’s targeting you.” Finally, Cole looked up, into Noah’s eyes. “I cannot let him hurt you.”
“Is that what the protective unit is about?”
“Yes. I’ll do anything to keep you safe.” Cole took a deep, slow breath. His thumbs stroked over the backs of Noah’s hands. “Which is why we need to separate and I’m moving out.”
“What?” Noah shouted.
“Ian’s targeting you because of me. He doesn’t want me to have anything in my life aside from him, so he’s coming after you. I can’t be around you as long as he’s out there. I can’t be with you until we catch him. I can’t let him hurt you.”
“You can’t…” Noah’s head spun. He shook his head, slowly, then faster, until his whole body was shaking. “And what if you never find him? What if you never catch him? You didn’t catch him before!”
Cole flinched. “Michael thinks this is the best way to keep you safe.”
“He thinks? Fuck what he thinks!”
“I’m not willing to risk your life. I’m not willing to take the chance that he could hurt you. I love you, and I’ll do anything to keep you safe. Anything.”
“Even leave me?”
Cole said nothing.
“Is this the end?” Noah whispered.
Cole’s thumbs dug into the back of his hands, so hard he felt his bones shift.
“Don’t do this,” Noah begged. “We’re supposed to face the world together. Face everything side by side. Aren’t those the vows we’re about to take? For better or worse, in sickness and in health? We’re supposed to face everything together.”
“If Ian hurt you… I couldn’t live with that. I can’t go on if he—” Cole’s eyes squeezed closed. His breath rattled in his chest. Noah felt Cole’s heartbeat in the tips of his fingers. “I can’t.”
“Then we’re careful, and we work with the police—”
“Noah.”
Noah turned his hands over, tangled his fingers with Cole’s. “This was supposed to be forever.”
“We don’t have a future as long as he’s out there. I have to stop him.”
“Cole…”
“Michael has arranged for you and Katie to be put in witness relocation. The FBI will rent a place for you under an assumed name. You can pack some bags, and another agent will—”
“I’m not leaving our home,” Noah growled. “Ian Ingram is not chasing me out of the home you and I built together.”
“He knows where we live.”
“I’m not leaving our house. Double the police presence, but I’m not leaving.”
Cole nodded. He lifted Noah’s hands and kissed each of his knuckles. Kissed his ring finger and the engagement band he’d put on Noah himself. “I love you.”
“Don’t do this,” Noah’s voice fractured. “Please.”
“I swore I’d do anything it took to keep you safe.” Cole’s words were breaths of air on Noah’s skin, brands on the backs of his hands. “Ian nearly killed you on that highway, and I watched over you for days in the hospital, thanks to him. I’ve lived every second since then terrified he was going to come back and finish what he started. He can’t have you, Noah. I’ll do anything to stop him.”
“Including leave?”
“Anything,” Cole breathed, “If it means you live.”
Cole leaned in and kissed him, a soft, salt-stained press of cold lips against his own. Noah’s chin trembled, and he tasted his own tears as he kissed Cole back. He tried to hold on, tried to lace his hands through Cole’s, grab hold of his jacket or his arms, keep him from walking away.
But Cole slipped through his hold, and he walked across the grass, toward Michael and the waiting FBI car. He climbed inside and didn’t look back.
Noah sank to his ass on the dead lawn and watched the love of his life drive away.
* * *
Noah walked backinto the FBI office at five p.m. Jacob and Sophie were still there, talking softly over the coffee pot. They straightened when they saw him, twin expressions of concern on their faces.
“Boss?” Jacob asked softly. “You look like a bomb went off inside you.”
Noah shook his head. His fingertips traced the edge of a filing cabinet. A few days ago, he and Cole had held hands right here, eaten doughnuts side by side. How ridiculous his fears of marriage seemed now, set against Cole walking away. He’d take being an awful husband, he’d take Cole’s recriminations, if it meant they were together. But they weren’t, not anymore.
Not as long as Ingram was out there.
His eyes blurred as his breath hitched. “Cole moved out. He left.”
Jacob sagged against the lateral file cabinet. The metal groaned, squealing beneath his weight. Sophie cursed and shook her head, her face a mask of confusion.
“Why? He loves you. That doesn’t make sense.” Jacob glared at the conference room, the closed blinds and the locked door. “It has something to do with this investigation, doesn’t it? Who shot us, Noah? What the hell is going on?”
He doesn’t want me to have anything in my life aside from him, so he’s coming after you. I can’t be around you as long as he’s out there. I can’t be with you until we catch him. I’ll do anything to save your life.
And I’ll do anything to save our love, Cole.
He took a breath. “Yes. It has to do with the investigation. And I’m going to fix it. I’m going to stop the son of a bitch that’s tearing our lives apart, starting right now. But to do that, I’m going to have to steal some FBI files, and then I’m going to have to run my own, off-the-books investigation.” He looked each of them in the eye. “If we put the bastard away, no one will complain about the details. If we don’t…” His throat closed up. He couldn’t even let the idea take shape. He pressed his lips together. Felt his pulse hammering. “Will you help me?”
* * *
First,he had to explain who Ian Ingram was. The FBI had done a bang-up job covering its own ass. Whether by strategy or by luck, the Bureau had avoided press releases and the media when Ingram was initially captured. When it all went sideways, there wasn’t much to sweep under the rug: two murdered agents and Cole’s devastation. That was a small price for an FBI director to pay to avoid being eviscerated on Capitol Hill. Director Harper, like all FBI directors, was a politician, not a cop. Sometimes that was painfully obvious.
Noah started with his and Jacob’s shooting, and how Assistant Director King had swooped in and taken over that investigation. Then him and Cole going to Oak Haven Meadows, and then Brett Kerrigan’s abduction, and King’s arrival in their office. The break-in at his and Cole’s home. How the BAU, and Cole, thought Ian was coming after Noah.
He went back in time next and told them everything Cole had told him, which he knew Cole had self-edited. There were big chunks they were missing.
“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?
Jacob took over working through Ian’s victimology and the hundreds of potential victims the FBI had been trying to ID as his eight years ago. Noah had never met a man who could power through so many fine details as Jacob could. Too many people mistook Jacob’s size for lack of intelligence, and he’d been pushed toward the testosterone-fueled tactical teams his entire career. Jacob hated that knuckle-dragging, hoorah machismo. He was happiest when he was burrowing through reams of paperwork, finding the narrow thread of criminality that tied a case together. Check deposits that traveled through three offshore accounts and proved fraud and money laundering, or victims’ records that revealed a single, missed commonality between five strangers. Jacob was a master at uncovering the hidden within the obscure.
“Okay,” Noah said after several hours, when they were rubbing at their sore eyes and shaking their heads. His mind spun, bleeding bits of interrogation and snippets of the case file like paint splotches against his skull. Ian’s depravity and brutality, his cruelty toward his victims, were incomprehensible. Noah’s mind kept shutting down, refusing to process the details of what he was reading. Cole going in day after day after day, trying to pull information out of him, seemed like trying to measure the distance of eternity. It seemed impossible, reading the reports. How had Cole faced Ingram or worked the few secrets out of him that he had? “Let’s run down the facts.”
He grabbed his dry-erase marker and moved to the wall—his empty wall, where his whiteboard used to be. King had taken it. He drew a line down the center, writing Before Escape on one side and After Escape on the other.
“The Bureau was looking into three thousand, nine hundred cases of missing adult men who vanished within Ian Ingram’s likely target range during the years he claimed to be active prior to his arrest,” Jacob said.
Sophie’s eyes closed as Noah scribbled on the wall: 3,900 missing men.
“Not all thirty-nine hundred are attributable to Ingram, but it shows the massiveness of the investigation. The original team built a map of Ingram’s known locations, going through his financial, residential, and travel records.” Jacob flipped one of the pages he’d printed, a photo of the original task force’s operations center and a map of the US with a forest of pushpins stuck into it. “Eventually, the investigation whittled the files down to around five hundred potential victims.”
“Still too many for one man. They aren’t all Ingram victims. He would have fucked up, and the FBI or the locals would have spotted him,” Noah said.
“Agreed,” Jacob rumbled. “And the original task force agreed, too. But Ingram’s victims were in those five hundred, and their job—Cole’s job—was to identify which ones belonged to Ingram.”
“Did they ever find a commonality? A victim profile? Something that united a segment of those missing men?”
“No.” Jacob sighed. “The closest they ever got to establishing a victim profile was uncovering Ingram’s methodology. He came at the men he abducted through blitz attack or manipulation/ruse.”
“We saw that with Brett Kerrigan. He used both, manipulation/ruse and blitz attack. He got Kerrigan to stop his car and then came through the driver’s window.”
“Going through the driver’s window comes up a few times in the case file. Some of those missing men’s cars had broken driver’s windows when they were found, and those cars weren’t in the locations where people expected the men to be.”
“Ian moved the cars after attacking and subduing his victims.”
“That’s what it looks like,” Jacob said. “He worked in rural areas, abducting low-risk victims out of low-risk locations. He was careful, and he planned everything. He wasn’t going to get caught unless he fucked up or someone survived and escaped.”
“He did fuck up, and he was caught.” Noah kept scribbling, making notes on the wall. “And he’s going to fuck up again.” He moved to the next column and turned to Sophie. “What’s happened since his escape?”
Sophie took a deep breath. “Between the date Ian Ingram escaped custody and today, 3,511 adult men have been reported and remain missing in the United States. Unlike before, we have no geographic location data for where Ingram went or where he’s been. His bank account and Social Security number haven’t been touched. He’s lived completely under the radar, most likely cash only or bartering for what he needs. There’s been no sign of him in eight years, anywhere.”
“No one has been looking for him, either,” Noah said. “The FBI never even put out a BOLO.”
“To be honest, I’m feeling like those poor bastards did eight years ago.” Sophie spread her hands. “Where do we start? How do we determine which of these men are Ingram’s victims and which are victims of some other killer? Or victims of nature, or suicide, or circumstance? Three thousand men, Noah. I have no idea where to begin.”
“There will be commonalities between his victims. There always are. Like the Coed Killer. The victims seemed random until we understood the killer, and then they made sense.”
“It was Cole who figured that out,” Sophie said softly. “And even he wasn’t able to figure out Ian Ingram’s victim profile.”
“Patterns. Commonalities. Things Ingram can’t help doing and that tie his victims to him. We start with what we know. Let’s break down the missing men into groups. Forget geography right now. Let’s look instead at his methodologies.” Noah turned back to the wall and scribbled new subheadings beneath the After Escape column. He spoke as he wrote. “Men whose cars were found with broken windows, away from where they were expected to be. Men who went missing in woodlands, in state or national parks. Men who went missing on waterways. Cole says Ingram has a thing for lakes and rivers, along with woods.” He tapped the marker on the wall, black dots swarming like a storm cloud. “Supposedly none of Ingram’s victims have been recovered, but how do we know that’s true? If we don’t know who his victims are, how would anyone know if any unidentified remains belonged to one of his victims? Jacob, I want you to look for any unidentified human remains found in the woods in shallow graves or near waterways. Buried naked.”
“The paper crane seems to be a signature, too.”
“Definitely. A paper crane in the mouth or inside the grave would be a strong indicator that those were his victims. Depending on the age of the grave and the circumstances of the burial, though, the paper could have disintegrated or decomposed along with the body, so we can’t treat the presence as a required sign.”
Jacob nodded.
“Ian thinks he’s better than us, better than everyone. He’s not. He’s terrifying, yes. But terrifying isn’t better.” Noah checked the time. It was already after midnight. “I’m going to stay and start digging through these missing persons reports. You guys should head home. It’s late.”
Sophie slapped the arms of her chair. “Nothing to go home to. Might as well stay and get some good work done. Not like I’m going to sleep anyway, with this in my mind.”
“I already told Holly I was working late. She told me to tell you to kick ass and take names.”
Noah smiled. “Well, if we’re going to be burning the midnight oil, we’re going to need more coffee. Who wants a fresh cup?”
