The Grave Between Us by Tal Bauer
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?”
“I haven’t found any rule-outs listed on NamUs or in any other database.” Jacob shook his head. “It looks like they didn’t run any DNA against the remains. I’m not sure why.”
“Give the locals a call. Ask them to run Boyer’s DNA against the remains. See if they’ll put a rush on it for us but keep our investigation under wraps.”
Jacob nodded.
“I think you’re on to something, though,” Noah said. He pulled out his own notepad and flipped through the notes he’d scrawled overnight. His handwriting had gotten worse and worse as the hours wore on. “North Dakota came up in my searches, along with a few other hot spots, more than what feels like coincidence.”
“Coincidence could be an unrecognized pattern. Something no one else has seen,” Sophie said. “Yet.”
Noah nodded. “I was checking where personal vehicles were found after men were reported missing, especially near state or national parks. A lot of the time—most of the time, in fact—the cars were found in the parking lots and hadn’t been touched. But there were handfuls that were found away from the missing men’s last reported locations. At strip malls, apartment buildings, hotels, or different parks. And the cars had broken windows.”
“Where?” Sophie asked. “And how many cars?”
“North Dakota, four cars. Upstate New York, five cars. Wisconsin, three. Wyoming, four. All from men reported missing within the past eight years, since Ingram’s escape.”
“Might be the start of a geographic profile,” Jacob said. His hands gripped the armrests of his chair, kneading the fabric. “That’s good work.”
“Sophie, what do you have?” Noah asked. “You said you were changing gears?”
“I was getting overwhelmed,” she said, rubbing her fingers against her forehead. “I decided to work backward from now. We know this asshole is here now, right? Brett Kerrigan, your house…” Her face twisted. “And Iowa 141, two weeks ago. I started pulling reports of men who’ve gone missing in Iowa, from Brett Kerrigan and going back in time.”
She pulled out a small stack of missing persons reports, public posters, and local law enforcement dispatches. She licked her thumb and started paging through, reading the top line of each. “Brett Kerrigan, last Saturday, Oak Haven Meadows. Recovered deceased. Julio Marquez, February 5, Cedar Rapids. Twenty years old, Hispanic. Local police think he went missing voluntarily. Warren Cabrillo, January 2, Waterloo. Fifty-four years old, Hispanic. Aiden Dumont, January 23, Seven Oaks Recreation in Boone, thirty-one, Caucasian—”
“Wait.” Noah sat forward. Grasped his coffee cup and the edge of his desk. “Wait, say that last one again.”
“Aiden Dumont. He was at Seven Oaks, that little spitball-sized ski area north of here? Dumont spent a half day cross-country skiing, and he was last seen on the security cameras heading to the parking lot. His car was missing from the lot, but he never made it home.”
“What day did you say?” Noah’s voice shook.
“January 23. A Saturday.”
“Oh God.” He slumped forward, head in his hands. “Oh God, that’s it. That’s the intersection. That has to be it.”
“Boss?” Jacob got up from his chair and came around Noah’s desk, crouching in front of him. One big hand landed on Noah’s shoulder, and Noah raised his head to meet Jacob’s gaze. His lumpy face was etched in worry, concern pouring from him. “What do you mean, that’s it?”
“This whole time, Cole and I have been wondering why now? Why did this happen all of a sudden? What the hell triggered all this? It can’t have just come from nowhere.”
“Why do you think Seven Oaks has something to do with it?” Sophie asked.
“Because we were there that day. We took Katie so she could try snowboarding. We were there all afternoon.”
“You think Ian saw you guys there?”
“He must have. Let me see the missing persons report.” Noah held out his hand, and Sophie passed it over.
A nuclear warhead detonated inside Noah’s heart. The report, with Aiden Dumont’s photo stapled to the front, fluttered to his desktop, settling sideways, half beneath the scattered notes he’d amassed all night. He stared at Dumont’s eyes—the color of cognac, the color of old leather—and his blond hair, cut long on top, tapered on the sides. The perfect length to run fingers through. The perfect length to grab hold of. The perfect length to brush over the tops of eyebrows, to tease his lover’s eyes behind a curtain of cornsilk and sunlight.
The other features matched, too. An angular jaw, sharp in places. Clean shaven. Lips on the thinner side.
It was like looking at a photo of Cole.
“Jacob,” he murmured. “Get me the photo of Lane Boyer.”
Jacob wheeled back to his papers and rummaged through, then pulled out the missing persons flyer. He set it down on the desk, next to the picture of Dumont. “Holy shit,” Jacob breathed.
“Sophie, where’s Brett Kerrigan’s file?”
She was already in action, flinging folders left and right until she found Kerrigan’s. She tore through the pages, then pulled out the photo his fiancé had given to the police and laid it next to the others.
Three blond men, all in their late twenties to early thirties, each with brown eyes and defined jaws, easy, friendly smiles, open expressions. Each one could be a brother to Cole, or, in the case of the skier, a doppelgänger.
Noah turned to his computer and reran the search they’d run the night before: adult men reported missing between the day of Ian’s escape and today. He changed two search criteria, narrowing the search to men with blond hair and brown eyes.
From three thousand missing men, only seventy-nine remained, scattered across the United States, with definite clusters in North Dakota, Wisconsin, upstate New York, and Wyoming. And now, two in Iowa: Aiden Dumont and Brett Kerrigan.
“Fuck,” Sophie hissed. “Fuck, fuck. Noah. Fuck.”
Flashes popped before his eyes, images he hadn’t remembered before: his SUV, crashed in the ditch; Jacob bleeding from the side of his head, his face half in the mud. A man crossing the highway, striding toward him. He hadn’t been able to breathe then, and he couldn’t breathe now, like the world itself had landed on his chest. He clawed at his throat, tore at the buttons of his shirt. Jacob appeared in front of him again, shoving his big face into Noah’s, forehead to forehead, the way he and Cole liked to be.
Cole. Cole, my God.
Ian isn’t after me.
They’d done it: they’d found Ian’s victim profile. At least, the profile he’d switched to after his escape. After he’d met Cole and built an obsession around Cole, he’d hunted men who looked like Cole. Director King, the BAU, even Cole hadn’t considered what had changed in Ian’s life between his first string of attacks and those after his escape. He hadn’t simply gone back to the same life, to hunting any man who intersected his path at the wrong place and the wrong time. No, he’d focused his fantasy, distilled it to the man who now meant the world to him: Cole.
Eight years of fantasizing about Cole. Eight years of obsession, of reliving his memories of Cole, and of stalking and hunting men who looked like Cole in endless cycles, endless repetitions, the script to Ian’s most fevered daydream.
Eight years of replacements, of stand-ins, of runners-up.
Until suddenly he was right there. The iris of his infatuation contracting on Cole, on Noah, on their lives.
Had everything that happened from that moment on been because Ian had laid eyes on Cole that January afternoon and had seen him with Noah and Katie, happy and in love? Had his need sharpened, his hunger turned feral? Had he turned from men who looked like Cole to craving Cole himself?
He doesn’t want me to have anything in my life aside from him, Cole had said.
It had to have been that day. Fresh snow, Katie asking if she could learn to snowboard. They’d had so much fun as a family. He’d held Cole’s hand for hours, had kissed him as they waited for Katie to finish her first snowboard lesson. They’d laughed until their sides cramped, leaning into each other to stay on their feet. That night, they’d made love for hours, slow and languid and deliriously happy.
The memories were stained now, touched with the horror of knowing Aiden Dumont had been taken that day, from the same place. Seven Oaks wasn’t large. Every hill, every modest ski slope and cross-country trail emptied into the same base area. He and Cole had watched Katie at the bunny slopes, and ten feet away, there’d been picnic tables where others waited for their loved ones. Had Ian been right there, watching them?
It started that day, Noah was sure of it.
And he was certain, as certain as he was that Cole was the love of his life, that Ian was hunting Cole.
“It’s Cole,” he gasped, grabbing Jacob’s meaty arms. “He’s coming after Cole.”
