The Grave Between Us by Tal Bauer
Chapter Twenty-Six
Jacob tookcommand of the river scene, along with Sophie, who’d driven up with Sheriff Clarke. Michael followed, trailed by his entourage again, like ducklings following their mother. He stood quietly at the edge of the woods, watching.
Deputies swarmed the river and the tree line, processing the scene, staking off the riverbank and the clearing where Ian had tortured Cole. They bagged the gun Ian had pulled, too, and showed it to Noah before he left in the ambulance with Cole. It was his weapon, the one he’d lost when Ian had ambushed him and Jacob.
He rode back to Des Moines with Cole in his arms, the lights and sirens wailing. Cole wasn’t in mortal danger, but Noah didn’t begrudge the paramedics their haste. Cole was shivering and in danger of hypothermia, and the paramedic thought he had more than a few cracked and bruised ribs thanks to Jacob’s CPR. But he was alive. Alive and in Noah’s arms. Cole leaned against Noah for the entire drive, his eyes closed and his body limp, his face pressed to Noah’s neck.
Cole insisted he didn’t want to stay at the hospital, and he signed himself out with wrapped ribs and a bottle of antibiotics at four p.m. His clothes were evidence, so all he had on was a set of scrubs. Noah protested, but Cole asked him to please take him to the high school, and all Noah’s arguments evaporated.
Dale had dropped off a car for them, and Noah drove as Cole stared out the window, lost in the silence and darkness Ian had opened inside him. Noah didn’t know what to do or what to say, so he just held Cole’s hand, hoping his love was a tether Cole could cling to.
They got to the high school right before the final bell. Noah pulled into the emergency parking zone and turned on the red-and-blues. Cole slipped out of the passenger seat and waited, watching the building doors, chewing on his thumbnail. Noah came around the front to join him.
Katie came out three minutes later, and when she saw the car, then Noah, then Cole, she screamed and ran straight for him. She ditched her cheer bag and her backpack on the sidewalk and flew at Cole, wrapping him in her arms as she buried her face in his shoulder. Cole grunted, and Noah caught his wince of pain, but he didn’t let go of Katie. They went to the ground together, Cole sobbing, Katie crying, clinging to each other in a heap on the pavement. Cole reached out, blindly seeking Noah, and Noah joined them, sinking to his knees as he wrapped Cole and Katie—the loves of his life, his family—in his arms.
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.’”
Cole’s face scrunched up, and he tried to smile. It was like looking at an echo of a smile in a cracked mirror.
“I can know what you’ve seen and what you’ve been through, but I can’t feel what you’ve been through. I can’t share that experience. And a part of me is dying that I can’t, that I can’t be right there with you to help you through—”
“I don’t want you to.” Cole’s voice had dropped, gone rough and ragged. “I don’t want you to feel this darkness.”
He stroked Cole’s hand. Pulled it to his lips and kissed Cole’s fingers. Kissed his engagement ring, like Cole had kissed Noah’s when he said he was leaving. “You’re not alone. I’m here,” Noah breathed. “I’m always going to be here.”
He watched the tears spill over Cole’s eyelashes, watched him search the night sky through the windows. “There’s this hole inside me,” Cole said after long minutes of silence. “I call it my grave. It’s where I put the things I’ve seen that can’t be described. Things I can’t talk about or share. The grave sits between me and the rest of the world. Between you and me, even.” He breathed in. Shuddered. “Sometimes it’s really small, so small I can reach across it like it’s not even there. Sometimes it feels like there’s nothing between us at all.”
He rolled to his side, facing Noah. The firelight burned in his pupils. “And other times, it feels like a Grand Canyon, a chasm that cuts me off from everything and everyone. Even you. Especially you. I never want you to see what’s in there.”
“I don’t have to. But I’m here with you, no matter what.”
Cole nodded. He laid his hand on Noah’s cheek. “Even if sometimes I can’t talk about it, if you’re there with me, I’m not facing it all alone.”
“Silence together isn’t the same as silence alone.” He kissed Cole’s knuckles again. “I’ll never leave you.”
“And I’ll never leave you again,” Cole whispered. “I swear it, Noah.”
* * *
In the morning,Noah drove Cole back out to the northern arm of the Raccoon River. Sheriff Clarke had sent a dive team in to scour the bed and the banks for miles, searching for Ian’s corpse. Noah got the text at four a.m. They’d hauled Ian out of the water south of County 44, where he’d gotten tangled up in brush and debris around the bridge pilings.
Noah walked hand in hand with Cole to the water’s edge, where Sheriff Clarke had set up a white tent to shield the corpse from the media and any onlookers. The body was covered in a tarp, and Dallas County Medical Examiner personnel waited nearby.
Sheriff Clarke nodded to Noah and Cole and stepped aside. Noah took hold of the corner of the tarp and flipped it back. He was still holding Cole’s hand, and he felt Cole’s full-body flinch, saw him close his eyes and look away. He waited, stroking Cole’s hand with his thumb, until Cole turned back and stared into the pale, water-logged, dead face of Ian Ingram.
“That’s him,” he said. “It’s Ian.”
“Positive ID,” Sheriff Clarke said, noting it on his records. “Doc, you can take the body now. Get the son of a bitch out of here.”
* * *
When Noahand Cole got to the office, Director King and his team had already cleared out. They’d left a stack of whiteboards on the conference room table, the maps rolled up in the trash, and a pile of car keys on the seat of one of the chairs.
“Not even a thank-you card,” Sophie groused. “Your ex-coworkers are assholes, Cole.”
“He’s already on to the next murder.” Cole, despite everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, managed a small, sad smile. “Still want to work for the BAU, Sophie?”
Sophie screwed up her face. “You know, I’m having second thoughts about that one.”
“Maybe Iowa isn’t that bad?”
“Maybe,” she said, winking.
Cole sat in Noah’s office as Noah tried to clean up his office after their all-nighter. Cole was quiet, withdrawn, but he took Noah’s hand whenever Noah reached for him.
Midmorning, Noah got a phone call from a blocked number. “Downing,” he answered.
“I know what you did to my laptop,” King said. Noah could hear airport announcements in the background, final boarding calls and offers to gate-check baggage. “Destroy the copy you made.”
King didn’t have to verbalize the rest. If he wanted to turn Noah in to the OIG, he already would have. He wouldn’t have bothered calling. “I will.”
“You and your team did good work. I’m glad you found him.” King ended the call.
Found Ian, or found Cole? Noah shook his head as he hung up.
At noon, Dale poked his head in, telling Noah he had a caller on line two who was frantic to speak to someone about the man on all the news channels. That he’d employed the man, a guy he’d known as Charles, for the past six months.
Noah picked up the phone. The caller was an older man, the owner of a contracting business, who sometimes hired day laborers. Six months ago, he’d hired Charles to do some roof work, and then for some construction work, and he’d liked him so much he decided to keep him on. Charles told him he was working under the table to avoid having to pay alimony to his “bloodsucking bitch of an ex,” and the caller, who had two ex-wives and was working on a third, sympathized. He’d had no idea, he said, his voice trembling, no idea at all, that Charles was a murderer.
He was more than willing to turn over everything he had on Charles, including his address, even driving it to the FBI office. He couldn’t get rid of it fast enough, like the paperwork itself was radioactive.
An hour later, Noah, Jacob, and the rest of the office served a search warrant at the address Charles had used. It was a run-down single-wide trailer parked on a worn-out piece of land, nothing but dirt and emptiness, between Bayard and Jefferson. The landlord was an old woman who lived in Davenport, who’d accepted cash mailed to her once a month. She didn’t know nothing about nothing, she’d told the Davenport police officer who went to her door. She made $200 a month from that trailer, but that wasn’t worth the headache of the police on her doorstep. They could do the hell they wanted with the thing, as far as she was concerned.
Cole had been staying within arm’s reach of Noah all morning, but he waited in the SUV while Noah and Jacob broke down the door. “You don’t need to come inside,” Noah had said.
“No, I don’t,” Cole had breathed.
Pencil sketches papered the trailer’s interior walls and ceiling. Hundreds of drawings, all of the same subject.
Cole in every pose imaginable, from the professional to the perverse. Cole as an object of desire, Cole as a victim. Cole alive, Cole dead, Cole in a grave. Cole decaying and turning to a skeleton. Noah plucked that one from the wall and tore it to shreds.
“This scene is closed to Cole,” he told the team. “Do not show him these drawings. Do not show him the photos you take.” He waited for each of his people to meet his eyes and nod. “After you photograph this place, bag up every drawing of Cole in one envelope, seal it, and give it to me.”
He’d burn those drawings. They weren’t taking Ian to trial. Evidence could be misplaced. Lost forever.
Hidden behind the drawings of Cole, Dale and Miya found other images, men they couldn’t identify. Sophie thought one looked like Lane Boyer, the missing national guardsman from North Dakota.
When the search of the trailer was complete, they had 107 drawings of unidentified men. Noah overnighted them to Director King at Quantico, along with a copy of the scene processing report.
Cole never asked what was inside the trailer. Noah’s silence was enough, it seemed, for him to know the edges of the truth.
* * *
North Dakota’scrime lab called a few days later. They’d run the DNA against a sample they requested from the Department of Defense. The remains from Grahams Island were a match to Lane Boyer. And the sketch Ian had drawn was an eerily accurate representation of how he’d looked the month before he’d disappeared.
FBI headquarters spun up a new task force: the Ian Ingram Graves Recovery Task Force. They ran the sketches against the missing persons databases. They matched 102 of the drawings to men who had vanished from areas where Ian Ingram was known or suspected to have been, both in the original sixteen years he was active and in the eight years following his escape.
The task force used Jacob’s search algorithm, too, calculating a maximum distance from abduction site to probable grave location. Twenty-five miles seemed to be a lock, no matter where Ian was active.
Once the FBI knew where to look, Ian’s graves opened out of the earth like corpse flowers, blooming for the first time in years.
* * *
Cole came back slowly.Noah measured his days in broadening smiles and decreasing silences. Cole was present more of the time, no longer staring into the distance, gazing into an abyss only he could see. He was there for homework and dinner, staying with Noah and Katie throughout the length of conversations. Holding Noah’s hand as they ate. Humming as they did the dishes side by side. He sat with Katie, helping her salvage her shattered makeup palettes, learning how to mix the colored powder with rubbing alcohol to form a paste that they transferred into new tins and then dried in the oven. He and Katie painted her bedroom, and Noah found them painting each other before they were done, rolling the paint up and down each other’s backs and over their hair. He escaped before they tag-teamed him, shutting the door on them and holding it closed as they laughed and shouted.
There were nightmares. Nights when Cole was seized by terror, when he screamed and screamed and Noah couldn’t shake him awake, no matter how hard he tried. Nights Cole woke up gasping, dizzy, choking for air. Hyperventilating. Nights he clung to Noah and wept silently, and it was all Noah could do to hold him and let his tears fall. Cole would listen to Noah’s heartbeat as Noah kissed his brow, and they’d spend hours in silence, waiting for dawn.
Those nights became fewer, and more and more often they fell asleep holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes, and stayed that way until the sun rose.
They bought a new bed, an extravagant, king-sized sleigh bed. The night it was delivered, Cole put Noah on his belly and had him grip the footboard with both hands. He ate Noah out until Noah was trembling, until his bones were jelly and he couldn’t even moan anymore, and then he pulled Noah to his knees and slid his cock all the way to Noah’s heart.
Noah looked over his shoulder, watching Cole watch him as they made love, reaching back to hold Cole’s hands. Cole pulled out and rolled him over, then slid back inside. Noah wrapped his arms around Cole’s shoulders and buried his hands in Cole’s hair. Cole held him close, moving inside him tenderly. He kissed Noah’s cheeks and his eyelids, his forehead. “I love you,” Cole breathed. “Thank you for staying with me. Waiting for me.”
“I’ll always be here with you,” Noah said, moving with Cole. Rocking together, his hips and Cole’s moving faster, Cole sliding in and out until Noah was arching his spine and tipping his head back and he grabbed the footboard with both hands as he shuddered, as he breathed Cole’s name and came all over himself and Cole buried his face in Noah’s chest and spilled inside him.
They stayed up all night, talking quietly, making love every other hour. Reconnecting in a way they needed to, down to the molecular level. Noah traced the veins on Cole’s arms, and Cole drew patterns on Noah’s back, kissed a path up and down Noah’s hairy thighs and the backs of his knees until Noah giggled and snorted. Noah gave him a long massage, until Cole was a loose-limbed pile of muscles and bones mumbling Noah’s name in between deep groans.
As the sun rose, Noah grabbed his phone and pulled up a web page he’d saved a week earlier. “I have another idea for our wedding.”
Noah laid his head on Cole’s chest while Cole scrolled through the site. He heard Cole’s heart speed up. Felt his breath come faster.
“How soon can we do this?” Cole asked.
“I can buy plane tickets right now.”
Cole kissed him deeply, tossing the phone to the carpet. He pushed Noah into the mattress, tangled his fingers with Noah’s. His cock was hard and heavy against Noah’s hip. “Let’s do it,” he breathed against Noah’s mouth. “I don’t want to wait any longer. I want to be yours.”
“You already are mine.” Noah wrapped his arms and legs around Cole. Cole’s cock pushed against his hole, still slick from the last time they’d made love. He pushed back, sighing as Cole slid inside him. “And I’m yours.”
“Forever,” Cole whispered, in between kisses to Noah’s lips, his neck, his collarbone. “Forever, Noah.”
