The Grave Between Us (A Noah & Cole Thriller, #2)

by Tal Bauer

What was the point of fantasy if he could never wrap his hands around another man’s neck? Never feel the life fade away, see the panic in another man’s eyes spike and then dissipate, like mist burning off under the sun?

The only drawback to his escape eight years ago was that it ended his days with Cole.

There were times when Cole’s memories turned on him, and instead of seeing one of the brunette girls on the sand, or in their body bags, or on the antiseptic steel drawer inside the morgue, he saw Katie.

knee-length ditzy floral dress with a high neck and long sleeves, decorated with tea-stained lace and little buttons. It was almost Little House on the Prairie, but the cut was modern, and he could already tell it would look great on her. “What do you think about cowboy boots with this?”

That sounds gross

He’d dedicated his life to trying to understand how a man went from laying eyes on someone to deciding to wrap his hands around their neck. How the switch flipped in a man’s mind as his gaze traveled the lines of another person’s body. What he thought as his eyes drank in the pretty face of a stranger and a vision of her death bloomed like virus cells growing under a microscope slide. And everything that came after. What pliers did to flesh. The definition of piquerism. What skin looked like from the inside.

He remembered wanting what Sophie wanted. He remembered that hunger, that drive. He remembered that need to tear into the darkness and rip the monsters out of the shadows. His first monster, and the bottle of tequila he drank alone in his bathroom after, made him move a little more slowly, a little more carefully, as he entered the darkness.

He’d watched more men spontaneously orgasm recounting their murders than he ever wanted to count.

One profiler he’d worked with had spent days meticulously transcribing audio recordings a killer made of his torture and murder of eleven young women in the back of his van. She filed her report, drove home, did the laundry, made lunches and dinners for the next week so her husband wouldn’t have to worry about feeding their sons, and then ate her handgun in the shower so she’d be easy to clean up. She said so, in the sticky note she left on the closed bathroom door. I’m sorry. I can’t stop reliving it.

Damn

Noah’s lips pressed together. Doubts still lingered in his mind. Not about Cole’s love for him. No, his doubts, his anxieties, were firmly fixed on himself. Cole deserved a man who would be a great husband to him, not just an okay husband, like he’d been in the past.

Misspelled

Half his face was black and blue, and a line of stitches ran from his temple to the back of his half-shaved head, like someone had taken a hook to the back of his skull and pulled.

Jesus Christ

“He’s back, Cole,” Michael said simply. “He’s resurfaced.” Even after all this time, Michael didn’t need to use a name.

Ingram has been a traveling paramedic since he got out of the military fourteen years ago. Locum tenens. He’s worked in emergency rooms across the country, from California to Oklahoma to West Virginia. New Mexico to Arkansas. Indian country, even. Hell, he worked in Nome for a few days with the Army. Do you know where Nome is?” “Alaska. Seward Peninsula.”

“The FBI is overflowing with killers who left no trace for over a decade?

So he’d been killing over a decade

Ingram was a predator. Every moment of his life, he hungered: to possess, to dominate, to extinguish. Every cell of Ingram’s body was locked in an endless scream, fueled by incandescent rage. An inferno that never guttered. He visited that rage on his targets, relishing their cries and the chill of their flesh cooling beneath his savage touch. He dug his graves by hand with a smile. He hunted, and hunted, and hunted, day in and day out. He loved what he did. He loved to kill.

Desire vanished for days, weeks, sometimes months during an investigation.

“I want nothing. I don’t care what you offer me. I’m not your fucking monkey to dance because you clap some cymbals.

“He escaped,” Cole whispered. “We don’t have him anymore. We lost him eight years ago.”

So he must’ve never been convicted

Lead interrogator. As if that banal term could encompass what he’d done, what he’d become, and what Ian had become to him in the space of those months.

Wtf does that mean

He fixed Cole with a withering stare. “You see why you’re the only light in my life, don’t you?”

Because his DNA was deep in the blades, nestled in the screws. Something, I’ve been told, that would only happen if there was sustained, prolonged, intense contact between propeller and man.

Jesus

“No. I want to see you work for this. Show me you’re worthy to know my men.”

Typo

He was a young graduate student spending time camping in the woods over the summer break.

Who the hell goes camping in the woods alone?

“You realize that when you find one of my graves, you’ll be taking a part of me inside of you, like I took their lives inside of me. Think about the significance: the last person to touch these men was me, and the next to touch them could be you.”

“If you open up my graves, we’ll be bonded forever. There’s nothing that can link two people quite as intimately as a grave. So are you willing to take me inside you?”

Ian stared at Cole through the window, smiled, and then turned away. Cole followed Ian’s gaze, his eyes turning to the trees. Not the lake. Cole frowned. From where they’d parked by the water’s edge, the woods surrounding them looked almost like a beckoning tunnel.

Ian’s nose and lips pressed against the back of his neck. He inhaled in a wet, hot groan. Ian’s tongue poked out, gliding up Cole’s nape, tickling the short hairs behind his ear. “Oh, yes,” Ian moaned. “That’s it. That’s exactly it. I knew you’d smell so fucking good with his death all over you.” He moaned again. Breathed hard, in short, frantic grunts.

OH. MY. GOD.

“I knew you’d bring that scent back to me. You’re so good. So, so good.” More stroking. Ian shivered. “You planned this,” Cole croaked. “Guilty as charged,” Ian purred. His eyelids fluttered as his nostrils flared, and he sucked down another deep, openmouthed breath. “Do you get it now? I can never fill enough graves, because filling graves with broken men makes me feel alive. I live for this moment, when I can smell their death. Smelling it on you is—” He shuddered, bit his lip. “Are you upset? Are you scared? Contemplating your own mortality? Was that why your voice quavered? Was that why you walked unsteadily back to me? Is that fear I smell on you, Cole?”

“You’re the only profiler or FBI agent who was able to get into his head, and because of that, we’ve got solid leads on finding his victims and bringing them home. You’re doing that. Be proud of that.” He nodded. Was he getting inside Ian’s mind, or was Ian getting inside his?

“Well,” McHugh snorted. “Cole Ingram decided to grace us with his presence.”

WOW. Hate, much?

got everything I wanted, including you, smelling like death and coming to share yourself with me. That went better than I imagined, if I’m being honest. You, oh… You smelled absolutely divine.”

McHugh lay farther up the road, as if he’d tried to run. He had the classic look of a strangulation victim: bulging face, protruding tongue, petechial hemorrhages on his skin and in his eyes, and the broken-doll tilt to his neck. His eyes were wide, and his hands seemed to be reaching for his stomach, where Ian had taken a shard of glass and sliced him from crotch to collarbone, then reached inside and pulled. Yanked anything he touched. There was more of McHugh on the roadway than inside him.

OH. MY. GOD.

In the car, Ian freed his hands and reached over the seat, strangling McHugh as he drove. They crashed, and in the chaos, Ian got hold of the shotgun. He put Hillary on his knees and shot him point-blank.

Wtf was Hillary doing during the strangulation, just sitting there???

The FBI collapsed the Ingram investigation, boxing everything up as if it had never happened. The failure was too huge, their failure upon failure upon failure magnified in the OIG’s confidential report. Director Harper had a choice: admit a serial killer had operated with impunity for almost two decades, the FBI unaware of him or his victims—and then admit that, after being arrested through sheer chance, the killer had manipulated the BAU, playing mind games until the FBI couldn’t tell up from down and hadn’t seen through his ploy to gain his freedom. That he’d escaped, unwittingly aided by an FBI agent, and was on the loose.

Or wipe it away as if Ian had never existed. Avoid the congressional investigations and the public censure. Rewind time, reset to before Ian had skidded out on that icy mountain road. Except for McHugh’s and Hillary’s deaths, of course.

Director Harper never spoke to Cole again, never shook his hand, never even looked his way when they crossed paths at headquarters or the BAU.

the Oak Haven Meadows bed and breakfast—

Fucking hell

They didn’t usually use sugary nicknames. But when Noah called Cole “hon,” Michael’s jaws seemed to scrape together, and Cole’s response nearly made steam come out of his ears.

“Because he took you away! Because Noah Downing took you away from me and from the BAU.

“I was going to give you the BAU.” Michael’s voice dropped. Instead of shouting, he sounded resigned. Wistful, even. “I don’t want to do this very much longer. My time is almost up. Hell, maybe it’s already up. I’m retiring in a few years, and I wanted to give you the BAU. You were going to be Assistant Director Kennedy. I had it all planned out for you. That’s what was supposed to happen.” Michael shoved the chair he’d dropped his jacket on.

The closer they drove, the more the whispers grew. He could feel Ian in the air, feel him hovering in the fields and the fog as if he was watching them. Watching Cole.

“It was incredibly easy to get your number. Your receptionist should be fired. All I had to do was pretend to be calling from Quantico, pretend I’d had my call dropped a few times trying to connect to you. She gave me your direct line before I even asked.”

“I know everything about you. I know you’re low on milk. I know Katie doesn’t ever pick up her shoes. I know you’re low on soda and someone—Noah, right?—likes his toast well done. I know you have indigo towels in your guys’ bathroom, but Katie has seafoam green ones in hers. I know Noah leaves his wet towels on the end of the bed and that you haven’t done your laundry in a few weeks.”

The glass door to the back porch was broken, shattered all over the kitchen floor, and the door to the garage was open, lock picks still stuck into the doorknob. Kitchen cupboards were open, dishes thrown on the ground. The fridge was open, food smashed, milk poured out. Siting on the kitchen counter was a police scanner, tuned to the emergency channel. It wasn’t something Cole owned, and he knew Noah didn’t have one, either.

Ian had stripped off the comforter, and it looked like he’d rolled in their bed, wrapping the sheet around himself as he did. Cole crept closer, peering at the rumpled linens. Fresh semen stained the fabric, still glistening. Cole’s pillowcase was gone. And an orange paper crane sat atop Noah’s pillow.

“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.

Oh HELL

was like looking at a photo of Cole.

They’d done it: they’d found Ian’s victim profile. At least, the profile he’d switched to after his escape.

He turned right and pulled up to the last stop sign before their neighborhood. There was a creek on the right, burbling past a little stone bridge. Sometimes deer would be at the water’s edge, making their way out of the thick trees, the basswood and aspen and oak. There’d been two does there the day he and Noah came to look at houses, and Noah had fallen in love with the neighborhood immediately.