“Get these goddamned motherfucking things off my hands!” He looked up at Jake. Then added, without a hint of sincerity, the single word, “Please?”
Jake looked down at his father, at the better part of a century that had rolled over his features, stretching them, darkening them, aging them. Behind the furrowed brows and the clenched lips, the same man stared back at him. Angry. Mean. “I’ll get the nurse,” Jake said, and turned to the door.
He saw Nurse Rachael at the far end of the hallway, on the other side of the station. He signaled her and she jogged over, holding her stethoscope around her neck with one hand as she ran. As he watched her, he realized that Jacob Coleridge, the great observer, was still lucid enough to recognize that she did look like Mia.
When they got back to the room, Jacob was pulling at the bandaged clubs with his teeth, like a dog getting the stuffing out of an old cushion. Tufts of gauze peppered his beard and chest as he gnawed at them. He made hungry sounds as he tore at the white cloth.
“Mr. Coleridge, let me help you with that.” Nurse Look-alike came forward, and produced a needle from her pocket.
“What the fuck is THAT?” Jacob asked, trying to back up in the bed, away from the syringe.
“Don’t worry, it’s not for you.”
“The fuck it isn’t! Get away from me with that. You’re not sticking that in—”
Nurse Rachael jabbed the needle into the IV tube and depressed the plunger.
Jacob’s eyes unfocused, his mouth closed, and it was as if someone had drawn all the frustration from his body with a magnet. His muscles went slack, he sank back into the pillow, and closed his eyes. Then his chest expanded with a single deep breath, seemed to hold it, and his head fell to one side.
Jake turned to the nurse. “Thank y—”
It was in that hang time between the two words of gratitude that Jacob Coleridge bolted upright in the bed. The metal frame jolted the nightstand, sending Finch’s flowers to the floor in a high-pitched collision of lead crystal and linoleum. The vase shattered, and shards of glass and lilies bowled across the floor.
Spittle and gauze flecked Jacob’s lips. He looked at his son, at the nurse, and at his hands. Then he let out a shrill scream that rattled the windows, spraying chewed bandage, saliva, and frustration across his chest. He lifted one of the torn nubs at the end of his wrist, pointed it at his son, and bellowed. “You can’t keep him away! He’ll find you! Run!”
Then he fell back as if someone had pulled his plug.
And was silent.
15
The preliminary press conference had gone well but the feeling that it was only the first of many quashed any momentary elation Hauser felt coming on. The storm was bad enough but somehow the specter of the double homicide was more threatening in a not so abstract way. Dennison at the NHC had done a good job of scaring him but somehow Jake Cole and his traveling road show of death had managed to eclipse even Dylan; the next few days would be an entry for the memoirs.
In his brief respite between the press release of the murders and a general meeting of his staff about the coming storm—which the sheriff had been nice enough to open up to the media in part of that give-and-take Jake had spoken of—he decided to go through the Mia Coleridge file.
The box smelled of basement and the first file was a once-bright red that had faded to pale salmon—a capital crime file. He placed the old manila folder down on the sparse top of his desk, peeled back the cover, and began reading.
The pages had become brittle and the staples had rusted, leaving dark red marks everywhere, like iron nails in a ship’s hull. By nature Hauser was a patient man, and this quality had always worked for him within the framework of his occupation; he began on page one and went through the file slowly and methodically, not bothering with notes or any sort of an effort to memorize facts. He simply wanted to find out anything he could about Jake Cole so he could get a feeling for a man he was forced to work with. Hauser had learned a long time ago that it wasn’t what he didn’t know that could hurt him, but rather what he knew for sure that just wasn’t so. It was an old logic—delivered in an almost obsolete vernacular—but it had served him well in his twenty-plus years in the department. He had very little in the way of disposable time but figured that a fifteen-minute trek into the history of the FBI consultant was worth the investment if he was going to hand over the keys to the kingdom.
He began with background notes that the officer on duty had taken the time to write out by hand—Hauser recognized the slow, careful script of someone who was bad with a pen and only took notes by hand because it was easier than using a typewriter (the not-so-distant ancestor of the keyboard), a condition he could empathize with because he shared it. A lot of the younger men on the force, the ones who had been born into the digital age, had no problem with the keyboard but Hauser wrote his reports out longhand and he recognized the fear of technology in the script before him.
It was a familiar handwriting, penciled in by his predecessor, Sheriff Jack Bishop. Hauser knew Bishop had been a good cop and a solid man when needed. Hauser also knew that three days after Bishop’s retirement, he had gone out to the garage, jammed a double-barrel twelve-gauge into his mouth, and painted the rafters with his brains. No one talked about it but they all knew why. A few of the old-timers, the ones who had given everything up for the job—their families, their dreams, their lives—realized that after the badge was retired and the sidearm was put in the safe, there really wasn’t much to look forward to. After all, when you had sacrificed everything for the job, what did you have when it was gone? It was a story Hauser had heard about more cops than he wanted to think about. And part of him felt smugly superior because he knew it would never happen to him. As much as he loved the job, he loved his wife more, his daughter more. And there was plenty of bird hunting and fishing still to do. Maybe even a cottage to build. Something upstate on a little lake where the musky fishing was good and the summers weren’t packed with weekend assholes who had more money than brains. Maybe that place where they had vacationed that last summer before Erin had gone off to Vassar; Lake Caldasac—you could buy a cottage on the water for thirty grand. And the fish were monsters.
The file was neatly stacked, like it hadn’t been rifled through as much as a murder case should be. Homicides were rare in his jurisdiction but not as rare as he would have liked. There were a few each year, usually chalked up to a drunken brawl that got out of hand or a domestic dispute that went supernova after too much yelling and not enough talking. The usual result was that someone with a surprised look on their face ended up on one of Dr. Reagan’s tables.
But this was a thing of legend. He had heard that during every cop’s lifetime there was a single case that eclipsed all others. Made a man want to leave the job. Maybe hang sheetrock. Even without the benefit of hindsight, Hauser knew that this would be his.
Hauser read Bishop’s notes before he went to the photographs he felt sticking out of the folder with the edge of his finger. Bishop had started with the basics, first-impression kind of things. Sex: female. Age: unknown. Height: approximately five foot three. Hair color: unknown. Race: unknown. Eyes: brown. Clothing: non-applicable. Back then, before they had started using DNA as an identification tool, they had relied on dental records—a slow and often worthless process. But Hauser checked a note that Bishop had come back and scrawled into the margin ten hours after the cover page had been time-stamped, stating that they had a positive dental match for Mia Coleridge. Hauser shook his head and snorted at that; today, when they were lucky, DNA took seventy-two hours to get sequenced, two weeks when they weren’t. But back then it had been real footwork and human ingenuity—not computers—to keep the whole thing rolling forward.