“Sure…” Hauser let the word trail off as he walked into Jacob Coleridge’s house. He stopped in the doorway and looked around. He saw the whiskey bottles, the cigarette butts, the paintings stacked like cordwood, and the decades of neglect covered by dust.
Hauser paused by the Nakashima console in the entry, leaned forward, put his hands on his knees, and examined the spherical sculpture that had sat there for decades. It was a wire-frame model of—what? A molecule, Hauser guessed. “Jake, what’s going on?” He sounded more than tired, Jake realized. He sounded frightened.
Jake considered the question as he dumped the groceries out on the counter. He caught a can of tuna before it rolled off the edge. “I don’t know. Not yet.” He examined the can, then surveyed his healthy smorgasbord. Part of him was happy that Kay wasn’t here to see this gastronomical crime; his foray to the Kwik Mart on 27 had yielded him two six-packs of Coke, a can of spaghetti sauce, a package of linguini, two cans of tuna, a loaf of Wonder Bread, a squeeze bottle of mustard and another of mayonnaise, two packs of luncheon meat that resembled packaged liposuction fat, a carton of cream, some club soda, a tin of coffee, and some sugar packets stolen from the coffee counter. He had taken a little of Frank’s advice; in the car were two cases of water, a flashlight, a dozen batteries, and a box of pepperoni sticks. He pulled the tab on the coffee lid and it hissed open with what sounded like a death rattle.
Hauser meandered through the detritus of Jacob Coleridge’s life, unintentionally casing the place, a species-specific habit natural to cops and crooks alike—it was something that Jake both recognized and resented. Hauser stopped in front of the piano and examined a small painting that was part of a larger pile on top of the instrument, ignoring the huge expanse of ocean through the big plate-glass window. On the floor at his feet was the box the handyman had left behind, full of half-used tubes of silicone and a few cans of spray-foam insulation. “Mind if I take a look?” he asked, pointing at one of Jacob Senior’s ugly little canvases.
Jake was at work on the coffee, the twelve-stepper’s surrogate addiction. “Knock yourself out.”
Hauser picked up one of the asymmetrical blobs that was jammed under the dusty Steinway and held it away from himself. He examined the painting for a few seconds, holding it first one way, then rotating it to look at it another, trying to decide which way it went. He flipped it around and looked at the back, as if he had missed something. After a few seconds he shoved it back under the piano. “I don’t know shit about art,” he said. “But if I look at a painting and don’t know what the hell I’m looking at, it’s not for me. I don’t want a painting that represents the plight of man. How the hell can you paint that? Me? I want a field. Or a pretty girl on a swing. Hell, I’d even take dogs playing poker. But I guess I just don’t understand this modern stuff.” He shrugged.
“To quote my father about the only thing I’d trust him on, it’s self-indulgent undisciplined crap.”
“Not a fan?” Hauser sounded a little relieved.
“I like my father’s early work. The stuff he did before he made it onto the college syllabuses. Maybe up until 1975 or ’76. After that…” He let the sentence trail off into a shrug.
In the ensuing silence, Hauser shifted his focus to the big window and the Atlantic beyond. “Helluva view.” The wind had picked up from earlier; the high-pressure blanket that sat over the coast was being slowly pushed away by the advancing hurricane, 1,600 miles and closing.
Jake finished scooping grinds into the basket and flipped the machine on, a little stainless-steel Italian robot that had been bought before the great coffee revolution had swept America and its suburbs into believing that Starbucks knew what it was doing. It started to hiss and he came around from behind the counter. “Are you going to give me the protocols?”
Hauser looked down at the large manila envelope in his hand, as if it might be seeping pus. He held it out.
Jake tore it open, upending it over the coffee table, now clear of the forest of cigarette butts and empty bottles. Photographs, two computer disks, and a sheaf of files held together with a black office clip glided out. Jake picked up the photographs.
All of a sudden he was back in the house, walking its halls, examining its dead. Hauser, the coffee maker sputtering away, the hiss of the surf beyond the window, the slight static that every house has—faded away. He was there. In the room with her and her child. With his work.
The first photo—clear, color, well lit—showed her fingernails, scattered over the carpet like a handful of bloody pumpkin seeds, strands of flesh hanging off in little black tails. He flipped through the photos until he found the one he wanted, a close-up of her left eye. It stared up at him like the satellite photos of Dylan on CNN, only her eye was lifeless, the white ruptured in dark subconjunctival hemorrhages. “This guy’s not fucking around,” he said, and dropped the photo to the table, stepping out of the murder scene in his mind.
“You looked like you were in some sort of a trance.” Hauser’s eyes narrowed.
“I reconstruct things in my head. It’s what I do.” The smell of coffee reached him and he changed the topic. “Sugar? Cream?”
“Two sugars, no cream.”
Jake wound his way through the vast expanse of the great room and the ease, the familiarity, with which he did surprised him. He had been back less than—what? Twenty hours maybe, and already the house was once again home. Except for the locked doors. The sod of lawn in the fridge. And that his father had lost his grasp on most of the tangible parts of his psyche.
Jake pulled two cups from the rack beside the sink—now full of dishes he had cleaned—and poured the coffee. He added sugar to both cups and looked up to find Hauser standing in front of the counter.
“My mother had Alzheimer’s. I know how hard this can be.” It sounded accusatory.
“Whatever is between my old man and me is not going to affect my performance. It took your lab—” he checked his watch—“nine hours and fifty-one minutes to process those protocols.” He nodded across the room to the coffee table. “You want shortcomings, you’ve got all you need right there.”
“I don’t see how you can be objective here. I don’t want some FBI ghost-hunter all hopped up on vengeance kicking the shit out of this thing. Do you have a thirty-three-year-old axe to grind?”
Jake froze, raised his eyes to Hauser. “You want me to tell you this is not personal? I don’t lie, Mike, it’s bad policy.”
“I need to know what I have to worry about.”
Jake pointed at the coffee table. “Nine hours, fifty-one minutes is a good place to start. Two full-time detectives should have had that done in five hours flat. And it would be useful, solid data. Your lack of experience in this is your biggest liability. Me? I’m the guy who’s going to be doing all the heavy lifting.”
Hauser stopped, swiveled his flat-top toward Jake. “Is this guy crazy?”
“Sure, he’s crazy. But is that going to help you find him? Probably not. He’s not crazy in his public life, at least not most of the time. It’s the quiet time he has inside his own head, sitting at home in his garage, or in his study, or in the little room out behind his house, that the freak comes out to play. These guys are all fucking crazy, but they know what they do is wrong, Mike. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t hide it. They all know that there are consequences for their actions. Unfortunately, it’s the only way most of them can fire up the money shot.
“This guy, there’s something different about him, though. Most killers do it as an act to pleasure themselves. It’s not about the victim, it’s about enacting their own fantasies out on a stage, and that stage usually involves the victim as a bit-player. But the focus is always on themselves. This one…he—it’s about them. It’s like he’s—I don’t know—punishing them. He skinned them and left. No evidence of any kind of performance or reenactment. He wanted to hurt them.”