“So he knows them?”
Jake nodded, then shook his head, and the movement was unsettling. “He thinks he does. He’s acting out against someone. They just take the brunt of it. His mother, probably. Maybe all women in general. I don’t know. Not yet.”
“You’re going to stay on the case?”
“I have to. I don’t want this to happen again.”
Hauser looked like he had been zapped in the base of the spine by a wasp. “You think this is going to happen again?”
All of a sudden Jake realized that the thought had never crossed Hauser’s mind; in his desire to see this go away, he had swept it under that vast expanse of psyche carpet used to avoid facing grating truths. And a skinned woman and child were a hard thing to deal with in any capacity. “I guarantee it.”
“How do you know? Why? Are you sure? I don’t—”
“What happened here?”
“A woman and her child were—” He swallowed. “Taken apart. Skinned.”
Jake nodded. “What does that tell you?”
“That we’re dealing with one sick sonofabitch.”
Jake shook his head. “No. Think in cold, objective terms. What else does it tell you?”
“It takes someone special to do that kind of thing. To find pleasure in it.”
Jake nodded. “And if he liked it, what would the next box on the flowchart say?”
Hauser froze for a second as the machinery in his head went through the process. “He’ll want more.” He looked up and his eyes had gone back to that sickly flat that they had possessed in Dr. Reagan’s lab. “He’ll want lots more.”
Jake examined Hauser, wondering why he hadn’t asked him if he thought it was the same killer after all this time.
18
One of the only good memories Jake had of his old man was his dog Lewis. Of course, like everything else with his father, it had been destroyed in a single act of narcissistic rage. But he occasionally allowed himself to think about the first part. The good part.
His father had brought Lewis home the morning of his son’s eleventh birthday. Jake had not asked for a puppy—he would never have dreamed of asking for one—but the sight of the little German shepherd was something he thought of often. A small fawn with black hindquarters. Fourteen weeks. Jake named him Lewis.
From May on, armed with a new built-in friend, Jake began to explore the world beyond the fenced-in deck and broad patch of grass that ended at the studio, the glimmer of beach beyond. Spencer—called Spence by this point because it was so much cooler—taking his flank. Lewis was more than a mascot and companion, he was Jake’s friend. A book from the library and a little help from his mother was all that was needed to turn Lewis into a relatively well-behaved dog. And Jake had his own personal bodyguard.
By November Lewis was a going concern in the Coleridge household. Jake had the dog trained like the army—he would do anything Jake asked him. Lewis sat, came, shook, high-fived, laid down, rolled over on the snap of a finger. But Jake could not teach the dog to play dead—he saw the trick on the Dick Van Dyke Show and wanted Lewis to figure it out. He had bribed the dog, scolded the dog, teased the dog, tried to coax the dog into understanding the command. But it had never worked out.
On mornings when Jake was tired, he’d let Lewis out the back door to do his business. The dog usually took a few minutes to go through his prebreakfast ritual, after which he’d bark and scratch at the back door. Jake would usually have a bowl of Cap’n Crunch out by now, and he’d let the dog back in and feed it a big stinky can of Alpo.
It was a late November morning and Jake was in a deep sleep. The dog had nosed him first in the hand and then in the neck. Jake had grudgingly put on his Planet of the Apes robe and walked the dog downstairs. It was barely morning outside and he could see the light on in his father’s studio. When he opened the door a frigid breeze screamed in and the dog marched out. Jake went back upstairs, crawled into bed, and fell back asleep.
By the time he opened his eyes, it was bright in his room and he could feel that it was later. He got out of bed, put on some clothes—some warm clothes—and headed down to stir up some cereal, maybe make some Pop-Tarts. He was above the living room when he spotted Lewis. Just outside the back door, lying in a long rectangle of blood.
Jake had screeched out one long high-pitched wail that brought his mother running. She led him downstairs, put him on the sofa, and opened the door. Lewis’s throat had been cut. A single, deep slash crossed the broad patch of white that stretched from jaw to chest. Only now it was not white.
Mia screamed. Asked Jake what had happened. Jake sat on the leather sofa, his legs sticking straight out in front of him, and stared at Lewis. “He musta been barking or something. Maybe he was making too much noise.” Jake’s eyes shifted to the studio at the edge of the property, the chimney stack chugging a nice hardwood smoke that the wind off the ocean swept away in a straight westward line.
His mother followed his gaze. Out to the building on the edge of the property where Jacob had been at work for the past four days. She gave Jake a kiss, a hug, and told him to stay put. She laid a big gray Hudson’s Bay blanket over the dog and headed for the studio.
Jake never knew what they talked about—from the house there was just no way to hear what went on and Jake was too scared to leave the sofa. So he sat there. Staring at the lump under the blanket. Waiting to stop feeling frightened.
His mother had come back red-eyed and pale, but not crying. She told Jake that she was sorry about Lewis and then she took him out to breakfast at the yacht club. French toast—three pieces; a dozen silver-dollar pancakes; three strips of bacon; three sausages; maple syrup; and apple juice. He choked some of the breakfast down because he didn’t want to waste his mother’s money. They had talked very little. Then they went to a movie. That night she had slept in the guest room.
Eventually—he couldn’t remember just how soon but it was less than a week—she returned to the marriage bed. But his parents’ relationship had changed. Even Jake could sense it. And the change in his mother was something palpable, as if a little chunk of her had been taken away. The little boy would always be afraid of his father after that, mostly because his mother started to behave like she was running on borrowed time.
19
The pool, like the rest of the home, had surpassed disregard and was well on its way to developing its own ecosystem. The surface was skinned with algae and lily pads. A merganser circled the lip, her large, late-summer ducklings following in file. Beyond the line of birds was the sagging handrail of the deck, the beach beyond, and the Atlantic stretching out to the edge of the world.
But Jake Cole had forgotten all of this, including the sounds, because he was deep into the work. He was comfortably ensconced in the sofa, his cold coffee swirling into a loose spiral that resembled the eye of Dylan—still a day and a half away. His mind was lost in the rooms of the house up the beach. He was alone, and he moved through the lifeless house without worrying about what Hauser and his flag pin were thinking. He strolled through time, taking in the details.
His eyes were locked on his Mac as he cycled through the nearly 1,300 high-resolution shots that Conway had taken. The photographer had done a good job. Hauser’s own shots were fine, but not much past adequate, and Jake had been at this long enough that he had developed his own unique way of doing things; he was glad Conway had understood what he had wanted.