“That’s rude,” Kay said. “Who doesn’t wave at a kid?”
Jake wasn’t looking. He just shrugged and kept walking. “You two aren’t local, those two people are. They don’t wave to outsiders here.”
“Now you’re bullshitting me.”
“Go ahead, wave.”
So Kay waved.
No response.
A second time.
They kept walking.
“You wave,” she ordered Jake.
“I’m from here. They probably know that somehow.” Jake raised an arm, gave one Nixonesque wave, and put his hand back in his pocket.
Both the husband and wife raised their hands, waved, nodded, and went back to their walk.
“That’s creepy.” Kay sounded disgusted. “Welcome to Purgatory.”
“To them,” Jake offered in the way of an explanation, “You don’t even exist.”
“Wait until I flash the husband my boobies. Then see who doesn’t exist, me or that mummy he’s married to.”
And with that Jake realized how glad he was that she had come. Her view of the world was going to be a big help, if only in the cheerleading department.
Up ahead, Jeremy had stopped in front of Jacob’s house and was squatting down, furiously digging at something in the sand. He pulled it out, held it up to the light, and nodded in approval, his tiny CPU calculating that it was the perfect size for throwing.
For an instant, Jake saw the light hit it, saw it glimmer in his son’s hand. There was a pulse, and a red flash hit his eye as if the thing in Jeremy’s hand were a chunk of glass taillight, then the boy threw it. It arced nicely out over the line of weed and foam that rimmed the ocean’s lip, and plopped into the waves.
“Daddy!” he chirped, thrilled with the improved pitch. He danced around the freshly excavated hole at the water’s edge, kicking up sand that the wind carried toward the house.
Jake paused where the boy had pulled the object from the earth and bent down, sweeping his fingers over the sand. Just below the surface he brushed a rough object that his touch told him was a rock. He scraped the surface away and saw a piece of what looked like red glass—the same hue as the one Jeremy had launched into the Atlantic. It was not sharp, but globular, amorphous, a melted chunk of red light, dimpled with the acne texture of sand burned into the surface. Jake held it up, squinted into its depths, something about it asking to be investigated.
Inside, neatly suspended in a red translucent cloud, was a small crescent-shaped inclusion. It was light, much lighter than the material it was encased in, and for a second Jake thought he was looking at a human fingernail. Was that possible? What could—
Then Jeremy pulled it out of his hand and threw it at the water.
It arced beautifully, a red drop of light that hung over the surf for a second. Then it plunked into the ocean. “All gone, Daddy,” he said, and ran up the rickety steps to the beach house.
22
While Jake went back to work on the case, Kay dug into clearing out some of the garbage so they’d at least be able to walk from the kitchen to the stairs without having to negotiate an obstacle course. She had opened the doors to the beach and fresh air funneled through the house, swirling motes of ancient dust and cigarette ashes across the floor. She wanted to hang the Persian carpets over the railing on the deck to air them out but for some reason they were nailed and stapled and screwed down to the floor in an overlapping crosshatch—more of Jacob Coleridge’s handiwork.
Kay had locked the hasp on the gate to the low railing that sectioned the pool/swamp off from the rest of the deck and Jeremy was outside, swathed in a white long-sleeved shirt, sunblock, and his little bucket hat, singing one of the happy songs he had learned at daycare. He was busy repeatedly crashing a plastic fire truck into his stuffed Elmo. Sooner than Jake would like, Elmo would be replaced by Optimus Prime. And slowly his son would grow up.
Jake sifted through the autopsy protocols, layering the information into strata, each successive level building on the last. He cycled through the endless photographs; he always learned more from images than other people’s notes. He examined blood spatter from different angles. Studied the macro shots of smeared fingerprints and shattered teeth. The worst was the little boy, a cracked scabbed bundle of muscle and tissue contracted into the fetal position, lidless eyes crossed, little fists tightened into bloody meatballs. At one point he looked away and sucked in a great gulp of oxygen, realizing that he had been holding his breath.
Jake had seen nearly a thousand murder scenes and for him the only common factor between them was the stench of fear. It came in various degrees, depending on what had happened, and like cigarette smoke in a room, it never really left. Spritzing a little Lysol wouldn’t get it out. That stink lingered for a long time. Years. Forever. Maybe longer. Everyone moved out of a house where someone they loved had been murdered. Some people bulldozed it. Others just burned it to the ground. But they all left. Except for the hardcore narcissists; those folks put it behind them and moved on with their lives, going on as if nothing had happened. Working. Drinking. Painting.
The longer Jake stared down at the rigor-mortis contortions of the mother glued to the carpet with her own blood, the more he realized the only obvious truth in the case: this was beyond Hauser’s expertise. Which meant that Jake would be working alone. Going after him.
Jake closed the lid of the MacBook and rubbed his palms into his sockets. Outside, Jeremy was still singing away and playing with his cars. Jake kept his eyes closed and listened to his son, the happy lyrics offset by the brittle snap of plastic cars colliding with one another. In the other part of his brain—the part occupied by murdered children and evidence bags—he was thinking about the house up the beach. The house where two suitcases were missing. Where there were no toys—no fire trucks or Elmo dolls or Optimus Prime figures. The owners were unreachable. And there were another three hundred little things that, taken on their own, didn’t yield any sort of a payback. Yet taken as part of a big picture, they looked a lot like a personal fuck-you. The kind that ended with a woman being skinned down to her muscles.
Jake opened his eyes and Kay was in front of him, staring down, consciously avoiding the photos spread out on the coffee table; she had made the mistake of looking at his work once before and it was not something she would do ever again.
She smiled at him, one hip cocked out, her almost Mohawk tied up with a black bandanna, and the ink on her arms splashing down, around her wrists, ending in L-O-V-E across the knuckles of one hand, H-A-T-E across the knuckles of the other. She had switched into a pair of cutoff shorts and the red-and-black mermaids that were tattooed onto her hips dipped out on both sides of the frayed denim, tails curling around her thighs below the exposed pockets that flapped below the white-cut line. The King Khan and the Shrines wife-beater was pulled tight across her frame, the ribbed fabric pulling taut lines between her breasts. “Can you give me a hand with something?” she asked.
Jake snapped back to the sunny room opening onto the Atlantic, to Jeremy forcing automotive destruction on the imaginary citizens of Make-believe Land, and dropped his eyes to the coffee table, to the images of death spread out like baseball cards. He began to paw the photos and papers into a pile. “Sorry about this, baby.” Back in the city he had an office where he locked everything away in metal filing cabinets when he wasn’t home so Kay or Jeremy wouldn’t walk in and see his pornography of the dead. He put the manila folder over the protocols.