“They’re renting the place out for four grand a month. Not very much money for a place like that. Funds were in the form of postal money orders. They were bought with cash. I’ve put a trace on them and when they come back we can check with the actual branch that sold them; unfortunately no one keeps track of postal money orders. You’re not allowed to purchase them with a credit card and if you’re paying cash, no one really asks questions unless you buy ten grand. It will take three days and it’s probably a dead end.” Hauser sounded frustrated. “So each step takes us further and further away.”
“Nice people implies more than a mother and child, doesn’t it?” Jake went back into the studio, closing and locking the door behind him. In here, in the womblike dark, there was a soft silence.
“One of the neighbors—she wasn’t home the night of the murders—walked by the Farmer house on Tuesday afternoon and thinks she saw a woman and child walking on the beach. She couldn’t give any sort of a description other than she looked thin and the child had a lot of energy. They were too far for her to get any solid details. Saw them twice. But no husband. No boyfriend.”
“Could be the man works a lot. Could be she has a girlfriend,” Jake offered. “If she saw the child on the beach with a woman more than once—and she couldn’t identify the woman—maybe there were two women.”
There was a pause as Hauser digested this little bit of possibility. “Hadn’t thought of that.”
“How long have they been renting the place?”
“Two weeks back. Looks like an end-of-season rental. Daughter said her folks were happy that they had found someone who wanted the place for the fall. It was short notice.”
“Why come here in the fall on short notice?” Jake paced the studio, painting the pixels of data into the 3-D model he had assembled in his mind the night before when he had walked onto the set. “When did the first money order get deposited?”
“August thirtieth.”
“September first lease. They’ve been here more than two weeks. Someone has seen them. Guaranteed.”
Hauser let out a sigh. “Problem is, most of the neighbors have packed up and left.”
Jake remembered the advancing storm. “How long until it’s too late to leave?”
“The wind will get bad tonight. Rain, too. Serious rain by the morning. By supper things will be intense. I’d say leaving at two p.m. tomorrow is cutting it short. Just in case something goes wrong—and something always goes wrong.” There was a pause. “You thinking about your wife and child?”
“I’m thinking about all of us.”
“When are you getting on the road?”
Jake thought about lying but it wasn’t something he felt good at. “I’m staying.”
“Jake, the Southampton hospital is a solid building that is going to resist the storm surge and winds. It was designed to withstand a hurricane. Hell, any municipal building erected after the big one of ’38 was designed to withstand a missile attack.” There was a pause. “I will personally look in on your old man. You don’t need to worry about him.”
What could he say to that? I really don’t give a flying fuck? Because when it comes down to it, it’s everything else that has me on edge. It’s the woman and her child up the beach. It’s the studio with the bloody men in the flat-black sky. It’s these canvases that my old man spent years painting—these lousy dead meanderings of a diseased subconscious. It’s my mother’s car, sitting out there for the past quarter-century like some pop art shrine, my father perched in his Star Trek chair, guzzling back scotch and doing what—? Weeping? Laughing? Screaming his fucking lungs out? Too many loose threads for me to walk away from. All he said was, “It’s not just my old man. It’s everything else. The case. All of it. What was the second thing you wanted to tell me?”
“The ME’s people just finished going over the house. If you want to take another walk through, now’s the time. We can go up there together before things get too bogged down with this storm. And after the storm there may not be a crime scene to visit.”
Jake pulled his eyes away from the ocean, then swiveled back to the house and headed inside. “When can you pick me up?”
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
31
Hauser’s new Charger sounded like a German Panzer from half a mile off, the supercharged Hemi growling as it tore up 27. It made a statement but Jake saw the car in the same light as he viewed a lot of American industry—yet another rehash in a once innovative field that had been reduced to copying its glory days. He had to step back when the sheriff swerved off the road onto the gravel shoulder. The taste of electricity in Jake’s mouth was replaced with dust and exhaust. He climbed in.
“Ever lose anyone to this car?” Jake asked as he strapped himself in.
“Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
Jake realized that this was the first time he had seen Hauser look even remotely comfortable around him; it was probably a home-court advantage. “City asshole tried to outrun me with his Ferrari and hit the corner at Reese’s dairy doing one-eighty. Went straight off the point and disintegrated. By the time we picked up all the pieces from the rocks, it was a different season.”
Jake shook his head. “In this line of work you get to see people at their best, no doubt about it.”
Hauser’s eyes slid over to Jake for a second. He swallowed and the comfortable body language of a few seconds ago was lost. “How’d you end up doing what you do?”
Jake reached into his pocket for a cigarette, then realized that Hauser wouldn’t want that new cop-car smell to get fucked up by his Marlboro. He let the smokes fall from his fingers and put his hand on his thigh. “Bad luck, I guess.”
Hauser shot another sideways glance at him and said, “You and those rose-colored glasses. You need yoga or tai chi. You ever try any of that?”
“Smoking relaxes me.”
They lapsed into a silence that lasted until Hauser’s cell phone pinged the national anthem. “Yeah?” the sheriff said into his hands-free earpiece.
Hauser listened for a few seconds, then glanced in the mirror, flipped the siren and cherries to life, and pounded down on the brakes. He spun the wheel and hit the gas and the big rear end of the Charger swung in an arc of squealing tires. The car fishtailed in a 180-degree high-pitched scream on the faded asphalt and pulsed forward in a smoking cloud of rubber, heading back the way they had just come.
He snapped. “Yep. Yep. Yep. Six minutes.” And threw his earpiece violently into the dashboard.
Hauser turned to Jake, his mouth curved down like the edge of a hunting knife. He punched the gas and the big Hemi pulled the car into the future. “Your skinner just hit a woman in Southampton,” he said.
32
It was a neat neighborhood of postwar cottages with single-car garages, predictably pruned yards, and lawn chairs set up on small concrete porches. Cars were being loaded for the evacuation, some on the grass in front of the concrete steps, some in the driveway, trunks and doors open, pet carriers and prized televisions waiting to be loaded. Some houses were already empty, shutters fastened over windows—some neatly done in plywood and cut to size, others haphazard patches of scrap lumber. One home had duct tape over the windows in a sloppy silver weave. Jake watched the hurried, nervous movements of the people leaving their homes, and wondered when, exactly, the American motto had changed to, I’ll give you my television when you take it from my cold, dead hands.