35
Jake took an hour to go through the home of Rachel Macready, age forty-four, 2134 Whistler Road, Southampton, NY. This time Conway didn’t ask any questions, he just listened and did as he was told. The ME’s people had a newfound respect for Jake; whereas last night he was viewed as an alien interloper, today he was an outside professional. A few phone calls to Hauser’s receptionist had loosened details about Jake’s behavior in the morgue that morning and the chattering classes had spun up their own version of the truth about him. Last night the tattoos and clothing had been otherness; today they had been elevated to some sort of spiritual armor.
Jake was leaning against Hauser’s cruiser, smoking a Marlboro, when the sheriff came out the front door. His complexion had reverted to the same waxy apple-green as last night in Madame X’s presence. He came over, leaned back on the car with Jake, and held out his hand. “Mind if I bum a smoke?”
Across the street, the media were doing a good job of entertaining themselves—a flashing light-show of rictus grins and shoe-polished hair, the dance of entertainment by people lacking real marketable skills. Jake and Hauser ignored them.
“You smoke?”
“I do when I have the taste of puke in my nostrils,” Hauser said, sounding embarrassed. “That was mighty professional,” he added.
Jake held out the pack and Hauser clumsily took one, firing it to life on Jake’s sterling Zippo, tooled with dancing Day of the Dead skeletons. Jake blew a light stream of smoke from his nostrils, dragon-style. “Anyone who sees something like that and isn’t affected is a monster.”
Hauser sucked in a lungful, picked a bit of tobacco off of his tongue, and turned to Jake. “Doesn’t seem to affect you.” The words came out in a puff of smoke.
Jake pulled on his cigarette again. “I just lock it all away. I have to or I’d lose it. But I think I’ve reached the point where something’s gotta give. I’m retiring. I’ve had enough of the dead to last me—” He stopped, looking for the right words.
“The rest of your life?”
Jake nodded a thank-you. “The rest of my life. Yes. Perfect. Thank you. Apparently I’m running low on clichés. The first sign of tension rot.”
Hauser spat on the ground. “Your heart, how bad is it?”
Jake shrugged. It was an academic question. “Bad enough that they wired in a computer-run defibrillator to keep it from shitting the bed.” Jake was staring at his motorcycle boots. “Back in my Death Valley days I’d do heroin for breakfast followed by some coke, then keep going until I ran out, usually after rolling through three days of headaches, dry mouth, diarrhea, and the occasional cardiac failure. Died three times.” Jake took a long haul on the cigarette between his index and middle fingers. “I started to feel like a parody of myself.”
“You find God?” Hauser asked earnestly.
It wasn’t the first time he had been asked the question, but it was inapplicable. He never understood why junkies and losers seemed to find God. “I woke up one morning and decided that I’d had enough of hating myself. Somehow I had the resolve to stay straight long enough to hunt down my uncle and ask for help. He checked me into a psychiatric hospital. Three days in hell bleeding poison followed by months of having a candle put to my head. Then years of NA and AA meetings. No matter how bad I think the shit in my life is, at AA there’s always some poor fucker who makes me realize that I’ve hit the lottery of good times.”
“We’re motivated by the good and the bad.”
“You sound like Yoda.”
“I can butt out if you want.”
Jake shook his head. “Cops don’t usually like talking to me.”
Hauser remembered his earlier mistrust of the man and he felt the blush of embarrassment. “Why is that?”
“You tell me,” Jake said, shrugging and pulling another cigarette out of the pack.
Hauser dropped his to the ground, heeled it into the asphalt. Just a few hours ago he hadn’t trusted Jake but the collapse in the house had turned him from an aloof adversary into a regular guy with problems. “You look like the other side.”
Jake held up a hand, dark lines of script running across the metacarpals.
“Don’t you find life challenging enough without inking your whole body with an Italian horror story?”
Jake was surprised that Hauser had even noticed what his ink said. “It wasn’t a conscious decision. I woke up with this one morning after a four-month bender I don’t remember.” He turned his hand over and the script wrapped around onto the palm. “The font is courier, halfway between a fifteen and sixteen point. I had the lab at work go through it, hoping that maybe they could help me put those four months back.” Jake fired up another cigarette. “A job like this is roughly five hundred hours of work. Letters are complicated. And in the thousands of words there isn’t a single spelling mistake or typo. All the letters are perfect. And there isn’t a tattoo shop in the city that did the work. Some guy spent a good five hundred hours marking my flesh and I don’t know why. I don’t know his name. And I don’t know how I paid for it.”
Hauser looked at the script that wound up Jake’s neck from his collar. His expression said that he didn’t understand how that was possible. “Jake, what you do scares people.” He paused, reorganized his thoughts. “It’s just…I don’t know…incomprehension. Cops train their whole lives to be able to read a crime scene properly. You waltz in with that crash-test-dummy expression on your face, and it’s like you don’t have any of the emotions we associate with the good guys.”
Jake took a drag on the cigarette. “You of all fucking people should understand that it’s part of this job. Every time you tell some parent that their kid had his brains scattered over the shoulder by a drunk driver, or that their kid was DUI and killed someone, you go into combat mode. It’s a defensive thing. Self-protection. Otherwise we’d be walking around weeping.”
For a second Hauser remembered his son, Aaron, killed by the swerve of an Econoline when he was ten. “Or throwing up all over the crime scene,” he added.
Jake smiled around the new cigarette. “There is that, yes.”
Hauser leaned back, crossed his arms over his chest. “What’s going on here, Jake? I don’t know what to do. I have crime in my jurisdiction. Hell, some of the wealthiest people in America live here—you have no idea how much crime that attracts. But three people skinned?”
Jake’s eyes went back to the pavement and his words were slow, deliberate. “She opened the front door for him. She probably just got home. It was after her shift—Dr. Sobel sent her home early and the ME will put the time of death within half an hour of her knocking off. She asked him in. Maybe a neighbor saw, but I wouldn’t count on it.”
A few sentences in, Hauser realized that Jake’s words were coming from somewhere else. Maybe Jake didn’t see himself as a psychic. Maybe Carradine didn’t believe in channeling. But Hauser knew what he was hearing, and it was most certainly not Jake Cole talking.
The cigarette smoldered away in Jake’s fingers, the blue smoke taken away by the wind that had started up, full of electricity with the coming storm. “She turned her back on him and headed for the kitchen. I think she would have offered a drink. Tea, not coffee. He followed her down the hall, and as he did, the knife came out. Same one—big-bladed hunting knife—recurve edge. She turned. He kicked her hard in the stomach. A few of her ribs are broken.
“He came at her head with the knife when she doubled over. She was trying to breathe and he yanked her head back. Swept the knife across her forehead—there’s blood spatter across the wallpaper beside the stairs from this. Threw her to the carpet. Put a foot on her back and yanked her head back by her hair, scalping her. She couldn’t scream because she couldn’t even breathe. No one would have heard a thing.”