“Back at that house, you said it looked like revenge. Why?”
“These guys like what they do. They take pleasure in the act. They cherish it and hold it and drag it out. Not this one. He’s in and out. Or at least he was with the Macready woman. He shows up angry, doles out his punishment, and leaves. Why?”
“Why would he cart off thirty pounds of skin and hair? Is he making jumpsuits in his basement? Lampshades? Wallets? Jesus, listen to me.”
Jake shook his head and let out a cloud of smoke that the wind coming off the water smacked away. “I don’t get that feeling. If he’s punishing them for something, it’s payment. That means a personal motive.”
Hauser held up his hands. “Are you saying that he knows the victims?”
“I don’t know.”
“If I was the guy running this investigation—”
Jake pointed at Hauser. “You are the guy running this investigation.”
“You know what I mean. The only thing I can say for sure is that this sonofabitch scares me—deep-down scares me.”
Jake’s face stayed flat, calm. “Me, too,” he said.
“Is it true that these guys want to get caught?”
Jake smiled, shook his head. “Not that I’ve noticed.”
“Then why the fuck would a killer write letters to the police or keep dumping bodies in the same place? It’s counterproductive.”
“It’s not that they want to get caught—they don’t think they can get caught. You have to remember that these people—if you can call them people—all have severe personality disorders. There is no such thing as a repeat killer who is a well-adjusted human being. It’s all about them. Getting away with a killing builds confidence. Getting away with a second one builds more. All of a sudden the guy thinks that he’s a criminal mastermind. It’s cockiness. Serial killers generally follow the same intelligence guidelines as the population—running the gambit from barely functional to high acuity. But the rule of thumb is that they are maladjusted losers.”
Hauser examined Jake’s face for a few seconds, trying to see behind the skin. “I’m glad you said that.”
“Why?”
“The way you talk about these guys—the way you seem to understand them—makes it look like you have some kind of deep-down respect for them.”
For the first time Jake could remember, something caught him off guard. “This is not big-game hunting where I relate to the animal. I don’t have any respect for these monsters—and believe me, that’s all they are. Social misfits and broken people. The people who romanticize them as anything else are losers of a lesser degree, but losers still. Christ, I fucking hate these guys.” He looked back at the ocean and saw that the weather was building up to go with what was happening here. Maybe he had been right, maybe this was some sort of a German opera.
“Me, too.” Hauser stood up, brushed sand off his seat. “I’ll be back at the Macready house. Get me through the station since I don’t have a cell phone right now.”
Jake’s mouth moved into an embarrassed smile. “Sorry about that.”
“I thought someone was going after my family…” Hauser let the sentence die and he paused at the top of the steps, his eyes locked out on the ocean. “I’ll get a cruiser out here to keep an eye on things.”
“You can’t afford the manpower right now.”
“And you can’t afford to let something happen to your family. Get them out of here in the morning, Jake. You should leave, too.”
“Can’t.” He shrugged again. “Won’t—it amounts to the same thing. My dad. The killer.” He wanted to add the weird paintings over in the studio, the studies of the faceless men of blood. “I have to be here.” He nodded out at the frothing Atlantic where the clouds had woven into a gray blanket that rose from the ocean. The waves were sloshing up on shore and foam and bits of flotsam were kicked around at the water’s edge. “Where’d the birds go?”
Hauser looked into the sky. “If I had a choice, you think I’d still be here?” He turned and walked away.
37
Jake was still sitting on the steps watching the ocean build up its courage for the next day’s big show when Kay walked out onto the deck with Jeremy bouncing along beside her. He was watching the surface of the ocean chop in on gray swells topped with white that slid halfway up the beach, hissing and bubbling, as Jeremy came over and sat down in his lap.
“Daddy, there’s a policeman in the driveway.”
“He’s going to be watching over the house when Daddy’s not here.” The fatigue of the world melted away and for an instant he felt like everything was all right with the universe.
Kay plopped down beside him and gave him a smooch. “How was your afternoon?” she asked.
How could he even think of answering that? Groovy. Except maybe for the poor woman who was scalped and skinned. Probably for no other reason than she had the misfortune to be my father’s nurse. Oh, and the skinned woman and child in the morgue—can’t forget them. “Fine,” he said, keeping what he did from her yet again—another reason he had decided to stop doing this.
She was in a pair of Levi’s and a tight T-shirt that had the smiling face of David Hasselhoff beaming back with the words Don’t Hassel The Hoff! scripted across the curve of her bust.
“Where did you get that shirt?” Jake asked, laughing.
“Nice, huh?” She pointed her breasts at him like gun turrets. “Kind of gets your attention, doesn’t it? Nobody messes with The Hoff!”
“The man in the store said Mommy looked smoking,” Jeremy offered cheerily.
Jake’s laugh blossomed and it felt good. “Smart man.”
Kay smiled over at him. “He was about fifteen. I don’t think he had ever seen boobies this close.” She looked down at the shirt. “He said he thought my tattoos were cool.”
“Cool, huh?”
“When you’re semipubescent and staring at a chick’s cans, you have to say something.”
“Smoking,” Jeremy repeated. “Is Mommy burned?”
Jake hugged his son closer. “No, she’s beautiful.”
Kay’s eyes misted over and she said, “Why are you the only man who has ever called me beautiful?”
Jake shrugged, something he felt he had been doing a lot of lately. “Because you are. And because you used to spend your time with assholes.” Kay had come to her first NA meeting with her arm in a cast. Her last boyfriend had smacked her around while she had been asleep. He broke her wrist—her playing wrist.
“Now I got me a shiny happy nice guy!”
“And I got me a delusional woman.”
She punched him in the arm. “I’m hungry.”
“So go make some food.”
Kay’s talent in the kitchen was an old faded joke between them. When Jake wasn’t working, he did the cooking; otherwise a good chunk of their income went toward restaurants. Jeremy was fond of pizza with anchovies, Reuben sandwiches, and sweet-and-sour matzo-ball soup from the Chinese kosher restaurant down the block from their apartment.
Jake stood up with his son and flipped him around to a piggyback position like a chimp handling its baby. “How about pizza, Moriarty?”
Jeremy’s arms went around his neck. “And apple juice?”
Jake remembered the Angelo’s Pizza Palace flyer mixed in with the pile of mail by the front door. “I think we can do apple juice.”
Supper came half an hour later. The first thing that struck Jake was the single box in the delivery kid’s hand.