“You okay?” he asked.
Kay shook her head. “Do I look okay?” She wiped her nose on the hem of her T-shirt. “I don’t want you staying here. I don’t care what this job is about. I don’t care if this whole fucking place gets washed into the ocean. You are coming home with us.”
Jake nodded.
“They won’t let him on the bus with no pants, Mommy.”
Jake and Kay looked down at his naked body. “You, my friend, may have a point,” Jake said, and reached for the phone to call Hauser.
44
Jake was relieved that the medical examiner was at one of the Olympus microscopes in the corner of the lab instead of headed west in the Long Island Hurricane Exodus. It was obvious that she had been here all night. She was hunched over, her face squinched up with the expression common to microscope-gazers everywhere. He dropped a Ziploc containing Jeremy’s bloody T-shirt onto the table beside her and the noise jarred her from her scientific myopia.
“Special Agent Cole,” she tried as a greeting.
Jake was glad people were laying off the Charles Bronson thing—he hated it. “Dr. Reagan.”
She offered her version of a smile—the same tight line she had shown at Madame and Little X’s the other night. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” There was something about the last word that sounded insincere.
Jake put on his be-nice face, as Kay called it. “Could you please analyze the blood on that?”
She picked up the bag and examined it. It squished against the polyethylene, red like a battlefield dressing. “What is it?”
“T-shirt. There may be some contaminants like mucus and saline from another source but it’s the blood I want analyzed.”
“DNA?”
“First check the typing against all three bodies. Madame and Little X and the Macready woman.”
“Where did you get this?” she asked.
“Something smeared it on my son’s face.”
“You mean someone.”
“No.” Jake’s voice sounded a million miles away, even to him. “I don’t.”
45
The doctor’s waiting room looked like every one he had ever been in, the chairs just a little past being presentable and the walls adorned with the unimaginative combination of public health posters and ugly hotel-room art.
Jake sat with his head in his hands, feeling like his brain was filled with ants. He was going over Jeremy’s Misfits makeup, trying to figure out where it had come from. The cop in the driveway hadn’t seen a thing; no one had come via the road, and with the way the house was situated on the property, he would have seen someone approach from three of the sides. Which left the beach as the only viable route.
But by looking at things this way, he was forgetting to ask the most important questions of alclass="underline" Who was the man in the floor and what did he want?
Jake lifted his head and eased back in the vinyl seat, letting his focus drift to the thought of pulling up stakes and heading back to the city. But he knew that he couldn’t leave—even the thought of it in the abstract felt treasonous; he would stay in Montauk until everything was tied up and nailed shut. And like the old saying about how to eat an elephant, Jake knew that the next step in the process began here, in psychiatrist’s office.
Sobel’s receptionist, a woman of twenty-five with the unhappy face of a burgeoning depressive, busied herself behind the desk. A mother and daughter sat at the other corner of the office. The girl was about twelve, and had the look of someone plugged into a different sensory universe. Jake guessed that she was autistic. She played with a bowl of colored candies. Her mother sat reading a thick paperback that had a beautiful man with beautiful hair embracing a beautiful woman with beautiful hair, and they were wearing beautiful clothes, and back, in the distance over their shoulders—
—like that goddamned lighthouse over Rachael Macready’s shoulder—
—skinned—
—was a beautiful estate filled with their beautiful life. The book was titled The Bluebloods of Connecticut and Jake knew there were horses in the story. Horses with long, well-groomed tails. Probably a private jet. Kisses and muscular embraces. Unadulterated crap.
The girl stared off into the distance, as if watching a movie behind her eyes. She slid the large glass bowl of candies from the center to the side of the coffee table and had cleared all the magazines into a neat pile. As her mother read of the steamy sexploits visited upon the handsome characters of the Connecticut estate, Jake watched the girl mechanically remove candies from the bowl one at a time, then lay them out on the table. She was sitting on the floor and her hand would dip into the bowl, then place the candy on the table. Then she would repeat the process. The table was strewn with candies in no apparent order, most not touching. Her mother was too engrossed with the heavy breathing between the pages of her paperback to notice that her daughter was making a mess.
“Mr. Cole,” the receptionist said, her mouth turned down at the corners. “Please go on in.”
Jake stood up and stepped around the coffee table. Neither the woman nor her daughter seemed to notice.
Dr. Sobel got up from behind his desk and shook Jake’s hand. “I’m sorry about yesterday, Jake. If I thought that your father was a danger to himself, I would have had him restrained before.”
Jake eased into the mail-order-catalog chair and examined Sobel for anything that he could make use of. The psychiatrist’s face was a blank sheet of meat and Jake recognized the clinical training of a man trying to study him for, well, anything he could make use of. Jake put his hands on the knuckles of the chair arms, crossed one booted foot over his knee, and waited. After Sobel’s eyes finished taking him apart, he took a deep breath and opened his hands as if he were trying to sell Jake pet insurance.
“I know how tough this can be.” Sobel did a pretty good job of sounding sincere.
“I’m not having this conversation—I’m not here to have a candle put to my head.”
Sobel seemed to mull this over for a few seconds.
“What’s going on with my father? How do I best take care of his needs right now, in the immediate future, and in the long-term?”
Sobel opened a large file on his desk and Jake recognized the same colored pages and Post-Its from the metal clipboard the day before. “For a man of eighty, your father’s vitals and blood work are spectacular. He’s obviously taken care of himself.”
Jake snorted. “Not that I know of.”
Sobel’s mouth turned down at being contradicted.
How to say this without sounding like a prick? No clean route. “My father has been a raging alcoholic ever since he could raise his arm. He ate for shit. Never exercised. Ran himself ragged. Sometimes he’d stay up for a week solid, fueled on booze and anger. No, I don’t think that your tests have painted an entirely accurate picture.”
Sobel penciled a note onto the page. “What is his domestic life like?”
Jake felt the cold flash of wasted time burst in his head. “Dr. Sobel, I thought you had done an evaluation on my father. You should know all of these things. If you don’t even know who he was, how can you compare that to who he is?”
Sobel stopped nodding and folded his arms across his chest. “I am also trying to get a feel for you, and what you are willing to do for him, Mr. Cole. This is not solely about him. I need to see how much you’re willing to handle. How much you can handle. Your impressions of your father also give me a lot of insight into you.”