“I appreciate the honesty.” He looked over Hauser’s shoulder, at the bedroom door thrown wide, the interior of the chamber lit up in space whites from the utility lights. He told himself to wait another minute, until after Hauser was up to speed on his new PR function. “What are you doing about media?” he asked, skipping small talk.
Hauser shook his head. “No media.”
“Half the news crews in the country are within fifty miles of here. Official FBI policy is to work with the media. Establish a relationship and you’ll be surprised how the news can do more good than bad.”
Hauser pulled off his rubber glove and massaged his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. “I don’t have a lot of experience with this kind of thing.”
Jake gave the sheriff a thirty-second talk on putting together an effective media plan that would be a useful tool in the investigation. He suggested Hauser as the public information officer—as far as PIOs went, Jake thought the man would present well on camera. After his quick lecture and promises of help, Jake pointed at the bright rectangle of utility lights and excused himself.
He slid past Hauser and walked to the door, pushing two of the sheriff’s people out of the way as he moved. No one protested or said a word when Jake was on site—something about him told people to get out of his way.
He saw them on the floor and his brain did what it did, the computational software automatically gathering details and comparing them against the vast databank in his mental vault. The noise in the room stopped. The people moving behind him disappeared. And there was no light save for the harsh truth of halogen on the dead. He stood there for a few seconds that could have been minutes or hours or days and inventoried everything he saw in a mental data download.
Immediately—quicker than immediately if that was at all possible—he knew. Knew. With a certainty that was as inexplicable as what he did.
Now he understood the background chatter he hadn’t quite recognized when he had walked in. It had been the scent of familiarity. He knew this work. It was him.
Him.
Jake stood there, the minutiae of the scene humming in his skull. He knew what had happened. How it had happened. How long it had taken.
The world was gone—just gone—and there was no sound except for the howling of the child. The screams of the woman on the floor. Jake heard the celery-bite crunch when her ribs were kicked in. He heard the snap as her jaw broke when she was hit with the pommel of the hunting knife that would be used to skin her. He listened to her screeching above the sound of her skin coming off her body. And her gurgled intimate prayers for it all to stop. For death to come for her.
And then, just as quickly, it was gone. He was back at the threshold and a voice off to his left made a joke. Someone laughed. Jake was jolted out of his work, out of himself, and he turned.
A big trooper with a shaved head had the tail end of a smile hanging on his lips.
Jake kept himself from yelling but made sure everyone in the house heard him. “Does this look fucking funny to you, asshole?”
The trooper, whose nametag identified him as Scopes, locked his eyes on Jake. The look on his face was half resentment, half embarrassment.
“Do you know what happened here?” He waited, and the house went silent. Everyone stopped what they were doing. “A woman was skinned alive. She was held down, forced to watch a little boy mutilated while the fucking kid probably broke the sound barrier with his screeching. And he bled to death before his murderer was finished with him. He would have twitched a lot at the end. Then the motherfucker dropped the kid to the floor like a broken toy and kicked the woman’s ribs in. While she was gasping like a fish, trying to find some breath to pray or scream for help, he scalped her. Then he probably winded her again, and she almost lost consciousness. And while she was sinking away from the world, he sliced all the meat off of her face. Then he waited. And when she woke up, he probably let her scream for a few minutes so he could get a nice memory-image to jerk off to later. Then, because he liked the sound of her voice too much at this point, he held her down with his foot and sliced all the skin off of her while she went through degrees of agony that would take your brain apart. So if you find something even remotely funny here, I am personally going to take you outside and beat some fucking sense into you and if you think I am not serious,” Jake took a step toward Scopes, a good half-head taller, and easily the biggest man in almost every room he entered, “say something just a little bit stupid.”
Scopes dropped his eyes. “I didn’t—”
“Shut the fuck up. I don’t want an apology. I want you to get the fuck out of my sight. And if you decide to build up enough balls to come after me later, liquored up and full of rage, you have an open invitation. Are we clear?”
“I’m sorry.” His face went a little pale, then shifted to a deep red that showed the veins in his neck.
“Go do something useful and I’ll consider this forgotten.”
Scopes nodded and grudgingly went outside.
Jake turned, looked at Hauser. The sheriff’s eyes were locked on the bedroom door and his skin had gone pale, greenish.
“You okay?” Jake asked, trying to be the other half of his personality.
Hauser still looked green, although he was starting to get his bearing back. The sheriff waved him away. “I’m sorry about Scopes. We all deal with stress in different—”
Jake shook his head. “Forget it.”
Hauser swallowed, his lips a tight line that barely moved when he spoke. He swallowed again, trying to breathe through his mouth. The house smelled of metal, blood, shit, and fear.
Jake wanted to turn back to the bedroom, to the violated bodies on the thick pile rug. Back to the work. But that little voice in his head was chattering away now, rattling off the unifying factors in this case and the other one. The first one. The one that had made him decide to do this.
Hauser cut into his head. “The house is owned by Carl and Jessica Farmer and from what the neighbors tell us, they rent it out when they travel. Right now I assume these, um—” he paused, turned his head consciously away from the room of the dead—“people are—were—renters. We don’t know their names. Not the woman or the child.”
“He’s her son.”
Hauser looked at Jake and his eyes narrowed. “How do you know?”
“I just do.”
Hauser started back up. “According to a neighbor, the Farmers are sailing in the Caribbean. They go every fall and winter and there’s always new people coming and going.”
Jake looked around, took in the art, the antiques, the expensive fabrics. The neat order was in stark contrast to his father’s morbid cave down the beach. “It doesn’t look like they need the money. There’s twenty grand in Aubusson cushions in the living room. Why would they rent it out?”
Hauser shrugged, pulled the back of his hand across his mouth again. “I don’t know. The rich are different.” He paused and looked over Jake’s shoulder, his eyes peering to the bedroom. “So far, none of the neighbors have seen any renters or heard a child playing. Maybe the woman and…her child just arrived. Maybe they were the renters.”
“You checking the Farmers’ bank account?”
The sheriff nodded. “If rent was paid by check we’ll have something tomorrow. Two days if it’s an out-of-town bank.”
“No purse? Mail? Prescription bottles in the bathroom?”
Hauser’s blank expression slid back and forth as he shook his head. “No purse. No wallet. No luggage. Nothing distinguishing, nothing personal found.”
“Clothes?”
Hauser shook his head. “No kid’s clothes. No clothes for a woman that size. Or age, if you’re right and she is the mother. Without her…skin, it’s hard to tell. Could be his grandma or—”