Jake shook his head. “She’s the right age. Good musculature, not much subcutaneous fat.” What about the other things you saw? the little voice asked from the dark.
A woman of about sixty-five, primped and perfect in a once-blonde pageboy haircut, came over. She was thin and wearing one of the antistatic spacesuits that Jake had seen on hundreds of crime scenes. Hauser introduced her as the medical examiner, Dr. Nancy Reagan. “No relation,” he added very matter-of-factly and Jake hoped he wouldn’t turn out to be one of those dumb cops who had somehow slid into the job because of family influence in the area.
“Is the FBI officially involved?” Reagan asked pleasantly, like a snake greeting a mouse.
He thought about the woman behind him, sprawled out and glued to the carpet with her own blood. “Yes.”
The ME’s smile went a little flat and she said, “Do I look incompetent to you, Special Agent Cole?”
“It’s not a question of competence, it’s a question of experience.” Jake slipped back into character. “You mind if I have a few minutes in here with Madame X and the child?” he asked. “By myself.”
Hauser swallowed for what must have been the hundredth time in two minutes and nodded. “Sure. No problem. I give out tickets. Sometimes I see accidents. Drunk kids in fights in town. Killings? Sure, this is America, there’s enough of that shit to go around. Shootings and stabbings and beatings and drownings and suicides. But I have never even imagined that people do this kind of shit to one another. Not once.” He glanced over his shoulder and his Adam’s apple Ichabod Craned again. “Why would anyone skin a child? I can’t…I just…I don’t…”
Jake cut the sheriff off to prevent him from crying in front of his people. “I’d like Dr. Reagan’s photographer to stay with me. Shoot what I ask him to. On my own flash card. You can have copies, of course. I’ll also expect copies of your protocols.” The ME’s office had already gone through the place. Blood spatter patterns had been recorded, the crime scene cataloged by a photographer, and every surface dusted for prints or genetic evidence. But Jake wasn’t looking for the things that the ME would be interested in—or even able to see. What Jake Cole wanted was to reach inside the fear he felt pulsing through the house and speak to the dead with that part of him that he never really understood.
Hauser snapped back to the here and now. “I’m staying.”
“It’s your investigation.”
The sheriff lifted his head. “Everyone outside. Conway?”
A small man in one of the ubiquitous spacesuits with an expensive Nikon dangling from his neck came over, his feet swishing on the carpet. “Yeah?”
“This is Special Agent Jake Cole, FBI. Cole is doing us a favor here, so shoot whatever he tells you—however he tells you. Understood?”
Conway nodded. “No problem, Sheriff.”
The house began to empty, the sheriff’s people filing out with the ME’s people in a silent white-suited crowd. Conway changed memory cards in his camera and adjusted the big Sunpak flash.
When they were alone, Jake leveled his gaze at Conway. “Let me poke around a bit but keep me in sight.”
Conway shrugged like a man used to taking orders and cycled up his flash.
Hauser stepped back like he was at a nature preserve observing wildlife. He cocked his head to one side and watched, hoping that this would somehow put what had happened into some sort of a rational context.
Jake walked to the bedroom and stopped at the threshold. On the floor were the scabbed skinless sprawled-out figures of Madame X and her little boy. He walked through the door for a second meeting with woman and child. Mother and son.
These are not people, Jake told himself.
This is not a family.
This is a set of clues.
Left by an artist.
An artist you know.
You’ve seen.
This is his palette.
He stopped just inside the threshold and the jagged peal of the bells of bad memories started clanging away in his head. For an instant he wanted to reach out, to grab something for support, but like his brain, his muscles had frozen, the machine of his body unplugged from his CPU. He stood there, his eyes locked on the bodies spilled out of their skins onto the floor, his lungs cocked in a half-breath.
It is him, the voice in his head said, matter-of-factly.
And he was surprised that he was calm. That his feet were welded to the floor and that he was stronger this time. He felt Hauser’s presence in the empty space behind him, a cold spot in the room. He could tell that the sheriff was holding his breath.
Jake filled his lungs with the sickly sweet air and for a split second it got away from him and he thought he was going to throw up. He didn’t fight it, didn’t try to suck it back or push it down, just let the feeling rumble around inside him for an instant and then it was gone like he knew it would be and he was back in the room. Back in the here and the now and the bedroom gallery with the art of the dead.
He recorded what he saw, took it down in pixilated form and committed it to the memory banks because this one was—
Him.
—important.
Him.
Jake didn’t need to see any more to know. He already knew. The signature—his signature—was all over this place. That’s what the secondary smell had been back in the living room when he had been talking to Hauser: the stench of familiarity.
Madame X was at the end of the bed, slopped all over the floor like a water balloon that had let go. She was facedown on the rug, one of her legs bent at the knee, a bloody foot smeared onto the edge of the mattress. There was a lot of blood on the carpet. On the bed. On the floor. The happy zigzag pattern of a weekend butcher at work.
Him.
“Did you check the drain? Tub and shower?” Jake asked Hauser, who had moved silently up behind him. “Pull the grilles and the P-traps?”
It was Conway who answered in a swish of mint. “Ran a swab down the drain, straight into the septic system. No municipal service out here. Didn’t find a thing.”
Are you sure that it is him? Hope whispered. But there was no mistaking it. Not this close. Not after everything that had happened. Spencer was right, there are no coincidences.
He squatted down on his haunches and leaned over the body of the woman. He had seen a lot of indignities in his time but the added horror of familiarity somehow made it more visceral, as if it had been meant for him to see.
Even before he examined her, he knew what he’d find.
All the skin had been removed from her body. He twisted his head like a cat going through a fence, peeked between the bloody stubs of her toes, bent down, looked into the crook of her arm, examined the base of her skull, and couldn’t find a shred of skin anywhere. She had been peeled and thrown on the floor. Her flesh was etched all over with crescent-shaped incisions left by the tip of the knife. Without meaning to, he said aloud, “She was skinned with a single-edged knife with a recurve tip. Thick blade. Hunting knife, most probably.” He looked at the work, at the technique, and it all came rushing back.
Him. It was almost a chime in his head now. A choral mantra.
“Why would he do that?” Hauser asked somewhere between a whisper and no sound at all.
“Do what?”
Hauser licked his lips so that his vocal cords would work this time around. “Um, skin her. Was he trying to conceal her identity?”
Jake shook his head and reminded himself that most people—police included—never get to see something like this. As far as stupid questions went, he had heard a lot worse. “It has nothing to do with that. We have her dental—mostly. And DNA. No, we’ll find out who these people are and he knows it.” Jake looked down at them and realized that he hadn’t answered Hauser’s core question, the big Why? “Some take feet. Some take internal organs. A lot take genitals. This guy likes skin. I don’t know the why yet, only the how. The short answer is simply that it’s his trip, his own little mental toboggan ride, so he sets it up in a way that makes him feel good.” He turned to the woman. “He finds this beautiful.”