by Robert Pobi
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—”
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.”
The flesh under her face was puckered and cracked like pudding and her teeth were jagged nubs of white that she had gnashed off on the carpet. Her tongue was a few inches from her face; she had chewed it off and spat it out and it looked like a thick meat slug that had died trying to escape a building on fire.
He opened the closet and stopped. The hangers were empty. In the bright beam of the task lighting, Jake saw eight small indentations on the carpet. “Get these. With measurements.”
“Get what?” Conway asked, staring at the rug.
Jake squatted down, pointed in turn to the eight indentations.
Conway squinted. “I don’t see anything.”
Jake pointed them out again. “There, there, there, there. Then again here, here, here, and here.”
Conway’s face shifted into puzzlement when he saw them. “Holy shit. What are those?”
Jake tried not to roll his eyes.
“Suitcase feet,” Hauser said from behind.
“Suitcase feet?”
“Someone took two suitcases out of the closet.” Jake raised his finger, pointing at the bar above his head filled with the empty wire hangers. “And all the clothes.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Just take the fucking pictures, okay?”
That was when Jake realized that something else was missing—toys. You didn’t go anywhere with a child that size without toys. Even if you were only going for five minutes.
Jake turned away and went over the room with is eyes, taking in every object, surface, and detail, forming the space into a 3-D model in his skull that he could walk through later when he needed something. He ignored the coppery sweet smell of blood mixed with the bitter gag of feces and the smell of his own fear—ignored that he was in a room where a child had been skinned in front of his mother and she had been taken apart like a bloody present. He dismissed that Hauser’s boys were outside probably contaminating the crime scene. He was even able to forget the photographer
, squatting down on his static-free haunches and snapping photos, great drafts of incomprehension coming off him like steam. He was even able to forget the dead.
But he was unable to ignore the little voice that had begun chattering away in his mind like some fevered ghost on speed. He’s been waiting for you to come home, Jakey. You thought that he was gone. Maybe even dead. Didn’t you?
Well, guess what?
He’s back.
And you, my friend, are fucked.
5
1,260 miles east of Nassau, Bahamas
Every now and then Mother Nature assembles a performance to show off a little. Or a lot. Scripture labels it Judgment, usually laid down by a vengeful God to keep Man humble. But through progress made in earth sciences, it is now known that natural catastrophes are nothing more than a synchronous assembly of coincidental atmospheric conditions. All that is necessary is patience and the right combination of events.
In mid-September, roughly 500 miles southwest of the Azores island chain, a massive thunderstorm stalled over the ocean. This stall was precipitated by three storm fronts moving in on one another, and they pinned the thunderstorm in place.
The water that fueled this malevolent beast had been lifted off the ocean by solar heating, driven up into the atmosphere in the form of condensation. The act of evaporation generated energy that quickly increased wind speeds over the tropical waters, and the faster winds caused increased surface evaporation, feeding the thunderstorm with even more condensation. This hoarding of fuel swelled the pregnant belly of the beast and the storm clouds mushroomed into the atmosphere, forcing more condensation to form, and a self-feeding monster was born.
The system, affected by the earth’s rotation, began to spin, a massive heat-engine with an endless supply of fuel. The metamorphosis from large thunderstorm to hurricane was complete.
There was more heat.
More evaporation.
More wind.
More condensation.
More.