by Robert Pobi
Jake stepped over the threshold into the hallway. Keeping clear of the bloodspatter with fluid movements born of experience. Hauser was still clearing his throat at the sink. Jake skirted the area rug where the woman lay, now thick and heavy with her blood. Back in the kitchen, he could hear Hauser at the sink, spitting like he had a down feather stuck to the back of his throat. Jake moved by the woman, past a fan-shaped arc of blood on the cracked wallpaper in the hallway, and into the body of the home.
The house was typical of its kind and Jake knew the layout without having to be told: kitchen at the back, living room and dining room in front, two small bedrooms and a bathroom—all with sloped walls—on the second floor. Basement. Detached garage.
He headed into the living room to be sure that there were no more victims even though the little voice was telling him that she was the sum total of occupants; the unmistakable flavor of a single inhabitant filled the place, even thicker than the smell of blood and the buzz of flies.
There was an old upright piano, a long low sofa in tufted velour, a pair of Barcaloungers, a glass coffee table piled high with copies of People and Us, and a small television with a paperback on top. There was a plug-in fireplace with a few photos perched on the plastic mantel; bright happy splashes of color that smiled from across the room. Other than the few pieces of furniture and sparse reading, the room was sparse, and Jake knew that the woman who lived here worked a lot.
Jake moved toward the photos, stepping high to avoid creating static that might pick up errant trace evidence. He had not been aware that his heart had been pounding until he took the first step and felt the woozy flush of lightheadedness that told him his fuel pump was racing. He took one of the deep belly-breaths that Kay had taught him to use when he had to oxygenate his blood, and the vitriolic smell of death pierced his head like a flechette. He stood still for a second, concentrating on his breathing. When his chest stopped vibrating like it had a live animal in it, he moved forward, taking full breaths, smelling the skinless woman sprawled on the carpet behind him. The photographs had grown from indistinct flashes of color to fuzzy face shapes bisected by white smiles. Another step and the fuzziness hardened, became clear.
He reached for one of the framed photos, and the movement pulled all the blood from his system, as if his arm were a pump handle. His fingers touched the frame and he stared into the face grinning out at him. A woman—and he knew that it was the same woman back on the floor, splayed like a sideshow knife-thrower’s assistant on a spinning plywood wheel—sat on the gunwale of a sailboat somewhere off Montauk Point, the lighthouse behind her by an easy mile. Jake brought the photograph up, his gloved fingers holding it carefully by the corners.
He looked at the face smiling out of the frame, unaware that his breath squeezed though his teeth in ragged birthing pants.
Skinned.
She smiled up at him. Bright white teeth. She looked so alive. So happy.
Now fly-covered on the hallway carpet.
He felt his chest tighten and his heart hammered as he was hit with a bucket of adrenaline. His chest went numb, cold.
The frame slid from his fingers and thudded to the carpet.
There are no coincidences, Spencer’s tinny voice echoed through his head.
Then everything slipped off the edge of the world and went cold as he hit the floor.
Jake knew her.
34
“Jake? Jake?” Hauser’s voice cut through the static brazing his circuitry and the sheriff’s face materialized above him. His breath smelled of vomit and his thousand-yard death stare had been pushed aside with concern. “Jake?”
Jake lifted himself onto his elbows and groaned. “Sorry about that.”
Hauser was eying him suspiciously. “Did you faint?”
Jake shook his head. “It’s not drugs or booze or anything you’d understand.” He stood up, consciously avoiding touching anything.
“Try me.”
Jake stood in place, staring down at the photograph he had dropped. “I have an appliance—a CRT-D.”
“You were right, I don’t understand.”
Jake didn’t move his eyes from the photograph on the floor. “It’s a cardiac resynchronization defibrillator. A pacemaker.”
“Bad heart?”
No, my heart’s fucking perfect, that’s why I have an appliance to make sure it keeps pumping. “I didn’t take as good care of myself as I should have and it translated into cardiomyopathy.” He kept his eyes locked on the photograph. “Whenever my heart rate stumbles, my appliance is supposed to regulate things.” She was smiling up at him, unaware that in a year—two? three?—she would become a nightmare for people in the neighborhood. “I assume that it’s this electrical storm moving in. Any strong magnetic field can affect it.” He lifted his head. “But this is not supposed to happen.”
“We’ll get you to a cardiologist.”
Jake shook his head. “It does this sometimes.” Which was a lie.
“This isn’t the best kind of work for someone with a bad heart, Jake.”
Jake shook his head. “My pulse isn’t affected by work. Not usually.” He bent and picked up the photograph. “I know her.” He replaced the photograph to its perch atop the faux-wood plug-in fireplace.
“Know…her?” the sheriff asked, jerking a thumb at the body on the floor, over his shoulder at roughly the same angle as the Montauk lighthouse in the photograph, now back in its place until relatives came to pack everything up.
“She’s my father’s nurse at the hospital. Rachael Something.” He looked at the photo, at the smiling, live face grinning out at him. Even in the photo it was hard to miss that she looked like his mother.
The sound of cars pulling over outside was punctuated by the thudding of doors.
Hauser’s jaw took on a new shape and his eyes went cop again. “I’m starting to get the feeling that somebody’s fucking with you.” He turned, looked out the window. The medical examiner’s people were outside in their white cube-van convoy along with another Southampton cruiser. Across the street, craning their necks and standing on their toes, the line of journalists looked like alpacas at a petting zoo.
“Let’s go talk to these assholes,” Hauser grumbled, and headed for the door.
But Jake’s eyes were on the woman laid out on the floor. She had looked like his mother. Maybe even more so now.
35
Jake took an hour to go through the home of Rachel Macready, age forty-four, 2134 Whistler Road, Southampton, NY. This time Conway didn’t ask any questions, he just listened and did as he was told. The ME’s people had a newfound respect for Jake; whereas last night he was viewed as an alien interloper, today he was an outside professional. A few phone calls to Hauser’s receptionist had loosened details about Jake’s behavior in the morgue that morning and the chattering classes had spun up their own version of the truth about him. Last night the tattoos and clothing had been otherness; today they had been elevated to some sort of spiritual armor.
Jake was leaning against Hauser’s cruiser, smoking a Marlboro, when the sheriff came out the front door. His complexion had reverted to the same waxy apple-green as last night in Madame X’s presence. He came over, leaned back on the car with Jake, and held out his hand. “Mind if I bum a smoke?”
Across the street, the media were doing a good job of entertaining themselves—a flashing light-show of rictus grins and shoe-polished hair, the dance of entertainment by people lacking real marketable skills. Jake and Hauser ignored them.
“You smoke?”
“I do when I have the taste of puke in my nostrils,” Hauser said, sounding embarrassed. “That was mighty professional,” he added.
Jake held out the pack and Hauser clumsily took one, firing it to life on Jake’s sterling Zippo, tooled with dancing Day of the Dead skeletons. Jake blew a light stream of smoke from his nostrils, dragon-style. “Anyone who sees something like that and isn’t affected is a monster.”
Hauser suc
ked in a lungful, picked a bit of tobacco off of his tongue, and turned to Jake. “Doesn’t seem to affect you.” The words came out in a puff of smoke.
Jake pulled on his cigarette again. “I just lock it all away. I have to or I’d lose it. But I think I’ve reached the point where something’s gotta give. I’m retiring. I’ve had enough of the dead to last me—” He stopped, looking for the right words.
“The rest of your life?”
Jake nodded a thank-you. “The rest of my life. Yes. Perfect. Thank you. Apparently I’m running low on clichés. The first sign of tension rot.”
Hauser spat on the ground. “Your heart, how bad is it?”
Jake shrugged. It was an academic question. “Bad enough that they wired in a computer-run defibrillator to keep it from shitting the bed.” Jake was staring at his motorcycle boots. “Back in my Death Valley days I’d do heroin for breakfast followed by some coke, then keep going until I ran out, usually after rolling through three days of headaches, dry mouth, diarrhea, and the occasional cardiac failure. Died three times.” Jake took a long haul on the cigarette between his index and middle fingers. “I started to feel like a parody of myself.”
“You find God?” Hauser asked earnestly.
It wasn’t the first time he had been asked the question, but it was inapplicable. He never understood why junkies and losers seemed to find God. “I woke up one morning and decided that I’d had enough of hating myself. Somehow I had the resolve to stay straight long enough to hunt down my uncle and ask for help. He checked me into a psychiatric hospital. Three days in hell bleeding poison followed by months of having a candle put to my head. Then years of NA and AA meetings. No matter how bad I think the shit in my life is, at AA there’s always some poor fucker who makes me realize that I’ve hit the lottery of good times.”
“We’re motivated by the good and the bad.”
“You sound like Yoda.”
“I can butt out if you want.”
Jake shook his head. “Cops don’t usually like talking to me.”
Hauser remembered his earlier mistrust of the man and he felt the blush of embarrassment. “Why is that?”
“You tell me,” Jake said, shrugging and pulling another cigarette out of the pack.
Hauser dropped his to the ground, heeled it into the asphalt. Just a few hours ago he hadn’t trusted Jake but the collapse in the house had turned him from an aloof adversary into a regular guy with problems. “You look like the other side.”
Jake held up a hand, dark lines of script running across the metacarpals.
“Don’t you find life challenging enough without inking your whole body with an Italian horror story?”
Jake was surprised that Hauser had even noticed what his ink said. “It wasn’t a conscious decision. I woke up with this one morning after a four-month bender I don’t remember.” He turned his hand over and the script wrapped around onto the palm. “The font is courier, halfway between a fifteen and sixteen point. I had the lab at work go through it, hoping that maybe they could help me put those four months back.” Jake fired up another cigarette. “A job like this is roughly five hundred hours of work. Letters are complicated. And in the thousands of words there isn’t a single spelling mistake or typo. All the letters are perfect. And there isn’t a tattoo shop in the city that did the work. Some guy spent a good five hundred hours marking my flesh and I don’t know why. I don’t know his name. And I don’t know how I paid for it.”
Hauser looked at the script that wound up Jake’s neck from his collar. His expression said that he didn’t understand how that was possible. “Jake, what you do scares people.” He paused, reorganized his thoughts. “It’s just…I don’t know…incomprehension. Cops train their whole lives to be able to read a crime scene properly. You waltz in with that crash-test-dummy expression on your face, and it’s like you don’t have any of the emotions we associate with the good guys.”
Jake took a drag on the cigarette. “You of all fucking people should understand that it’s part of this job. Every time you tell some parent that their kid had his brains scattered over the shoulder by a drunk driver, or that their kid was DUI and killed someone, you go into combat mode. It’s a defensive thing. Self-protection. Otherwise we’d be walking around weeping.”
For a second Hauser remembered his son, Aaron, killed by the swerve of an Econoline when he was ten. “Or throwing up all over the crime scene,” he added.
Jake smiled around the new cigarette. “There is that, yes.”
Hauser leaned back, crossed his arms over his chest. “What’s going on here, Jake? I don’t know what to do. I have crime in my jurisdiction. Hell, some of the wealthiest people in America live here—you have no idea how much crime that attracts. But three people skinned?”
Jake’s eyes went back to the pavement and his words were slow, deliberate. “She opened the front door for him. She probably just got home. It was after her shift—Dr. Sobel sent her home early and the ME will put the time of death within half an hour of her knocking off. She asked him in. Maybe a neighbor saw, but I wouldn’t count on it.”
A few sentences in, Hauser realized that Jake’s words were coming from somewhere else. Maybe Jake didn’t see himself as a psychic. Maybe Carradine didn’t believe in channeling. But Hauser knew what he was hearing, and it was most certainly not Jake Cole talking.
The cigarette smoldered away in Jake’s fingers, the blue smoke taken away by the wind that had started up, full of electricity with the coming storm. “She turned her back on him and headed for the kitchen. I think she would have offered a drink. Tea, not coffee. He followed her down the hall, and as he did, the knife came out. Same one—big-bladed hunting knife—recurve edge. She turned. He kicked her hard in the stomach. A few of her ribs are broken.
“He came at her head with the knife when she doubled over. She was trying to breathe and he yanked her head back. Swept the knife across her forehead—there’s blood spatter across the wallpaper beside the stairs from this. Threw her to the carpet. Put a foot on her back and yanked her head back by her hair, scalping her. She couldn’t scream because she couldn’t even breathe. No one would have heard a thing.”
Hauser held up a hand. He was almost successful at keeping it from trembling. “How do you know this?”
What could Jake say? That he had taken a mental snapshot of the body and the blood spatter and position of the corpse and it painted a perfect picture for him? That there was no other way for this to have happened? That he could do a blind walk-through and get everything—including the length of time it had taken the monster to skin her—100 percent right? Hauser wouldn’t understand. All he said was, “I know.” The cigarette, still forgotten, continued to smoke, the ash long and curved. “Her scalp was off before she could even begin to understand what was happening to her. He flipped her over again and belted her in the stomach with a knee, a little higher this time, breaking at least two ribs. Bounced on her to drive the air from her lungs. Then went to work on her in earnest.”
Hauser’s complexion had reverted to the pale green that Jake now associated with him. “He did this to her while she was alive?”
Jake shrugged, as if the answer was self-evident.
“Guys like this, where do they come from? I mean, they can’t come from good loving parents who care about them, can they? Someone who understands love couldn’t do this.”
Jake looked up at the house, getting dark in the pewter light that was slowly seeping into everything. “Some families run on love, some run on anger and madness, some run on worse things.” He dropped his cigarette to the ground.
“I never thought I’d have a serial killer in my town.”
Jake crushed out the smoking butt on the asphalt. “He’s more than that.”
“What are you talking about?” Hauser’s voice fluttered with the question.
Repeating the definition from the bureau’s literature, Jake said, “A serial killer is defined as someone who kills three or more p
eople with a cooling-down period between the murders. The time between Madame and Little X and the Macready woman was his cool-down. And the years since my mother’s death certainly constitutes a cool-down.” He thought about the night she went to the Kwik Mart for cigarettes and Mallomars. “He’s not going after random targets—he’s going after specific ones. Targets that are connected to my father, and by extension to—” He stopped and stood up. “—Me.”
“You okay?”
He shook his head. “My wife and son are at home alone.”
36
Hauser’s Charger ate up the road at 120 miles an hour and the car vibrated so badly that it felt like they were about to crack the sound barrier. Hauser had the gas punched to the carpet as he slalomed through traffic, taking the nearly two-ton mass of Hemi-powered Detroit iron onto the shoulder when cars ahead didn’t get out of the way fast enough. From inside the Dodge the siren was barely audible above the scream of the engine.
Hauser had called ahead but there were no cruisers anywhere near Sumter Point. Jake had Hauser’s BlackBerry suction-cupped to his ear as he tried to hear Kay’s phone ringing over the roar of the angry V-8. It was his third call and there was no answer. “Fuck,” he snarled, and pitched the cell phone against the dashboard. It bounced off and flew out the window. “Motherfucker!”
Hauser kept his attention on the road and his hands on the wheel. “About two minutes,” he said flatly.
Jake squirmed with the horrors splattering across the canvas in his head. He wished he was in his own car instead of Hauser’s beast—Hauser had the disadvantage of caution; Jake would have had it to the floor. He had to get home now. If that monster got to Kay and Jeremy—