Jake was deep in the heat stage of REM sleep when she put her hand on his back, and his skin felt like a smooth sun-baked stone. She rubbed gently, feeling bones under the skin. Eventually he woke, rolled over.
She just watched him, waiting to see if he would make the rare transition from sleeping child to awake child; most of the time he would just smile at her, close his eyes, and drift off into wherever it was that he went when he slept.
“What time is it?” Jake stretched and his pajama shirt climbed up, exposing ribs and tummy.
She looked at her watch. “Four thirteen.”
“Dad come back with you?”
His mother’s face, a beautiful mixture of gentle shadows, smiled. “The show went well and he wanted to stay and talk. I wanted to come back to see you.”
“You should have stayed,” Jake said through a gaping yawn. “Did you have a nice hotel room? The kind with free soap?”
She smiled, rubbed his leg. “Yeah, the kind with free soap.” She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, something he was not yet embarrassed about—at least not in private. She had driven the coastal highway with the top down and she smelled of perfume and salt, that humid ocean smell that gets into everything by the water. “What did you do tonight, Jakey? Anything fun?”
“It was all right. Billy came over. We watched the Creature Feature. Battle of the Gargantuas was on but we didn’t have any Mallomars. Billy decided that he wanted to sleep at home.”
She ran her hand along his leg and kissed him again. “I have to run back to the Kwik Mart to get some cigarettes. I’m pretty sure they have Mallomars, too. You want me to get you some?”
It was the kind of thing his mother always did for him and he had to constantly resist the urge to abuse her kindness. Even at the age of twelve he could see that his dad did that enough for the both of them. “I’m okay, Mom.”
“I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. If you want, we can go down to the beach and watch the sun come up. I’ll put some coffee in Dad’s old army Thermos and we’ll cuddle up under a blanket and pretend that we’re the last two people on the planet and apes have taken over.”
“Cool.”
She smiled, stood up. “See? I’m not so bad for an old lady.” She was thirty-seven.
She leaned down and kissed him again and he couldn’t smell cigarettes on her and he knew that she was going to go to the store whether he asked her to or not. “Get a big bag,” he said.
“You got it.”
They found her car a mile from the Kwik Mart, pulled into the driveway of an empty summer rental.
There was no blood—no signs of a struggle—just her Pagoda sitting on the gravel with over half a tank of gas in it. A fresh pack of Marlboros sat on the middle console, a single cigarette missing from the pack. The bag of Mallomars and her purse were on the passenger’s seat. Two cookies were gone but the $25,000 in cash from the gallery show was still in her purse. Nothing missing but those two cookies and a single cigarette.
What was left of Mia Coleridge lay on a red patch of gravel 200 yards away.
10
Jake sat in a vinyl and aluminum chair jammed in between the sink and the window, staring at—but not seeing—his father. His mind was walking through the rooms at the Farmers’ house up the highway. He was in one of the guest rooms—an empty guest room—looking at the floor. He squatted down on his haunches and focused on something on the threshold. He had only seen it glimmer for a second, then he was past it, and it had become invisible. He leaned forward and the nearly straight line of a long strand of yellow hair, almost white, jumped off the topography of the wood grain.
He moved his mind’s eye back and forth, taking it in. It was twenty-six or twenty-seven inches in length, and thin, wispy. It was well past yellow and on its way to white. He hoped Hauser’s guys had bagged it.
Why hadn’t he said anything last night? Because he was used to working with the bureau boys, and their forensic guys never missed things like that. In a way, it was a test. A test he hoped Hauser’s people passed.
He’d see the medical examiner in a few hours and there would be a lot more in the way of answers. Until he talked with the ME, and examined Madame X and the child, all he had was the three-dimensional model in his head. More than enough to work with. Enough to kill a few hours with at least.
In his head, Jake left the room with the yellow hairs, turned, and walked on down the hall to the room where the murderer had spread Madame and Little X all over the floor. He stared down at them. Eyes massaging the scarlet mess for…for…
“Can I get a drink?” a voice said out of the darkness and the model fell apart. He was back in the hospital in the chair in the corner and he blinked once, fiercely, and saw his father staring at him.
He had lost none of the worldliness that had made him a favorite of critics and fans alike. He had never pretended to be polished or special. He believed he was what he was: a painter. And now he was a thirsty painter. “Well, dickhead, can I get a drink?” he asked again, his voice hitching up with a tremor of irritation.
Jake stood up. “A drink? Sure.” Then he remembered Nurse Rachael’s story about the scotch. “There’s only water. No scotch.” Staring his old man in the eyes now, he felt nothing, not even a glimmer of the old poison. And his father’s snarl didn’t push any of the scare buttons it used to. Then again, he wondered if he even owned scare buttons anymore or if they had all been lost along the way.
The old man smiled as if he were talking to a person of diminished capacity. “Of course there’s no scotch. It’s a hospital. You think they hand out scotch at a fucking hospital? What kind of a volunteer are you, anyway? Sitting there staring off into space. Aren’t you supposed to be reading to me or scratching my ass or some such bullshit since I can’t do anything myself?” He held up his hands, two clumsy stubs of white gauze, black-red where dark punches of blood had seeped through. “Why don’t you—” And then he stopped abruptly, as if someone had pulled the plug to his vocal transformer. After a few seconds of examining Jake’s face, he asked, “You look a little like Charles Bronson. My son looked a lit—” And then he stopped again, voice box on pause. He looked at Jake for a few heavy breaths, examining his features. “I can see it in your eyes,” the old man said, something about him suddenly very still.
“See what?” Jake asked.
“The dead people have started showing up.”
11
The room was cold and humid and the air tasted of steel and disinfectant. But the lighting was good and Dr. Nancy Reagan knew how to run a lab. There were only two permanent autopsy tables in the room, and Jake was grateful that they weren’t in the middle of the busy season. He often wondered how little country offices managed to solve any crimes at all with the limited resources they had; the ME for the greater Manhattan area had sixty-five full-time autopsy tables and a four-floor lab that occupied an entire city block. Not to mention a backup network of nearly 1,000 folding units in the event of a natural disaster or pandemic situation.
Two bodies lay under semitransparent plastic sheets. Both were laid out straight now, the rigor mortis having either been eased or broken out of the joints. One body took up a lot less real estate under the sheet. Both looked black under the semi-transparent polyethylene covers, only going to red where a wet bit pushed up against the plastic.
Sheriff Hauser stood at the foot of the two tables, his arms crossed tightly across his chest, his jaw clenching its way through half a pack of very strong mint gum. His hat was on a seat by the door and he stood a little lopsided—not very pronounced, but noticeable if you paid attention.