Two imposing stone pillars that supported massive wrought-iron gates flanked the driveway. A pair of Southampton black-and-whites guarded the opening, a visual opera of sharp red, white, and blue flashes. Jake swung the Charger through the gate and stopped short as one of the uniformed officers scrambled up to his window, a Maglite hanging loosely from his hand.
Knowing cop protocol, he didn’t bother to look up—an eyeful of flashlight beam could set off one of his headaches.
“You Special Agent Cole?” the unseen officer shimmering at the edge of his peripheral vision asked and Jake’s software pulled up an image to go with the voice. When the beam of the flashlight was off his face he looked up.
“Spencer?” he said, and felt the corners of his mouth curl up with the closest thing to a smile he was capable of when on the job.
The cop took a step back and the flat expression on his face evened out into a question mark that flashed in the cruiser lights. “It’s Officer William Spencer.” And with his last name, the tone dropped off as he recognized Jake in the pulsing blue and red.
“Jakey? What the actual fuck!” The cop’s face switched to smile mode and it was a lot friendlier, even in the alternating Christmas glimmer of the roof rack. His eyes slid over Jake and his mouth managed a pretty good smile, which even after all this time surprised Jake because he had knocked half of it out back in second grade. Spencer swung the flashlight in the car, then over the baby seat in the back.
Jake stopped the emotions he knew he would not be using in the next little while and held up his badge. “Your sheriff sounded pretty grim on the phone fifteen minutes ago.”
Spencer ignored him. “You back about your old man?” Then, after nodding of course to himself, said, “What’s with the name?”
Jake drew in a chestful of sea air and let it settle to the bottom of his lungs. This is what he hated about coming back. They asked about his past. “The name Jacob Coleridge was more of an obstacle than a blessing out in the world.” Being the son of the famous painter had come with its own kind of baggage, none of it good. Except maybe the art-school groupies who had slept with him as a way to somehow absorb some good old famous DNA, even if it was once-removed.
Spencer’s smile short-circuited and he nodded like he understood. “You’re the guy Hauser called?” It was worded as a question but meant as a statement.
Jake nodded and stared up at the former oyster-shucker. In the blaring lights of the cruisers his eyes still flashed blue and red, ornaments that couldn’t make up their minds. “I’d hate to be you,” Spencer said.
The pulsing eyes were a little unsettling and Jake turned his focus onto the glowing slant of the roof just over the slight hill of the drive; it was an old Long Island landscaping habit to keep the house hidden from the road with a berm. He watched the slate roof lit up by the lights of the emergency vehicles he knew were encamped in the drive, fanned out in varying degrees of importance. “Where have you put the media?” Jake knew that with the storm rolling in, every national news program would have its people out stalking the coast for impending disaster stories. And they wouldn’t miss a double homicide, no matter how deep the local police tried to bury it.
Spencer shook his head. “No media. Sheriff hasn’t called anyone and I don’t think he’s going to.”
Jake put that down on the list after American lapel pin.
Officer William Spencer tapped his sidearm with the lens of the big flashlight. “Cameraman tries to get in there, I have a trespasser on the premises.”
Jake shook his head. “No, Billy, you don’t. You come get me. We clear?”
Spencer let the question rattle around in the silence for a few seconds before he said, “Sure. Yeah.”
“The media is going to be important with this investigation. We want them working with us, not against us. They show up, you come get me.”
Spencer smiled, and they were good again. “You were called for a reason.”
“I’ve done this before. The bureau was requested by the local SD and the New York office knew I was staying out at the house. I guess the powers-that-be thought I needed to be here.” He turned back to Spencer, whose flashing-ornament eyeballs had somehow become less disturbing. “Just a lucky coincidence, I guess.”
“You’re a smart guy, Jake. At least you used to be.” Spencer’s mouth opened up and his teeth began to flash along with his eyes in the glare of the cruiser. “No such thing as coincidence.” His mouth pursed up and he looked down, as if he was embarrassed. “You know that.”
Jake hated platitudes and clichés, but something about the way Spencer said it raised a flag somewhere in his head. “Drop by,” he said, and roared off down the driveway.
4
Unlike the Wyeth clan, the next generation of the Coleridge bloodline couldn’t draw a stick figure without fucking it up. Jake was, however, able to do some remarkable things inside his skull. His one true talent—even greater than his father’s gift—was the ability to paint the final moments of people’s lives. And this uncanny and often frightening gift made Jake Cole very good at hunting monsters.
The people he worked with thought of it as an esoteric art form, some sort of weird channeling from places best left alone—deranged, psychotic, tortured places. Jake found the nuances in what made individual crime scenes unique. And in this uniqueness he decoded the stylistic fingerprint—the murderer’s signature. Once this signature was committed to memory, he would recognize it on sight. In the real world art market, if applied to paintings, a gift like his would have been worth millions of dollars a year in the economy of the business. In the search for killers, it was priceless.
He walked through the high arched doorway, intricately carved in a French motif. The house immediately spoke to him. Of wealth. Education. Breeding. Death. And…and? And something else Jake couldn’t quite nail. He had never been here before—he had eidetic memory for surroundings and had no recall of the property—but back, buried behind the personality traits of the home, there was something he knew. A distant chatter that he could not quite recognize.
Sheriff Hauser looked exactly like the mental portrait that Jake had painted in his skull, right down to the American flag pin in his lapel. He stood an easy six three in his engineer boots, weighed in at a healthy two-forty, and had the prerequisite flat-top and bland good looks of his ilk. Although now, standing in the beach house of dead people he had promised to protect and serve, with two bloody skinned human bodies splattered all over the floor, Jake saw stress vibrating beneath the sheriff’s composure. The tight lines of concern looked like fissures in a garden statue that had been left to the elements for too long. Without knowing how he knew, Jake was sure the man had played football; there was something in the way he moved his shoulders, the way he swiveled his head, that said quarterback. But for all his presence, Jake knew that it wouldn’t take much to put a few holes in Hauser’s thin skin of togetherness, and he’d have to go outside to throw up.
Jake pushed into a conversation the sheriff was having with a spacesuited photographer from the Medical Examiner’s Office.
“Sheriff Hauser? Jake Cole.” Jake extended his hand.
Hauser didn’t take it, but looked Jake over. His mouth tightened a little and Jake wondered if he had met another tight-assed small-town sheriff who would end up being his own worst enemy on the case. Hauser surprised him. “Cole? Sure. Sorry. I…” He let it trail off and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “I’m not firing on all eight right now. I guess that’s the last thing I should be saying to the FBI, huh?”