Jake threw his cup of coffee at the trash basket. It hit the lip and sprayed over the floor. He turned and headed for the door. There was another mortar blast of thunder and the emergency lights fluttered nervously.
“Jake!” Hauser ran after him.
Jake stopped in the doorway, turned.
“I’m spread a little thin right now. I don’t have a solution. There’s no other way to figure out what that painting is?”
Jake shook his head. “Not without an airplane hangar and a month of time. I have 337 gigs of data that I need to get to Quantico. There are five thousand-plus pieces in this puzzle,” he said, tapping the laptop. “And I need the right software and minds to do it—” He stopped cold and that thing he did—that magical process of connecting the dots—kicked in.
Hauser saw his expression change. “What?” he asked.
“That girl at the hospital,” he said slowly, deliberately.
“What girl?”
Jake told Hauser about the girl in Dr. Sobel’s office; about the candy portrait laid out on the teak coffee table beside the sailing magazines; about how she was able to create entire portraits with single pixels of information. Maybe she could decipher it. Recreate it. Draw it.
Hauser waved one of his deputies—a short barrel-chested man who was consuming the last half of an egg-salad sandwich while swearing at his useless cell phone—over. “Wohl, get a Dr. Sobel on the phone—Southampton Hospital staff psychiatrist. We need the name and number of one of his patients—a child that he saw this morning. She may be helpful in the homicide investigation. He is not allowed to mention his involvement to the media.”
Wohl ducked away, his jaw mashing the last bit of sandwich in great swirling bites.
A burst of rain shrieked against the entrance and the ten-foot arched oak doors swung in a few inches. A wedge of water spilled through the temporary weakness and fanned out over the marble floor, sprinkled with leaves and another of the ubiquitous Starbucks cups.
“And tighten up that door,” Hauser barked to the workers of the weather-battered hive.
Outside, Dylan was in character, and his ugly, offensive nature was shining. He was four hours away from hitting his earsplitting apex, and until then there was weaponry to suck into his belly, monstrous columns of condensation that he slurped off the ocean in million-gallon gulps. He gave a little of this back to the earth as rain. But the rest—the lion’s share of his spoils—was stored in the armory.
It was obvious that he had no intention of calming down any time soon.
59
Frank bounced the clunky Hummer over the curb and up onto a lawn to avoid a tree across the road. He sucked on his cigarette and the end glowed bright orange, then faded to a dull red that was lost in the ash. “You really think that this little girl can help you?”
Jake shrugged, his signature move now. “It’s a long shot. Christ, it’s more than a long shot, it’s a winning-the-Powerball-two-weeks-in-a-row kind of shot.”
Frank wrenched the wheel and the truck spun to the right, kicking up water and great gulps of wet lawn. “This kid retarded?”
Jake shook his head. Frank was old school—real old school—and didn’t have the disadvantage of political correctness to shut down his thought process. “No, Frank. She’s autistic. And she’s got a form of savantism.” Jake had a strong understanding of psychology. He read academic papers, sat in on classes at George Washington University under an auditing waiver, and had picked the brains of hundreds of psychiatrists and psychologists over the years. He could have taught a second-year psychology course at college.
“What’s that?”
Jake half resented, half appreciated having his thoughts drawn away from Kay and Jeremy and he decided to thank Frank with dialogue instead of silence. “Don’t you watch TV?”
Frank shook his head and snickered derisively. “Why the hell would I do that?”
“It’s a hypertalent. Half of savants are autistic, the other fifty percent have some form of neural abnormality. They can do things no one can figure out.”
“Example?”
“Eidetic memory is common. Some can add numbers together faster than a computer—a column of three dozen six-digit numbers instantly. Many have a thing with dates. My birthday, for exam—” His chest tightened up and he just stopped. Stopped talking. Stopped thinking. Stopped trying to be part of the world. Because he realized that he actually had no idea what his real birthday was.
He thought about the father who wasn’t his father, strapped into a hospital bed ten miles from here, and about the clues left behind like Brothers Grimm breadcrumbs—clues that so far pointed to a faceless killer: the bloody portrait on the hospital-room wall; the carpet optical illusion; and the eyeless studies climbing out of the walls of the studio. He thought about the mother who hadn’t been his mother, and how she ended her time on the planet in an abandoned lot down the highway, stripped of her skin and robbed of her future. He thought about his uncle Frank, who wasn’t his uncle at all. And he realized he was connected to these people not because he shared their genes but because he shared their tragedy. “—um, you tell certain savants a date—ten years ago or a century and a half—they’ll tell you what weekday it was, what the weather was like, and what time the sun rose. They’re never wrong.”
Frank whistled. “Idiot savants. Read something a long time ago, can’t tell you the date, and certainly don’t know what day of the week it was.”
“They’re called savants now. Idiot is not politically correct. Neither is retard, moron, and anything else that can be misconstrued as derogatory.” Wow, Frank really was old school.
Frank shook his head disgustedly. “Fucking politically correct assholes. They’re changing Huckleberry Finn because of these small-minded people. You know who else did shit like this? The Nazis!” Almost on cue, the headlights caught a BMW X6 half submerged in water and jammed up against a tree, abandoned. “Goddamned Nazi pansy mobile! Buy American!” he hollered, and slapped the wheel of the Humvee. “Where was I? Oh, yeah—everybody’s so goddamned worried about offending the wrong goddamned people all the time. Sorry, the world isn’t fair. Some people will be made fun of. I don’t care if they’re fat or stupid or from Latvia, someone’s going to call them a name. You don’t see me lobbying to stop old-man jokes, do you? Fucking country has gone to shit. Everyone wants to be more equal than the next guy.” Frank was talking loud—not quite yelling, but close—to be heard above the engine and the wind and the rain. “What does this girl do?” he asked.
Jake was grateful that Frank was keeping his mind off the places it wanted to go. Tortured, dark, foul places. “She puts pictures together. I’m hoping that she can see something in the photo stream of—” he paused, weighed the next word—“Jacob’s paintings. I’m probably wasting time I don’t have.”
Frank shook his head. “But he’s already left paintings of this guy.”
Jake thought about the faceless men on the studio walls. The hospital portrait rendered in his own blood. Jacob wanted his son to see those so he would get used to looking. Then the carpet mosaic—a portrait with a blank face constructed of pieces—fragments—like the Chuck Close. Like those canvas puzzle fragments. “He left faceless portraits, Frank. Those were to get me started. The portrait of the killer—if that’s what this is—is for my eyes only. I don’t think he trusted anyone else with this.” It was starting to look like his father had sent him away on purpose. “This is something he wants me to figure out.”