Frank put his hand out, laid it on Jake’s arm. He felt the muscles under the fabric shift like bunched steel cables. “Jake, you don’t fucking worry about anything. You don’t worry about your dad and you don’t worry about me. I might be old but I ain’t rusty. I’ve killed just about everything out there—including men—in my time, son. I can still kick ass. So go do whatever you have to do to find your wife and your son.”
Jake wanted to say something, to maybe thank the old man, but he knew that if he opened his mouth he’d only cry. And maybe not stop.
He took the keys and ducked into the black stairwell.
64
It took Jake twenty minutes to negotiate the terrain between the hospital and the sheriff’s office, a trip that under normal circumstances—even in the midst of long-weekend tourist traffic—should have taken five. The big military vehicle handled the deep trenches of water that sloshed over the roads with ease but the wind was an entirely different matter. The Hummer had been designed for slow going over bad terrain—it could climb rocks, riverbanks, and other cars with ease—but heading straight into the 150-mile-an-hour winds that were screaming over Long Island was an effort for the big clumsy truck. A few times he felt the wind get under the front end and try to flip the vehicle. Like Frank, he found himself talking to the Hummer, calling her all kinds of sweet names as she made it from one endurance test to the next.
It was night now, and the hurricane had blocked out the sky in a roiling canopy of black water that screamed at the earth. The tall cement curbs that kept the lawns free of rain during the big summer rainstorms were funneling water down the streets and it raged and boiled like a river. The entire town was flooded and half the trees were uprooted. Houses were collapsed and there was debris everywhere.
He saw no one on the roads and wondered how the coast was doing. Was all this water from the rain that belted down or had the ocean made it up onto land? At the intersection of Front and Lang he had to climb over the lawn of the Presbyterian church. The windows were dark, absent even of the flicker of candlelight, and Jake knew that it was empty, with no one inside praying. He found this strange since the holy rollers always like to ask God for protection and help through times like this. To Jake, swearing at the old motherfucker made more sense since wasn’t it the Almighty visiting this shit on them in the first place?
The parking lot of the sheriff’s office was still empty of official vehicles and he parked near the side door, in the lee side of the wind howling by.
The cop with the egg sandwich, Wohl, was inside the door, barking at his walkie-talkie with demented enthusiasm. He stopped when he saw Jake, rain-soaked and one hundred years older than two hours ago.
“Where’s Hauser?” Jake barked.
Wohl nodded at the two big slabs of arched oak that did duty as front doors, hastily secured with duct tape and two pieces of iron pipe. They flexed and rattled with the wind trying to blow its way in to get to the little piggies. “Trying to help the EMT guys over at the mall. Propane tank at the Denny’s blew up. Custodian got a red-hot doorknob launched through his head.”
Jake lifted the MacBook. “You got communications up yet?”
Wohl held the walkie-talkie up with his index and thumb like it was a turd on fire. “You think I’d be screaming at this thing if we had satellites?”
Jake stopped, took a few seconds to gather his thoughts. “I need a garbage can. Maybe two foot across. Size of a beach ball. And something to eat. You got a vending machine?”
Wohl smiled, glad that there was something he could do. “How about egg salad with plenty of onions on rye with a little mustard? And coffee. I got coffee. Lots of coffee.”
“Sounds good.”
“How you take it? We got no sugar.”
“In a cup.”
On his way he passed Scopes, leaning against the wall by the door digging mud out of his boot treads with a big tactical knife. He looked up, saw Jake, and waved with the knife.
Kay’s face popped up in his head, smiling, freckled, beautiful and alive. Behind her, not far away, Jeremy was there with Elmo, dancing around with a Moon Pie in his hand. Jake blinked and willed the images to stop, to crawl back into the dark.
Kay blew him a kiss. Then fell away into the shadows.
Jake shoveled two of Wohl’s sandwiches down followed by two cups of coffee. Then he went to work on the dissected beach-ball skin.
He didn’t have the time to go back to the beach house to get the stainless-steel frame that sat on the console by the door; right now he needed to jerry-rig something so he lined a large garbage can with paper towels, balled up to make a rough bowl, and set the skin of the beach ball into it. He padded it out, and was surprised that it was a pretty good fit for a half-assed mock-up.
As he tried to align the parts, which slipped by one another like a handful of guitar picks, he got glimpses of features here and there. Almost a nose. A bit of an eye. A cheekbone. Finally he had it laid out in the bottom of the can enough that all he had to do was push a little more of it together. He fiddled it into shape, held it into place, and looked down at the image that Emily Mitchell had drawn for him.
It was a portrait.
A good portrait.
The girl had done an unbelievable job.
But Jake knew that it wasn’t what his father had painted on the canvases back at the beach house.
No hell. No way.
And for the second time that night, he felt the warm fist of defeat heat up in his stomach. This was it—his last shot at figuring out what his old man was trying to tell him. And behind all the static of grief and anger and frustration, he knew that his father was trying to tell him who had taken Kay and Jeremy.
Now he would never get them back. Not Kay. Not Jeremy.
Skinned.
They were gone.
Skinned.
For good.
Scopes burst into the room. “Special Agent Cole, the medical examiner is on the phone.”
Without lifting his head, Jake said into his hands, “I thought the phones were down.”
“Actually, they’re the only thing that’s held up. Push line three.”
Jake wobbled to the old oak table, the top stained with countless coffee-mug rings and cigarette burns. He picked up the receiver and pressed line three.
“Cole, here.”
“Special Agent Cole, Dr. Reagan. Two things. First of all, the blood on the child’s T-shirt you brought in this morning is the same type as the boy from the Farmer house. It hasn’t been sequenced, but it’s AB negative.”
Jake remembered Jeremy standing at the bottom of the stairs, his head tilted to one side, pink tears streaking his face. “And?”
“And the second thing is that whoever killed Rachael Macready cut out her tongue. At first I thought she had bitten it off like Madame X but it wasn’t in the house.”
“Did you check her stomach?” Jake asked.
There was silence on the other end of the line while Dr. Reagan swallowed once, loudly. “It wasn’t there, although I hadn’t thought that it might be.” She had that mistrust in her voice now, the one they all got around him sooner or later when they began to understand how well he knew these monsters. “You’ve got more experience than I do in homicides of this type—what do you make of that?”
Jake ran through the endless parade of murders he had seen in his years hunting down killers. It was usually standard Freudian backlash reasoned out by a psychologically fractured mind. Edmund Kemper was the poster boy for this kind of thinking; he had killed six women before building up the courage to go after the one he really wanted to take out. To understand these men, all you needed was the key. And it was usually pretty simple. He said the first thing that came to mind. “He saw her as a traitor.”