The boy bent over the dog and spit on it. “THAT’S HOW YOU PLAY DEAD!” he screamed and went back into the house, closing and locking the door.
Of course, his mother knew. She had always known about him. Known how he was. Who he was. But Jacob wouldn’t listen. He’s had a tough start. Give him time. Give him a chance. Give. Give. Give.
His father had ordered her to take Jake out for breakfast, maybe to a movie. And the whole time she had just stared at him, as if examining an insect under a lens, her mouth a hard line, her eyes just a little too narrow. He had eaten a spectacular breakfast with a hearty appetite and when he had asked for more pancakes because they were his favorite, she had run from the table and he heard her sobbing in the restaurant’s bathroom.
After that morning she had always been afraid of him. And his parents’ marriage began to fall apart; it looked like eventually his father would have to make a choice between him and his mother. He had been on the boy’s side up until now, sticking up for him, trying to get her to give him a chance.
But it didn’t take a scientist to figure out that he had burned all of his chances with her—every last one.
As his father began the difficult process of choosing sides, Jake felt the gap begin to widen.
So he decided to improve his odds.
83
Jake was very still, his mind’s eye peering over one of the memory fences slapped up haphazardly between the different parts of himself. The images on the other side were spotlighted like exhibits in a museum—grotesque studies of a self he saw but did not recognize.
He drew the back of his hand across his mouth and it tasted of saltwater, tears, scotch, and vomit. Jake began to protest, to offer some kind of denial, but at that particular instant he saw something out of the corner of his eye, a glimmer on the staircase. He turned his head.
Jeremy sat on the bottom step, wearing the little hat with the dolphin embroidered on it. His son was smiling, hugging Elmo to his chest. He looked so happy. So alive. So real.
Jeremy lifted his little fist, opened and closed it in his own special version of a wave, then brought it back to Elmo. He flickered a little, like a distant television signal.
Tears filled Jake’s eyes. He blinked and they fell away. When he opened them again, Jeremy was gone.
Hauser stood up, circled around Jake. “You sonofabitch.”
Jake looked up, tried to focus on the man he thought of as some kind of an ally, some kind of friend. Did he not—could he not—see that this was a mistake? “I…I…didn’t…I couldn’t…”
“Yes, you could,” Hauser bellowed. “YES, YOU COULD!”
Jake’s defibrillator launched a bolt of electricity to his heart. He flinched, bit his tongue.
“You killed that woman and her child up the beach, Jake. You remember that?”
Jake shook his head. How could Hauser think that he had—?
But the compartments in his head were coming apart and the images were flowing together, creating pictures. Pictures that thrashed and screeched and bled. More pornography of the dead.
Jake had peeled Madame X, a squirming bag of shrieking bloody meat who had chewed off her own tongue. She had squealed and begged and bled and died in his hands. Jake Cole. The Bloodman.
The two television stations in his head were melding, knitting their separate signals into one program. The sequences they transmitted were still a little fuzzy, short on details. Except maybe the color red. There was plenty of that. More than enough to go around.
Hauser stepped to his right, blocking out Jake’s view of Frank with the yellow foam cracking his head apart. “Carradine told me that they got an ID on Little X, Jake. His DNA was matched through a lateral connection.”
“Through a sibling?” The only time children had their DNA on file was if they had been reported as missing and a sample had been provided to the bureau’s CODIS databank—the Combined DNA Index System. CODIS contained nearly three million DNA samples from missing persons. But a lateral match meant that they were matched through a family member who had their DNA in the CODIS databank—besides the missing persons section, CODIS contained nearly eight million genetic fingerprints of known offenders. As well as government and law-enforcement personnel.
Hauser’s face pulled tight and he looked into Jake’s eyes, the expression a cross between sadness and…what? Hauser walked over to Frank’s corpse, still shifting from the expanding foam. “I know who they are. Madame and Little X.”
Jake stumbled over and leaned against the island. “I don’t want to know.” The bright staccato of a rapid-fire slide show filled his vision. Faces developing out of shadows, like black-and-white photographs in a developing tank, growing clearer by the second.
Hauser shook his head, pulled two computer-printed photographs out of his pocket. He held them out, fanned wide like a pair of losing cards. Jake reached out, took them, and they slowly developed into faces. A woman. A boy. Beautiful. Alive.
His wife.
His son.
“No. No. Nononononononononooooooooooooo.”
Somewhere off in the distance he heard his son’s voice screeching as someone took him apart with a knife.
Not someone.
Him.
The Bloodman.
Me.
“Jake, I never saw them. No one did. You’ve been in Montauk for two weeks. TWO WEEKS! Jesus. You killed your wife and kid, Jake. Kay and Jeremy. You fucking skinned your wife and son, you sonofabitch. What is wrong with you?”
Jake’s chest thumped again but this was his adrenaline, not the Duracell. He held the photo, vibrating like a leaf in his hand. He saw Kay smiling up at him, then a quick loop of tape played through his head, one where she was on the floor, howling.
“Those horsehairs we found all over the house? They were from a bow. A cello bow.”
Jake could no longer see. His eyes had flattened into crystal lines. He saw light and dark and red but little else. “No. No. No. No.” Over and over. Inside his head, the images were flashing in series now, each one bloodier than the last.
Then Kay’s voice roiled up out of the dark, her screaming so intimately horrible that he clamped his hands over his ears to block it out. Only he realized that it was inside his head, and something about that made it all the more frightening. He began to scream, the sound echoing like a gored animal in a steel tank.
Hauser spat on the floor. “No one saw them, Jake, except you. That morning you and I were discussing Carradine, they were upstairs taking a bath, remember that? Sure, I heard water running. I heard a radio in the bathroom. But you know what I didn’t hear, Jake? Splashing. Talking. Laughing. Or any one of the million other noises you hear when a three-year-old takes a bath. There was no one else here with you, Jake. You were alone with your eidetic memory. You can create crime scenes in your head. You can create anything in your head. You’re like Dr. Frankenstein, blowing life into discarded pieces. You imagined your family.”
Jake’s chest filled with hot lava that seared his vocal cords shut, melted his stomach, sent a boiling burst of adrenaline up into his brain. He doubled over. “Stop this!”
Hauser’s hand was on his pistol and his eyes were humorless old pennies behind the yellow shooter’s glasses. “The two bodies in the Farmer house were your wife and child, Jake.”
“I was with Kay and Jeremy this morning!” he screamed. “Someone took them!” And it sounded like a lie, even to him.
Hauser shook his head but the pennies stayed nailed to Jake. “No, Jake. The woman and child were your wife and son.”
“That woman and boy died three nights ago, Mike! Kay and Jeremy disappeared yesterday!”