Hauser shook his head. “No, Jake. They died three days ago. I spoke to Carradine—the lab at Quantico matched the dead child’s DNA to you. Well, half to you, anyway.”
“I WAS WITH THEM TODAY!”…wasn’t I?
“No, Jake, you weren’t.” Hauser shook his head sadly. “Over the past three days, no one’s seen your wife or son.”
“If they weren’t here, who have I been talking to?” Making love to?
Hauser shrugged. “You don’t act crazy. It’s that memory of yours. Seems more like a curse than anything else. Carradine said you see things that no one else does. Maybe that’s exactly what happened. You pulled them out of your memory.”
Jake thought of the way his mother used to visit him after she died and his fingertips tingled like they were filled with spiders. “Why would they be at the Farmer house?”
“Wohl finally spoke to Mr. Farmer an hour ago. He’s in St. Lucia. He said that the house was rented by Kay River for the first of September.”
Jake was thumped in the chest again and the breath left him with an audible chug. “Do…you…realize…how…crazy…this…sounds?”
“DO YOU? You’ve been alone in here.” Hauser paused, searching back through all the little things he had missed. “Remember the pizza delivery? You ordered a single one for yourself. And a Coke. Because you knew there was no one else here.”
“That’s not true, I called the place to complain…”
“Do you remember placing the order?”
“Sure I—” And then he realized that he didn’t.
“You skinned your own family, then created a memory-generated model so you could—” Hauser paused, tried to understand the thought process involved. “You are so fucked it’s not even funny.”
Nobody’s your kind of mean, Jakey. Spencer’s words Teletyped across his mental TV screen. Spencer, who had not wanted to discuss Lewis. Because he knew. Nobody’s your kind of mean, his no-longer-alive voice repeated.
Then came the images of Kay on the bed with him mere hours before. Then he thought about the empty handcuffs.
He remembered the beach yesterday, Kay holding his hand, Jeremy waving to the couple walking by.
The couple not waving back.
Kay—incredulous—waving.
And the couple ignoring her, too.
Why?
They could not see her.
Or Jeremy.
Because they weren’t there.
“They weren’t locals,” Jake whispered. “That’s why,” this so small he hadn’t said it at all.
“No one saw them in town in the past three days, Jake. No one. And your wife kind of stuck out. No one at the Kwik Mart on Twenty-Seven. No one in the Big Shopper or the Montauk Market saw them. Not the place that sells the Hasselhoff T-shirts.” Hauser stopped, and for a second it looked like he stopped breathing. Then he filled his lungs with a great dirty gasp. “I don’t want this. I don’t want this more than anything in the world, Jake. But you did it. I see it starting to swing around behind your eyeballs. You’ve been in town for nearly two weeks. Two fucking weeks! You rented the place up the beach to take care of your father—you came here before he had his accident. You think I’m making this up?”
Jake shook his head. “I got here three nights ago. The night Madame and…and…Jeremy…and…” His voice trailed off into a sob as the little men in his head pulled the chocks from the wheels and the memories began to roll slowly forward.
“You murdered your wife and son at the Farmers’ house and you cleaned up. Because that part of you—the bad part—has been paying attention to what you know. It may have its secrets from you but you certainly have no secrets from it.”
The pictures arrived from his data-recovery software. Hundreds. Thousands. Millions. Frame by frame by frame.
He threw up again, a dry wracking spasm that shook his chest. “I don’t—What—? Oh, Christ. Fucking kill me!” The wind throbbed outside and somewhere off in the distance there was a crash of another house falling into the sea. “Please.”
He remembered Kay and Jeremy on the deck the other morning, Kay so proud of her Don’t Hassel The Hoff! T-shirt, Jeremy’s little hat with the embroidered dolphin on it. How could she…how could his son…?
And he saw other, fragmented pictures.
That twitched and shrieked and splattered and kicked.
His stomach convulsed in another violent swirl of acid and reflex and he threw up again, doubling over and retching loudly. Only there was nothing left to come out but pain.
Hauser went on. “After your wife and son, you killed Rachael Macready and David Finch. Then you killed Mrs. Mitchell and her daughter. You were floating in the water to clean yourself off. And that poncho probably protected you from most of their blood in the first place.”
Guess again, a little voice at the back of his head said softly.
Hauser’s jaw pulsed like steel cable. “I found the portrait inside the beach ball that the little girl made—you left it in the garbage can in the interview room. You said it was no good, that we couldn’t use it. Why was that, Jake?”
Hauser left the room, his boots thudding over sand, then thunking on the stone floor in the foyer. He came back with the steel polyhedron cradled under his arm like a football helmet. He stood on the raised step above the living room and tossed the frame to Jake. Jake snatched it in, hugged it to his chest, collapsed over onto it.
Hauser reached inside his poncho and pulled out the scissor-slashed skin of the beach ball that Emily Mitchell had constructed/channeled. He tossed it to Jake. “Put it together,” he said.
It landed beside him, a little left of the can of spray-foam insulation that had done Uncle Frank in. Jake shook his head. Cleared his throat. Tried to speak. The words came out cracked, broken, like the rest of his insides. “She…she…m…made a mistake. She didn’t read my father’s painting right. She did a portrait of—”
“A portrait of you, Jake. Not a mistake. Only you didn’t figure it out, did you?” Hauser tried to look into Jake’s eyes—into the man he had liked, the man who on the surface seemed like he had turned a poisonous past around and had built something for himself. Something beautiful.
He remembered hearing that every culture has a bogeyman.
Jake stared back, and his eyes were deep black; a red hemorrhage blossomed in his left, his right clear and bright.
“Your father wanted you to know that the Bloodman is you.”
Hauser came down and took the big stainless pistol from Jake’s holster. He backed up and emptied it into his palm. He dropped five of the .500-caliber cartridges to the floor and swept them away with his foot, into a puddle. He dropped the sixth into the cylinder, slowly spun it into place, and snapped the weapon shut.
“That’s why you’re so good at hunting killers, Jake. You understand their language because you’re one of them.” Hauser watched Jake, watched the memory walls in his skull come down one after another in the domino effect.
“Remember those two suitcases that disappeared from the Farmer house? The ones that you figured out from the indents on the carpet? Guess what?” He pointed at the corner where Kay’s Halliburton—dented and peeking open like a clam—lay beside the cello case, covered in sand and garbage that had blown in. “There’s the second one.”
“What about Kay’s cello? Why would she come up here for one day and bring her cello? She knew she’d have no time to play it. I bet we call the bus company in a few hours and no one will remember a woman with a cello, Jake. Kay and Jeremy came up in your car. That’s why there’s a baby seat in the back. You stayed at the Farmers’ a little while. And then…” He let the sentence drop off. “Your father wasn’t trying to warn you, he was trying to scare you away.”