Or someone with money, posturing as an artist.
In Jacob’s experience, the vast majority of bad guys took the path of least resistance. That was what made them bad guys: an overwhelming need to do whatever they wanted while expending as little energy as possible. Most criminality was a pathological form of laziness.
This guy, though. He had a sense of style. Repulsive, but distinct. Maybe he truly was different, or thought he was. There was a second variety of criminal, less common but flashier. The Rippers, the Ed Geins, the BTKs. They went the extra mile to make the papers. A notable subtype being the Hitlers and the Stalins and the Pol Pots.
Both types were dangerous. The first because they were careless, the second because they were careful.
Jacob wandered into the studio and stood before the east-facing window, thinking about the house he’d grown up in, the corner of the garage taken over by twenty-five-pound boxes of clay, jars of paint and glaze, a small electric kiln, a drying rack hidden behind a drop cloth. The wonky three-legged stool she sat on. No potter’s wheel. Bina Lev had worked freehand.
He had a vague notion of a youthful flirtation with the avant-garde. No physical evidence of that period remained, though, and by the time he got old enough to conceive of his mother as an individual with ambitions, hers had imploded. The woman he knew strictly produced ritual objects — goblets for holding the Sabbath wine, menorahs, spice boxes for the havdalah ceremony. She hauled them to weekend fairs, sold them on consignment at local Judaica stores. You couldn’t exactly call it pragmatic, her choice to forsake art for craft. It wasn’t like she made any money. And there was bitter irony for Jacob in learning that these items were now considered collectible in some circles, owing to their scarcity.
The Internet would have served her well. Poor timing.
Poor timing, all around.
Shortly after her funeral, Sam, nearly comatose with grief, decided to put the house up for sale. It was a simple enough matter getting rid of the furniture, but he begged off cleaning out the garage. Jacob stepped in. He was used to feeling like the sole adult.
He bought a roll of contractor bags and went about the business with methodical rage, half-finished candelabra thrown in indiscriminately alongside unopened cases of Amaco Low Fire Lead-Free. He disjointed the drying rack and gave the pieces to his neighbor, who had a working fireplace. A pawnbroker offered him thirty dollars for the kiln, a sum so meager that it brought remorse down on him like a bootheel.
Fifty with the tools.
Jacob said no, thanks, he’d decided to keep those.
He took his thirty bucks and went back to the garage, combing through the bags in search of anything worth salvaging. He’d done an unfortunately thorough job of venting his anger: mostly it was shards and dust.
A few items swathed in newspaper had survived. A couple of coffee mugs. A double-handled cup for washing hands. A mezuzah. A lidded jar with strong, thin walls whose exact function he could not determine. He placed them carefully in a duffel bag lined with towels.
One well-padded bundle turned out to be several dozen smaller pieces, individually wrapped. Curious, he pulled away a corner of the paper and was startled by the appearance of a tiny, alien face. He unwrapped the rest of the pieces and discovered more of the same.
He had long assumed that his mother’s switch to plates and cups had something to do with Judaism’s disapproval of depictions of the human form — an outgrowth of the ban on idolatry.
Or maybe she had given herself an out, on a technicality: certainly, the things in his hands weren’t human in any conventional sense. Gray, mottled with black and dark green, strongly organic, they shimmered, and their limbs writhed as though to escape.
Bina had invited people to handle her creations. Even the simplest pieces responded to touch.
These appeared to resent it.
Surrounded by junk on the floor of the broiling garage, his hair sticking up, he’d stared at the figurines, wondering if and how he’d misjudged her.
He wrapped them up and put them in the duffel.
He’d borne this sad legacy through two marriages and countless apartments, nailing up the mezuzah, putting the washing cup by the kitchen sink, filling the jar with sugar. He took his coffee black, but it gave him something pleasant to offer a lady friend in the morning. They oohed and aahed at his good taste.
The potter’s tools he displayed in the bookcase: they were objects of beauty in themselves, their smooth wooden handles glowing from within. He could look at them and be reminded that life was fragile and strange and brief. For some reason, that made him feel good.
The figurines creeped Renee out so badly that he’d moved them to a safe deposit box.
Probably not worth the monthly rental. Anyway, nobody around to protest now, and as he peered down into the pleated canyon, he thought that he ought to go retrieve them.
A black hand smacked the glass.
He crashed backward, Glock up, shouting orders at an empty room.
Silence.
The thing that had made the noise — it was outside, clinging to the window.
Squat, domelike. Black segmented underbelly. Flittering wings tonguing the glass.
He shook his head and laughed at himself. He’d almost put two bullets in a bug. Twenty hours without sleep or proper nutrition could do that to you.
He holstered his gun, left the house, and jogged to the Honda. He reached down and grasped one of the liquor bottles. He took a few sips, leaving himself just shy of impairment, just enough control to get home, drink more, and fall asleep.
That night, he dreamt of an endless garden, lush and dripping. At its crowning center stood Mai. She was naked, her arms open to him. He stretched for her but he could not reach her, and the chasm between them ached, for he understood that on the other side lay a homecoming.
Chapter nine
Up early, wired, Jacob hacked away at the keyboard, nursing a cup of spiked coffee and neglecting an Eggo waffle.
The murder house belonged to a trust, which belonged to another trust, which belonged to a holding company in the Cayman Islands, which belonged to a shell corporation in Dubai, which belonged to another holding company in Singapore, for which he found a number.
He calculated the time difference, debated whether there was any point calling in the middle of the night, decided it was worth a try to see if the number even worked.
A woman answered in accented English, and a tortuous series of questions revealed that he was speaking not to the holding company but to an answering service whose sole reason for being was to divert nosy callers from obtaining information about the holding company. He was in the midst of conjuring his most persuasive self when the sat phone jumped: Officer Chris Hammett.
Jacob hung up on Singapore without saying good-bye.
Hammett sounded young and bewildered. “Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner, Detective. I was kind of — I got held up.”
“Not a problem. How’re you doing?”
“Honestly?” Hammett exhaled. “Still kind of freaked out.”
“I don’t blame you. I saw it.”
“I mean, seriously. That is some fucked-up shit.”
“No kidding. You mind telling me how it went down?”
“All right, well, I got up there about midnight—”
“Before that,” Jacob said. “Where were you when the call came in?”
“Down Cahuenga, near Franklin. Dispatch said they got a woman calling in to report something suspicious.”
“A woman?”
“That’s what they told me.”