by Robert Pobi
Jake smiled, and suddenly realized that he wished he had been able to talk to his father like this. Not all the time, but once would have been good.
“And be careful. It’s acting like things are the same as always when they aren’t that will get you in trouble. You handling this all okay?”
“I’m good, Frank.” He thought back to his father’s kitchen and realized that at least some shopping was in order. “I just need someone who will get things done.”
“And that’s me.”
“And that’s you.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“I can book you a flight, I have air miles. I get free—”
“Fuck free. I’m not flying. I’m driving. I have to finish changing the fuel pump on the truck but I can get that done by supper. Be there within twenty-four hours.” There was a pause as he fired up another cigarette. “He in any pain?”
Jake thought back to the tranquilizer that Nurse Look-alike had pumped into the drip. About his father’s screams. And the points of white mucus in the corners of his eyes. “I can’t tell, Frank. The old Jacob Coleridge is gone. Just gone. He’s confused. He’s scared.”
“You can accuse him of being a lot of things, Jakey, but scared is not one of them. Never. Not when we were growing up. Not when we were in Korea together. Not in bar fights or staring down pirates. Nothing scares your old man.”
An image of the barricaded bedroom door lit up for a second. “He’s scared now, Frank.”
Jake heard Frank pull on the smoke. “Yeah, well.” The old man didn’t sound convinced.
“Thanks for doing this, Frank. I appreciate it.”
“That’s what blood’s about, Jakey. You do things for blood you don’t do for anybody else.”
17
The sheriff’s cruiser was in the driveway when Jake got back to the house. Hauser sat inside, windows open, doing a good imitation of a man trying to sleep and being unsuccessful. As Jake’s sleek Charger entered the drive, the cop got out of the car, leaving his Stetson inside. He came over to the shade of the big pine where Jake parked, his movements loose from lack of sleep, not comfort.
Hauser ran his finger along the line of the front quarter panel, feeling the metal beneath the glossy paint. Then he looked back at his own car, an updated version of the classic American muscle car, and something about the movement seemed tentative. Jake hoped the cop wasn’t about to start talking cars—he hated talking about cars almost as much as talking about the stock market. More, maybe.
Jake shut off the engine, opened the door, and swung out into the afternoon. He nodded a greeting and took the bag of groceries from the baby seat in the back.
“Cole,” Hauser said, trying to sound good-natured but only making it a little past tired. Jake heard something else in his voice. Embarrassment, maybe.
Jake fished his father’s keychain out of his pocket. It was a flat stone with a hole drilled in the center, worn smooth from rubbing against pocket lint and scotch tops for years. “Sheriff.” He figured that Hauser was here to interview him.
Jake had gone through this before—it was part of being the resident interloper with every department he visited. Hauser needed to have faith in his team. So he surrounded himself with reliable people. If Jake was part of that team, Hauser would want to know a little more about him. And if you took this equation a little further, Jake had been interviewing Hauser as well.
Jake balanced the groceries on his knee, turned the key in the lock, and pushed the big door open. “Coffee?”
“Sure…” Hauser let the word trail off as he walked into Jacob Coleridge’s house. He stopped in the doorway and looked around. He saw the whiskey bottles, the cigarette butts, the paintings stacked like cordwood, and the decades of neglect covered by dust.
Hauser paused by the Nakashima console in the entry, leaned forward, put his hands on his knees, and examined the spherical sculpture that had sat there for decades. It was a wire-frame model of—what? A molecule, Hauser guessed. “Jake, what’s going on?” He sounded more than tired, Jake realized. He sounded frightened.
Jake considered the question as he dumped the groceries out on the counter. He caught a can of tuna before it rolled off the edge. “I don’t know. Not yet.” He examined the can, then surveyed his healthy smorgasbord. Part of him was happy that Kay wasn’t here to see this gastronomical crime; his foray to the Kwik Mart on 27 had yielded him two six-packs of Coke, a can of spaghetti sauce, a package of linguini, two cans of tuna, a loaf of Wonder Bread, a squeeze bottle of mustard and another of mayonnaise, two packs of luncheon meat that resembled packaged liposuction fat, a carton of cream, some club soda, a tin of coffee, and some sugar packets stolen from the coffee counter. He had taken a little of Frank’s advice; in the car were two cases of water, a flashlight, a dozen batteries, and a box of pepperoni sticks. He pulled the tab on the coffee lid and it hissed open with what sounded like a death rattle.
Hauser meandered through the detritus of Jacob Coleridge’s life, unintentionally casing the place, a species-specific habit natural to cops and crooks alike—it was something that Jake both recognized and resented. Hauser stopped in front of the piano and examined a small painting that was part of a larger pile on top of the instrument, ignoring the huge expanse of ocean through the big plate-glass window. On the floor at his feet was the box the handyman had left behind, full of half-used tubes of silicone and a few cans of spray-foam insulation. “Mind if I take a look?” he asked, pointing at one of Jacob Senior’s ugly little canvases.
Jake was at work on the coffee, the twelve-stepper’s surrogate addiction. “Knock yourself out.”
Hauser picked up one of the asymmetrical blobs that was jammed under the dusty Steinway and held it away from himself. He examined the painting for a few seconds, holding it first one way, then rotating it to look at it another, trying to decide which way it went. He flipped it around and looked at the back, as if he had missed something. After a few seconds he shoved it back under the piano. “I don’t know shit about art,” he said. “But if I look at a painting and don’t know what the hell I’m looking at, it’s not for me. I don’t want a painting that represents the plight of man. How the hell can you paint that? Me? I want a field. Or a pretty girl on a swing. Hell, I’d even take dogs playing poker. But I guess I just don’t understand this modern stuff.” He shrugged.
“To quote my father about the only thing I’d trust him on, it’s self-indulgent undisciplined crap.”
“Not a fan?” Hauser sounded a little relieved.
“I like my father’s early work. The stuff he did before he made it onto the college syllabuses. Maybe up until 1975 or ’76. After that…” He let the sentence trail off into a shrug.
In the ensuing silence, Hauser shifted his focus to the big window and the Atlantic beyond. “Helluva view.” The wind had picked up from earlier; the high-pressure blanket that sat over the coast was being slowly pushed away by the advancing hurricane, 1,600 miles and closing.
Jake finished scooping grinds into the basket and flipped the machine on, a little stainless-steel Italian robot that had been bought before the great coffee revolution had swept America and its suburbs into believing that Starbucks knew what it was doing. It started to hiss and he came around from behind the counter. “Are you going to give me the protocols?”
Hauser looked down at the large manila envelope in his hand, as if it might be seeping pus. He held it out.
Jake tore it open, upending it over the coffee table, now clear of the forest of cigarette butts and empty bottles. Photographs, two computer disks, and a sheaf of files held together with a black office clip glided out. Jake picked up the photographs.
All of a sudden he was back in the house, walking its halls, examining its dead. Hauser, the coffee maker sputtering away, the hiss of the surf beyond the window, the slight static that every house has—faded away. He was there. In the room with her and her child. With his work.
The first
photo—clear, color, well lit—showed her fingernails, scattered over the carpet like a handful of bloody pumpkin seeds, strands of flesh hanging off in little black tails. He flipped through the photos until he found the one he wanted, a close-up of her left eye. It stared up at him like the satellite photos of Dylan on CNN, only her eye was lifeless, the white ruptured in dark subconjunctival hemorrhages. “This guy’s not fucking around,” he said, and dropped the photo to the table, stepping out of the murder scene in his mind.
“You looked like you were in some sort of a trance.” Hauser’s eyes narrowed.
“I reconstruct things in my head. It’s what I do.” The smell of coffee reached him and he changed the topic. “Sugar? Cream?”
“Two sugars, no cream.”
Jake wound his way through the vast expanse of the great room and the ease, the familiarity, with which he did surprised him. He had been back less than—what? Twenty hours maybe, and already the house was once again home. Except for the locked doors. The sod of lawn in the fridge. And that his father had lost his grasp on most of the tangible parts of his psyche.
Jake pulled two cups from the rack beside the sink—now full of dishes he had cleaned—and poured the coffee. He added sugar to both cups and looked up to find Hauser standing in front of the counter.
“My mother had Alzheimer’s. I know how hard this can be.” It sounded accusatory.
“Whatever is between my old man and me is not going to affect my performance. It took your lab—” he checked his watch—“nine hours and fifty-one minutes to process those protocols.” He nodded across the room to the coffee table. “You want shortcomings, you’ve got all you need right there.”
“I don’t see how you can be objective here. I don’t want some FBI ghost-hunter all hopped up on vengeance kicking the shit out of this thing. Do you have a thirty-three-year-old axe to grind?”
Jake froze, raised his eyes to Hauser. “You want me to tell you this is not personal? I don’t lie, Mike, it’s bad policy.”
“I need to know what I have to worry about.”
Jake pointed at the coffee table. “Nine hours, fifty-one minutes is a good place to start. Two full-time detectives should have had that done in five hours flat. And it would be useful, solid data. Your lack of experience in this is your biggest liability. Me? I’m the guy who’s going to be doing all the heavy lifting.”
Hauser stopped, swiveled his flat-top toward Jake. “Is this guy crazy?”
“Sure, he’s crazy. But is that going to help you find him? Probably not. He’s not crazy in his public life, at least not most of the time. It’s the quiet time he has inside his own head, sitting at home in his garage, or in his study, or in the little room out behind his house, that the freak comes out to play. These guys are all fucking crazy, but they know what they do is wrong, Mike. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t hide it. They all know that there are consequences for their actions. Unfortunately, it’s the only way most of them can fire up the money shot.
“This guy, there’s something different about him, though. Most killers do it as an act to pleasure themselves. It’s not about the victim, it’s about enacting their own fantasies out on a stage, and that stage usually involves the victim as a bit-player. But the focus is always on themselves. This one…he—it’s about them. It’s like he’s—I don’t know—punishing them. He skinned them and left. No evidence of any kind of performance or reenactment. He wanted to hurt them.”
“So he knows them?”
Jake nodded, then shook his head, and the movement was unsettling. “He thinks he does. He’s acting out against someone. They just take the brunt of it. His mother, probably. Maybe all women in general. I don’t know. Not yet.”
“You’re going to stay on the case?”
“I have to. I don’t want this to happen again.”
Hauser looked like he had been zapped in the base of the spine by a wasp. “You think this is going to happen again?”
All of a sudden Jake realized that the thought had never crossed Hauser’s mind; in his desire to see this go away, he had swept it under that vast expanse of psyche carpet used to avoid facing grating truths. And a skinned woman and child were a hard thing to deal with in any capacity. “I guarantee it.”
“How do you know? Why? Are you sure? I don’t—”
“What happened here?”
“A woman and her child were—” He swallowed. “Taken apart. Skinned.”
Jake nodded. “What does that tell you?”
“That we’re dealing with one sick sonofabitch.”
Jake shook his head. “No. Think in cold, objective terms. What else does it tell you?”
“It takes someone special to do that kind of thing. To find pleasure in it.”
Jake nodded. “And if he liked it, what would the next box on the flowchart say?”
Hauser froze for a second as the machinery in his head went through the process. “He’ll want more.” He looked up and his eyes had gone back to that sickly flat that they had possessed in Dr. Reagan’s lab. “He’ll want lots more.”
Jake examined Hauser, wondering why he hadn’t asked him if he thought it was the same killer after all this time.
18
One of the only good memories Jake had of his old man was his dog Lewis. Of course, like everything else with his father, it had been destroyed in a single act of narcissistic rage. But he occasionally allowed himself to think about the first part. The good part.
His father had brought Lewis home the morning of his son’s eleventh birthday. Jake had not asked for a puppy—he would never have dreamed of asking for one—but the sight of the little German shepherd was something he thought of often. A small fawn with black hindquarters. Fourteen weeks. Jake named him Lewis.
From May on, armed with a new built-in friend, Jake began to explore the world beyond the fenced-in deck and broad patch of grass that ended at the studio, the glimmer of beach beyond. Spencer—called Spence by this point because it was so much cooler—taking his flank. Lewis was more than a mascot and companion, he was Jake’s friend. A book from the library and a little help from his mother was all that was needed to turn Lewis into a relatively well-behaved dog. And Jake had his own personal bodyguard.
By November Lewis was a going concern in the Coleridge household. Jake had the dog trained like the army—he would do anything Jake asked him. Lewis sat, came, shook, high-fived, laid down, rolled over on the snap of a finger. But Jake could not teach the dog to play dead—he saw the trick on the Dick Van Dyke Show and wanted Lewis to figure it out. He had bribed the dog, scolded the dog, teased the dog, tried to coax the dog into understanding the command. But it had never worked out.
On mornings when Jake was tired, he’d let Lewis out the back door to do his business. The dog usually took a few minutes to go through his prebreakfast ritual, after which he’d bark and scratch at the back door. Jake would usually have a bowl of Cap’n Crunch out by now, and he’d let the dog back in and feed it a big stinky can of Alpo.
It was a late November morning and Jake was in a deep sleep. The dog had nosed him first in the hand and then in the neck. Jake had grudgingly put on his Planet of the Apes robe and walked the dog downstairs. It was barely morning outside and he could see the light on in his father’s studio. When he opened the door a frigid breeze screamed in and the dog marched out. Jake went back upstairs, crawled into bed, and fell back asleep.
By the time he opened his eyes, it was bright in his room and he could feel that it was later. He got out of bed, put on some clothes—some warm clothes—and headed down to stir up some cereal, maybe make some Pop-Tarts. He was above the living room when he spotted Lewis. Just outside the back door, lying in a long rectangle of blood.
Jake had screeched out one long high-pitched wail that brought his mother running. She led him downstairs, put him on the sofa, and opened the door. Lewis’s throat had been cut. A single, deep slash crossed the broad patch of white that stretched from jaw to chest. On
ly now it was not white.
Mia screamed. Asked Jake what had happened. Jake sat on the leather sofa, his legs sticking straight out in front of him, and stared at Lewis. “He musta been barking or something. Maybe he was making too much noise.” Jake’s eyes shifted to the studio at the edge of the property, the chimney stack chugging a nice hardwood smoke that the wind off the ocean swept away in a straight westward line.
His mother followed his gaze. Out to the building on the edge of the property where Jacob had been at work for the past four days. She gave Jake a kiss, a hug, and told him to stay put. She laid a big gray Hudson’s Bay blanket over the dog and headed for the studio.
Jake never knew what they talked about—from the house there was just no way to hear what went on and Jake was too scared to leave the sofa. So he sat there. Staring at the lump under the blanket. Waiting to stop feeling frightened.
His mother had come back red-eyed and pale, but not crying. She told Jake that she was sorry about Lewis and then she took him out to breakfast at the yacht club. French toast—three pieces; a dozen silver-dollar pancakes; three strips of bacon; three sausages; maple syrup; and apple juice. He choked some of the breakfast down because he didn’t want to waste his mother’s money. They had talked very little. Then they went to a movie. That night she had slept in the guest room.
Eventually—he couldn’t remember just how soon but it was less than a week—she returned to the marriage bed. But his parents’ relationship had changed. Even Jake could sense it. And the change in his mother was something palpable, as if a little chunk of her had been taken away. The little boy would always be afraid of his father after that, mostly because his mother started to behave like she was running on borrowed time.
