Bloodman (29 page)

70

Jake had his hands wrapped around a cup of warm coffee and his fingers almost felt like his own again. Hauser had scrounged up a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and the dry clothes combined with the warm mug had almost stopped the shivering. He sat in a wooden chair in the same interrogation room where he had hastily put together Emily Mitchell’s portrait. Hauser sat on the edge of the table, cradling his own cup of coffee and looking just as tired as Jake. Frank stood in the corner, working on a sandwich and another cigarette that Hauser had grudgingly allowed him to smoke inside. Kay’s bloody T-shirt sat on the table in a clear evidence bag.

Jake and Frank showed up at Hauser’s office just after the sheriff had returned from the Mitchell house—in these conditions the crime scene investigation would have to wait, and Hauser had left his most inexperienced (i.e., expendable during the storm) deputy to make sure that no one contaminated the scene. The ex-quarterback’s usually calm demeanor was showing signs of tension rot from watching the community he was sworn to serve and protect get ravaged by forces far beyond his control. After Jake filled him in on what had happened at the hospital, he had run through an extensive—and impressive—litany of curses. Now, after the initial rush of adrenaline, the three men sat in an exhausted silence.

It was Frank who spoke. “This sandwich tastes like ass. And not the good kind.”

Hauser shook his head. “It might taste better if you didn’t smoke while chewing on it.”

Frank snorted in derision and went back to work on the cigarette break/snack.

Hauser crossed his arms on his chest. He looked at Jake, his bloodshot eyes narrowing. “What do we do to stop this guy? Wait until he runs out of people to kill?”

“I have to stop him. There is a way. He has a purpose here, I’m just not seeing it.”

“How the fuck can you sit there so goddamned calm and analytical? Your wife—” he picked up the evidence bag with the wet T-shirt inside—“your son—are missing! This guy has your goddamned family and you sit there like the fucking Rock of Gibraltar. Jesus Christ, where do you come from?”

Jake sprung up and threw his cup at the two-way window. It hit dead center and detonated in an explosion of ceramic and coffee that sprayed the room. “You think I’m calm? I’m one inch away from going out and executing everyone I see on the off chance that it’s him! I’m real sorry about Madame X and Little X and Rachael Macready and David Finch and Mrs. Mitchell and her daughter and my father and the rest of the people who have been hit by this—I
really
am. I’d like to be benevolent. I’d like to believe in sacrifice. But I don’t. Not now and not ever. I’d trade all of them for my wife and son. And if I can’t get them back, I can go forward until this burning in my guts turns to despair and I give up.” Jake pointed at Hauser and his eyes filled with tears. “The only way I can do this—the only way I keep from eating a round from this—” he yelled, slapping the pistol in the holster on his belt—“is by remembering that this monster is going to keep doing what he does until I stop him. And you, with your
I’m only a poor country cop
soliloquy, certainly aren’t going to do it! Not with your whole fucking troop of inexperienced egg-salad-eating morons out there! The one chance we have at this—the one guy that can find this fucker—is
me
. He’s here for me. And you want a little fact, Mike? I hope he finds me. I pray to whatever roll of the dice put him onto me all those years ago that he finds me, because he and I are going to have a little talk.” Jake’s eyes went a deeper shade of not there. “And only one of us is walking away.”

Hauser pursed his lips. “So what’s next?”

“I go home. That’s where this started, that’s where it’s going to end. I don’t know how I know, but I do. He’s going to come looking for me. He
has
to.”

The door flew open and Wohl burst in. “Special Agent Cole, we got a satellite link. I don’t know why—the storm’s not getting any better—but it’s up. I don’t know for how long.”

Jake reached for his laptop on the table beside Hasselhoff’s bloody face grinning up from the evidence bag. “I need a few minutes for this.”

Wohl shrugged. “You can have all the time you want but when it comes to the satellite, that’s up to Mother Nature.”

Jake followed Wohl and Hauser closed up the rear. Frank opted to stay in the interrogation room now that he had someplace to smoke.

The communications room was pretty much what Jake expected: a pair of dispatch transmitters—a hot unit and a backup—blinking like pachinko machines; three computer terminals equipped with enormous monitors for tracking cell phone and handheld calls; and an assortment of server towers and network hubs, all running off the backup generator.

Jake sat down and the communications officer, Mary Skillen, nodded a hello. “We’ve had a connection for one minute, thirty-one…thirty-two…thirty-three seconds. It ain’t gonna be here forever.” There was a FireWire cable and a computer printout in her hand. “Here’s the system access code. Get your mail out as fast as you can.”

Like theatrical punctuation in a high school play, the lights dimmed and Jake heard the three officers hold their communal breath. Jake ignored the brown-out, connected the MacBook, and hooked up to the server. He was past hoping for anything and running on autopilot at this point.

Skillen’s eyes were glued to the network monitor. “You’re on, Special Agent Cole.”

Jake brought up the FBI mail service and uploaded the video he had taken—half with Kay, half with Spencer. The status bar began an agonizingly slow crawl across the bottom of the screen.

“You really think that this is a portrait of the killer, Jake?” Hauser asked from the doorway.

Jake shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s another dead end. But Dad went through a lot of trouble—a lot of mental gymnastics—to do this. And I can’t believe it was simply the artist in him talking. He was trying to tell me
something
. With that portrait he arranged in the carpets, with the painting he did in his own blood, with the Chuck Close he chopped the eyes out of. They were all messages—hints—that I had to look at things from a different perspective. From
his
perspective.”

“Your dad gave you a lot of credit,” Hauser said slowly.

Jake hadn’t thought about it in those terms but when Hauser laid it out like that, he realized that the man was right; this was not the kind of Easter-egg hunt that most people would be able to follow. The old man
had
put a lot of trust into him.

He sat watching the status bar, feeling like time was running in reverse. Then it hit 3 percent…3.5 percent.

The only noise was the rage of the storm outside, now at its zenith, and Hauser was waiting for the eye to pass over, giving them a few hours of much-needed time to recharge their batteries. Then the weather would descend back into biblical tragedy and Act II would rip over Long Island, tying up loose ends, finishing any manmade buildings that had had the audacity to remain standing. If they were lucky, they’d all be here when this was over.

But the word
lucky
was slowly being purged from Hauser’s lexicon. He had seen a string of bad luck before—the time his knee had been crushed on the football field had been a study in the butterfly effect gone wrong—but this thing with Jake and the Bloodman had crossed bad luck the moment his mother had been killed all those years ago. As far as the sheriff was concerned, this was more of a curse.

And he knew that curses have a way of finishing things off on their own terms.

71

Frank and Jake headed east on 27, toward the point, sticking to the empty oncoming lane because it was farther from the shore, if only by a few feet. Off to their right the ocean was boiling up fifty-foot swells that slammed into the beach and snow-plowed the hundred yards to the highway where they detonated against the embankment, launching tons of water into the air. A three-foot surge pulsed over the asphalt, and Frank held the wheel to the right to keep the heavy truck out of the ditch. Every now and then the wash would lift the Hummer just a little, drifting it sideways; Frank would wrench the wheel and hit the gas, hollering for more purchase. So far this had happened three times in four miles and both of them knew that if they kept at this long enough, the law of diminishing returns guaranteed that they’d get washed off the highway. But maybe—just maybe—with the storm past its worst, they’d make it. So they kept going. For Jeremy and Kay and for the simple reason that there was nothing else they
could
do. It was that old Destiny thing again.

The bottom foot of the truck was filled with water—a design detail that ensured the Hummer didn’t lose traction in flash floods or swampy conditions. Jake’s feet had been wet for hours now and he wondered if they’d ever be dry again.

Hauser had asked them to remain at the station but Jake had insisted on leaving. He knew that the chances of the highway still existing were as slim as the house still standing but something told him that he had to go there. At least he’d be findable at the beach house. Not that that had made much of a difference up until this point. Still, it was all he could think to do.

The Old Testament wall of water that shot up over the road made Jake understand how primitive man had seen storms as God’s wrath. A thick blanket of seawater hit the rock-strewn ditch beside the road, shot straight up in the air, and came down into the pavement with a muffled smack. Frank steered into the surge and the tires managed to stay connected to the road; a smaller vehicle would have been washed off the highway and it was only Hauser’s call that had got them past the roadblock that cut off access to the tip of Long Island.

Frank negotiated the truck over enough debris to build a small city. It looked like ground zero for a nuclear test; at least a dozen homes were sprawled across the asphalt like smashed shoe boxes. Everything from crushed lampshades to a thirty-foot section of cedar deck blew across the road and Frank kept petting the dashboard and telling the truck she was a good girl. And when that didn’t work, he called her other things.

Jake worked on a cigarette and decided that when this was all over he was going to crawl into a bottle until he stopped knowing who he was. He had had enough. And without Kay and Jeremy, none of it mattered anyway.

Jake felt they were moving at the speed of plate tectonics but when he looked outside at the black world illuminated by the bright glow of the LEDs and found a landmark, he realized that they were actually making good progress. At this clip they’d be back at the beach house in another ten minutes.

Then the real waiting would begin.

Jake put the data through his head, crunched the numbers, and he knew he was missing something—something that would make sense of why things had happened the way they had.

“I want to know why,” he said out loud, not meaning to.

“What?” Frank steered the Hummer around a twenty-five-foot cabin cruiser lying on its side in the wash, each slam of the waves coming in off the Atlantic nudging it a little further toward the opposite side of the road.

A wave reached out of the dark and rose up beside the truck like the wall of a cliff. Jake flinched as it came down and Frank steered into it. The front of the truck bucked as it took the impact, then bounced back up. Frank hammered down on the gas to gain a little more purchase and the truck miraculously stayed on the road.

When he caught his breath, Jake said, “This guy took my mother. Now he’s taken everything else. Why?”

“The same guy? After all this time? He’d be old—I mean, she was killed thirty-three years ago.” Frank’s cigarette glowed orange as he sucked on it. “Christ, where did the time go? I remember the day she was killed like it was yesterday. Your father had a big show in New York and he had nailed it. Sold out. He wanted to stay in town and get ripped and talk with his painter buddies and his good-time party friends. Your mom wanted to get back here to you. She worried about you, you know.”

A small smile creased the corners of Jake’s mouth.

“She left the city. I put her in her car and we drove back together. We ran out of smokes but she didn’t even want to stop at the Kwik Mart because she wanted to check on you. Wouldn’t even drive me down my street, I had to get off at the corner and walk.” Frank smiled.

“It sounds like you miss her, too, Frank.”

Frank nodded and smoke came out of his nose and teeth. “I do, Jakey. You know, I never told anyone this, but I envied him Mia. He thought I was in love with her but that wasn’t it. Your mother was just something special. Whoever took her from your old man effectively killed him, too.”

“Why didn’t you ever get married?”

Frank laughed. “Isn’t it obvious? I’m not exactly what you’d call husband material.”

“Neither was my father.”

Frank nodded and stubbed his cigarette out on the metal dashboard. “You got me there. But your dad didn’t find a typical woman—he found Mia. You know how many women can live with guys like us?” he asked, his thumb twitching back and forth, indicating Jake and himself.

“Guys like us?” Then he thought of Kay, and realized that the old man was right.

“Come on, Jakey. Me? I spent half my life on safari or in the mountains, hunting down just about everything that runs, walks, or crawls on the planet. Even now, I fuck off into the mountains for three-week stretches. You think that your average woman wants a man who does that? As much as they talk about being liberated, as much as they talk about wanting an equal share, I have yet to find a woman who lets me be
me
. And you?” He laughed, but it was a kind, loving laugh. “You’re the same. I don’t care who your genetic parents were, you’re a Coleridge. Only you hunt
people
for fun.”

“I don’t do this for fun, Frank.”

“I’m not big on advice, Jakey, but you get into trouble when you start believing your own bullshit.” Frank’s voice nearly disappeared in the noisy cab. “I watched you today—you
like
what you do.”

Jake shook his head. “You’re wrong. I’m quitting. I made up my mind. This case and one more to tie up. At least I was.”

Frank nodded. “Sure. And one more, then one more, then one more. Always one more. It’s like a bad relationship that you can’t get out of. Because we love the things that destroy us, Jakey. In that destruction we feel alive.”

They reached Sumter Point and Frank swung into the driveway. In the bright lights of the truck the house looked like it had been abandoned for years. Most of the flashing was torn away, chunks of the roof were gone. The shrubs had been washed away along with the gravel drive—now just a muddy track. Behind the house, close to the ocean, the studio was leaning back, toward the sea, as if it had lost its grip on the earth and was thinking about diving into the ocean.

Jake knew that the Bloodman was going to come here. He had to—there was no one left now but him and Frank. He thought about telling the old man about his plan, about what they were doing here. But Frank wouldn’t like it. Not one little bit. Because no one—not even a tough old sonofabitch like Frank Coleridge—liked to be used as bait.

“Home sweet home,” Jake said.