Bloodman (32 page)

81

Hauser sat down on the edge of the hearth and rested the hand with the Sig on his knee. He watched Jake for a few minutes. “Wohl got a call from Carradine—you were right to send your mother’s Benz to the lab.”

Jake looked up at Hauser, his bloodshot eyes filled with tears. “What are you talking about?”

Hauser smiled and shook his head. “This is over, Jake. It stops with you and me.” He raised his eyes to the beach out beyond the windows. “The lab found two prints on your mother’s car. Index and middle finger of a left hand. Under the armrest on the console. Fingerprints in your mother’s blood. They had been wiped off but one of your magicians was able to raise them. Modern science—it’s a hoot, isn’t it?”

Jake felt his stomach tighten on its axis and the room suddenly felt a thousand times too small. Then his guts clenched and he bent over and vomited on the floor, beside his wife’s skin. He retched until he was burping up nothing in convulsive spasms.

“You want to know why the recent murders are so polished in comparison?” Hauser’s eyes slid back onto Jake. “You’ve evolved.”

82

He got Lewis for his eleventh birthday. His father had bought the ugly dog because it was a gift that required little imagination and even less common sense. Jake had tried to like it—actually sat staring at the stupid awkward thing and
willing
himself to like it—but it was another in a long line of lost causes.

The part that infuriated him the most was how stupid it was. Tell it to sit, and it just stared at Jake as if he had asked it to tell him his telephone number. Shake or high-five was akin to a grammar question. Lie down or roll over was like asking that fucking dog to solve the Riddle of the Sphinx. The dog became neglected very quickly.

Then one evening Jake saw a dog play dead on the
Dick Van Dyke Show
—one of those boring old black-and-white programs that his mother made him watch because she thought humor was good for him. He saw the trick—performed with a German shepherd no less—and he became determined to teach it to Lewis.

By the fifth minute he realized that wonder dog was not going to be playing dead anytime soon. The only thing this dog was good for was smelling bad and pooping.

“Play dead!” the boy snapped, pointing at the ground.

Lewis stood there, eyes vacant, tongue lolling out of his mouth, actually looking like he had a smile on his face.

“I said play dead!”

Lewis took a step forward and got Jake in the mouth with a hot wet tongue.

And that did it. Jake stormed into the kitchen and ripped open the cutlery drawer. He found the big knife—the one his mother used to cut up chicken when she made that greasy slop called
coq-au-vin
. Jake pulled it out of the drawer, pounded back to the dog, and raised the knife above his head.

“PLAY DEAD!” he screamed at the dog.

Lewis’s ears snapped back and he winced. He knew the boy, knew how he became when his voice changed, and he backed up.

Jake charged the dog, grabbed it by the ear, and opened its throat in a wide swipe of the knife.

The dog made half of a high-pitched squeal, backed up a single step, and collapsed to the deck. Blood pumped out in a rhythmic arc that shrank with each pulse of his dying heart and his legs cycled in a run because his body did not yet understand that it was dead. He looked up at Jake with his big brown eyes.

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!”

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.”