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.