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. Only 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.

19

The pool, like the rest of the home, had surpassed disregard and was well on its way to developing its own ecosystem. The surface was skinned with algae and lily pads. A merganser circled the lip, her large, late-summer ducklings following in file. Beyond the line of birds was the sagging handrail of the deck, the beach beyond, and the Atlantic stretching out to the edge of the world.

But Jake Cole had forgotten all of this, including the sounds, because he was deep into the work. He was comfortably ensconced in the sofa, his cold coffee swirling into a loose spiral that resembled the eye of Dylan—still a day and a half away. His mind was lost in the rooms of the house up the beach. He was alone, and he moved through the lifeless house without worrying about what Hauser and his flag pin were thinking. He strolled through time, taking in the details.

His eyes were locked on his Mac as he cycled through the nearly 1,300 high-resolution shots that Conway had taken. The photographer had done a good job. Hauser’s own shots were fine, but not much past adequate, and Jake had been at this long enough that he had developed his own unique way of doing things; he was glad Conway had understood what he had wanted.

Much of his work followed typical FBI protocol; the bureau had a solid forensics system that covered every base that could be imagined. Everything from the genetic evidence gathered under the CODIS umbrella to their Behavioral Science Department operated on good, solid principles. But what Jake did, the way he worked, was viewed with more than a modicum of skepticism by many of the people he helped. He understood that the sideways-glance treatment was the result of his solid—not weak—results. What they didn’t understand was which set of senses he used. And as many times as he had tried to explain what he did, he ended up confusing the issue more than clarifying it.

Jake didn’t believe in any of the parasciences. He didn’t believe in mediums or psychics or any of the unquantifiable bullshit that the Discovery Channel was so fond of talking about. Jake didn’t receive visions or see auras or summon spirits, although the people around him treated him like he did. No, the process Special Agent Jake Cole used was little more than a nineteenth-century parlor trick.

Jake knew that no quantifiable proof of tangible psychic power had ever been demonstrated. Never. Not once. People believe because they want to believe. Some are duped, others outright lied to, but the great truth is that there has never been a controlled experiment where a psychic was able to prove anything other than an extremely well-honed set of observation skills. And this was what Jake capitalized on. He didn’t talk with the dead, or speak with the spirit world. He observed. Watched. Saw. And computed. The con artists who masquerade as psychics call it cold reading.

In simple terms, he solved riddles—it was as mundane as that.

The element of the otherworldly that his coworkers subscribed to was simply confusion in the face of a mental acuity they could not understand. Like a musical or mathematical savant, Jake was able to tap into something that those around him could not and the result was that they were uncomfortable around him. Some were even afraid.

Jake did not create character sketches of killers; his talent lay in creating detailed renderings of the mechanics of a murder. It was a subtle science where slight nuances equaled a vastly different image. He never changed his opinion about a case because he never made a judgment call until he was certain.

Jake looked away from the screen and rubbed his eyes. The defining factor in this case was the lack of details he was seeing. Men like Hauser would call it evidence but Jake didn’t think in those terms. Jake thought of each detail as a pixel of color in a painting, and like any art, when enough pixels were present, an image took shape. But when they were absent, all the mental gymnastics in the world wouldn’t be able to finish the picture. This time, though, the lack of details was a godsend. Without a lot of physical evidence to sift through he had been forced to fall back on that part of him that even he didn’t understand. And through this computational process he had somehow recognized the killer’s smell. After all this time. After all the anger and hate and fear and heroin and booze. He would—

The phone jolted him out of the reenactment stage lit up in his head. “Cole,” he said wearily. Warily.

“This is Nurse Rachael at the hospital. You need to come down here right now.”

“My father—” He stopped himself. “What happened?”

“I think you should come to the hospital.”

There was the cymbal-like clang of something metal bouncing on a floor. Of breaking glass. Swearing. A slap. “Please,” someone said in the background. “Mr. Coleridge. Please stop. It’s going to be okay.”