Kay had locked the hasp on the gate to the low railing that sectioned the pool/swamp off from the rest of the deck and Jeremy was outside, swathed in a white long-sleeved shirt, sunblock, and his little bucket hat, singing one of the happy songs he had learned at daycare. He was busy repeatedly crashing a plastic fire truck into his stuffed Elmo. Sooner than Jake would like, Elmo would be replaced by Optimus Prime. And slowly his son would grow up.
Jake sifted through the autopsy protocols, layering the information into strata, each successive level building on the last. He cycled through the endless photographs; he always learned more from images than other people’s notes. He examined blood spatter from different angles. Studied the macro shots of smeared fingerprints and shattered teeth. The worst was the little boy, a cracked scabbed bundle of muscle and tissue contracted into the fetal position, lidless eyes crossed, little fists tightened into bloody meatballs. At one point he looked away and sucked in a great gulp of oxygen, realizing that he had been holding his breath.
Jake had seen nearly a thousand murder scenes and for him the only common factor between them was the stench of fear. It came in various degrees, depending on what had happened, and like cigarette smoke in a room, it never really left. Spritzing a little Lysol wouldn’t get it out. That stink lingered for a long time. Years. Forever. Maybe longer. Everyone moved out of a house where someone they loved had been murdered. Some people bulldozed it. Others just burned it to the ground. But they all left. Except for the hardcore narcissists; those folks put it behind them and moved on with their lives, going on as if nothing had happened. Working. Drinking. Painting.
The longer Jake stared down at the rigor-mortis contortions of the mother glued to the carpet with her own blood, the more he realized the only obvious truth in the case: this was beyond Hauser’s expertise. Which meant that Jake would be working alone. Going after him.
Jake closed the lid of the MacBook and rubbed his palms into his sockets. Outside, Jeremy was still singing away and playing with his cars. Jake kept his eyes closed and listened to his son, the happy lyrics offset by the brittle snap of plastic cars colliding with one another. In the other part of his brain—the part occupied by murdered children and evidence bags—he was thinking about the house up the beach. The house where two suitcases were missing. Where there were no toys—no fire trucks or Elmo dolls or Optimus Prime figures. The owners were unreachable. And there were another three hundred little things that, taken on their own, didn’t yield any sort of a payback. Yet taken as part of a big picture, they looked a lot like a personal fuck-you. The kind that ended with a woman being skinned down to her muscles.
Jake opened his eyes and Kay was in front of him, staring down, consciously avoiding the photos spread out on the coffee table; she had made the mistake of looking at his work once before and it was not something she would do ever again.
She smiled at him, one hip cocked out, her almost Mohawk tied up with a black bandanna, and the ink on her arms splashing down, around her wrists, ending in L-O-V-E across the knuckles of one hand, H-A-T-E across the knuckles of the other. She had switched into a pair of cutoff shorts and the red-and-black mermaids that were tattooed onto her hips dipped out on both sides of the frayed denim, tails curling around her thighs below the exposed pockets that flapped below the white-cut line. The King Khan and the Shrines wife-beater was pulled tight across her frame, the ribbed fabric pulling taut lines between her breasts. “Can you give me a hand with something?” she asked.
Jake snapped back to the sunny room opening onto the Atlantic, to Jeremy forcing automotive destruction on the imaginary citizens of Make-believe Land, and dropped his eyes to the coffee table, to the images of death spread out like baseball cards. He began to paw the photos and papers into a pile. “Sorry about this, baby.” Back in the city he had an office where he locked everything away in metal filing cabinets when he wasn’t home so Kay or Jeremy wouldn’t walk in and see his pornography of the dead. He put the manila folder over the protocols.
“What can I do?”
“Come help me get into the bedroom. I want to get this place a little better before I put Jeremy down.”
Jake winced—he had always hated that expression, thinking it sounded ugly outside of a vet’s office.
She looked around. “And these booze bottles have to go. We could probably squeeze out enough to start a really good fire, and I don’t need to be around scotch right now.” She chewed her bottom lip. “I can’t speak for you.”
That had been a nice way to ask, he thought, and pulled her into his lap. “Haven’t even thought about it.” He smiled, tapped the breast pocket of his café racer. “Had a few smokes though. And I think I’ll have more.”
“You have smokes?” Her face twisted into the mock surprise of a blow-up doll, mouth round, eyes popped.
He pulled the Marlboros out. “Don’t get cancer on me. I love your playing too much.”
She tapped one out, smelled it as if it were a fine cigar. “Hmmm…fresh.” She patted around in his pockets, her hand finding the rigid lump of the lighter. She fired it up, taking a long haul and exhaling a clean stream straight up. “Fuck, that’s astounding. Keep these things away from me. No matter what I offer you.”
Jake’s eyebrows joined in a single helpless peak. “Sure. No problem. But you never play fair—it’s not in you. You’ll pull those out,” he said, nodding at her breasts, “and I lose. You have too much of an advantage. I declare unilateral neutrality.”
She pulled in another lungful and laughed it out in thin jets between her teeth. “Now, are you going to go all FBI on me and open that door so I can see what we have in the way of supplies? Let’s make sure we have enough bedsheets, water, and shotgun shells.”
“My dad’s room at the end of the hall?”
She nodded. “It’s barricaded like he’s Robert Neville.”
Jake shrugged. “I didn’t go in. Haven’t had time. Maybe it should wait.” There was a brittle edge to his voice, one she was unfamiliar with.
Kay pushed into him. Her flesh was warm and she smelled as good as she had on the beach, that faint whiff of papaya mingling nicely with the Mr. Clean and cigarette smoke. “For what?” she asked, and sucked on the Marlboro.
“For tomorrow. For next week. I don’t know. There’s plenty to do here.”
Her head swiveled around the vast nave of the living room. Beneath the dust and booze bottles were the bones of a once-beautiful space, like a garden left to time; overgrown neglect that hinted at a former order. “Jake, you never told me about this place, about what it was like growing up here. I mean, look at this.” She swept an arm across the room. “This is something.”
Jake knew what she was talking about. It was impossible not to be in love with this place. Yet he had somehow managed it. He didn’t say anything, but pulled her in closer, slid his hand over the curve of her hip, and rested it on her bum.
“You must have some good memories from here.” Half declaration, half sentence.
“I guess.”
“Don’t dismiss me. I’m being serious.”
He ran his mental fingers over the files in his memory banks. One of the dog-eared folders glimmered and he pulled it up, opened the dry cover. He felt his mouth curl with an involuntary smile and her fingers dug into the back of his neck with encouragement.
Grudgingly, he began. “One night, I guess I was about eight, it was—I don’t know, two, maybe three in the morning—and someone rang the doorbell. My dad’s off in the studio and my mom answers the door in one of her nightgowns—all feathers and silk, looking like a movie star. Andy Warhol’s standing there with this six-foot-five Scandinavian broad and a bunch of people spilling out of the limousine like it’s a clown car. After being thrown out of some club in Manhattan, they had sardined themselves into a Lincoln and headed for the one place they knew they would have a little fun. It was common knowledge that as dedicated to his work as my father was, he never said no to a drink or a good time. I crawled out of bed and my mom put me in a pair of her jeans and I spent the night painting with Warhol while his groupies smoked weed and my dad, the Grand Poobah, held court, discussing art and composition and the usual bullshit with people who couldn’t even begin to understand what he was talking about.