Jake looked over at his wife and saw her bottom lip trembling a little. “Jeremy,” she said, maybe a little too harsh.

Recognizing the tone, the boy looked up at her.

“You don’t go anywhere without Mommy or Daddy, okay? We’ve talked about this. There are bad people out there. Mean people.”

Jeremy shook his head. “Not the man in the floor. He’s Daddy’s buddy. He said so.” He pointed at the ocean. “Like teaching Elmo to swim.”

Jake turned back to the water. Out beyond the surf line, Elmo still spun facedown in the swell, a few bits of seaweed now clinging to his furry orange ass. He didn’t look like he was swimming. He looked dead.

“The next time he comes to play, you tell Daddy,” Kay said.

Out past the surf line, the swell capped and Elmo was driven down into the black Atlantic.

24

On the way in from a trip to the medical examiner’s office, Hauser stopped at his receptionist’s desk. She was busy putting office supplies into Ziploc bags—her idea of preparing for the storm.

“I need you to get on the phone to the FBI office we went through last night—the one that gave us Jake Cole. I want to speak to this witch doctor’s supervisor or boss or whatever his superior is called. I want him on the phone and I want it done in the next three minutes.”

The phone was buzzing by the time he sat down behind his massive slab of oak. “Hauser here.”

“Sheriff, this is Field Operations Manager Matthew Carradine—Jake Cole’s handler. What can I do for you?”

Handler? What kind of a word was that? Then Hauser remembered Jake’s 3-D crime scene party trick and decided that maybe he was looking at a circus act.

Hauser didn’t start by telling Carradine that he was glad the guy had called back—that would be too much of an aw-shucks way to start a conversation. “Who is Jake Cole?”

“I don’t understand the question, Sheriff Hauser.”

He could have pointed out the tattoos or the clothing or the spooky crime scene Ouija show but all of that was secondary. “Jake Cole creeps me out.”

Carradine let out a low little rumble that sounded like it had weight to it. It was an irritated, bored sound that said Go away. Maybe it worked with people who hadn’t seen de-epithelialized children, Hauser thought bitterly.

“Can you be specific, Sheriff?” Meaning, It’s none of your business.

“Yes, Carradine, I can. What—specifically—does he do? And by that I mean beyond walking through a crime scene with that glazed expression on his face and giving me instructions on how to set up a media plan.”

“The FBI is not in the habit of handing out private details pertaining to our personnel.”

“Mr. Carradine, I am not some lost fuckstick local sheriff who can’t find his cock with both hands. If I am going to work a double homicide with a man, I need to know a little about him.”

Carradine was silent on the other end, probably thinking things through, Hauser realized.

It took him ten seconds to begin speaking. “First off, if you want to know about Jake Cole, you’ll have to ask him. But I’ll tell you what, Sheriff Hauser, I am going to share a little information with you because you can’t afford the luxury of mistrust on this one. You don’t have the time. Of all the police departments in the United States investigating a homicide right now, yours is the luckiest. If Cole’s father wasn’t going through what he is, I’d have Jake out of there so fast you’d think he was a dream. I am not denigrating your situation—I’ve read the file and you have a real problem on your hands—but Jake has other cases that are a lot more pressing than yours.”

“What’s more pressing than a mother and her baby skinned alive?” Hauser asked, reminding himself out loud what was at the center of this whole thing.

“Try nine little boys who have disappeared over the past month and whose parents have been receiving their heads in the mail a few days later—collect. With nails pounded into them. Pre-mortem.”

“Jesus.”

“Yes. Jesus. Look, I understand that Jake Cole does not fit the bureau profile that we have set for ourselves and I’d be lying if I said that you were the first law-enforcement officer to field a call like this. It’s obvious to all parties that Jake’s left of center of our phenotype. He works autonomously for us and we are privileged to have him—you are privileged to have him.” He paused again, as if he was deciding how much to open up to Hauser. “Jake has a rare ability.”

“Is he some sort of a psychic?”

Hauser was surprised to hear Carradine laugh, a hearty roar that echoed for a few seconds. “Sheriff, we are good at what we do because of science. Because of protocols we have developed. Because we understand that data supports data and that the eventual outcome is a solution. Not because of some boojie-woojie evil eye. Again, I’d be lying if I told you that you were the first person who had asked me that, but as a lawman you should know better. There are no mediums. No psychics. No people who speak to the dead. That’s all unsupported unscientific wishful thinking.

“In simple terms, Jake is the most pragmatic problem solver I have ever seen. First off, he has eidetic memory—I mean complete photographic recall. He walks through a room once and he can recall the tiniest detail, as if he has a digital recorder in his head. It’s a little disconcerting because it’s very uncommon. It’s also remarkable. Jake would be the first to tell you about it if you bothered to ask.”

Hauser felt himself drop the classification of Jake as some kind of circus freak to little more than a stupid human trick. “It’s not some weird I-see-dead-people thing?”

Carradine let a little chuckle roll out again. “No, Sheriff, it’s just a very keen power of observation. And if his calm gets to you, please remember that he sees the worst of humanity all the time. It takes a lot to get him flustered.”

Hauser remembered Jake in the ME’s subterranean room, caressing Madame X’s peeled foot.

“Have I answered your questions?” The tone told Hauser that his five minutes were over.

Hauser realized that in a way he now knew less about Jake Cole than before he had made the call. “I guess so,” he said, then added a tired “Thank you,” and hung up.

25

Jake crouched in front of the master bedroom pocket door. He had managed to spread it a few more inches, and the opening was almost large enough for Kay to squeeze her nearly diminutive body through. She stood in front of him, her arm and shoulder already through the crack. From his vantage point, her crotch was in his face and he felt himself staring at the tight V of her jean shorts instead of concentrating on getting the door open.

“Can you get that out of my face?” he said between clenched teeth and gave the door another tug. It moved slowly in, as if the pocket were filled with tightly packed sand.

“What?”

“That,” he said, nodding at her crotch.

“My vagina?”

“I can’t open this door and stare at your camel toe at the same time. It’s too distracting.”

“Camel toe? I have a camel toe? I thought current nomenclature was cooch. When did we go to camel toe?”

“When you put those shorts on.” Jake rolled his eyes. “Now cut it out.”

“Oh, all right.” She squatted down beside him, resting the part of her ass that was hanging out of her shorts on the heels of her boots again. “This better?” she craned her neck theatrically, to see if anything was popping out. “No fur.”