Jake shook his head sadly. “Jesus, where did I find you?” he asked rhetorically.

“AA—us good ones all hang out at AA meetings. We get to meet the cool guys there. The guys who have no jobs, no friends, no self-esteem. Or if they do have jobs, they’re like really creepy jobs that don’t make them happy.” That had been six-plus years now. Before, in the language of their relationship. Before they had fallen in love or had Jeremy or had found the feeling of safety neither had ever experienced but both had recognized on sight. “And in exchange these guys get hot musician babes with no jobs, no self-esteem, and big juicy camel toes.” She leaned forward and kissed him. “Now open this fucking door, Houdini, we need a place to sleep and if we have to crash in the living room, you won’t get to put anything in my warm parts tonight.” Her freckled face scrunched up. “Clear?”

Jake nodded. “I’m working on it, okay?”

Another good tug and it opened enough for Kay to squeeze through.

“Lucky you,” she said. “You’re gonna get some lovin’ later.”

Jake stood up without brushing the dust bunnies off of his jeans. His peripheral vision stayed on Jeremy engineering the death of more imaginary two-inch motorists. “I’m glad he doesn’t pay attention to your mouth.”

Kay managed to squeeze through the crack by putting her hands over her head and sliding sideways. Her breasts made a scraping sound on the wood when they popped through. She flipped a switch and a single table lamp on the floor in the corner sputtered to yellow, feeble life.

“Oh, hey. Here’s why you couldn’t budge the door.”

There was a soft clack and she slid the door back, a two-foot screwdriver in her hand. “Your dad drove this through the wall, into the door.”

Jake rolled the door closed again, and saw the crude hole whittled into it.

“How did he get out, though?”

Kay looked at the doorway, the hole in the wall, the screwdriver, and did some rough calculating. “He could have reached through and locked it from the outside. You’d have to know where this was to get to it but if you’ve got long arms…”

A heavy chest of drawers blocked the opening and Jake slid over the top. The room, like the rest of the house, was cluttered, although this one felt more like a lair. The bed didn’t look filthy but the sheets were crumpled and knotted on top of the mattress in the shape of a human nest. Clothes—mostly his father’s standard work outfit of jeans and white T-shirts—were strewn about. There were empty scotch bottles, cracker boxes, and anchovy tins in the way of garbage. And, of course, a few dozen yellow plastic utility knives.

“This isn’t good,” Kay said in a long, low whisper.

“Let’s jimmy the locks on my old room and my mother’s office.”

His mother’s office was a static photo of what it had been all those years ago—exactly as it had been when Jake left—exactly as it had been for the five years previous to that. More than thirty years of closed air and dust and sadness. His own room was sparse and bare, as if no one had ever lived there at all.

Kay brushed her hands off on her thighs. “I’ll get some garbage bags. We’ll be sleeping in your father’s room.”

Jake watched her walk down the hall and head for the stairs. As she passed Jeremy he watched her gingerly lift her foot above the invisible crowd he was plowing his car through. When she was out of sight he turned his head back toward the bedroom at the end of the hallway. A single question looped through his head: Why would he barricade the door?

26

Hauser sat on a stool by the counter dividing the kitchen from the open room that made up most of the ground floor and the exposed hallway that ran overhead. He sat back, his Stetson on his knee, stoically fingering the rim of his coffee cup. He felt better about Jake, more at ease, after talking to Carradine. They had a case to get to. But first Hauser felt like he needed to apologize.

Jake stood behind the counter, leaning against the bank of drawers that hid more of the creepy little paintings. Kay and Jeremy were upstairs in the bath, cleaning off. The sound of the water running was almost overpowered by a radio belting out Sesame Street tunes, Jake’s attempt at making up for Elmo’s mysterious drowning.

“I called Carradine.” Hauser’s finger stopped tracing the rim of the hand-thrown mug and his eyes lifted.

Jake took a sip of his own coffee, pausing the lip of the cup below his chin. “What did he tell you that you think I wouldn’t have?”

Hauser loosened up a little. “I’m sorry, Jake. I am not used to working with outsiders. It was a mistake.”

Jake shrugged. “I have a predictable effect on people. I’m sure Carradine told you this is more than some sort of Freudian fantasy to find my mother’s killer.”

Hauser shifted uncomfortably in his seat, lifted his hand. “I didn’t say—”

“I did,” Jake said very calmly. “This is not some subconscious quest to make things right in the universe so I can put the little frightened boy that still lives inside me at ease.”

“That sounds like therapist speak.”

“It is. I’ve spent a lot of my time in the offices of people who spend their time listening to other people’s problems. I had to. I wasted too much of my life being angry and self-medicating.”

“The booze?”

Jake laughed. “When I was roaring, the booze was the least of my vices.” Something in Jake’s eyes turned off and the light coming in through the big windows was no longer reflected in his pupils. “The booze was how I pressurized, how I medicated in public. Problem with me is that I inherited my old man’s metabolism. I have an LR that’s in the basement—meaning little reaction to alcohol—and that goes for anything I put in my body.” Jake shook his head. “And I put everything you can imagine into the machine. I have a pacemaker in my chest, Mike. I did so much heroin they’re not sure my heart will beat without a mechanical aid. I used to do speedballs for breakfast.”

The sheriff shifted in his seat; he was a man who was used to people trying to hide their secrets from him.

“Whenever my heart rate rises above—or drops below—a certain point, I get zapped by the little plastic juice-box they wired into my sternum.” He shrugged, like it really didn’t matter one way or the other. “In a lot of ways, it is a drug of its own—the lets-me-know-I’m-not-yet-dead drug.”

Hauser finished his coffee in a big gulp and slid the mug across the counter, declining a refill with the shake of his head. “I thought you were some sort of a paranormal freak.”

Jake’s mouth flattened a little. “There are no psychics. It’s called cold reading. Remember the Sherlock Holmes story, The Sign of Four?”

“I’m more of a movie guy.”

Jake smiled. “Watson hands Holmes a watch and asks what can be deduced by observation. Watson feels that as a mass-produced item, it reveals nothing of the owner. Holmes examines the piece, hands it back, and rattles off a litany of details about the previous owner—who he says is Watson’s brother. The man was a drunkard, he was often broke, and so on and so forth à la the smug bastard everyone knows Holmes to be. Watson gets pissed and accuses Holmes of contacting his family to learn the history of his poor brother.” Jake took a sip of coffee. “The deductions were simple. Holmes saw the initials and knew that it had belonged to Watson’s father, after which it was handed down to the eldest son—as was customary. There were pawn numbers scratched into the case that pointed at the brother falling in and out of debt—otherwise he would neither have pawned the watch, nor been able to pick it up. The keyhole was scratched and Holmes figured that no sober man would miss the hole as consistently as was evident. To Holmes it was obvious. Watson thought it was witch-doctory.