Jake took a drag on the cigarette. “You of all fucking people should understand that it’s part of this job. Every time you tell some parent that their kid had his brains scattered over the shoulder by a drunk driver, or that their kid was DUI and killed someone, you go into combat mode. It’s a defensive thing. Self-protection. Otherwise we’d be walking around weeping.”

For a second Hauser remembered his son, Aaron, killed by the swerve of an Econoline when he was ten. “Or throwing up all over the crime scene,” he added.

Jake smiled around the new cigarette. “There is that, yes.”

Hauser leaned back, crossed his arms over his chest. “What’s going on here, Jake? I don’t know what to do. I have crime in my jurisdiction. Hell, some of the wealthiest people in America live here—you have no idea how much crime that attracts. But three people skinned?”

Jake’s eyes went back to the pavement and his words were slow, deliberate. “She opened the front door for him. She probably just got home. It was after her shift—Dr. Sobel sent her home early and the ME will put the time of death within half an hour of her knocking off. She asked him in. Maybe a neighbor saw, but I wouldn’t count on it.”

A few sentences in, Hauser realized that Jake’s words were coming from somewhere else. Maybe Jake didn’t see himself as a psychic. Maybe Carradine didn’t believe in channeling. But Hauser knew what he was hearing, and it was most certainly not Jake Cole talking.

The cigarette smoldered away in Jake’s fingers, the blue smoke taken away by the wind that had started up, full of electricity with the coming storm. “She turned her back on him and headed for the kitchen. I think she would have offered a drink. Tea, not coffee. He followed her down the hall, and as he did, the knife came out. Same one—big-bladed hunting knife—recurve edge. She turned. He kicked her hard in the stomach. A few of her ribs are broken.

“He came at her head with the knife when she doubled over. She was trying to breathe and he yanked her head back. Swept the knife across her forehead—there’s blood spatter across the wallpaper beside the stairs from this. Threw her to the carpet. Put a foot on her back and yanked her head back by her hair, scalping her. She couldn’t scream because she couldn’t even breathe. No one would have heard a thing.”

Hauser held up a hand. He was almost successful at keeping it from trembling. “How do you know this?”

What could Jake say? That he had taken a mental snapshot of the body and the blood spatter and position of the corpse and it painted a perfect picture for him? That there was no other way for this to have happened? That he could do a blind walk-through and get everything—including the length of time it had taken the monster to skin her—100 percent right? Hauser wouldn’t understand. All he said was, “I know.” The cigarette, still forgotten, continued to smoke, the ash long and curved. “Her scalp was off before she could even begin to understand what was happening to her. He flipped her over again and belted her in the stomach with a knee, a little higher this time, breaking at least two ribs. Bounced on her to drive the air from her lungs. Then went to work on her in earnest.”

Hauser’s complexion had reverted to the pale green that Jake now associated with him. “He did this to her while she was alive?”

Jake shrugged, as if the answer was self-evident.

“Guys like this, where do they come from? I mean, they can’t come from good loving parents who care about them, can they? Someone who understands love couldn’t do this.”

Jake looked up at the house, getting dark in the pewter light that was slowly seeping into everything. “Some families run on love, some run on anger and madness, some run on worse things.” He dropped his cigarette to the ground.

“I never thought I’d have a serial killer in my town.”

Jake crushed out the smoking butt on the asphalt. “He’s more than that.”

“What are you talking about?” Hauser’s voice fluttered with the question.

Repeating the definition from the bureau’s literature, Jake said, “A serial killer is defined as someone who kills three or more people with a cooling-down period between the murders. The time between Madame and Little X and the Macready woman was his cool-down. And the years since my mother’s death certainly constitutes a cool-down.” He thought about the night she went to the Kwik Mart for cigarettes and Mallomars. “He’s not going after random targets—he’s going after specific ones. Targets that are connected to my father, and by extension to—” He stopped and stood up. “—Me.”

“You okay?”

He shook his head. “My wife and son are at home alone.”

36

Hauser’s Charger ate up the road at 120 miles an hour and the car vibrated so badly that it felt like they were about to crack the sound barrier. Hauser had the gas punched to the carpet as he slalomed through traffic, taking the nearly two-ton mass of Hemi-powered Detroit iron onto the shoulder when cars ahead didn’t get out of the way fast enough. From inside the Dodge the siren was barely audible above the scream of the engine.

Hauser had called ahead but there were no cruisers anywhere near Sumter Point. Jake had Hauser’s BlackBerry suction-cupped to his ear as he tried to hear Kay’s phone ringing over the roar of the angry V-8. It was his third call and there was no answer. “Fuck,” he snarled, and pitched the cell phone against the dashboard. It bounced off and flew out the window. “Motherfucker!”

Hauser kept his attention on the road and his hands on the wheel. “About two minutes,” he said flatly.

Jake squirmed with the horrors splattering across the canvas in his head. He wished he was in his own car instead of Hauser’s beast—Hauser had the disadvantage of caution; Jake would have had it to the floor. He had to get home now. If that monster got to Kay and Jeremy—

He pushed the thought away and tried to snap his mental armor into place but the pieces wouldn’t click home; his mind kept going back to Kay, to the thought of someone tearing her scalp off with a piece of honed steel.

The adrenaline stab of fear had flooded his system and his heart was throbbing like a venomous snake in his rib cage. There were a couple of jolts from the CRT-D sewn into his chest but none of the bright pyrotechnics that had fried his circuitry twice today.

She’s fine.

Skinned.

Jeremy’s fine.

Skinned.

Why did he go after the nurse?

Revenge.

For what?

You’re just not looking hard enough.

It’s a coincidence.

There are no coincidences, you naïve motherfucker!

They rounded the gentle wide arc that was the last bend in the road before Sumter Point and at almost 120 miles an hour it was neither gentle nor wide. Hauser counter-spun the steering wheel and drifted the heavy car through in a blast of noise and gravel.

After the corner, Jake had his seat belt off and his hand on the grip of his pistol. Hauser punched up the last quarter-mile of asphalt with a final burst of power from the big-block V-8 and floored the brake at the last second, pulling into the driveway in a power slide that spewed rocks and dust in a wide arc. Jake was out of the car and through the front door before Hauser had turned off the engine.

Hauser stormed out of the car and ran around back, his Sig out of the holster, safety off, one in the chamber, his finger on the curved sport trigger. He didn’t know how to deal with the aftermath of human skinnings but he was pragmatic with a good old-fashioned meat-and-bones adversary. It had made him a brief success on the football field.