He reached the deck as one of the big glass doors slid open. He raised his Sig, locked on the opening, and centered on the chest of the man coming out.

The figure materialized into Jake holding up a square of notepaper. “They’re in Montauk.”

Jake came out onto the deck and dropped onto the steps that grinned down at the beach like the gray wooden teeth of a funhouse dummy. “Shopping.” He looked at the note for a second, then balled it up and stuffed it into his pocket. He still had the gun in his hand and after Hauser slid the safety home on his own sidearm and returned it to the holster, Jake tucked his away.

With the threat gone, Hauser’s adrenaline dissipated and he collapsed to the steps, resting his elbows on his knees. “Maybe they shouldn’t be here, Jake.”

Jake let out a long breath, leaned back, and stretched. “They’re going home. I don’t want them here for the storm. I don’t want them here for the skinner. I don’t want them near me or in harm’s way.”

Hauser thought back to the house of death back in Southampton where Rachael Macready had been reduced to past tense. “Jake, what do I do about this guy?”

Jake pulled his cigarettes from his pocket, offered one to Hauser who passed, and fired one up with the sterling Zippo. He watched the ocean get darker as the sun began its descent behind them, over the western flange of the island. He wondered how different the ocean would look tomorrow morning, with the storm five hundred miles closer. And how bad would it get tomorrow night? Would it just rip everything out of the ground and set it down in Kansas? “There were two killings last night. Another this afternoon. That’s close. Even for an extreme maniac. Working that fast you make mistakes, bad decisions. It’s as if there’s a time limit.”

“Storm’s coming,” Hauser said, pointing at the ocean.

Jake shook his head and pulled on his smoke. “That’s not it. There’s purpose to what he’s doing. He’s working hard because he has to. We—I—have to figure out why. With the why we will have a lot better chance at figuring out the who.” He sucked on the filter and the paper cracked and sizzled.

“Back at that house, you said it looked like revenge. Why?”

“These guys like what they do. They take pleasure in the act. They cherish it and hold it and drag it out. Not this one. He’s in and out. Or at least he was with the Macready woman. He shows up angry, doles out his punishment, and leaves. Why?”

“Why would he cart off thirty pounds of skin and hair? Is he making jumpsuits in his basement? Lampshades? Wallets? Jesus, listen to me.”

Jake shook his head and let out a cloud of smoke that the wind coming off the water smacked away. “I don’t get that feeling. If he’s punishing them for something, it’s payment. That means a personal motive.”

Hauser held up his hands. “Are you saying that he knows the victims?”

“I don’t know.”

“If I was the guy running this investigation—”

Jake pointed at Hauser. “You are the guy running this investigation.”

“You know what I mean. The only thing I can say for sure is that this sonofabitch scares me—deep-down scares me.”

Jake’s face stayed flat, calm. “Me, too,” he said.

“Is it true that these guys want to get caught?”

Jake smiled, shook his head. “Not that I’ve noticed.”

“Then why the fuck would a killer write letters to the police or keep dumping bodies in the same place? It’s counterproductive.”

“It’s not that they want to get caught—they don’t think they can get caught. You have to remember that these people—if you can call them people—all have severe personality disorders. There is no such thing as a repeat killer who is a well-adjusted human being. It’s all about them. Getting away with a killing builds confidence. Getting away with a second one builds more. All of a sudden the guy thinks that he’s a criminal mastermind. It’s cockiness. Serial killers generally follow the same intelligence guidelines as the population—running the gambit from barely functional to high acuity. But the rule of thumb is that they are maladjusted losers.”

Hauser examined Jake’s face for a few seconds, trying to see behind the skin. “I’m glad you said that.”

“Why?”

“The way you talk about these guys—the way you seem to understand them—makes it look like you have some kind of deep-down respect for them.”

For the first time Jake could remember, something caught him off guard. “This is not big-game hunting where I relate to the animal. I don’t have any respect for these monsters—and believe me, that’s all they are. Social misfits and broken people. The people who romanticize them as anything else are losers of a lesser degree, but losers still. Christ, I fucking hate these guys.” He looked back at the ocean and saw that the weather was building up to go with what was happening here. Maybe he had been right, maybe this was some sort of a German opera.

“Me, too.” Hauser stood up, brushed sand off his seat. “I’ll be back at the Macready house. Get me through the station since I don’t have a cell phone right now.”

Jake’s mouth moved into an embarrassed smile. “Sorry about that.”

“I thought someone was going after my family…” Hauser let the sentence die and he paused at the top of the steps, his eyes locked out on the ocean. “I’ll get a cruiser out here to keep an eye on things.”

“You can’t afford the manpower right now.”

“And you can’t afford to let something happen to your family. Get them out of here in the morning, Jake. You should leave, too.”

“Can’t.” He shrugged again. “Won’t—it amounts to the same thing. My dad. The killer.” He wanted to add the weird paintings over in the studio, the studies of the faceless men of blood. “I have to be here.” He nodded out at the frothing Atlantic where the clouds had woven into a gray blanket that rose from the ocean. The waves were sloshing up on shore and foam and bits of flotsam were kicked around at the water’s edge. “Where’d the birds go?”

Hauser looked into the sky. “If I had a choice, you think I’d still be here?” He turned and walked away.

37

Jake was still sitting on the steps watching the ocean build up its courage for the next day’s big show when Kay walked out onto the deck with Jeremy bouncing along beside her. He was watching the surface of the ocean chop in on gray swells topped with white that slid halfway up the beach, hissing and bubbling, as Jeremy came over and sat down in his lap.

“Daddy, there’s a policeman in the driveway.”

“He’s going to be watching over the house when Daddy’s not here.” The fatigue of the world melted away and for an instant he felt like everything was all right with the universe.

Kay plopped down beside him and gave him a smooch. “How was your afternoon?” she asked.

How could he even think of answering that? Groovy. Except maybe for the poor woman who was scalped and skinned. Probably for no other reason than she had the misfortune to be my father’s nurse. Oh, and the skinned woman and child in the morgue—can’t forget them. “Fine,” he said, keeping what he did from her yet again—another reason he had decided to stop doing this.

She was in a pair of Levi’s and a tight T-shirt that had the smiling face of David Hasselhoff beaming back with the words Don’t Hassel The Hoff! scripted across the curve of her bust.

“Where did you get that shirt?” Jake asked, laughing.

“Nice, huh?” She pointed her breasts at him like gun turrets. “Kind of gets your attention, doesn’t it? Nobody messes with The Hoff!”

“The man in the store said Mommy looked smoking,” Jeremy offered cheerily.