Kay reached up between the heavy oak spokes of the headboard and Jake slipped the worn police handcuffs over her wrists. He snapped them closed—a shining pair of silver eyes—and began.
She rose up into him, her eyes locked on his. He reached down beside the bed and found his belt. He picked it up and her eyes twitched when she heard the buckle clink. She tried to turn her head, to see it coming, but he held her jaw and kept his eyes locked on hers in the almost-dark. The deep shadow of her sockets yawned up at him as he slipped the belt around her neck.
The black leather fell between her breasts, its tail curling up against the crossed pistols. She clenched her teeth and kept her eyes locked on his.
Her breaths rasped out in those little birthing whistles she made before the sex circuits in her head went supernova. The belt around her neck thrashed and writhed as she threw her hips into his weight, and he felt her hard pelvic bone beneath the flesh, knocking into his.
Kay was sliding back and forth beneath him. She snarled.
Jake reached down, looped the snapping tail of the belt around his hand, and began to tighten. The black noose circled in around her flesh and the buckle rose up against her chin, dimpling a small fold of skin with its floral edge.
She moaned the word, “Now,” only it came out in four fuck-jarred syllables.
He pulled the loop tight and Kay’s face jolted pale. Then red. Her mouth opened, to breathe, to scream, but she was unable to get air.
He tightened the belt one more turn of his fist and his fingers went numb.
Her mouth broadened, then opened like a beached fish sucking air. Her eyes snapped wide, gleaming out of the deep shadow of her sockets. Then bulged. The veins in her neck rose to the skin like fingers trying to claw through and there was a startling deep-space second when their eyes connected, then she arched her back violently and shuddered.
She lay there afterward, completely still, her unfocused eyes pointed into the dark.
41
Mike Hauser was only going to be home for a few minutes—very likely his last visit until the storm was gone. Very possibly his last visit to this house. This wasn’t melodrama speaking, just honest analysis of a situation that had so many outcomes that the possibilities could keep a supercomputer busy for a year. The hand of God was coming, advancing on a roiling storm that might obliterate Hauser’s community from the earth—and that’s precisely how he thought of this little patch of land—his community. And unfortunately that included the invisible motherfucker with the hunting knife. Along with Jake Cole—a man who attracted death like some kind of magnet for the broken. Right now Hauser’s kingdom had more than a few ugly shadows circling overhead. The trick would be in surviving them.
It was 2:12 a.m. and the sheriff walked into the kitchen in full gear, including the web belt with his Sig and the various accoutrements of his trade. He poured himself a ginger ale from a torpedo-sized plastic bottle in the fridge. He took a sip, got disgusted that it was flat, and poured it down the drain. Of all the things progress had bulldozed under in the name of improvement, he lamented the loss of glass bottles the most. He settled on water from the tap, put it away in three loud gulps, and placed the glass in the dishwasher.
Stephanie was out of town and he suddenly wished that she were here to give him one of her talks, maybe a smooch and a punch in the arm. But he had flown her inland, to her brother’s house where she’d be safe. Only Hauser’s concept of safe had changed a lot in the past few days. Irrevocably so.
Of all the images that this case brought with it, the one that kept popping up from behind the bushes was the woman and child up the beach, still known as Madame and Little X. More than two full turns of the hour hand later and all their forensic and digital know-how couldn’t answer the simple question as to who they were. It was like investigating the murder of two people who had never really been there at all.
He moved down the basement steps by feel, listening to the new voice of his house in the approaching hurricane. When he was at the bottom he flipped the two middle switches and the floor-to-ceiling display cases flickered to life, humming yellow like a bank of supermarket freezers.
One wall was taken up by his shotgun collection, the second by his deer rifles and handguns, the third by his reference library, and the last by his knives.
Hauser stared at his reflection in the glass. He had organized what had happened to the point where images of Madame X and her son no longer popped up randomly, but they were never far from the viewfinder in his head and he continually turned his mind’s eye away from them whenever one fired to life. Things like this were not supposed to happen here. But he knew that wasn’t how it worked; if he put a little horsepower into the thought process the next deduction was that things like this weren’t supposed to happen anywhere.
Only they did. All the time. All you had to do was look in the bedroom of the house up the road. After all, why should this place be special?
The one break they were getting in the investigation—the single little let-up—was with the media; with Hurricane Dylan ripping in, reporters were having a hard time nailing down interviews. Usually, Hauser would worry about one of his men getting cornered over beers at the Scrimshaw Lounge after work, or one of the Macready woman’s neighbors ending up on Fox. But with the storm advancing, no one had time to talk to these people—they were too busy saving their iMacs and Franklin Mint collectibles. The very definite side benefit to this was that the news was now more interested in the weather than in the three dead bodies. Of course, Jake had assured him that this wouldn’t last for long. Not once those parasites attached the word serial to the killings.
Then everyone from the greengrocer to the gas station attendant would be popping up on Channel 7, analyzing the evidence, waxing poetic about DNA, CSI, and the rest of the acronyms they had picked up from prime-time television. The worst, Jake had assured him, would be watching the talking heads—the self-professed experts—yakking away, coming up with motivational or personality profiles of the killer when they were missing very important pieces of evidence—most notably facts.
Hauser had come home to pick up a few personal things, the first being his great-grandfather’s 1918 trench knife. If the house and everything else was torn from the earth, this was the only thing he wanted to save besides his wedding band and that one trophy his son, Aaron, had won in little league. The rest of the shit could go and he wouldn’t care. Not in any real sort of way.
He opened the case and removed the weapon. He had no memories of his great-grandfather, but this knife had meant a lot to his grandfather, and then to his father so, by extension, it meant a lot to him. He had hoped that it would mean something to Aaron some day—a little piece of honor handed down from man to man in the family—but all that had been taken away by a drunk in a van. But that didn’t mean that Hauser was going to let it sit here and maybe get taken away by the storm.
The waxy feel of the metal gave way to a greasy one as the protective oil on the knife warmed to his touch. He examined it for a few minutes, hoping that it would give up some of its secrets. What did Jake see when he looked at a knife? Something told Hauser that a man like that didn’t see just another tool in the history of human evolution—for a man like Jake, a knife was a potential opera of horror.