The sheriff looked around the room, examining the display cases full of his hunting gear. Suddenly he understood why to a man like Jake Cole, the world looked like an accident waiting to happen.

Hauser slid the knife into its worn leather case, snapped the stay, and strung it onto his tactical belt. Then he shut off the lights and headed out to his cruiser.

42

Kay lay still, cuffed to the headboard, Jake resting solidly on top of her. The belt around her neck hung in a loose loop now, the tight lines of pressure bruised into her throat. She had popped a blood vessel in her left eye, and it had ruptured into a beautiful red flower.

Jake watched her face for a few minutes, a series of unmoving geometric shadows in the dark. She lay still, barely breathing. He stared at her, willing himself to be here and now, not there and then. He wondered how he had learned to compartmentalize his life so completely, so utterly, that he could visit horror all day yet come home to such happiness. And in this swirl of thoughts came the realization that it really was time for him to quit the job. To leave. To move on with his life and become a whole man—a man without fractures.

“How did I find you?” she asked.

Kay was beautiful lying there, but Jake knew that behind her, deep in the pockets of her mind, things were not bright or happy or safe. Her eyes were riveting, mesmerizing, but something was missing in the way they moved, as if a little of the happiness had been knocked out along the way. Once, after they had begun to suspect that what they had might be something special, she told him that she had always loved bad men. There was something about the danger—about the not knowing what was next—that was as addictive as the booze had ever been. She said she still hated herself for it.

Jake suspected that sometimes he did, too.

Her mouth started a smile, the blistered vein in her left eye tinting it with weirdness. “I love getting fucked by you,” she said.

“That’s because you’re a hopeless romantic.”

The tinkle of laughter turned into a wide-mouthed roar that wracked her body and the buckle clinked in the dark, a scratchy metallic note that sounded like Hauser pushing the Macready woman’s door open.

Jake stiffened. “I want you two on the noon bus.”

Her laugh stopped cold and he felt her stiffen beneath him. “No way, Poppy. I didn’t haul this hot little ass out here for a fast fuck and the bum’s rush. I’m not leaving without my man.”

“We’ll talk about it.” But he knew she’d be off Long Island at noon no matter how much she bitched, even if he had to shoot her and Jeremy in the ass with tranq darts and send them home in a pair of FedEx boxes.

He tilted his head and looked into her eyes. Her face held a loose peaceful edge that he knew he was lucky to see. He kissed her.

“Another one?” she asked.

The day ran through his head on fast-forward, from the bloody portrait to Rachael Macready bled out and abandoned on the sopping carpet. He thought about the lighthouse over her shoulder, about Hauser pacing the morgue, about the departmental Charger pushing 120 miles an hour and the sound the Coke bottle made when it hit the floor in the studio. He wanted to say he was too tired, that he needed some sleep, but it would have been a lie.

He opened his mouth and fastened it on hers.

She moaned, slid her legs wider apart, and shimmied further under him. The buckle clinked.

Then he wrapped the belt around his fist.

And began to squeeze off her oxygen.

43

Day Three

Sumter Point

“Jake!”

The single word was filled with such panic, such wrongness, that he was down the hall with the pistol in his hand before he was fully awake.

He stopped at the top of the stairs and looked out at the nave. Jeremy stood in the living room, his back to the staircase, his head canted over at an odd angle as if some of the hydraulic hoses that powered his neck had ruptured. Jake couldn’t see his face but the boy’s body language was foreign, unfamiliar, and with that realization came a little more of the fear he had heard in Kay’s voice.

Kay was on her knees in front of the boy, holding him at arm’s length, her face sculpted tight with shock.

Jake walked down the stairs with the pistol still clamped in his fingers. He was naked.

Kay didn’t look up. Didn’t acknowledge his existence. She was staring at Jeremy with the same eyes she had last night during climax—bulging and glassy. Both of them had hemorrhages now, and the second had burst into a bloody storm that raged around her pupil. She was holding Jeremy and shaking, the tremors traveling down her arms and transferring to his little body, which was vibrating like more hydraulic hoses were about to pop.

Jake moved slowly. “Baby?”

Kay just stared at the boy’s face, and a bright rim of tears formed on her lashes below the hemorrhaged reds and it made her eyes look like they were bleeding.

Jake’s foot hit the bottom stair and this nearness flipped a switch in Jeremy’s head because he shrugged off his mother’s grip and turned around.

His sockets, cheekbones, and the curved line of his jaw were outlined in sloppy red finger strokes. The stitching of the mouth was broad, and went across his face in thick vertical lines that were crooked and unequal. The boy’s face was painted like a skull. The whole thing had the lilt of madness about it, as if his face was a funhouse prop. Jake didn’t need to be told that it was blood—he could smell it.

Jeremy’s bottom lip trembled and he was crying red streaks. Tears dripped down his cheeks and ran to the collar of his T-shirt, slowly turning pink. Jake could see that he was one breath away from flying into hysterics.

Jake scooped him up, covering the back of his head with his hand, and hugged him. “Moriarty, what happened?”

He looked at Kay over the top of the boy’s head. She stood there shaking her head, her red eyes leaking clear tears. The big door to the deck was open a few inches. “We were in here alone, Jake. I opened the door to get some fresh air because it smells so…bad. I turned my back on him for a minute. Maybe less.” She shook her head. “I was making coffee…just making coffee when Jeremy barked—literally barked—like a dog and I rushed over and he was…he was…like that…I…don’t…um…I—” She shuddered and for a second it looked like she would throw up.

Jake looked at the open door. “Moriarty?”

Jeremy squeezed him, his little body quivering.

“What happened?” His voice climbed up a little, and he had to add the words, “It’s okay, son,” to let Jeremy know he wasn’t angry—the natural assumption of someone without fully developed emotions.

“It was him, Daddy.”

Jake pried his son’s head out of the nook in his collar. Jeremy’s little tear-streaked blood-skull leered up at him, teeth outlined, eye sockets darkened, the logo for an album cover. “He said he wants to play with you, Daddy.”

Jake felt his chest tighten again and he sat down on the sofa, his skull-painted boy clinging to him like a lemur.

“Then he touched me,” the little boy said. “He touched my face. And now it smells icky. He said he started a game with you when you were a little boy and he likes playing with you very much. He said you don’t get scared. Is that true, Daddy? You don’t get scared? Because I’m scared. I’m very scared and I want to go home and I don’t want to play with him any more. He’s not nice. He’s mean and ugly and he smells bad and—” The words stopped and he looked around, as if the room were bugged.