“It’s okay, son,” Jake said again.

Jeremy’s eyes widened, two contrasting orbs in black-red sockets. “Remember the time in the park when I found that bird, Daddy? Remember that? I said it smelled yucky and you said that’s because it was dead. Do you remember? And you ’splained that sometimes birds and animals have accidents or get sick and then they are made dead and that makes them smell bad. Do you remember, Daddy? Do you?” There was a fevered, crazed quality to the boy’s voice.

Jake looked over at Kay. She had her back to the window and she was hugging herself and crying, bright streaks streaming down her cheeks. She didn’t see him. Or Jeremy. She was off in the theater behind her eyes watching a test pattern.

“I remember, son.”

“The man in the floor smelled just like that bird in the park, all bad and sick and dead. And he’s not nice any more. Don’t play the game with him. Please promise me that you won’t play the game with him.”

Jake pulled Jeremy in close, cradling his head in his collarbone. He stepped forward and grabbed Kay and the touch of another human seemed to snap her out of the place she had retreated to. She sniffled, looked up, and locked her eyes on him.

“You okay?” he asked.

Kay shook her head. “Do I look okay?” She wiped her nose on the hem of her T-shirt. “I don’t want you staying here. I don’t care what this job is about. I don’t care if this whole fucking place gets washed into the ocean. You are coming home with us.”

Jake nodded.

“They won’t let him on the bus with no pants, Mommy.”

Jake and Kay looked down at his naked body. “You, my friend, may have a point,” Jake said, and reached for the phone to call Hauser.

44

Jake was relieved that the medical examiner was at one of the Olympus microscopes in the corner of the lab instead of headed west in the Long Island Hurricane Exodus. It was obvious that she had been here all night. She was hunched over, her face squinched up with the expression common to microscope-gazers everywhere. He dropped a Ziploc containing Jeremy’s bloody T-shirt onto the table beside her and the noise jarred her from her scientific myopia.

“Special Agent Cole,” she tried as a greeting.

Jake was glad people were laying off the Charles Bronson thing—he hated it. “Dr. Reagan.”

She offered her version of a smile—the same tight line she had shown at Madame and Little X’s the other night. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” There was something about the last word that sounded insincere.

Jake put on his be-nice face, as Kay called it. “Could you please analyze the blood on that?”

She picked up the bag and examined it. It squished against the polyethylene, red like a battlefield dressing. “What is it?”

“T-shirt. There may be some contaminants like mucus and saline from another source but it’s the blood I want analyzed.”

“DNA?”

“First check the typing against all three bodies. Madame and Little X and the Macready woman.”

“Where did you get this?” she asked.

“Something smeared it on my son’s face.”

“You mean someone.”

“No.” Jake’s voice sounded a million miles away, even to him. “I don’t.”

45

The doctor’s waiting room looked like every one he had ever been in, the chairs just a little past being presentable and the walls adorned with the unimaginative combination of public health posters and ugly hotel-room art.

Jake sat with his head in his hands, feeling like his brain was filled with ants. He was going over Jeremy’s Misfits makeup, trying to figure out where it had come from. The cop in the driveway hadn’t seen a thing; no one had come via the road, and with the way the house was situated on the property, he would have seen someone approach from three of the sides. Which left the beach as the only viable route.

But by looking at things this way, he was forgetting to ask the most important questions of all: Who was the man in the floor and what did he want?

Jake lifted his head and eased back in the vinyl seat, letting his focus drift to the thought of pulling up stakes and heading back to the city. But he knew that he couldn’t leave—even the thought of it in the abstract felt treasonous; he would stay in Montauk until everything was tied up and nailed shut. And like the old saying about how to eat an elephant, Jake knew that the next step in the process began here, in psychiatrist’s office.

Sobel’s receptionist, a woman of twenty-five with the unhappy face of a burgeoning depressive, busied herself behind the desk. A mother and daughter sat at the other corner of the office. The girl was about twelve, and had the look of someone plugged into a different sensory universe. Jake guessed that she was autistic. She played with a bowl of colored candies. Her mother sat reading a thick paperback that had a beautiful man with beautiful hair embracing a beautiful woman with beautiful hair, and they were wearing beautiful clothes, and back, in the distance over their shoulders—

—like that goddamned lighthouse over Rachael Macready’s shoulder—

—skinned—

—was a beautiful estate filled with their beautiful life. The book was titled The Bluebloods of Connecticut and Jake knew there were horses in the story. Horses with long, well-groomed tails. Probably a private jet. Kisses and muscular embraces. Unadulterated crap.

The girl stared off into the distance, as if watching a movie behind her eyes. She slid the large glass bowl of candies from the center to the side of the coffee table and had cleared all the magazines into a neat pile. As her mother read of the steamy sexploits visited upon the handsome characters of the Connecticut estate, Jake watched the girl mechanically remove candies from the bowl one at a time, then lay them out on the table. She was sitting on the floor and her hand would dip into the bowl, then place the candy on the table. Then she would repeat the process. The table was strewn with candies in no apparent order, most not touching. Her mother was too engrossed with the heavy breathing between the pages of her paperback to notice that her daughter was making a mess.

“Mr. Cole,” the receptionist said, her mouth turned down at the corners. “Please go on in.”

Jake stood up and stepped around the coffee table. Neither the woman nor her daughter seemed to notice.

Dr. Sobel got up from behind his desk and shook Jake’s hand. “I’m sorry about yesterday, Jake. If I thought that your father was a danger to himself, I would have had him restrained before.”

Jake eased into the mail-order-catalog chair and examined Sobel for anything that he could make use of. The psychiatrist’s face was a blank sheet of meat and Jake recognized the clinical training of a man trying to study him for, well, anything he could make use of. Jake put his hands on the knuckles of the chair arms, crossed one booted foot over his knee, and waited. After Sobel’s eyes finished taking him apart, he took a deep breath and opened his hands as if he were trying to sell Jake pet insurance.

“I know how tough this can be.” Sobel did a pretty good job of sounding sincere.

“I’m not having this conversation—I’m not here to have a candle put to my head.”

Sobel seemed to mull this over for a few seconds.

“What’s going on with my father? How do I best take care of his needs right now, in the immediate future, and in the long-term?”

Sobel opened a large file on his desk and Jake recognized the same colored pages and Post-Its from the metal clipboard the day before. “For a man of eighty, your father’s vitals and blood work are spectacular. He’s obviously taken care of himself.”