Jake stopped the emotions he knew he would not be using in the next little while and held up his badge. “Your sheriff sounded pretty grim on the phone fifteen minutes ago.”
Spencer ignored him. “You back about your old man?” Then, after nodding of course to himself, said, “What’s with the name?”
Jake drew in a chestful of sea air and let it settle to the bottom of his lungs. This is what he hated about coming back. They asked about his past. “The name Jacob Coleridge was more of an obstacle than a blessing out in the world.” Being the son of the famous painter had come with its own kind of baggage, none of it good. Except maybe the art-school groupies who had slept with him as a way to somehow absorb some good old famous DNA, even if it was once-removed.
Spencer’s smile short-circuited and he nodded like he understood. “You’re the guy Hauser called?” It was worded as a question but meant as a statement.
Jake nodded and stared up at the former oyster-shucker. In the blaring lights of the cruisers his eyes still flashed blue and red, ornaments that couldn’t make up their minds. “I’d hate to be you,” Spencer said.
The pulsing eyes were a little unsettling and Jake turned his focus onto the glowing slant of the roof just over the slight hill of the drive; it was an old Long Island landscaping habit to keep the house hidden from the road with a berm. He watched the slate roof lit up by the lights of the emergency vehicles he knew were encamped in the drive, fanned out in varying degrees of importance. “Where have you put the media?” Jake knew that with the storm rolling in, every national news program would have its people out stalking the coast for impending disaster stories. And they wouldn’t miss a double homicide, no matter how deep the local police tried to bury it.
Spencer shook his head. “No media. Sheriff hasn’t called anyone and I don’t think he’s going to.”
Jake put that down on the list after American lapel pin.
Officer William Spencer tapped his sidearm with the lens of the big flashlight. “Cameraman tries to get in there, I have a trespasser on the premises.”
Jake shook his head. “No, Billy, you don’t. You come get me. We clear?”
Spencer let the question rattle around in the silence for a few seconds before he said, “Sure. Yeah.”
“The media is going to be important with this investigation. We want them working with us, not against us. They show up, you come get me.”
Spencer smiled, and they were good again. “You were called for a reason.”
“I’ve done this before. The bureau was requested by the local SD and the New York office knew I was staying out at the house. I guess the powers-that-be thought I needed to be here.” He turned back to Spencer, whose flashing-ornament eyeballs had somehow become less disturbing. “Just a lucky coincidence, I guess.”
“You’re a smart guy, Jake. At least you used to be.” Spencer’s mouth opened up and his teeth began to flash along with his eyes in the glare of the cruiser. “No such thing as coincidence.” His mouth pursed up and he looked down, as if he was embarrassed. “You know that.”
Jake hated platitudes and clichés, but something about the way Spencer said it raised a flag somewhere in his head. “Drop by,” he said, and roared off down the driveway.
4
Unlike the Wyeth clan, the next generation of the Coleridge bloodline couldn’t draw a stick figure without fucking it up. Jake was, however, able to do some remarkable things inside his skull. His one true talent—even greater than his father’s gift—was the ability to paint the final moments of people’s lives. And this uncanny and often frightening gift made Jake Cole very good at hunting monsters.
The people he worked with thought of it as an esoteric art form, some sort of weird channeling from places best left alone—deranged, psychotic, tortured places. Jake found the nuances in what made individual crime scenes unique. And in this uniqueness he decoded the stylistic fingerprint—the murderer’s signature. Once this signature was committed to memory, he would recognize it on sight. In the real world art market, if applied to paintings, a gift like his would have been worth millions of dollars a year in the economy of the business. In the search for killers, it was priceless.
He walked through the high arched doorway, intricately carved in a French motif. The house immediately spoke to him. Of wealth. Education. Breeding. Death. And…and? And something else Jake couldn’t quite nail. He had never been here before—he had eidetic memory for surroundings and had no recall of the property—but back, buried behind the personality traits of the home, there was something he knew. A distant chatter that he could not quite recognize.
Sheriff Hauser looked exactly like the mental portrait that Jake had painted in his skull, right down to the American flag pin in his lapel. He stood an easy six three in his engineer boots, weighed in at a healthy two-forty, and had the prerequisite flat-top and bland good looks of his ilk. Although now, standing in the beach house of dead people he had promised to protect and serve, with two bloody skinned human bodies splattered all over the floor, Jake saw stress vibrating beneath the sheriff’s composure. The tight lines of concern looked like fissures in a garden statue that had been left to the elements for too long. Without knowing how he knew, Jake was sure the man had played football; there was something in the way he moved his shoulders, the way he swiveled his head, that said quarterback. But for all his presence, Jake knew that it wouldn’t take much to put a few holes in Hauser’s thin skin of togetherness, and he’d have to go outside to throw up.
Jake pushed into a conversation the sheriff was having with a spacesuited photographer from the Medical Examiner’s Office.
“Sheriff Hauser? Jake Cole.” Jake extended his hand.
Hauser didn’t take it, but looked Jake over. His mouth tightened a little and Jake wondered if he had met another tight-assed small-town sheriff who would end up being his own worst enemy on the case. Hauser surprised him. “Cole? Sure. Sorry. I…” He let it trail off and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “I’m not firing on all eight right now. I guess that’s the last thing I should be saying to the FBI, huh?”
“I appreciate the honesty.” He looked over Hauser’s shoulder, at the bedroom door thrown wide, the interior of the chamber lit up in space whites from the utility lights. He told himself to wait another minute, until after Hauser was up to speed on his new PR function. “What are you doing about media?” he asked, skipping small talk.
Hauser shook his head. “No media.”
“Half the news crews in the country are within fifty miles of here. Official FBI policy is to work with the media. Establish a relationship and you’ll be surprised how the news can do more good than bad.”
Hauser pulled off his rubber glove and massaged his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. “I don’t have a lot of experience with this kind of thing.”
Jake gave the sheriff a thirty-second talk on putting together an effective media plan that would be a useful tool in the investigation. He suggested Hauser as the public information officer—as far as PIOs went, Jake thought the man would present well on camera. After his quick lecture and promises of help, Jake pointed at the bright rectangle of utility lights and excused himself.
He slid past Hauser and walked to the door, pushing two of the sheriff’s people out of the way as he moved. No one protested or said a word when Jake was on site—something about him told people to get out of his way.
He saw them on the floor and his brain did what it did, the computational software automatically gathering details and comparing them against the vast databank in his mental vault. The noise in the room stopped. The people moving behind him disappeared. And there was no light save for the harsh truth of halogen on the dead. He stood there for a few seconds that could have been minutes or hours or days and inventoried everything he saw in a mental data download.