Frank tapped another cigarette out of his pack and screwed it into Jake’s mouth—Jake took it mechanically, eyes still locked on the breakers slamming the beach—and flamed it to life for him with an old USMC Zippo. There was the unsaid love of family in the action and Hauser was glad that Frank was here.

“Jake, I need photographs of your wife and son.” He dropped his eyes to his feet, then said, “We’ll get them on the missing persons registry. With the storm coming, and the traffic heading down 27, we can’t put up a roadblock. It would slow things down too much.” Meaning: It could cost more lives.

Jake stood up, uncoiling to his full height, and Hauser expected him to say that he didn’t care, that he wanted his wife and son found.

All he did was shrug. Then he went to his wallet and pulled out a photograph. Kay and Jeremy smiling up, Alice and the Mad Hatter behind them, taken in Central Park back before time had stopped.

For the first time since he had known Jake Cole, Hauser realized that he was afraid of him. Initially it had been the clothes and the tattoos and that creepy way he shrugged everything off, as if horror was an inevitable part of life. But now, watching him face the disappearance of his family with the same grim lack of hope he attached to everything else, he saw that Jake was one of those men who went through life with nothing to lose because it had all been taken from them long ago.

Hauser had read the reports on his mother’s murder, and knew that the impact from an event like that was immeasurable. It surpassed Freud and went straight into Hitchcock country. Besides being afraid of him, Hauser had come to respect and like Jake, and that was odd because Hauser consciously kept a professional distance from the people he worked with—it helped to keep his judgment clear. But behind this atypical fondness was a silent specter of fear, bunched up like an ink-covered creature with cold, dead pupils and a flat voice.

Jake’s eyes had melted into furious black tunnels that bore straight back into his skull. He raised an arm, pointed at the officer with the broken nose and embarrassed posture. “That fucker was asleep on the job.” He turned his head from Hauser to the cop who now looked a little frightened. “I find out that you could have stopped this, and you are going to have to hide on the bottom of the ocean. That’s not a threat, it’s just the way things are.” Jake spat on the floor. “Now get the fuck out of my sight.”

Hauser held up his hand. “Jake, you’re angry. You’re upset. You’re not thinking clearly. I need you to be calm.”

Jake’s head swiveled around and he laid his eyes into Hauser. “Do I sound calm?”

Hauser realized that he did. He turned back to Whittaker and nodded at the door. “See one of the EMT people at the station about your nose.”

The cop opened his mouth to say something but Jake nailed him with another angry look. He closed his mouth and slipped outside.

Jake put his revolver down on the piano. “This all has something to do with my father.”

Spencer looked at Hauser, his eyebrows going up in a quick question mark. Hauser shifted his gaze so Jake wouldn’t catch on to their silent dialogue. It was a subtle, furtive movement but one that Jake’s radar instantly picked up.

“What?” Jake asked.

Spencer looked at his feet.

Hauser looked at Jake. “You know a man named David Finch?”

“My father sells through his gallery. He came by yesterday. Piece of shit.”

“You don’t like many people, do you?”

Jake shrugged. “What does that have to do with David?”

Hauser sat down on the piano stool. “We found him out on Mann’s Beach.”

“Found?”

“In his car. Same as the Macready woman.”

Jake’s eyes narrowed. “When were you going to tell me this?”

Hauser waved his arm through the air. “Like I said, you have your hands full. The car couldn’t stay where it was with the hurricane coming in so I had it moved to a garage. We photographed the interior as best we could—”

“You get Conway to do it?” Jake asked.

“No. Scopes did it with his camera.”

“Scopes?” Jake shook his head. “That car needed to be filmed in place. A trip on a flatbed will rattle it like a cocktail shaker.”

“I couldn’t leave it out on the beach,” Hauser said defensively.

“No, but you could have recorded the crime accurately. Is Scopes some kind of hotshot photographer that I don’t know about?”

Hauser stayed silent.

“When was David killed?” Jake asked.

“I don’t know. Dr. Reagan is with the body right now.”

“Did you take a temperature reading on site?”

Spencer asked, “A temperature reading?”

Jake shook his head like he was monitoring a village idiots’ convention. “A body loses heat at a calculable rate. By measuring the temperature, you can fix a TOD.”

Spencer’s face went a little white. “How do you take a temperature?”

Jake rolled his eyes. “What is this—kindergarten? You use a rectal thermometer. Of course, without an epidural layer the rate of cooling would be different, but you need that reading. If nothing else, you need a timeline for this guy.” Jake looked at Hauser. “Who found him?”

“Scopes,” Hauser said.

Jake and Spencer used to hang out at Mann’s Beach after work sometimes. It was a great place to take girls because no one ever went out there. It was fenced off on a little isthmus of rock that might as well have been the dark side of the moon. “What was Scopes doing out at Mann’s Beach?”

Hauser eyed Jake. “With this coming down,” he said, indicating the storm outside with a jab of his thumb, “I had all the beaches checked. I didn’t want any of those storm-chaser dimwits to get killed while camping out in a pup tent and shooting the storm with a Sony Handicam.”

Finch’s death had no effect on Jake; he was too busy trying to connect dots. “And now Finch. Why is this guy so pissed at my father?”

Frank cocked his head to one side, and if Jake would have been paying more attention he would have seen one of his father’s movements reflected in the genes. “Why do you think this has something to do with your dad, Jakey?” he asked, his voice a near-yell like Hauser’s.

Jake let the shrug roll off his shoulders again. “I’ve been looking for this guy for thirty-three years, Frank. I didn’t know it, but I was. He killed my mother. He killed a woman and her child up the beach. He killed my father’s nurse. He killed David. And now…” He let the sentence fade out.

Jake swiveled his head and locked the black rivets that used to be his eyes on Hauser. “I’d like to say that Madame and Little X were practice. I’d like to believe that. But I can’t. It’s not the way this one would work.” Even talking loud, his voice had that long-distance sound to it again. “My father had something to do with Madame and Little X. This is all about him somehow.” Behind the shock smoldering away in the greasy loops of his guts, Jake felt something else squirming around. He thought about Sobel and the blood man and about Jeremy and the man in the floor.

Hauser nodded fatalistically. “We have someone at the hospital.” With the storm coming in, it was an expensive sacrifice in resources. “We’ll take care of your old man. Don’t worry.”

Jake looked up. “Do I look worried about him?”

“I need to know what’s going on inside your head right now. What are you seeing or not seeing that might help me with all of this? Where are the soft spots? The weaknesses?”

“Weaknesses, Mike?” He handed the photo of his wife and child to Hauser. “There are the weaknesses.”

Hauser took the photo, stared down at Kay, Jeremy grinning goofily along with Alice and her demented friends in the background. “What are you going to do?”

Jake took a T-shirt off the piano and slipped it on, then he snapped the pressure holster onto his belt. The big-bore handgun with the black combat grip was nearly invisible against the black fabric, the stainless frame winking intermittently. He put his bare feet into his boots, and he pointed at Spencer. “I need him for three hours. Pull the guy off my dad at the hospital if you need manpower.”