“What do you need him for?”

Jake thought of Sobel and the blood man again. “I think my father knows who is doing this. I think he’s too scared to say it in words but not with paint. He spent years filling that studio out there with about 5,000 weird little canvases. It’s a puzzle. And it means something. I think it’s a portrait of who is doing this. The Bloodman. I need to photograph those paintings and I need to have them analyzed by pattern-recognition software. If they fit together in a certain way, the computer will see it.”

Hauser looked at Jake for a few seconds. “Then what?”

“Then I know who to kill.”

51

Frank parked the massive Humvee at the edge of the lot where he’d be able to four-by-four it over the fence and onto the street if the area flooded. The sky was coming down in a steady stream and the parking lot was covered in dancing rain, a foot deep in some places. A Starbucks coffee cup skittered across the lot, followed by an armada of trash. Frank stepped out of the truck and a plastic Walmart bag floated by like a contestant in a corporate-sponsored jellyfish race. He headed into the hospital, moving steadily through the lot, the water sloshing up the sides of his boots.

Frank Coleridge didn’t recognize the destroyed shadow of a man that used to be his brother, asleep under the yellow rectangle of fluorescent light that hung over the headboard like a grave marker. His face came through like the reflection in a distorted, fire-ravaged mirror. He and his brother had been born identical twins but a lifetime of individual road-wear had left each with different battle scars. Now, after the fire and accident, the resemblance was peripheral at best. Frank was astounded that two bodies constructed from the same molecular building blocks could have turned out so differently.

The destruction to his brother’s earthly vessel had been extensive—his beard and eyebrows had been burned off and an eight-inch scar where a ragged sliver of plate glass had bisected his left brow and cheek gleamed with stitches and opaque antiseptic ointment. Jake told Frank about his hands, but seeing the bandaged batons at the ends of his wrists had hammered home that Jacob’s painting days were—the one creepy blood portrait notwithstanding—over. And whatever physical problems he had been prepared for were negligible when compared to the decay of his mind.

The brilliant Jacob Coleridge was losing the core reactor in his head was the hardest thing for Frank to fathom. Jacob had been a fixture in his life since the day their cell had divided, before he had become a husband or a father or a painter, and the one continuous fiber that ran through all the stages of their lives had been Jacob’s genius. Technically, Frank knew that cell for cell they possessed the same gray matter, but he had lived long enough to know that technicalities didn’t count for shit in the practical world; a show on the Discovery Channel had NASA engineers mathematically prove that technically speaking, bumblebees couldn’t fly. So in a genetic sleight of hand, Jacob had ended up with more than a fair share of that indefinable quality called talent. But Frank had never been jealous of his brother’s gifts in anything except Mia.

Mia.

Her name was still a dull ache in his chest. He had never told Jacob. Or Mia. He had, in fact, believed that it had been his only secret from his brother. But one night a few years after she had been murdered, Jacob, in one of his highball-fueled diatribes, had spat it out, like some poisonous tumor rotting in his stomach, and Frank had been forced to confront his brother. He had lied, shaken his head, denied, denied, denied. But Jacob had been relentless and had lost his temper, smashing his knuckles into the table, then into the wall, then into Frank’s face. That had been the end for them.

Frank looked down at his twin brother, strapped into the bed, medicated, small, asleep, and wondered why this opera was being carried out. “What do I tell them?” The only sound was the soft rasp of Jacob’s breathing and the hum of the fluorescent bulb.

His voice sounded serious in here, solemn, and he reached out and touched his brother’s foot through the blanket. For a brief second, he hoped that good wishes and the best of intentions could be transmitted through the waffled cloth. He squeezed Jacob’s foot, warm and stiff under the yellow shroud, then withdrew his touch. Jacob’s head moved on the pillow and he tried to lift one of his arms. The buckle clinked. And his eyes popped open, gleaming sickly in the yellow light that dropped down from the fixture hanging over the bed.

Jacob licked his lips and his eyes swung halfway across the room, from the window he had been facing, to his brother standing at the foot of the bed. Their eyes met and Frank realized that their lives had gone by, that most of the sand had dropped to the lower bout of the hourglass.

“Frank?” Jacob said tentatively, as if he didn’t trust his own judgment.

“Yes, Jacob, it’s me.”

Jacob looked around the room like a drunk waking up in an alley, not sure how he got there. “Frank,” he said again, and tried to move his arm. The belts and buckles holding him in tightened and he swiveled his head and glared at the straps. Then he looked at the spiderweb of nylon harnessing him in. “Frank, what the fuck is going on?”

Frank’s face split into a broad grin because he knew his brother was lucid. “Hospital, pal.”

“You here to spring me?” His eyes focused on the big clubs at the ends of his wrists. His face grew puzzled, then angry, like a character in a science fiction movie who wakes in a lab to find that his hands have been replaced with giant lobster claws. “And what the fu—” The sentence stopped short and he sucked in a long breath. “Oh, God. The fire. The window.” He tried to move his leg, his other arm. “Frank, can you undo some of these buckles?”

“The last time you were free you chewed off your bandages and painted a picture on the wall in your own blood. If I unleash you, you gotta stay put.”

Jacob’s face went red, only under the yellow light it came through as a sickly pink. “Jesus fucking goddamned Christ, Frank. Unbuckle me or cut these fucking straps or get the fuck out of here.”

Any other time, any other place, without having heard everything that Jake had laid out back at the house, he would have taken the old Ka-Bar out of its sheath and cut his brother free. But with everything he knew, everything he had been warned about, it took him a few seconds to make up his mind. “Fine. But keep it together.”

“Or?”

“Or the nurse is going to come back in here and shoot enough tranquilizers into your ass that they’ll be able to remove your brain with a vacuum cleaner and you won’t even notice. We clear?”

Jacob glared with the two pieces of flint he was using for eyes.

Frank undid the restraints at his brother’s feet and wrists, leaving the loop that shackled his waist fastened so that he wouldn’t be able to get out of the bed; the pineapple-sized knobs at the ends of his arms made undoing any buckles impossible.

Jacob stretched, brought one of his former hands up to his face, and rubbed his eyebrow and cheek like a bear scratching against a tree. The stitches sticking out of the antibiotic ointment made a soft rasping sound against the fabric. “How bad are my hands?” His voice was clear, but there was a slight slur to it, no doubt from the painkillers going into him one dull drop at a time.

“You want me to get the doctor?”

Jacob let out a long irritated sigh. “If I wanted you to get me a doctor, I’d have asked you to. What I want is for you to tell me how my fucking hands are.”