A human skin. Weighed down with a cinder block.

Jake screamed and lost the air from his lungs in one violent roar. He breathed in, sucked in silt and saltwater and despair. Vomited under the water. Instinctively pushed for the surface.

Broke through.

Screamed a long, horror-wracked vowel. Then dove back into the muck.

He found the cinder block, lifted it up, and wrapped his fingers around the oily skin below.

Foraged on the bottom.

Found a second cinder block.

And a second skin.

He wrenched it free, pushed for the surface, and came up in the shallow end.

They were as thick and as heavy as lead-shielded X-ray bibs. Jake stood there, his heart pounding against his ribs, unwilling to look down.

What was left of Kay in one hand.

What was left of Jeremy in the other.

Hauser stood on the deck above him, his mouth still turned down at the corners in such a way that it looked like his face had taken on a permanent set. He turned on his Maglite, flashed it on Jake. On the things in Jake’s hands. Then snapped it off.

Jake went to the steps, stumbled up, and collapsed on the deck.

Kay’s skin unrolled with a meaty slap. Her eyeless, toothless, lifeless face pointed up into the sky and Jake saw that a knife had opened her mouth from ear to ear. The pool had scrubbed her clean and every bruise, every laceration, leered up at him in madness.

“No,” he said so softly that it may not have been spoken aloud at all.

Jake turned to the skin that had covered his son. It was ragged around the edges and scrubbed clean from its time in the pool. There were no ears.

Hauser came over but kept the light off. “Inside, Jake.” The pistol hung loosely in his hand, glimmering like a prosthetic attachment.

Jake picked what was left of his little boy up, and something about it felt sickening. He got an arm under Kay’s torso, and her tattoo of the crossed pistols flashed in front of his eyes. Tough Love.

He looked down at her torn, chopped-up hands. Love. Hate.

Back at the pistols.

Tough Love, with a jagged line through it.

He remembered the T-shirt she had just purchased with Don’t Hassel The Hoff! across the front.

All that was left—slogans.

Jake picked up his family and they sluiced around his thighs, caressing him with long tendrils of skin. Kay’s hair made a rasping noise against his jeans.

He brought them to the living room, laid them out at Uncle Frank’s feet, and sat down on the floor. For a second he just stared.

“Are you here to kill me?” he asked without lifting his eyes from the horror on the floor.

Hauser took a step forward and lifted the pistol. “I guess you’ve figured it out by now.”

80

Scopes slalomed through the debris that littered 27, lights flashing, siren blaring. The world around him looked like the old black-and-white footage of Hiroshima he had seen on the History Channel. But without the frame to hold it in, to cut it down, it was so much larger than anything he could imagine by orders of magnitude. He felt like he was driving through a madman’s dream. Everywhere he looked—for as far as he could see—the world had been kicked apart.

This was the eye of the storm. There was still more to come. Looking around, he wondered why it would even bother coming back? What was left to take?

As of nine minutes ago when he had left the station, the death toll was at fourteen. Of course they would probably find more bodies. Buried in the debris. Hanging in trees. Washed up on the beach. And then there’d be the bodies they would never find. The ones that the storm had dragged out to sea to be swallowed by the Atlantic.

While the other officers back at the station regrouped—catching up on sleep and writing out their wills—Scopes headed to Jacob Coleridge’s beach house. He wanted to talk to Special Agent Jake Cole about a few things. He wanted a little perspective on what was happening. And maybe to hand back a little perspective.

Scopes was not a naturally inquisitive man, but the chewing-out Cole had handed him had been rattling around in his head the past two days and it got him thinking. Thinking about the six murders. About the disappearance of Cole’s wife and son. About the way Hauser was handling the investigation. What Scopes realized no one had clued in to was that this had to be coming from somewhere inside—somewhere close. But close was a matter of perspective, wasn’t it?

Scopes had been on the job for four years, which translated into more than a few shifts hosing chunks of bone and brain off the side of the road after some summer asshole had loaded up on too many Bombay Sapphires and missed a turn on the way back to the beach house; four years of dealing with hysteric widows after their husbands painted the ceiling with gray matter because their stockbroker had pissed their fortune into the pocket of some corrupt CEO; four years of responding to domestic calls where he had to read the Miranda rights to some crying drunk who had just finished his wife off with a tire iron because she had bought the wrong kind of beer. So Scopes was no stranger to punishment and he had always been able to hold his cookies.

But Jake Cole had a tolerance that couldn’t be measured in human terms. At least up until now. Scopes wondered how the Iron Man was holding up now that his family had gone up in a puff of smoke. He had seen him at the station last night, doing his dead man’s walk, trying to act like he was still alive when his guts had to be on fire. Scopes wondered how that felt for him.

He didn’t find any pleasure in these thoughts, but as he threaded his way through the obstacle course that used to be the town he had grown up in, he needed to occupy his mind with something. And Jake Cole and his missing family were a helluva lot more interesting than some fucking storm. He couldn’t do anything about Dylan. But Cole? That was something else entirely.

81

Hauser sat down on the edge of the hearth and rested the hand with the Sig on his knee. He watched Jake for a few minutes. “Wohl got a call from Carradine—you were right to send your mother’s Benz to the lab.”

Jake looked up at Hauser, his bloodshot eyes filled with tears. “What are you talking about?”

Hauser smiled and shook his head. “This is over, Jake. It stops with you and me.” He raised his eyes to the beach out beyond the windows. “The lab found two prints on your mother’s car. Index and middle finger of a left hand. Under the armrest on the console. Fingerprints in your mother’s blood. They had been wiped off but one of your magicians was able to raise them. Modern science—it’s a hoot, isn’t it?”

Jake felt his stomach tighten on its axis and the room suddenly felt a thousand times too small. Then his guts clenched and he bent over and vomited on the floor, beside his wife’s skin. He retched until he was burping up nothing in convulsive spasms.

“You want to know why the recent murders are so polished in comparison?” Hauser’s eyes slid back onto Jake. “You’ve evolved.”

82

He got Lewis for his eleventh birthday. His father had bought the ugly dog because it was a gift that required little imagination and even less common sense. Jake had tried to like it—actually sat staring at the stupid awkward thing and willing himself to like it—but it was another in a long line of lost causes.