Текст книги "Bloodman"

Автор книги: Robert Pobi

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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

60

Judging by the lighted windows on the block, one in ten residents had opted to stay, probably figuring that if the hurricane got bad, and a storm surge rose up, they’d be safe this far inland. Everyone had been talking about how lucky they were that the storm had made landfall at low tide. Of course, no one thought that they were only nineteen feet above sea level and a good surge would scrub the town from Long Island. Or that the tide was destined to rise again.

Frank pulled the truck into the driveway of a small two-story postwar bungalow that was not dissimilar to Rachael Macready’s. They ran for the door, Frank zipped up in the oilskin jacket, Jake wrapped in one of Hauser’s rain ponchos. Mrs. Mitchell opened the door before they were up the steps and ushered them inside with the standard small talk that a change in weather generates. When they were inside she pulled the screen door shut, then the white-painted main door with the diamond window centered in it.

Jake could see her playing in the living room. Sobel had given Hauser her mother’s name and number and the sheriff had called ahead asking her mother’s permission for Jake to speak to her. Her name was Emily Mitchell. She was twelve.

Jake knew that there was no way to guarantee any sort of result. Maybe she was behind a linguistic wall that he wouldn’t be able to penetrate. Maybe he’d just burn up more time. But he didn’t have much in the way of options and even less in leads.

Jesus, he thought. Listen to me. Grasping at straws. If it hadn’t been so goddamned sad, he’d have laughed at it.

Mrs. Mitchell was bundled in an old cable-knit sweater that had splotches of paint on one arm and a patch on the other. Jake guessed that it was her version of a security blanket. “Mrs. Mitchell, thank you for this.” Jake pulled the hood off of the poncho. “This is important.”

Frank receded into a corner of the small entryway. “M’am,” he said stiffly.

Jake pulled out his badge and held it up. She dismissed it after a cursory glance—it was amazing how many people did that. “I talked to you at Dr. Sobel’s office this morning, I wasn’t sure you’d remember…”

On the table inside the entry were a kerosene lantern, a box of candles, and two flashlights that looked like Cold War relics. Jake wondered if she had tested them or simply pulled them out of whatever junk drawer they had been relegated to. Beside the hurricane essentials was another crappy novel, this one featuring a velvet-clad pirate in the midst of foreplay with a buxom countess whose expression belied lust more than rape.

“I remember you,” she said slowly, and something about the way she spoke told him a lot wasn’t being said. “I never thought you were an FBI agent, though.” She smiled awkwardly.

“I get that a lot.” But not as much as he had since he had come back to Montauk, he realized. “This is Frank.” Jake knew that the woman had to be a little skittery at having two strange men in her house during a hurricane asking her daughter questions as part of a murder investigation—regardless of what Hauser had said over the phone.

“Come in,” she said.

Jake pulled off his boots and Frank sat down on a small bench near the door to undo his old lace-ups. Mrs. Mitchell disappeared into the kitchen and he saw that the layout was identical to Rachael Macready’s house. “I made some coffee,” Mrs. Mitchell offered from the other room.

“That would be great.”

She came back with two steaming mugs just as Frank finished taking off his boots and Jake—the eternal student of human behavior—was surprised how flexible the old man was.

“Mrs. Mitchell—like Sheriff Hauser said on the phone, you don’t have to help me. Your daughter’s not a witness or anything like that. I am not even sure that she can help. I am here because I have nowhere else to go and, to be honest, I’m probably wasting your time as well as my own.” He was able to say it with conviction because it was the truth. “You’ve heard about the people who were killed in Montauk?”

She stiffened, and a little of the coordination seemed to leave her. “Everyone has.”

“I think the same man who killed those people also took my family.” He thought about Kay standing on her tiptoes so she could kiss him, about the way her hair smelled of papaya. And he thought about Jeremy and MoonPies. “My wife and three-year-old son.”

Mrs. Mitchell said, “I’m sorry,” barely above a whisper.

“I think I have an image of him but it’s in pieces.”

She held out the mugs. “Like a puzzle?”

“Yes.”

Frank took a sip of his coffee and said, “You’re an angel.”

She led them into the living room. “She either pays attention or she doesn’t. There are no in-betweens. Yelling doesn’t help. Shaking her doesn’t help. Slapping her doesn’t help. It can be frustrating. If she moves something, or touches something, don’t interfere, even if it’s yours—it makes her mad and you don’t want her to get mad.” She looked Jake over with an expression he hadn’t seen in a long time. “You have things to do, so you best be started.”

The living room was identical to the Macready victim’s, including the placement of the furniture. The only difference was a small bookcase crammed with candy-colored paperbacks with saccharine titles on their spines, denoting more romantic embraces between oversexed people with good hair and trust funds.

Emily was on the floor, putting a puzzle together. She had upended the box on the carpet and had flipped all the pieces over so they were upside down and all she had to work with now was a fragmented cardboard pallet of like shapes. She worked fast, snapping pieces home with the precision of an assembly-line robot. The scene looked like a film played in reverse.

“Emily,” Mrs. Mitchell said softly. “This man wants to show you something. It’s a puzzle. A picture puzzle.”

Emily kept locking the colorless cardboard shapes into place and the puzzle was growing rapidly. If she had heard her mother, Jake had seen no sign of it.

“She does these all the time. Won’t do a puzzle twice. I’ve tried to fool her by putting a puzzle she’s already done into a new box and laying it out upside down for her and she knows instantly. Just slaps it aside.” She brushed the hair out of Emily’s eyes and readjusted a big yellow barrette. “Don’t you, sweetheart.” She leaned over and kissed her daughter on the head. The girl hadn’t reacted to the introduction, the caress, or the kiss. She just kept firing the pieces of the puzzle home with the same blank expression Jake had seen on her face in Sobel’s office that morning. Back when he still had a family.

Mrs. Mitchell nodded at Jake and he put his laptop down on the floor in front of the girl. He opened it up.

The image frozen in the video frame was him, holding up one of his father’s weird little paintings. He looked half asleep in one of those typical poses taken between the ending of one movement and the beginning of another, like an alternative version of himself. Jake hit play on the trackpad and the miniature himself-but-not-himself version put the canvas in his hands down, picked up another. Then put it down and picked up another. And another. Again. And again.

Emily paid no attention to the computer. Her eyes were locked on the puzzle in front of her, her hands mechanically assembling the pieces as if each were invisibly numbered and she was wearing special glasses. Frank watched from a chair near the window, sipping his coffee and observing the girl with focused attention.

A few seconds in, Jake realized that he hadn’t started the film at the beginning. He reached over and hit the rewind button and the picture ratcheted back.

And that’s when Emily froze, a single brown puzzle piece held above its place in the big picture she was assembling.

Jake looked at Mrs. Mitchell. She shrugged.

Emily dropped the puzzle piece. Reached out. Put her finger down on the trackpad, and swung it across the black frame. The video began sliding by at high speed.

“No, Emily, that’s—” and Mrs. Mitchell grabbed his arm as he reached for the child. Jake froze.

The girl was watching the screen with rapt attention as the video sped by at sixty times its recorded speed.

Emily’s eyelids fluttered as the sped-up version of Jake went through the process of holding one painting up after another—in an endless loop. Her eyes didn’t seem to be looking at the screen, but beyond it, and Jake wondered if she was seeing anything in the random shapes that were snapping by too fast for him to catch. Every now and then he would get a glimpse of a canvas, an image that flashed by slowly enough for his brain to register its shape, but by the time he saw it, it was gone.

Emily sat photo-still as she watched the video, her only movement being that slight twitch in her eyelids. The wind and rain bombarded the house and the images of the canvases flicked by in jagged splashes of color against Jake’s almost unmoving form in the frame.

As he watched the girl, Jake forgot the mug of coffee cradled in his hands. Frank drank his absentmindedly and his attention was divided between the girl and the storm tearing through the neighborhood outside. The sea was funneling down the street in a two-foot-thick surge. A big wheeled garbage can somersaulted down the middle of the saltwater river, lid flapping like the jaw of a basking shark straining for plankton.

Emily watched the blue-glow screen, enrapt. By the second minute, she was whistling through her nose, a rhythmic hiss that was almost musical.

The video came to an end and Emily gasped. Without pausing, she drew her finger back across the touchpad, and the video began to crawl backward. The jerky, puppetlike movements that Jake’s alternate self had just danced through began to run in reverse, and it had the same unreal quality to it as Emily’s upside-down puzzle making.

The girl was humming now, a thick, deep-throated buzz like a power transformer heating up. Jake understood how ignorant thirteenth-century peasants could see autistics as being possessed; their world was so distant, so impenetrable, that there was no way to equate it with the nuts and bolts of the average mind. He watched her stare at the video—even if you ignored that almost complete upside down puzzle on the floor—and realized there was no way to label this girl as average. Not even in the abstract. Which said something.

The video ended.

Emily’s eyes stayed locked beyond the screen, her eyes focused on the pixilated universe inside the laptop.

“Did you see anything, Emily?” Jake asked, trying to keep the edge of hope—or was that hysteria?—out of his voice. Without her, they were at a dead end.

Dead.

End.

Skinned.

The little girl stared ahead, unmoving.

“Sweetie?” Mrs. Mitchell asked. “Did you see anything? Was there anything there?”

No movement.

Jake felt the adrenaline of expectation fizzle into the dull ache of despair. He began to stand.

Emily clicked to life.

She stood up and her expression changed from blank disregard to intense concentration. She stomped out of the room and Jake continued to rise but Mrs. Mitchell put her hand on his shoulder and shook her head. “She’s on a mission now. Maybe it has something to do with you, maybe she’s just off to stack the soaps in the bathroom, but she’s going to do something.”

Frank had stopped sipping his coffee and waited for the girl to return, absorbed by the whole weird process. Jake sat stone-still on the sofa beside Mrs. Mitchell, waiting for—what?

Off in another room there was the sound of a drawer being emptied, of utensils being gone through, then it stopped. More heavy footsteps as the girl moved to another part of the house. A door opened. Closed.

Emily came back into the living room carrying a beach ball under one arm and a pair of scissors and a few felt markers in her hand. She walked over to the stereo, snapped the power on, and pressed play on the CD player. The high-octane music of Johnny Puleo and the Harmonica Rascals came on in full volume.

Mrs. Mitchell leaned over and spoke into Jake’s ear. “She loves that CD. It’s all I’m allowed to play.” Something in her tone suggested that she wasn’t all that fond of the music.

Jake watched the girl, mesmerized.

Emily sat down on the floor and locked the beach ball between her legs. She turned it over like a gemologist looking for a flaw, and when she found whatever she was looking for, stabbed the scissors into the thick rubber surface. The ball sighed, then let its life out in a long protracted fart.

Then the little girl with the expressionless face went to work with her scissors and magic markers.

61

It took Emily Mitchell eleven minutes to finish her scissor surgery on the beach ball as Johnny Puleo and his Harmonica Gang belted out musical mayhem as accompaniment. She worked quickly, without time for reflection, her fingers deftly manipulating the skin of the ball like an Old World tailor going at a pattern. To most people it would have looked like there was no thought or deliberation behind her actions—just raw industry. Jake recognized the innate ability of someone born with a gift and for one of the few times in his life he understood why the people he worked with couldn’t understand how he did something—it was a simple lack of language.

Emily slashed at the rubber with her scissors, turning the wrinkled skin this way and that as she made precise cuts in the material. When she was done, her thick black bangs were plastered to her forehead with sweat and the bright yellow barrette that secured them hung lopsided by her temple.

She laid the ball out on the floor, colored side down, and the hundreds of cuts had reduced it to a flat plane, myriad small irregularly shaped shards barely connected by thin strands of rubber. Jake recognized these shards as a miniature model of the weird little canvases piled up at the beach house. The pieces were not independent of one another, and the gestalt was roughly the shape of a lopsided lobster with odd, clubbed feet and a deformed body, formed by thousands of small interconnecting scales—each denoting one of Jacob Coleridge’s blobs of madness.

She made her last snip in the ball and lay the scissors gently down on the floor. Then she picked up the markers and began coloring in her handiwork. At one point she stopped and stood up and Jake wondered what was wrong. But she just walked over to the CD player and hit Repeat.

“She only likes the first four songs,” Mrs. Mitchell offered as explanation.

Emily returned to the carpet by the sofa and went back to work like a high-speed robot programmed to color.

It took her another nine minutes of coloring in the loosely connected bits of rubber ball until she was finished. She stopped, placed the markers on the floor beside the scissors, and went back to work on her upside down puzzle.

Mrs. Mitchell looked over at Jake and shrugged. “I guess that’s it.”

Jake looked at the ball, laid out like a dissection in a biology class.

Mrs. Mitchell shrugged. “Looks kind of like some of the pieces on your video.”

Jake stared into the swirling rubber puzzle, trying to pick out details that made some sort of sense.

It was Frank who said, “It’s upside down.”

Jake stood up and walked around to the other side of Emily’s artwork. In the middle of the spider’s body, sprawled out like a gerrymander map, four irregularly shaped pieces of rubber came together and formed the image of a human eye.

“You sonofabitch,” Jake said through his teeth.

“What?” Frank came over and stood beside him.

“It’s a sphere. Jacob meant for this to be assembled into a sphere.”

“What would be the point?”

Jake squatted down and lifted one of the legs of the rubber skin; it was cold in his hand. “So you could only see the painting from the inside.” He looked up into Frank’s eyes.

Frank looked at the model that Emily Mitchell had constructed from her vantage point, way out beyond comprehension. “He really has lost his mind.”

Jake shook his head and tried not to sound too reverent. “This is brilliant.” He thought of the stainless polyhedron model on the console by the door, the one his father had welded thirty-plus years ago. It was about the same size as the beach ball. In fact, if he thought about it, it was worth betting that it was exactly the same size as the beach ball. Somehow the old man had broadcast on a frequency that Emily Mitchell had received. The idea that the panels back in the studio were actually the mock-up for the real piece of art, which was right here in his fucking hands, was too far-reaching to consider. How could he know that we’d be able to do this? Jake wondered.

And the answer was, he hadn’t. This was a fluke, a one-in-a-trillion-squared shot that had panned out. The girl had deciphered the panels, and she had somehow stumbled upon—or been magically instructed by the video to find—a beach ball of the right size. Jacob Coleridge’s wire-frame sculpture was just that—a frame. And this piece in his hand, this cold piece of rubber that felt a little too much like human skin, was the tailor-made canvas. This was what the old bastard had wanted. A spherical painting to be viewed from the inside—the perfect way to hide his work. And Jake had somehow stumbled on a solution. It had been an accident, one of those things that you read about every now and then.

The thought of anything else was simply ridiculous.

The cold, almost epidermal rubber felt perverse, wrong in his hands. But he had his mug shot.

Skinned.

Jake turned to Mrs. Mitchell. “Thank you for your help.”

62

Jake and Frank headed for the hospital, fighting into the wind this time, their progress handicapped by the lousy aerodynamics of the big metal beast. With the new lead, Jake had come out of his angry grief enough to be amazed at the force Mother Nature was throwing around. He wondered if the house back at the point was still standing or if it had been snatched from the shoreline in one violent grab of the ocean.

“You think that’s a portrait of the killer?” Frank jerked his thumb at the mutilated beach-ball skin that lay in Jake’s lap, wrapped in two garbage bags.

Jake caressed the plastic beneath his fingers, wondering what was in there. “I don’t know.” He thought about the mind it had taken to put this together—a three-dimensional painting that was supposed to be viewed from the inside. How many men were capable of something like that? A handful on the planet at most. Maybe less.

And he thought about the other part, the part that was a little too freaky-deaky to really examine, because there was no way to put it into any sort of context.

“Jacob wanted this to be seen from the inside? I don’t understand, Jakey.”

Jake wasn’t sure he did, either. “All those little canvases at the house—all those little irregular shapes piled all over the place, are parts of a whole—of a bigger piece. Alone, they are nothing. It’s like a digital photograph. Up close—too close—all you see are little squares of color, like tiles in a mosaic. I knew they meant something, I just couldn’t figure out what.”

“How’d he design it? Did you look at the way that kid chopped up that beach ball? Something like that takes a shitload of smarts.” Frank shook his head and fired up a cigarette.

“You can fault Jacob Coleridge on a lot of things but you can’t accuse him of being dumb. And I think that this thing was designed to be stretched over that sculpture in the—”

Frank slapped the steering wheel. “—hallway! Sonofabitch, that’s smart, I mean—” And he stopped, realizing that meant that this had been Jacob’s plan for three-plus decades. “Oh, boy.”

Up ahead there was a dip in the road that had filled in with water. Jake shifted in his seat. “That looks deep, Frank.”

“Don’t worry. Got a snorkel,” he said, and tapped the windshield, pointing to a pipe that stuck out of the hood in front of Jake. “Besides, this thing won’t float—it’s designed to fill up with water so we don’t lose traction. Might get your pants wet but do you really give a shit?”

Jake’s fingers wrapped tighter around the support bar mounted on the dashboard in front of his seat, keeping one hand on Emily Mitchell’s artwork in his lap. He looked to the east, to the waves detonating against the newly gouged shoreline, and tried to ignore that if the storm wanted them to drown, a snorkel wasn’t going to do shit.