Текст книги "Bloodman"

Автор книги: Robert Pobi

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Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

79

Jake moved away from Frank’s corpse with slow but fluid movements, as if his bones were not connected to one another. “You want to tell me what’s going on?” he asked.

Hauser stepped down into the sunken living room. “I thought that’s what you did, Mr. Witch-doctor. Figure shit out.” He said it softly, almost kindly, but there was something else, something angry, behind the words. He had his pistol in his hand.

“Where is my wife? My child?”

Hauser moved against the fireplace. The remaining curtains danced like ghosts, tattered and torn. The sheriff looked over at Frank’s misshapen head, disconnected jaw. “I ask the questions, Jake,” he said, bringing up the Sig, and that’s when Jake saw the big trench knife hanging off his belt—a killer’s knife, not a cop’s.

Jake now understood that part of him, the part that knew this was all going to be over relatively soon, had stopped caring. He also realized that back there, in the static of disbelief over how this had unfolded, Kay and Jeremy’s voices had stopped. Along with this came a great weariness. He nodded at the kitchen. “I need a drink.” It was a statement, not a request. He had stopped asking anyone for permission when he had walked out of this place all those years ago and he wasn’t going to start now, not even when he was staring down a nine-millimeter Parabellum.

There was a foot of sand in the kitchen and he had to wrench the door to the cupboard under the sink open. He pulled out a bottle of scotch that had been hiding at the back and poured two fingers into a teacup. His head was buzzing like a shorted bulb and he heard the harsh chirp of electrical circuits simmering. He knew that after the blue-white jolt his heart had taken, he’d need a few minutes to get his think box back on line. Spencer was dead. Frank was dead. While he had been out on the floor, someone had killed them both. No, not someone—the man his father had been terrified of. Jeremy’s man in the floor—Bud man. His father’s faceless portrait. The killer. The Bloodman. All of them. “You want a drink?” he asked Hauser.

Hauser nodded wearily, and came forward, the pistol still up. “Why not?”

“You’re on duty,” Jake said, and poured one for Hauser.

“And you’re a recovering alcoholic.”

“Just a drunk between drinks.” He slid the cup across the counter, then raised his own in a toast. He looked at Frank, dead in the chair over Hauser’s shoulder like the lighthouse behind Rachael Macready in that goddamned photograph in the house of the dead. His eyes filled with clear, bright tears.

All he could wonder was, Why?

He downed the booze and the fire was sweet and familiar. He closed his eyes, took in the heat and the beauty of the flames in his stomach. How long had it been since he had had a drink? But he knew, down to the minute if he really wanted to think about it—a gift from his perfect memory. Except for those four months he had never been able to buy back—those were gone for good.

He opened his eyes and Hauser was still standing there with that unhappy look welded onto his skull, eyes distant, mouth turned down. He looked like the stickers that Kay put on the chemicals under the sink so Jeremy wouldn’t pour himself an afternoon cocktail of bleach and stainless-steel cleaner.

Kay. Jeremy. Where were they?

The living room was full of sand and debris. The portrait of the man in the floor was gone, covered over. Jake swiveled his line of sight to the pool. The storm had emptied the algae and lily pads and the foundation had all but been swept out to sea. It still hung off the deck, tilted into the ocean, the waterline at odds with the angle of the rim. The water was a dirty brown now. Murky. Lifeless.

And he remembered what Frank had said. You’re the guy who thinks like a murderer. You do the math.

And his head lit up like the lightning that had been coming down all night. He knew where the bastard had put them. Somewhere no one would check, not even the cops when they had combed the property. Someplace so fucking close no one would think of looking there.

Jake came out from behind the counter. Fast.

Hauser flinched but Jake was so fast he was past the sheriff before he understood what was happening.

Jake barreled by, jumped through one of the blown-out windows, and dove into the pool.

The underwater world tasted of salt and mud, not chlorine. Jake kicked for the bottom and felt his hand sink into the muck and garbage that had settled after the storm. He palmed through the silt and his fingers brushed aside pebbles and stones and empty beer cans and scotch bottles.

His pulse throbbed in his ears. He slid his hands back and forth over the bottom, searching the debris. The air in his lungs tried to pull him to the surface, back to the world, but he kicked to keep himself down. He felt a hubcap, a broken plate, more empty cans and bottles. Then the rough form of a cinder block. And below it, something soft and rubbery that could only be skin.

Jake ran his hands over it and it rippled, coiled back onto his knuckles like it wanted to touch him, to let him know that it knew he was there. His index finger slid into a slimy depression—like Braille, it was familiar to his touch—a small, perfect belly button. And beneath that he felt the crescent-shaped ridges created by a single-edged knife. Beneath that, the rough concrete bottom of the pool.

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.

The part that infuriated him the most was how stupid it was. Tell it to sit, and it just stared at Jake as if he had asked it to tell him his telephone number. Shake or high-five was akin to a grammar question. Lie down or roll over was like asking that fucking dog to solve the Riddle of the Sphinx. The dog became neglected very quickly.

Then one evening Jake saw a dog play dead on the Dick Van Dyke Show—one of those boring old black-and-white programs that his mother made him watch because she thought humor was good for him. He saw the trick—performed with a German shepherd no less—and he became determined to teach it to Lewis.

By the fifth minute he realized that wonder dog was not going to be playing dead anytime soon. The only thing this dog was good for was smelling bad and pooping.

“Play dead!” the boy snapped, pointing at the ground.

Lewis stood there, eyes vacant, tongue lolling out of his mouth, actually looking like he had a smile on his face.

“I said play dead!”

Lewis took a step forward and got Jake in the mouth with a hot wet tongue.

And that did it. Jake stormed into the kitchen and ripped open the cutlery drawer. He found the big knife—the one his mother used to cut up chicken when she made that greasy slop called coq-au-vin. Jake pulled it out of the drawer, pounded back to the dog, and raised the knife above his head.

“PLAY DEAD!” he screamed at the dog.

Lewis’s ears snapped back and he winced. He knew the boy, knew how he became when his voice changed, and he backed up.

Jake charged the dog, grabbed it by the ear, and opened its throat in a wide swipe of the knife.

The dog made half of a high-pitched squeal, backed up a single step, and collapsed to the deck. Blood pumped out in a rhythmic arc that shrank with each pulse of his dying heart and his legs cycled in a run because his body did not yet understand that it was dead. He looked up at Jake with his big brown eyes.

The boy bent over the dog and spit on it. “THAT’S HOW YOU PLAY DEAD!” he screamed and went back into the house, closing and locking the door.

Of course, his mother knew. She had always known about him. Known how he was. Who he was. But Jacob wouldn’t listen. He’s had a tough start. Give him time. Give him a chance. Give. Give. Give.

His father had ordered her to take Jake out for breakfast, maybe to a movie. And the whole time she had just stared at him, as if examining an insect under a lens, her mouth a hard line, her eyes just a little too narrow. He had eaten a spectacular breakfast with a hearty appetite and when he had asked for more pancakes because they were his favorite, she had run from the table and he heard her sobbing in the restaurant’s bathroom.

After that morning she had always been afraid of him. And his parents’ marriage began to fall apart; it looked like eventually his father would have to make a choice between him and his mother. He had been on the boy’s side up until now, sticking up for him, trying to get her to give him a chance.

But it didn’t take a scientist to figure out that he had burned all of his chances with her—every last one.

As his father began the difficult process of choosing sides, Jake felt the gap begin to widen.

So he decided to improve his odds.

83

Jake was very still, his mind’s eye peering over one of the memory fences slapped up haphazardly between the different parts of himself. The images on the other side were spotlighted like exhibits in a museum—grotesque studies of a self he saw but did not recognize.

He drew the back of his hand across his mouth and it tasted of saltwater, tears, scotch, and vomit. Jake began to protest, to offer some kind of denial, but at that particular instant he saw something out of the corner of his eye, a glimmer on the staircase. He turned his head.

Jeremy sat on the bottom step, wearing the little hat with the dolphin embroidered on it. His son was smiling, hugging Elmo to his chest. He looked so happy. So alive. So real.

Jeremy lifted his little fist, opened and closed it in his own special version of a wave, then brought it back to Elmo. He flickered a little, like a distant television signal.

Tears filled Jake’s eyes. He blinked and they fell away. When he opened them again, Jeremy was gone.

Hauser stood up, circled around Jake. “You sonofabitch.”

Jake looked up, tried to focus on the man he thought of as some kind of an ally, some kind of friend. Did he not—could he not—see that this was a mistake? “I…I…didn’t…I couldn’t…”

“Yes, you could,” Hauser bellowed. “YES, YOU COULD!”

Jake’s defibrillator launched a bolt of electricity to his heart. He flinched, bit his tongue.

“You killed that woman and her child up the beach, Jake. You remember that?”

Jake shook his head. How could Hauser think that he had—?

But the compartments in his head were coming apart and the images were flowing together, creating pictures. Pictures that thrashed and screeched and bled. More pornography of the dead.

Jake had peeled Madame X, a squirming bag of shrieking bloody meat who had chewed off her own tongue. She had squealed and begged and bled and died in his hands. Jake Cole. The Bloodman.

The two television stations in his head were melding, knitting their separate signals into one program. The sequences they transmitted were still a little fuzzy, short on details. Except maybe the color red. There was plenty of that. More than enough to go around.

Hauser stepped to his right, blocking out Jake’s view of Frank with the yellow foam cracking his head apart. “Carradine told me that they got an ID on Little X, Jake. His DNA was matched through a lateral connection.”

“Through a sibling?” The only time children had their DNA on file was if they had been reported as missing and a sample had been provided to the bureau’s CODIS databank—the Combined DNA Index System. CODIS contained nearly three million DNA samples from missing persons. But a lateral match meant that they were matched through a family member who had their DNA in the CODIS databank—besides the missing persons section, CODIS contained nearly eight million genetic fingerprints of known offenders. As well as government and law-enforcement personnel.

Hauser’s face pulled tight and he looked into Jake’s eyes, the expression a cross between sadness and…what? Hauser walked over to Frank’s corpse, still shifting from the expanding foam. “I know who they are. Madame and Little X.”

Jake stumbled over and leaned against the island. “I don’t want to know.” The bright staccato of a rapid-fire slide show filled his vision. Faces developing out of shadows, like black-and-white photographs in a developing tank, growing clearer by the second.

Hauser shook his head, pulled two computer-printed photographs out of his pocket. He held them out, fanned wide like a pair of losing cards. Jake reached out, took them, and they slowly developed into faces. A woman. A boy. Beautiful. Alive.

His wife.

His son.

“No. No. Nononononononononooooooooooooo.”

Somewhere off in the distance he heard his son’s voice screeching as someone took him apart with a knife.

Not someone.

Him.

The Bloodman.

Me.

“Jake, I never saw them. No one did. You’ve been in Montauk for two weeks. TWO WEEKS! Jesus. You killed your wife and kid, Jake. Kay and Jeremy. You fucking skinned your wife and son, you sonofabitch. What is wrong with you?”

Jake’s chest thumped again but this was his adrenaline, not the Duracell. He held the photo, vibrating like a leaf in his hand. He saw Kay smiling up at him, then a quick loop of tape played through his head, one where she was on the floor, howling.

“Those horsehairs we found all over the house? They were from a bow. A cello bow.”

Jake could no longer see. His eyes had flattened into crystal lines. He saw light and dark and red but little else. “No. No. No. No.” Over and over. Inside his head, the images were flashing in series now, each one bloodier than the last.

Then Kay’s voice roiled up out of the dark, her screaming so intimately horrible that he clamped his hands over his ears to block it out. Only he realized that it was inside his head, and something about that made it all the more frightening. He began to scream, the sound echoing like a gored animal in a steel tank.

Hauser spat on the floor. “No one saw them, Jake, except you. That morning you and I were discussing Carradine, they were upstairs taking a bath, remember that? Sure, I heard water running. I heard a radio in the bathroom. But you know what I didn’t hear, Jake? Splashing. Talking. Laughing. Or any one of the million other noises you hear when a three-year-old takes a bath. There was no one else here with you, Jake. You were alone with your eidetic memory. You can create crime scenes in your head. You can create anything in your head. You’re like Dr. Frankenstein, blowing life into discarded pieces. You imagined your family.”

Jake’s chest filled with hot lava that seared his vocal cords shut, melted his stomach, sent a boiling burst of adrenaline up into his brain. He doubled over. “Stop this!”

Hauser’s hand was on his pistol and his eyes were humorless old pennies behind the yellow shooter’s glasses. “The two bodies in the Farmer house were your wife and child, Jake.”

“I was with Kay and Jeremy this morning!” he screamed. “Someone took them!” And it sounded like a lie, even to him.

Hauser shook his head but the pennies stayed nailed to Jake. “No, Jake. The woman and child were your wife and son.”

“That woman and boy died three nights ago, Mike! Kay and Jeremy disappeared yesterday!”

Hauser shook his head. “No, Jake. They died three days ago. I spoke to Carradine—the lab at Quantico matched the dead child’s DNA to you. Well, half to you, anyway.”

“I WAS WITH THEM TODAY!”…wasn’t I?

“No, Jake, you weren’t.” Hauser shook his head sadly. “Over the past three days, no one’s seen your wife or son.”

“If they weren’t here, who have I been talking to?” Making love to?

Hauser shrugged. “You don’t act crazy. It’s that memory of yours. Seems more like a curse than anything else. Carradine said you see things that no one else does. Maybe that’s exactly what happened. You pulled them out of your memory.”

Jake thought of the way his mother used to visit him after she died and his fingertips tingled like they were filled with spiders. “Why would they be at the Farmer house?”

“Wohl finally spoke to Mr. Farmer an hour ago. He’s in St. Lucia. He said that the house was rented by Kay River for the first of September.”

Jake was thumped in the chest again and the breath left him with an audible chug. “Do…you…realize…how…crazy…this…sounds?”

“DO YOU? You’ve been alone in here.” Hauser paused, searching back through all the little things he had missed. “Remember the pizza delivery? You ordered a single one for yourself. And a Coke. Because you knew there was no one else here.”

“That’s not true, I called the place to complain…”

“Do you remember placing the order?”

“Sure I—” And then he realized that he didn’t.

“You skinned your own family, then created a memory-generated model so you could—” Hauser paused, tried to understand the thought process involved. “You are so fucked it’s not even funny.”

Nobody’s your kind of mean, Jakey. Spencer’s words Teletyped across his mental TV screen. Spencer, who had not wanted to discuss Lewis. Because he knew. Nobody’s your kind of mean, his no-longer-alive voice repeated.

Then came the images of Kay on the bed with him mere hours before. Then he thought about the empty handcuffs.

He remembered the beach yesterday, Kay holding his hand, Jeremy waving to the couple walking by.

The couple not waving back.

Kay—incredulous—waving.

And the couple ignoring her, too.

Why?

They could not see her.

Or Jeremy.

Because they weren’t there.

“They weren’t locals,” Jake whispered. “That’s why,” this so small he hadn’t said it at all.

“No one saw them in town in the past three days, Jake. No one. And your wife kind of stuck out. No one at the Kwik Mart on Twenty-Seven. No one in the Big Shopper or the Montauk Market saw them. Not the place that sells the Hasselhoff T-shirts.” Hauser stopped, and for a second it looked like he stopped breathing. Then he filled his lungs with a great dirty gasp. “I don’t want this. I don’t want this more than anything in the world, Jake. But you did it. I see it starting to swing around behind your eyeballs. You’ve been in town for nearly two weeks. Two fucking weeks! You rented the place up the beach to take care of your father—you came here before he had his accident. You think I’m making this up?”

Jake shook his head. “I got here three nights ago. The night Madame and…and…Jeremy…and…” His voice trailed off into a sob as the little men in his head pulled the chocks from the wheels and the memories began to roll slowly forward.

“You murdered your wife and son at the Farmers’ house and you cleaned up. Because that part of you—the bad part—has been paying attention to what you know. It may have its secrets from you but you certainly have no secrets from it.”

The pictures arrived from his data-recovery software. Hundreds. Thousands. Millions. Frame by frame by frame.

He threw up again, a dry wracking spasm that shook his chest. “I don’t—What—? Oh, Christ. Fucking kill me!” The wind throbbed outside and somewhere off in the distance there was a crash of another house falling into the sea. “Please.”

He remembered Kay and Jeremy on the deck the other morning, Kay so proud of her Don’t Hassel The Hoff! T-shirt, Jeremy’s little hat with the embroidered dolphin on it. How could she…how could his son…?

And he saw other, fragmented pictures.

That twitched and shrieked and splattered and kicked.

His stomach convulsed in another violent swirl of acid and reflex and he threw up again, doubling over and retching loudly. Only there was nothing left to come out but pain.

Hauser went on. “After your wife and son, you killed Rachael Macready and David Finch. Then you killed Mrs. Mitchell and her daughter. You were floating in the water to clean yourself off. And that poncho probably protected you from most of their blood in the first place.”

Guess again, a little voice at the back of his head said softly.

Hauser’s jaw pulsed like steel cable. “I found the portrait inside the beach ball that the little girl made—you left it in the garbage can in the interview room. You said it was no good, that we couldn’t use it. Why was that, Jake?”

Hauser left the room, his boots thudding over sand, then thunking on the stone floor in the foyer. He came back with the steel polyhedron cradled under his arm like a football helmet. He stood on the raised step above the living room and tossed the frame to Jake. Jake snatched it in, hugged it to his chest, collapsed over onto it.

Hauser reached inside his poncho and pulled out the scissor-slashed skin of the beach ball that Emily Mitchell had constructed/channeled. He tossed it to Jake. “Put it together,” he said.

It landed beside him, a little left of the can of spray-foam insulation that had done Uncle Frank in. Jake shook his head. Cleared his throat. Tried to speak. The words came out cracked, broken, like the rest of his insides. “She…she…m…made a mistake. She didn’t read my father’s painting right. She did a portrait of—”

“A portrait of you, Jake. Not a mistake. Only you didn’t figure it out, did you?” Hauser tried to look into Jake’s eyes—into the man he had liked, the man who on the surface seemed like he had turned a poisonous past around and had built something for himself. Something beautiful.

He remembered hearing that every culture has a bogeyman.

Jake stared back, and his eyes were deep black; a red hemorrhage blossomed in his left, his right clear and bright.

“Your father wanted you to know that the Bloodman is you.”

Hauser came down and took the big stainless pistol from Jake’s holster. He backed up and emptied it into his palm. He dropped five of the .500-caliber cartridges to the floor and swept them away with his foot, into a puddle. He dropped the sixth into the cylinder, slowly spun it into place, and snapped the weapon shut.

“That’s why you’re so good at hunting killers, Jake. You understand their language because you’re one of them.” Hauser watched Jake, watched the memory walls in his skull come down one after another in the domino effect.

“Remember those two suitcases that disappeared from the Farmer house? The ones that you figured out from the indents on the carpet? Guess what?” He pointed at the corner where Kay’s Halliburton—dented and peeking open like a clam—lay beside the cello case, covered in sand and garbage that had blown in. “There’s the second one.”

“What about Kay’s cello? Why would she come up here for one day and bring her cello? She knew she’d have no time to play it. I bet we call the bus company in a few hours and no one will remember a woman with a cello, Jake. Kay and Jeremy came up in your car. That’s why there’s a baby seat in the back. You stayed at the Farmers’ a little while. And then…” He let the sentence drop off. “Your father wasn’t trying to warn you, he was trying to scare you away.”

Images were jamming up in his brain, tumbling over one another to let themselves out. His father had loved him, had defended him. And when Mia had been murdered, he had given up, crawled into the bottle, and tried to forget that he was still alive. Only he couldn’t stop painting because it was what he had been made to do. And in his painting, in his work, he had let it come out. He had loved his son, had not turned him in, but he had turned his back on the boy. We do things for blood we don’t do for anything else, Uncle Frank had said over the phone.