Текст книги "Bloodman"

Автор книги: Robert Pobi

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

15

The preliminary press conference had gone well but the feeling that it was only the first of many quashed any momentary elation Hauser felt coming on. The storm was bad enough but somehow the specter of the double homicide was more threatening in a not so abstract way. Dennison at the NHC had done a good job of scaring him but somehow Jake Cole and his traveling road show of death had managed to eclipse even Dylan; the next few days would be an entry for the memoirs.

In his brief respite between the press release of the murders and a general meeting of his staff about the coming storm—which the sheriff had been nice enough to open up to the media in part of that give-and-take Jake had spoken of—he decided to go through the Mia Coleridge file.

The box smelled of basement and the first file was a once-bright red that had faded to pale salmon—a capital crime file. He placed the old manila folder down on the sparse top of his desk, peeled back the cover, and began reading.

The pages had become brittle and the staples had rusted, leaving dark red marks everywhere, like iron nails in a ship’s hull. By nature Hauser was a patient man, and this quality had always worked for him within the framework of his occupation; he began on page one and went through the file slowly and methodically, not bothering with notes or any sort of an effort to memorize facts. He simply wanted to find out anything he could about Jake Cole so he could get a feeling for a man he was forced to work with. Hauser had learned a long time ago that it wasn’t what he didn’t know that could hurt him, but rather what he knew for sure that just wasn’t so. It was an old logic—delivered in an almost obsolete vernacular—but it had served him well in his twenty-plus years in the department. He had very little in the way of disposable time but figured that a fifteen-minute trek into the history of the FBI consultant was worth the investment if he was going to hand over the keys to the kingdom.

He began with background notes that the officer on duty had taken the time to write out by hand—Hauser recognized the slow, careful script of someone who was bad with a pen and only took notes by hand because it was easier than using a typewriter (the not-so-distant ancestor of the keyboard), a condition he could empathize with because he shared it. A lot of the younger men on the force, the ones who had been born into the digital age, had no problem with the keyboard but Hauser wrote his reports out longhand and he recognized the fear of technology in the script before him.

It was a familiar handwriting, penciled in by his predecessor, Sheriff Jack Bishop. Hauser knew Bishop had been a good cop and a solid man when needed. Hauser also knew that three days after Bishop’s retirement, he had gone out to the garage, jammed a double-barrel twelve-gauge into his mouth, and painted the rafters with his brains. No one talked about it but they all knew why. A few of the old-timers, the ones who had given everything up for the job—their families, their dreams, their lives—realized that after the badge was retired and the sidearm was put in the safe, there really wasn’t much to look forward to. After all, when you had sacrificed everything for the job, what did you have when it was gone? It was a story Hauser had heard about more cops than he wanted to think about. And part of him felt smugly superior because he knew it would never happen to him. As much as he loved the job, he loved his wife more, his daughter more. And there was plenty of bird hunting and fishing still to do. Maybe even a cottage to build. Something upstate on a little lake where the musky fishing was good and the summers weren’t packed with weekend assholes who had more money than brains. Maybe that place where they had vacationed that last summer before Erin had gone off to Vassar; Lake Caldasac—you could buy a cottage on the water for thirty grand. And the fish were monsters.

The file was neatly stacked, like it hadn’t been rifled through as much as a murder case should be. Homicides were rare in his jurisdiction but not as rare as he would have liked. There were a few each year, usually chalked up to a drunken brawl that got out of hand or a domestic dispute that went supernova after too much yelling and not enough talking. The usual result was that someone with a surprised look on their face ended up on one of Dr. Reagan’s tables.

But this was a thing of legend. He had heard that during every cop’s lifetime there was a single case that eclipsed all others. Made a man want to leave the job. Maybe hang sheetrock. Even without the benefit of hindsight, Hauser knew that this would be his.

Hauser read Bishop’s notes before he went to the photographs he felt sticking out of the folder with the edge of his finger. Bishop had started with the basics, first-impression kind of things. Sex: female. Age: unknown. Height: approximately five foot three. Hair color: unknown. Race: unknown. Eyes: brown. Clothing: non-applicable. Back then, before they had started using DNA as an identification tool, they had relied on dental records—a slow and often worthless process. But Hauser checked a note that Bishop had come back and scrawled into the margin ten hours after the cover page had been time-stamped, stating that they had a positive dental match for Mia Coleridge. Hauser shook his head and snorted at that; today, when they were lucky, DNA took seventy-two hours to get sequenced, two weeks when they weren’t. But back then it had been real footwork and human ingenuity—not computers—to keep the whole thing rolling forward.

Hauser went down the sheet, the details puzzling him at first. A few lines in he began to recognize words, phrases, and he started to form an ugly picture in his head. After the end of the first page he stopped, flipped through a few more sheets, and went to the photographs of the crime scene.

He had known what he was going to see before he pulled it out—Bishop had been precise in that particular way cops had. But there was no way to bolster himself against something like this. Not unless he was some kind of a monster. He picked up the photograph and felt the air lock in his chest, felt the blood stop pumping in his veins, felt his cardiac pistons seize in one massive system reset.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, not meaning to. He stared at the image for a few seconds, the black-and-white doing little to stave off the nausea he felt stirring his empty stomach. Then he dropped the old photo to the desk and let out a low moan.

Staring up at him from thirty-three years ago was Mia Coleridge, body twisted in rigor mortis, teeth brittle white shards amid her bloody face. There was no expression on her visage except for the primitive animal snarl of pain. Other than that, you could barely tell you were looking at a human being, let alone a woman.

Mia Coleridge had been skinned alive.

16

Jake sat in his car under a tree in the hospital parking lot for ten minutes, trying to talk himself into heading east on 27 and not stopping until he was home with Kay and Jeremy. He listened to the radio for a few minutes, hoping that the chatter about the storm would take his mind off of what had happened in his father’s room upstairs. But the radio anchor very quickly began to annoy him with his very un-Cronkite-esque fear rhetoric and pseudo-factoids. Jake shut off the radio with an angry, “Oh, fuck off!”

Jake didn’t have a mountain of available time—not now, not ever—but he needed to clear his head. And he needed to get some work done. Only that had become more difficult the past little while, hadn’t it? The invasive process of turning secrets of the murdered over in his mind so many times that they became worn and polished from examination had started to become commonplace. Maybe he had turned into a ghoul, just like the people he hunted. After all, what did he like about the job? It was the subtleties, the nuances, that separated these monsters. The little signatory differences. The way one held a knife, the way another only bit down with the left side of his jaw. It was in these weird little psychosis-fueled details that their personalities began to shine. Maybe he wasn’t supposed to see these things. Like Hauser rushing out of Reagan’s lab today, maybe Jake needed to find a little of his lost humanity. It was as if he had a keyring in his pocket, only most of the keys just opened ugly places that he had to stop visiting because they were starting to feel too much like home. Kay had been telling him to quit for a while now. A year. And she was right. Hell, she was more than right, she was justified. He had agreed. Promised. All that was left to do was to tell Carradine. Yet he somehow hadn’t. Why?

Which is probably why he had come up here to deal with his father and the mausoleum of scotch and cigarettes and demented, black canvases. It was with a heavy, foul-tasting twinge that he realized that all the things that had gone on between him and his father were of no value any more. Not to him. Not to his father. And certainly not toward gaining any sort of closure. The door had slammed shut when the first threads of his father’s mind had begun to unravel.

What was he going to do? He needed help. Kay would be here this afternoon. But he needed a different kind of help than she could offer, as much as she’d try. He needed someone with a little distance. Someone who wouldn’t care if this was easy or tough on him. Someone pragmatic. Someone who could handle his old man. Problem was, with the exception of his gallery owner, Jacob had successfully driven everyone who had ever cared about him away. Every friend. Every publicist. Every—

Jake pulled his iPhone out and thumbed through the menu. It took a few seconds to find the number, but it was there, three months back. He sat there, the windows open, his thumb poised above the send button. Would Frank care enough to come or had Jacob burned that bridge as well?

He pressed send.

There was the sound of computer chatter, a low throaty whisper of static that sounded like the voice of the Devil played at seventy-eight RPM, followed by a series of clicks that Jake knew were satellite connections being made. It took almost half a minute until the phone at the other end began ringing, a series of double chirps that sounded strange, foreign. After fifteen or sixteen rings, a voice that belonged in a public service announcement against the dangers of smoking answered, “Frank Coleridge.”

“Frank, it’s Jake.”

Frank didn’t prod Jake with phony cheer, he simply took another drag on the cigarette that Jake knew was plugged into his face and said in that singularly unique voice, “What do you need, Jakey?”

“It’s Pop.”

“The—” there was a rasping sound, like someone tearing a dry leaf in half, as Frank took in a lungful of smoke—“fire?”

“You heard?”

“Yeah. Found a note on my door this morning. Neighbor left it.”

Jake rolled his eyes and remembered the nine sacks of mail at the hospital; it was amazing how the fame monster affected people.

Frank continued. “I’ve been out—” another long pull on the cigarette—“hunting. Just got back to the cabin.”

Jake scrolled through his mental filing cabinet for a second, trying to align Frank’s statement with his knowledge of state regulations. “What’s in season in September?”

Frank let out a dark arid laugh. “Nothin’s in season, Jakey. Had a bear kill a foal. Tracked him to high country. Old sumbitch with a bad leg. Only thing he could kill would have been that foal. Maybe a human child. Had to get him before that started happening. I was gone four days.”

“What did you get him with?”

Frank responded with a low laugh. “Lead poisoning. How’d your old man set himself on fire?”

“From what they know, he had oil paint all over his hands. Maybe he was lighting a smoke, maybe he was trying to throw another log on the fire.”

“He torched bad?” This was followed by another tearing leaf.

“His hands are gone. Lost three fingers and they’re not sure if he’ll be able to keep the rest. He was flailing around and ran through one of the plate-glass windows. Cut himself pretty bad.”

Frank whistled. “Without his hands, without his painting, the best thing that could have happened to your old man would have been if a big sliver of glass would have taken his head off. Without painting, not much of Jacob Coleridge is left. And what is, is pretty broken.”

“Frank, I could use your help. I need someone who’s honest. Someone I can trust. Someone who’s pragmatic.”

There was another pause as Frank took in some smoke, coughed one short rattle, and said, “Who says you can trust me? It’s not like your old man and I got along all that well.”

Jake closed his eyes, and dropped his head back onto the leather seat. It was a good question. It was more than good—it was valid. “Frank, cut the shit. I trust you and I don’t trust anyone. I need to deal with Dad’s life and with what’s happened to him. You wouldn’t believe how he’s been living.”

“Worse than before?”

“I found keys, paperbacks, and sod in the fridge. The house is an ashtray. There are empty bottles all over the place. The rooms are crammed with crap. Some of them are locked and I haven’t been able to get them open. The studio is bolted shut. There is a barricade in the bedroom.” Then he just stopped. If that hadn’t painted reason enough, nothing would. Besides, he hated feeling like he was asking for something almost as much as having no one else to ask.

“You have anyone else helping you out?”

“Kay is supposed to come up from the city but with this storm heading our way, I wouldn’t be surprised if she stayed in New York.”

“What kind of storm?” The question was calm, serious, and showed that Frank was obviously dragging his ass in the television-watching department.

“Category Five Cape Verde. They’re advising evacuation at this point. I wouldn’t be surprised if it came to a forced evacuation.”

Frank whistled and even that sound was dry, brittle. “Another Express.” The New England hurricane of 1938 had gone down in the books as the Long Island Express. “Stock up on water and batteries. Or better yet, get out, Jakey. Get your dad airlifted if you have to. Get him on an ambulance. Go home until this blows over.”

Jake wanted to listen to Frank, but the monkey in the wrench was the woman and child skinned up the beach. He had to be here. It wasn’t a question of choice. “I can’t, Frank. There’s other stuff I got going on.”

Frank’s voice grew distant, flat. “Work?”

“Yeah, work.” It happened again, he wanted to add.

“If you stay, put a survival kit together. Something that will keep you hydrated and fed and maybe even dry for a week if things get as bad as Katrina. The one thing on your side is that you are above sea level. Put a bag together. Handgun with extra ammunition. Seal a bunch of toilet paper in Ziplocs—nothing worse than wiping your ass with a sock. Good solid knife. A Ka-Bar or dive knife. Something you can use for a tool. Antiseptic ointment. Sutures. Gum.”

Jake closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose, and tried not to be dismissive. Frank was a pragmatic man, which is why Jake needed his help.

Frank had never been married but had always carried on long—and more or less monogamous—relationships with very distinctive women his entire adult life. Some younger, some older, some wealthier, some not. And the relationships had all seemed solid, pleasant. But the inevitable announcement would come that she had left during the night. A brief period of a little too much booze and not enough self-control would follow, and soon another striking woman would begin appearing at his side. Not long after Mia’s murder, Frank had moved away from Long Island. To hunt more. Spend more time with Nature. But Jake knew that he had moved to get away from the memories of all the good that had once been here. He had ended up in the Blue Hills of Kentucky.

Since the brothers were no longer talking, Jake had lost touch with his uncle and things had stayed broken until all those years later when Jake woke up in a quarter inch of cold shitty water on the kitchen floor. He had somehow found Frank. And asked for help.

Jake never forgot that Frank had saved his life. And he was so unused to asking anyone for help that he felt guilty about asking for it now. “This is Long Island, not Zimbabwe.” There was a fondness in his voice that he didn’t have for his own father. He spoke to his uncle a few times a year, mostly when the job was getting to him and he needed to get an outside perspective on the world. Jake had an enormous amount of respect for the man. “I’m a shooter, not a shootee.”

Frank laughed and it sounded like a diesel engine turning over. “Still, get yourself some supplies. You’re a smart boy, Jakey, always have been.” His laugh rattled to a stop. “Although I guess calling a forty-five-year-old man a boy is kind of an insult but when you’re as old as I am, anyone who doesn’t have to tape his balls up so they don’t swing into his knees is a kid.”

Jake smiled, and suddenly realized that he wished he had been able to talk to his father like this. Not all the time, but once would have been good.

“And be careful. It’s acting like things are the same as always when they aren’t that will get you in trouble. You handling this all okay?”

“I’m good, Frank.” He thought back to his father’s kitchen and realized that at least some shopping was in order. “I just need someone who will get things done.”

“And that’s me.”

“And that’s you.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“I can book you a flight, I have air miles. I get free—”

“Fuck free. I’m not flying. I’m driving. I have to finish changing the fuel pump on the truck but I can get that done by supper. Be there within twenty-four hours.” There was a pause as he fired up another cigarette. “He in any pain?”

Jake thought back to the tranquilizer that Nurse Look-alike had pumped into the drip. About his father’s screams. And the points of white mucus in the corners of his eyes. “I can’t tell, Frank. The old Jacob Coleridge is gone. Just gone. He’s confused. He’s scared.”

“You can accuse him of being a lot of things, Jakey, but scared is not one of them. Never. Not when we were growing up. Not when we were in Korea together. Not in bar fights or staring down pirates. Nothing scares your old man.”

An image of the barricaded bedroom door lit up for a second. “He’s scared now, Frank.”

Jake heard Frank pull on the smoke. “Yeah, well.” The old man didn’t sound convinced.

“Thanks for doing this, Frank. I appreciate it.”

“That’s what blood’s about, Jakey. You do things for blood you don’t do for anybody else.”

17

The sheriff’s cruiser was in the driveway when Jake got back to the house. Hauser sat inside, windows open, doing a good imitation of a man trying to sleep and being unsuccessful. As Jake’s sleek Charger entered the drive, the cop got out of the car, leaving his Stetson inside. He came over to the shade of the big pine where Jake parked, his movements loose from lack of sleep, not comfort.

Hauser ran his finger along the line of the front quarter panel, feeling the metal beneath the glossy paint. Then he looked back at his own car, an updated version of the classic American muscle car, and something about the movement seemed tentative. Jake hoped the cop wasn’t about to start talking cars—he hated talking about cars almost as much as talking about the stock market. More, maybe.

Jake shut off the engine, opened the door, and swung out into the afternoon. He nodded a greeting and took the bag of groceries from the baby seat in the back.

“Cole,” Hauser said, trying to sound good-natured but only making it a little past tired. Jake heard something else in his voice. Embarrassment, maybe.

Jake fished his father’s keychain out of his pocket. It was a flat stone with a hole drilled in the center, worn smooth from rubbing against pocket lint and scotch tops for years. “Sheriff.” He figured that Hauser was here to interview him.

Jake had gone through this before—it was part of being the resident interloper with every department he visited. Hauser needed to have faith in his team. So he surrounded himself with reliable people. If Jake was part of that team, Hauser would want to know a little more about him. And if you took this equation a little further, Jake had been interviewing Hauser as well.

Jake balanced the groceries on his knee, turned the key in the lock, and pushed the big door open. “Coffee?”

“Sure…” Hauser let the word trail off as he walked into Jacob Coleridge’s house. He stopped in the doorway and looked around. He saw the whiskey bottles, the cigarette butts, the paintings stacked like cordwood, and the decades of neglect covered by dust.

Hauser paused by the Nakashima console in the entry, leaned forward, put his hands on his knees, and examined the spherical sculpture that had sat there for decades. It was a wire-frame model of—what? A molecule, Hauser guessed. “Jake, what’s going on?” He sounded more than tired, Jake realized. He sounded frightened.

Jake considered the question as he dumped the groceries out on the counter. He caught a can of tuna before it rolled off the edge. “I don’t know. Not yet.” He examined the can, then surveyed his healthy smorgasbord. Part of him was happy that Kay wasn’t here to see this gastronomical crime; his foray to the Kwik Mart on 27 had yielded him two six-packs of Coke, a can of spaghetti sauce, a package of linguini, two cans of tuna, a loaf of Wonder Bread, a squeeze bottle of mustard and another of mayonnaise, two packs of luncheon meat that resembled packaged liposuction fat, a carton of cream, some club soda, a tin of coffee, and some sugar packets stolen from the coffee counter. He had taken a little of Frank’s advice; in the car were two cases of water, a flashlight, a dozen batteries, and a box of pepperoni sticks. He pulled the tab on the coffee lid and it hissed open with what sounded like a death rattle.

Hauser meandered through the detritus of Jacob Coleridge’s life, unintentionally casing the place, a species-specific habit natural to cops and crooks alike—it was something that Jake both recognized and resented. Hauser stopped in front of the piano and examined a small painting that was part of a larger pile on top of the instrument, ignoring the huge expanse of ocean through the big plate-glass window. On the floor at his feet was the box the handyman had left behind, full of half-used tubes of silicone and a few cans of spray-foam insulation. “Mind if I take a look?” he asked, pointing at one of Jacob Senior’s ugly little canvases.

Jake was at work on the coffee, the twelve-stepper’s surrogate addiction. “Knock yourself out.”

Hauser picked up one of the asymmetrical blobs that was jammed under the dusty Steinway and held it away from himself. He examined the painting for a few seconds, holding it first one way, then rotating it to look at it another, trying to decide which way it went. He flipped it around and looked at the back, as if he had missed something. After a few seconds he shoved it back under the piano. “I don’t know shit about art,” he said. “But if I look at a painting and don’t know what the hell I’m looking at, it’s not for me. I don’t want a painting that represents the plight of man. How the hell can you paint that? Me? I want a field. Or a pretty girl on a swing. Hell, I’d even take dogs playing poker. But I guess I just don’t understand this modern stuff.” He shrugged.

“To quote my father about the only thing I’d trust him on, it’s self-indulgent undisciplined crap.”

“Not a fan?” Hauser sounded a little relieved.

“I like my father’s early work. The stuff he did before he made it onto the college syllabuses. Maybe up until 1975 or ’76. After that…” He let the sentence trail off into a shrug.

In the ensuing silence, Hauser shifted his focus to the big window and the Atlantic beyond. “Helluva view.” The wind had picked up from earlier; the high-pressure blanket that sat over the coast was being slowly pushed away by the advancing hurricane, 1,600 miles and closing.

Jake finished scooping grinds into the basket and flipped the machine on, a little stainless-steel Italian robot that had been bought before the great coffee revolution had swept America and its suburbs into believing that Starbucks knew what it was doing. It started to hiss and he came around from behind the counter. “Are you going to give me the protocols?”

Hauser looked down at the large manila envelope in his hand, as if it might be seeping pus. He held it out.

Jake tore it open, upending it over the coffee table, now clear of the forest of cigarette butts and empty bottles. Photographs, two computer disks, and a sheaf of files held together with a black office clip glided out. Jake picked up the photographs.

All of a sudden he was back in the house, walking its halls, examining its dead. Hauser, the coffee maker sputtering away, the hiss of the surf beyond the window, the slight static that every house has—faded away. He was there. In the room with her and her child. With his work.

The first photo—clear, color, well lit—showed her fingernails, scattered over the carpet like a handful of bloody pumpkin seeds, strands of flesh hanging off in little black tails. He flipped through the photos until he found the one he wanted, a close-up of her left eye. It stared up at him like the satellite photos of Dylan on CNN, only her eye was lifeless, the white ruptured in dark subconjunctival hemorrhages. “This guy’s not fucking around,” he said, and dropped the photo to the table, stepping out of the murder scene in his mind.

“You looked like you were in some sort of a trance.” Hauser’s eyes narrowed.

“I reconstruct things in my head. It’s what I do.” The smell of coffee reached him and he changed the topic. “Sugar? Cream?”

“Two sugars, no cream.”

Jake wound his way through the vast expanse of the great room and the ease, the familiarity, with which he did surprised him. He had been back less than—what? Twenty hours maybe, and already the house was once again home. Except for the locked doors. The sod of lawn in the fridge. And that his father had lost his grasp on most of the tangible parts of his psyche.

Jake pulled two cups from the rack beside the sink—now full of dishes he had cleaned—and poured the coffee. He added sugar to both cups and looked up to find Hauser standing in front of the counter.

“My mother had Alzheimer’s. I know how hard this can be.” It sounded accusatory.

“Whatever is between my old man and me is not going to affect my performance. It took your lab—” he checked his watch—“nine hours and fifty-one minutes to process those protocols.” He nodded across the room to the coffee table. “You want shortcomings, you’ve got all you need right there.”

“I don’t see how you can be objective here. I don’t want some FBI ghost-hunter all hopped up on vengeance kicking the shit out of this thing. Do you have a thirty-three-year-old axe to grind?”

Jake froze, raised his eyes to Hauser. “You want me to tell you this is not personal? I don’t lie, Mike, it’s bad policy.”

“I need to know what I have to worry about.”

Jake pointed at the coffee table. “Nine hours, fifty-one minutes is a good place to start. Two full-time detectives should have had that done in five hours flat. And it would be useful, solid data. Your lack of experience in this is your biggest liability. Me? I’m the guy who’s going to be doing all the heavy lifting.”

Hauser stopped, swiveled his flat-top toward Jake. “Is this guy crazy?”

“Sure, he’s crazy. But is that going to help you find him? Probably not. He’s not crazy in his public life, at least not most of the time. It’s the quiet time he has inside his own head, sitting at home in his garage, or in his study, or in the little room out behind his house, that the freak comes out to play. These guys are all fucking crazy, but they know what they do is wrong, Mike. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t hide it. They all know that there are consequences for their actions. Unfortunately, it’s the only way most of them can fire up the money shot.

“This guy, there’s something different about him, though. Most killers do it as an act to pleasure themselves. It’s not about the victim, it’s about enacting their own fantasies out on a stage, and that stage usually involves the victim as a bit-player. But the focus is always on themselves. This one…he—it’s about them. It’s like he’s—I don’t know—punishing them. He skinned them and left. No evidence of any kind of performance or reenactment. He wanted to hurt them.”

“So he knows them?”

Jake nodded, then shook his head, and the movement was unsettling. “He thinks he does. He’s acting out against someone. They just take the brunt of it. His mother, probably. Maybe all women in general. I don’t know. Not yet.”

“You’re going to stay on the case?”

“I have to. I don’t want this to happen again.”

Hauser looked like he had been zapped in the base of the spine by a wasp. “You think this is going to happen again?”

All of a sudden Jake realized that the thought had never crossed Hauser’s mind; in his desire to see this go away, he had swept it under that vast expanse of psyche carpet used to avoid facing grating truths. And a skinned woman and child were a hard thing to deal with in any capacity. “I guarantee it.”

“How do you know? Why? Are you sure? I don’t—”

“What happened here?”

“A woman and her child were—” He swallowed. “Taken apart. Skinned.”

Jake nodded. “What does that tell you?”

“That we’re dealing with one sick sonofabitch.”

Jake shook his head. “No. Think in cold, objective terms. What else does it tell you?”

“It takes someone special to do that kind of thing. To find pleasure in it.”

Jake nodded. “And if he liked it, what would the next box on the flowchart say?”

Hauser froze for a second as the machinery in his head went through the process. “He’ll want more.” He looked up and his eyes had gone back to that sickly flat that they had possessed in Dr. Reagan’s lab. “He’ll want lots more.”