What was left of Mia Coleridge lay on a red patch of gravel 200 yards away.

10

Jake sat in a vinyl and aluminum chair jammed in between the sink and the window, staring at—but not seeing—his father. His mind was walking through the rooms at the Farmers’ house up the highway. He was in one of the guest rooms—an empty guest room—looking at the floor. He squatted down on his haunches and focused on something on the threshold. He had only seen it glimmer for a second, then he was past it, and it had become invisible. He leaned forward and the nearly straight line of a long strand of yellow hair, almost white, jumped off the topography of the wood grain.

He moved his mind’s eye back and forth, taking it in. It was twenty-six or twenty-seven inches in length, and thin, wispy. It was well past yellow and on its way to white. He hoped Hauser’s guys had bagged it.

Why hadn’t he said anything last night? Because he was used to working with the bureau boys, and their forensic guys never missed things like that. In a way, it was a test. A test he hoped Hauser’s people passed.

He’d see the medical examiner in a few hours and there would be a lot more in the way of answers. Until he talked with the ME, and examined Madame X and the child, all he had was the three-dimensional model in his head. More than enough to work with. Enough to kill a few hours with at least.

In his head, Jake left the room with the yellow hairs, turned, and walked on down the hall to the room where the murderer had spread Madame and Little X all over the floor. He stared down at them. Eyes massaging the scarlet mess for…for…

“Can I get a drink?” a voice said out of the darkness and the model fell apart. He was back in the hospital in the chair in the corner and he blinked once, fiercely, and saw his father staring at him.

He had lost none of the worldliness that had made him a favorite of critics and fans alike. He had never pretended to be polished or special. He believed he was what he was: a painter. And now he was a thirsty painter. “Well, dickhead, can I get a drink?” he asked again, his voice hitching up with a tremor of irritation.

Jake stood up. “A drink? Sure.” Then he remembered Nurse Rachael’s story about the scotch. “There’s only water. No scotch.” Staring his old man in the eyes now, he felt nothing, not even a glimmer of the old poison. And his father’s snarl didn’t push any of the scare buttons it used to. Then again, he wondered if he even owned scare buttons anymore or if they had all been lost along the way.

The old man smiled as if he were talking to a person of diminished capacity. “Of course there’s no scotch. It’s a hospital. You think they hand out scotch at a fucking hospital? What kind of a volunteer are you, anyway? Sitting there staring off into space. Aren’t you supposed to be reading to me or scratching my ass or some such bullshit since I can’t do anything myself?” He held up his hands, two clumsy stubs of white gauze, black-red where dark punches of blood had seeped through. “Why don’t you—” And then he stopped abruptly, as if someone had pulled the plug to his vocal transformer. After a few seconds of examining Jake’s face, he asked, “You look a little like Charles Bronson. My son looked a lit—” And then he stopped again, voice box on pause. He looked at Jake for a few heavy breaths, examining his features. “I can see it in your eyes,” the old man said, something about him suddenly very still.

“See what?” Jake asked.

“The dead people have started showing up.”

11

The room was cold and humid and the air tasted of steel and disinfectant. But the lighting was good and Dr. Nancy Reagan knew how to run a lab. There were only two permanent autopsy tables in the room, and Jake was grateful that they weren’t in the middle of the busy season. He often wondered how little country offices managed to solve any crimes at all with the limited resources they had; the ME for the greater Manhattan area had sixty-five full-time autopsy tables and a four-floor lab that occupied an entire city block. Not to mention a backup network of nearly 1,000 folding units in the event of a natural disaster or pandemic situation.

Two bodies lay under semitransparent plastic sheets. Both were laid out straight now, the rigor mortis having either been eased or broken out of the joints. One body took up a lot less real estate under the sheet. Both looked black under the semi-transparent polyethylene covers, only going to red where a wet bit pushed up against the plastic.

Sheriff Hauser stood at the foot of the two tables, his arms crossed tightly across his chest, his jaw clenching its way through half a pack of very strong mint gum. His hat was on a seat by the door and he stood a little lopsided—not very pronounced, but noticeable if you paid attention.

Dr. Reagan had a home-court advantage here and she pretended to be busy for a few minutes before heading over. Jake thought about going to her desk and picking her up by the elbow but decided that he’d let her have her literal fifteen seconds. Of all the links in the chain here, Reagan was second in importance only to Sheriff Hauser—and it was an arguable distinction at this point of the investigation.

Jake stood beside the longer body, his hands on his hips, his breathing down into the slow range, waiting for Reagan’s power trip to blow itself out so they could all learn a little more about what had happened to Madame and Little X.

The ME finally stood up, straightened her lab coat, took a sip of coffee, and came over, her pumps—elegant and black—clack-clack-clacking on the cold linoleum.

She stared down at the autopsy report. “First off, Special Agent Cole was right. I don’t have DNA confirmation yet but I do have a matched blood type that points to mother and child. AB negative.”

“One person per hundred and sixty-seven individuals,” Jake repeated from memory.

Reagan raised her eyes above the lenses of her glasses. “Female. Roughly five foot one inch tall. Age twenty-five to thirty-five. I’d lean to early thirties. Ninety pounds, postmortem. Pre? We can say roughly one-twenty, depending on how much subcutaneous fat she had. I’d go with very little. She was fit.”

“COD?” Hauser asked.

Reagan’s eyes stayed balanced above her glasses. “She bled to death. They both did.”

Hauser nodded like he regretted asking, then lapsed into his former sullenness.

“Distinguishing physical history?” Jake asked, his hand slowly climbing for the head of the sheet.

The medical examiner shook her head. “Her right wrist has been fractured. It’s an old break, most likely a fall. It was compound. Other than that, no previously broken bones. No wounds, operations, or deep-tissue scars on her body.” Dr. Reagan flipped through her notes, and pointed to the corpse laid out on the stainless-steel table.

“Last night makes up for that,” Hauser said, barely above a whisper.

Reagan took a deep breath, but there was nothing theatrical or pensive about it, she just wanted enough oxygen to run through her findings. “Three fractures to her jaw caused by a single impact with a pointed object—it left an octagonal indent in the bone. Her nose was broken and her left orbit was caved in. She was hit twice in the sternum, the first blow breaking the fourth through seventh rib on the left, the second snapping the third through seventh on the right. These strikes were probably used to keep her from making too much noise.”