“Because it was taken. Maybe it was a little porn to jerk off to later so he can feel all big and powerful and in control of the storm raging inside the fucked-up fusebox that passes for his brain.”

Hauser took a step back. “Jesus Christ.”

Jake looked at Hauser, saw his hands twitching, his face going green like last night. “Go get some air. I’ll fill you in when we’re done.” Then he turned to Dr. Reagan. “Can I get copies of her tox scans? Especially the GGT, ALT, and AST ratios,” he asked, ignoring Hauser.

Hauser spun and darted out of the room.

The sound of a kicked garbage can was the last noise before the sheriff’s steps disappeared into the stairwell. Jake ignored the sound of the metal lid rolling in faster and faster circles and turned to the smaller hump on the next table.

“Tell me about the child,” he said.

12

22,216 Statute Miles Above the Atlantic Ocean

Sent into space during the height of President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, the geostationary satellite began its life as a tool of the Cold War, using thermal imaging to track nuclear submarines via the heat generated by their reactors. Under the watchful eye of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, the satellite—internally designated Loki—was launched in early 1985. A few months later, perestroika began, and the Iron Curtain quickly started to show signs of metal fatigue. But Loki continued to track Soviet naval traffic in the Atlantic for eight more years, until the SDIO was retooled as the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization under President Clinton’s administration. The satellite, written off the books as so much obsolete space garbage, was donated to the National Hurricane Center, and retasked to serve the people of the United States in spying on a less predictable adversary—Mother Nature.

Now, a quarter-century after it had been launched, and performing a task for which it had not been designed, Loki’s unfeeling eyes stared down at the planet from its vantage point in space. Its taskmasters had focused its vast array of attention on a massive weather system that had somehow sprung to life nine days ago off the coast of Africa, gorging itself on heat and seawater, growing into a Category 5 hurricane—a hurricane now called Dylan.

Loki’s data showed that in the past five hours, the distance from Dylan’s center to his outermost closed isobar was nearly nine degrees of latitude. Dylan was now the largest Atlantic hurricane in recorded history, with a diameter of more than 1,200 miles. This data in itself would usually have been enough to cause a panic at the National Hurricane Center, but Dylan was not yet finished reaching into its bag of dirty tricks.

Dylan soon began to generate massive vertical winds. These winds carried particles of water off the ocean up through the body of the storm with a force stronger than regular evaporation by orders of magnitude. As these vertical wind-driven water particles, known to meteorologists as hydrometeors, were slammed upward, they rubbed against one another. This friction generated a charge in the water particles. The hydrometeors separated by weight and charge—the negatively charged (and heavy) particles dropped to the lower regions of the hurricane, and the positively charged (and lighter) particles rose to the top of the massive storm turbine. This separation of positively and negatively charged water molecules created a new weapons system for the hurricane.

Dylan had just gone electric.

13

Hauser slammed through the doors and chewed up linoleum with an efficient long-legged stride. He was trying to burn off the sickening thud that had blossomed in his chest just after Dr. Reagan had pulled the plastic sheet off the three-foot chunk of bled meat that used to be a living, breathing child. Hauser’s hand was still clamped around the rubber grip of his Sig and the muscles in his long jaw pulsed like snakes under his skin. For the first time he could recall he wished he had chosen another type of work. Contracting, maybe. He had always liked taping sheetrock—the pay wasn’t bad and you never took your work home with you at night.

And it beat the hell out of looking at skinned children.

A half-dozen reporters sprang up in his path, microphones out, the bright lights from the cameras actually heating his skin. Hauser stopped, took a deep breath, and tried to look calm. “I will have a press release for you in exactly thirty minutes.”

“Have the autopsies been completed?”

“Do you have any suspects?”

“Can you release their names?”

Hauser stared down the cameras and said, “Give me half an hour to get a statement together. I promise that this will be the first release of many. Please make sure you all leave your coordinates—including your producers’ coordinates—at the front desk. We will keep you informed.” He turned away and plowed into his office, irritated at the gratitude he felt toward Jake for prepping him in how to deal with the media; without Jake’s coaching, Hauser knew he would have already fucked his relationship with the news teams six ways past repairable. And he didn’t want to confuse gratitude with like. He didn’t want to like Jake. Not one little bit.

The sheriff stopped at his receptionist’s desk. “I have to put a statement together for the double homicide. Give me twenty-five minutes to write it up and you can type it and print it up for me. While I’m working on it, I need everything you have on the Coleridge family. I know Mrs. Coleridge had some sort of an accident. I want everything there is.”

Jeannine uh-huhed and no-problemed, and for a bright angry second Hauser wanted to drag her by her hair down to the lab so she could look at the kid who had been peeled like a piece of squirming screaming fruit to see if she could keep that same bored-to-death timbre in her voice. Instead, he walked into his office and kicked the door shut.

He went to the bar, pulled out a glass, and poured himself a caffeine-free Coke from the little stainless fridge his wife had bought him as a birthday gift last year. When he had downed the can, he popped another. Then burped.

Dr. Reagan had been very precise with her diction. Skinned was too blunt a term for a profession as elegant as forensic pathology so she had opted for de-epithelialized instead. Who used words like that? While sipping a cold coffee and standing over a kid who—at only three feet tall—still managed to make all the multibody car wrecks of the past year look like underachievers.

First he had de-epithelialized the son—they knew this because the mother’s blood was all over the child, but the child’s blood was absent from the mother (except the palms of her hands). Madame X had been held down while someone peeled her kid. This one took the Best in Show trophy. Maybe even a Lifetime Achievement Award. It was the saddest thing he had ever taken part in. How the fuck did you word something like that for those press assholes? He had seen other sheriffs thrust into the national spotlight. He had watched the police chief of Montgomery County, Charles Moose, examined ten times a day for three solid months. Jake had taught him how to avoid that, completely, by making it clear that the only rules were his rules, and that he’d throw anyone who got in the way of his investigation in jail and deal with the courts as soon as he was finished with the case. So he had followed Jake’s lead and laid it out with conviction. Because when that freaky-deaky, heebie-jeebie tattoo freak opened his mouth, he seemed to be channeling from the other side. And that worried Hauser. Maybe even frightened him a little.