Hauser was still trying to absorb the walkie-talkie advice. “I appreciate the call.”

“I left my number with your receptionist and we’ve sent full contact packages to the email address of every civil servant in your area. If you can, get another branch of the city to print the flyers and donate personnel to handing them out. The library or post office. That would be smart. Get them all orange highway vests and a flashlight; Swiss Army knife; name tag—people just fucking love name tags; and all the damned coffee they can drink. Call me directly if you need help, I’ll be at the office until Dylan dies out. And please, use our media package. Get a website up fast—these days, if it’s not on the web, people don’t believe that it exists.”

“Sure.”

“Take care.”

Hauser hung up, glad that Dennison hadn’t said God Bless. Then again, Be Prepared was pretty close. But a lot better than trusting an invisible man in the sky. “Jeannine!” he bellowed.

He heard the click-click-click of her heels, then his door opened. “Yes, Sheriff?”

“Where do we keep the walkie-talkies?”

Her face scrunched up and she asked, “What’s a walkie-talkie?”

Hauser felt the acidic surge of heartburn flare up in his stomach. He faced the nearly blank page of the press release, realizing that he was going to be doing a lot of these in the next few days. “Get me some Tums or Rolaids or some such shit and I want to see Spencer and Scopes in my office in five minutes. Get everyone in here in an hour for an emergency meeting. Pull in everyone. And call everybody you know and tell them to get inland in a hurry.”

Jeannine’s eyes shifted uncomfortably. “Is it going to be bad?”

“It’s going to be worse than bad, Jeannine.” Hauser stared at the page, his eyes unmoving. “A lot worse.”

14

His father was still sleeping. Still snoring. Still looking like one of those after photographs that little communities put up by the side of the road to remind people to keep fresh batteries in their smoke detectors. Jake had come back here because the sheriff’s department was dragging its feet with the reports. Even though eight hours was still under accepted law-enforcement standards, it was well below what a competent FBI forensics team would consider permissible. So Jake had come back to the hospital to get some more work done. With the new reports from the medical examiner, things were expanding and he needed time to correlate the new information with the old. So he sat in the corner trying to stare into the house down the beach. But all he could see was the hospital room.

The flowers had been carted down to the children’s ward and the rainforest effect had almost dissipated. The room still smelled of flora and dirt but it wasn’t as humid. A single tasteful arrangement of calla lilies and baby’s breath in a tall wheel-cut crystal vase sat on the imitation-wood nightstand. The card was sealed in a little white envelope secured with a single staple. Jake ripped it off the foil ribbon and pried it open. On simple white stationery were the words, Get well soon, old friend—David Finch.

Jake shook his head, tucked the card back in the envelope, and tossed it into the wastebasket. Finch had been the first gallery owner to take a chance on Jacob. Because of this, combined with his being the shrewdest art dealer on the East Coast, Jacob had stayed with him for more than fifty years. Jake hated Finch, always had, and the thought of the obsequious little fuck tightened his stomach into a greasy knot.

“Goddamned fag flowers,” a voice croaked.

Jake turned to his father. “Hello…um, Jacob. How are you?” The doctor had guaranteed that his father would sleep for two days on the pharmaceutical cocktail they’d primed into his IV.

“What day is it? More red, Godammit! More red!”

More red? What the hell was that about? Where was the nurse? “You’re Jacob Coleridge. Remember?”

“Jesus fucking Christ. What are you? Retarded? Of course I’m Jacob Coleridge. What’s with the ugly flowers? White? Is it a wedding or a funeral? Who the hell buys white flowers? Only the stupid, the unimaginative, or the sycophantic send white. Must be from Dave. What the fuck do you want? Where are my clothes?” And then he saw his hands, two big gauze-wrapped stumps the size of pineapples. On his left hand, a black scab of blood was hard and cracked and the white outline of the fabric’s weave shone through and he examined it. “What the hell is THIS?” he said, throwing his hands into Jake’s face. “Take these off, for fuck’s sake.”

The doctor yesterday had warned him that the morphine could alter his father’s personality. He said that many patients at the tail end of a terminal illness just drifted off into a hallucinatory dementia that robbed them of much of their identity. The morphine, coupled with his father’s Alzheimer’s, could make Jacob Coleridge a very ugly man to be around. As soon as Jake had stopped laughing he told them to give the old man as much morphine as they could load into a caulking gun. But it sure didn’t seem to be slowing him down at all. Suddenly he realized where his own metabolism had come from.

“Get these goddamned motherfucking things off my hands!” He looked up at Jake. Then added, without a hint of sincerity, the single word, “Please?”

Jake looked down at his father, at the better part of a century that had rolled over his features, stretching them, darkening them, aging them. Behind the furrowed brows and the clenched lips, the same man stared back at him. Angry. Mean. “I’ll get the nurse,” Jake said, and turned to the door.

He saw Nurse Rachael at the far end of the hallway, on the other side of the station. He signaled her and she jogged over, holding her stethoscope around her neck with one hand as she ran. As he watched her, he realized that Jacob Coleridge, the great observer, was still lucid enough to recognize that she did look like Mia.

When they got back to the room, Jacob was pulling at the bandaged clubs with his teeth, like a dog getting the stuffing out of an old cushion. Tufts of gauze peppered his beard and chest as he gnawed at them. He made hungry sounds as he tore at the white cloth.

“Mr. Coleridge, let me help you with that.” Nurse Look-alike came forward, and produced a needle from her pocket.

“What the fuck is THAT?” Jacob asked, trying to back up in the bed, away from the syringe.

“Don’t worry, it’s not for you.”

“The fuck it isn’t! Get away from me with that. You’re not sticking that in—”

Nurse Rachael jabbed the needle into the IV tube and depressed the plunger.

Jacob’s eyes unfocused, his mouth closed, and it was as if someone had drawn all the frustration from his body with a magnet. His muscles went slack, he sank back into the pillow, and closed his eyes. Then his chest expanded with a single deep breath, seemed to hold it, and his head fell to one side.

Jake turned to the nurse. “Thank y—”

It was in that hang time between the two words of gratitude that Jacob Coleridge bolted upright in the bed. The metal frame jolted the nightstand, sending Finch’s flowers to the floor in a high-pitched collision of lead crystal and linoleum. The vase shattered, and shards of glass and lilies bowled across the floor.

Spittle and gauze flecked Jacob’s lips. He looked at his son, at the nurse, and at his hands. Then he let out a shrill scream that rattled the windows, spraying chewed bandage, saliva, and frustration across his chest. He lifted one of the torn nubs at the end of his wrist, pointed it at his son, and bellowed. “You can’t keep him away! He’ll find you! Run!”

Then he fell back as if someone had pulled his plug.

And was silent.