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?