Jake polished off the rest of the Coke, dropped the bottle into a dust-covered cardboard box, and pushed himself off the steel cabinet. The crumpled ball of the portrait sat on the table, folded in patches of hospital yellow, plaster-dust white, and drips of Jacob Coleridge’s most valuable pigment. Jake circled the table a few times, his arms crossed over his chest, his eyes never leaving the bundle sitting under the task lighting like a car bomb waiting to fulfill its destiny.

With the taste of Coke still fresh in his mouth, he began unfolding the portrait like a cabbage, layer by layer, some pieces tucked into others. He slid them around, laying them out in sequence, and for one minor second he knew that in some twisted way Finch had been right; this was art.

When the painting was assembled he took a step back to get perspective and he thought he heard the figures on the walls and ceiling gasp in approval. Even they had to admit that it was beautiful.

Jake stared down at it. He may not have had the talent of his father when it came to mechanics, but Jake understood composition, perspective, and technique. He had always paid attention and the least one could say was that he was fifty percent his father. What he was looking at now was astounding.

Part of that came from it being painted in blood by a half-crazed man. Another part came from his having chewed off his bandages and used his charred, nerveless fingers as palette knives, the split bone and half-broiled cartilage of each finger lending a different edge to the lines in his diminished arsenal. He had lost three fingers—would probably lose more—and Jake saw at least seven distinct lines in the painting. He knew that his father’s natural ability had come out without thought, or premonition—it had come out in the rawest of ways, in instinct.

The portrait was not sloppy or haphazard like a child’s finger painting but controlled, directed. You didn’t need a degree in art history to see the consummate skill in the rendering. It had a raw and honest power that was impossible to ignore. But the skill was incidental; the import was in the meaning.

He went back to the old Kenmore for another Coke and thought about it.

There was no doubt that his father was trying to say something, even if it was from behind the foggy curtain of dementia. Little bits of almost-signal were getting through from the other side and what was coming out was…was…

What?

The big what, of course, was, What difference—if any—would figuring out what the old man was trying to say, make? Like deciphering Finnegan’s Wake, at some point the detective has to ask himself, What’s the point?

Was this man—this faceless man—the manifestation of a psychotic episode? Schizophrenics often had religious visions, so why not his father? Because the old man had never believed in God. He had never believed in any sort of higher power other than random chance and pure accident. These renderings had nothing to do with the idea of church or God or Satan. This drawing of the bogeyman was something more immediate, more menacing, than some made-up bullshit—Jake couldn’t explain how he knew, only that he did.

Jake was an expert in examining evidence from someone else’s point of view. But throwing the entire Freudian history of the Coleridge men into the mix pushed him back from any sort of objectivity and he knew that objectivity was where unbiased, untainted, unpremeditated observation was able to function. You throw in the father—son dynamic, especially one as poisoned as theirs, and the results were guaranteed to be skewed.

What did the painting of the man in blood mean? What did the repeated studies of him on the walls mean? Why did he have no face?

And what about the canvases piled around the studio in skewed columns? The highest one looked to be about eight feet and there wasn’t one under six. He walked through the pillars of canvas, shuffling some around, picking some up, examining them, putting them down. Jake knew if his father had painted them, they had a purpose. He wouldn’t—couldn’t—believe that they were just the byproduct of a lifetime spent at the easel, with no greater objective other than to take up time. No hell. No way. If Jacob Coleridge had believed enough to pick up a brush and put it to canvas, it was because it meant something.

No shit, genius.

He rifled the Coke bottle across the room and it hit the wall, bounced back, and smashed on the concrete, skittering shards across the floor. He hated this. The being here, the dealing with his father, the man with the hunting knife and his nightmare skill set.

And they were all connected. Somehow sewn together with a thread so fine that the light wasn’t even hitting it.

Finding it was impossible, unless you ran into it. And when you did, chances were it was at neck height, and maybe you’d feel a slight pinch, then you’d hear your head hit the floor and get a last-second glimpse of your body stumbling forward, then bumping into something and going over in a clumsy crash of arms and legs that would twitch because they no longer had the software to tell them to stop and then the lights would go out and—

“STOP IT!” Jake roared, the words coming up like black hot vomit from his heroin days. He forced a few deep breaths down into his belly where they would do the most good.

It’s there.

Look for it.

I am.

No, you’re not.

Would you fucking stop it!

Sure. As soon as you figure it out. Witch doctor, my ass.

I’ve always said that.

That was when you were good at seeing things.

I can do this. It will take a little time.

You don’t have time. He’s coming.

Who?

Him.

Him, who?

Him.

Jake pinched the bridge of his nose and decided that it was time to get to bed. It was almost two a.m. He wasn’t much of a sleeper, in fact he never had been, but today, with the defibrillator misfiring like a gremlin-inhabited fuel pump, he needed to give the old corpus a little downtime. Mostly because tomorrow promised to be another rock-’em-sock-’em robots day. He turned off the lights and closed the door.

Outside, the wind was stronger and the swells were breaking before they hit the shore now, ugly white slashes against the black ocean, like blisters rupturing. The moon was squelched somewhere behind the bank of clouds and for the first time he realized how fast the weather was changing now, like watching time-lapse photography.

Jake came in the front door and flipped on a few lights. The Nakashima console lit up, the bright pin spot illuminating the sculpture of the sphere—a polyhedron, his father had once yelled at him—in stark relief. His old man had built it—no, built was the wrong word—engineered was more accurate. Out in the studio one night with a hundred-plus stainless-steel speargun shafts and a determination to learn how to TIG weld. Thousands of tiny transepts that terminated in triangles that connected into a perfect sphere. It looked like a NASA engineering model, sitting forgotten under the lone spotlight, a shrine to his father’s only experiment in three-dimensional art. He ran his finger over the frame and pulled up a line of fuzzy, greasy dust. The piece almost vibrated at his touch, it had lived alone for so long.

Kay had done a nice job with the place, even going so far as to lay some coasters out on the coffee table. Jake laughed at the gesture; the surface of the table was pitted with cigarette burns and drink circles that stared up like empty sockets. The big Chuck Close portrait with the cut-out eyes leaned against his mother’s Steinway like some Oedipal warning.

Something about the painting needled Jake, and he hated that he couldn’t nail it down with any sort of precision. He wanted to write it off as stress but the inability to put things together was becoming much too familiar to him lately and he was worried that it was some sort of permanent handicap. He hated not being able to see. The only event he could equate to it would be Kay blowing out her hearing and having to stare at her cello afterward. He stood above the sunken living room and took in the vandalized canvas.