I Hunt Killers (19 page)

A hand gently nudged Jazz from a deep slumber

—gotta wakey, wakey, Jasper, my boy—

and he startled, waking Connie, who had drifted off with him. The Gerstens were nowhere to be seen, and G. William stood over him.

“You hearin’ me, Jazz? You awake?”

Jazz grumbled, sitting up and wiping an embarrassing string of drool from his chin. It hadn’t been the usual dream, with the knife. It had been Rusty this time. He blinked bleary sleep away.

—gotta wakey—

“I’m awake. Is Howie—”

“He’s up. In the ICU. Dr. Mogelof says no visitors tonight, but she’s making an exception, given the circumstances. Need to talk to the two of you. Put together some kind of timeline for what happened tonight.” G. William checked his watch. “
Last
night, technically.”

Connie disentangled herself from Jazz and stood up. “Let’s go.”

“Sorry.” G. William seemed genuinely apologetic. “Family only back there. I got a need for Jazz—police business—but they won’t let you in. Maybe tomorrow.”

Connie took that as well as she usually took someone telling her what she couldn’t do: She crossed her arms over her chest and cocked her left hip in what she called her Sassy Stance and fixed the sheriff with a glare that Jazz knew all too well.

He leapt up between them before Connie could start a fight. “Con, it’ll be okay. You should go home. Get some real rest. We’ll both come back tomorrow to see Howie together, okay?”

“He’s my friend, too,” she said, her jaw set, her eyes flashing with anger.

“I know.” He hugged her, even though she didn’t open her arms to him. He held her until she thawed, pecking him on the cheek and leaving without so much as a kind look in the sheriff’s direction.

G. William adjusted his hat and grinned. “That one’ll keep you on the straight and narrow, Jasper Francis. Don’t let her go.”

He clapped a hand on Jazz’s shoulder and guided him through a door and down a corridor. The hospital was quiet, even the footfalls of nurses muffled by the gummy soles of their shoes. Jazz felt like he was walking down a dream hallway, where sounds were not allowed to exist. Sounds and, maybe, the living.

Breaking the unnerving silence, he said, “I have to ask.…This may seem stupid, but…Ginny. Ms. Davis. Is she really—”

“Sorry, Jazz. I know you tried your best. But yeah.”

“Okay. I thought there was a chance maybe that I was wrong, that I didn’t read her pulse right, or…”

—put your fingers right here and make sure, Jasper, make damn sure, ’cause the last thing you want is what’s supposed to be a corpse gettin’ up and tellin’ the world what you done—

There was no chance. Of course not. But he’d hoped.

“I want to wrap this up fast,” G. William said, moving. “I bet you’re worried about your grandmom, and I want to get you home to her.”

Gramma. In all the craziness, he’d forgotten about her, had completely lost track of time. He wasn’t even sure what day it was, or what year. Time had gone elastic and malleable and ductile.

Nighttime was the worst time of the day for Gramma, but the Benadryl should have kept her knocked out. He hated imagining what she would do if she woke up alone. Anything was possible, really, up to and including deciding that he’d been abducted and launching her own version of a commando raid on the nearest house.

Well, there was nothing to do about it for now. He had to help G. William, and then—

“Here we are,” G. William said, gesturing to a door.

Somehow it wasn’t fair. Beyond that door lay Jazz’s best friend in the world, the best friend he’d put in harm’s way, the best friend he had nearly killed as easily as if he’d wielded the knife himself. And yet the door looked like every other door along the corridor. There was nothing special about it, and there should have been.

“You ready for this?” G. William asked.

Jazz wasn’t, but he nodded anyway and G. William pushed open the door.

It wasn’t nearly as bad as Jazz had feared. That said, it was still bad enough.

“If I didn’t have bad luck, I wouldn’t have any luck at all,” Howie said as soon as he saw Jazz, cracking a grin.

It was Howie and it wasn’t Howie, all at once. His best friend lay in a hospital bed, covered to the chest with a blanket so faded blue that it was almost white. Stick-thin Howie looked even thinner under that blanket, a series of long wrinkles in the fabric that suggested a body more than revealed one. His skin was sallow, his eyes sunken above massive bags that drooped down like twin black eyes with something to prove. Bruises ran up and down both arms, radiating out from the points where tubes entered his body.

The tubes.

There were—Jazz counted—three of them. A saline drip for hydration. A line still transfusing blood. And a third one. Something else…

“Dinnertime,” Howie joked, pointing to one bag, as if he could read Jazz’s confusion over the air like a radio transmission.

Dextrose. Right. It had been hours since Howie had eaten, and he probably still wasn’t up to taking solid food, what with the trauma, the anesthetics.…

A duo of wires also hung limp between connection points on Howie’s chest and a heart monitor beside the bed. The monitor’s EKG line loped along at a steady, slow sixty beats per minute. Tolerable.

“Apparently,” Howie said jovially, “he missed every vital organ and only nicked a blood vessel. You probably would have gotten up and chased the guy down. Me? I end up facedown in my own blood. Three cheers for low clotting factor! Next time
you
get to be the one who gets stabbed.”

“You weren’t stabbed,” Jazz said after a moment’s hesitation. “You were slashed. They’re different.”

“Okay, whatever.” Howie grimaced as he adjusted his position in bed. “Can we at least do some
CSI
mojo on my wound and figure out what kind of knife he used and then, like, track him down where he bought it and totally go SWAT-style on his ass?”

G. William answered before Jazz could. “Doesn’t work like that. Sorry. Slashing wounds don’t, uh, betray any characteristic of the blade. Only stab wounds do that. If he’d stabbed you instead of slashing you, then maybe we could get some kind of forensic…” G. William realized he was rambling and drifted off into silence, clearing his throat. He settled into a chair next to the bed. “Anyway. The docs are saying you’re gonna be fine. Glad to hear it.”

Jazz still lingered by the door, unable to move closer. A crashing wave of guilt had broken over him as soon as he recognized Howie in the bed, and the force of that wave kept him from approaching. Guilt—this kind of guilt, at least—was unfamiliar to him. Guilt for manipulating people? Sure. All the time. But he dismissed that guilt as a matter of course, as a cost of doing business. This was different. He’d almost gotten someone killed.

He
had
gotten someone killed.

Howie raised a hand, even though it clearly took effort, and waved for Jazz to come closer. “You gonna guard the door all night? Don’t you want to see my stitches? They’re gross.” He said “gross” with a whisper of delight.

Jazz went to the bed and stood opposite G. William. He had a powerful urge to
touch
Howie, almost to prove to himself that this paper-thin, transparent-skinned thing in bed was really his best friend and not a hallucination.

Howie leaned as close as he could, given his weakness and the tubes. His voice—already weak—wasn’t getting any stronger as he spoke. “I have to own up, dawg; you can’t see the stitches yet. They’re still taped and gauzed.”

Jazz played along. “Are you gonna have a scar?”

Howie frowned. “A little one. I wanted a nice big one, but no one asked me, on account of me being unconscious at the time. Can you believe it?”

“Bastards,” Jazz intoned, and then he did it—he reached out and put his hand over Howie’s where it lay on top of the blanket.

Something in that connection, something in that completed circuit—the taut vulnerability of Howie’s skin, the reality of contact,
something
—shattered a vessel deep inside Jazz, and he found himself speaking before he could think.

“It’s all my fault,” he whispered. “It’s my fault she’s dead.”

“It’s not.”

“It is. You wanted to call G. William from the car. If we had—”

“If we had”—Howie’s voice floated from the bed, weak but resolved—“it would have gone down the same. Homeboy was already killing her.”

“Howie’s right, Jazz,” G. William said gently. He rubbed his battered mass of a nose. “If you’d called, we wouldn’t have gotten there any faster. And in the meantime, you made him deviate from his plan. You interrupted him. Scared him. He usually cuts the fingers off postmortem. This time he cut them off while she was still alive.”

“Oh, yay.” The bitterness lay heavy on Jazz’s tongue. “A victory for us. I’m sure Ginny will be glad to hear— Oh, wait, that’s right: She’s
dead
.”

G. William gave him a moment to indulge his anger and guilt, then cleared his throat. “I need to know exactly what you guys did and saw. Gonna record this, okay?” He brandished his smartphone and aimed the camera at them.

They consented to being recorded and Jazz pulled up a chair, sinking into it next to Howie, leaving one hand brushing against Howie’s, as if to make sure his friend wasn’t going anywhere. Between the two of them, they recounted the logic that had taken them to Ginny’s apartment, and what had happened afterward. Jazz surprised himself by recalling and describing Ginny’s death in a voice entirely devoid of emotion, and as he recited the facts, he found those same facts bothering him less and less. Grief was replaced with anger—anger at himself for failing, but also anger at the man impersonating his father.

“…called nine-one-one,” Howie was saying, “and then I heard something in the alleyway, so I went back there and”—Howie coughed—“and valiantly attacked his knife with my guts, to no avail.”

“Did you get a good look at him? Could you describe him?”

Howie smiled wanly. “Yeah. He was about yay long”—he held up his hands, four inches apart—“thin, made of steel. Pointy. Sharp.”

Jazz grinned despite himself.

“What about you, Jasper?”

Jazz shook his head. He’d been trying to recall the killer’s face, his eyes, anything. But he’d had only that single instant before the man vanished through the window, heading for street level and Howie’s gut. Those blue eyes. “All I can tell you is he’s white, which I think we already assumed. Probably between five-eleven and six-one. Ish.” He waggled a hand. “Blue eyes.”

G. William thanked them and stood to leave, gesturing to Jazz that it was time for Howie to get some rest. But Jazz had to know: “Did you guys find props? In her apartment?”

The sheriff hesitated, then nodded. “Yeah. A toy bow and arrow, and some other stuff. You know.”

During his phase as the Artist, Billy had posed his victims. For his fourth victim, he’d posed her like Cupid drawing a bow, matching her initials—V.D.—to Valentine’s Day. Billy’s first dozen or so killings had all taken place before Jazz was born, so he didn’t know why Billy had done this. Probably one more in a highly successful string of distracting tactics that had kept the cops off his trail for decades.

“So I was right,” Jazz said.

“Looks like it. Definitely mimicking Billy’s career.”

“What about the fingers?”

“Cut ’em premortem, not post-, but you knew that already. We’re not assuming this is a change in MO. Just that he heard you guys coming and had to move quickly.”

Quickly…No more than a minute had passed between Jazz pounding on and then crashing through the door. The Impressionist had cut off Ginny’s fingers in record time.

“Left the middle finger, as per usual. We found it under the sofa.”

Jazz wondered if he’d kicked it there when running into the room. “You know what you have to do.” He stared at G. William and did not let up.

The sheriff didn’t even need to consult his smartphone. “Billy’s next victim was named Isabella Hernandez. Maid at a hotel. Thirty-five. First thing in the morning, my crew is contacting every hotel in the area and asking if they have anyone with the initials I.H. working for them.”

“Morning? What about now?”

“If he’s following Billy’s pattern, we have three days before he takes his next victim. Better to let my people go at it in the light of day.”

“What about the victims after her? You have the whole chronology of Billy’s career. You can start looking for all of them, not just the next one.”

G. William shook his head. “Jazz, I can’t do it that way. Have to put all of my manpower on the most imminent threat.” He held up a hand to stop Jazz before he could interrupt. “How would you feel if your wife was the next victim and she got killed and then you found out that the cops hadn’t put all their efforts into protecting her?”

Good point. “What about the feds? You have to be getting them involved, right?”

G. William snorted. “Not just yet. Still putting together the ViCAP report.” Quickly, before Jazz could jump in, he added, “That thing’s thirteen pages long, Jazz. A hundred eighty-some questions to answer. And it ain’t worth doin’ if we don’t do it right. And right now there’s nothing convincing. Right now it’s just a pattern, but there’s no MO, no signature that’s common—”