I Hunt Killers (2 page)

Jazz backed up out of the brush and carefully made his way back to his Jeep, which he’d concealed along an old dirt path that cut through the Harrison property.

Jazz would go to G. William. He had to go. To see the body. He would confront his own past and see what impact it had on him. If any. Maybe it would have no impact. Or maybe it would have the
right
kind of impact. Prove something to the world, and to himself.

A body was one thing. That finger, though…That was new. He hadn’t expected that. It meant…

Bouncing along now on the nearly nonexistent shocks in his father’s old beat-up Jeep, he tried not to think of what it meant, even though the finger hovered there in his imagination, as though pointing at him. It’s not that he’d never seen a dead body before. Or a crime scene. Jazz had been seeing those for as long as he could remember, thanks to Dear Old Dad. For Dear Old Dad, Take Your Son to Work Day was year-round. Jazz had witnessed crime scenes the way the cops wished they could—from the criminal’s point of view.

Jazz’s dad—William Cornelius “Billy” Dent—was the most notorious serial killer of the twenty-first century. He’d made his home in sleepy little Lobo’s Nod and, for the most part, kept his nose clean while in town, adhering to the old adage “Don’t crap where you eat.” But eventually time had caught up with Billy Dent. Time, and his own uncontrollable urges. Even though he was a masterful murderer, having killed into the triple digits over the previous twenty-one years, he eventually couldn’t help himself. Two Lobo’s Nod bodies later, G. William Tanner tracked Billy down and cuffed him. It was a sad and ignominious end to Billy Dent’s career, caught not by some FBI doctorate with a badge and the might of the federal government behind him, but rather by a local cop with a beer gut and a twang and one decent police car.

In fact…Maybe Dear Old Dad was right. Maybe all those guys—including Billy Dent—wanted to get caught. Otherwise, why hunt at home? Why crap where he ate?

Jazz pulled into the parking lot of the sheriff’s office, a low, one-story cinder-block building in the center of town. Every election year, some town selectman or county commissioner would run on a promise to “beautify our dour, grim center of law enforcement,” and after every election, G. William would quietly divert the money to better equipment and higher salaries for his deputies.

Jazz liked G. William, which was saying something, given that he’d been raised to respect but despise cops in general, to say nothing of the cop who finally put an end to Billy Dent’s legendary multidecade career of death and torture. Ever since arresting Dear Old Dad four years ago, G. William had kept in touch with Jazz, almost as if he felt bad for taking away Jazz’s father. Anyone with any sense could see that taking away Dear Old Dad was the best thing that had ever happened to Jazz. Poor old G. William and his old-fashioned Catholic guilt.

Occasionally, Jazz would confide in G. William. Things he’d already told Connie and Howie, usually, but could use an adult perspective on. Two things remained unspoken between them, though understood: G. William didn’t want Jazz to end up like Billy, and Jazz didn’t confide
everything
.

Just about the only thing Jazz didn’t like about the sheriff was his insistence that everyone call him “G. William,” which constantly made the speaker sound surprised: “Gee, William!”

Inside the station, Jazz nodded to Lana, the secretary/dispatcher. She was pretty and young and Jazz tried not to think about what his father would have done to her, given the chance.

“Is G. William in?” he asked, as if he didn’t know.

“Just blew through here like a tornado,” Lana said, “then blew straight back.” She pointed to the restroom. G. William’s bladder couldn’t stand being away from the office for too long.

“Mind if I wait for him?” Jazz said as calmly as he could, as though he weren’t itching to get into that office.

“Help yourself,” she said, waving him back toward G. William’s office.

“Thanks,” he said, and then—because he couldn’t help it—he gave her the full-on megawatt smile. “The Charmer,” Billy had called it. One more thing passed down from father to son.

Lana smiled back. Provoking her into a smile was no challenge.

The office door was open. A sheet of paper lay on the desk in the cone of sickly yellow light coming from an ancient lamp-shaped pile of rust. Jazz darted a glance over his shoulder, then flipped the paper around so he could read it.
PRELIMINARY NOTES
, it read at the top.

“—to lab for pos. ID—”

“—excised digits—”

The jangle of handcuffs and G. William’s heavy tread alerted him. He flipped the page around again and managed to step away from the desk before the sheriff came through the door.

“Hey, there, Jazz.” G. William positioned himself behind the desk and put a protective hand on the preliminary notes. He was no fool. “What can I do for you? A little busy right now.”

Excised digits
, Jazz was thinking. Digits, plural. Not singular. He’d seen only one finger in the evidence bag.

You’d need a knife. Not even a good one. Just sharp. Get between the lesser multangular and the metacarpal—

“Yeah,” Jazz said, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “Body in the Harrison field.”

G. William scowled. “Wish someone would outlaw police scanners.”

“You know how that goes, G. William,” Jazz said lightly. “If you outlaw police scanners, only outlaws will have police scanners.”

G. William cleared his throat and sat, causing his ancient chair to complain. “Really am kinda busy. Can we banter another time?”

“I’m not here to banter. I want to talk to you about the body. Well, really, about the killer.”

That earned him a raised eyebrow and a snort. G. William had a massive, florid nose, the sort of bulbous schnoz usually seen on heavy drinkers, though G. William rarely, if ever, touched booze. His nose was a combination of pure genetics and thirty-five years as a cop, being hit in the face with everything from fists to gun butts to planks of wood. “You know who the killer is? That’s great. I’d love to go home, watch football like a citizen.”

“No, but…” Jazz didn’t want to admit that he’d been spying on the crime scene or that he’d read G. William’s notes, but he didn’t have a choice. “Look, a dead body is one thing. Excising multiple digits is—”

“Oh, Jazz.” G. William slid his sheet of paper closer to himself, as though by taking it away now he could somehow erase Jazz’s memory of reading it. “What are you doing? You need to stop obsessing about this stuff.”

“Easy for you to say. You’re not the one everyone thinks is gonna grow up to be Billy Dent, the sequel.”

“No one thinks—”

“Plenty of people do. You don’t see the way people look at me.”

“It’s in your head, Jazz.”

They gazed at each other for a long moment. There was a pain in G. William’s eyes that Jazz figured to be as intense as his own, though of a different flavor.

“Dead female Caucasian,” Jazz said in a clipped voice. “Found at least two miles from anywhere in any direction. Naked. No apparent bruising. Missing fingers—”

“You get all of that from here?” G. William waved the paper in the air. “You didn’t have that much time to look at it.”

Busted. He’d revealed too much. Even knowing that G. William was savvy, Jazz had still tipped his hand too soon.

Oh, well. He would probably have to admit this, anyway.…

Jazz shrugged. “I was watching.”

G. William slammed a fist on the desk and swore out loud. Something about that mustache and those big brown eyes made the swearing incongruous—Jazz felt like he’d just seen a nun do a striptease. G. William’s bushy mustache quivered.

“You know how I grew up,” Jazz said, his voice low and thick as they stared at each other across the desk. “The rumpus room. The trophies. It was my job to keep them organized for him. I understand these guys.”

These guys.
Serial killers. He didn’t have to say it out loud.

G. William flinched. He was intimately aware of the details of Jazz’s upbringing. After Billy and Jazz (and Jazz’s missing mother), G. William knew the most about what growing up with Billy Dent had been like. He knew more than Gramma. More than Connie, Jazz’s girlfriend. More than Melissa Hoover, the social worker who’d been messing with Jazz’s life ever since Billy’s arrest. Even more than Howie, the only kid Jazz truly thought of as a friend. It had, after all, been G. William who’d found Jazz that night four years ago, the night Billy Dent’s reign of terror ended. Jazz had been in the rumpus room (a converted pantry in the back of the house, accessible only through a hidden hatch in the basement), doing as his father had commanded: gathering up the trophies so that they could be smuggled out of the house before the cops searched the place.

It should have been an easy task—Billy didn’t take large or complicated trophies. An iPod from one, a lipstick from another. The trophies were well organized and easily portable. Still, G. William got there before Jazz could finish. And Jazz truly didn’t know if he would have followed through with his father’s orders. He’d spent his childhood obeying his father’s every command, but as Billy Dent had become more and more erratic—culminating in the two Lobo’s Nod bodies—Jazz had begun to shake off the chains his father had bound him with.

And so he had stood there with all but one of the trophies in a large backpack, staring at the last one, the driver’s license of Heidi Dunlop, a pretty blond girl from Baltimore. And in that moment, Jazz had felt like he’d woken up for the first time in his life, as if everything else that had happened to him had been unreal, and now he was about to make his first and only true decision. As he tried to decide whether he would hide the trophies…or run and hide himself…or turn them over…fate took the decision out of his hands in the form of G. William, who came up through the hatch, puffing with exertion but pointing what looked like the biggest goddamn pistol in the entire universe right at Jazz’s thirteen-year-old junk.

“Let me help you,” Jazz insisted now. “Just let me look at the file. Maybe a few minutes with the body.”

“I’ve been doing this for a while. I don’t need your help. And it’s a little early to go barking ‘serial killer.’ You’re jumping the gun, kid. Serial killers have to have at least three victims. Over an extended period of time. This guy has one.”

“There could be more,” Jazz insisted. “Or there will be more. These guys escalate. You know that. Each victim is worse. And they experiment. Cutting off the fingers…You just have to look at things from his perspective.”

The sheriff stiffened. “I did that with your dad. I didn’t like doing it then. Don’t like the thought of it now.”

Finding Billy Dent had taken its toll on G. William, who had still been grieving for his recently deceased wife when the first of the Lobo’s Nod bodies showed up. He’d thrown himself with an obsessive fervor into tracking and catching Billy Dent, and while he’d succeeded, his sanity had almost been another of Billy’s victims. Jazz remembered the expression on G. William’s face when the sheriff had come up through the rumpus room hatch, that huge revolver pointed at him. With all he’d seen in his life—the bodies, the trophies, what his father had done to poor Rusty—very few things could haunt Jazz, but the look on the sheriff’s face that day was a regular star in Jazz’s nightmares. He’d never seen a man so utterly despondent and devastated, the gun steady as a rock even though the big man’s lips trembled when he shouted, “Drop it! Drop all of it! I swear to Christ I’ll shoot you!” in a high lunatic’s falsetto. G. William Tanner’s eyes had seen too much; if that night had not ended Billy Dent’s career, Jazz was certain that the next day would have seen G. William dead by his own hand.

It had been four years since then; G. William still saw a therapist every month.

Now G. William stroked his mustache with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. Jazz imagined cutting off that forefinger. It wasn’t that he wanted to hurt G. William. It wasn’t that he wanted to hurt anyone at all. It’s just that he couldn’t. Stop. Thinking about it. Sometimes he felt like his brain was a slasher movie set on fast-forward. And no matter how many times he jabbed at the Off button, the movie just kept playing and playing, horrors assaulting him constantly.

For him, imagining cutting off that finger was an academic exercise, like a calculus problem at school. It wouldn’t take much strength. An easy trophy. What did that mean about the killer? Did it mean he was weak and scared? Or did it mean he was confident and knew it was best to take something quickly?

If G. William knew the thoughts that came unbidden to Jazz’s mind, he would…

“Let me help,” Jazz begged. “For me.”

“Go home, Jazz. Dead woman in a field. Tragic, but nothing more.”

“But the fingers! Come on. That’s not a woman who stumbled out there naked at night and fell and hit her head. That’s not Joe-Bob McHick smacking around his girlfriend and then leaving her to die.”

“We already had one serial killer in this town. Be a hell of a coincidence to have another one, don’t you think?”

Jazz pressed on. “At any point in time, it’s estimated there’s something like thirty to forty serial killers active in the United States.”

“I think,” G. William said, sighing, “that I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me, and you’re not helping any. We’ll figure this body out, along with all the other usual junk we have to do around here.” He gestured for Jazz to leave.

“You’re at least treating this as a reportable death, right?”

“Of course I am. I’ve got the medical examiner coming in first thing tomorrow morning for a complete autopsy, but Dr. Garvin is doing a quick work-up today. A woman’s dead, Jazz. I take that very seriously.”

“Not seriously enough to be going over the crime scene with tweezers. Or to cut down the vegetation to look for clues. Or to—”

G. William rolled his eyes. “Give me a break. What do you think this is? What kind of resources do you think we have here? I had to call in the staties and deputies from three towns over to do justice to that scene.”