I Hunt Killers (9 page)

“Garlic! Bread! Crumbs!” she spat, thrusting the shotgun for emphasis.

With a smooth, unhurried motion, Jazz plucked the shotgun out of her hands. “Yep. Garlic. No vampire will come within a hundred yards of you after you eat this stuff.”

Gramma sniffed and crossed her arms over her chest. “No such thing as vampires. Just monsters.”

Jazz couldn’t argue with that. He gave the shotgun back to Gramma, who looked at it like it was a new toy and then, bored, laid it next to the love seat. If the whole scene hadn’t been so routine to him by now, he would have found it hilarious or horrifying.

Probably hilarious.

He whipped up the macaroni and cheese as promised. After dinner, he was standing at the sink, washing dishes and idly gazing out the back window at the old abandoned birdbath, when Gramma suddenly marched up to him at the sink and smacked him on the back of the head.

“For back-talking me!” she shrieked.

Jazz gripped the edge of the sink and told himself not to spin around, not to strike back at her. She was a weak old woman. He was a strong young man. One blow from him would cripple, if not kill, her.

Another blow landed. Jazz kept washing the dishes. A beating from Gramma was more an inconvenience than anything else. He let her pinwheel her bony arms at him until she tired and staggered back to lean against the kitchen table, clutching her chest and breathing in ragged gasps. The chest-clutching was new. Was she about to have a heart attack, right here and now?

Jazz didn’t know how he felt about that. No one would weep when Gramma died. Dead, she would be nothing more than another body on the Dent family’s roster of them. Alive, though: Like Melissa said, maybe his caring for Gramma would somehow redeem her. Or his father. Or himself. Maybe in caring for her, he would observe something, learn something about his lineage, something that would give him some sort of insight into his father and his own upbringing. Anything. Something to help him figure out how to avoid a future that, on some days, felt inevitable. A future that ran thick with blood.

Or maybe, more likely—

“Just like your daddy,” Gramma gasped, fumbling into a chair, having apparently decided not to die. “You’re just like your daddy.”

Now
that
hurt. More than a beating ever could.

After getting Gramma washed up and tucked in for the night, Jazz finally allowed himself to collapse on his bed, but not for long. He had plans to make for his excursion back to the crime scene. He scoped the area out on Google Earth, even though he knew it well already. Then he carefully packed a small duffel bag with everything he thought he and Howie would need.

Had he forgotten anything? He tilted back in his desk chair, thinking, staring at the walls. Long ago, he’d taped up images of his father’s victims—one hundred twenty-three photos clipped from newspapers, printed off the Web, surreptitiously photocopied from G. William’s files. He told himself it was a reminder. A reminder of what could happen if he ever lost control.

In that roster of the dead was a one hundred and twenty-fourth photo, this one taped between Billy’s eightieth and eighty-first official kills. That was Jazz’s best guess as to when Billy had killed the woman in the photo, Jazz’s own mother.

The photo was all that remained of her. That and a few scanty memories of her from when he was much younger: the dog, Rusty, that she’d given him as a puppy; the smell of cupcakes in the oven; the tang of her homemade lemon frosting. That was it. He remembered so little about her, but based on Gramma’s comments and Billy’s actions, there was only one reasonable conclusion: His mother had been the one good thing in his life, and even though he had precious few memories of that good thing, he would kill or die to keep them.

The police could find no evidence that Billy had killed Mom. No one could. She was officially a missing person, and her case was colder than Popsicles on New Year’s Eve. Jazz only knew that one day she’d been in his life and the next she’d been gone. He had been eight years old, and when he asked Billy, “Where’s Mom?” Billy had simply shrugged and said, “She went away.” That’s all Billy would ever say, no matter how Jazz asked. He could beg and plead: “She went away.” Weep and bawl: “She went away.” Threaten and rage: “She went away.”

All that remained were the half-remembered snippets of his childhood. Did anyone ever remember their childhood with perfect clarity? Jazz wasn’t sure, but his own was staticky and foggy. Billy’s lessons remained, of course. The day he met Howie. What had happened to Rusty. But so much else was just…muddy. A river of images and thoughts and feelings, dirtied and polluted so that no one could drink from it without gagging.

And that one memory. Or dream. Or both. He didn’t know which it was. But it felt so
real
. The knife. The voice. Billy’s voice, he knew, telling him to take the knife. Billy’s hands, guiding his own, Billy’s voice again—

A knife…

A knife and flesh and the flesh parts and he feels the resistance of it and how does he know? How does he know the resistance of flesh?

Another voice, drawn tight in pain, a gasp.

Of all his victims, Billy refused to talk at all about Janice Dent. Par for the course. Serial killers pretended to confess, but they never really told the truth, going back to olden days. Back in the nineteenth century, H. H. Holmes confessed to killing twenty-seven women during the Chicago World’s Fair, but police were convinced he’d murdered more than a hundred.

Jazz knew killers. Billy had studied the serial killers of the past the way painters study the Renaissance masters. He learned from their mistakes. He obsessed over them. And he passed his knowledge down to his son. Lucky Jazz—
those
were the things he remembered from his childhood.

Killers always held something back. They couldn’t help themselves.

Jazz’s mom was Billy’s hold-back.

Other than the one hundred twenty-four victim pictures, there was only one other photo in the room, this one of someone still living. It was a black-and-white photo of a pretty, slender teenager dressed in a prim dress, wearing a pillbox hat and carrying a small clutch purse. She was standing in front of a church, smiling at the camera.

His grandmother as a young woman. Years before she begat a monster.

Jazz followed the chronology of Billy’s career, reciting the name of each victim from memory as he gazed at the pictures. “Cassie Overton,” he began. “Farrah Gordon. Harper McLeod.” He ended back at Gramma’s old photo.

“Someday,” he murmured. “Someday I could snap. I’m my father’s son. It could happen. And when that day comes, when I take my first victim…it could even be you.”

He surprised himself by crying, but he wasn’t sure if it was for his grandmother or for himself. He didn’t like thinking about killing her, but he couldn’t help it; it felt good. She was a horrible person; she’d given the world the Artist, Green Jack, whichever nickname you wanted to use for Dear Old Dad. He wanted to figure out what made her tick, but he also wanted her gone from the face of the planet. Maybe then—
maybe
—he wouldn’t feel so guilty.

But he knew that wasn’t true. He would always feel guilty. He hadn’t been able to protect his own mother. He hadn’t been able to help that kid, the one at the drugstore who’d collapsed at his feet. He should have killed Billy in his sleep years ago. God knows he knew how to do it—Billy had been instructing Jazz in the fine, gory art of murder since Jazz was old enough to walk. He could handle knives, guns, hatchets, hammers.…Billy had kept an old hand drill in a kitchen cabinet, and Jazz could have drilled right into his father’s brain while Dear Old Dad slept. Could have done it and saved the world the gruesome murders that followed.

People said to him:
You were thirteen. You knew right from wrong. You knew what he was doing was wrong. Why didn’t you stop him?

But what they could never understand was that killing was only wrong for
other
people. Not for Billy. And not for Jazz. That’s how he’d been raised; brainwashed; duped. Whatever word you wanted to use. That was…

He rolled over in bed and stared at the wall, finding Harriet Klein’s picture. Green eyes, like he remembered.

Bringing back Harriet Klein was impossible. And there was nothing he could tell Jeff Fulton that would make the poor man’s sad, wretched life any better. But there was a way to atone, Jazz knew, for his father’s sins, and for his own.

Jane Doe’s killer was still out there.

“I’m going to catch you,” Jazz whispered. “I’ll track you down, no matter how crazy it is, no matter how crazy it makes me.”

Because ultimately, he would rather be
that
kind of crazy than his grandmother’s.

He called Howie, keeping his voice low so as not to waken Gramma, who slept one thin wall away.

“We’re on,” Jazz said when Howie answered. He checked his bedside clock: 11:20. Plenty of night left.

“Are you kidding me?” Howie complained. “Colbert’s on in, like, ten minutes. Besides, after the morgue, I figured you’d  stop being Supercop.”

“First of all, we’re going in a few hours, not right now. To see it closer to when the killer was there. Second of all, not a chance. Third of all, if you want me to forgive you for ratting out our field trip to the morgue to Connie, you’ll do this.”

“Oh, come on!”

“I can’t believe you told her. Whatever happened to bros before hos?”

“There’s a little-known corollary to bros before hos, which states that if Bro One is terrified because Bro Two’s girlfriend can make his nose bleed just by looking at him the wrong way, he’s allowed to put hos before bros. I chose to implement that corollary because your girlfriend is a total badass.”

“Howie, I want you to think about this carefully: Who are you really more afraid of, Connie or me?”

Howie went silent for a moment. “Honestly? Some days it’s about even. But hey, if you want to go back to the field, I’m there for you. On one condition.”

Jazz groaned. He could tell from Howie’s tone of voice what that condition would be.

Jazz caught a few hours’ sleep, then sneaked out of the house. Howie was no slouch at sneaking away from his overprotective mother, either; he was already waiting for Jazz at their usual meeting spot, a goofily tall shadow in the moonlight.

“Left shoulder this time,” Howie said as he climbed into the Jeep. “It’s gonna be a flaming basketball. I mean, like, one that’s actually on fire, you know? Wait, wait,” he said before Jazz could interrupt. “Let me see what we’ve got so far so I can be sure.”

“Now?” Jazz asked. “Here?”

“You want my help or not?”

Jazz grumbled, but he shifted the Jeep into park and then slipped off his T-shirt, revealing three tattoos—on his right shoulder a stylized
CP3,
for Chris Paul, Howie’s favorite basketball player; across the broad sweep of his back a Yosemite Sam with both pistols drawn; and around his right biceps a black string of Korean characters that Howie swore translated to “I am strong and mighty in the wind,” but which Jazz feared actually translated to “Another dumbass white kid with Asian tats. LOL.”

Howie had wanted the first tat—the Paul number—last year, but his parents and his doctor thought it was too risky, given Howie’s particularly persnickety flavor of hemophilia. Jazz—in a moment of weakness he now regretted—had stepped in and told Howie that
he
would get the tattoo on his behalf, and Howie could look at it whenever he wanted.

One thing had led to another.

“Yeah,” Howie said as Jazz swiveled in the seat so that he could see the tats better. “Left shoulder. A basketball on fire. I drew a sketch.”

He fumbled in his pocket for a piece of paper, but Jazz pushed his hands away. “I don’t want to see it. I don’t care what it looks like. We’ll go to the guy who doesn’t check IDs next week and get it done, okay?”

“Sweet.” Howie beamed like a kid on a Halloween sugar high. “But if that Erickson guy shows up out of nowhere again to arrest us, I’m gonna be totally pissed.”

“Yeah, well, me, too.” The thought of Erickson popping up again made Jazz think of the way the deputy had glared at him the night before, leaving just the slightest impression that he wouldn’t unlock the handcuffs. Erickson had enjoyed that moment, Jazz knew—Billy had always said that there was only a hairbreadth of difference between cops and killers.

As they drove to the field, Howie said, “You know what?”

“What?”

“I think I would follow you onto the battlefields of hell.”

“That’s nice.”

“But I would still ask you why we were going to the battlefields of hell.”

“Right.” Sometimes talking to Howie was an exercise in extreme patience. It was patience as Olympic sport. He talked circles and circles and circles until the conversation was a whirlpool.

“What I’m saying is, I’m going tonight. I’m there for you. But I still have to ask: Why are you so obsessed with this?”

“I told you yesterday: I think this is a serial killer.”

“So? If it is, the cops will eventually figure it out.”

“And a lot of other people might die in the meantime.”

“People are dying all over the world. Right now. Everywhere. And you
know
they’re dying; it’s totally not theoretical. So why are you so focused on this totally imaginary, maybe-not-real serial killer?”

Jazz pressed his lips together tightly, as if he could physically prevent himself from speaking. But some part of him needed to say what came next, and that part overrode the rest of him.

“Because,” he said quietly, “if I
catch
killers, then maybe that means I’m not a killer.”

Howie snorted. “You are so totally
not
a serial killer. I can prove it.”

“This should be good. Go ahead, Dr. Freud.”

Howie rushed on, his gestures animated. “Lookit. Serial killers tend to go after the weak, right? The ones who can’t fight back. Well, who’s weaker than me, man? I bleed at the
sight
of a knife. I could hemorrhage to death by being hit with a spoon.”

All true.

“But you’re my best friend, and you’d never hurt me. That should tell you everything you need to know.” Howie crossed his arms over his chest and nodded, as if he’d just solved cold fusion.

It was a nice thought, and Jazz really, truly wished it meant what Howie wanted it to mean. But even serial killers could form attachments. There was a couple he’d read about in England, where the husband tortured and killed all sorts of women, including his own daughters, but never harmed his wife.

It was another twenty minutes to the field where Jane Doe was found; they were silent for the rest of it. Howie leaned against his window, staring out at the darkness as they pulled onto an access road without street lamps. Only the moon offered any light, its luminescence shredded and blotched by the trees overhead. As Jazz parked along the road—they would have to walk the mile to the spot where Jane Doe was found, so as not to leave tire tracks—Howie spoke up.

“What’s your middle name again?”

“What?”

“Your middle name. I don’t remember it.”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Starts with an
F
, right?”

“What’s the big deal?” Jazz asked as they got out. He opened the back of the Jeep to haul out the small, stuffed duffel bag.

“Serial killers all have three names,” Howie said. “I’m checking to see what yours is like.”

“I think that’s assassins. John Wilkes Booth. Lee Harvey Oswald.”

“Serial killers, too,” Howie insisted. They began walking toward the crime scene. “Like John Wayne Gacy. Bobby Joe Long. Jeremy Bryan Jones.”

“You’ve spent way too much time with me, to know all those guys.”

“And more! William Cornelius Dent. The Boston Strangler.”

“Now you’re being ridiculous. Boston isn’t his middle—”

“I can be ridiculous all night long.”

“Fine. Francis. It’s Francis.”

“Jasper Francis
Dent
,” Howie mused. He said it several more times, giving it different inflections and different emphases: “
Jasper
Francis Dent. Jasper
Francis
Dent.” Finally, he shook his head. “Nah, it doesn’t work. Doesn’t sound right. I don’t think you’re a serial killer.”

Carefully stepping through tall weeds and dead stalks of soybean plants, Jazz muttered, “Well, that’s a relief.” But deep down, he was surprised by how grateful Howie’s pronouncement made him feel.

They finally crested the hill that overlooked the site where Jane Doe’s body had been found. The crime-scene tape still staked out a lopsided hexagon. Forgotten and flicking in a slight breeze, a single plastic flag marked where the severed finger had been found near the body. Stakes ran in rows up the hill, twine strung between them in both directions to form a series of tight, adjoining squares. So, G. William at least ordered his men to perform a rudimentary grid search. That was good.

Before they went any farther, Jazz pulled out shower caps and gloves.

“Here we go again,” Howie grumbled, slipping them on. “Why do I have to be here?”

Jazz chuckled; they were two miles in any direction from civilization, and Howie was whispering.

“I might need to measure some things. And it can never hurt to have a lookout.”

“For what?” Howie looked around. In the moonlight, the field had gone dull silver, with spots of black, like tarnish. “Afraid gophers are going to show up and interfere?”

“Nah. But this guy might not know yet that the cops took her. A lot of them like to come back and see the body where they left it. To relive it.”

“Oh, that’s gross.”

Jazz grinned. “Sometimes they even jerk off.”

Howie mimed shoving a finger down his throat. “T-M-I. You have so totally ruined masturbation for me. Why couldn’t you have brought Connie instead?”

“Connie doesn’t like it when I go all Billy.”

“Oh, and I do?”

“You tolerate it. Just keep an eye out, man.” Jazz hunkered down on the hill, scanning the grade that rolled gently down to the spot where Jane Doe had been left and then found. Howie fell silent behind him, standing tall and still, like the world’s least effective scarecrow.

He didn’t tell Howie the other reason he hadn’t invited Connie: When it came to this sort of skulduggery, “bros before hos” stopped being a cute motto and became a rule to live by—he’d been dating Connie for only a few months, but he’d been friends with Howie for years. Howie might spill his guts to Connie, but he would never tell an adult about this trip. He couldn’t be certain that the same applied to Connie.

It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her; it’s just that his trust for Howie bordered on psychotic. Howie had been there all along, always a friend. He was Jazz’s friend when Billy was still home, pretending to be just another single dad juggling his child with his job. And Howie was there when Billy got arrested, and in the shocking days right after the arrest.

Most important of all, Howie remained his friend in the dark days afterward—during the hearings and the trials; after the reporters swarmed Lobo’s Nod; when the TV specials aired. Back when no one else even wanted to look in Jazz’s direction. Jazz had felt guilty that he’d never told Howie about his father’s true occupation, that he’d never managed to reveal the dark secret of his upbringing before the rest of the world found out. But like the children of alcoholics and the victims of abuse, Jazz had been a master at compartmentalizing. That, combined with Billy’s persistent brainwashing and total control, meant Jazz had never uttered a peep to anyone.

Howie never let that get between them. That meant something. For Jazz it meant everything.

He stared into the moonlit murk of the field. The moon was only a tiny bit smaller than it would have been when the killer dumped Jane Doe here. Jazz was seeing the scene the way the killer had, which was important.

No one but us ever sees it like this
, Billy said. The occasion was Jazz’s seventh birthday, and Dear Old Dad had decided to take his son to work. Jazz sat in the Jeep while Billy finished killing his thirty-ninth victim—a schoolteacher named Gail Clinton—in an abandoned restroom in a public park in Madison, Wisconsin. Then, when he’d finished disjointing her corpse (for victims thirty-five through forty-two, Billy went through a phase where he liked repositioning the body with the limbs in interesting and varied positions that required separating them at the joints), he brought Jazz in and walked him through the crucial steps necessary to remove evidence that would lead the cops (“the bastard cops,” Billy always called them) back to him.
No one ever sees it like this
, he’d explained.
They try to imagine how we see it, but we can’t let them. So we leave false clues sometimes. And we never let ’em into our heads. Got it? ’Cause our heads belong to us, to us and no one else. Now go hand Daddy that garbage bag like a good boy, will ya?