I Hunt Killers

by Barry Lyga

  “Sorry,” the deputy said in a curt tone that seemed to be anything but an apology.

  Erickson stalked over to Jazz, who held out his wrists to be released. Erickson stared at Jazz, and something in the deputy’s eyes made Jazz want to shiver, an urge he resisted. He had the disturbing sense that Erickson was going to defy Tanner and refuse to unlock the cuffs.

  How could I have been so wrong about that guy? Jazz thought. I saw isolation and weakness, but it was really…what? First-day jitters? Something else?

  Their eyes locked for long seconds. Jazz had never feared another human being—other than his father—and he wasn’t about to start now.

  Erickson grunted at last and unlocked the cuffs. “I’m not going to forget this,” he said.

  Jazz flashed him a grin, just because he knew it was annoying. I won’t, either.

  CHAPTER 5

  “That,” Howie said as they climbed into the Jeep, “was a close call. What was that guy doing down there, anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” Jazz said. “And right now, I don’t care. Let’s get out to the field, though. I want to see it at night, the way the killer—”

  “Are you nuts?” Howie goggled at him. “Go by yourself. I’m not going anywhere but home. Didn’t you hear Tanner? He was pretty serious.”

  “It’s his job to be serious. I need you to come with me to—”

  “Uh-uh. No way. Take me home. It’s already past midnight, and I need my beauty rest.”

  Jazz really wanted to go back to the field and see it the way the killer had seen it—in the predawn dark. But he would need Howie’s help again, so it was best to let his friend cool off first.

  Jazz dropped Howie off at his house and headed home. His grandmother was sound asleep, having passed out on the couch in the living room as she often did these days. The TV was still on, blaring at full volume. Jazz had learned from prior experience that if he turned it off or down, Gramma would bolt awake and raise holy hell for his troubles, so he left everything as it was and crept past her sleeping, snoring form.

  How could G. William not see what Jazz saw? How could he miss it? Were the million petty details of being a cop making G. William ignore what was right in front of him? Or was it something deeper?

  Linkage blindness is the technical term for when cops refuse to acknowledge that two or more cases might be connected, despite the evidence. The idea that they might be dealing with a serial killer is so huge, so overwhelming and horrifying and depressing, that they just refuse to see it. In this case, there was only the one victim, but Jazz was certain of something: This was not the killer’s first victim, nor would it be his last. If G. William didn’t see that, then Jazz would have to take matters into his own hands.

  And how do you know that, Jazz? he asked himself. He avoided looking at himself in the mirror as he brushed his teeth and washed up for bed. There were times when he was afraid that he would see Billy staring back from the mirror, and this was one of those times.

  No. Afraid was the wrong word to use. Jazz wasn’t afraid—he was convinced.

  Convinced because he heard Billy’s voice in his head too much these days: It grew with time, as though the longer Billy stayed in prison, the stronger his voice in Jazz’s head became. Convinced because he couldn’t help seeing another serial killer in the Nod, even with very little evidence.

  What was the opposite of linkage blindness? What described being certain of something without any kind of evidence?

  As he flopped into bed, Jazz realized: The term was faith.

  What a thing to have faith in, he thought, and drifted off to sleep.

  In his sleep, there was a knife.

  A knife in a sink.

  There was always a knife in a sink.

  And a voice.

  And a hand.

  A hand on the knife.

  Sometimes he thought—

  (no)

  —he thought—

  (no don’t don’t don’t you go and)

  Easy, a voice says. So easy. It’s just like cutting chicken.

  And another voice says:

  (no)

  It’s okay. It’s okay. I want—

  And sometimes he thinks

  (no)

  A knife.

  Jazz jerked awake as though shocked with electricity, out of breath and trembling. He looked over at his clock; no more than an hour had passed since he’d collapsed into bed. Yet he was fully awake, his mind spinning. This was ridiculous. He needed to get some sleep. He had school in the morning.

  The dream. The dream. The knife. And then the voices. And then the other things…At least this time he’d woken up before…

  Jazz tossed and turned in bed, willing himself back to sleep, unable to get there. Images of Jane Doe drifted through his mind’s eye, and Billy’s voice whispered in his ear. Suggesting. Insisting. Reminding. People matter. People are real. I will never kill, Jazz told himself over and over, his promise to himself. He had said it to his father once—just once—and Billy had laughed and said, You go on thinking that way, Jasper. If that’s what it takes to get you through the night, you go on thinking that way. Billy had been so sure that Jazz would someday go into the family business.

  Something about Jane Doe nagged at him. Was it something in the report? No—the report had been useless. G. William was right—he should have waited another day or so for more information to come in. From the complete autopsy. From fingerprints.

  He rolled over and punched his pillow, cursing under his breath. What an idiot he’d been, breaking into the morgue tonight. Another day—two at most—and the complete autopsy report would have been available to him. Just a little more time and he could have had all the information the police had.

  But no. He had to be impatient. He had to rush in. Stupid. A stupid kid’s mistake. And there was no way he’d ever get back in now; G. William would have the locks changed by morning, and the new keys would be watched carefully. Jazz would never see that final autopsy report, and he had only himself to blame. If he was going to do this—really do this—then he couldn’t make any more stupid mistakes.

  Jane Doe, he thought, looking at the ceiling, wasn’t her real name, of course. Would her real name give him some additional clue? It wasn’t the name itself that mattered—her name just identified her to people. But a name is about a person and their relations. Jane Doe wasn’t important because of who she was. Classic victimology: It wasn’t about what she seemed like. It wasn’t even about what she really was. It was, instead, all about what she symbolized or represented for him, for the killer.

  “Him,” because of course the killer would be a man. Most serial killers were. Most killers were, period. And when the victim is a young, attractive woman, found naked…Plus, you had to factor in the location—there were no tire tracks anywhere in the field near the body, which meant the killer carried her. Few women have the upper-body strength to do that, even with someone as small as Jane Doe, and there’d been no drag marks.

  So, a male. Probably thirties or older, because—Jazz was convinced—the guy wasn’t new at this. White—serial killers tended to hunt (to prospect, in Billy’s parlance) within their own ethnic groups. He was probably smart.

  Jazz sighed. Age, race, and intelligence were all relatively easy to predict. Motive was tougher.

  He would go to the field tomorrow. No question about it. He would see what the cops had missed. Because he knew they had to have missed something. He could feel it.

  More faith. Jazz figured he had enough faith for an entire seminary. What he needed was some evidence.

  He ran through the report in his mind, ran through what he’d seen at the crime scene. He was replaying his memory of looking at Jane Doe’s mutilated hand in the morgue when sleep finally slipped up behind him, wrapped an arm around him, and carried him off, this time without dreams.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Impressionist—that was the name he’d settled on for himself, picking it from a list of t
hree quite good ones—stood just across the street from Jazz’s house, gazing up at Jazz’s dark bedroom window. He wondered—idly, but he wondered nonetheless—how Billy Dent’s son slept at night. Did Jasper Dent dream of bodies and blood, or was he like every other teenage boy, dreaming of girls and cars and the future?

  The Impressionist had followed the body to the police station/morgue. There was no particular reason to do so, no imperative that compelled him. But when you’ve spent such intimate time with someone, when you’ve seen the light in her eyes glimmer and then blink out, heard the soft sigh of her last breath…Sometimes it’s hard to let go. So he’d parked down the block to watch the cranky old station wagon pull into the parking lot.

  And, to his amazement, he’d spotted none other than Billy Dent’s Jeep in the parking lot, just like any other car. The Impressionist recognized it from an episode of 60 Minutes. Or maybe it was 20/20—he kept getting them confused. Whichever one, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that it was definitely Billy Dent’s Jeep, which meant that the kid who then came out of the police station and kicked the bumper had to be none other than Jasper Dent.

  From the police station, the Impressionist followed Jasper at a distance. To the morgue that night, then to here, home.

  The “street” on which Jazz lived with his grandmother was a street in name only; it was more a long driveway to a large, grotesque McMansion half a mile away, a run of cracked pavement and loose stone. The Dent house, a rickety colonial in a state of disrepair, sat along this drive like an afterthought, equidistant between the McMansion and the main road. Everything about the house said, “Oh, that’s right, now I remember.…” as though the house were slowly forgetting itself into nonexistence. Unless you knew who lived within, you would never peg this house as the epicenter of Billy Dent’s decades-long harrowing of America. But within those humble walls, a legacy had been born. Billy Dent had grown up there, and now his son lived there, the house and the legacy passed down like a baton going from one runner to the next. A simple house, run-down and inconspicuous. Right here in the very middle of Middle America, hell had been born and suckled and matured.

  The Impressionist grinned.

  A serial killer’s greatest ability is the ability to blend in. Just like this house. No one driving by would guess at what had grown within, and no one would guess what was growing in there now. Billy Dent had blended in flawlessly, convincing friends and neighbors and acquaintances that he was “just one of the guys.” Barbecues in the summer. Coaching a Little League baseball team for three years. Volunteering to drive the FoodMobile on alternating weekends. And no one knew. No one suspected. Idiots.

  No, no. Not idiots.

  Prospects.

  The Impressionist blended in, too. The dead woman in the field hadn’t suspected a thing when he’d first approached her at the Dairy Queen off the highway just outside Lobo’s Nob. Late at night, a bland-looking man asks to borrow your cell. Car died two miles back, you see. Just need to call AAA, if you don’t mind. Oh, hell (and then a quick apology for swearing in front of a lady—she ate it up), they need to call me again near the car so I can read them the VIN number. Can I borrow your phone again? Or…maybe you can just walk with me and then take your phone back when I’m done?

  It was too easy, really.

  He sighed into the cool October night air, his breath a vaporous cloud that dispersed almost immediately.

  The Impressionist had known that he would, inevitably, cross paths with Dent’s kid. In a perverse way, he looked forward to it, even though he had been given a rule: He was not to interact with Jasper Dent. And sure as hell, no harm was to come to Jasper Dent.

  We’ll see about that, the Impressionist thought. He raised his cell phone and thumbed through the photos and videos stored there. All shot today. All of Jasper Dent, caught unawares, going about his life.

  As far as the Impressionist could tell, young Jasper Dent had the blending-in part down to a tee. No one suspected him of being a killer.

  Even Jasper himself didn’t suspect it.

  CHAPTER 7

  —gotta wakey, wakey, Jasper, my boy—

  Jazz forced himself awake the next morning, past the shreds of his father’s voice. Lay awake in the sunlight slanting through his window blinds.

  —gotta wakey, wakey—

  People matter, he countered. People are real.

  And just in case he forgot, the scrolling screen saver on his computer reminded him: Remember Bobby Joe Long.

  He dressed and headed out to the Coff-E-Shop, where he and Howie met almost every morning before school. The tables bore several generations’ worth of nicks and stains, and every surface was slick with a grease that seemed to congeal from the very air, but none of that stopped the clientele from pouring in every morning.

  Jazz got there first and grabbed a small table near the window for Howie and himself. He’d invited Connie to join them for their morning ritual about a month ago, but she had declined. “You guys need to have your guy time. I don’t want you to start ignoring poor Howie just because you have a girlfriend now.”

  Helen was usually on duty this time of day, and today was no exception. She spied Jazz from across the shop, saw he was alone, and nodded to him, a nod that said, I’ll be over once Howie gets here. One of the benefits of living in a small town.

  Howie came in a few moments later. Jazz watched him make his careful way through the crowded line of people waiting for take-out coffee, gently edging bodies aside and making as little contact as possible to avoid bruises.

  “Once again,” Howie announced as he got to the table, “Howie the Barbarian deftly avoids the crushing throngs of heathens looking to destroy him and arrives unscathed!”

  “Did your mom say anything about the bruise on your wrist?”

  “Wore long sleeves today. I’m no dummy.”

  “What can I get you today, Howie?” Helen asked, gliding up to their table. She didn’t have to ask Jazz because he always drank his coffee black with a little sugar. Howie, though, treated ordering coffee as if it were some sort of game show, where you only get points for not repeating yourself.

  “Hmm…” He tapped a finger to his lips. “Hmm…What do I feel like having today?”

  Jazz held up his wrist so that Howie could see his watch. “School in twenty minutes.”

  “You can’t rush my creative genius,” Howie said, “with your quotidian worries.”

  “Quotidian? Seriously?”

  “I would have said mundane, but that word is so…mundane.”

  “I do have other tables.…” Helen reminded them.

  “I think today,” Howie announced, “I’m going to try a nonfat macchiato with a double shot of caramel, lots of foam, and whipped cream on top.”

  Helen’s pen hesitated at her order pad. “Foam and whipped cream?”

  Howie pretended to mull it over. “Yep.”

  “And you want nonfat, but then you want whipped cream?”

  “I’m a complicated man, with complicated taste buds.”

  Before Helen could move away entirely, Jazz stopped her. “Make those to go, will you?”

  “Sure, Jasper.”

  “What the—” Howie broke off. “Oh. I see. Sleazoid alert.”

  He had seen what Jazz noticed moments before: Sitting at the Coff-E-Shop’s counter was none other than Doug Weathers, a reporter for the county’s weekly rag of a newspaper. When Billy had been caught and arrested, Weathers found himself in the catbird seat as the first reporter on the scene, and the one with all the background dirt. He knew the most recent victims’ families. He knew the area. He knew Billy’s friends and coworkers. He had even met Billy once, many years earlier, at some local political function.

  And Weathers milked that for all it was worth when the time came. Suddenly he was in demand as a “local expert,” his mug plastered all over CNN and Fox News and all the major broadcast channels. For months, you couldn’t turn on a television without seeing Billy De
nt…and right after Billy, you’d see Doug Weathers.

  Doug was also responsible for pictures of Jazz showing up, first in the newspapers and then on TV. Jazz was sure there were people he hated more than Doug Weathers, but he was equally sure that it was a really short list. He wanted to get out of the Coff-E-Shop before Weathers could—

  Too late. Weathers had turned on his stool and spied Jazz and Howie. His eyes—murky and dun-colored—widened, and he slid off the stool immediately.

  “Oh, great.”

  “Hey, there, Jasper,” Weathers said, grabbing a chair from another table to join the boys. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  “Yeah, real fancy,” Howie growled. “Everyone knows we get coffee here. How long have you been waiting for us?”

  Weathers grinned. He was in his thirties, medium build, with a face that looked sad even when he smiled. It was a bright, clear day outside, but he wore a trench coat anyway, probably because someone had once told him that reporters wore them.

  “Hey, Gersten, if you want in on the fame, I can make it happen. Convince Jasper here to give me an exclusive. A one-on-one interview. Mano a mano. And I’ll do a nice sidebar with you as the ‘best friend who lived through the madness.’”

  “Wow, Jazz.” Howie whistled with false appreciation. “A sidebar. I could be a sidebar!”

  “Back off,” Jazz said to Weathers. “Did you not understand it the ten other times I’ve said it to you?”

  “Check it, kid. Together we can—”

  “Or the six times I e-mailed it to you?”

  “—get your side of the story out there—”

  “Or the dozen texts?”

  “—and make a big splash with it,” Weathers rattled on as if Jazz had said nothing. “C’mon. Just a single interview. Been up to the penitentiary to see your dad lately? That’s even better. Good atmosphere. I’ll get a photographer and we’ll go together. One little interview. Won’t hurt anyone, and it’ll change your life.” His eyes danced with excitement.