by Barry Lyga
When he’d managed to gather his wits, Jazz pulled himself to his feet and dared to go inside.
The vestibule was dark. Gramma had turned off the lights and closed all the blinds.
“Gramma?” he called. “Hey, Gramma. It’s Jasper. I’m alone.”
Nothing.
He flicked on a light and made his way into what Gramma insisted on calling the parlor, even though it was nothing more than a cramped little dayroom with a dusty old love seat and some side tables. His grandmother was curled into a corner on the love seat, her legs tucked up against her chest, her spindly form wrapped in a threadbare housecoat. Her thinning hair spun around her head like a whirlwind of gray cotton candy gone wrong.
She was aiming a shotgun at him, her eyes wide and wild.
“Hi, Gramma.”
“I’ll shoot her!” Gramma shouted. “I’ll shoot her right through you if I have to!”
“She’s not with me, Gramma. I’m alone. I promise.” He took another step toward her.
“Don’t think I won’t shoot you. I will. I shoulda shot your daddy. Shoulda shot him when he came right out of me. Or maybe when he was still in me. That would have been good, too.”
“Can’t argue with you there, Gramma.” Another step. The gun was harmless, but if she pulled the trigger, she’d learn how harmless it was. And she’d be twice as pissed.
“He wasn’t always bad, you know. He grew up okay. It was when he met her that everything went all to hell.”
Billy Dent had been torturing and killing small animals since the age of eight, but Jazz let Gramma have her delusions. She liked to believe that Jazz’s mother had made Billy into a sociopathic murder machine, and since Mom was long dead, there was no harm in letting her have that special, specific delusion.
“Just like you!” she yelled, raising the shotgun to track his head as he closed in on her. “Like you! I know what you been up to! Just like your pappy! Taking up with whores! Putting your thing inside them! That’s where the corruption comes from, boy!”
Jazz bit the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing. Had he just been bemoaning his fears and constant struggles over women? Well, here was their genesis! Handed down from crazy old Gramma Dent to sociopathic Billy Dent, and from there to Jazz himself. Rarely did real life provide such immediate context for a problem. Who needed therapy when Gramma could just explain everything?
“I’m thinking of making macaroni and cheese for dinner,” Jazz told her, now mere inches from the shotgun. “I’ll use the garlic bread crumbs on the top, the way you like it. And if we have some Romano cheese, I’ll add that to the cheddar. How’s that sound?”
“I should blow your damn fool head off,” Gramma snarled. “I don’t want them damn elbow noodles, either.”
“Right. Who would? I’ll use bow ties. How’s that?”
“Bow ties are good. They remind me of how I met your granddad. He was so handsome in his dress uniform.” She sighed. “You think cooking me dinner means I’m not gonna shoot you?”
“Well, you can shoot me after dinner. If you shoot me before dinner, who’s gonna cook for you?”
She squinted as if she were attempting long division somewhere behind those ice-blue eyes. They were Billy’s eyes, almost exactly. Jazz’s were hazel. His mother’s eyes. He thought of them as “sane eyes.”
“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 me
mory. 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.
CHAPTER 9
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.