I Hunt Killers

by Barry Lyga

  “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?

  There were no false clues here. No clues at all. The cops had walked at least half a mile in a grid pattern to search for evidence. They’d come up empty-handed. Locard was a smart guy, but out in a field like this, the exchange of evidence could mean a thread from the killer’s pants clinging to and blending in with a tall weed. It was worse than looking for a needle in a haystack.

  “Mind telling me what we’re looking for?” Howie asked. “Maybe I can help.”

  “I’m trying to think like the killer,” Jazz admitted after a moment, a bit frustrated that he was having trouble doing just that. “The most important thing is to figure out how the guy entered or left the scene. If he was smart, he did both the same way. Easier to keep from leaving evidence that way.”

  “Look!” Howie’s voice broke with excitement and he pointed. “A footprint! And oh my God—there’s another one!”

  Jazz shook his head. “Those are from the cops. They tried to be careful, but the ground was soft when they got here.”

  “So maybe the killer guy left footprints,” Howie said, sulking a little bit.

  “Cops didn’t find any. Makes sense. He would have been here before sunup. This time of year, the ground would be too hard at night from the cold.” To illustrate, he pointed to the path he and Howie had taken—there were no footprints from their own shoes.

  Howie sniffed. “Well, if it’s that cold, she could have been out here for days. Or weeks.”

  “Nah, it’s not that cold yet. Animals and bacteria can devour every scrap of flesh in a month. She didn’t even have flies on her yet. She was fresh.

  “So he came here at night,” Jazz went on, thinking aloud. “If you were coming here at night, which direction would you come from?”

  Howie pointed. “Back the way we came. Duh. It’s the easiest way.”

  “Yeah, but it’s only the easiest way because we know about it. We grew up around here, so we know about the access road.”

  “So you’re saying he couldn’t have come that way?”

  Jazz shrugged. “I’m saying we can’t a
ssume it. But if he did come that way, it means something about him. It means he’s either a local or he scouted Lobo’s Nod and this field for a long time before he did this.”

  “Whoa. You think he’s someone in town? Someone we know? What are the odds?”

  He meant the odds of a town the size of Lobo’s Nod having two resident serial killers, of course. Jazz was no math whiz, but he figured those odds to be something like a jillion to one, to be technical about it. Jazz ignored Howie for a moment and crept forward in the dark until he found the spot he was looking for. He glanced over his shoulder; only twenty yards away, in the direction he now looked, he had hidden and watched the cops the day before. He was now standing exactly where Deputy Erickson had been standing then, unaware that Jazz was observing him. Erickson, Jazz realized now, had had the best view of the entire crime scene as the investigators worked.

  “Maybe he just scouted the area,” Jazz said. “The access road isn’t on any maps, but maybe it shows up on Google Earth or something. I didn’t notice before; I’ll have to check.”

  “No one knows her, so she’s not from around here,” Howie said. “He killed her somewhere else and just dumped her here in the Nod. The highway’s thataway.” He pointed off to their left. “And the farmhouse is thataway”—to the right now—“so you know he didn’t come from that direction. So it makes sense he’d be driving by on the highway, see this nice empty field, and think, Oh, cool—I’ll leave the body there. Right?”

  Jazz blinked. Of course. He was an idiot. The answer was in front of him the whole time!

  “He came up the hill,” he whispered.

  “What?”

  Still crouched, Jazz pointed down the grade, past the flat spot where the body had been found, to a slightly steeper grade that rolled down to a copse of trees. “This guy is no dummy. He knew the cops would make two assumptions, just like you did. That he came from the highway or from the access road. Look—from here you can see where the cops did their grid search, and they only came up the hill to the left and toward you and me. Because that’s where the roads are, and that’s where it’s easiest. Path of least resistance. When you’re carrying a dead body, do you want to carry it up a hill or down a hill?”

  “Me, personally?” Howie asked. “I usually carry all my corpses downhill. Easier on the back.”

  “Right. That’s like Forensics 101—body-dumpers go downhill. But this guy…” Jazz stood up and clapped his hands together. “I guarantee you he came up the hill from those trees. Because he knew the cops wouldn’t think to look there. Come on.”

  They loped down the grade in a circular pathway that avoided contaminating the crime scene. “I can’t imagine carrying a body up this hill,” Howie complained. “I would have just burned it up. Why didn’t he just burn it?”

  “Are you kidding? A crematorium gets up to fifteen hundred degrees for two hours, and bones and teeth still survive. Billy learned that one the hard way. Tried burning his tenth victim. Didn’t go well.”

  “What about that lime stuff? Dissolve it.”

  “Quicklime? Takes a long time. And you need a lot of it. And while it’s happening, the body can get dehydrated and might actually end up preserved, not dissolved. So there’s no guarantee you can get rid of the body. Your best bet is to make sure you’ve removed all connections from it to you.”

  “Well, now I know who to call if I ever need to get rid of a body,” Howie said. At the bottom of the hill, he paused and looked ahead at the trees. “This doesn’t make sense. How would he get into the trees in the first place? There’s no road. There’s no—”

  “I don’t know how,” Jazz said, his voice rising in excitement as they took off running across the field under the light of the moon. “He just did. I know he did!” His heart thrummed with something more than the exertion of running. Something deeper. More primal. He didn’t know what it was, not yet, but he liked it.

  In moments, they’d crossed the tree line. Jazz warned Howie to be careful, playing a flashlight beam along the ground and up the trunks of trees. Howie complained until Jazz gave him a flashlight, too, and soon the two of them were creeping along through the trees, picking out roots and moss and shrubbery with their flashlights. Suddenly, Jazz stopped dead in his tracks and motioned for Howie to stop, too, hissing, “Ssshh! Don’t say anything!”

  “I didn’t say anything!” Howie argued.

  “You just did.”

  “Yeah, because you said—”

  “Just shut up and listen!” Jazz waved his hand manically for emphasis and Howie shut up. They both strained, leaning into the air, listening.

  “Do you hear it?” Jazz whispered.

  “Hear what? All I hear is the creek. What do you hear, Super-Hearing Guy?”

  “Exactly. The creek.” A grin split Jazz’s face. He shined his light right in Howie’s face so he could see the expression when the facts collided in Howie’s head. “Where does the creek lead?”

  “Lead?” Howie frowned. Like most kids in the Nod, he’d played in and around these fields when he was younger. “Doesn’t lead anywhere. It cuts through the farm and goes west to…Oh.” Howie’s jaw dropped. “Holy…It goes to the highway!”

  The creek in question—no more than thirty yards from where they stood—ran across the farm property east to west, passing under the highway and then petering out to a trickle. The killer could have left his car along the highway late at night when no one from Lobo’s Nod would be on the roads, then carried Jane Doe through the creek to the trees, then up the hill to dump her body. The water was no more than a foot high at the creek’s greatest depth. Would it be easy work? Not at all. But serial killers tended to be dedicated types, real overachievers. Wading the creek would leave less of a scent for dogs (if the cops ever got this far), and trace evidence would just be washed away or dissolved. Put Jane Doe in a plastic bag, and she would even bob along in the water a little without getting wet. When it was time to leave, he would go back the same way he’d come. It was a pretty decent plan.

  “This guy is a hell of an organized killer,” Jazz said as they walked. “He thought of everything. Didn’t leave anything behind he didn’t want found.”

  “So we can’t learn anything about him.”

  “We can always learn something. Even if there’s nothing there, that still tells us something. Disorganized killers go nuts and leave all kinds of evidence. So we can assume things about them. Organized killers don’t leave evidence, but that tells us something about their personalities. Like our guy. He’s highly organized. Probably firstborn or an only child. Probably had a decent relationship with his father. Stable. Did well in school, but most likely dropped out.”

  “He’s starting to sound like your dad,” Howie said.

  Jazz laughed. “Pretty sure Dear Old Dad is still locked up. I think we would have heard if he was out.” Jazz refused to communicate with Billy, but G. William made a point of calling once a month and confirming that—yes—Billy was still locked up in the penitentiary.

  They reached the creek and rushed to explore its borders. Jazz wasn’t so naive as to hope for footprints in the softer ground near the water, but he did see two or three spots that looked as though they’d been swept and brushed with leaves or branches. Had the killer entered or exited the water at one or more of these points, then covered up his tracks?

  The faster thud of Jazz’s heart told him yes. Yes, he had.

  But there was nothing else to see. Jazz knew that—despite what Billy had taught him—there was really no such thing as a perfect crime or a perfect crime scene. Everyone left some clue, some trace, some trail to follow. Something. Maybe the cops would miss it, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. Jazz had something the cops didn’t have, though. It went beyond just being able to think like a killer, though that was a big part of it.

  Most natural thing in the world, his father’s voice whispered from the past. Cain slew Abel, all under God’s eye. One of those memories that wouldn’t go
away, no matter how much Jazz tried to make it. Rusty—poor Rusty—was long dead. Mom—poor Mom—was long gone. It was just Jazz and Billy and regular lessons in how to murder. Twelve years old, and Jazz was learning very well, learning blood-spatter patterns, learning anatomy, learning knives and garrotes and hammers and screwdrivers and more.

  Standing perfectly still, he drew in a deep breath and tried to see the scene the way the killer would have. Tried to see it the way Billy would have. It wasn’t difficult.

  Good cover. Even during the day, you combine the tree cover with the remote location, and the odds of being seen are slim. A pain to haul her up that hill—even as tiny as she was, she was still dead weight—but worth it, to throw the cops off the trail. And before you go, you drop the middle finger there, you stick it to the cops, but you keep the other two because…Because they’re small. Portable. Stick a finger in your pocket and no one will notice. “Say, is that a severed finger in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?” Ho ho ho. But why keep two of them? Why—

  “Hey, Jazz?” Howie said, a note of curiosity in his voice.

  Jazz turned and aimed his flashlight at the sound. Howie was balanced precariously on some wet rocks jutting from the creek, stooping low to gaze into the water at his feet. Jazz bit his bottom lip and tried not to picture Howie slipping and cracking his skull. “Hey, be careful, okay?” He didn’t want to imagine how quickly Howie would bleed out.

  “When you said clues,” Howie went on, ignoring him, “did you mean something like this?”

  With that, Howie did the worst, stupidest thing he could do, reaching out between two rocks even as Jazz shouted, “Don’t touch anything!”

  But it was too late.