by Barry Lyga
She cocked her head at him. “And then once I have the court order, we officially arrest him. Then we take our DNA samples. We match them to the samples we already have and when they match, we have our guy.”
“How long will that take? Matching the DNA?”
Hughes and Morales shared a look. “Depends if we go with the city or the federal labs…” Hughes said.
“We can get a special courier to get the samples to Quantico within hours,” Morales said. “I bet our lab is less backlogged than yours.”
“I’ll get someone to check,” said Hughes. “Either way, it’s gonna take a couple of days to get results back,” he told Jazz. “It’s not like on TV, where it takes a couple of hours.”
“How long can you hold him? Can you hold him until the results come back?”
“Probably. It’s a weekend. Once we officially charge him, we can keep him for twenty-four hours before we take him to a judge. By then, it’s Sunday, so we get a break. Monday, we take him to the judge. If the results are back by then—”
“If,” Hughes stressed.
“If,” Morales agreed, “then we’re golden. If not, we show the confession and hope the judge holds him without bail pending the DNA results.”
“In the meantime, we have an hour before you’re actually arresting him, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Then I need to talk to him,” Jazz said. “You have to let me in.”
“No. No way,” Morales said. Hughes nodded in agreement.
“He called me out, you guys! If it’s him, he left that message for me. You have to let me talk to him.”
“No way. Sorry, but I’m not risking having a confession thrown out because of something you did or said. I want him in jail for life. Or maybe even a needle in his arm, if we play our cards right.” Morales seemed to relish the idea, and her mien completely convinced Jazz that she would gleefully help him kill Billy.
“Look, once you get the DNA results back, his confession won’t even matter,” Jazz said. “The whole reason you brought me out here was because you think I have some kind of rapport with guys like this, right? He wants to see me. He wants to talk to me. Let’s give him what he wants and see what happens.”
Montgomery had joined the group while Jazz was talking. “Has anyone Mirandized this bedbug yet?”
“He’s not under arrest, Captain,” Hughes said. “He came in voluntarily—”
“We need to step very carefully here. I don’t want him to lawyer up yet, but I don’t want to step in a pile of crap that the DA’s gonna have to scrape off my shoe, either.”
“I’m sort of a legend to these guys,” Jazz said, adding a dollop of embarrassment to his voice. “If this guy’s a serial killer, then he called me out. He knows who I am. Just my presence alone might jostle something loose from him. I can be very careful with what I say and do, Captain Montgomery. I won’t violate his rights in any way. But if we can pull some more information out of him…”
Montgomery looked over at Morales. “Well?”
“Not a chance in hell.”
Jazz threw his hands up in the air. “Look, he confessed. Right now, he’s in there realizing he made a mistake. There’s a good chance that he’ll recant. Hell, once you Mirandize him, you’ll probably never hear his voice again, and there’s still plenty to learn from him. If seeing me can make him talk some more, isn’t that a good thing? Trust me, Captain Montgomery”—and he gave the captain his most potent look of trustworthiness—“I know where the land mines are. I know what areas to avoid to make sure your case is still solid.”
Montgomery wiped both hands down his face. It was a gesture of surrender Jazz had seen time and time again on teachers, principals, and G. William. “Okay,” the captain said, nodding. “It may seem crazy, but so is this guy. As long as someone’s in there with you. For protection.”
“I’m totally against this, Captain,” said Morales.
“It’s not your call to make,” said Montgomery, and Jazz fought off the grin that wanted to blow up on his face. Gotcha, he thought. Finally gotcha, Montgomery.
“Fine. Hughes, you’re on this, then.”
“Let’s do it.”
Moments later, Jazz and Hughes went into the interrogation room. Jazz felt a moment’s frisson of panic/delight. He was in control here.
Saints and sinners, all the same, Billy said. That hard-on cops get from beatin’ down a suspect is the same hard-on ol’ Dahmer got drillin’ holes in boys’ heads.
Shut up, Billy, Jazz thought. Couldn’t he enjoy something—couldn’t he feel something, anything—without Dear Old Dad chiming in from the past?
Belsamo sat at one end of the table, staring down at his fingernails, now picked nearly clean. He had piled a small, disgusting mound of dirt on the table in front of him. Jazz took a seat about halfway down the table, perpendicular to Belsamo. Close enough to converse pleasantly, far enough away to demonstrate the figurative distance between them.
“Oliver,” said Hughes, sitting at the farthest point of the table from Belsamo, “this young man is not affiliated with the NYPD. He’d like to talk to you. Is that okay? You’re not surrendering any of your rights in speaking to him, and you can stop at any time. Do you understand?”
Belsamo looked up for the first time, opening his mouth to speak. He caught a glimpse of Jazz first, and his mouth stayed open, gaping, silent.
Jazz had expected a reaction to his presence. His encounter with the Impressionist educated him as to his position in serial-killer mythology. He was the sole scion of the world’s greatest living serial murderer—that position in history’s most demented hierarchy meant something to a certain class of sociopath. For the Impressionist, it was worship. For Belsamo…
“You’re here,” the man finally said, gasping it as though he’d inhaled tear gas. “You’re him.”
Jazz kept his expression carefully neutral. You show any weakness to a serial killer, he’d once told Connie, and they live inside you after that. He had managed to survive interviews with his father and the Impressionist and come away essentially intact. He wouldn’t let Hat-Dog break that streak.
“Of course I’m here,” he said calmly. “You called to me. You sent me a message. So I came.”
Belsamo’s awed manner cracked, becoming confusion. If it was false, then it was a truly magnificent performance. Jazz almost stood and applauded.
“You sent me a message,” he said again, still calm. “So I came. What did you want to tell me?”
Belsamo tilted his head, an archaeologist finding the wrong fossils.
“Was it about the men?” Jazz whispered, leaning in. “Did you want to tell me why you kept some of their penises, but not others?”
Still nothing.
Desperate, Jazz knew he had two powerful cards to play, his aces in the hole. His trumps. He could mention Billy. Or he could mention the thing that had made the Impressionist fling himself face-first into his cell door….
“Is this all about Ugly J?” Jazz asked. “Do you have a message”—for? to? from?—“about Ugly J?”
Belsamo blinked, then opened his mouth….
And a sound came out.
It wasn’t a word. It was just a noise, loud and sharp and short. Then Belsamo grinned and made the noise again.
“Caaaawwww!” he cried.
Stunned, Jazz sat back in his chair. He thought he had been prepared for anything Belsamo might say. What the hell?
Belsamo jumped up, twirling drunkenly as he warbled to the ceiling. Hughes was up instantly, moving faster than Jazz thought possible, interposing himself between Belsamo and Jazz.
“I think we’re done here,” Hughes muttered.
“Yeah, I think so.” They watched Belsamo for another moment as the man wheeled and spun and tumbled into a corner of the interrogation room, giggling to himself as he hit the wall.
Hughes held the door open, and just as Jazz went to walk through, Belsamo cried out, “Behold my power!”
Jazz tu
rned, hearing Hughes swear vigorously at the sight of Belsamo, his pants and underpants dropped to his ankles, his turgid junk gripped in one hand and waving proudly. “Behold!” Belsamo shouted again, and cawed.
Hughes pushed Jazz through the door and slammed it shut behind them. “Great. Now someone’s gonna have to clean up in there when he’s done choking his chicken.”
“Hughes, that guy… is it just me, or was he totally clueless when I mentioned the message he sent to me?”
Hughes grimaced. “I don’t think I like where this is headed.”
“It’s just that… if he doesn’t know about the message, he couldn’t have—”
“Look, let’s just wait and see what the DNA says. No point burning brain cells over it until then.”
“But—”
The detective shushed him. “We have some time. Ever seen the Statue of Liberty, Jasper?”
CHAPTER 34
That afternoon was cold but sunny in Lobo’s Nod, even on the cursed ground that had once belonged to Billy Dent. Connie had tried calling Jazz—this was big stuff now, she’d decided, and that dream of him buried had rattled her—but the call had gone to voice mail. Just as well, maybe. He was doing something important and most likely dangerous in New York. He didn’t need a distraction.
The branch was still where she’d jammed it the night before when Connie and Howie arrived once again at the site of the former Dent house. Howie peered around in the bright of day. By daylight, the place was less foreboding. It was also less concealed, despite the trees and hedges. Anyone driving by would see them.
“You think someone’s gonna see us?” Howie asked. “Chase us off?”
Connie shrugged and dropped the tools on the ground. She looked around the perimeter of the former Dent property, at the trees and shrubs. “I don’t think so. But let ’em try. Hopefully we don’t need long.”
They started with a pickax, taking turns breaking through the hard crust of the earth. Howie had swiped the shovel from his own garage, but realized on his way to get Connie that at this time of year, they’d need to break up the frozen topsoil first. So he’d stopped off at a hardware store. (“You owe me twenty bucks, by the way,” he told Connie.)
Within the first five minutes, Howie was exhausted. Connie stripped off her heavy coat and kept swinging the pickax. She tried not to imagine what she would do if it turned out this was a setup or a hoax. She would be getting in a hell of a lot of trouble with her parents for nothing.
“You’re doing great,” Howie cheered from the sidelines. “Look at you go!”
Resisting the urge to bury the pickax in Howie’s head instead of in the ground, Connie flailed away until she’d broken up a patch roughly a foot and a half in every direction. The soil beneath was warmer and looser. She reached for the shovel. Howie helpfully handed it to her.
She dug out a foot or so down before favoring Howie with a deathly glare that got him off his butt and over to the hole. He dug for a while, maintaining a steady patter of complaints, until his phone chirped for his attention.
“It’s Sam,” he said, looking at it. “She needs me.” His voice almost vibrated with pleasure.
“Gramma probably needs her adult diaper changed,” Connie told him.
“But my fingers may gently brush against Sam’s as we change the diaper together,” Howie pointed out.
“Fine. Go. Just remember to come back for me.”
Once Howie left, Connie allowed herself a five-minute break before taking up the shovel and attacking the ground again. She was determined to dig until she found something. A gopher hole. A rabbit warren. A treasure chest full of Spanish doubloons. A pocket of oil that would make her richer than Midas and solve the energy crisis. Something. Even if it took all day and all night.
But it didn’t take that long. It took only another ten minutes.
Bodies, Connie knew, were buried six feet deep, for reasons she couldn’t recall. Something superstitious and ancient and partly forgotten, like so many modern rituals. Something about being certain that the dead person couldn’t get out of the grave…
She didn’t have to dig six feet, thank God, only three.
Only? Ha! Her arms and shoulders ached as her shovel hit something with a CHANNNNG sound. She thought—briefly—of her dream, of finding Jazz buried here, then plunged ahead, spooning out loose dirt and digging around the edges of the thing to find its dimensions. With a few more minutes’ hard digging, she’d managed to clear away its top.
It was a lockbox of some sort, measuring maybe twelve inches by five inches. Connie pried around the edges of it, then lay flat on her belly to reach down and pull it up. It was only a couple of inches deep, and lighter than it appeared; she had no problem hauling it out.
Once it was on the ground next to her, she stared at it for long moments. Gray and dull, with a hinged top and a stout combination lock hanging from a steel loop. She picked it up and tilted it gently from one side to the other. Something inside shifted. Something light, but relatively solid. It didn’t feel fragile. She put the box back down on the ground and stared at it.
Jazz had told her once how to foil a combination lock. She didn’t remember all of the details—something about sensitive fingertips and listening to the tumblers—so she just raised the pickax with the last of her strength, aimed carefully at the lock, and brought it crashing down.
And missed, gouging another new trough into what was left of Billy Dent’s backyard.
Oops. Crunching up the ground with a pickax was one thing, but hitting the small target of a lock was another al-together. Especially since she couldn’t afford to hit the box itself—she didn’t want to damage whatever was inside it.
She took a few deep breaths, yoga breaths, clearing her mind. Then, hearkening back to her acting training to center and relax herself, she swung again with the pickax and thought, Hey, wait, what if Billy left something explosive in that box? But it was too late—she couldn’t halt the momentum of her swing and the sharp, hard blade of the pickax smashed into the combination lock.
Which didn’t break.
Oh, come on! Her shoulders and arms felt like slabs of meat ready for the grill. The lock was dented and twisted, but a few tugs told her that it wasn’t going anywhere.
Could be something explosive in there. Could be anthrax. If Billy Dent left this, it could be just about anything. You should go get Sheriff Tanner and have him tackle this.
Made sense.
But, she countered her own internal logic, if you get the cops, then they’ll be all like, “Why didn’t you call us as soon as you got that first text message?” And you’ll have to put up with all that nonsense. And you might never get to see what’s inside.
Curiosity fueled her muscles as she swung the pickax again, trying not to imagine a choking cloud of something noxious and lethal erupting from the open box.
This time, the lock broke.
Connie opened the box, thoughts of explosives and gases and anthrax already fled from her mind. She needed to know what was inside. Some part of her thought that Howie would be disappointed not to have been here for the opening, but she was beyond caring now, driven. She had to know. She had to see it.
The box did not contain anthrax or a bomb or anything else exotic. A few inches shallow, it contained exactly three things: two clear plastic bags with envelopes zipped into them, and…
A toy.
She plucked it from the box gingerly, as if it were dangerous. But it was just a small plastic bird. Black. A raven, or maybe a crow. Something like that. Weren’t they part of the same family? Or genus? Connie couldn’t remember—her bio class interested her about as much as Whiz’s video games.
A crow… the Crow King…
This was a cheap plastic bird, the kind of thing you bought at a gift shop somewhere. It was hollow—when squeezed, it made a halfhearted wheezing sound. Connie shrugged and put it on the ground next to the box.
She unzipped one of the plastic bags and withdre
w a manila envelope that measured something like six inches by five inches. Even as she did it, she thought, Maybe I should actually measure it and take notes for the cops, before realizing that she had already touched and moved the evidence. Oh, well. So much for preserving the crime scene.
What crime? So far, all you’ve found is some junk buried in the backyard.
The envelope was only partly full, still crisp and nearly flat, fastened with a metal clasp, then sealed. She opened it as gingerly as she could, thinking of old cop shows where “the guys in the lab” managed to pull DNA samples from envelope flaps and identify the killer that way. Her hands shook.
What are you doing, Connie? Call the cops! Call them now!
But she was powerless to stop herself as she peeled back the flap, then shook the contents out into her hand.
Anthrax! screamed some primitive part of her, but all that fell into her palm was a set of photographs.
There were half a dozen of them, all of them with three people. The man Connie recognized immediately—it was Billy Dent. He was younger, but there was no mistaking that infamous grin, those piercing eyes.
The woman, she knew, was Jazz’s mother. It was a shock seeing her—Connie had seen only the one photo of her, the picture Jazz kept in his wallet and now had scanned into his phone. The only picture that had survived Billy’s purge of all things “Mom” from the Dent house nine years ago. But here were more pictures of her.
Holding a baby, in the top picture.
Connie didn’t need to flip the photo over, didn’t need to read JASPER, 7 MONTHS to know that she was seeing something Jazz had never seen—his own mother holding him as a baby. Jazz had one fat little baby fist jammed in his own mouth, and from his free hand dangled the very same crow toy Connie had just examined. Baby’s first toy…
The other pictures progressed from Jazz at seven months to fifteen months. Connie couldn’t tell if these were special occasions or what. Each photo was roughly the same—Jazz’s parents and baby Jazz in some combination. In one photo, Jazz was standing, arms akimbo in that drunken baby waddle toddlers use, as his parents crouched near him, ready to catch him if he fell. It looked so normal that Connie realized in a flash how Billy had managed to go without being identified as a sociopath for so many years. He really did seem normal. He just seemed completely normal.