by Barry Lyga
Howie drove Connie home, still processing what she’d told him. “Looks like you lucked out,” he told her as they pulled up. There were no cars in her driveway.
“God, it feels like I’ve been gone for days,” she said. “But it’s just been a couple of hours.”
“Maybe your moms decided to stick around the mall. Run errands or something while your brother’s at the movies.”
“Maybe. I’m not gonna question some good luck.” She got out of the car. “You’re good to take it from here?”
“I’m not a complete screwup,” Howie said, offended. “I can handle my part. Just make sure you send it.”
She waggled her phone. “Already e-mailed. Let me know what happens. And hey—be careful.”
Howie backed out and headed back to the Dent house, doing his best to pay attention to the road, even though all he could really focus on was a notion that he’d never imagined possible: What if Jazz wasn’t Billy Dent’s son? What would that mean for his best friend? It seemed impossible, but that blank on the birth certificate… Why leave it blank if you knew who the father was? Had Jazz’s mom had an affair? Or maybe a one-night stand with a man she didn’t even know?
Another thought occurred to Howie, one that tightened his gut so much that he had to pull over for a moment until the tautness in his belly subsided: What if Billy Dent had… well, what if he had forced one of his male victims to rape his own wife? What if that’s how Jazz had been conceived?
Connie had wanted to call Jazz right away. To give what might be the best news of Jazz’s life. And Howie could understand that. Nothing would please him more than to say to Jazz, Hey, buddy, you know how you’re worried that being Billy’s kid means you’re, like, genetically predisposed to go psycho? Well, guess what? I have good news!
But he’d stopped Connie because… was it good news? No matter who the sperm donor was, Jazz had still been raised by William Cornelius Dent, which was bad no matter what. And would it really be any better to know that Billy wasn’t your dad… but that he’d been there for the conception, gun in hand? Howie shivered at the thought and nearly threw up on the steering wheel.
After settling his stomach and his nerves, he drove back to the Dent house. Gramma was running around in her underwear as Samantha chased her with a housedress, begging her to put some clothes on. Howie averted his eyes. Not out of propriety but just to avoid wrinkled old-person flesh. Guh-ross.
Upstairs, he used Jazz’s computer to check his e-mail. As promised, Connie had sent over a picture of the birth certificate. Howie printed it, folded it, and tucked it in his pocket, then went downstairs to help Sam wrangle Jazz’s grandmother.
Something in Sam’s presence brought out the child in Gramma, which made her a little easier than usual to handle, though Howie still found it beyond perturbing to see a septuagenarian running around the house, giggling, her hair tied up in pigtails, occasionally trying to pinch him. (His arms bore welts and bruises from where she’d managed to succeed.)
“Can I show you something?” he asked Sam, who was in the process of getting Gramma settled onto the sofa with what looked like a big photo album.
“Jazz warned me about you, Howie. Told me how to handle you. I’m not falling for that old trick,” Sam said. “I don’t want to hear your zipper if I say yes.”
“That’s a little obvious for me,” Howie sniffed. “I love you for your mind, anyway.”
Sam was partly bent over Gramma as she paged through the album, her rear sticking out in a very fetching way. She fixed Howie with an eyebrow-raised glance over her shoulder and straightened up, annoyed. “Really? Stop staring at my mind, then, kid.”
“Right.” He produced the birth certificate and flapped it in the air. “But I really do have something to show you.”
“Can you be a good girl and look at pictures for a little while?” Sam asked her mother, who gasped and pointed at a picture.
“Handsome man!” she crooned. “Handsome daddy!”
It was a picture of Billy’s father.
“Right. Handsome daddy.” A shudder seemed to run through Sam at the photo of her own father. “You see if you can find all the pictures of Daddy.”
“You’re my favorite sister,” Gramma said, and hugged Sam with a strength possessed only by the crazy.
“And you’re mine.” Sam disengaged herself and joined Howie in the kitchen, positioning herself, he noticed, so that she could keep an eye on Gramma through the doorway. “What have you got?”
Howie handed over the birth certificate. He explained how and where Connie had found it.
Sam scanned it quickly. “You think it’s Billy leading her around?” Her voice dipped when she spoke the name, and her eyes flicked to her mother. “Why would he want her to find this?”
“I don’t know. But did you notice the space for father is blank?”
“Yeah. Probably an oversight.”
“An oversight?” Howie struggled to keep his voice down. Gramma was peacefully paging through the album. No point getting her riled. “The guy who got away with killing over a hundred people didn’t make an oversight. There’s a reason it’s blank.”
“There could be a million reasons, not just one. Maybe at one point Billy might not have thought Jazz was his. He was pretty pissed when Janice got pregnant initially. I remember Mom telling me that. But he got over it. But I’m sure they had some reason.”
“Like what?”
Sam shrugged. “I don’t know. Because my brother was completely insane?”
“Was?”
“Is. You know what I mean.” She crossed her arms over her chest, the birth certificate dangling from her fingers like something dead or dying. “Howie, you have to promise me that you and Connie aren’t going to go poking around into this anymore. Let the cops handle it.”
“We’re trying to help Jazz. If it turns out he’s not Billy’s kid—”
“Then what? He’s going to suddenly be all better? His childhood will magically disappear in a puff of smoke? Please. There’s a better chance of you actually getting to first base with me.”
“I already got to first base with you.”
Sam tilted her head to one side. Excuse me? the motion said.
“I touched your butt the other day. When you were washing dishes.”
“You bumped me with your hip. It doesn’t count, and besides, that’s not first base, anyway.”
Howie sighed. “Felt like heaven.”
Sam groaned and massaged her temples with her thumbs. “Look, this birth certificate doesn’t mean anything at all. For all you know, it’s not even legit. It could be something that Billy dummied up to mess with Jazz. Or Connie. Or you. Or just something he did to amuse himself. He’s crazy, Howie. His motivations don’t—”
“Sammy J!” Gramma shouted suddenly. “Sammy J!” She scampered into the kitchen, flush with excitement, the photo album huge and flapping like a giant bird in her withered hands. “Look! Look!”
Sam took the photo album from her breathless mother, who jabbed a finger at a photo. “I found a picture of you, Sammy! See? See?”
“Very good!” Sam said, her voice proud. “Good job!” To Howie, she said, “It actually is me. I’m sort of surprised.”
Howie bent to look at the picture. It was a young girl—maybe four or five years old—in a dress and what looked like dirty sneakers. She was very plain—no indication at all in this picture that she would grow up to be the sexy thang Howie so lusted after. “God bless puberty, huh?” he said.
“Oh, you sweet talker,” Sam drawled with sarcasm. “How do you keep the ladies from throwing their naked bodies at you?”
“Usually I just keeping talking,” Howie admitted.
“Anyway, yeah, I was a late bloomer,” Sam said, turning another page. More middling photos of an awkward prepubescent Sam. “Didn’t really get much better until high school. Buh—” She caught herself. “You-know-who was the good-looking one. From day one, pretty much.”
/> As if she’d conjured it, the next page had a photo of a younger Gramma, tired but smiling, holding a baby. Howie knew without asking or being told who that baby was.
For what was probably the first time in his life, Howie did not say what immediately came to his mind. Which was: Dude. The Antichrist as a baby…
CHAPTER 37
Morales drove Jazz back to the hotel. The next set of suspects would be coming in soon enough, and things were now doubly crazy due to the new body. A long night stretched ahead of all of them, so Morales was going to sneak a quick nap in the precinct break room. Jazz just wanted some peace and quiet so that he could think.
If he hadn’t known better, he would swear that someone was trying to keep him from thinking. Someone was trying to prevent him from putting together the pieces.
Pieces. Literally, of course. There were body parts in great profusion, some of them taken, some of them not. But if Hat-Dog was a puzzle to be put together, he seemed to use pieces from different boxes, as though he’d opened a bunch of jigsaws and then taken whatever pieces he wanted from them whether they matched or not. It was so chaotic that it almost seemed like it had to be deliberate.
Then again… why couldn’t that be possible?
He wrote UGLY J on a sheet of paper and circled it, then circled it again. Ugly J was at the center of it all. It sounded like a serial killer’s moniker, but no one had heard of such a person. Could this be Billy’s new identity? The Impressionist had said that Ugly J was beautiful, which jibed—the Impressionist worshipped Billy, after all, and would see a free, murdering Billy Dent as something beautiful to behold.
But if Billy was Ugly J—which made the most sense—then what was his connection to Hat-Dog? Jazz could believe his father had planned far enough in advance to set up the Impressionist before going to jail, but to do so twice? To set up a second serial killer, this one in the biggest, most complicated city in the country? Somewhere Billy had—so far as Jazz knew—never visited even once?
No. That didn’t track.
So that meant that either Billy hadn’t set up Hat-Dog…
Or that Billy wasn’t Ugly J.
Neither possibility made much sense. Neither possibility was any more or less comforting than the other.
Jazz reached for one of the photos. It was a close-up of one of the carvings, a hat knifed into a woman’s shoulder. He had his theory about the hats and dogs—bitches and gentlemen, he remembered saying—and maybe that was so, but…
He was alternating for a while there. And then…
Jazz consulted the list of victims. Yes. As he remembered: two hats in a row. And then, later, two more hats in a row. No one knew why. The cops had had a theory at one point that had to do with the weather, but it wasn’t a terribly good one, and ultimately it didn’t pan out.
This is the key, Jazz thought. This is where the pattern breaks down. Those are crucial. That’s where we’ll find this guy. What happened there? Why two hats in a row?
And what about Belsamo? He didn’t fit the profile. Other than his age and race, he was a complete mismatch. And yet he had coincidentally showed up to confess right when Hat-Dog decided to dump his latest victim four blocks away?
Right. Jazz could almost hear Howie’s voice: That’s a coincidence the same way I’m the starting forward for the Pistons.
Two of them, Jazz realized. Two of them working together. That’s what it was.
But the cops already eliminated that idea. Every scrap of DNA they found—Hat or Dog—matches. It’s one guy.
He thought of how Belsamo had refused the water. How he had not touched anything in the interrogation room.
Maybe the profile was wrong. Maybe Belsamo was as good an actor as Jazz, as good an actor as Billy. All of that cawing and cackling… a ruse, to make them think he couldn’t possibly be the killer. Coming in voluntarily to distract the cops while someone else dumped a body in their backyard…
He called Hughes. “Hey, what happened to Belsamo?”
“Your little buddy?” Hughes started laughing. “Guy who liked to wave his dingus around?”
“Yeah, him.”
“Man,” Hughes said, gasping for breath, “as long as I live, I will never, ever forget the look on your face when he whipped that little Johnson of his out and—”
“I didn’t know they made them that small,” Jazz deadpanned.
Hughes exploded into deeper laughter, and it took a minute or two for both of them to settle down.
“So what happened to him?” Jazz asked.
“What do you mean? We cut him loose. You saw.”
“Yeah, but did you ever get that DNA sample from him?”
“No. Of course not. You were there; we were still waiting for the court order. Even the feds can’t make a court order appear in the time it took for that body to show up at Baltic and Henry. Well,” he considered, “maybe for a Homeland Security thing they could. But a run-of-the-mill homegrown serial killer? Nah.”
Jazz thought. “What about the interrogation room? Did he leave DNA anywhere?”
“Jasper…”
“He was masturbating. Remember? Did he finish?”
Hughes made a gagging sound. “I am grateful to report: no. No one had to clean up his grungy spooge. I guess once you left the room, he couldn’t keep it up anymore, kid.”
“Ho, ho, ho. How about hairs?”
A sustained, groaning sigh from the other end of the line. “Do you have any idea how many people were in and out of that room all day? I’m sure there are plenty of hairs in there. Which ones belong to your boyfriend, though, I can’t say.”
“So we have nothing?”
“We need nothing. He’s not the guy.”
They hung up, and Jazz stared at the wall until his eyes lost focus. Hughes could be sure. Jazz wasn’t.
What we need, Jazz decided, is a DNA sample from that guy.
Connie paced the length and breadth of her bedroom, thinking. Juggling, more like. She had so many things up in the air right now, so many balls to track…. And some of them, she was afraid, would turn out to be grenades.
She had worried—briefly—that Whiz might rat her out to her parents, but figured she could rely on Mutually Assured Destruction on that front. If Whiz ratted her out, she could tell her parents to change the parental lock on the satellite box, and Whiz knew it. Done and done.
If only all of her dilemmas had such simple, hands-off resolutions.
Just call him. Just call Jazz….
No. She couldn’t do that. This wasn’t the sort of news you delivered over the phone: Your father might not be your father after all…. Uh-uh. She had to do it in person. Look him in the eye. Hold his hands. Show him the birth certificate and be there for him….
Checking the Internet, she assumed he was busy with Hat-Dog in New York, even though there was no mention of him on any of the websites. The task force was definitely keeping his involvement a secret. And the local Lobo’s Nod news had nothing, of course. Not even a mention of Hat-Dog at all. This, she realized, was how guys like Billy got away with it. Most serial killers were local. They only made national news when they did something stupid, like forsaking their “jeopardy surfaces” for new territory. In Billy’s case, he just kept changing methods and signatures as he changed geographic areas. No one was watching the news in—for example—Tennessee and in Utah, so no one made the connections. Until it was too late.
Hat-Dog was killing people in New York. No one in Lobo’s Nod cared. Why should they?
They would care if they knew there was a connection to Billy. But there’s no hard proof of that yet.
Yet being the operative word.
Connie knew that Billy was involved somehow. The Ugly J graffito and acrostic on the Impressionist’s letter just couldn’t be a coincidence. She refused to believe that. That meant there was a connection—however tenuous—between Billy and the Hat-Dog killer. Connie was even willing to bet that it was Billy who had—somehow—invited Jazz to
“the game,” whatever that meant. And she was sure he was the one who’d guided her to the old Dent house and its strange buried treasure. Who else could have done that? Who else would have done that? Who else would even know there was something there in the first place?
Her cell rang and she grabbed it. Howie was supposed to call her if he learned anything new from Sam, but when she answered, she realized immediately that it wasn’t Howie.
“You broke the rules, Connie,” said a voice she didn’t recognize, and not because it wasn’t familiar to her. She didn’t recognize it because it had been filtered and Auto-Tuned to the point that it sounded both musical and robotic at the same time.
“Who is this?” she asked, not expecting an answer, and not surprised when she didn’t get one.
“You broke the rules,” the voice said again, sounding vaguely disappointed in its flat way. “And the rules weren’t complicated. I said no police. You called the police. So simple. I thought you were smarter than that.”
Connie’s mind raced. She hadn’t called the police. But someone else had. The guy with the baseball bat. But how on earth could her caller know that? It had just happened, like, an hour ago. Maybe ninety minutes. How…
“I didn’t call the police,” she said. “It wasn’t me. It was a neighbor. It was—”
“Do you really expect me to believe you?” the voice asked. “Do you expect me to trust you? You would say anything, wouldn’t you?”
If the voice knew about the police… that meant the person had to be local, right? Someone who would be aware of happenings in Lobo’s Nod.
Or just someone who has a line to the Lobo’s Nod police band. Or…
She flipped up the lid of her laptop and searched BILLY DENT PROPERTY and the day’s date. Sure enough, a squib popped up on the Lobo’s Nod Web version of the police blotter that the cops had been called to Billy Dent’s old haunt. Attributed to Doug Weathers, of course. That weasel probably lived with a police scanner glued to one ear, just on the off chance Billy Dent’s old address popped up on a broadcast.
And now it was online. Anyone in the world could know.