Game (12 page)

“Oh,” she said, as if the idea hadn’t even occurred to her. “Right. Okay. I won’t.” A moment passed, and then she said, “Not even the ones you’re friends with?”

Friends?

Before she could answer his next question—before he even asked it—Jazz knew what was about to happen. “What friends?” He had made it an unbreakable policy not to befriend anyone in the media.

“The guy…” she said, uncertain. “The guy from the local paper. Weathers.”

Of course. Doug Weathers. Jazz nearly went blind as his vision turned red. “Doug Weathers,” he said. “You talked to Doug Weathers.”

“He came by this afternoon. He didn’t seem like the national people. Just wanted to check in, he said. He said he hadn’t talked to you in a while and was wondering—oh, Jesus. Jasper, what did I do?”

You gave information to the enemy, you idiot!
Jazz wanted to scream. He took a deep breath, then another. She didn’t know. Aunt Samantha had been hit with the media sledgehammer four years ago, but that had been it. She hadn’t lived under the constant threat of press intrusion like Jazz had.

“What did you tell him?”

“I am so sorry,” Samantha said. “God, I was an idiot, wasn’t I? He seemed so nice. And I thought, I thought, well,
He’s just a local paper
. And he said he knew you, that you were friends.”

“He was telling half the truth. Which, to be fair, is about fifty percent more than usual. What did you tell him?”

“Nothing. Well, not nothing. But nothing important. He asked if you were around and I told him you were out of town.”

“Is that it? Did you tell him where I went?”

She sighed, resigned and defeated. “I said you were in New York. But,” she said hurriedly, “I didn’t tell him you were there for the police.”

It didn’t matter. Weathers was a sleaze, a bottom-feeder, and a poor speller, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew that if you
added Jasper Dent and New York, you could only come up with one solution: the Hat-Dog Killer.

“Okay, thanks, Aunt Samantha,” Jazz said as calmly as he could. Connie walked through the lobby just then, carrying two bottles of soda and a bag of chips. She arched an eyebrow at him as she headed to the elevator.

“I’m so sorry,” Samantha said again.

“Don’t worry about it. Tuck Gramma in, and I’ll talk to you again tomorrow.”

In the room, Connie was at the desk, a neatly ordered stack of paperwork before her. “I can’t believe I came all this way to play secretary,” she began, but when she saw the look on his face, her snark fell away and she went to him, wrapping him in her arms. “What happened?”

“I think it’s all gonna hit the fan,” he told her.

Later, they lay in bed together, curled into each other. They had snuggled in the backseat of the Jeep before and had napped together at the Hideout or—on occasion, when her parents and Whiz were away—at Connie’s house. But this was—would be—their first time spending an entire night together. Jazz suddenly wished he’d thought to bring condoms.

He was also glad he hadn’t. There was no way Connie would let them have sex without protection, so he was safe.

You could talk those pretty legs open if you wanted to
, Billy told him, licking his chops.
She wants it so bad, she’s
drooling for it. And you know it. You know it in your gut and in your balls. It’ll feel so good, and the best part of it is that you’ll be making her do it, making her want it. That’s the best part, Jasper. When they can’t help themselves.

“What are you thinking?” Connie asked.

“You don’t want to know.”

“You’re thinking about the murders.”

“Yeah,” he lied. It was easier, the lying. It spared her so much.

She sat up in bed. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No. I don’t want to bother you.”

“It’s okay. I’m here to help.”

He ransacked his mind for something he could discuss. It wasn’t difficult. The case files were jam-packed with contradictory and nonsensical bits of information, so he latched on to one of them.

“It’s the disemboweling,” he told her.

“Because he didn’t do that right away,” Connie said, and Jazz smiled in the dark, proud of her.

“Right. He didn’t start disemboweling until his sixth victim.”

“So why start then? Is that what’s bothering you? He didn’t start the paralysis until later, either.”

“Yeah, but that’s a practical thing. He doesn’t feel an urge to paralyze them—I really believe he just does it to make things easier.”

“And by ‘things,’ you mean gutting them.”

“Yeah.”

“But wouldn’t paralyzing them make them not feel pain? I thought these kinds of guys got off on causing pain.”

“He’s paralyzing them from the waist down. Then cutting open their bellies. Trust me—they felt plenty of pain.”

Connie shivered next to him. “Does this mean he’s getting worse?”

“Escalation like this isn’t unheard of. A lot of these guys take time to refine their fantasies. He’s been thinking about all of this stuff for a long time. Maybe he thought that raping and killing and cutting off the penises would be enough. But by the time he hit number six, it wasn’t doing it for him any more. He needed something else.”

“So he adds in disemboweling.”

“Right. But here’s the thing: When he gutted number six, he was sure, confident. The cuts were precise. Almost surgical. When he killed number seven, there were hesitation cuts.”

“Like he was unsure of himself. Or maybe unsure of what he was doing?”

Jazz squeezed her hand. “Right. And that’s just weird. These guys usually get
better
, not worse. So why did he hesitate to gut number seven?”

Connie thought for a while. Jazz allowed himself to enjoy the quiet and the radiating warmth of her. “Maybe,” she said, “something distracted or startled him. No one is consistent all the time. Not even your dad.”

Variety’s the spice of life
, Billy admitted.

But Jazz wasn’t buying it. “It’s not just the gutting,” he told her. “It’s other things, too. Like the rapes.”

Connie stiffened next to him, and Jazz cursed himself
inwardly. To him, rape was just another crime visited upon Hat-Dog’s victims, but of course to Connie it would resonate more viscerally than that. “We really don’t have to talk about this now,” he said as gently as he knew how.

“I want to help,” she told him. “Keep going.”

He drew in a deep breath. “Okay. Well, rape is about power,” he told her. “Power and dominance.”
And fun
, Billy chortled.
Heaps and heaps of fun!
“But this guy doesn’t seem to enjoy his power. At least, not all of the time. If you look at the medical examiner’s reports, his rapes fall into two categories—some are violent and repeated while the victims are alive. Others are perimortem.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means at or around the time of death.”

“He’s raping corpses? Jesus Christ.”

“No, not corpses. Just raping them at their weakest, so he doesn’t have to struggle as much. So part of the time, he’s getting off on the power and the domination over them while they’re still alive and fighting. The rest of the time, he waits until they’re practically dead so that he can do it without any trouble. It doesn’t make sense.”

“The guy’s crazy, Jazz. It doesn’t always have to make sense.”

The same thing Hughes had said earlier. And the answer was still the same: “Not to you, no. But to them—to
me
—yeah, they should always make sense.”

“Are you saying your
dad
made sense to you?” she asked, horrified.

“I’m saying…”

This is a special thing, Jasper. For us and only us. Not for anyone else.

“I’m saying that I can understand it. I can live in his head. That doesn’t mean I agree with it.”
I don’t think.

Because a part of him couldn’t stop thinking about Billy’s voice. Before. Urging him to sucker Connie’s legs apart and slide between them…

“I can live in his head,” Jazz told her, “because that’s where I grew up. With that kind of thinking. It was my normal. Like being in a cult, I guess. All the normal things, all the things that made sense to you or to Howie, were things I was taught didn’t apply to me. Like… like, did your parents ever tell you stories?”

“You mean, like ‘Goldilocks’ or ‘Sleeping Beauty’? Yeah, sure.”

“Well, Billy used to tell me stories, too. Stories about his prospects. And there was even…” He drifted off, suddenly lost in his own past. The Crow King… He had forgotten all about the Crow King. How could he forget that? It had been a mainstay of his childhood, that story. That myth. He’d loved it, not for the story itself but rather for the way Billy had told it, changing his voice and his facial expression to match the different characters as he went.

“You still there? Earth to Jazz…”

“I was just remembering, is all. When I was a kid, after Mom died, Billy used to tell me this story. Like a fairy tale, or a fable. It was about a crow. The king of crows, really.”

“The king of crows?”

“Yeah. It started out with the Crow King, who was surveying all he ruled…”

… and he saw it was good, Jasper. There was peace where there was supposed to be peace, and war where there was supposed to be war. Because the crow is a wise bird, the crow knows that someone’s always killin’ someone else somewhere. That’s the way of the world. That’s the natural order of things. And the Crow King was the wisest of all the wise birds, so there wasn’t no way no how he was gonna dispute the natural order of things. And so the world turned and the crows ate carrion and the young squirrels still a-sleepin’ in their nests and the vegetables growin’ in the fields (and you need to eat your vegetables, too, Jasper, to grow up big and strong).

Now one day, into this perfection, into this natural world, there came a red robin. Red like a sunset, Jasper. A more beautiful bird you could not imagine, not with all the thinking in all the world. And the robin decided that it wanted to be like a crow. More than that, it wanted to be the Crow King.

And so the robin went off and the robin killed. It killed a great many birds. It slaughtered, bringing war where there had been peace.

And the Crow King said, “No, this is not for you. This is only for me.” And he hunted down the robin, and when he found him, he held down the robin and pierced its breast with his beak and drank from it, draining it until its red feathers turned white.

And that, Jasper, was the first dove. And this is why the
dove is a bird of peace—because it knows better than to try to be otherwise.

“That’s… that’s a
horrible
story!” Connie said.

“That was my bedtime story,” Jazz said, without inflection.

Connie wrapped her arms around him and Jazz let her and then—thankfully—he fell asleep, just like a little boy who’s been read to by his father.

Lips on his

(oh, yes)

shoulder and trailing a line of cool heat

(oh)

down farther and his fingers touch something so soft and familiar

(there, touch me there)

and also somehow unknown and a groan

his groan?

or

hers?

He reaches out, back, around

(Oh, yes)

and opens his mouth

and licks

He awoke to find himself pressed tightly against Connie, terrified and horrified and aroused all at once. She was awake, too, whether because of him or not he didn’t know, but he kissed her and she kissed back just as urgently and fumbled with the drawstring on his pajama bottoms and reached for him there, and he would have let her, he needed to let her, but at the last minute he drew in a breath and

—like cutting
—

Oh, yes, just touch
—

he pulled back, pulled away, shoving Connie more violently than he’d intended.

Both dreams. Both of them at once
—

He rolled out of bed, arms flailing, smacking into the nightstand, pulling the alarm clock and the phone down to the floor with him.

Both of them. Killing and sex and
—

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”