Game (16 page)

“Sorry, kid,” he said, passing by.

Jazz realized in an instant what had happened.

I wish I had more to tell you. But this is why I wanted you involved.

I?

I. Me. We. Whatever. I was the one who lobbied to bring you in, is all.

Long dragged Jazz into the office Hughes had vacated, much more harshly than was necessary for someone coming willingly.
Nothing like a little embarrassment to ramp up the aggression
, Jazz thought.

A cop sat behind a desk, his uniform festooned with more bric-a-brac than the other cops Jazz had seen.
CPT. NILES MONTGOMERY
read the sign on his desk.

“Here he is, Cap,” Long said, shaking Jazz a bit by his arm.

“Easy, Long. Don’t take it out on the kid. Have a seat, Jasper. Long? Give us a minute.”

Long left, closing the door. After a brief hesitation, Jazz decided to sit.

Sighing, the captain said, “I’m sorry to do this. You’re not supposed to be here. You were never supposed to be here….”

And then it all came out, just as Jazz had imagined it:
Doug Weathers’s story—headlined
NYPD SEEKS TO “DENT” HAT-DOG?
—had hit the Lobo’s Nod newspaper’s website overnight. It was a matter of a couple of hours before a New York reporter came across it and, scanning it, realized its implications. The reporter called the New York mayor’s office and woke up a press person there, demanding a comment on the insertion of Billy Dent’s son into the Hat-Dog Killer investigation. The mayor’s office, caught completely off guard and totally flabbergasted by the very idea of involving Jasper Dent, had immediately contacted Captain Montgomery, the titular head of the task force, waking him up an hour before his alarm.

“As you can imagine,” Montgomery told Jazz, “I was a bit surprised to find out that a newspaper was reporting you were helping my investigation.”

Jazz said nothing. He knew what would come next.

“I don’t know what Detective Hughes told you, but the fact of the matter is this: He doesn’t speak for this precinct, this department, or this task force. He was supposed to visit you in Lobo’s Nod and show you a limited subset of our investigatory data. He certainly wasn’t supposed to open his kimono. And especially not to bring you to New York.”

Jazz still said nothing.

“I’m sorry that it had to come to this. This neighborhood… these
neighborhoods
, really… the ones that are at the center of this. Nice, peaceful. For the most part. Biggest crime we usually get around here is purse snatching. Now we’ve had seven months of bodies. Gun permit applications are up—literally—four
thousand
percent. Every couple of
nights, I get to go to a different school auditorium and try to calm people down, and they just yell and scream and demand answers I can’t give them. They’re scared. It’s my job to reassure them, and it’s not very reassuring when the media starts saying that now I’m relying on the teenage son of a serial killer for help. It reeks of desperation. You understand?”

Jazz shrugged.

“This isn’t about you. You didn’t do anything wrong,” Montgomery assured him. “But I can’t have you involved in this. I’m going to send you home.”

Now
it was time to speak. Jazz picked his words with cautious precision and leaned forward in the most urgent yet restrained way he could. He’d perfected this pose/expression combination over years of practice. It almost always worked. “Captain? Sir?” he began. “I understand everything you’ve said, but can I suggest you keep me on anyway? I know you think it’s crazy, but I really am good at this. You can call Sheriff Tanner back in Lobo’s Nod—he’ll tell you. I’ve already helped get one of these guys. If you let me, I can lead you places you’d never go otherwise. And no one has to know it’s me. You can keep me in that little hotel where Hughes set me up. I’ll never set foot in this building again. The press will never see me. And God knows I will never talk to them. Not once. Let me help. Please.”

Montgomery leaned back in his chair. “Look, it’s not like I’m saying we don’t need help—”

“Exactly,” Jazz said, pouncing. “Not that you guys aren’t qualified or anything,” he added hurriedly, “but when you get something like this, in a neighborhood like this, it’s all hands
on deck, right? So you’ve got your local guys and your Homicide guys and you pull in the FBI. Why not go all the way?”

The captain was on the edge, Jazz could tell; he could go either way.

“When you stand up in those schools, I bet you tell people you’re doing everything possible, don’t you?” Jazz said, and when Montgomery’s head inclined in the slightest nod, Jazz knew he had him. One more push. “How can you go back out there and tell them that if it’s not the truth? You’ve got one more resource sitting right in front of you. How can you not use it?”

On a good day, Jazz could talk his way into or out of just about anything. This was a good day.

But he hadn’t counted on one thing.

“I can’t do it,” Montgomery said, with a tone of real regret. “The mayor, the commissioner, the chief of Ds… they’ve made it clear: They want my head or they want yours. And I’ve grown attached to mine.”

“But—”

“Thanks, but no thanks. And please stop talking. Your freakin’ Jedi mind tricks are giving me a headache. I’m going to ask you not to talk to any of the media in New York or when you get back home. Not about this case, at least. And please turn over anything Detective Hughes may have given you.”

Jazz wasn’t sure what to do, how to react. He’d never been shot down like this.
Bureaucracy. Who knew that bureaucracy would be my kryptonite?

“I told you,” he said, “I never talk to the press. And your
guys took everything Hughes gave me. Unless you count the pizza and pop from yesterday.”

Montgomery cracked a grin at that. “No, no. You can keep the pizza and, uh, pop. I’ll have someone drive you back to the hotel. But first, if you don’t mind, one of the FBI agents would like to speak with you.”

Moments later, Jazz found himself in a tiny office jammed with four desks. A Hispanic-looking woman in a skirt and blazer, her hair tied back in a bun, closed the door behind her and perched on the edge of a desk, crossing two shapely and distracting legs.

“I’m Special Agent Jennifer Morales,” she said. “Thanks for talking to me.”

“Just because I’m a hormonal teenage male doesn’t mean you can use your legs to get me to talk,” Jazz said, offended. “What was your next move? Taking down your hair? Is that a
special
tactic they only teach to the
special
agents?”

His sarcasm hit home—she knew as well as he did that there was actually no difference at all between an agent and a special agent. The titles were mere flukes of FBI history and meant nothing. Morales’s lips pursed and she narrowed her eyes… then nodded once and slid into a chair. “Okay, good call. Sorry. No BS, then. I was one of the agents involved in hunting down your dad, back when he was going by the name Hand-in-Glove.”

Hand-in-Glove had been Billy’s fourth alias. He had killed mostly in the Midwest, mostly blonds, and had made a practice of swapping their undergarments, so that his fourth victim wore his first victim’s bra, and so on. Jazz didn’t know
why he did this. Billy claimed “it was all just in good fun” when he confessed to those murders, and then he’d grinned at the prosecutor.

“You should talk to Special Agent Ray Fleischer,” Jazz told her. “He’s the guy who debriefed me when I was fourteen. Or maybe Special Agent Carl Banning. Or Dr. James Hefner. They’re the guys who talked to me after Billy escaped. They can tell you what I told them—I don’t know anything. I can’t help you find him. I can’t even find him myself.”

Drumming her fingers on the desk, Morales said, “I don’t believe you. Not entirely. I think you know things. They just may not be things you know you know.”

“Well, my subconscious isn’t cooperating these days.”

“You could tell me about growing up with him. You could tell me how he was as a father. Something to give me insight.”

Inwardly, Jazz bristled, but he didn’t let Morales see it. His past was
his
. It was fractured and weird and a typhoon of emotions and fragments of memories, but it was his and his alone. No one else had the right to go trolling through it, sifting the garbage for the golden memory that could lead to Billy Dent.

“I can’t help you,” he told her with false contrition.

She bought the contrition. Of course she did. Women.
Even the ones wearin’ badges and britches still think with their wombs.

Shut the hell up, Dear Old Dad.

“Look,” she said gently, “I think you have a lot to offer. If it was up to me, I’d have you on this task force in a heartbeat. You’ve heard of natural born killers, right? Well, you’re a natural born profiler.”

“There are lots of good profilers out there.” Jazz wasn’t sure where she was headed now.

“Not like you. They get how these guys think, sure. But you get how they
feel
. What it’s like for them, what they like. Why they like it. You took one look at my legs and you knew what I was trying to do to you. And you called me on it. Most guys wouldn’t have gotten it. Maybe subconsciously they’d’ve understood. Even the ones who understood it consciously wouldn’t have said anything about it. Because they think they can master their impulses. They think, ‘Yeah, she’s trying to distract me with her body, but I can get past that, and if I don’t say anything, I still get to check her out.’ What they don’t realize is—”

“—is that if you’ve gotten that far, you’ve already won,” Jazz finished for her. “I know.”

“See?” Her chair was on wheels and she pulled herself closer to him, squeaking just a bit. “You understand the impulses. You feel them. But you master them. You overcome them. Give me some help.”

“I offered to help Captain Montgomery,” Jazz said with genuine confusion. “He told me he couldn’t use me. Are you going to pull rank on him? In his own precinct?”

She batted away the thought of it. “This stuff? This Hat-Dog guy? He’s nothing. Compared to your dad. I mean, yeah, he’s led the NYPD on a merry chase and we’re still getting our bearings, but we’ll catch him. And soon. They have a dozen good suspects already, and soon we’ll narrow it down. He’s small fry. I want the big game.”

“You want Billy.”

“Everyone wants Billy,” she said. “But he killed three girls while I was hunting him. He knew my
name
, Jasper. Sent me text messages. ‘Looking good today, Special Agent Morales.’ ‘I like your hair better in a ponytail.’ ‘I walked by you in the Seven-Eleven today. I could have touched you.’ ” She shivered with the memory. “I want him. You want to find him, too. Well, I can help. I have resources. Use me, Jasper. Help me find him and I’ll help you once I have him.”

“What do you mean? Every cop and fed in the world is looking for Billy. You think you’ll make a difference?”

Morales leaned in close, so close that Jazz could taste the old coffee on her breath. “They’re
looking
for him. You want to do more than find him, don’t you? You want to kill him. Well,” she said, smiling a mirthless smile, “I can help with that.”

On his way out of the precinct, Jazz made sure to pay special attention to the whiteboards and corkboards he’d skipped on his way in. When he spotted the one he wanted, he stooped to tie his shoes, taking his time.

Gazing at the twelve photos—blown up from driver’s licenses—pinned to a board under the double-underlined word
SUSPECTS
.

Twelve white men. Ages ranging from late twenties to early forties, from the looks of them. Jazz tried to memorize names, but the uniformed cop assigned to return him to the hotel nudged him and said, “C’mon,” and he had to move.

They smuggled him out a side door. By now the New York
press had caught wind of the story and had besieged the Seven-six, so Jazz had to sneak back to the hotel. The room was empty when he got there, and a sharp panic jabbed at him. He checked the room quickly but thoroughly: A change of clothes was gone, as were her purse and cell phone. That boded well, but it was entirely possible that someone had forced her to dress and bring her things when abducting her.

When he went to call her, though, he saw a text message waiting from her—
out 4 a bit back soon
—time-stamped a few hours ago. He still wasn’t used to the gadget; he hadn’t even heard the text chime in all the ruckus at the precinct.

Relieved, he plopped down on what he thought of as his bed and stared up at the ceiling. Morales’s offer had been tempting. But in the end, he couldn’t accept. He just wasn’t sure that she would be able to give him the kind of help he needed.

And besides: He didn’t know if he could trust her to follow through.

The thought of being able to kill Billy, though… God! To see the end of his father, to write
finis
to the man who’d made Jazz the bundle of nerves and fear and frightening strength that he was… It could save him. It could destroy him. Billy’s death could show that Jazz had a soul or prove that he had never had one.

That thought kept him up nights. Some nights because it thrilled him. Others because it terrified him.