Game (28 page)

That was the theory. Jazz wondered if it would actually work. Billy had once been interrogated by the police, in association with a Green Jack murder.
They thought they
had me fooled
, he said,
but all they did was show me how desperate they were
.

Jazz realized his upper lip was damp. He wiped at the sweat. Montgomery was right—not every serial killer was Billy. Billy was the exception, not the rule.

Just as he settled into a chair for a day of watching interrogations, Morales came in. She was wearing a severe black pantsuit with a white blouse buttoned almost to the throat. Her hair was tied back in a bun.

“Any last-minute advice?” she asked Jazz. He was both flattered and relieved that a seasoned FBI agent was looking to him for help.

He gave her a quick up-and-down appraisal. The nearly sexless look was the right approach. Hat-Dog had serious sexual issues. Gender hang-ups. His rapes of women varied from violent and desperate to perfunctory and almost gentle. The penectomies of his male victims indicated either a fear or an exaltation of male sexual power and prowess. He was a messed-up dude, as Howie would say.

So going with a sexually neutral image to start was best for Morales. If she felt like the interview was headed in a certain direction where her feminine charms could be of assistance, it would be easy to remove the jacket, let down the hair, unbutton an extra button or two. Far more difficult to go from sexy to dowdy; that genie never goes back into the bottle quietly or easily.

“You know what you’re doing,” Jazz told her. “Is Hughes going in with you?”

“Yeah. He’s gonna be bad cop.”

“Good luck.”

Jazz settled back with Montgomery and a couple of other observers, including a civilian psychiatrist who was consulting on the case. “I would love to interview you sometime,” he whispered, slipping Jazz a business card. Jazz just sighed and put the card in his pocket, making a mental note to throw it away later.

The first suspect was a man named Duncan Hershey. He wore dirty jeans and a surprisingly clean black T-shirt. His winter coat was hung on a peg on the back of the door, well out of his reach. Hershey’s hair was long, unkempt in the manner of a man unfamiliar with long hair. He had been forgoing haircuts for a while. “Lost his job last summer,” Montgomery said, bringing everyone in the room up to speed. “About two weeks before the first murder. Could have been the inciting incident.”

Jazz had the particulars committed to memory already. Hershey was white, thirty-five years old. Married for six years with two children, a four-year-old and a six-year-old. Had been a construction foreman until last summer. Now he picked up piecemeal freelance work and handyman jobs.

He had especially been flagged by the NYPD because he worked in the building where Monica Allgood had been found, the building where the glass had been deliberately broken from the outside to screw up the cops.

Duncan didn’t look particularly tired as Morales and Hughes came into the room. The old cop trick of getting a guilty suspect to fall asleep in the interrogation room clearly
hadn’t worked on this guy. Which could mean something or nothing, really.

He was hunched over a paper cup of water, which he’d drained almost immediately. If Hershey turned out to be the Hat-Dog Killer, he’d just made a rookie mistake. Never drink something the cops ask you to drink. For one thing, they can withhold bathroom privileges to stress you. For another—

“You done with that?” Morales asked, indicating the cup.

“Oh, yeah.” Hershey’s voice was higher than Jazz had expected.

“Need a refill?” she asked, sounding for all the world like a waitress. Hughes had said absolutely nothing since walking in, pausing to flip through a folder and sigh theatrically.

“Nah, I’m done,” Hershey said, glancing at Hughes.

“Let’s just get this out of the way, then….” Morales deftly guided the paper cup away from Hershey, pushing it down the table with the tip of a pen. It looked utterly natural, but Jazz knew she was avoiding touching it.

“He’s not the guy,” Jazz announced. “He just voluntarily gave you guys his fingerprints and his DNA on that cup. It’s not him.”

“People screw up,” Montgomery reminded him. “Don’t be so quick.”

“Not him,” Jazz said, and folded his arms over his chest. “He’s smarter than that.”

They watched the interrogation in all its mind-numbing details. Hershey had alibis for some of the murders, no alibis for others. His memory was neither particularly good
nor particularly bad, which is to say he seemed like anyone else pulled into a police station and suddenly asked to account for their lives over the past several months. If the police had hauled Jazz into an interrogation room and said to him, “On Monday September second, where were you at or about ten
PM
?” Jazz was pretty sure he wouldn’t know, either.

Guilty people knew. They always knew. They lived in fear that they would be forced to account for their whereabouts during their crime, so they crafted their lies with great care and loving attention to detail.

“Ever been to Coney Island?” Hughes asked more gruffly than the question demanded. “Down the boardwalk?”

Hershey wasn’t intimidated. “What, are you kidding me? Who
hasn’t
been to Coney Island?”

“You go this past November, maybe?” Hughes leaned across the table as though he would beat the answer out of Hershey, who pulled back a bit in his chair.

“Settle down,” Morales said, putting a calming hand on her partner’s shoulder. “Can you just think back, Mr. Hershey, and tell us if you remember going to Coney Island? I kind of like it there in the off-season. Not as many tourists. I went myself in October. Can you remember?”

Hershey shrugged. “Hell if I can remember exactly. Probably, though. Usually get down that way a couple, three times a month, you know? My wife’s mom lives in Bay Ridge.”

“Of course,” said Morales, smiling.

After about an hour of back-and-forth softball and hardball with Morales and Hughes, Hershey seemed annoyed and frustrated. Which is exactly how Jazz expected an innocent man to act.

“It could be a con job,” Montgomery reminded him. “These guys are good at wearing masks.”

Yeah, Jazz knew that. He was pretty good at wearing masks himself, and he prided himself on being able to see through them.

Then again, there was Jeff Fulton/Frederick Thurber/the Impressionist. That had been a mask made out of lead. Not even Jazz’s X-ray vision had been able to see through it.

Just then, Hughes made a show of standing up and stretching, as though trying to work out a kink in his neck. That was the sign that they were done with this guy.

“Not the guy,” someone in the observation room said. One of the FBI guys.

Told you
, Jazz didn’t say.

He didn’t need to. Montgomery looked over at him and lifted an eyebrow that seemed to say,
Well, yeah, okay
.

“What were the odds it would be the first one?” Montgomery said.

What are the odds it’ll be any of them?
Jazz wondered.
How many people live in Brooklyn? In the whole of New York City?
The profile was good; the task force had done a tremendous job. But they were still looking for a chameleon in heavy weeds.

“Next victim,” someone deadpanned.

“Anyone need coffee?”

Jazz sighed.

The sun shone brightly overhead when Connie started digging in what had once been the backyard of Billy Dent’s house. She quickly became overheated and should have taken a break, but instead she just peeled off layers and kept digging, sweat streaming down her face even though it was freezing outside.

A persistent beeping noise began, repeating over and over—three quick beeps, followed by a pause, then three again. She ignored it and kept digging.

CHAKK

Her shovel hit something, and as she peered down into the hole she’d dug, she was horrified to see a flap of hair and flesh pared away from gleaming white bone by the tooth of her shovel.

Beep-beep-beep.

“Don’t go chasing…”

Someone was buried here. She had found a body.

Don’t.

Go.

Cha-

-sing
…

Swallowing, she kept digging, trying not to strike the body again. The police would want it intact, wouldn’t they?

Beep-beep-beep.

She cleared more dirt away from the head and bit back a scream of absolute terror.

Beep-beep-beep.

It was Jazz.

She’d found Jazz buried in his own backyard. She would know that face anywhere. Recognize that nose, those lips…

But how? How could Jazz be buried here? And oh, God, if he was down here, then who—
what?
—had she been dating and kissing and almost sleeping with all these months?

Connie took a step back, dropping the shovel, and a hand came around her from behind and she tried to scream and then she opened her eyes and almost without thinking reached out to slap her alarm clock, silencing it halfway through a sequence of
Beep-beep-beep.

Oh, God
, she thought, and touched her chest, feeling her heart race exactly as it had just now in the dream.
Oh, thank God.

“Look who’s joining us for breakfast on a Saturday,” Mom said, pleased, when Connie appeared in the kitchen. The rest of the family was already there at the table, Dad wearing a tie, which meant he had to go into the office even though it was a weekend. Ugh. The only work Connie ever wanted to do on a weekend was a Sunday matinee performance on Broadway.

“You’re quiet this morning,” said Dad as she poured milk over her cereal.

“She’s tired from sneaking around the house all night,” Whiz said helpfully. Connie shot him a dirty look.

“What’s this?” Dad asked, clearing his throat and suddenly taking tremendous interest in his daughter. “Sneaking?”

“Something woke me up,” she lied. “I thought I heard something, so I went to check on Whiz.” She glared at him. “I should have let the boogeyman take him.”

“I’ll show you boogies!” Whiz cried, and went for his nose with one finger.

“Wisdom!” Mom said sharply. “If you stick that finger in your nose, you will
lose
it, do you hear me?”

Whiz shrugged and dove back into his scrambled eggs. He insisted on eating them topped with a nauseating concoction of ketchup, mustard, and soy sauce.

“What did you think you heard?” Dad wouldn’t let it go.

Connie made a show of being exasperated, even though the direction of the conversation petrified her. Did Dad know she’d sneaked out the previous night? “I don’t know. Something. It was probably a dream. Or the house settling. Or the wind.”

Dad hmphed and checked his watch. That would be one parent out of the way. Mom worked at the Tynan Ridge branch of the state university, and they never called her in on weekends. Connie had to get her and Whiz out of the house so that she could escape. Howie had tormented her earlier this morning with a text that said
Ready?
, accompanied by a picture of himself standing in overalls, propping up a long-handled shovel like the farmer in Grant Wood’s
American Gothic
.

After Dad was gone, Connie slipped into Whiz’s bedroom, where he busily slaughtered something vaguely dragonish on his Xbox.

“I need a favor,” she said.

Whiz ignored her. He was good at that when he wanted to be.

She tried again. “I need your help. I need you to get Mom to take you to the mall.” The nearest mall was a half-hour drive away. Connie would prefer that Mom be gone all day, giving her a chance to get out, dig, and come back before being missed. But if Mom just dropped Whiz off and came home, it would still give her plenty of time to get out of the house, cover her tracks, and contemplate the punishment her father would eventually visit upon her.

“I don’t want to go to the mall,” Whiz said, aiming and swiping his on-screen sword with scary precision. Connie idly wondered if Billy Dent had ever owned an Xbox.

“Sure you do. There’s that new movie—”

“Already saw it.”

“And you want to see it again.”