Game (31 page)

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 withdrew 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.

Jazz’s mom looked… unhappy. In most of the pictures, she seemed off-kilter, as if dissatisfied or distracted. Connie wondered if she was on drugs—some kind of prescription or maybe something you didn’t pick up at the pharmacy along with tampons and Halloween candy. Or maybe she just knew what her husband was, what he did, and she couldn’t hide that knowledge.

How many had Billy killed at this point? Did she think it would get better, that he would stop? Was she in denial?

And who, she wondered suddenly, took these pictures?

Probably Gramma. Who else would it be?

She scrutinized the pictures for long minutes, looking for some clue, some detail that would illuminate her current quest. Or maybe something that would mean something to Jazz when he saw these photos. But there was nothing. The clothing and the decor—the photos having been taken, no doubt, in the house that once stood mere yards from her—were typical of the late nineties. Nothing special.

At least Jazz would now have more pictures of his mother. That was something, right?

She tucked the photos back into the envelope, then rezipped it into the bag and set it next to the crow.

The envelope in the second plastic bag was so thin that she thought it must be empty, but when she opened it, she saw a single sheet of paper within. With the tips of her fingernails, she pulled it out.

For a moment, she didn’t know what she was looking at. But then she realized: It was a birth certificate. More important, it was
Jazz’s
birth certificate:
DENT, JASPER FRANCIS
was typed in the appropriate space, along with Jazz’s birth date, time of birth, length, and weight…. It was signed by a Dr. Ian O’Donnelly at Lobo’s Nod General Hospital.

Connie stared at it, and then she saw what she should have seen right away, and all her breath left her lungs and the world swam black and red.

Morales had retreated to an empty office to harangue federal and local courthouses to find a judge who could sign the court order that even now one of Montgomery’s cops was filling out on the computer. The faster that order was signed, the quicker they could get Belsamo’s DNA and get that process started. Jazz needed a break, so he and Hughes sneaked out to the car and drove back to the place called Red Hook. Hughes parked in a grocery store parking lot and pointed through the windshield.

“See? The Statue of Liberty. Told you.”

Sure enough, Jazz could see the statue off in the distance. Big deal. He’d seen it on TV and in movies.

“You really think Belsamo’s the guy?” he asked. “Even after that little display?”

Hughes shrugged. “Could be. Some guy just wandering into the precinct like that? It’s possible. Some of these guys—a lot of these guys—they want to get caught.”

Most of these guys, they want to get caught
, Dear Old Dad had said so many times that Jazz had lost count.
You understand what I’m saying? I’m saying most of the time, they get caught ’cause they want it, not ’cause anyone figures ’em out, not ’cause anyone outthinks ’em.

“Yeah. Some of them.”

Almost without realizing it, he rubbed briefly at his collarbone, where the reversed
I HUNT KILLERS
tattoo emblazoned his flesh.

Yeah, I hunt killers. Right. Seems more like
they
hunt
me
lately. Between the Impressionist literally knocking on my front door and Hat-Dog calling me out, I’m not doing much actual hunting.

“He just doesn’t seem right for this,” Jazz said, switching the topic to a more comfortable area. “Hat-Dog is highly organized. Belsamo… isn’t.”

“We don’t know that,” Hughes argued. “We don’t know how much of what we saw in there was an act.”

“Really? Pulling your pud in a police station is a far way to go for an act.”

“You’re the one who’s always saying that the stuff we think is crazy makes perfect sense to these guys. Maybe he’s spent the past year wanting nothing more than a chance to show his junk to Billy Dent’s kid.”

For some reason, this made Jazz think of a world in which the solution to serial murder was for him to see the exposed genitals of serial killers, leading to a brief mental image of a traditional cop lineup, sociopaths all in a row, pants on the
floor, and Jazz walking down the line like the Pope blessing worshippers.

“That’s insane.”

“Exactly.”

“Insanity alone can’t account for everything. For someone as organized as Hat-Dog, there’s an underlying sense to it.”

“What about this Ugly J thing? You think that’s some connection between your dad and this guy and that Impressionist guy?”

Jazz shrugged. “Billy was in jail when Hat-Dog started up. But he was in jail when the Impressionist was prospecting, too. Someone kick-started the Impressionist. Maybe Hat-Dog. Or maybe the other way around.”

“Prospecting. You said that before. Is that… is that what he called it? Prospecting?”

And now Jazz felt like
he
was the one who’d exposed himself in public. He wanted to curl up in a corner of the car and melt away. He’d forgotten that not everyone had memorized every detail of Billy’s career. Was the word
prospecting
even something in the public record? He didn’t know.

“Never mind,” he said.

Hughes said nothing, and they sat in silence, gazing out at the Statue of Liberty until Hughes’s cell chirped for attention.

“It’s Morales.”

“Too soon for the court order,” Jazz said. “Even for the feds.”

“Text just says ‘bad news.’ ” He started the car. “Let’s find out what.”

Jazz and Hughes arrived at the precinct just in time to watch them let Belsamo go. He shuffled out the door reluctantly, like a vagrant turned away from a shelter.

“What the hell?” Hughes demanded. “He confessed! You can’t have even taken his DNA yet, and the bastard said he killed—”

“That’s enough!” Montgomery barked, and dragged them into his office. “Settle down, Louis. You can’t go off like that out there, whipping everyone into a frenzy.”

“What happened?” Hughes asked, and Jazz answered almost by reflex, realizing in a flash of insight what must have happened.

“They found a new body,” he said. “Didn’t they?”

Hughes gaped at him and before Montgomery could respond, Morales breezed into the office.

“New body,” she said tightly. “Three damn
blocks
from here. The bastard is laughing at us. Corner of Henry and Baltic. Right outside P.S. Twenty-nine. Assistant principal leaving school found the body fifteen minutes ago.”

“But Belsamo could have—”

“Let me guess,” Jazz said, interrupting Hughes. “The body wasn’t there this morning.”

Morales nodded emphatically. “The body
had
to have been dumped during the day. In broad daylight. The timing doesn’t work—Belsamo was here most of the morning, waiting to be interrogated, seen by a million cops and feds.”

“The whole damn task force is his alibi,” Montgomery said bitterly.

“Just another nutjob.” Hughes sounded defeated.

“Unis and evidence collection are on the scene. Want to check it out?” Morales asked.

“Let’s go,” Jazz said.