I Hunt Killers (15 page)

“G. William. Hey. It’s Jazz.” Calm. Cool. Rational. Inside, though, his blood thrummed and his soul screamed. “I figured it out. There will be more victims. Here’s what I know about the next one.…”

In the crisp light of the autumn morning, Jazz was no longer as certain as he’d been the night before. He double-checked his logic and found no flaws. No flaws except for the fact that his theory was completely insane. But maybe G. William would see potential in it.

He gulped down a quick breakfast and set up Gramma in her favorite chair in front of the TV. Mornings were her best time, so she was usually okay during the day while he was at school. By three or four in the afternoon, though, she started wavering, which was one reason among many why Jazz was eager for
The Crucible
to have its debut in a couple of weeks. It was also why he’d never had—and never could have—an after-school job.

He met Howie at the Coff-E-Shop, which was more chaotic than usual for the morning rush. On this morning, his best friend was sporting a massive bruise along the left edge of his jaw. It looked like someone had smacked him in the face with a sock full of quarters.

“What happened?” Jazz asked.

“Medicine cabinets are
dangerous
,” Howie said. “Those doors, man. They’ll just spring on you like a ninja. Mark my words: Be careful in your bathroom or you could end up like me.”

What would it be like to go through life so fragile?
Jazz wondered. He was glad he would never know, but he also worried that someday Howie’s sense of humor would run out. Or at least prove not broad enough to cover an ever-growing roster of bruises, abrasions, and contusions.

“Nice set of luggage,” Howie said out of nowhere, and it took Jazz a moment to realize he was talking about the bags under his eyes.

“Yeah, didn’t sleep much.” He told Howie about G. William’s late-night visit and the revelation that there was definitely a serial killer at work.

“Suh-weet!” Howie fist-pumped the air in triumph, then realized that he was celebrating a serial killer’s handiwork. “I mean, you know, ‘suh-weet’ that you were right, not ‘suh-weet’ that…you were…right.…” He drifted off and they stared at each other for a silent moment.

“What is taking so long today?” Howie demanded, peering around the shop. Helen was nowhere to be seen, and the rest of the staff was scrambling to keep up.

Before Jazz could answer, he saw Doug Weathers push his way through the door and the crowd. Persistent. Like hemorrhoids.

“Let’s just get out of here,” Jazz said, tugging Howie toward another door.

“But I need my caffeine! And today I was gonna try a double-pumpkin foamless latte with vanilla syrup, cloves, and—”

“Come on. We can grab Cokes at school.”

They were already at school and in separate homerooms when Jazz realized that he’d forgotten to borrow Howie’s cell phone. He wanted to call G. William and see what the sheriff thought of his theory. By the time lunch rolled around, Jazz had successfully allowed himself to be distracted by Howie’s demands that they get the new tattoo this weekend.

In fact, he managed to forget about the case all day long, until about halfway through play practice, when the rear door to the auditorium suddenly clanged open with a sound like an off-key church bell. Ginny spun around in her seat in the middle of the house and shouted, “Quiet, please! Rehearsal!” at a volume hilariously at odds with her tiny frame.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Deputy Erickson said in a tone that made it clear he really could not care less. He stomped halfway down the aisle to the stage, then planted his feet and pointed a steady finger right at Jazz. “You. Now.”

Jazz, standing onstage between Tituba and John Proctor, looked around as if he’d just been accused of witchcraft. “Me? What?”

“I will
drag
you out of here if I have to,” Erickson said.

After a hasty apology to Ginny and a quick hand-squeeze of reassurance from Connie, Jazz hopped off the stage and walked up the aisle. Erickson didn’t wait for him—he turned on his heel and was out the door before Jazz was halfway there.

The hallway was empty, school having gotten out an hour ago, and Erickson stood in front of the glass trophy case, staring at his own reflection. The extracurricular clubs would all be meeting in rooms somewhere, and Howie was probably lurking in the library, where he liked scoping out the hot college girl who was student-teaching toward her library degree and stayed late to reshelve books. (Howie had suddenly developed a yen for the work of e. e. cummings, since that was shelved with the best view of the circulation desk.)

Jazz came to a halt behind Erickson and planted his feet. “Who do you think you are—”

He didn’t get any further. The deputy spun around so fast that Jazz was surprised the man didn’t topple over. Erickson’s eyes narrowed, and then he grabbed Jazz by the arm and marched him out to the parking lot and hustled him into the back of his squad car.

And that was enough. Jazz was done with Erickson. “I have rights, dillweed,” he said. “You can’t just grab me up and do whatever you want.”

“Shut up,” Erickson said in a flat tone.

Bail. That was Jazz’s best option: Jump out before the car got up to speed. He reached for the door handle and learned a quick lesson that should have been obvious from the start: Cop cars don’t
have
door handles in the backseat. Of course they wouldn’t.

As Erickson cruised out of the school parking lot, a small, cold spike of fear pricked at Jazz. He was trapped. Erickson was armed and in control of the car. He could take Jazz anywhere, do anything.…

A thought reared up and demanded Jazz’s attention. It was a series of thoughts, actually, beginning with Erickson’s positioning himself at Fiona Goodling’s crime scene. And then showing up that same night in the morgue. And then…He was originally from Lindenberg, where Carla O’Donnelly had been murdered. Being groomed by G. William…Did he have access to the sheriff’s voice mail? Did he know what Jazz knew, the suppositions he’d made?

No matter how much Jazz protested or questioned, Erickson said nothing as they cruised to the police station, where he let Jazz out of the car and dragged him inside, marching him past Lana, who watched, gape-mouthed.

It was the second time in less than a week that Lana had seen Jazz dragged around by the cops. Jazz threw her a smile, just to keep things on an even keel. Despite herself, Lana smiled back, but it was fleeting.

“Here he is,” Erickson announced, pushing Jazz into G. William’s office. The sheriff was on the phone, nodding and grunting occasionally. He shooed Erickson out with a curt wave of his hand. Jazz allowed himself to enjoy the wounded, angry expression on the deputy’s face.

Erickson slammed the door on his way out—so hard that the framed pictures on the walls rattled. G. William seemed not to notice.

“Sit down,” he told Jazz once he was off the phone.

“No.” Jazz stood his ground, arms crossed over his chest. “What’s going on here? You can’t just kidnap me from school and then—”

“What the hell are you up to, Jazz?” G. William hissed. “What kind of sick game are you playing?”

“Game? I’m not playing any kind of—”

G. William whipped out his smartphone and fiddled with it for a moment. Then Jazz heard his own voice: “G. William. Hey. It’s Jazz. I figured it out. There will be more victims. Here’s what I know about the next one. She’ll be around twenty-five years old. Brown hair. She’ll be a waitress. She’ll be killed by an injection of drain cleaner. The body will be posed in a kneeling position, the hands tied together at the wrists to mimic prayer. She’ll be missing four fingers, but the middle one will be at the scene. And her initials will be H.M. That’s all.”

G. William shoved the smartphone back into his pocket and glared at Jazz. Jazz didn’t know what to think. He hadn’t expected the sheriff to get so upset about a stupid voice mail.

“I’m sorry, G. William. I guess I wasn’t thinking—”

The sheriff pointed to a chair. This time, Jazz sat.

A moment later, G. William threw a folder at him. “Explain,” he said, biting into the word like it was a worm he’d found in his apple.

Jazz’s hands were trembling and he could barely get the folder turned around in his lap. The file tab read
MYERSON,
HELEN
.

His throat went impossibly tight.

“Helen Myerson,” G. William said, saving Jazz the trouble of opening the file. “Age twenty-five. Works over at the Coff-E-Shop as a waitress. You’ve probably sat at her table before, Jazz. You and your friends. Brown hair. Found her this morning over in the old abandoned barn on the west side. You know it?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Sure you do. Cause of death, well, we’re still waiting for the labs back, but it sure looked like a heart attack to me. And there was a needle and a bottle of Drano on a table near the body, just in case we didn’t get it on the first try. The body that—guess what?—was posed like she was praying. So, Jazz”—G. William sat on the edge of his desk and leaned into Jazz’s space—“you got anything you want to tell me?”

Oh my God. I was right.
Jazz was too shocked to say anything for a moment, and then he wondered if G. William would take his silence for guilt. “I didn’t do this,” he blurted out. “It wasn’t me.”

G. William’s expression shifted from anger to cunning curiosity. “Why would you say that? I didn’t accuse you of being part of it.”

Even before getting caught, Billy had been questioned by the police numerous times in connection with his crimes, always as a witness or passerby. Billy had enjoyed those times, seeing the inner workings of the investigation against him, and had always cooperated as long as it didn’t involve the truth. One thing he had drummed into Jazz’s head:
Don’t ever tell the cops more than what they ask for. Never, ever, ever!

Jazz had broken that rule.

“It wasn’t me,” he said again, dug deep into a hole and not sure how to get out. He had what was called “guilty knowledge.” He knew things that only the killer or an eyewitness would know, and he had to explain how he knew those things, or else the cops would think he was the killer…and Jazz couldn’t really blame them. How much of a leap was it to think that the son of the world’s most notorious serial killer would someday snap?

“You got something to say, now’s the time for it,” G. William said, shifting his bulk on the desk. “It’s just me and you in here. We can figure this out together, or I can figure it out on my own.”

No longer was G. William the shaky, overstressed, pathetic figure from the night before. He was confident. Sure. He was the man who’d puzzled out Billy Dent’s last two murders and then bearded Dent in his own home. Jazz flashed to the first time he’d seen G. William, to the image burned irrevocably into the backs of his eyelids: the sheriff bursting into the rumpus room, the impossibly huge hand-cannon pointed Jazz’s way.
Drop it! Drop all of it! I swear to Christ I’ll shoot you!

“It’s not me,” Jazz said again. “It’s my dad. It’s Billy.”

“Okay, okay. Thanks. Yeah, thanks. You, too,” G. William was saying into the phone. He leaned back in his chair, gazing over the desk at Jazz, who still sat opposite him, the Helen Myerson file on his lap. Myerson. She had served him coffee a thousand times, and he’d never known her last name. He tried to remember when he’d last seen her. A couple of days ago…Weathers had been there, the first time Jazz had seen him in a long time. So he and Howie had gotten their coffee to go. Had Jazz left a tip? He couldn’t remember, and it suddenly seemed incredibly important.

G. William finished on the phone. It had taken only a few minutes to confirm what they already knew.

“Billy’s still locked up nice and tight,” G. William said. “Warden says he’s been exactly where he’s supposed to be. All night and all day and all night again. Just like the last four years. He’s not going anywhere, and he hasn’t gone anywhere. So unless your dad has figured out how to teleport or split himself in two…”

Jazz shook his head, staring down at the Myerson file. It all made sense. It all fit. He had realized last night—looking at the O’Donnelly and Goodling murders, then looking at Billy’s victims—what the pattern was. And it fit Billy Dent.

“Billy’s first victim,” he had explained moments earlier to G. William, “was a woman named Cassie Overton. Her life, her age, her appearance, her death—all identical to O’Donnelly. His second victim was Farrah Gordon. Same age, job, hair color as Fiona Goodling. Strangled to death and left naked in a field, just like Goodling. And now a third victim. Same initials as Helen. Harper McLeod. Waitress. Twenty-five. Brown hair. Boom. Billy started having fun at that point. Drain-cleaner injections. Causes muscle spasms. Intense pain. Arrhythmia. Eventually, heart attack. That’s when he started the posing, too. Got the nickname ‘the Artist.’”

“It’s not your daddy,” G. William said now, his tone kind.

It was meant to be reassuring, Jazz supposed, but he couldn’t let himself take it that way. He wasn’t sure which was worse: the idea that Billy had somehow escaped and decided to relive his greatest hits, or that…

“A copycat, maybe,” G. William said, almost to himself, as though Jazz weren’t even in the room. “Someone out there doing his best Billy Dent impression?”

And
there
was the “or that…” that had worried him. A copycat. Someone who knew Billy’s crimes well.

But the most likely copycat, everyone would assume, would be none other than Billy Dent, Jr., also known as Jasper Francis Dent. Maybe Howie was wrong—maybe that was a good serial killer name after all.

Jazz wet his lips; it took him almost a minute to find his breath, to say the words he didn’t want to say. But he had to know.

“You don’t think I did this, do you, G. William?”

“I don’t want to think that.” The sheriff sounded like he was trying to convince someone. Himself? Or Jazz?

“That…didn’t really answer my question.”

G. William sat up straight and strummed a jaunty little rhythm on the desk, totally out of nowhere, completely unsuited to the moment. “Plenty of people out there know all sorts of things about your dad’s crimes, Jazz. You’re pretty far down on my suspect list.”

Ah.
“But I’m still on it.”

G. William snorted. “If my mama was alive, she’d be on my list until I could clear her. You know how this goes, Jazz.”

Yes, Jazz knew how it went, but it didn’t make him feel any better. He couldn’t allow the niceties and vagaries of police procedure to lull him into complacency. G. William’s opinion was fine, but pretty soon this would be bigger than the sheriff of Lobo’s Nod. There would be a task force, and reporters, and all the usual nonsense. And sooner or later—probably sooner; probably way too soon for comfort, really—someone would say,
You know what? Why are we spending all this time looking for some mystery man when the most likely candidate is over at the high school, dressed like a Puritan and screaming to the rafters about the blood on his head?

Because didn’t that make the most sense? That Jazz had finally cracked and decided to follow in Dear Old Dad’s footsteps?

Jazz struggled to keep his expression neutral, but something must have slipped through because G. William, again in a not-unkind tone, said, “Jazz, don’t go worrying. We’re gonna catch this guy. It’s a done deal. He’s caught, you hear me?”

“There’ll be more murders,” Jazz said. “Once he hit number three, Billy went on a spree and did three more in pretty rapid succession. You’re going to have—”

“Listen to me,” G. William interrupted. “Listen. It might not be someone following his career. Could be someone inspired, sure, but that doesn’t mean they’re following him to the letter. Those first two murders were pretty generic. A plastic bag. Strangling.”

“It’s exactly how Billy did it!” He couldn’t believe G. William wasn’t taking this more seriously.

“And,” the sheriff said calmly, “it’s exactly how a thousand other people did it, too. There’s nothing unique about a plastic bag or throttling someone with your bare hands.”

“But the initials…The victims…And the latest one…It’s practically the same woman!”

G. William leaned back in his chair. “I know you’re trying to help, but there’s things worse than linkage blindness in cases like this.”

“Yeah? Like what?” Jazz fought to keep a sneer out of his voice. Fought and failed.

“You have to think around corners and behind walls to catch these guys, Jazz. Nothing is ever what it appears to be. Figure you’d know that more than anyone else. Worse thing than linkage blindness is getting cocky. Thinking you get it, thinking you’ve got it figured out before you really do. You ever think this could all be a setup? Hmm? That this guy could be playing us?”

Jazz shrugged. Sure, it was possible.…But an obnoxious, un-ignorable tickle in the back of his mind—and a matching twist in his guts—told him that it wasn’t likely.

“If I wanted to throw the cops off my scent,” G. William went on, “you know what I would do? I would make it look like I was following a preset list. I would follow it to the letter. And then I would totally juke to the right when they were looking for me to go left.”

“I don’t know.”

“You can’t underestimate these guys. This guy, he’s like your daddy, all right. Highly organized. Really smart, this one. You know how we found Helen? I’ll tell you how: an anonymous tip. Nine-one-one call from a pay phone outside town. Same as Goodling. Now, who do you think gave us that tip?”

“The killer. Of course.”

With a pleased smile, G. William said, “Right. Had to be. He’s setting us up. Making it look like he’s following Billy’s path. And to make it look that way, he has to make sure we find every clue. So he’s ‘helping’ us along. But you know how these guys are, Jazz. They don’t give with one hand unless they got a gun loaded and cocked and pointed at your head with the other. He’s trying to trick us. And I’m not gonna let that happen.”

“But—”

“Look, we’re gonna look into it. All the aspects, all the angles. Including this Billy angle. Probably get the feds into it, too, soon as we can fill out that damn ViCAP questionnaire and get it confirmed Goodling and O’Donnelly were killed by the same guy. So don’t you worry—we’re gonna get him.” He nodded thoughtfully. “We’re gonna get him, Jazz. This isn’t gonna be a repeat of your dad’s days. This guy’s not even getting close to double digits, all right?”

Jazz forced himself to nod.

G. William heaved his bulk out of the chair, using the desk for support and leverage. “Let’s go. I’ll drive you back to school.”

They rode in silence, G. William speaking only once, to apologize for Erickson yanking Jazz out of play practice so roughly.

“It’s all right,” Jazz told him.

“It’s been a bad few days for him. He was first on the scene to find Myerson’s body. And he was first on the scene for Goodling, too.” G. William chuckled without mirth. “Poor guy transfers down from Lindenberg and his first couple of days are one body stacked on top of another. So he’s just real upset. You know how it is.”

“It’s really all right.”

Play practice was still in session as they pulled up—Jazz recognized some of his castmates’ cars in the parking lot, as well as Ginny’s beat-up old Kia.

“You’re done, Jazz,” G. William told him as he got out of the car. “You’re out of the investigative business, got it? You got any other ideas, you run ’em past me, okay?”

“Sure.”

He waved good-bye to G. William and headed inside, where practice was just ending. With the exception of Connie and Ginny, everyone looked surprised to see him, as though they had expected him to be behind bars by now. And maybe that wasn’t such a crazy expectation. He could hardly blame them.

“I can’t believe he pulled you out of here like that,” Ginny fumed after rehearsal ended. The rest of the cast had drifted off to their cars, leaving Jazz onstage with Ginny and Connie. “I was going to call your grandmother, but Connie said that might not be such a great idea.”

“Probably not.” He squeezed Connie’s hand, which hadn’t left his since he’d walked through the door. “Thanks.”

“But I was ready to call a lawyer. My brother knows someone—”

“It was a misunderstanding,” he assured her, pouring on the charm. He allowed his face to relax into a lazy grin, a “nothing’s wrong in the whole wide world, darlin’” sort of smile that immediately put people at ease. He’d learned it from watching Billy, and it was way too effective. Also, it was far too easy to slip into.

Maybe it was just being in the auditorium, surrounded by the pieces of
The Crucible
, but Jazz couldn’t help being reminded of another of Hale’s bits of dialogue: “Theology, sir, is a fortress; no crack in a fortress may be accounted small.” He felt the same way about his own sanity. Even the smallest crack, the smallest lapse, could lead to…

Ginny patted his arm. “You let me know if I can help. If you want me to write a letter or something…”

Jazz suppressed a snort of laughter. Write a letter. God bless Ginny Davis and her goofy curls and her millennial hippie-ism.

Connie stayed quiet until they got to Jazz’s car.

“Now what?” she asked, though the expression on her face and the tension he felt in her hand told him that she already knew.

“Ignoring G. William has gotten me this far,” Jazz said. “Let’s see where it takes me next.”