I Hunt Killers (6 page)

The Impressionist—that was the name he’d settled on for himself, picking it from a list of three quite good ones—stood just across the street from Jazz’s house, gazing up at Jazz’s dark bedroom window. He wondered—idly, but he wondered nonetheless—how Billy Dent’s son slept at night. Did Jasper Dent dream of bodies and blood, or was he like every other teenage boy, dreaming of girls and cars and the future?

The Impressionist had followed the body to the police station/morgue. There was no particular reason to do so, no imperative that compelled him. But when you’ve spent such intimate time with someone, when you’ve seen the light in her eyes glimmer and then blink out, heard the soft sigh of her last breath…Sometimes it’s hard to let go. So he’d parked down the block to watch the cranky old station wagon pull into the parking lot.

And, to his amazement, he’d spotted none other than Billy Dent’s Jeep in the parking lot, just like any other car. The Impressionist recognized it from an episode of
60 Minutes
. Or maybe it was
20/20
—he kept getting them confused. Whichever one, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that it was definitely Billy Dent’s Jeep, which meant that the kid who then came out of the police station and kicked the bumper had to be none other than Jasper Dent.

From the police station, the Impressionist followed Jasper at a distance. To the morgue that night, then to here, home.

The “street” on which Jazz lived with his grandmother was a street in name only; it was more a long driveway to a large, grotesque McMansion half a mile away, a run of cracked pavement and loose stone. The Dent house, a rickety colonial in a state of disrepair, sat along this drive like an afterthought, equidistant between the McMansion and the main road. Everything about the house said, “Oh, that’s right, now I remember.…” as though the house were slowly forgetting itself into nonexistence. Unless you knew who lived within, you would never peg this house as the epicenter of Billy Dent’s decades-long harrowing of America. But within those humble walls, a legacy had been born. Billy Dent had grown up there, and now his son lived there, the house and the legacy passed down like a baton going from one runner to the next. A simple house, run-down and inconspicuous. Right here in the very middle of Middle America, hell had been born and suckled and matured.

The Impressionist grinned.

A serial killer’s greatest ability is the ability to blend in. Just like this house. No one driving by would guess at what had grown within, and no one would guess what was growing in there now. Billy Dent had blended in flawlessly, convincing friends and neighbors and acquaintances that he was “just one of the guys.” Barbecues in the summer. Coaching a Little League baseball team for three years. Volunteering to drive the FoodMobile on alternating weekends. And no one knew. No one suspected. Idiots.

No, no. Not idiots.

Prospects.

The Impressionist blended in, too. The dead woman in the field hadn’t suspected a thing when he’d first approached her at the Dairy Queen off the highway just outside Lobo’s Nob. Late at night, a bland-looking man asks to borrow your cell. Car died two miles back, you see. Just need to call AAA, if you don’t mind. Oh, hell (and then a quick apology for swearing in front of a lady—she ate it up), they need to call me again near the car so I can read them the VIN number. Can I borrow your phone again? Or…maybe you can just walk with me and then take your phone back when I’m done?

It was too easy, really.

He sighed into the cool October night air, his breath a vaporous cloud that dispersed almost immediately.

The Impressionist had known that he would, inevitably, cross paths with Dent’s kid. In a perverse way, he looked forward to it, even though he had been given a rule: He was not to interact with Jasper Dent. And sure as hell, no harm was to come to Jasper Dent.

We’ll see about that
, the Impressionist thought. He raised his cell phone and thumbed through the photos and videos stored there. All shot today. All of Jasper Dent, caught unawares, going about his life.

As far as the Impressionist could tell, young Jasper Dent had the blending-in part down to a tee. No one suspected him of being a killer.

Even Jasper himself didn’t suspect it.

—gotta wakey, wakey, Jasper, my boy—

Jazz forced himself awake the next morning, past the shreds of his father’s voice. Lay awake in the sunlight slanting through his window blinds.

—gotta wakey, wakey—

People matter
, he countered.
People are real.

And just in case he forgot, the scrolling screen saver on his computer reminded him:
Remember Bobby Joe Long.

He dressed and headed out to the Coff-E-Shop, where he and Howie met almost every morning before school. The tables bore several generations’ worth of nicks and stains, and every surface was slick with a grease that seemed to congeal from the very air, but none of that stopped the clientele from pouring in every morning.

Jazz got there first and grabbed a small table near the window for Howie and himself. He’d invited Connie to join them for their morning ritual about a month ago, but she had declined. “You guys need to have your guy time. I don’t want you to start ignoring poor Howie just because you have a girlfriend now.”

Helen was usually on duty this time of day, and today was no exception. She spied Jazz from across the shop, saw he was alone, and nodded to him, a nod that said,
I’ll be over once Howie gets here.
One of the benefits of living in a small town.

Howie came in a few moments later. Jazz watched him make his careful way through the crowded line of people waiting for take-out coffee, gently edging bodies aside and making as little contact as possible to avoid bruises.

“Once again,” Howie announced as he got to the table, “Howie the Barbarian deftly avoids the crushing throngs of heathens looking to destroy him and arrives unscathed!”

“Did your mom say anything about the bruise on your wrist?”

“Wore long sleeves today. I’m no dummy.”

“What can I get you today, Howie?” Helen asked, gliding up to their table. She didn’t have to ask Jazz because he always drank his coffee black with a little sugar. Howie, though, treated ordering coffee as if it were some sort of game show, where you only get points for not repeating yourself.

“Hmm…” He tapped a finger to his lips. “Hmm…What do I feel like having today?”

Jazz held up his wrist so that Howie could see his watch. “School in twenty minutes.”

“You can’t rush my creative genius,” Howie said, “with your quotidian worries.”

“
Quotidian
? Seriously?”

“I would have said
mundane
, but that word is so…mundane.”

“I do have other tables.…” Helen reminded them.

“I think today,” Howie announced, “I’m going to try a nonfat macchiato with a double shot of caramel, lots of foam, and whipped cream on top.”

Helen’s pen hesitated at her order pad. “Foam
and
whipped cream?”

Howie pretended to mull it over. “Yep.”

“And you want nonfat, but then you want whipped cream?”

“I’m a complicated man, with complicated taste buds.”

Before Helen could move away entirely, Jazz stopped her. “Make those to go, will you?”

“Sure, Jasper.”

“What the—” Howie broke off. “Oh. I see. Sleazoid alert.”

He had seen what Jazz noticed moments before: Sitting at the Coff-E-Shop’s counter was none other than Doug Weathers, a reporter for the county’s weekly rag of a newspaper. When Billy had been caught and arrested, Weathers found himself in the catbird seat as the first reporter on the scene, and the one with all the background dirt. He knew the most recent victims’ families. He knew the area. He knew Billy’s friends and coworkers. He had even met Billy once, many years earlier, at some local political function.

And Weathers milked that for all it was worth when the time came. Suddenly he was in demand as a “local expert,” his mug plastered all over CNN and Fox News and all the major broadcast channels. For months, you couldn’t turn on a television without seeing Billy Dent…and right after Billy, you’d see Doug Weathers.

Doug was also responsible for pictures of Jazz showing up, first in the newspapers and then on TV. Jazz was sure there were people he hated more than Doug Weathers, but he was equally sure that it was a really short list. He wanted to get out of the Coff-E-Shop before Weathers could—

Too late. Weathers had turned on his stool and spied Jazz and Howie. His eyes—murky and dun-colored—widened, and he slid off the stool immediately.

“Oh, great.”

“Hey, there, Jasper,” Weathers said, grabbing a chair from another table to join the boys. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“Yeah, real fancy,” Howie growled. “Everyone knows we get coffee here. How long have you been waiting for us?”

Weathers grinned. He was in his thirties, medium build, with a face that looked sad even when he smiled. It was a bright, clear day outside, but he wore a trench coat anyway, probably because someone had once told him that reporters wore them.

“Hey, Gersten, if you want in on the fame, I can make it happen. Convince Jasper here to give me an exclusive. A one-on-one interview. Mano a mano. And I’ll do a nice sidebar with you as the ‘best friend who lived through the madness.’”

“Wow, Jazz.” Howie whistled with false appreciation. “A sidebar. I could be a sidebar!”

“Back off,” Jazz said to Weathers. “Did you not understand it the ten other times I’ve said it to you?”

“Check it, kid. Together we can—”

“Or the six times I e-mailed it to you?”

“—get your side of the story out there—”

“Or the dozen texts?”

“—and make a big splash with it,” Weathers rattled on as if Jazz had said nothing. “C’mon. Just a single interview. Been up to the penitentiary to see your dad lately? That’s even better. Good atmosphere. I’ll get a photographer and we’ll go together. One little interview. Won’t hurt anyone, and it’ll change your life.” His eyes danced with excitement.

“It’ll change
your
life. Put you back in the spotlight. Do you really miss being on CNN that bad?”

His eyes alight with fame-lust, Weathers laughed a modest little laugh. “Well, I’m sure there’ll be some demands for my time and my insight. That’s usually how the game’s played.…”

Just then Helen arrived with the coffees. To go. Jazz and Howie snatched theirs up.

“It’s not a game, douche,” Jazz said.

“Yeah, and if it were,” Howie said, “you would seriously suck at it.”

They scooted from the Coff-E-Shop. Jazz shot one last look over his shoulder. Weathers still sat at the table in the window, glaring out at the two of them, his eyes lifeless and burning at the same time. He’d had a glimpse of the world beyond the Nod when Billy was arrested, and would spend the rest of his life doing anything to claw his way back to it.

But he wouldn’t get there by climbing up on Jazz’s shoulders.

Somewhere up the street, a dog barked. Jazz thought of Rusty. Great. An encounter with Doug Weathers and now thinking of Rusty. He knew that this was going to be a bad day.

Sure enough, school was torture.

Jazz wanted nothing more than to get back out to the field. With every hour that passed—with every
minute
that passed—the field was reverting to its natural state, losing any remaining evidence. If Howie hadn’t lost his nerve last night…

Well, no point thinking about that now. He wanted to get out there and poke around, ideally in the hours before sunrise. To see the field the way the killer had seen it.

But school dragged.

Jazz didn’t like school, but not for the usual teen reasons. He didn’t like school for the same reason that he didn’t like any situation where he was surrounded by people.

“It’s like this,” he’d explained once to Connie. “If someone gave you a single rose, you’d be happy, right?”

They had been sitting in Jazz’s Jeep at the nearby state park. Connie had feigned confusion, peering in the glove compartment, twisting to look in the backseat. “I don’t see a rose. There’s no happiness here.”

“Okay,” he went on, “now imagine someone gives you
ten thousand
roses.”

“That is a whole lotta roses,” she said. “That’s too much.”

“Right. Too much. But more than that, it makes each individual rose much less special, right? It makes it hard to pick one out and say, ‘That’s the good one.’ And it makes you want to just get rid of all of them because none of them seem special now.”

Connie had narrowed her eyes. “Are you saying when you’re at school you just want to get rid of everyone?”

It wasn’t that. Jazz wished he knew how to explain it. It wasn’t a matter of wanting to kill people. It was simply that when there were so many people, didn’t they seem, well, expendable? With fifteen hundred students at Lobo’s Nod High, would anyone really notice if a few went missing? The more people there were around him, the less personal they became. The less real.

People matter.
It was a tough lesson; it was the opposite of what Billy had taught Jazz all his life.
All these people, you see ’em
, Billy would say at a ball game or at the park or in a movie theater or mall.
All these people aren’t real. They don’t have real lives. They don’t have hearts. They don’t matter. Only you matter.

“Lots of people had crappy childhoods,” Connie had told him. “Some of them even grew up the same way as a serial killer, but they didn’t turn into serial killers. It’s not like there’s a manual you can follow and it makes a kid grow up to kill people.”

“If anyone would know how to custom-design a sociopath, it’s Billy,” Jazz had said.

“But you don’t
want
to kill people,” she’d said with finality, and Jazz had let the conversation die right there. Because the only honest response would have been:

It’s not that I want to or don’t want to. It’s just…I can. I could. It’s like…I imagine it’s like being a great runner. If you knew you could run really fast, wouldn’t you? If you were stuck walking somewhere, wouldn’t you want to let loose and run like hell? That’s how I feel.

Instead of saying any of that, he’d let it go and then sent Connie a dozen red roses the next day, with one rare blue rose at the center of the bouquet; money he could ill afford to spend, but it felt somehow necessary. The card read, “You’ll always be my special rose.” He didn’t know if the sentiment was romantic or corny as hell (he strongly suspected the latter), but Connie ate it up, and since the whole point of the gesture was to make her happy, Jazz counted it as a win.

Sometimes his programming simulated human emotions pretty well. And sometimes he convinced himself that it wasn’t programming at all.

On Mondays, between calculus and biology, he had five minutes to kill, five minutes when his schedule jibed with Connie’s. They connected outside her history class, as they always did on Mondays. Today she was wearing jeans and a pink T-shirt that stretched across her chest, reading,
CONTAINS 0% PLASTIC
. He moved in for a quick kiss on the lips.

“Dent!” barked Mr. Gomez. “PDA!”

Jazz threw his arm around Connie’s shoulders. “Aw, c’mon, Mr. Gomez!” he said with just the right amount of swagger in his voice. “Could
you
resist?”

Jazz could read people, and he had a pretty good suspicion that Albert Gomez entertained some R-rated—at the very least—fantasies about the girls in his class. So he didn’t outright accuse him of anything, just poked right at the tender spot.

Mr. Gomez cleared his throat nervously—music to Jazz’s ears—and wiped at an imaginary bead of sweat on his upper lip. “Just watch it, okay?” he said, and suddenly found something else to occupy his attention.

“That was mean,” Connie said as they found a spot against the wall to lean and talk. “He’s not a bad guy.”

Yeah, right.
“I was just being honest. How could anyone resist?” He moved to run a hand through her cornrows, then pulled back, remembering the one time he’d tried that—Connie had lectured him on the Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not touch thy black girlfriend’s hair. Ever. He kissed her again instead, quickly and out of the visual range of any random teacher drones.

Hmm. Drones. Not good.
People matter.

Especially Connie. Connie, with her soft lips, her wicked grins, her dark eyes that couldn’t see into his soul, but still made him jump a little inside whenever they roamed his way. Her hair—off-limits to touch, but not to his other senses—entranced him, jet black, shoulder-length, tightly coiled like powerful springs, smelling slightly of chemicals and cinnamon, the beads at the end of each braid clicking together as she walked. It was as if she bound up limitless energy in those braids, and he couldn’t imagine what it would be like to release it. Her skin was soft to the touch and the color of…

Well, who cared about color? She was the color of Connie. Beautiful.

For his part, Jazz knew he was handsome. It had nothing to do with looking in the mirror, which he rarely did. It had everything to do with the way the girls at school looked at him, the way they became satellites when he walked by, their orbits contorted by his own mysterious gravity. If attention could be measured like the Doppler effect, girls would show a massive blue shift in his presence. In the last year or so, he had even remarked the scrutiny of older women—teachers, cashiers at stores, the woman who delivered UPS packages to his house. What had once been a maternal flavor in their glances had taken on a lingering, cool sort of appraisal. He could almost hear them thinking,
Not yet. But soon.