I Hunt Killers

by Barry Lyga

  Something on the screen distracted him for a moment—a commercial, with two puppets pretending to run across a field.

  He thought for a moment. About puppets.

  About being controlled.

  Everyone was controlled by something, the Impressionist knew. By a spouse. A parent. A boss. A friend. By one’s own impulses, be they dark or light.

  Everyone was a puppet to something.

  Most people just couldn’t see the strings, is all. And so they didn’t believe they were puppets in the first place.

  The Impressionist could see his strings. He knew how long they were. He knew their tensile strength. How much slack they had.

  He knew who pulled them.

  But he wondered.

  He wondered about a puppet that can see its strings.

  He wondered…What if a puppet could cut its own strings?

  Physics and logic dictated that the puppet would collapse, lifeless.

  But what if that didn’t happen?

  What if a puppet could cut its own strings, and in that act of defiance and strength of will become truly alive? Become its own puppetmaster?

  What if, indeed?

  The Impressionist was not supposed to engage with Jasper Dent. He had broken that rule.

  He couldn’t help himself. The Impressionist knew himself to be a strong-willed individual, but when it came to Jasper Dent…Every rational part of him screamed to avoid the kid. But something deeper and more primal urged him forward, wanted him hurtling in Dent’s direction.

  The Impressionist wondered: Is this what it’s like to be in love? Is this what people in love experience?

  He flicked through his phone until he found a picture of Dent. What, he wondered, did other people see when they saw Jasper Dent? They probably saw nothing more than a teenager. A boy. A student. They didn’t know—not really—what walked among them.

  We do what we want, the Impressionist thought. And no one can stop us.

  CHAPTER 26

  The next day, school was practically silent. There was none of the usual boisterous shouting and jibing in the halls before homeroom; the buzz of conversation had been replaced with the occasional sound of a hiccupping sob.

  Jazz wondered how they would all feel if they knew that Ginny’s death—as devastating as it had been to them—was only one pearl in a bloody strand. In two more days, a woman with the initials I.H. would die. She would be sexually assaulted, invaded both vaginally and rectally, then injected with drain cleaner (the penultimate victim to be so injected) and posed via a system of nails and fishing line so that she stood in a hotel shower as though washing. That’s what Billy had done as the Artist, and that’s what the Impressionist would do, down to a T, adding only the subtraction of six fingers for his own sick reasons.

  Waiting for the first bell in homeroom, Jazz flipped open a notebook to a fresh page and started scribbling names and facts, hoping that his writing hand would figure out what his brain could not. But nothing connected. Nothing worked. He had only two real suspects: Erickson and Weathers. It could be either one, but neither of them fit exactly. He didn’t even bother writing down G. William’s name, his cheeks again flushing briefly with the embarrassing memory of suspecting the sheriff.

  He thought, too, of Jeff Fulton, Harriet Klein’s father, but quickly discarded him. It was possible—in theory—that the man’s grief had pushed him over the edge, but grief usually didn’t take that sort of form. If Fulton had been driven that crazy, he’d be more likely to try to kill Jazz or Billy, not to replicate Billy’s crimes.

  In addition, he realized there was no reason the killer should be someone Jazz knew—the odds were that it was a complete stranger. Which meant that he had a lot of information and no conclusions. As usual.

  “All classes,” the principal’s voice boomed over the PA, “please observe a moment of silence for Ms. Davis.”

  Other than a stifled sob, Jazz’s homeroom went utterly silent.

  Two days. Two days until another murder. The Impressionist was stalking Lobo’s Nod, and Jazz couldn’t think of a single thing to do to stop him. He texted G. William—any updates????—surreptitiously using Howie’s cell under his desk, but the moment of silence ended and classes began with no response.

  It went that way all day. He checked the phone obsessively, certain that he’d missed some sort of notification due to his unfamiliarity with the gadget, but no matter how he tapped, poked, swiped, or manhandled the thing, no message from G. William came up.

  He suffered the school day in silence and solitude, keeping to himself even more than usual, avoiding eye contact. By now, everyone knew that he’d been present at Ginny’s death. As he’d predicted, that bit of news had been deduced and spread overnight. The only thing they didn’t know was that Ginny’s death was connected to others. G. William was still waiting for the ViCAP report to come back from the FBI. That would officially connect the first murder in Lindenberg to the others—then he would go public. So the cops were pretending that the body in the field and the dead waitress and the dead teacher had nothing to do with one another.

  That was a lot of murders for little Lobo’s Nod. A lot of suspicion.

  Jazz wore the heavy cloak of that suspicion all day.

  He’d been an idiot to think that he could just be a normal kid. The past four years, he’d been fooling himself in the worst possible way. First, when Billy was arrested, there’d been sympathy. Then that had withered away, and now only suspicion remained.

  It would never change. It would never go away. People didn’t trust him; they would never trust him, and he could scarcely blame them. Someone else would have been able to save Ginny, he knew. Or at least wouldn’t have had some sick part of him enjoying her death…

  Since Ginny’s death, of course there hadn’t been a play rehearsal. But Connie dragged Jazz to Eddie Viggaro’s house right after school for a meeting of the cast and crew. He stood in a corner and said nothing, certain that no one in the room could abide his presence.

  It took a long time before anyone could speak; there were too many tears. Jazz wished he could join them. Wished he could cry. Wished he could tell them all about Ginny’s last moments in some way that would help them and not seem morbid.

  “We need to honor her,” Connie said. “She meant so much to us.”

  Everyone agreed and tears gave way to words spoken with the urgency of the desperate and the mourning.

  “A plaque,” someone suggested, and Jazz flinched despite himself.

  “That’s lame,” the girl playing Abigail scoffed. “We should build a statue—”

  Jazz fidgeted. A plaque. A statue. Trophies.

  “Maybe a whole series of statues,” said the kid playing Giles Corey. “Like, for each role she played in college or something.”

  That generated an excited babble among the cast and crew, a babble that stilled only when a strong voice cut in: “Do you really want to honor her memory?”

  Everyone looked at Jazz in surprise.

  He hadn’t meant to speak, but he couldn’t help himself. And now he had to keep going because they were all staring.

  “Look,” he said, hesitant at first, but gaining confidence with each word, “if you want to memorialize her, you don’t do it with a…with a thing. That’s not what life is about. Life isn’t about”—gloves, an iPod, a driver’s license, a lipstick—“the things we own. If you want to honor someone, you don’t do it with things. You do it with action.”

  They were still staring, but the stares were no longer of surprise. They were of curiosity.

  He told them his idea.

  There was a candlelight vigil on the school football field at sundown that evening. Connie insisted that Jazz attend, although the last thing in the world he wanted was to attend a celebration of a life he had failed to preserve. It felt somehow ghoulish and hypocritical.

  “They’re all looking at me,” he whispered to her as they settled into their spots in the crowd. Around
them, it seemed as though every warm body in the school had gathered, jockeying for position in near-silence. And it wasn’t just kids—half the town had come out for the vigil. “Didn’t you notice?”

  “No one’s looking.”

  “They are.”

  “Because they know you tried to save her. Because they know you found her.”

  “They blame me,” he said.

  “No one blames you.”

  They should, he did not say.

  “Your idea was brilliant,” she said, leaning in close and hugging him. “I’m so proud of you.”

  “It’ll be a lot of work,” he cautioned. “We’ll see if we can pull it off.”

  “We can. I know we— Oh, they’re starting.”

  The vigil began with Principal Jeffries making some remarks about hiring Ginny, how it had felt like a risk, this young, dynamic teacher fresh out of school, with all sorts of crazy ideas about teaching. But in the end, the real risk, he claimed, would have been not to hire her.…

  He droned on. Jazz wondered what the point was. Was telling him how wonderful Ginny had been supposed to somehow make him feel better about her being dead? That didn’t make any sense.

  All around him, he was surrounded by tears and outright weeping. Kids and adults alike.

  Principal Jeffries opened up the podium to anyone who wanted to speak. A few students mumbled into the microphone. A college friend of Ginny’s said a few words.

  And then there—to Jazz’s surprise—was Jeff Fulton.

  “I’m sorry. I hope I’m not intruding on your town’s grief. But I feel, in a small way, as though maybe God brought me here for this purpose. You see, a few years ago, a man from Lobo’s Nod killed my daughter, Harriet.” Fulton didn’t say Billy’s name; he didn’t need to. “And when I found that my business would take me near your town, I felt like I had to come here, to see the place where the man who killed my child lived. I don’t know why. Maybe I felt like I’d get some closure.” He chuckled ruefully. “‘Closure.’ That’s a real popular word, isn’t it? I came here looking for it, and what I realized was that I had it in my own heart all along. I can’t forgive the man who killed my daughter, but I can stop letting him run my life. I can move on. And that’s what I need to do. And that’s what I want to tell all of you to do. You, and you, and you.” He pointed out into the crowd. “We humans have the capacity to wreak horrors on each other. But we also have the capacity to survive those horrors.

  “You know, I wasn’t fortunate enough to know your Ms. Davis. But listening to everyone speak, I like to think…” He hesitated, and for a moment it seemed that he might just walk away from the microphone. But instead, he gripped the lectern and went on. “I like to think that maybe she would have been friends with my Harriet.” Tears streamed down Fulton’s face, and his voice caught. “So maybe now they both have a new friend in heaven. Thank you. Thank you, all of you.”

  Fulton staggered away from the podium to applause. Connie’s cheeks were smeared with dampness that shifted in the flickering light of her candle, and she clutched Jazz’s hand as speaker after speaker extolled the virtues and wonderment that had once been Virginia Davis. Jazz tried to be sympathetic, but the truth was, the crying and the wailing made him numb. Crying, he knew, was useless. An important lesson learned so young…

  —wakey, wakey, Jasper, my boy—

  And then:

  I’m doing Rusty tonight. You don’t gotta help, but you gotta watch.

  Rusty had been Jazz’s companion for the first eight years of his life, a mix of cocker spaniel and retriever the perfect color of soft caramel. They’d romped and played in the backyard together, and zoned out on the sofa watching TV together, and then one night, Jazz had watched as Billy gutted and flayed Rusty alive.

  Looking back, he was shocked at just how long the poor beast had lived, and in such unrelenting pain, but at the time he knew only that his dog was dying, was hurting, and there was nothing he could do about it. He’d cried; cried early and long and hard, the whole time Billy patiently stripped away Rusty’s life with his knives.

  When Rusty was well and truly dead, nothing more than a wet, slick hump of muscle and bone with a second pile of flesh and intestines glistening in the corner, Billy came to him and knelt down next to his bawling son. He folded his arms around Jazz and whispered, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” in a soothing, paternal tone, until Jazz had quieted enough to listen and understand what he said next. Which was: “You go on crying. You keep crying. It’s all right.”

  Jazz had needed no further encouragement. The tears kept coming, an endless gush of them, like a deepwater well under pressure spewing its contents out into the world. He leaned into his father—yes, he was a killer and a torturer, but he was Jazz’s father, and some biological imperative made his presence comforting—and Billy said, “Close your eyes,” and Jazz did, still weeping, the tears leaking out from his shut eyelids, and Billy held him, and when Jazz’s sobs began to slow, Billy said, in a voice that was almost kind, “You need to open your eyes now, son. You need to see something,” and Jazz did so, thinking magical, childish thoughts, but all he still saw was the two piles, and then Billy—his voice jovial with a sinister undercurrent—said, “See, Jasper? All that crying, and what did you accomplish? Nothing. And nothing.”

  He looked around the football field. Every eye was aimed at the makeshift dais set up on the fifty-yard line. Even Deputy Erickson was rapt by the testimonials, standing to one side near a still visibly overcome Jeff Fulton.

  Every eye but one.

  Jazz couldn’t believe it—there was Doug Weathers, looking directly at Jazz. And now he was making his way through the crowd toward him.

  God, that guy was everywhere! Was nothing sacred to him? Nothing at all?

  A rage more powerful than any he’d ever known before bubbled up inside Jazz. He wanted to do horrible, unspeakable things to Weathers, things that culminated in Weathers begging for his own death. Jazz let those fantasies range free in his imagination, and it felt good.

  Serial killers often went to the funerals and memorials of their victims, Jazz knew. Billy had done so on more than one occasion, always taking care to be in disguise. It was a compulsion with many of them, a way of extending their perceived ownership of the victim even beyond the act of murder.

  “Ow,” Connie whispered. “Jazz.”

  He was crushing her hand. He loosened his grip and whispered an apology, then let go of her hand completely and mumbled something lame about needing to get some fresh air. He pushed through the crowd, heading for the exit.

  Weathers changed direction, pressing through the crowd in Jazz’s wake. Soon, Jazz emerged from the throng of mourners into one of the field’s end zones. The tunnel path out of the football field wasn’t far away.

  He didn’t make it. Instead, he saw G. William and two deputies appear in the exit. The sheriff did a double take when he saw Jazz, then made a beeline for him.

  Jazz checked over his shoulder. Weathers had vanished. Great.

  “Jazz,” G. William said, “we got a problem. We got a body. Two days early, we got a body.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Her name was, or had been—Jazz wasn’t sure which way it went, once they were dead; did names survive death?—Irene Heller. Jazz gazed at her body, tucked into a shower, positioned exactly as he’d predicted. She hadn’t been moved or touched since being found.

  G. William handed him a photo of the Isabella Hernandez crime scene, not that Jazz needed one. Except for the difference in the shower tiles and the obvious differences between Isabella and Irene, it could have been a picture of the very crime scene before Jazz.

  “She wasn’t a maid at a hotel,” G. William said miserably. “We checked them all. She’s a stay-at-home mom. Kids go to school now, so she cleans houses during the day to supplement her husband’s income.”

  “Technically a maid,” Jazz murmured. He was only mildly surprised to find that Irene Heller’s corpse did not both
er him. He scrutinized it, looking for any clue that might lead him to the Impressionist. She was partly into rigor mortis—she’d been killed and posed hours ago.

  G. William, at the end of his rope, had asked Jazz to come look at the fresh crime scene. “I’m ready to try just about anything,” he had confessed in the end zone. “I know I didn’t want to do this to you, but…Look, I don’t know if you can help or not, but can you try?”

  Of course, Jazz had said yes. He had used Howie’s cell to call Connie and tell her what had happened, then followed G. William to a smallish split-level house in a shabby but clean neighborhood just off the main highway on the east side of Lobo’s Nod. And now it was him and G. William in the bathroom of Irene’s home, where her husband had found the body after coming home from work. Her kids, ironically enough, had gone straight from an after-school event to the Ginny Davis vigil.

  “I don’t see any differences between what he did here and what Billy did to Hernandez,” Jazz said. “Except for the fingers, of course.”

  Irene Heller’s right hand was fingerless, like Ginny’s. Her left hand’s middle finger lay on the floor of the shower, near the drain.

  “Sexually assaulted?” he asked.

  G. William cleared his throat. “Tough to say until we get her on the slab. But the ME thinks so. No obvious fluids.”

  “There wouldn’t be. Billy was always careful. Used a condom. But…” Jazz crouched down, getting a worm’s-eye view of the crime scene. “I don’t know. I have a suspicion that he didn’t actually rape her. Not with his own…you know. I bet he used a, a, you know, a sex toy or something.”

  “Why?”

  Jazz shrugged. He felt…good. He felt powerful and confident. Maybe it was being needed by G. William. More likely, it was because he was doing something he was good at.

  “This guy calls himself the Impressionist. He’s aping Billy’s crimes. He has no originality, no self. No personality. He’s an imprint of someone else. Billy raped women as a way of showing his dominance and control.”