by Barry Lyga
Hand-in-Glove had been Billy’s fourth alias. He had killed mostly in the Midwest, mostly blonds, and had made a practice of swapping their undergarments, so that his fourth victim wore his first victim’s bra, and so on. Jazz didn’t know why he did this. Billy claimed “it was all just in good fun” when he confessed to those murders, and then he’d grinned at the prosecutor.
“You should talk to Special Agent Ray Fleischer,” Jazz told her. “He’s the guy who debriefed me when I was fourteen. Or maybe Special Agent Carl Banning. Or Dr. James Hefner. They’re the guys who talked to me after Billy escaped. They can tell you what I told them—I don’t know anything. I can’t help you find him. I can’t even find him myself.”
Drumming her fingers on the desk, Morales said, “I don’t believe you. Not entirely. I think you know things. They just may not be things you know you know.”
“Well, my subconscious isn’t cooperating these days.”
“You could tell me about growing up with him. You could tell me how he was as a father. Something to give me insight.”
Inwardly, Jazz bristled, but he didn’t let Morales see it. His past was his. It was fractured and weird and a typhoon of emotions and fragments of memories, but it was his and his alone. No one else had the right to go trolling through it, sifting the garbage for the golden memory that could lead to Billy Dent.
“I can’t help you,” he told her with false contrition.
She bought the contrition. Of course she did. Women. Even the ones wearin’ badges and britches still think with their wombs.
Shut the hell up, Dear Old Dad.
“Look,” she said gently, “I think you have a lot to offer. If it was up to me, I’d have you on this task force in a heartbeat. You’ve heard of natural born killers, right? Well, you’re a natural born profiler.”
“There are lots of good profilers out there.” Jazz wasn’t sure where she was headed now.
“Not like you. They get how these guys think, sure. But you get how they feel. What it’s like for them, what they like. Why they like it. You took one look at my legs and you knew what I was trying to do to you. And you called me on it. Most guys wouldn’t have gotten it. Maybe subconsciously they’d’ve understood. Even the ones who understood it consciously wouldn’t have said anything about it. Because they think they can master their impulses. They think, ‘Yeah, she’s trying to distract me with her body, but I can get past that, and if I don’t say anything, I still get to check her out.’ What they don’t realize is—”
“—is that if you’ve gotten that far, you’ve already won,” Jazz finished for her. “I know.”
“See?” Her chair was on wheels and she pulled herself closer to him, squeaking just a bit. “You understand the impulses. You feel them. But you master them. You overcome them. Give me some help.”
“I offered to help Captain Montgomery,” Jazz said with genuine confusion. “He told me he couldn’t use me. Are you going to pull rank on him? In his own precinct?”
She batted away the thought of it. “This stuff? This Hat-Dog guy? He’s nothing. Compared to your dad. I mean, yeah, he’s led the NYPD on a merry chase and we’re still getting our bearings, but we’ll catch him. And soon. They have a dozen good suspects already, and soon we’ll narrow it down. He’s small fry. I want the big game.”
“You want Billy.”
“Everyone wants Billy,” she said. “But he killed three girls while I was hunting him. He knew my name, Jasper. Sent me text messages. ‘Looking good today, Special Agent Morales.’ ‘I like your hair better in a ponytail.’ ‘I walked by you in the Seven-Eleven today. I could have touched you.’ ” She shivered with the memory. “I want him. You want to find him, too. Well, I can help. I have resources. Use me, Jasper. Help me find him and I’ll help you once I have him.”
“What do you mean? Every cop and fed in the world is looking for Billy. You think you’ll make a difference?”
Morales leaned in close, so close that Jazz could taste the old coffee on her breath. “They’re looking for him. You want to do more than find him, don’t you? You want to kill him. Well,” she said, smiling a mirthless smile, “I can help with that.”
On his way out of the precinct, Jazz made sure to pay special attention to the whiteboards and corkboards he’d skipped on his way in. When he spotted the one he wanted, he stooped to tie his shoes, taking his time.
Gazing at the twelve photos—blown up from driver’s licenses—pinned to a board under the double-underlined word SUSPECTS.
Twelve white men. Ages ranging from late twenties to early forties, from the looks of them. Jazz tried to memorize names, but the uniformed cop assigned to return him to the hotel nudged him and said, “C’mon,” and he had to move.
They smuggled him out a side door. By now the New York press had caught wind of the story and had besieged the Seven-six, so Jazz had to sneak back to the hotel. The room was empty when he got there, and a sharp panic jabbed at him. He checked the room quickly but thoroughly: A change of clothes was gone, as were her purse and cell phone. That boded well, but it was entirely possible that someone had forced her to dress and bring her things when abducting her.
When he went to call her, though, he saw a text message waiting from her—out 4 a bit back soon—time-stamped a few hours ago. He still wasn’t used to the gadget; he hadn’t even heard the text chime in all the ruckus at the precinct.
Relieved, he plopped down on what he thought of as his bed and stared up at the ceiling. Morales’s offer had been tempting. But in the end, he couldn’t accept. He just wasn’t sure that she would be able to give him the kind of help he needed.
And besides: He didn’t know if he could trust her to follow through.
The thought of being able to kill Billy, though… God! To see the end of his father, to write finis to the man who’d made Jazz the bundle of nerves and fear and frightening strength that he was… It could save him. It could destroy him. Billy’s death could show that Jazz had a soul or prove that he had never had one.
That thought kept him up nights. Some nights because it thrilled him. Others because it terrified him.
He wondered: When next he saw his father, would he be thrilled or terrified?
CHAPTER 19
The killer sat in his easy chair, the remains of a home-cooked meal on the coffee table before him. The TV blathered the sorts of banalities his wife enjoyed—so-called reality TV, in which people competed to prove their superiority over one another. The killer tolerated the show, even pretended to enjoy it. One player and one alone captured his attention, a dental hygienist from Spokane, who spoke with a slight lisp and had hair the color of clarified butter and eyes so big and blue that he wanted to pop them out and eat them.
The killer had never eaten eyes. Or any other part of a human body. But he now desperately, desperately wanted to. The thought consumed him in a familiar, caressing way. He knew this feeling. It had been with him most of his life. He could not remember a time in his life when he could look at a woman and not want to possess her. Possess was an important word. It meant much. It meant to own. It meant to maintain one’s calm. It meant to captivate and enter like a demon, though the killer did not believe in such bogus and repugnant claptrap.
It also meant to have intercourse with.
The killer wanted to own women. In every way. And he had, indeed, owned many. Even the ones he found possessed (that word again!) of subpar appearance he yearned to own, for to own meant to be able to destroy.
Tall, short, thin, fat, ugly, gorgeous, black, white, all shades between and beyond… He wanted them all. For his own. So that no one else could have them. His to use and to keep or discard as he saw fit.
He had spent much of his life dreaming of this. Dreaming of captive women, compelled to do as he commanded. Dreaming of them on their knees before him, subject to his whims—beaten or comforted, killed or succored, raped or loved.
The dreams could not be sated. Not by anything he watched or to
uched or knew. Only finding her (any “her”) and owning her, making her his in every way, could satisfy his needs.
The first time he’d owned a woman, he’d thought it over at that. Thought that with the realization of his dream, he could and would now be like all the others he saw around him. He would now be what they called “normal.” He discovered relaxation; he learned that with his fantasy fulfilled, he could breathe and settle and close his eyes at last.
But his calm, his repose, did not last. The fantasies returned, first as niggling daydreams, then as all-consuming compulsions, until every woman he saw on the street, on the subway, anywhere, was a target, a victim waiting to happen. And he resisted. He resisted as long as he could. As best as he could. Until…
Until…
Until he no longer had to.
Until the message and the voice…
Just then, a phone rang. The killer stiffened. It was not his cell phone or his wife’s. It was something else.
“Is that yours?” his wife asked.
“Yes,” he said, and swiftly went to the small, cramped bedroom, where he closed the door and dug into the bottom of his chest of drawers. Three cell phones were there. One rang again. The killer answered, trembling.
“The number is six,” the voice said, and the killer felt a trill of anticipation—six!—until the voice said, “Six. Five and one.”
“Six,” the killer repeated. Five and one. Not three and three.
“And,” the voice went on, “a little something special this time.”
Shocked, the killer almost dropped the phone, but held tight and kept listening. He wrote nothing down—that would be foolish—but memorized every word.
“I understand,” he said when the voice had finished, then removed the battery from the phone. On his way back to the TV, he stopped in the kitchen and tossed the phone’s battery into the trash. Then he quickly snapped the cheap plastic hinge and tossed both halves of the broken phone into the garbage compactor.
“Who was that?” his wife asked.
He ignored her. She ignored him back, caught up in her show.
The killer stared at the TV. The dental hygienist from Spokane was staring back at him.
CHAPTER 20
Even though she wanted to, Connie didn’t bring up what had happened between them at the hotel overnight. She said nothing about it in the car on the way to the airport, nor at the airport itself, as they went through security and then waited for their flight. The NYPD—eager to get Jazz out of its jurisdiction as quickly as possible—had made some calls and arranged for his ticket to be switched to Connie’s flight, so they were in a rush from the time she returned to the hotel.
She tried to pretend that nothing had happened, that nothing had changed. She started to tell Jazz about her mini-tour of the crime scenes, but he clearly wasn’t focused. He kept interrupting to bring up something about Long or Hughes or the captain guy—Montgomery—who’d kicked him out of New York, and she eventually realized that he just needed to vent. So she listened as he told her about his encounter with the NYPD. And Special Agent Morales of the FBI.
“Do you think she was serious about helping you kill your dad?” she asked in a low voice. They were at their gate, and it was crowded. She didn’t want anyone to overhear.
Jazz shrugged. He was wearing sunglasses indoors and had bought a Mets cap, which he kept pulled over his forehead. Being recognized would—in a word—suck. “I don’t know.”
“Would you…” She stopped herself. This was neither the time nor the place for such a discussion. The amount of hatred in her heart for Billy Dent surprised her, though. She felt an immediate and powerful kinship with Special Agent Morales, whom she’d never even met. Any woman who wanted Billy Dent dead badly enough to risk her career—for surely if Jazz reported what she’d offered to a superior, she’d be out of the FBI—was a woman Connie could learn to love. Conscience Hall was well named by her parents, but even her conscience had its breaking point. The man who had mauled the childhood of the boy she loved definitely occupied a spot beyond that breaking point.
So she wasn’t surprised to find that she wanted Billy Dent dead. What surprised her was how happy the thought made her, how liberated it made her feel, even though she knew that Jazz killing his own father would send her boyfriend into a darker place than even he could imagine.
But if Jazz didn’t do it… If this Special Agent Morales was the one to do it…
Well, that wouldn’t be so bad, would it? The world would be rid of Billy Dent. More important, Jazz would be rid of him, without adding to the burden already on his too-full back.
Maybe this FBI lady is a gift from God, Connie wanted to tell Jazz.
She settled for squeezing his hand. After a moment, he squeezed back.
Jazz said nothing on the flight, staring moodily out the window instead, as though answers or resolutions had been inscribed in the billowy curves of the clouds. Connie, for her part, stared just as moodily at him, willing him to turn and look at her.
She so badly wanted to discuss what had happened the night before, in the hotel room. She still didn’t know who was being more unfair to whom, but one thing was certain—she wouldn’t figure it out until they actually opened their mouths and talked about it.
Had it been presumptuous to bring the condoms to New York? Probably. She could admit that. But she couldn’t shake the memory of the giddy, stomach-twirling elation she’d experienced at the drugstore when she’d bought them. They’ll have condoms in New York, she had thought. Why buy them here, where someone you know might see you? Then she dismissed it. She didn’t care if someone saw. She was in love. So what if people knew she was having sex with the man she loved? Her parents were both at work, so they wouldn’t see her—it would be a friend or an enemy, and it just didn’t matter.
She’d bought them and packed them and thought of them on the flight to New York. This was the right way to do it. Responsible. She and Jazz were both virgins, and they would do this the right way. The adult way.
It was time.
She knew in her head and she felt in her heart and in other, more primal, parts of her body. She was ready. When this state of readiness had been obtained, she couldn’t say. But after the Impressionist nearly killed Jazz, and after Jazz finally faced the demon of his past—his father—she sensed a change in their relationship. A growth. A maturation. They were ready for the next step, and once she knew that, she was desperate for it.
Still. She hadn’t planned on springing it on him the way she had. A late-night/early-morning grope-fest gone manically passionate. Blurting out that she had protection. Wrong way to go about it, she thought. I should have brought it up before. Been cool about it. Like, “Hey, I think it’s time. I think we’re ready. How about you?” And when he said, “Yeah,” then you say, “Great, we’re covered; let’s go.”
All of that was true, but no matter how badly she’d bungled it, his reaction—his refusal to talk, his sulking in the other bed—pained her. Intellectually, she knew that it was fear driving him, that it had nothing to do with her. But emotionally and with all the yearning in her body, she felt rejected. Harshly.
When the plane landed, she hoped that maybe they could talk while waiting for Howie to pick them up, but to her absolute mortification, her father was waiting as they passed through security.
“I just need a second—” she started.
“You had a first, a second, and a third,” her father said with barely concealed rage. “No more chances. Come with me. Now.”
“But, Dad—”
“No buts, Conscience.”
Jazz cleared his throat. “Mr. Hall, if Connie and I could just have a minute to—”
“To what?” Dad said, rounding on Jazz, that rage now no longer concealed at all. “To do what, Jasper? Abduct her to Chicago this time?”
“I didn’t abduct her,” Jazz said with amazing calm. “In fact, I told her not to come at all.”
“I’m sure yo
u did,” Dad said sarcastically. He loomed over Jazz like a hawk on a high branch. Connie didn’t know for whom she was more afraid: Jazz or her dad. Jazz seemed harmless, although she knew he was anything but. Her dad knew it, too. Or should have.
“Dad, let’s go.” Connie stepped in and took her father’s hand. “Let’s just go.”
Dad shook her off. “Listen to me, Jasper Dent. I haven’t said this before, but I’m saying it now: Stay the hell away from my daughter. Or else.”
“Or else what?” Jazz said with an infuriating, dead calm that belied his words. Connie knew this voice. “More history lessons about Sally Hemmings?” Almost bored. Contemptuously so. “Maybe this time a video on lynching?”
Connie pulled harder at her dad, who wouldn’t budge. Jazz’s calm was a gimmick, a trick. It was a Billy Dent tactic—forcing your prey to overreact by seeming completely unaffected. Jazz was trying to—
Oh, God. Jazz wanted Dad to take a swing at him. Maybe so that he could hit back and feel justified doing it. Maybe just because he was so pissed about everything that had and hadn’t happened in New York that he wanted to take it out on someone, anyone, and why not the man standing between him and Connie?
“Or else,” Dad said, in a threatening tone Connie had never heard before, “I’m going to make you wish you’d never seen her.”
And Jazz stared at her father. Connie had never seen such a stare. He didn’t move; his expression didn’t change. It was something ethereal, something in his eyes, or in his soul. Something had shifted, and Connie suddenly realized that she’d been wrong before—her father wasn’t the hawk on the high branch.
Jazz was.
“You think you’re scary?” Jazz said quietly, his lips quirking in a little smile.
