Blood of My Blood
Page 33
“New York is a political disaster right now. The evidence in the Hat-Dog case is severely compromised, and the DA wants the book closed on that. For good. They’re willing to give you immunity on the crimes you committed up to Oliver Belsamo’s death, in exchange for your testimony.”
Jazz pondered. That still left everything he’d done after Hat plugged Dog in the face. “What about the rest of the stuff I did in New York? Assaulting the cops? Everything else? And I probably broke some federal laws, too, when I fled across state lines.” He swallowed. “My parents.”
Mr. Hall spoke slowly. “We have testimony that what… happened to your mom was in self-defense. And as for Billy… Well, the knife that caused his wound was wiped clean when the police checked it. No prints. And Billy isn’t talking. There’s nothing concrete to implicate you, as long as you keep your damn mouth shut.”
Billy must have wiped the knife. Protecting his son to the last. It was so magnanimous and so twisted that Jazz couldn’t process it.
“You didn’t kill anyone,” Mr. Hall went on. “I’ve seen the crime-scene report of what happened in the storage unit, and it bears out your testimony that Duncan Hershey killed Oliver Belsamo and Agent Morales. They have you stone-cold on a whole passel of misdemeanors and things like breaking and entering, assault, but I bet we can get it all knocked down if you trade that evidence Howie’s hiding.”
“It seems too easy,” Jazz said doubtfully.
Mr. Hall leaned back in the chair, arms crossed over his chest. “It isn’t easy. It’s damn hard and you know it. That’s not what’s bothering you.”
“You don’t know what’s bothering me.”
“I’ve been around my share of defendants. I know exactly what’s bothering you. You feel guilty. Guilty about what you did and guilty about getting away with it.”
Jazz looked away.
“Do you think you deserve punishment, Jasper? Is that it?”
Did he? Was that it? He had done wrong. Much of it in the service of doing right, but did that really matter? He clenched his jaw, which tugged at the sutures in his face, spiking him with a moment of pain.
Pain.
Yes, pain meant life. But the symmetric property did not apply: Life did not mean pain.
“All right,” he said, turning back to Mr. Hall. “Let’s do it.”
“I thought you’d see it my way.”
“So, that’s New York. What about the feds and the stuff I did here in the Nod?”
“In exchange for your testimony against your father and mother, as well as producing information relevant to multiple unsolved serial killer cases, I can get a lot of that pleaded down to lesser charges. You’ll probably end up with probation.” Mr. Hall paused. “It’s going to be the mother of all probations, don’t get me wrong.”
“So I flip on the Crows, help the cops and the feds solve some old crimes…”
“Roll up some bad guys out there, resolve some lingering crimes committed by your parents…”
“And I get sent to my room without supper.”
“Repeatedly.”
“That’s the same deal Billy made,” Jazz said quietly. “He gives up information, he stays off death row. Like father, like son.”
“It’s not the same thing,” Mr. Hall said with a heat that surprised Jazz. “Your father murdered a great many people. And he made a deal not to die. You didn’t murder anyone. At worst, you assaulted people. And I’m not saying that’s not serious, but every last one of them is fine and will continue to be fine. You stole some things that can be replaced. You’ll get serious probation, but you’ll walk. Because at the end of the day, the good you’ve done has outweighed the bad.”
“That’s not the way the system works.”
“Today it is.” Mr. Hall actually cracked a smile. “Because you have a really good lawyer.”
Jazz drew in a deep breath that tested the work they’d done to stabilize his ribs. “So, I guess this is the part where you tell me that the price of you helping me out is staying away from your daughter.”
Mr. Hall stared at Jazz for a protracted moment that would have been unnerving and uncomfortable for anyone not the son of two Crows.
“I’m going to be brutally honest with you, Jasper. I don’t know where to go from here. The law stuff is almost simple compared to this. I don’t like my daughter with someone like you, someone who seems magnetized to danger. But even before that, yeah, I never liked my daughter with a white kid.”
“I know.”
Mr. Hall seemed to be struggling, helpless in the claws of something he couldn’t explain. “It’s visceral. It’s not in my brain, Jasper. It’s in my gut. It’s history and it’s still haunting us and I don’t like it.”
“I can respect that.”
“You can’t know what it’s like. You don’t know what it means to be black in this country, so you can never understand.”
They said nothing. Words ran through Jazz’s head, but they seemed impossible to form, to say. He couldn’t arrange them into anything that made sense.
So he just started talking.
“You’re right. I don’t know what it’s like to be black. And I never will. But here’s the thing: Everyone’s different, right? And sure, there are common experiences, but everyone sees the world at least a little bit differently. Everyone filters it their own way. You know your black experience, and you know so much more than I’ll ever know, but you can’t know everyone’s experience. Because if you think people are the same, if you think our experiences are interchangeable, well… that’s almost thinking like Billy. We are all individuals. People are real. People matter. Each one of us matters, for our differences as much as for our similarities.”
Mr. Hall grunted. Jazz wasn’t sure if what he’d said made much sense or if it was even relevant, but he felt better for saying it. He couldn’t go through life classifying people. For him, at least, that way lay the madness of Billy Dent.
“I’ve wondered my whole life what it would take,” Mr. Hall mused, “what it would take for us as a people, as a society, to become truly equal. To reconcile the sins of the past.”
“I don’t think you can reconcile the sins of the past.”
“Exactly.”
Jazz pondered. “Forgive, maybe. Forget, maybe.”
When you forget someone, Connie had told him once, the forgiveness doesn’t mean anything anymore.
“I can’t do either of them,” Mr. Hall admitted. “But here’s one thing I know for certain. For certain. I look at you and I look at Connie, and I see how much she cares for you, and now I see how much you care for her. And I think maybe I was looking at it the wrong way. It’s not about us as a people. Or as a society. It’s about us as individuals. One white boy and one black girl at a time. And maybe someday we—all of us—don’t forgive or forget, but maybe we just get a little better, and you folks get a little more tolerant and maybe I get a little less angry, and maybe we all don’t think about it as often. Does that make sense?”
“Makes sense to me. Then again, I grew up with two lunatics in the house.”
“You grew up fine, Jasper.”
Jazz gritted his teeth. He didn’t want Mr. Hall to see his tears, but they came, anyway.
Person to person. Just like Bobby Joe Long, letting Lisa McVey go.
One at a time. One person at a time.
Hall politely said nothing about Jazz’s tears. He just held out the box of tissues to him.
“You asked before if this was the part where I tell you that you can’t see Connie anymore. No, Jasper,” he said. “This is the part where I tell you that…” He paused and shook his head. “Where I tell you that I feel so sorry for you. I just feel so damn sorry for you, son.”
There was a quality in Mr. Hall’s voice that was unfamiliar to Jazz at first. After a moment, he placed it.
It was fatherly.
For the first time in so long, it soothed him, and he felt himself drifting toward gentle sleep.
CHAPTER 60
Jazz closed his eyes.
Epilogue
Five Years Later
It was an ugly day. It was an ugly room.
Except for the body.
The book made Jazz rich.
A Murder of Crows: My Life Inside the Serial Killer Conspiracy by Jasper Dent (as told to Ricardo Sloan, Jazz’s enthusiastic ghostwriter) debuted at number one on the New York Times Nonfiction Best Seller list and stayed there for sixteen weeks. It took eight months for the book to drop out of the top five, and another thirty months before it dropped out of the top ten. At random points in time, it would bubble up onto the list again for no particular reason, stay there for a month or so, then drop off. Until the paperback hit, and then the cycle started all over again.
The over-the-top subtitle had been insisted on by the publisher; Jazz hated it.
Jazz didn’t let the money change him. Other than renovating Gramma’s house in the Nod, he tried to live the life he’d always craved: quiet and simple. He would—on those occasions when the mood struck him and the case seemed particularly intractable—offer his services to the FBI or some local police agency that seemed stymied by a killing. After all, there were still a lot of Crows out there. The deciphering of Billy’s “journal” was a difficult affair, involving language experts, cryptographers, handwriting analysts, and—when all else failed—Jazz himself.
The tattoo across his chest—I HUNT KILLERS—still peered out at him every time he looked in a mirror, and sometimes it was still true.
But most of his time was spent overseeing the house renovation and working on his own pet project: a victims’ fund for those left behind by Billy Dent and Ugly J. He had to do it in secret. He didn’t want people to think he was buying forgiveness or understanding.
Those two things should not be for sale, at any price.
Howie, who had graduated college by now with a degree in business administration, was helping Jazz set up the fund. They spent big chunks of the day together, inevitably dissolving into idiotic juvenile laughter. It was like being kids again.
Except Connie wasn’t there.
Connie was in New York, an understudy in a well-received off-Broadway play. She usually got to go onstage a couple of nights a month, and her reviews had been good so far. She and Jazz spoke almost daily. He missed her, yearned for his other half, but he couldn’t take her dream from her. Love could burnish dreams but not substitute for them. She came home to the Nod as often as she could. Jazz visited New York rarely. The city held too many memories for both of them, but only Jazz could cause a minor riot by showing his face anywhere in the five boroughs.
Jazz knew that right now they were on separate paths. This was a good thing. She had seen and suffered too much being at his side. Now she was finally ready to be on her own. Those separate paths would meet again, would intertwine.
He could, of course, manipulate her. Control her. Draw on all those old tricks, those old schemes, so easy and readily available, like the house keys that come out of your pocket almost on their own as you approach the door, without conscious thought.
He had the keys to Connie’s mind and soul and heart. They jangled in his pocket every time he thought of her. Twisting up her emotions, making her cleave to him and making her think it had all been her own idea… Bringing her home for good, her dreams forsaken… That would be the easiest thing in the world.
But that’s what a sociopath would do.
And Jasper Francis Dent was not a sociopath.
Aunt Samantha had vanished. It would not be difficult to find her—innocent people don’t know how to hide—but while Jazz yearned for his only family, he could not bring himself to force himself back into her life. If there could be one Dent living beyond the taint of Butcher Billy and the Crow King, then let that be his aunt. She’d grown up with Billy. And as someone who’d done the same, he decided she deserved her privacy and her anonymity.
Most days—unless something absolutely prevented him or he was out of town—Jazz drove out to the Kettle/Herrara Care Institute, roughly a forty-five minute drive from the Nod. It was the best, most expensive long-term care facility in the state, a Gothic castle–looking edifice on a field of rolling hills, cherry trees, and oaks. Jazz paid good money to have his mother housed there, hooked up to the machines that breathed for her, fed her, dripped medicine into her.
Alive, but in what the doctors called a “persistent vegetative state.” Lack of oxygen to the brain for a prolonged period of time.
He was such a fixture that Dr. Indari, responsible for his mother’s care, joked about getting him an employee badge.
Kettle/Herrara was expensive, but not luxurious. The room in which his mother lay was ugly, the walls painted a sick green, the lighting dim and bland. He stood over his mother, watching her as she slept the sleep of the brain-dead. He knew that there was no activity in that head of hers—if he didn’t believe the docs, the EEG by her bedside told the tale—but he liked to think that somewhere deep down, she could hear him. Sense him.
“Hello, Mom,” he told her, as he did every time he visited. “It’s Jasper.”
Dr. Indari said that it was a very human thing to do, talking to someone when you know they can’t hear you. If he still had concerns about his own humanity, this would have allayed them.
Beautiful Janice—Ugly J—was beautiful no more. Her skin was dry and sallow, her cheekbones sunken. Machines beeped out her life.
As her only living blood relative, Jazz had medical power of attorney. As Indari reminded him often, he could pull the plug at any time.
A stroke of a pen to sign the orders. That’s all it would take to send Ugly J out of this world.
Every day, Jazz came to Kettle/Herrara CI and sat with his mother. Every day, he listened to her machine-assisted breath, watched her chest rise and fall, watched her closed eyelids occasionally flicker and jump from muscle spasms. The order to pull the plug lay on a clipboard by her bed, a pen sitting atop it.
Every day, he came here. Every day, he thought of what she had done.
“I could kill you anytime I want,” he whispered in her ear, like a lover.
Every day, he decided: Not today.
Acknowledgments
One more time…
Thanks again to Detective Paul Grudzinski of the NYPD and to Dr. Deborah Mogelof for law enforcement and medical advice, respectively. Where I got it right, it’s all them; where I got it wrong, it’s all me.
I also want to thank my agent, Kathy Anderson, and everyone at Anderson Literary Management for holding on during this wild ride.
I have more gratitude than you can imagine for everyone at Little, Brown who supported this quite crazy endeavor, especially not knowing where I was headed from the very beginning. My editor, Alvina Ling; her team, Bethany Strout, Nikki Garcia, and Pam Gruber; my production editor, Wendy Dopkin; the Sales, Publicity, Marketing, and Promotions folks (including Victoria Stapleton, Faye Bi, Jenny Choy, and Andrew Smith); the foreign sales team, including Amy Habayeb and Kristin Delaney; the designers and production team, who made these books look as creepy and as powerful as possible; and publisher Megan Tingley. Thank you all so much for your care, your professionalism, your attention to detail, and your faith in me.
Special thanks to Eric Lyga and Morgan Baden for reading the early drafts, and to Libba Bray for “Two Writers, One Bullet.”
Last but not least, thanks to you for reading this.
For more great reads and free samplers, visit
LBYRDigitalDeals.com
and join our communities at:
Facebook.com/LittleBrownBooks
Twitter.com/lbkids
theNOVL.com
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Part One: Up the Cliff Chapter 1
Chapt
er 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Part Two: Escape Routes Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Part Three: Killers Hunt Me Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Part Four: The Crow King Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Epilogue: Five Years Later
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.