Hughes did a good job covering his surprise, but not so good that Jazz couldn’t tell. “Yeah. How did you know that? That’s one of the things we kept out of the news.”
“Reading between the lines. There was a quote in one news story from the medical examiner, talking about ‘a real mess.’ And in the background of one of the pictures in the paper, you can see a CSI with a covered bucket. I played the odds.”
Hughes pressed his lips together. “Not bad. Yeah, he’s started disemboweling them.”
“And his deal is he marks them, right? Didn’t I read that? Some of them with a hat, some with a dog? Cuts it into them.”
“Yeah. There’s no pattern to that. At first we thought he was alternating, or marking the women with hats and the men with dogs. That would fit a certain sort of pathology. But then we got a dog on a woman. Then two hats in a row. And a hat on a man. And then another couple of hats in a row. There’s no pattern to it.”
“There’s a pattern to it,” Jazz said. “It’s just not one that you can see.”
“And you can?”
“I didn’t say that. It makes sense to him, though.”
“I know,” Hughes said testily. “I’m not right out of the academy. In this guy’s head, the most sensible thing in the world is to grab up people and torture them and kill them and carve hats and dogs on them. I get it.”
Jazz looked at his watch. “There’s your five. I hope it was worth it.”
“Wait!” Hughes threw out a beefy arm, blocking the front door. “Look, I didn’t come here to gab with you on your front porch. I need—we, that is. We need your help.”
Jazz laughed. “My help? What, because I caught the Impressionist? That was sort of a special circumstance.”
“Oh? How so?”
“He was imitating my father. He was practically killing people in my backyard.”
“I get it—so you only take the easy ones. And the people of New York just don’t count. They might as well not be real to you.”
People are real. People matter.
Words to live by, for Jazz. He had no other choice—the moment he stopped believing that (and it would be depressingly easy to do so, he feared) would be the moment he turned into his father.
But, yeah, people were real and people mattered, but Jazz couldn’t save them all. Flush off his success of capturing the Impressionist, he’d gone and tattooed I HUNT KILLERS in gigantic black Gothic letters on his chest. A new mantra, this one inked directly into flesh so that he couldn’t forget.
But in the months since the Impressionist’s arrest, Jazz had hunted nothing more than his own self-doubt. Sure, “I hunt killers” sounded great and made for a nice little slogan, but at the end of the day, he was still seventeen. Still dealing with his disintegrating grandmother and her dilapidated house. Still trying to get through school. To figure out what the hell he would do when he graduated. The million mundane details of everyday life had made him feel old before his time, as though the promise of that tattoo had begun to fade the instant the ink dried. Maybe even while it was still wet.
Jazz sighed and watched his breath drift off and dissipate. “Look, Detective Hughes. I got… I got lucky. Once. I’m sure you guys are doing the best you can. You have the FBI and all the resources of the NYPD. I’m not going to be much more help.”
“I disagree.” Hughes leaned in close, his eyes wide and insistent. “You understand these guys, don’t you? You have a lifetime’s experience with them, in a way even the best, most dedicated profiler can’t understand. All we can do is ask them questions after the fact. And who knows if they tell us the truth, or how much of the truth they bother with?
“You’re different. You grew up with him. While he was still hunting. And he told you everything, didn’t he?”
“Prospecting…” Jazz whispered before he could stop himself.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing.”
“You said ‘prospecting.’ Is that what your dad called it?”
“I said it’s nothing.” Jazz shoved Hughes’s arm away from the door. “I can’t help you. I’m seventeen, man. I’ve got school starting up in a few days.”
“So? I’ll write you a note. I write good notes.” Hughes grinned, his teeth huge and almost predatory. “Look, it’ll just be a couple of days. You come up, you look at some of the case files. Go to some of the crime scenes and work your mojo.” Hughes waved his hands like a magician. “You’re back before Christmas break is over. Maybe you miss one day of school. I will seriously write you a note, on NYPD letterhead and everything. I’ll get the commissioner to sign it. The mayor. You can eBay it when he runs for president someday.”
“I’m really sorry,” Jazz said, and even though he wasn’t all that sorry, it was no big trick to make Hughes think he was. The word sorry had magical properties. Say it with the right intonation and downcast eyes, and people will always believe it.
“My card,” Hughes said, believing. “In case you change your mind.”
Jazz tucked the card into his pocket without looking at it. “I won’t,” he said, and went inside.
CHAPTER 6
Touch me
says the voice
like that
it goes on
And he does.
He touches.
His fingers glide over warm, supple flesh.
Touch me like that
His skin on hers.
Move on
says the voice
like that
And his legs, the friction of them—
And so warm
So warm
like that
Jazz woke up, trembling, but not because of the cold. His grandmother’s old house was drafty and leaked like a torpedoed tugboat, but the space heater next to the bed kept him plenty warm.
He trembled from the dream. From what it meant. Or didn’t mean. Or could mean.
He didn’t know. Days like this—nights like this, he checked himself—he felt like he didn’t know anything. Not a single thing in the whole wide world.
The new dream…
It was sex.
Duh.
Obviously.
In the old dream—the dream which now seemed to be relegated to special guest appearances as the new one took over the starring role, yee-haw!—he had been hurting someone. Cutting someone with a knife. And the question for him then had been this: Unless I’ve actually cut someone with a knife before, how could I know what it feels like? How could I dream it so… so… keenly?
Jazz was a virgin. Despite what Billy chose to believe, Jazz had never had sex. He was terrified by the possibility and the probability of it.
He longed for it, too, of course. He was, after all, seventeen years old and in good health. He had hormones pumping through his bloodstream like any other seventeen-year-old. Sometimes he wanted sex so bad that he thought he would pass out from the strain of desire. He was dizzy with wanting it.
But he was afraid of what it could lead to. Yes, there were serial killers out there who had no sexual component to their depredations, but they were few and far between, so rare as to be almost nonexistent. And none of them had been programmed since birth by William Cornelius “Billy” Dent.