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 you 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.