“Because he’s pissed enough at me.”
“Like I’m not totaling up all the state laws you’ve broken in my head? Hell, I bet Belsamo could even file a civil suit against you. He’d probably win, too.”
“You said you would help me kill Billy,” Jazz told her, forcing her to shift uncomfortably, like a recalcitrant toddler needing to use the bathroom.
“Killing Billy and catching Dog are two different things.”
“No. They’re the same. The path to Billy leads through Dog. He said he came to New York looking for someone. Said he would tell Dog who. We catch Dog—without NYPD, without the task force—and we can force him to tell us who Billy came to find. And then we get that person and we’re one step closer to Billy.”
“Force him, huh? You gonna go all Cheney on him?”
“I don’t know what you mean by that. But I think I can be persuasive. In the first place, these freakshows are all giant Billy Dent geeks. The last one I caught thinks I’m some kind of demigod.” He left out the part about the Impressionist ramming his head into the bars of his cell.
“What if Dog doesn’t want to talk? Or what if he’s just too crazy to tell us anything worthwhile?”
“I think his whole cawing, look-at-my-dick act in the interrogation room was just that—an act. He wouldn’t be together enough to keep from being caught this long, otherwise. But you just have to trust me, Morales. We nail him down and I can make him talk. One way or the other.”
Morales rubbed her temples. “You’re talking about torture. You’re talking about kidnapping a United States citizen—”
“A criminal.”
“A United States citizen—”
“A serial killer.”
“—and depriving him of his rights, his due process. Then torturing him into giving up information not related to the crimes he’s accused of—”
“The crimes he committed.”
“—and using that information to assassinate another U.S. citizen.”
“You’re the one who offered to kill Billy!” Jazz threw his hands into the air. What the hell? He thought she was a hardcase. All of a sudden, she was a big ol’ wuss.
“Why come to me? Why not Hughes? Why not let him do his thing?”
“Like I said: Hughes said he was going to look into it, but he has to play by the rules.”
She snorted. “I’m an FBI agent. I have rules, too, you know.”
“Yeah, but you don’t care about them,” Jazz told her. “Not if they stand between you and Billy.” He purposefully and significantly glanced at the photo of her ex-husband, making sure she couldn’t miss it. “This is your chance to do what you’ve dreamed of for almost a decade. To bring down Hand-in-Glove. Permanently. To redeem all those dead girls. To redeem what you lost.”
Unfair, really. Completely unfair. Using her own grief and her own compulsions against her like that. But Jazz decided in that moment that he didn’t care if it was fair or unfair. Morales had become a tool, a widget he would use in order to get what he needed—Billy.
She actually licked her lips. That was when he knew he had her.
Sexy as she was, though, he had no interest in her body. Not now. Right now, all he needed was her authority, her badge, her gun.
She flipped open her cell and made a call. A moment later, she said, “Hughes. It’s Morales. You have men on this Belsamo character, right?”
Jazz nearly squealed in glee.
“No, I’m not with Dent,” she said impatiently, rolling her eyes as if it added to the illusion. “I’ve been looking at the workup on him and going over the interrogation transcript and there’s something that bothers me. And something must bother you, too, or you wouldn’t have uniforms on him, right?” She paused, and Jazz could imagine Hughes twitching, trying to think of a good reason to be following Belsamo, one that didn’t involve multiple crimes against the suspect.
“You’re kidding,” Morales said. “Okay, okay. I get it. Fine. Yeah, I’ll see you in the morning. They lost him in the subway,” she said to Jazz after she closed her phone.
“They what? Have these guys ever tailed someone before?”
“You know how tough it is to follow someone through the subway around here? You need more than a couple of uniforms, and that’s all Hughes could spare without going into detail about why he wanted to tail Belsamo. So what now, boy genius?”
Jazz fumed. He didn’t know what next.
“We could sit on his apartment,” she said, “but he might kill someone in the meantime and then we’ve just been sitting on our thumbs while—”
“Doggy needs a bone!” Jazz snapped his fingers, lurching toward her excitedly.
“What?” She took a step back, as if Jazz had threatened her.
“I can’t believe I totally forgot this in all the craziness. But that’s what Billy said to me. One of the last things he said: ‘Doggy needs a bone. But first, Doggy needs to play with his toys.’ The storage unit!”
“You think he’s gone there?”
Jazz nodded. “He needs a bone. I bet that means he’s picked out his victim. He needs his murder kit. But I checked his apartment thoroughly. There was no murder kit and nowhere to hide one. So I bet he’s got his tools at his storage unit.” Another thought occurred to him. “I bet that’s where he keeps his trophies, too.”
Morales held out her hand. “You have the envelope, right? Or at least the address.”
Jazz grinned. “Of course I do.”
Morales fist-pumped. “Yes! Let’s get going. I have a car downstairs.” She grabbed her shoulder holster from the chair and wriggled into it, her shapeless shirt becoming suddenly quite shapely in a way Jazz neither could nor wanted to ignore. As she turned to pluck a blazer from the desk, Jazz noticed a second, smaller gun tucked into the small of her back. A Glock 26 from the looks of it—nine-millimeter rounds.
But she hadn’t done anything since coming out of the bathroom, which meant that…
“Did you think I would leave you—or anyone—out here with my gun without knowing I had a backup in the john?” she asked, flashing him a knowing smile that reminded him of Connie in all the right ways. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 49
Billy Dent was not alone. He had company in his small room. He looked over and thought about discussing what was on his mind….
But no. There was no point.
Oh, Jasper. Poor Jasper. Seeing only a part of the game. Didn’t he know that there were many different kinds of games, games for all kinds of players?
Sure, there was the game Hat and Dog played. A game with specific rules and a very special prize. But then there was the game above that game. The game Billy played. The game with rules he himself had written. The best part of that game was that none of the pieces knew they were a part of it. It was a game with many sides, but only one player: William Cornelius Dent.
This is the way it was meant to be, of course. In a world filled with so many pieces of plastic, so many things—human beings, they called themselves in a great, self-perpetuating delusion—that thought they mattered, that thought they thought, there could be no more appropriate game than what amounted to solitaire. Billy Dent, playing alone.
Billy used one of his burner phones. When the ringing stopped, he said, “Hey there. Havin’ a good evening? It’s about to get better.”
He didn’t wait for a response, just continued on: “How’d you like to win this whole thing once and for all? Tonight?”
And, yeah, that got a response.