Текст книги "Game"

Автор книги: Barry Lyga

Соавторы: Barry Lyga
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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

CHAPTER 35

Morales had retreated to an empty office to harangue federal and local courthouses to find a judge who could sign the court order that even now one of Montgomery’s cops was filling out on the computer. The faster that order was signed, the quicker they could get Belsamo’s DNA and get that process started. Jazz needed a break, so he and Hughes sneaked out to the car and drove back to the place called Red Hook. Hughes parked in a grocery store parking lot and pointed through the windshield.

“See? The Statue of Liberty. Told you.”

Sure enough, Jazz could see the statue off in the distance. Big deal. He’d seen it on TV and in movies.

“You really think Belsamo’s the guy?” he asked. “Even after that little display?”

Hughes shrugged. “Could be. Some guy just wandering into the precinct like that? It’s possible. Some of these guys—a lot of these guys—they want to get caught.”

Most of these guys, they want to get caught, Dear Old Dad had said so many times that Jazz had lost count. You understand what I’m saying? I’m saying most of the time, they get caught ’cause they want it, not ’cause anyone figures ’em out, not ’cause anyone outthinks ’em.

“Yeah. Some of them.”

Almost without realizing it, he rubbed briefly at his collarbone, where the reversed I HUNT KILLERS tattoo emblazoned his flesh.

Yeah, I hunt killers. Right. Seems more like they hunt me lately. Between the Impressionist literally knocking on my front door and Hat-Dog calling me out, I’m not doing much actual hunting.

“He just doesn’t seem right for this,” Jazz said, switching the topic to a more comfortable area. “Hat-Dog is highly organized. Belsamo… isn’t.”

“We don’t know that,” Hughes argued. “We don’t know how much of what we saw in there was an act.”

“Really? Pulling your pud in a police station is a far way to go for an act.”

“You’re the one who’s always saying that the stuff we think is crazy makes perfect sense to these guys. Maybe he’s spent the past year wanting nothing more than a chance to show his junk to Billy Dent’s kid.”

For some reason, this made Jazz think of a world in which the solution to serial murder was for him to see the exposed genitals of serial killers, leading to a brief mental image of a traditional cop lineup, sociopaths all in a row, pants on the floor, and Jazz walking down the line like the Pope blessing worshippers.

“That’s insane.”

“Exactly.”

“Insanity alone can’t account for everything. For someone as organized as Hat-Dog, there’s an underlying sense to it.”

“What about this Ugly J thing? You think that’s some connection between your dad and this guy and that Impressionist guy?”

Jazz shrugged. “Billy was in jail when Hat-Dog started up. But he was in jail when the Impressionist was prospecting, too. Someone kick-started the Impressionist. Maybe Hat-Dog. Or maybe the other way around.”

“Prospecting. You said that before. Is that… is that what he called it? Prospecting?”

And now Jazz felt like he was the one who’d exposed himself in public. He wanted to curl up in a corner of the car and melt away. He’d forgotten that not everyone had memorized every detail of Billy’s career. Was the word prospecting even something in the public record? He didn’t know.

“Never mind,” he said.

Hughes said nothing, and they sat in silence, gazing out at the Statue of Liberty until Hughes’s cell chirped for attention.

“It’s Morales.”

“Too soon for the court order,” Jazz said. “Even for the feds.”

“Text just says ‘bad news.’ ” He started the car. “Let’s find out what.”

Jazz and Hughes arrived at the precinct just in time to watch them let Belsamo go. He shuffled out the door reluctantly, like a vagrant turned away from a shelter.

“What the hell?” Hughes demanded. “He confessed! You can’t have even taken his DNA yet, and the bastard said he killed—”

“That’s enough!” Montgomery barked, and dragged them into his office. “Settle down, Louis. You can’t go off like that out there, whipping everyone into a frenzy.”

“What happened?” Hughes asked, and Jazz answered almost by reflex, realizing in a flash of insight what must have happened.

“They found a new body,” he said. “Didn’t they?”

Hughes gaped at him and before Montgomery could respond, Morales breezed into the office.

“New body,” she said tightly. “Three damn blocks from here. The bastard is laughing at us. Corner of Henry and Baltic. Right outside P.S. Twenty-nine. Assistant principal leaving school found the body fifteen minutes ago.”

“But Belsamo could have—”

“Let me guess,” Jazz said, interrupting Hughes. “The body wasn’t there this morning.”

Morales nodded emphatically. “The body had to have been dumped during the day. In broad daylight. The timing doesn’t work—Belsamo was here most of the morning, waiting to be interrogated, seen by a million cops and feds.”

“The whole damn task force is his alibi,” Montgomery said bitterly.

“Just another nutjob.” Hughes sounded defeated.

“Unis and evidence collection are on the scene. Want to check it out?” Morales asked.

“Let’s go,” Jazz said.

Morales drove Jazz to the crime scene; Hughes stayed behind to coordinate the task force gathering the day’s alibis from their potential suspects.

“We also ran his name as a matter of course,” Morales said, still speaking of Belsamo, clearly pissed off. “He was questioned the night of the S-line murder in connection with a drunk-and-disorderly. Unis confirm he was with them for an hour in Boerum Hill. No way he had time to schlep out to Midtown, find our girl, do his thing, and then leave her on the S.”

“So… it’s definitely not him.”

Morales nodded a tight little nod. “Never even got anyone in there to take a blood sample. All happened too fast. Damn!” She slammed a palm against the steering wheel. “Thought we had this one.” She grabbed her phone and stabbed out a number as they paused at a light, then barked at whoever answered to cancel the court order. “No point wrecking a judge’s weekend for nothing. We might need a happy one later on.”

Jazz could feel the smoldering anger boiling off her like steam. She probably thought it made her tough, but it actually made her vulnerable. Angry people weren’t thinking straight. It would be easy to—

Stop doing that!

Never killed a cop before. Not even a lady cop, Billy mused. And this one’s real special, ain’t she? Tried to catch ol’ Hand-in-Glove, didn’t she? Would be great to get to know her from the inside out, get my drift?

Go to hell, Billy.

Hell’s all around, Jasper m’boy?

As Morales had said, the crime scene was mere blocks from the precinct. A crowd had gathered, along with the usual media vultures. Morales handed Jazz a pair of sunglasses and an FBI baseball cap. Crude disguise, but maybe it would work.

NYPD uniforms had set up a perimeter around the scene and now did their level best to keep gawkers and press from getting too close. Jazz looked around quickly as he stepped out of the car. This was brazen, leaving the body here. P.S. 29 was on the corner of Baltic and Henry. Not a busy intersection, from what Jazz could tell, but even a lightly traveled New York intersection got more traffic than the busiest in Lobo’s Nod. Right across the street was a Chinese restaurant—two guys in food-spattered aprons stood in the doorway, gaping at the craziness across the street.

The rest of the buildings within sight looked residential. Smallish, squat apartment buildings and some town houses.

“He’s definitely getting cocky,” Jazz murmured to Morales as they ducked under the crime-scene tape. “Dumping right out in the open like this?”

“Yeah.” Morales had taken in the surroundings, too. “Safe bet—well, safe-ish—that no one’s lingering around a school on the weekend, but even so, he had to figure someone would pop up unexpected.”

“Where’s the witness?”

Morales pointed. An NYPD uniform stood near the front door to the school, holding out a cup of what could have been coffee or water or even whiskey to a woman in a winter coat who seemed to be on the verge of hyperventilating. “Dr. Meredith Sinclair. Assistant principal at P.S. Twenty-nine. She’s not going to be any use to us for a few minutes. Let the unis calm her down and then we’ll take a run at her.”

Jazz liked the way she said “we.”

The body lay almost like a snow angel just within a fence that separated the school grounds from the sidewalk along Baltic. Nothing new. Jazz went into instant assessment mode.

Caucasian female, age twenty-five to thirty. Blond. Naked. Slit open from breastbone to waist, the gaping wound of her gut revealing the shiny-slick loops of intestines. Eyelids gone. Eyes missing.

“Left the guts in this time,” Morales mumbled, crouching down for a better look, blocking a crime-scene tech. Annoyed, the tech moved a bit and took another photo of the body. Another cop shot video.

“No,” Jazz said. “Put them back.”

Morales arched an eyebrow and summoned one of the medical examiner’s men, who probed at the corpse and confirmed that, yes, the intestines were no longer attached to the body. They’d been removed, then stuffed back inside.

“Evolution of his signature?” Morales wondered aloud.

“Or maybe just expedient,” Jazz said. “Maybe he wanted to leave a clean murder site and he didn’t have anywhere else to put her guts when he moved her.”

“She was left here sometime between ten, ten-fifteen, which is when Dr. Sinclair got here to do some work before the winter break ended, and three, which is when she came out the front door. Nice little five-hour window.” Morales tsked. “Anything else, Boy Wonder? You’re the one who found all the stuff we missed at the other scenes.”

Jazz shook his head. “There’s nothing else to see here. This is just the dump site. Every clue available to you is in or on the body.” He turned a tight circle, scanning the surroundings. “I don’t see any security cameras pointed this way. You won’t see him there. But maybe canvass the surrounding blocks, see if someone saw something as he headed this way. He wouldn’t have been walking, not with a load like that. You’re looking for a car that stopped at this intersection, a guy who got out….”

“Then why check around the other blocks?”

“Because he had to come from somewhere. If you can get an ID on the kind of car, maybe you can figure out which direction he came from. Maybe another camera out there somewhere on his route caught a picture of him or his license plate or something.”

Morales kicked at the ground. “Yeah. Okay.” He could tell by her tone of voice that she thought it was useless. And she was probably right. But they had to try something. Anything, at this point.

“He’s showing his contempt for us,” Jazz told her. “He knows the investigation is headquartered right down the road. He might have even known we were interviewing suspects.”

Morales clucked her tongue. “How would he know that? You think he’s a cop?”

She asked it so matter-of-factly that it stunned Jazz. No attempt to conceal her thoughts, no attempt to lower her voice. The New York cops within earshot all went stony-faced, offended, angered. If she noticed, Morales didn’t show it.

“Nah,” Jazz said lightly. It was possible, of course. But this seemed like such a risky move…. Would a cop—even a crazy cop—take such a chance? “I think he’s FBI.”

Morales blew out a puff of laughter. “Okay, yeah, right.” She took the woman’s wrist in her hand, almost as though checking for a pulse. “Her extremities are in rigor. Rest of the body’s getting there.”

“Given the cold temperatures, figure she’s been dead six, seven hours?” One of the medical techs looked at Jazz with impressed surprise and nodded, confirming the estimate.

“So he kills her early this morning and dumps her here right away,” Morales said. She moved, carefully, in order to get a better angle on the body. “Raped?”

“Won’t know until we get her on the slab,” the tech said, “but I’m guessing yes, based on some bruising on her inner thighs. Could have just been from rough consensual intercourse at some point in the last twelve to sixteen hours, but given the circumstances…”

“Let me know what you get,” she told the tech. To Jazz, she said, “Do you need to see anything else?”

Jazz glanced over at the assistant principal again. She was gulping whatever was in the cup, and the cop with her looked bored.

“Are we sure she didn’t see anything when she got here?”

“She says—”

“Witnesses are wrong. Eyewitness testimony is pretty unreliable.”

“I know that.”

“I’m just thinking… if I were a serial killer and I wanted to throw the cops off, I might drop a body so that it’s found when I’m talking to them. Make them think I’m just some kind of crackpot.”

Morales shook her head. “I would buy that if we came to him. But he approached us. We didn’t suspect him to begin with. Why would anyone—even a lunatic—try to throw off suspicion by raising suspicion?”

To that, Jazz had no answer.

CHAPTER 36

Connie didn’t even realize that she was still staring at the birth certificate until a voice suddenly shouted and shocked her back to reality.

“Hey! Hey, what are you doing?”

She looked up and around. Realized that the voice came from through the hedge to the east. A man stood there with a baseball bat.

“That’s private property!” he shouted.

Connie froze. Who the hell was this guy to try to run her off? It wasn’t his property. She opened her mouth to say “Buzz off!” but before she could, he said, “I’m calling nine-one-one!” and held up a cell phone as if he needed to prove it.

Oh… crap.

Trespassing. Disturbing evidence. Damaging private property… And those were just the crimes Connie could imagine herself. The justice system probably had plenty of other blanks to fill in.

She stooped down and gathered up the box and its contents, then took off in the opposite direction, leaving the shovel and pickax behind. I owe Howie more than twenty bucks now, some crazy part of her realized.

“Hey!” the guy shouted. “Hey! Stay right there! I’m calling the cops! I’m serious!”

I know you’re serious, dumbass, Connie thought as she ran like hell for the cover of the woods. Why do you think I’m running?

She didn’t know the woods and back byways of Lobo’s Nod the way Jazz and Howie did, but Connie did have excellent coverage on her phone. Its GPS got her through the woods and into another housing development, where she paused to catch her breath and text Howie while hidden behind someone’s shed. Howie, fortunately, was done at Jazz’s and easily able to pick her up, though he did complain—of course—about the lost shovel and pickax.

He stopped complaining when Connie showed him the lockbox and its contents.

And the birth certificate.

“This is the big one,” she said. “This changes things.”

“Why? So, it’s Jazz’s birth certificate. Now we know he wasn’t born in Kenya. Big deal.”

She pointed to a specific portion of the birth certificate. Howie’s eyes widened immediately and his chest hitched as though he’d been shoved.

“Oh my God.” He stared incredulously where she pointed. “Is this for real?”

“Yeah.”

The birth certificate was completely normal and unassuming. Except for one thing.

The spot for FATHER.

It was blank.

“It shows his mom’s name,” Howie breathed, “but there’s nothing for his dad….”

“Which means,” Connie said, speaking the words out loud for the first time, “that Jazz might not be Billy’s son.”

Howie drove Connie home, still processing what she’d told him. “Looks like you lucked out,” he told her as they pulled up. There were no cars in her driveway.

“God, it feels like I’ve been gone for days,” she said. “But it’s just been a couple of hours.”

“Maybe your moms decided to stick around the mall. Run errands or something while your brother’s at the movies.”

“Maybe. I’m not gonna question some good luck.” She got out of the car. “You’re good to take it from here?”

“I’m not a complete screwup,” Howie said, offended. “I can handle my part. Just make sure you send it.”

She waggled her phone. “Already e-mailed. Let me know what happens. And hey—be careful.”

Howie backed out and headed back to the Dent house, doing his best to pay attention to the road, even though all he could really focus on was a notion that he’d never imagined possible: What if Jazz wasn’t Billy Dent’s son? What would that mean for his best friend? It seemed impossible, but that blank on the birth certificate… Why leave it blank if you knew who the father was? Had Jazz’s mom had an affair? Or maybe a one-night stand with a man she didn’t even know?

Another thought occurred to Howie, one that tightened his gut so much that he had to pull over for a moment until the tautness in his belly subsided: What if Billy Dent had… well, what if he had forced one of his male victims to rape his own wife? What if that’s how Jazz had been conceived?

Connie had wanted to call Jazz right away. To give what might be the best news of Jazz’s life. And Howie could understand that. Nothing would please him more than to say to Jazz, Hey, buddy, you know how you’re worried that being Billy’s kid means you’re, like, genetically predisposed to go psycho? Well, guess what? I have good news!

But he’d stopped Connie because… was it good news? No matter who the sperm donor was, Jazz had still been raised by William Cornelius Dent, which was bad no matter what. And would it really be any better to know that Billy wasn’t your dad… but that he’d been there for the conception, gun in hand? Howie shivered at the thought and nearly threw up on the steering wheel.

After settling his stomach and his nerves, he drove back to the Dent house. Gramma was running around in her underwear as Samantha chased her with a housedress, begging her to put some clothes on. Howie averted his eyes. Not out of propriety but just to avoid wrinkled old-person flesh. Guh-ross.

Upstairs, he used Jazz’s computer to check his e-mail. As promised, Connie had sent over a picture of the birth certificate. Howie printed it, folded it, and tucked it in his pocket, then went downstairs to help Sam wrangle Jazz’s grandmother.

Something in Sam’s presence brought out the child in Gramma, which made her a little easier than usual to handle, though Howie still found it beyond perturbing to see a septuagenarian running around the house, giggling, her hair tied up in pigtails, occasionally trying to pinch him. (His arms bore welts and bruises from where she’d managed to succeed.)

“Can I show you something?” he asked Sam, who was in the process of getting Gramma settled onto the sofa with what looked like a big photo album.

“Jazz warned me about you, Howie. Told me how to handle you. I’m not falling for that old trick,” Sam said. “I don’t want to hear your zipper if I say yes.”

“That’s a little obvious for me,” Howie sniffed. “I love you for your mind, anyway.”

Sam was partly bent over Gramma as she paged through the album, her rear sticking out in a very fetching way. She fixed Howie with an eyebrow-raised glance over her shoulder and straightened up, annoyed. “Really? Stop staring at my mind, then, kid.”

“Right.” He produced the birth certificate and flapped it in the air. “But I really do have something to show you.”

“Can you be a good girl and look at pictures for a little while?” Sam asked her mother, who gasped and pointed at a picture.

“Handsome man!” she crooned. “Handsome daddy!”

It was a picture of Billy’s father.

“Right. Handsome daddy.” A shudder seemed to run through Sam at the photo of her own father. “You see if you can find all the pictures of Daddy.”

“You’re my favorite sister,” Gramma said, and hugged Sam with a strength possessed only by the crazy.

“And you’re mine.” Sam disengaged herself and joined Howie in the kitchen, positioning herself, he noticed, so that she could keep an eye on Gramma through the doorway. “What have you got?”

Howie handed over the birth certificate. He explained how and where Connie had found it.

Sam scanned it quickly. “You think it’s Billy leading her around?” Her voice dipped when she spoke the name, and her eyes flicked to her mother. “Why would he want her to find this?”

“I don’t know. But did you notice the space for father is blank?”

“Yeah. Probably an oversight.”

“An oversight?” Howie struggled to keep his voice down. Gramma was peacefully paging through the album. No point getting her riled. “The guy who got away with killing over a hundred people didn’t make an oversight. There’s a reason it’s blank.”

“There could be a million reasons, not just one. Maybe at one point Billy might not have thought Jazz was his. He was pretty pissed when Janice got pregnant initially. I remember Mom telling me that. But he got over it. But I’m sure they had some reason.”

“Like what?”

Sam shrugged. “I don’t know. Because my brother was completely insane?”

“Was?”

“Is. You know what I mean.” She crossed her arms over her chest, the birth certificate dangling from her fingers like something dead or dying. “Howie, you have to promise me that you and Connie aren’t going to go poking around into this anymore. Let the cops handle it.”

“We’re trying to help Jazz. If it turns out he’s not Billy’s kid—”

“Then what? He’s going to suddenly be all better? His childhood will magically disappear in a puff of smoke? Please. There’s a better chance of you actually getting to first base with me.”

“I already got to first base with you.”

Sam tilted her head to one side. Excuse me? the motion said.

“I touched your butt the other day. When you were washing dishes.”

“You bumped me with your hip. It doesn’t count, and besides, that’s not first base, anyway.”

Howie sighed. “Felt like heaven.”

Sam groaned and massaged her temples with her thumbs. “Look, this birth certificate doesn’t mean anything at all. For all you know, it’s not even legit. It could be something that Billy dummied up to mess with Jazz. Or Connie. Or you. Or just something he did to amuse himself. He’s crazy, Howie. His motivations don’t—”

“Sammy J!” Gramma shouted suddenly. “Sammy J!” She scampered into the kitchen, flush with excitement, the photo album huge and flapping like a giant bird in her withered hands. “Look! Look!”

Sam took the photo album from her breathless mother, who jabbed a finger at a photo. “I found a picture of you, Sammy! See? See?”

“Very good!” Sam said, her voice proud. “Good job!” To Howie, she said, “It actually is me. I’m sort of surprised.”

Howie bent to look at the picture. It was a young girl—maybe four or five years old—in a dress and what looked like dirty sneakers. She was very plain—no indication at all in this picture that she would grow up to be the sexy thang Howie so lusted after. “God bless puberty, huh?” he said.

“Oh, you sweet talker,” Sam drawled with sarcasm. “How do you keep the ladies from throwing their naked bodies at you?”

“Usually I just keeping talking,” Howie admitted.

“Anyway, yeah, I was a late bloomer,” Sam said, turning another page. More middling photos of an awkward prepubescent Sam. “Didn’t really get much better until high school. Buh—” She caught herself. “You-know-who was the good-looking one. From day one, pretty much.”

As if she’d conjured it, the next page had a photo of a younger Gramma, tired but smiling, holding a baby. Howie knew without asking or being told who that baby was.

For what was probably the first time in his life, Howie did not say what immediately came to his mind. Which was: Dude. The Antichrist as a baby…