Blood of My Blood (33 page)

Hughes and Tanner tried to interrogate Billy, but Dent clammed up, breaking his silence only to mock or insult them. A couple of deputies were staking out positions in the room, marking off the pool of vomit—now more resembling a multicolored scab on the carpet—as well as the spot where Billy Dent still lay on his stomach. A real crime-scene team would be taking more time, called in from the county, according to Tanner.

“We make do with what we’ve got,” the sheriff said without so much as a note of apology in his voice.

They were scrutinizing what had once been Doug Weathers’s laptop, its lid propped open where it rested on the desk. A Web map was on the screen, showing driving directions to a spot outside Lobo’s Nod.

“I know this place,” Tanner mused. “Just an old house there. The Dawes place. Been abandoned for more’n twenty years.”

“And they just let it sit there?” Hughes blurted before
reminding himself of all the outmoded, outdated, discarded, and deserted warehouses, bakeries, restaurants, and storefronts in the Seven-Six back home.

“Problem is,” Tanner said, “is this a clue left behind by Weathers? By Jasper? Or…” He cast a look over his shoulder at Billy Dent.

Hughes caught on. If Billy wanted them to go to this Dawes place, then that couldn’t mean anything good. Booby traps, maybe. Who knew what else?

And if the kid was the one who’d left the clue… What did
that
mean? Billy hadn’t been willing to talk, but so far the best possible assumption—the only reasonable inference to make—was that Jasper Dent had, like Tanner and Hughes, followed the audio file hint to Weathers’s apartment, where he’d confronted his pops and put a knife in his back. And then… what?

More importantly: Had Jasper intended to kill Billy with that knife blow and botched the job? The precision of the strike made Hughes think not, but there was no way to know for sure. Just as there was no way to know if he’d stabbed his old man in the heat of passion, in self-defense, or in cold blood.

Given Billy’s nature, Hughes leaned toward self-defense, but he didn’t
know
. It was almost equally likely that the kid had become the father, the acorn grown into an oak, and that they were now in pursuit of not a scared, desperate teen, but a crazed serial killer aborning.

“What’s the call, Sheriff? I bet we could get the FBI in here in no time flat.”

“No time for it. If Jasper’s hurt, we need to move.”

“And what if Jasper’s the bad guy now?”

To his credit, Tanner didn’t protest the idea, though Hughes knew it was anathema to him. “Then it’s even more important we move fast.” He clicked his shoulder mic. “Lana, this here’s G. William. Get those county boys here ASAP, okay, sweetheart? And note that Detective Hughes and I’re headed out to the old Dawes place for a look-see.”

“Are you psychic or something, Sheriff?” Lana’s voice came back startled.

“What do you mean?”

“I was just about to alert you that a call just came in through nine-one-one on the Dawes place. Shots fired.”

Jazz stole up the stairs. He braced himself against the railing and the opposing wall, ready for a stair to collapse, whether through age or perfidy.

She wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t booby-trap the stairs and kill me. She’s my mother
.

You’re next
.

A moment of adrenaline and rage. Of shock and of grief.

Could he talk her back from the ledge of madness? How far gone was she?

He climbed two more steps, probing them each with one foot before mounting them.

You’re next
.

He’d fallen for Billy’s last, desperate act of psychological sabotage: believing that his mother was complicit in his father’s horrors.

What had happened to him as a child was beyond monstrous. A part of him knew that he would never truly be able
to process the new information, no matter how long he lived. The revelations had made him physically ill, but the truth had done more than prompt up his dinner. It had speared his heart. But—he reminded himself—it had happened to
her
, too. Two victims with one moment of horror, mother and son both damaged together. And that had been Billy’s masterstroke. With one depredation, with a single act of depraved sexuality, he had psychically crippled mother and son, the first kneading in the sculptures his diseased mind directed him to mold.

She was as damaged as Jazz was. By the same hand.

Two more steps. Steeped in darkness now. He paused to let his eyes adjust. The murk ahead of him resolved into gray-and-black patterns, swimming in the air.

Depending on how brainwashed Mom was, would she be relieved that Billy wasn’t dead? Terrified? Enraged at his paralysis?

He would have to play this carefully. As carefully as his step off the staircase and onto the second-floor landing. It was almost perfectly dark, and then a light snapped on to his right, blinding him. He shielded his eyes with his hand, adjusting. A hallway extended in that direction, an open door at the end. Purling light beckoned him. He walked toward it.

By the time he reached the threshold, his eyes had become accustomed to the light. He paused at the door, then walked in and said hello to his mother.

The room was surprisingly clean and well kept. Sparse and spare, it had bare, whitewashed walls; peeling hardwood floors; and a single bulb hanging from the ceiling. There were two armchairs, both worn but intact, and a double bed against one wall.

His mother sat in one of the armchairs in the middle of the room, facing him.

“Jasper,” she said softly, and her eyes smiled as she bit a knuckle in emotion. “It’s been so long.”

She was shorter than he remembered. Of course. She’d been a giant to him as a child, but unlike most children, he’d never had the experience of growing up near her, around her, over her. Of that moment Howie’s mother had once described, of realizing a child could look her in the eye.

She wore sleek black boots and leggings under a short blue dress. Her hair was long, light brown with scatterings of gray. She was, as the Impressionist promised and as he remembered, beautiful, and his heart lurched at thinking of her that way, at the memory of what his father had compelled him to do with her and to her. His senses told him she was beautiful, his filial devotion told him to be proud of her beauty, and his gut told him never to look at her again.

“Mom.” He choked. Ten feet separated them. They’d suffered a distance of a thousand miles and nine years, with the barricade of Billy between them, but these last ten feet seemed insurmountable. They were a marathon and he was exhausted.

“You’ve grown so much,” she whispered.

Neither of them could move.

“You saw my play.” It was, bizarrely, the only thing he could think to say.

“Yes. You were very good. I was very proud of you.”

He flushed. Parental praise, for something not involving excising clues from a crime scene or memorizing pressure points on the human body? Something new.

“I guess we need to talk,” he said slowly. He would need to approach this with great caution. Something deep and primal roared for him to run to her, to embrace her, but he didn’t trust it. Didn’t trust himself or her reaction, for that matter.

She pursed her lips and nodded. “What would you like to talk about?”

People are real. People matter. Remember Bobby Joe Long
.

Bobby Joe Long had released Lisa McVey, even though he knew that doing so would lead to his capture. He’d been unable to stop himself from doing it, compelled by the same dark urges that led him to kill ten previous women.

Maybe that was the way in. The urge to save.

“I want to talk about Connie,” he said.

She seemed surprised and even a little annoyed, but she steepled her fingers and nodded. “Well, all right. If that’s what you want.…

“I remembered the lockbox in the backyard. I’d buried it years ago, before I left. Things I wanted to be sure were safe. I knew your father would erase me from your life when I left, and I wanted memories there. And when Connie got involved, I just knew that I had to play a game with her, too. So I led
her to the lockbox. I’d inscribed it with a bell before I left. For my other name, you understand.” She shrugged. “There was that paper company, Ness, right across from where your father and I were hiding out in Brooklyn. It just seemed too tempting, too much fun, to play with her. I bought a toy gun, and the rest was easy. Led her right to us.”

“Well, okay, but I sort of had that part figured out.” He licked his lips. “I want to talk about what happened when she got to you. When you were locked up together.”

She stared at him blankly. “I don’t understand.”

“You were both Billy’s prisoners. You helped her escape.”

“I was no one’s prisoner.”

Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt
, Howie quipped, and Jazz was inordinately pleased to hear his best friend’s voice.

“You were in handcuffs. Chained to a bed.”

She continued staring, and then suddenly the light dawned and she threw back her head and laughed, deep and throaty. “Oh, I understand! You
believed
that! Just like she did. I put those handcuffs on
myself
. There was a key tucked under the mattress. The whole thing was a setup. I wanted her to trust me, so that I could learn from her, and the deepest bonds of trust form between those who’ve suffered similar traumas. I never in a million years thought she would actually
escape
. Believe me, it was a long, quiet drive out of New York after that happened.”

“But—”

She shook her head and tut-tutted as though he were a toddler unable to figure out potty training. “Oh, Jasper, we could have killed that silly little bitch anytime we wanted. I
was just playing with her. Now that you and I are together, we’ll be sure to go get her before we leave the Nod. If you’re feeling particularly sentimental, you can take a piece of her with you, but really, don’t you think it’s time you moved on past this childish, adolescent… jungle fever of yours? Mommy’s back, after all. You don’t need her when you have me.”

Swallowing hard, he pressed on. “Billy isn’t a factor anymore. You need to understand that.” The final stroke: “You’re free now.”

She tilted her head and regarded him with an amused smile at play on her lips. “Jasper, what on
earth
are you talking about? Who do you think taught your father everything he knows?”

“The plan was to kill you,” she said airily.

“What?” Jazz’s lips had gone numb, and he could barely understand himself through the thickness of his own tongue.

His mother made a vaguely maternal groan. “Oh, Jasper. Jasper. Tell me something. Tell Mommy: What is it like to go looking for your soul, only to learn you never had one to begin with?”

Jazz’s lips and tongue stubbornly refused to function.

“Did you think Momma was a prospect?” she went on. “Did you think you had a fifty-fifty chance? No, son. You were blessed to be like us from birth. The two greatest killers the world will ever see, united in you.

“But from the first, we planned to birth you, take you home. Then see how long you could survive, neglected. Play with you. Not the way one normally plays with a baby, you understand. The way a Crow plays. That’s why we left Billy’s name off the birth certificate. He was becoming quite prolific at that point, really just beginning his serial
killer career. If the police ever tracked the dead infant back to me, I would be just another postpartum depression mommy to a sympathetic jury. Your father could plausibly deny ever even knowing there’d been a child.” She arched an eyebrow. “When Connie”—she spat the name with contempt—“asked about the birth certificate, I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing. She thought it redeemed you. Thought it meant you weren’t your father’s son.”

“I never thought that,” Jazz whispered. “Anyone who thought that was dreaming. I look like him. I sound like him. I’m Billy’s son.”

“You are. And mine.”

“I know who I am and what I am.”

“Do you?” She sat up straight, her eyes flashing at him. “Do you really? Because you keep talking like a prospect, Jasper. You sound like one of
them
. Like the men I noticed as a child. The ones who leered and stared at me. From the time I was thirteen on. And it didn’t frighten me or even disgust me. It amused me, Jasper. The way all their civility and sociability and intelligence just sluiced away like sand under a hose. My cleavage made them idiots. My legs turned them into morons. I realized then that men did not matter. That they were pathetic, subhuman creatures.

“And that made women even worse. Because everywhere I looked, women painted themselves, dressed themselves, put holes in their flesh to dangle jewelry, all to attract one of these pitiful, abjectly infantile male beasts that could barely control their own urges.

“My own father noticed. My changing body. Stared. Became foolish and stupid until the day I finally killed him.”

Her eyes shined as she rhapsodized. “But then I met your daddy. And he was the first real man I ever met. And that changed everything. Billy had only killed a couple before his own father died. But then we met. I knew about the Crows already, but they wouldn’t take me. Not a woman on her own. But with your father at my side, with him under my tutelage, we became…” She laughed. “We were the power couple of the serial killer world! Beyoncé and Jay Z! Brad and Angelina! Your grandfather’s death was the sign to Billy that it was time to take his calling seriously, that his real life would now begin. And, Jasper, he was more glorious than my wildest fantasies. An imagination more fecund than any I’d ever encountered. Endlessly inventive, endlessly depraved, endlessly wicked. Perfect in every way.”

Jazz leaned against the doorjamb for support. His legs quivered and his stomach, though vomit empty, filled with dread.

“This can’t be happening,” he said, though the denial sounded weak and thready even to his own ears.

“Of course it can. It’s already happened.” She tapped a long-nailed finger against her chin absently, the same tic he’d seen in Billy. “I wanted the ultimate pleasure, though. Craved it.” Her eyes sparkled. “Infanticide. I let myself become pregnant without telling Billy, and then when it was too late, told him. We began planning your death immediately.

“But then your father held you in his arms. And he went
weak, the way men do. Suddenly it was, ‘This is my boy. This is my son.’ And he became obsessed with the idea of living on through you. So the plans changed. We had so many ways to go. So many options. It was dizzying. We used to sit up nights, watching you sleep in your crib, and talk ourselves drunk with all the possibilities of you. And then we decided. We made up our minds. We would bond you to me. We would isolate you from your father and bond you to me. And the plan was for us to be lovers, and then one day for you to discover your father with me, in bed. Your rival for maternal affection. The Freudian primal scene. Who knows what that would have done to your fragile little brain? I bet it would have been exciting, though.

“But reality intervened. Momma had to go away. The plan changed. And now here we are,” she said. “You and I, together again. You’re a man now, and it is time for you to fulfill your father’s dreams on his behalf. The decks are almost cleared. Once your ‘girlfriend’ is dealt with, we’ll be free.”

Decks. Decks almost cleared
.

“You killed Gramma.” It burned into him like a laser. She hadn’t died of natural causes. Ugly J had claimed another victim. He gripped the doorjamb, trying to steady himself, but his legs wouldn’t hold out much longer. He retreated from the emotion, locked it away. He was good at that, he thought. He’d been doing it his whole life, retreating from the messy world of feelings to a clean, clinical, antiseptic realm of logic, of facts and details. But now his entire body was shutting down, his mental and emotional denial throwing circuit
breakers everywhere. It happened sometimes—psychological shock could traumatize the brain enough to cause unconsciousness. In extreme cases, even heart attack or death.

“Well, yes. It was long past time. Mom had lived a long, full life. You can’t tell me you actually miss her. Me, I despised that woman. She hated me from the get-go, from the very moment I came into her house. She thought I was a bad influence on your father. Far from the truth. I liberated him. I did what a good wife is supposed to do, Jasper: I
helped
him. I pushed him to realize his potential. Truly, he should have been the Crow King, not I.” She sighed with real regret, the most substantial emotion Jazz had witnessed thus far. “Billy didn’t want me to kill her, but I convinced him it would push you along the right path.”

Jazz gripped the doorjamb tighter. Then tighter. His fingers cried in pain, but he ignored it. The pain clarified. Gave him strength.

His parents weren’t perfect. They’d made a mistake.

Two of them, in fact.

First, the birth certificate. It taught him what didn’t matter. That it didn’t matter who his biological father was—
I am what I am, regardless. I haven’t killed anyone yet and don’t even want to. Could I? Sure. Would it be easy? Sure. I even told Connie that once. And it might not even bother me later. But I don’t
want
to. That’s
their
sickness. Mine is that I can imagine it and see it
.

The second mistake was killing Gramma. He’d laughed at the news of her death, but not out of joy or glee. He’d laughed at the notion that she’d been taken away, that the person he’d
focused his murderous thoughts on for four years was now gone. He had no target. And that, too, set him free. Free to no longer have to resist killing her, free to realize—now that he couldn’t kill her—that he never would have.

Because she was still his blood kin. And as crazy as she was, as spiteful and as mad, she had never, to the best of his knowledge, harmed another human being. Which was more than he could say for his mother or his father. Or even himself. When her Alzheimer’s took a turn toward the childlike, she became exasperating and verbally abusive, but also sweet, kind, and funny.

Killing Gramma was
wrong
. It outraged him, and the outrage gave him strength, stiffened his legs, flushed the guilt and shame and pain from his stomach. He pushed off from the doorjamb and stood straight and confident.

My mother killed my grandmother, and that was wrong. It’s as simple as that
.

I’m human
.

She said, “What happened between us was—”

“I didn’t want this!” he screamed. “Don’t you understand? I didn’t ask for this! I just wanted a life!” He didn’t even know what he meant by
this
. So many were the depredations piled up in his past that such a small word was too tiny to contain them. From nowhere, tears arose, and he resisted them. He’d made it this far. He could make it through to the end. Whatever that was.

“I’m becoming bored, Jasper,” Mom said. “The only question remaining is this: Will you take your father’s place, or will you be just another prospect?”

He’d been expecting that question, though he’d thought it would come from Billy or Sam. Not from his mother.

He knew the answer. He’d known for a while maybe, deep down, but certainly since the moment Howie had told him Gramma was dead. At that time, with that news, he’d known instantly who he was. What he was.

“I won’t kill for you,” he told her.

“Oh.”

And then his mother produced a pistol from next to her hip and shot him.