I Hunt Killers (26 page)

The sky had gone the hard blue of a new bruise by the time Hanson got him back to the police station and sneaked him in through a rear entrance. Jazz checked in with G. William, who was too busy to talk, coordinating a whole new effort to find the Impressionist’s next victim. So he slipped out through the funeral home to avoid the press and drove home in the Jeep.

A great sense of relief washed over him as he drove. He’d done it. He’d bearded the lion—the dragon—in his den and come away not only alive, but with valuable treasure: the information that would stop the Impressionist. Jazz felt newly alive. Like a whole new human being, with a whole new life ahead of him.

He noticed something in the center console of the Jeep and reached for it at a red light. It was Jeff Fulton’s business card. Jazz thought of Fulton’s impassioned speech at Ginny’s service and sighed. Would it really hurt anyone to spend five minutes with the guy? Jazz didn’t want to establish a precedent for talking to the grieving families of his father’s victims, but there was no reason he couldn’t show a little kindness to the man. He would call Fulton in the morning. It was something no serial killer would ever do, something no sociopath would ever imagine doing. Just thinking of it made Jazz feel good.

At home, he was surprised to find the crowds of reporters gone. A lone cop still sat in a cruiser in the driveway, and Jazz approached to ask what had happened to the mob.

“Tanner sent over a bunch of guys a couple of hours ago. Told everyone you and your gramma were in protective custody because there’d been some threats against you.”

“Have there been?”

“I don’t know.” The cop was clearly uncomfortable with the whole conversation. “Anyway, everyone cleared out. Welcome home.”

Jazz went inside and locked up. He checked on Gramma, who was still off in sleepland, maybe dreaming that she was sane. His stomach lurched and rumbled, and he realized he hadn’t eaten anything all day.

Down in the kitchen, all he could find to eat were some ice cream that had sprouted a fuzz of crystals, and two sad-looking drumsticks from the bucket of chicken Melissa had brought for Gramma days ago. He settled in at the table with the drumsticks and ate them cold, then scraped the top off the ice cream and ate the stuff underneath, which was stale, but edible.

As he ate, he stared through the kitchen door into Gramma’s backyard. During spring and summer, it was a nightmare of weeds, thistles, and overgrown grass that went on for two acres. But now, in autumn, it was just dead and flat all the way out to the toolshed.

Except for the birdbath.

There was nothing special about the birdbath. Cracked concrete base. A sculpted fish at the center, spewing water from its mouth into the basin. In a couple of weeks, it would be too cold for the birdbath and Jazz would disconnect it from the water line.

But right now, it sat there, happily gurgling away. Birdless.

So, yeah,
Billy had said
, I’ll help you, Jasper. But you’re going to help me, too.

Then what?
Jazz remembered throwing up his hands in frustration.
What
do
you want?

He got up from the table, dumped the remaining ice cream in the trash, and walked out to the birdbath.

You know that old birdbath my momma’s got in her backyard?

Yeah. Yeah, I know it. What are you—

Hush and listen, Jasper. I listened to you, now you listen to me. That damned thing…She’s had it since I was a kid. And I’ve been tellin’ her for forty years: She ain’t gettin’ birds in it ’cause she’s got it placed wrong.

What? What does this have to do with—

I said hush and listen, Jasper!
For the first time, Billy had seemed agitated. Not in control.

Over a birdbath.

She’s got it oriented to a western exposure. See? It’s not gettin’ the morning light, and that’s what them birds want. It needs to be moved to the opposite edge of the lawn. I tried gettin’ her to move it, but she never listens. And then she bitches and complains that she don’t got no birds to watch during the day.

So…
Jazz had thought carefully.
So, in exchange for your help, you—what? Want me to convince Gramma to move the—

No. I don’t want you to convince her of anything. Just move the damn thing. Go when she’s asleep and just move it. You know, where that big ol’ sycamore sits. Once she sees all her birdie friends, she won’t care what you’ve done. And if she complains or asks, just tell her it’s always been there. She’s already batty like a belfry; she won’t remember.

And this
, Jazz had said with incredulity,
is the price of your help?

Billy had sighed and placed
LOVE
over
FEAR
.
Indulge your old man, Jasper. You’re the only one who can take care of my momma while I’m locked up in here.

And so Jazz had agreed, and now he stared down at the birdbath.

The whole thing was ridiculous. It was insane.

So is Dear Old Dad.

Still, Billy was right. Gramma
did
always complain about the lack of birds for her to watch. And moving the birdbath probably
would
help.

He disconnected the water line and tilted the birdbath. It was lighter than he’d expected—it looked like the whole thing was made of concrete, but only the base was.

It couldn’t be as simple as moving it, he thought. Billy must have buried something under it.

But when he tilted the birdbath, all he saw underneath was a ring of dead, light brown grass that had been there forever.

Well…Why not?

He grunted and rolled the thing on the edge of its base. It wasn’t too heavy for him, but it was unwieldy, so it took him a while to wrestle it into its new position. From here the hose wouldn’t reach, so he had to go inside and find a longer hose. He reconnected everything and the birdbath started burbling again.

“I guess we’ll see what we see in the morning,” he said to it.

Inside, he caught the tail end of a chime of some sort coming from Howie’s cell phone, which was sitting on the kitchen table.

He tapped and poked at the screen until he found a text message from the sheriff:

think we found her. thx 4 yr help.—gwt

Jazz grinned. Now that the cops had the next victim in their sights, they could sit on her and wait for the killer to show up. Not bad for a day’s work. Not bad at all.

He went upstairs, tired beyond all belief. A note stuck to his computer reminded him that he needed to work on his rebuttal to Melissa Hoover’s recommendation, but his sleep-deprived brain couldn’t even entertain the idea.
Tomorrow
, he promised himself.
Tomorrow I’ll write it. Take care of everything. Tomorrow.

Even though it was still early, he stripped down to his boxers and crawled into bed.

For the first time since Fiona Goodling had been found in Harrison’s field, he drifted into an untroubled, un-dreaming sleep.

The Impressionist cursed under his breath and took a quick step back, positioning himself behind a tree. It was dark out and a street lamp was busted, so he had plenty of shadows.

He also had plenty of cops.

Cops!

Brenda Quimby. Mid-thirties. Blond. Kept the minutes for her husband’s monthly Masons meetings. Which, as far as the Impressionist was concerned, made her a secretary, even though her actual job was data analyst for a computer help desk.

It had taken him a while to find her, and he’d been keeping tabs on her for days. Tonight was the night he planned to abduct her and create his next artistic masterpiece, his final homage to Billy Dent’s career as the Artist before moving on to the next phase in his personal evolution.

But her apartment was surrounded by cops.

Oh, they thought they were clever, these particular cops. Thought they were hiding in plain sight, thought their undercover disguises would fool him.

The Impressionist was no idiot. He could see right through their deception.

How had they known? How had they figured it out? How had they beaten him to the punch?

The answer came to him in a flash of insight: the Dent kid. It
had
to be the Dent kid. There was no other possible answer. No other way. The Impressionist had underestimated young Dent, the only mistake he’d made so far in Lobo’s Nod.

Well, it would also be the last mistake.

The Impressionist strode calmly up the driveway toward the Dent house. The sun was down, the night black and starless. A police car was parked there, and the man inside had already noticed him coming. The Impressionist waved cheerfully.
See? Nothing to worry about here. Why, if I were a serial killer, I would hardly call attention to myself with a wave, would I?

He came up alongside the car and crouched down to look at the cop through the open window. “Is there something wrong, Officer?” he asked, feigning worry as he pulled a silenced pistol from his pocket and shot the cop right through the temple. The pistol made a small coughing sound; the cop made a strangled hiccupping sound. They sounded nice together.

Well, that was easy.

Jazz blinked awake at the sound of the doorbell. He checked the clock on his nightstand. It was just past nine. He’d only been asleep a half hour.

The bell rang again.

“Hang on!” Jazz shouted, rolling out of bed. He pawed around in the dark, found his jeans and T-shirt by touch, and dressed on his way to the stairs. Before going down, he poked his head into Gramma’s room. Still asleep. Good. Who was bothering him, anyway? Couldn’t be a reporter—there was still a cop positioned in the driveway, after all.

Maybe it was G. William, come to deliver some good news in person.

He raced down the stairs and threw open the front door.

Oh.

“Hi,” he said, slightly annoyed, but also—in an odd way—grateful. “I was just thinking about you.”

“Really? Can I come in?”

“Sure.”

Jazz stepped aside and ushered Jeff Fulton into the house.

The Impressionist took in the foyer. He’d been here before, but he’d been in a hurry. Now he could truly take it in. The house where Billy Dent had grown up. Somehow, he’d expected more. He wrinkled his nose.

“I guess this isn’t ideal,” the boy was saying, “but I’m glad you came over. I was going to call you in the morning.”

“My business kept me here a little longer than I thought,” the Impressionist said. “But I’ll be leaving soon.” He wanted to grin—wanted quite badly to grin—but instead forced himself to maintain Jeff Fulton’s air of agony and depression.

“Can I get you some coffee? Or something else?”

“Coffee would be great,” the Impressionist said. Billy Dent’s child was about to serve him coffee! What an amazing day.

He followed the boy into the kitchen—peeling paint on the cabinets, old appliances in harvest gold and avocado green. Leftover remnants from Billy Dent’s childhood. Billy Dent might have run to that refrigerator for an afternoon snack. He might have stored the severed head of a dead cat in the freezer.

The boy turned away from the Impressionist, reaching into one of the shadowy cabinets for a coffee mug.

And the Impressionist reached into his jacket pocket.

Jazz sensed more than felt Jeff Fulton come up behind him, stepping closer than usual propriety or politeness would dictate. For a single moment, he did not question their proximity.

That single moment was one moment too long.

Before he could turn, before he could move at all, the cool, unmistakable ring of a pistol muzzle pressed into the back of his neck.

“What—” he began, breaking off the instant he felt something sharp and thin press against the side of his neck and then break the skin.

“Don’t worry,” Fulton said in a tone of voice that Jazz thought was intended to be comforting. It wasn’t.

Fulton probably had more to say, but Jazz never heard it.

Jazz’s head throbbed, and there was a harsh rushing in his ears. He thought he heard something else, something above and beyond the rushing, but he couldn’t be sure.

dond whirrrr e

He tried to focus.

nahhhhhhd rain clee nar

His eyelids were weighed down with lead blocks, or so it felt. He didn’t even try to open them. He focused on the words (if they were words at all) in and among the vicious thrum filling his ears:

rain clee narrrr

He was bound, he realized. His limbs, numb until this moment, had come back online and reported that he was shackled. And—oh, what a pleasant surprise—gagged.

He had no choice. He had to open his eyes.

unnerstan meee?

He pried open his eyes. It took forever. Or at least much longer than it should have. Spots danced before him, sparkles flashing in the air, and he half expected to see Billy standing there, with Rusty’s leash in his hand.

A figure sat before him, elbows on knees, leaning forward. The lips moved in slow motion, and Jazz tried to match the shapes they made to what his ears were picking up a second later.

Drugged. I’ve been—

“—understand me?” Jeff Fulton said. “I said, ‘Don’t worry. It wasn’t drain cleaner.’ Just a mild sedative.”

Jazz blinked rapidly, clearing his vision. The room snapped into shape: He was in his own bedroom. Handcuffed to a chair at the wrists. His ankles were also cuffed. He was, he realized, manacled just as Billy had been earlier in the day. Fulton was sitting on the edge of the desk.

“Awake now, eh?” Fulton said. “Good. Good.” He stood up and walked over to Jazz. “I’m gonna take off your gag now. If you feel like yelling or screaming, go right ahead and do it. Won’t bother me at all. No one’s around to hear you. Closest house is…Well, I guess you know where that is, right? And the cop outside is, well, not terribly attentive right now.”

He slipped the gag off. Jazz drew in a huge breath. He wanted to scream at the top of his lungs, but he knew that Fulton had told the truth.

So instead of screaming, he said, “What do you want?”

Fulton’s eyes glittered. He spoke without rancor. “What do I want? Oh, I want a great many things, Jasper Francis Dent. For one thing, I want that pretty little girlfriend of yours dead. I want her gutted and her innards in a heap on the floor in front of you.”

Jazz’s jaw tightened. “Is that what this is about? Vengeance for your daughter? Kill Connie, kill me, to make Billy pay? That won’t bring your daughter back.”

Fulton looked surprised. “My daughter? What are…? Oh.” He lit up. “Oh, oh!” He laughed. “Oh, this is delicious! You still think I’m Fulton!” He produced a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped at his face, smearing some theatrical makeup, which made him look a little younger, a little less tired. Then he pawed around in his eyes and removed a pair of contact lenses. He fixed Jazz with a new gaze, this one bright blue.

Jazz blinked rapidly a few more times, chasing away the last of the drug-induced blurriness. He knew those eyes. He’d glimpsed them oh-so-briefly as the Impressionist jumped onto Ginny’s sofa, heading out the window.

The Impressionist laughed again, raucously. “You know something, Jasper? I wasn’t a hundred percent sure it was even gonna work. Even with the contacts. I thought for sure you’d see right through me. You, of all people. But then, after that first time I confronted you, I knew I had you. Because you could barely look at me. I could have had
THE IMPRESSIONIST
tattooed on my forehead and you wouldn’t have noticed.

“My God,” he went on. “I gave you every chance. I flew so close to the sun for you. When I got up to speak at that woman’s memorial…” He drew in a deep, satisfied breath. “When I spoke at her memorial, Jasper—God, I thought I was going to explode right there. I thought I would just combust from the sheer joy of it all. All of them looking at me. None of them knowing. It was glorious.
Glorious.
”

Jazz’s guts clenched, and for a perilous moment he thought he would soil himself, like a baby. The Impressionist had been under his nose the whole time. Playing with him. Manipulating him. Jazz’s failure was complete—he could have stopped the killer after Fiona Goodling died if only he’d done something as simple as looking for a picture of Jeff Fulton online.

The Impressionist returned to his chair, now sitting more confidently, as if by removing the elements of his disguise he’d also cleaned away the last dregs of Jeff Fulton’s sad, downtrodden personality. “Now do you get it?” he asked. “Now do you understand?”

“Yeah,” Jazz said, thinking quickly. He was physically restrained, so all he had on his side was psychology. He knew how sociopaths thought. Especially this one. This one, who had mimicked his own father. “You’re trying to take me off the board. You think Billy doesn’t need another protégé because he has me. But if you get rid of me, you can have that spot.”

The Impressionist didn’t honor that with a laugh. He just snorted. “You don’t get it at all. You have no idea
what
this is about. You can’t begin to imagine. You’re Billy Dent’s son, the heir apparent, and you haven’t killed a single person yet! Not even an animal!”

He stood up and advanced on Jazz, coming around behind him. Jazz tensed, remembering the pistol at his neck, the needle. But the Impressionist simply leaned over, his lips close to Jazz’s ear, and whispered, “You’ve forsaken your birthright. I’ve decided to make sure you accept it, Jasper Francis Dent. I’m here to help you learn the ways of blood and bone.”

Jazz closed his eyes. No. He would not.

“You know you want to,” the Impressionist said, his voice soft and low. “You’ve always wanted to.”

—do it—

“You’ve always wanted to be like Daddy, deep down inside.”

—good boy, good boy—

“Stop it,” Jazz said in a voice so quiet it was almost silent. “Stop.”

“Too much?” the Impressionist asked. He came around Jazz’s left side and sat on the edge of the desk again. “Too much for you? I know. It’s tough, isn’t it? At first, when you first realize what you are…It isn’t easy.”

“And what are you?” Jazz asked. He realized that he had to keep the Impressionist talking. As long as he kept him talking, there was always the chance that the man would reveal something—some weakness or quirk—that Jazz could exploit.

The Impressionist grinned. “What am I? I think you mean ‘What are
we
?’ You and I, we’re the same. We could have been brothers, Jasper. I’ll tell you what we’re not: We’re not sheep. We’re not mere humans. We’re not
prospects
. Oh, no. And we are not lords or kings or emperors. We’re
gods
, Jasper.” He leaned in toward Jazz again, his face lit with rapture. “You are the child of divinity. I came here to honor your father in my own way, you know. And I was never supposed to talk to you or see you, but I couldn’t resist. Who could resist meeting the child of Billy Dent?” He stroked Jazz’s cheek like a small child touching the softness of a rabbit for the first time. “Who could resist?” He leapt up from the desk, suddenly outraged and offended. “Imagine my disappointment in you. Imagine it!” he roared. “Pretending to be one of them! Acting—and yes, I know it’s an act—like any other child, forsaking your rightful place as king of the murderers. Well, all of that will change. I could not be here and watch you stumble through your life like a new toddler. Oh, no. I will birth you into the world you richly deserve.”

He turned to Jazz’s desk, where the contents of Jazz’s pockets lay: wallet, keys, Howie’s cell phone.

“We won’t need these things,” the Impressionist said, sweeping them all to the floor with his arm. “This, however…”

And he placed on the table the largest of the kitchen knives from the block on Gramma’s counter.

He grinned wickedly. “This, we will definitely need.”

Jazz swallowed. “You can’t kill me,” he said. He wanted to blurt it out, to scream it, to cry, but he knew that human weakness was like an aphrodisiac to a sociopath such as the Impressionist. “If you try, you’ll fail. I’m Billy Dent’s son. I can’t be killed.” A bluff. An insane bluff that wouldn’t work on anyone with even a shred of intact brainpower, but the Impressionist was a madman who believed he was a god. So…

The Impressionist blinked and in a moment his wicked expression fell into abject innocence, an innocence so real that for a moment Jazz felt guilty for accusing the man at all.

“Kill you? Why on earth…Is that what you think? That I want to kill you? No! Of course not! I would
never
…” He dropped to his knees in front of Jazz and gazed earnestly into his eyes. “I want to
improve
you. I want you to stride this earth like the murder god you’re meant to be, like the creature your father wanted to create. I’m not going to kill you. I’m going to help you.

“I’m going to help you fulfill your first kill.”

And with that, the Impressionist turned the chair so that Jazz could see his bed.

Lying on it was his grandmother.

She was still alive—Jazz could hear the slight susurration of her breathing. The tranq he’d given her would have kept her out for hours, and who knew if the Impressionist had given her a booster shot from his own stash?

“I killed my father when I was fifteen,” the Impressionist said. “Trust me when I say, Jasper, that you have no idea how liberating it is to cut—literally—your ties to your past. It’s a glorious thing.”

“I won’t do it,” Jazz said.

“Of course you will. If Billy Dent were here, he would
want
you to do it. He would gladly let you kill
him
, knowing that it would ignite your path to glory.”

Jazz thought of Billy in prison, gesturing to the universe and saying,
And destroy all of this?
when asked why he hadn’t committed suicide. “You don’t know anything about my father,” he said, and then some strange combination of panic and fear and guilt and—he couldn’t believe it—filial honor took him over, and he blurted out, “You don’t know anything about him. You’re some psychopathic
fanboy
who’s such a loser that he has to pretend to be my father in order to give meaning to his life. You’re nothing. You’re not a god. You’re nothing. You couldn’t even get it up to rape Irene Heller.”

He scored. The Impressionist’s left eyelid twitched, though the rest of his face remained serene even as he backhanded Jazz across the face with a blow so powerful that Jazz wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d lost a molar.

“I’m not afraid of you,” the Impressionist said, leaning in close. “I could worship you, but I will never fear you. Do you understand?” He held up the knife between them. Jazz caught his reflection in the blade and was astonished to see that he did not look in the least bit afraid.

“Then I’m one up on you,” Jazz said, his head spinning from the force of the blow and the taste of his own blood. “Because I’m also not afraid of you, and I’ll
never
worship you.”

With a strangled cry, the Impressionist grabbed Jazz’s collar with his free hand, jerking him forward. But the shirt was thin and old—it split down the middle from the force of the tug. The Impressionist laughed and twisted his arm, ripping the shirt apart, so that it hung in three big folds down around Jazz’s waist.

“Get your kicks like this?” Jazz taunted. “Is that why you couldn’t rape Irene Heller?”

But the Impressionist wasn’t paying attention. He’d caught notice of something and, after craning his neck to look behind Jazz, moved around the chair so that he had a view of Jazz’s back.

“Yosemite Sam?” he said in a perplexed voice. “Don’t you think it’s time to grow up?”

It could have been worse. Howie wanted SpongeBob SquarePants, but I talked him into something at least a little bit tough.

“This has all been fun.” The Impressionist came back around to face Jazz. “But we have much to do before the night is over. And we need to start now.”

The Impressionist came at Jazz, and Jazz tensed, ready for the knife blade. But all the man did was unlock Jazz’s ankles from the chair, then quickly cuff them together. He did the same with his hands, first unshackling the right wrist from the chair, then recuffing it to the left before unshackling that one.

Jazz was free to stand. To hobble. Could he escape?

Impossible. He couldn’t move more than six inches at a time. His hands were practically glued together.

The Impressionist hauled him out of the chair and half marched, half dragged him over to Gramma. Jazz’s head spun. Still dizzy from the drugs.

Jazz felt the knife forced into his hands—

—hold it tight—

—and then his hands pressed around the grip. The Impressionist’s strength was impressive. With one hand, he was keeping Jazz’s grip tight on the knife handle, and preventing Jazz from jerking the knife into the Impressionist.

A knife.

Another knife.

So familiar.

And Jazz knew in that moment: It wasn’t just a dream.

It was a memory.

He’d held a knife before. Like this.

Exactly like this. Hands on his own. Guiding him.