I Hunt Killers (7 page)

Despite his upbringing, despite the infamy of his father, they still watched him. Or maybe because of it. Maybe Howie was right about bad boys.

None of this mattered to him, except that it made getting his way fairly easy. Most guys were cowed by him, and most women were attracted to him. As long as he could exploit that, he had a pretty easy time of it.

Prospects are there for you and for me, Jasper. That’s what they exist for, get it?

“Howie told me what you guys did last night,” Connie said, shutting up Billy’s voice in his head. “Not cool.”

“I knew I should have killed that kid when I had the chance,” Jazz said lightly, then immediately regretted it when he saw the expression on her face. “Not funny?” he asked.

“Not when you say it. You don’t know how to joke like that.” She thought for a moment, her warm, dark eyes searching him for…what? He didn’t know. “You should probably never joke like that.”

“Okay.” Connie gave good lessons in being human. “But it needed to be done. We had to go in there.”

Connie patted Jazz’s shirtfront and frowned. “Nope. Not there. Let me see your wallet.”

Mystified, he put his wallet into her outstretched hand. She flipped it open. “Well, now,” she said, looking at the picture of her that he kept there, “that is one fine-looking honey, but…No. I don’t see it here, either.”

“See what?”

“The badge Tanner gave you when he made you a deputy,” she said, shoving his wallet at his chest. “Don’t do stupid things, Jazz. And don’t make me go all ‘psycho girlfriend’ on you. I don’t want to, but I will.”

The bell rang and Connie darted for her class. Jazz fumbled his wallet back into his pocket and hightailed it to biology.

Jazz didn’t see Connie again until the end of the day, when they met at the auditorium for rehearsal. The new drama teacher, Ms. Davis (she actually insisted that her students call her Ginny), was bringing
The Crucible
to life on the Lobo’s Nod High stage, and Jazz had been “encouraged” by Connie to audition. Result: He was now stuck every afternoon rehearsing with a bunch of kids he really didn’t care about, all to act out a role—Reverend Hale—that he found sort of annoying and wishy-washy. Not to mention hopelessly naive. There is a moment early in the play where Hale—an “expert” on witchcraft—haughtily brandishes his books and asserts that “Here is all the invisible world, caught, defined, and calculated.” As if it could be that easy.

Connie was no longer annoyed with him by the time they connected after the last bell; they spent the fifteen minutes between the end of school and the beginning of rehearsal feverishly kissing and groping back in the wings, behind a leftover matte painting from an old production of
Grease
. Or maybe she’d never been annoyed with him at all, he thought. Sometimes he couldn’t get a read on Connie’s emotions. Maybe it was a guy/girl thing.

He hoped that’s all it was. What if it was a predator/prey thing? A
human
thing? What if he was losing his connection to her? God, don’t let that be it. Connie was one of the few anchors that kept Jazz’s sanity firmly moored. Losing any one of them would be disastrous, but losing Connie in particular, he knew, would be catastrophic.

“Are you all right?” she asked, her fingers lightly stroking his cheek.

“Fine.”

“’Cause it’s like you’re not even here. Your tongue just stopped.”

“Sorry. I was thinking.” He kissed her again, and this time he forced himself not to think while he did it. This was how normal people kissed. Without thinking.

“Everyone onstage!” Ginny shouted from the house. “Come on, now!”

Jazz and Connie joined the rest of the cast onstage. Today they were running through the last scenes of the play, so Connie—who was playing Tituba—didn’t have to be there the whole time, but she always stayed through every rehearsal. Of the two of them, Connie was the drama geek, and would have watched rehearsals even if she didn’t have a part in the play. Now she sat in the front row with Ginny and watched Jazz in a scene close to the end of the play, as Reverend Hale argues and pleads with Judge Danforth to release the heroic John Proctor from jail and stay his execution. In the play, Hale starts out as one of the main proponents of the witch trials in Salem, but later comes to regret his part in them. As the play and John Proctor’s life near their end, Hale rants in the jail, begging Danforth to reconsider and spare Proctor so that he will not join the others who’ve died already at the hands of the Puritans. If Proctor can live, then maybe Hale can be redeemed.

“There is blood on my head!” Hale screams at Danforth, pleading with him.
You won’t just be saving Proctor’s life
, he’s saying.
You’ll be saving my soul, too!
“Can you not see the blood on my head!!”

It was a great moment, and Jazz and Eddie Viggaro (the kid playing Danforth) turned up the volume on it this rehearsal, really clicking for the first time. Danforth stood stone-faced and immobile, glaring out at the audience as Hale, a twitchy, fidgety mass of tics and guilt-induced pacing, roamed the stage, screaming, pleading, finally crumbling in a heap at Danforth’s feet.

“Really wonderful work today, Jasper,” Ginny told him when they broke for the day. “I really felt that. Nicely done. Everyone else!” She cupped her hands around her mouth. “Hey! All of you! Off-book next week on this scene. Take a few pointers from Mr. Dent and get those lines memorized, okay?”

“You’re awesome,” Connie said later, linking her arm in Jazz’s as they headed to the Jeep.

He shrugged. Pretending to be someone he wasn’t…That wasn’t the sort of thing he really wanted to be awesome at. But his being a part of the play with Connie seemed to make her happy.

“I can’t believe you’re playing Tituba,” he told her. “Like Ginny couldn’t have given you another role?”

“I
wanted
to play Tituba. It’s a great role.”

“But she’s a slave.” He opened Connie’s door and helped her into the Jeep. “Doesn’t that bother you?”

“Should it?”

“Well, you’re black.…”

“I am?” Connie looked at the back of her hand and feigned shock. “Holy crap! You’re right! I am.”

“Ha, ha.” Jazz closed her door and got in on the driver’s side.

“I don’t care about Africa,” she said suddenly.

“What?”

“Africa,” she explained. “I don’t care about it.”

Jazz stared at her. She had that expression on her face that told him that she had thought long and hard about what she was saying. So he figured it was best just to get out of her way and let her do it.

“I mean,” she went on, “I care about the people who are hurting there. The wars. The genocide. The famine. I care about that. But no more than people on any other continent who are suffering. And I don’t care about slavery, either. I know I’m supposed to. I know I’m supposed to be angry about it, like my dad is. But I care about the
now
, Jazz. The now and the coming. I don’t care about the past. Get it?”

He wasn’t sure where she was headed with this, and the expression on her face told him that she was trying to make a point beyond the obvious one.

She waited patiently while he thought about it. Lessons in being human. She told him something about herself and then turned it around on him, so…

“So, you’re saying maybe
I
should forget about
my
past and stop thinking about my father and serial killers and just get on with my life?”

She grinned and patted his cheek. “Aw, see? And everyone told me you were just a pretty face. But you have—”

Just then, a man appeared in front of the Jeep as Jazz was about to turn the key, making him forget all about race and Connie and
The Crucible
and the blood on Reverend Hale’s head. If not for his hangdog posture and the age in his eyes, Jazz would have thought him no older than forty. But the defeated, dragging stoop of his stance made him look more like sixty. He was a man crushed by the world, by life itself.

He was also right in front of the Jeep and not moving, staring at Jazz as though disbelieving his own eyes.

Jazz started the engine to give the guy a hint:
Move it, pal.

The man put a trembling hand on the Jeep’s hood and left it there as he slowly made his way around the fender to Jazz’s window and grabbed hold of the side mirror.

Sighing, Jazz obeyed when the man motioned to him to roll down the window.

“You’re Jasper Dent, aren’t you?” the man asked, his voice hollow and quavering. “I’ve been looking for you.”

Now that he was face-to-face with the guy, Jazz saw that his eyes—muddy brown and bloodshot—were sunken, as though they had seen too much and retreated as far into his skull as possible. Heavy bags drooped under them—the man needed a week’s worth of sleep at the very least.

He wasn’t a reporter; of that much, Jazz was certain. Jazz had a lot of experience with the press, far beyond bottom-feeding morons like Doug Weathers. Reporters of all kinds made their way to Lobo’s Nod, interviewing residents, all of them trying to land the Holy Grail of torture-porn journalism: an interview with Billy Dent’s only child. Jazz could have been rich beyond his wildest dreams by now, just by accepting the offers from the sleazier newspapers and tabloid TV shows, or the seven-figure offer from a big New York publishing house for his memoir. (“We’ll get someone to ghost the whole thing for you,” they had promised him. “The only writing you’ll do is when you sign the check.”)

“I’ve been looking for you,” the man said again, stumbling over his words. “Just got to town today. Didn’t think I’d…So soon…” As if he’d just remembered what to do when meeting someone, the man extended a hand through the window. Jazz shot a look over at Connie, who was staring at the scene unfolding before her. He sighed and shook the man’s hand.

“My name’s Jeff Fulton. Hello, miss,” he said, as though just seeing Connie for the first time. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I don’t want to keep you. I just…Harriet Klein is my…
was
my daughter.”

Jazz stiffened and jerked his hand away from Jeff Fulton. Harriet Klein. Billy’s eighty-third victim in the official chronology (eighty-fourth in Jazz’s own chronology). White. Twenty-seven years old. Pretty in an unnoticeable sort of way—you wouldn’t stop to look at her on the street, but if you were in a room alone with her, you’d feel it.

Unbidden, images flashed before his eyes: the police photo of her body, nailed naked to the ceiling of a church in Pennsylvania (“Hoo-boy, that took
all night
!” Billy had crowed, flushed with triumph and pride), her head lolling downward, her limbs bearing the weight of her body. When the reverend who found the body called the police, the skin and muscle were already coming loose; the medical examiner arrived just before her left arm pulled free from the wall. Four cops had to climb a scaffold and hold her in place so that they could get her down before the rest of her limbs shredded and dropped her amputated corpse to the floor.

It had been one hell of a piece of work.

“I don’t…I can’t help you,” Jazz said. And he couldn’t. This wasn’t the first time he’d been approached by a victim’s family. In the months after Billy Dent had been exposed and arrested, family members had flocked to Lobo’s Nod along with the reporters, looking for a glimpse of the killer, looking for clues, looking for that most elusive factor of all: closure.

In that time, Jazz had learned how to apply Billy’s lessons for hiding in plain sight—walk a certain way, dress a certain way, and people just won’t notice you, especially in crowds. And Lobo’s Nod had suddenly become very crowded.

Jazz was mostly successful at avoiding personal encounters like this one. The e-mails and phone calls were another matter entirely—no matter what sort of precautions he took, someone always managed to track him down, and then the harassment would start up again. Some pleading. Some just pathetic. Some of them outright threatening, like the woman who sent him detailed e-mails explaining how she wanted to kidnap Jazz and “hire some big ex-cons to do to you what your father did to my daughter, and see how you like it when no one comes to save you.” Jazz had actually reported her to the police.

The incident that resonated with him, though…The worst one of them all…

Jazz had been picking up his grandmother’s prescription at the drugstore when a kid he didn’t recognize—an outsider—approached him, some unidentifiable emotion swirling in his eyes. Jazz took a step back, on the defensive, checking for the kid’s weak spots already.

But the kid hadn’t been angry. Or ready to attack. Instead, he’d started crying and begged, “Why didn’t you stop him? Why didn’t you stop him?” over and over until he just collapsed in a pile of anguish and tears, his family rushing over to help him to his feet and take him away.

What was I supposed to do?
Jazz wanted to ask the kid, wanted to ask the whole world.
Was I supposed to kill him in his sleep? That would have been the only way to stop him. Kill my own father?

Maybe that’s what the world had wanted, though.

It bothered Jazz that he’d never done anything to stop Billy. But on that day, what bothered him more was his reaction to the kid—the way he’d immediately gone on the defensive and started looking for ways to hurt him. And all along, the kid hadn’t been angry or intent on revenge. He’d been wounded and hurt and mournful.

And Jazz hadn’t been able to tell the difference.

“I think you can help,” Fulton said now. “I just want to talk to you.”

“No. No, I’m sorry. I can’t.”

“Please.” Fulton gripped the Jeep tightly, his knuckles whitening. “Just five minutes of your time.” He gagged on his own emotions; tears welled up in his eyes. “I just want…I just want to understand.…”

“Please leave him alone.” Connie spoke from the passenger seat, her voice quiet but strong. “He didn’t kill your daughter.”

Harriet Klein. Reddish hair. Green eyes, according to the file, but they were gone when the police found the body, of course.
I was worried they’d drop out, what with her hanging upside down all night. So I took ’em out before I left her.