“It’s a pretty great image,” she admitted. “All that lather and soapy bubbles making me slick and shiny.” Her voice dropped, low and sweet.
Jazz adjusted uncomfortably. “I surrender. We need to change the subject. You’re killing me.”
He could almost hear Connie’s delicious smile over the phone. “What are we supposed to talk about?”
“I don’t know. Tell me what you were doing while I was with the cops yesterday.”
“Oh, yeah. Right.” She quickly filled him in on her mini-tour of some of the murder sites.
“Crime scenes,” he corrected her. “It’s possible they were murdered elsewhere and dumped there.”
“Right, right. Anyway, there was this graffito—”
“Graffito?”
“It’s the singular of graffiti.”
“Now you’re just messing with me.”
“I swear to God. Graffiti is plural. It’s like data and datum.”
“No one says ‘datum.’ ”
“People who speak properly do,” Connie sniffed. “Anyway, someone had painted Ugly J.”
“Ugly J? Why did you even notice that?”
She explained how it had stood out. “So someone went back afterward and left that tag,” Jazz mused.
“Maybe the killer? They go back to the scene, right?”
“Sometimes. Not always. It’s just as likely it’s some smart-ass tagging crime scenes. Some kid’s idea of a sick joke.”
“I don’t know. It wasn’t stylized or artistic. Like, most taggers have a style. A little finesse. They want it to stand out, to be noticed. But this was just there. It was like doing your homework in Arial or Times New Roman. And before you asked: I already Googled Ugly J. Didn’t find anything.”
“It’s probably some New York thing.”
“I love the way you say ‘New York’ with such contempt,” Connie said, laughing. “You were there, what, thirty-six hours? And you already hate the place.”
“Can we talk about something else?”
“Sure. Let me tell you about the bath I took the other day….”
He groaned. Eventually, they hung up, and Jazz went to take the coldest shower in the history of cold showers. He tried not to think of Connie in the shower, too, but that task wasn’t particularly easy to accomplish. He had a very, very vivid imagination.
Emerging dripping and freezing, he wrapped a towel around his waist and headed back to Billy’s old room. His clothes were scattered on the bed, so he picked through them for an outfit, shoving aside the sheets of paper.
But he just couldn’t let them go. Every time he touched those papers, it was as though they had some sort of psychic/magnetic attraction to him. He felt compelled to read them every time. This time was no different—cold and half-naked, he scanned his father’s letter, then looked over the Impressionist’s vile “shopping list” and its strange appendix.
And that’s when he saw it. And once he saw it, he couldn’t unsee it. In fact, he wondered how he could have possibly not seen it until now.
UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES ARE YOU TO
GO NEAR THE DENT BOY.
LEAVE HIM ALONE.
YOU ARE NOT TO ENGAGE HIM.
JASPER DENT IS OFF-LIMITS.
He blinked and looked again. It was so obvious:
UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES ARE YOU TO
GO NEAR THE DENT BOY.
LEAVE HIM ALONE.
YOU ARE NOT TO ENGAGE HIM.
JASPER DENT IS OFF-LIMITS.
In his relatively short life, Jazz had disturbed crime scenes, stolen and tampered with evidence, broken into the morgue, and illegally photocopied official police files. Now he broke most of Lobo’s Nod’s speed limits on his way to the sheriff’s office and compounded his criminal career by breaking the state law about cell phone use while driving; he just kept getting G. William’s voice mail.
“Lana?” he demanded, now having gotten through to the police dispatch line. “Lana, it’s Jasper Dent. Where’s G. William?”
Lana had a thing for Jazz—even seeing him handcuffed late that one night for breaking into the morgue with Howie hadn’t dissuaded her. Now she was flustered, stuck halfway between trying to make small talk with him and answering his question. “Well, he’s—he just stepped—are you okay, Jasper? Can I help you, maybe?”
“I need to see G. William. Is he coming back to the office?”
“Sure. I just saw him pull up. He’s—”
“Tell him I’m on my way,” Jazz said, and hung up. Soon, he pulled into the sheriff’s department lot, parking Billy’s old Jeep right next to G. William’s cruiser. Someone should get a picture of that, he thought.
Inside, he blew past the reception desk, blowing off Lana, who smiled and tried to get his attention. He found G. William in his office, grinning and leaning back in his chair. The sheriff saluted Jazz with a massive mug of coffee that said SUPERCHARGED! on it.
“G. William—”
“Settle down, Jazz. You got ants in your pants again.”
“Is Thurber still here? Has he been transferred yet?”
G. William slurped some coffee. “He’s here. Catch your breath. Stroke at your age is a hell of a thing.”
Jazz took a deep breath and compelled himself to calm down.
“You come on a social call, or is this business?” G. William asked. “ ’Cause I do have some news for you. Somethin’ you might find interesting.”
Okay, sure. Jazz let out that deep breath and let the tension all along his spine dissipate. “Is it about the new coffee cup?” he said with forced friendliness.
“And there’s the keen powers of observation that brought down the Impressionist.”
“You’re stoned on caffeine, aren’t you?”
“I gotta admit—when there’s more coffee in the cup, I tend to drink more coffee. You think this is why my leg feels all numb and tingly?”
“Could be.” Without being asked or invited, Jazz slid into one of the chairs across from G. William’s desk.
“In all seriousness, though,” G. William said, leaning forward, “I should tell you about a couple of things been going on in town.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. We had three cars parked in no-parking zones yesterday. And Erickson pulled over the Gunnarson girl for texting while driving.”
“And…?”
“Not a goddamn serial killer among ’em!” G. William guffawed, slapping a meaty palm on his desk. “Not a murder, not a maiming, not a missing person! It’s almost like being the sheriff of a small town!”
Jazz allowed himself a tiny grin. “You’re positively giddy.”
“I think I’m entitled. Don’t you?”
It was true. For a small-town sheriff to go after two serial killers in one career was unprecedented, as far as Jazz knew. A return to the petty, mundane crimes of Lobo’s Nod should be celebrated, and G. William had every right to do so.
“I’m glad for you. I really am. But I need—”
“You need something so big and important that you called my cell half a dozen times and then scared the poop outta Lana and then barreled in here like you were on fire. Jazz, you’re seriously gonna give yourself a stroke.”
“Please listen to me,” Jazz said, and then quickly explained Connie’s discovery in New York, along with the acrostic he’d uncovered in the Impressionist’s pocket.
G. William listened, occasionally sipping at his coffee.
“It could be the world’s most incredible coincidence,” he said.
“You don’t believe that for a minute.”
The sheriff shook his head. “I want nothing more in this world than to believe that. I want to believe that there’s no connection between the guy in lockup waiting to be transported to court and the guy killing people in New York. Mostly ’cause that would probably mean there’s a connection to your daddy, too. So, yeah, I want to believe it’s all a coincidence, but I’m not as dumb as I look, which is a hell of a good thing.” He heaved himself out of his chair. “Let’s go.”
Jazz rose to follow him. “Don’t we have to check with his lawyer first?”
“Usually, yeah. But the Impressionist has made it clear that he’s always available to see you. As long as there’s no cops present, you can talk to him whenever and however long you want. You just can’t report it to us or tell us about it, ’cause then it’d be off-limits in court. But hell—he’ll talk to you all day long, if you want.”