Belsamo shrugged.
“I’ve heard a lot of things, Oliver.” Using his first name. Familiar. Comforting. “I’ve heard a lot. I can handle it. You can tell me whatever you want. This is a safe space. I know you have something to tell me. This is the place. This is the time.”
“Please stop asking,” Belsamo whispered. Montgomery turned up the volume on the speaker from the interrogation room.
“Why? Because you’ll tell me?”
Another shrug.
“You’ll tell me, won’t you, Oliver? You’ll tell me, and you’ll tell me the truth, right? Because you wouldn’t lie to me.”
“I don’t lie,” Belsamo said, with something like pride.
“That’s good. Because you know what’ll happen if you lie to us, don’t you? If you tell us something that’s not true?”
Belsamo contemplated this for a moment, still picking at his fingernails. “I know what will happen,” he said in a low, barely audible voice. “I’ll go to jail.” Then, more strongly: “I’ll go directly to jail.”
“Well, maybe not directly. It might take a little while. But, yeah, you’ll go to jail if you don’t tell the truth.”
“It’s time to open up,” Hughes said in a kind tone, sensing the moment. He pushed the two pictures a little closer. “It’s time to tell us.”
Belsamo sighed, his entire body crumpling and deflating like yesterday’s balloon. “Yeah. I know.” He cleared his throat and pointed to the pictures. “I did it. I killed her.”
Jazz’s heart pounded. Montgomery swore softly under his breath.
“You killed her,” Morales said, her voice controlled and soft. “Just her?”
For a moment, it seemed as though Belsamo did not understand the question. Struggle writhed his features, twisted his lips, and crunched his eyebrows together. But finally he shook his head.
“How many?” Hughes asked. Flat. No expression on his face. No judgment. No excitement. How many?
“A bunch of them,” Belsamo went on. Pause. Then, as if helpless to stop himself, gathering steam: “I killed them all.”
CHAPTER 33
The precinct dropped its pretense of studied, methodical calm and fell right into chaos. As Jazz emerged from the observation room, he felt as though he’d stepped into an evacuation drill. People ran in every direction. Phones blared.
Hughes slid out of the interrogation room, his eyes shining and bright and alive. “Did you hear that? Were you in there? Did you hear that?”
“Yeah.” Jazz accepted a sudden and unexpected bear hug from the detective, who trembled with what Jazz could only assume was joy. Or maybe a massive overload of adrenaline.
“I mean, it’s not definite,” Hughes went on. “He sort of clammed up right away, like he realized what he’d said. And people confess to crap they didn’t do all the time, especially in this city, where the crazy quotient is ridiculous, but—”
“Hughes—”
“—I just have a feeling, you know? He just feels right for it.”
“Hughes, he doesn’t fit the profile.”
Hughes released Jazz and stepped back. “Yeah,” he said, looking for all the world like a toddler whose birthday party has just ended. “I know. I know that. But—”
“I’m just saying. Not married. No kids. No serious relationship at all. A loner. And look at him. Did you really look at him? The hair? The dirty nails? He’s not organized enough to take a shower or wash his hair—how do you expect him to be organized enough to pull off the Hat-Dog murders?”
Hughes frowned. “He confessed. You weren’t in the room. You didn’t see the way he reacted when we showed him the crime-scene photo.”
“I saw. I was watching.”
A head shake. “No, man. It was different, in the room. Ask Morales.”
As if summoned by her name spoken aloud, the FBI agent emerged from the interrogation room, grabbing another FBI guy to say, “I want an NCIC check on this guy ASAP. Get a medic down here right now. I’m getting a court order for his blood, and as soon as it gets here, I want that blood out of him and in a lab.”
“Is he under arrest?” Jazz said, and then felt stupid for asking.
But Morales shook her head. “No. Once he’s in custody, I have to read him his rights. If he babbles something else in the meantime, I want it to count. Once the court order for his blood gets here, we’ll make it official and take him into custody, Mirandize him, all that.” She shouted at the other agent, who apparently wasn’t moving quickly enough for her. “Get on the damn phone and get that medic! I want a DNA match to the blood and semen samples yesterday, got it?”
“How long until we know?” Jazz asked her.
Morales clucked her tongue. “It’ll take maybe an hour to get the court order, depending on how quickly we can find a judge on a Saturday. Shouldn’t be that tough, though. I’m going to put the highest possible priority on this.”
“And then…”
She cocked her head at him. “And then once I have the court order, we officially arrest him. Then we take our DNA samples. We match them to the samples we already have and when they match, we have our guy.”
“How long will that take? Matching the DNA?”
Hughes and Morales shared a look. “Depends if we go with the city or the federal labs…” Hughes said.
“We can get a special courier to get the samples to Quantico within hours,” Morales said. “I bet our lab is less backlogged than yours.”
“I’ll get someone to check,” said Hughes. “Either way, it’s gonna take a couple of days to get results back,” he told Jazz. “It’s not like on TV, where it takes a couple of hours.”
“How long can you hold him? Can you hold him until the results come back?”
“Probably. It’s a weekend. Once we officially charge him, we can keep him for twenty-four hours before we take him to a judge. By then, it’s Sunday, so we get a break. Monday, we take him to the judge. If the results are back by then—”
“If,” Hughes stressed.
“If,” Morales agreed, “then we’re golden. If not, we show the confession and hope the judge holds him without bail pending the DNA results.”
“In the meantime, we have an hour before you’re actually arresting him, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Then I need to talk to him,” Jazz said. “You have to let me in.”
“No. No way,” Morales said. Hughes nodded in agreement.
“He called me out, you guys! If it’s him, he left that message for me. You have to let me talk to him.”
“No way. Sorry, but I’m not risking having a confession thrown out because of something you did or said. I want him in jail for life. Or maybe even a needle in his arm, if we play our cards right.” Morales seemed to relish the idea, and her mien completely convinced Jazz that she would gleefully help him kill Billy.
“Look, once you get the DNA results back, his confession won’t even matter,” Jazz said. “The whole reason you brought me out here was because you think I have some kind of rapport with guys like this, right? He wants to see me. He wants to talk to me. Let’s give him what he wants and see what happens.”
Montgomery had joined the group while Jazz was talking. “Has anyone Mirandized this bedbug yet?”
“He’s not under arrest, Captain,” Hughes said. “He came in voluntarily—”
“We need to step very carefully here. I don’t want him to lawyer up yet, but I don’t want to step in a pile of crap that the DA’s gonna have to scrape off my shoe, either.”
“I’m sort of a legend to these guys,” Jazz said, adding a dollop of embarrassment to his voice. “If this guy’s a serial killer, then he called me out. He knows who I am. Just my presence alone might jostle something loose from him. I can be very careful with what I say and do, Captain Montgomery. I won’t violate his rights in any way. But if we can pull some more information out of him…”
Montgomery looked over at Morales. “Well?”