Sam groaned and massaged her temples with her thumbs. “Look, this birth certificate doesn’t mean anything at all. For all you know, it’s not even legit. It could be something that Billy dummied up to mess with Jazz. Or Connie. Or you. Or just something he did to amuse himself. He’s crazy, Howie. His motivations don’t—”
“Sammy J!” Gramma shouted suddenly. “Sammy J!” She scampered into the kitchen, flush with excitement, the photo album huge and flapping like a giant bird in her withered hands. “Look! Look!”
Sam took the photo album from her breathless mother, who jabbed a finger at a photo. “I found a picture of you, Sammy! See? See?”
“Very good!” Sam said, her voice proud. “Good job!” To Howie, she said, “It actually is me. I’m sort of surprised.”
Howie bent to look at the picture. It was a young girl—maybe four or five years old—in a dress and what looked like dirty sneakers. She was very plain—no indication at all in this picture that she would grow up to be the sexy thang Howie so lusted after. “God bless puberty, huh?” he said.
“Oh, you sweet talker,” Sam drawled with sarcasm. “How do you keep the ladies from throwing their naked bodies at you?”
“Usually I just keeping talking,” Howie admitted.
“Anyway, yeah, I was a late bloomer,” Sam said, turning another page. More middling photos of an awkward prepubescent Sam. “Didn’t really get much better until high school. Buh—” She caught herself. “You-know-who was the good-looking one. From day one, pretty much.”
As if she’d conjured it, the next page had a photo of a younger Gramma, tired but smiling, holding a baby. Howie knew without asking or being told who that baby was.
For what was probably the first time in his life, Howie did not say what immediately came to his mind. Which was: Dude. The Antichrist as a baby…
CHAPTER 37
Morales drove Jazz back to the hotel. The next set of suspects would be coming in soon enough, and things were now doubly crazy due to the new body. A long night stretched ahead of all of them, so Morales was going to sneak a quick nap in the precinct break room. Jazz just wanted some peace and quiet so that he could think.
If he hadn’t known better, he would swear that someone was trying to keep him from thinking. Someone was trying to prevent him from putting together the pieces.
Pieces. Literally, of course. There were body parts in great profusion, some of them taken, some of them not. But if Hat-Dog was a puzzle to be put together, he seemed to use pieces from different boxes, as though he’d opened a bunch of jigsaws and then taken whatever pieces he wanted from them whether they matched or not. It was so chaotic that it almost seemed like it had to be deliberate.
Then again… why couldn’t that be possible?
He wrote UGLY J on a sheet of paper and circled it, then circled it again. Ugly J was at the center of it all. It sounded like a serial killer’s moniker, but no one had heard of such a person. Could this be Billy’s new identity? The Impressionist had said that Ugly J was beautiful, which jibed—the Impressionist worshipped Billy, after all, and would see a free, murdering Billy Dent as something beautiful to behold.
But if Billy was Ugly J—which made the most sense—then what was his connection to Hat-Dog? Jazz could believe his father had planned far enough in advance to set up the Impressionist before going to jail, but to do so twice? To set up a second serial killer, this one in the biggest, most complicated city in the country? Somewhere Billy had—so far as Jazz knew—never visited even once?
No. That didn’t track.
So that meant that either Billy hadn’t set up Hat-Dog…
Or that Billy wasn’t Ugly J.
Neither possibility made much sense. Neither possibility was any more or less comforting than the other.
Jazz reached for one of the photos. It was a close-up of one of the carvings, a hat knifed into a woman’s shoulder. He had his theory about the hats and dogs—bitches and gentlemen, he remembered saying—and maybe that was so, but…
He was alternating for a while there. And then…
Jazz consulted the list of victims. Yes. As he remembered: two hats in a row. And then, later, two more hats in a row. No one knew why. The cops had had a theory at one point that had to do with the weather, but it wasn’t a terribly good one, and ultimately it didn’t pan out.
This is the key, Jazz thought. This is where the pattern breaks down. Those are crucial. That’s where we’ll find this guy. What happened there? Why two hats in a row?
And what about Belsamo? He didn’t fit the profile. Other than his age and race, he was a complete mismatch. And yet he had coincidentally showed up to confess right when Hat-Dog decided to dump his latest victim four blocks away?
Right. Jazz could almost hear Howie’s voice: That’s a coincidence the same way I’m the starting forward for the Pistons.
Two of them, Jazz realized. Two of them working together. That’s what it was.
But the cops already eliminated that idea. Every scrap of DNA they found—Hat or Dog—matches. It’s one guy.
He thought of how Belsamo had refused the water. How he had not touched anything in the interrogation room.
Maybe the profile was wrong. Maybe Belsamo was as good an actor as Jazz, as good an actor as Billy. All of that cawing and cackling… a ruse, to make them think he couldn’t possibly be the killer. Coming in voluntarily to distract the cops while someone else dumped a body in their backyard…
He called Hughes. “Hey, what happened to Belsamo?”
“Your little buddy?” Hughes started laughing. “Guy who liked to wave his dingus around?”
“Yeah, him.”
“Man,” Hughes said, gasping for breath, “as long as I live, I will never, ever forget the look on your face when he whipped that little Johnson of his out and—”
“I didn’t know they made them that small,” Jazz deadpanned.
Hughes exploded into deeper laughter, and it took a minute or two for both of them to settle down.
“So what happened to him?” Jazz asked.
“What do you mean? We cut him loose. You saw.”
“Yeah, but did you ever get that DNA sample from him?”
“No. Of course not. You were there; we were still waiting for the court order. Even the feds can’t make a court order appear in the time it took for that body to show up at Baltic and Henry. Well,” he considered, “maybe for a Homeland Security thing they could. But a run-of-the-mill homegrown serial killer? Nah.”
Jazz thought. “What about the interrogation room? Did he leave DNA anywhere?”
“Jasper…”
“He was masturbating. Remember? Did he finish?”
Hughes made a gagging sound. “I am grateful to report: no. No one had to clean up his grungy spooge. I guess once you left the room, he couldn’t keep it up anymore, kid.”
“Ho, ho, ho. How about hairs?”
A sustained, groaning sigh from the other end of the line. “Do you have any idea how many people were in and out of that room all day? I’m sure there are plenty of hairs in there. Which ones belong to your boyfriend, though, I can’t say.”
“So we have nothing?”
“We need nothing. He’s not the guy.”
They hung up, and Jazz stared at the wall until his eyes lost focus. Hughes could be sure. Jazz wasn’t.
What we need, Jazz decided, is a DNA sample from that guy.
Connie paced the length and breadth of her bedroom, thinking. Juggling, more like. She had so many things up in the air right now, so many balls to track…. And some of them, she was afraid, would turn out to be grenades.
She had worried—briefly—that Whiz might rat her out to her parents, but figured she could rely on Mutually Assured Destruction on that front. If Whiz ratted her out, she could tell her parents to change the parental lock on the satellite box, and Whiz knew it. Done and done.
If only all of her dilemmas had such simple, hands-off resolutions.
Just call him. Just call Jazz….