I don’t hunt killers. I couldn’t save Ginny Davis. I couldn’t save Melissa Hoover. I almost couldn’t save myself. Who am I kidding?
The Impressionist had been taking pictures and video of Jazz while he’d been in Lobo’s Nod. Where he’d found the time between murdering Helen Myerson and Jazz’s drama teacher and the others, Jazz had no idea. But the cops had recovered the pictures and video from the killer’s cell phone when they’d arrested him. As soon as Jazz found out about them, he’d insisted on seeing them.
G. William, of course, had resisted. But Jazz was very persuasive. Natural gift for the progeny of a sociopath.
We’re the most convincing people in the world, Billy liked to say. Everyone wants to do us favors. Everyone wants to make us happy. Until they know what it really takes to make us happy. Then they tend to put up a fight. He grinned here. By then, it’s usually too late for the fighting. But I guess they think they gotta try.
So it had been a fait accompli—Jazz saw what his stalker had seen. Jazz outside the police station. On his way to the Coff-E-Shop. Hanging out with Howie. Holding hands with Connie on the way to play practice. A shot of his bedroom window at night, the light dimming.
“This is what it feels like,” Jazz had murmured, clicking through the photos on G. William’s computer.
“What what feels like?” the sheriff asked.
Jazz had paused before answering, “To be stalked.” But that was just the kind answer, the answer G. William could accept. And of course he accepted it because it came from Jazz and Jazz was the most convincing person in the world when he needed to be.
The truth—the real answer—was what he wanted to say but didn’t: This is what it feels like to be one of you. This is what it feels like to be vulnerable. And weak. And merely human.
This is what it feels like to be a prospect.
Now Jazz tossed and turned in bed. On his wall were photographs of the one hundred and twenty-three people Billy Dent had admitted to murdering. Plus a photo of his mother.
His own mother had been a prospect.
He drifted into that twilight space between wakefulness and sleep, that place where the world is plastic and malleable and unsure.
His own mother…
He groaned as sleep fled from him, and stretched to grab up his jeans from the floor where he’d left them. Pawed around until he found the pocket and the card within.
There was a gold embossed shield to the left, with the words CITY OF NEW YORK POLICE DETECTIVE. The name LOUIS L. HUGHES, with DETECTIVE beneath it, along with two phone numbers, a fax number, and an e-mail address.
Oh, hell. Jazz reached for the phone. If he was gonna do this, he might as well enjoy waking Hughes up in the middle of the night.
CHAPTER 7
“Well,” Connie told Jazz, doing her best to sound both forceful and casual at the same time, “obviously I’m going with you.”
Jazz’s expression didn’t change. Connie cursed inwardly. It was so difficult to tell whether she’d gotten to him or not. He could conceal his reactions or fake them so well that even for her—even for the person who had gotten closer to him than anyone else in the world—it was impossible more often than not to tell what was going on behind those sexy and enigmatic eyes. Better luck reading a reaction from a portrait of him than the real deal.
“You’re not going with me,” he said very calmly, with the slightest hint of a smile. That smile… was it to catch her off guard? Was it a slip on his part? Did he want her to think it was a slip? Or was it—
“You’re such a pain sometimes,” she announced. “Would it kill you just to tell me what you’re thinking and maybe not try to manipulate me?”
“I’m not trying to manipulate you. But you can’t come to New York with me. For one thing, your dad would go ballistic, and I don’t need that noise in my life.”
Connie’s father made no secret of his deep and abiding loathing for Jazz. Between Jazz’s racist grandmother and Connie’s dad, she figured they had the makings of a modern-day Romeo and Juliet on their hands. Only with more blood and death than even Shakespeare’s fertile imagination could conjure.
“I can handle my dad,” she said confidently. They were at the Hideout, Jazz’s secret sanctum in the woods outside Lobo’s Nod. It was an old moonshining shack that he’d repaired and outfitted with the bare essentials as a getaway from the rest of the world. Connie was pretty sure she was the only person he’d shared it with. She tried not to let him know how much that meant to her—he was constitutionally leery of opening himself to other people, and she didn’t want to frighten him away. Snuggled together on a beanbag chair, they were as entwined as two clothed people could be, warmed by a space heater he’d rescued from his grandmother’s basement.
“No one can handle your dad. Besides, I don’t know how long I’ll be gone, and you shouldn’t miss school. And besides besides, what are you going to do while I’m off with the cops?”
“Golly,” she chirped in her very best sorority girl impression, “maybe I’ll go shopping and buy shoes and kicky skirts and makeup! Dumbass,” she said, punching him in the shoulder and dropping her voice. “I’ll be helping you. You think I’m going to see the sights?”
“I hear they have really tall buildings.”
“And subways.”
“And museums.”
“And more than a dozen black people, too. It’s truly a land of wonder.”
“A miracle of our modern age,” Jazz agreed, and kissed the back of her neck.
“Oh, don’t do that,” she admonished in a tone of voice that didn’t convince even herself. “You’re trying to distract me.”
He kissed where her neck met her shoulder. “Mea culpa.”
Connie’s head swam. She both hated and loved being so deliriously vulnerable to him. She’d never felt this way with another boy, and she knew Jazz had never felt this way with another girl. Her friends were fond of telling her that she was drawn to Jazz Dent because he was the ultimate bad boy—whereas some girls fell for selfish jerks, Connie was in love with a guy who was quite literally deadly.
But that wasn’t it. Connie loved him despite his past, despite his darkness, not because of it. She saw in him a light, a light buried so deep that Jazz himself never saw it. But she did. Not always. There were hours and days and sometimes whole weeks that would go by where she lost track of it, but never had it failed to resurface. Connie believed in Jazz’s humanity more than he did.
A sexy, brooding boyfriend who didn’t realize exactly how sexy and brooding he was? God save her! It was all she could do sometimes not to jump him, but she knew that he wasn’t ready for that, no matter how ready he acted and felt. They’d never discussed it, but it was clear to her. And she understood. Just reading about Billy Dent’s crimes had freaked her out; growing up with a dad whose version of “the talk” included binding techniques and torture tactics would be even worse.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
“I’m thinking,” she managed to say, “that if you keep doing that thing with your tongue on my shoulder, I’m going to force myself on you.”
He nipped her shoulder playfully and then disentangled from her, rising to adjust the space heater. “We’re running out of kerosene. It’s gonna get really cold in here soon. We should get going.”
Connie kicked at his shin with the point of her toe. “You jerk. I’m onto you. You think you can make the sexy time with me and get me to forget what we were talking about? Not a chance. I’m going to New York with you.”
He sighed that very special sigh, the one that said he was exasperated that she couldn’t just be manipulated and stay manipulated like his Dear Old Dad had promised him people would. “Hughes already has my ticket. We’re flying out tonight.”
“Believe it or not, there are other ways of flying out that don’t rely on Detective Louis L. Hughes. If that’s really who he is.”