Above all else, serial killers did not want to die. They cherished their lives more than anything else.
Because you can’t kill people if you’re dead.
“Drop it!”
“Really, man. Drop it,” Jazz said, and took another step. The strong, overwhelming scents of formaldehyde and bleach and metal from the storage unit curled his nose hairs and made his nostrils want to slam shut. “Dude, it’s not worth dying.”
“Get back,” Morales said tightly. “Get out of there, Jasper. Now.”
Jazz looked down. He hadn’t realized it, but he had stepped into 83F. He had started to back up when he caught—out of the corner of his eye—Belsamo moving. His heart thrummed a quick, panicked beat.
But it was just Dog dropping the scalpel. It hit the workbench with a clatter.
“Good boy,” Morales said in a voice loaded with irony and relief.
And then Jazz jerked as though awakened by a nightmare as a flat cracking sound echoed in the claustrophobic confines of the storage hallway, followed by another one before the first could fade away.
In the time it took to blink, the entire world spun and shifted away from him, a dizzying amusement park ride gone horribly awry. For some reason he couldn’t understand, he was suddenly staring up at the ceiling of unit 83F, and his heartbeat roared loud in his ears, drowning out everything else. In that single, nigh-imperceptible instant, something—and everything—had changed.
It took only another moment for him to realize what and how. In the space of that new moment, the pain hit him. The pain and the dampness of his own blood soaking through his clothes.
She shot me, he thought. Morales shot me.
CHAPTER 56
Connie’s cabbie said nothing until they pulled onto the highway.
“Good thing not a little colder,” he said abruptly. “All this be snow.” He gestured through the windshield.
Connie nodded. That would suck. Being stuck out here by the airport, waiting for plows. Ugh.
She vaguely remembered that when Hughes had driven them to Brooklyn, it had taken almost an hour, so she knew she had some time. She dug into the laptop bag and produced the Costner picture, staring at it. Costner wore a three-piece suit and pointed a gun right at her. Was that the clue? A gun in the bag and then another gun in a picture…? Both fake guns, of course… Was the Costner picture because Mr. Auto-Tune knew that Connie wanted to be an actor? And if so, what was the message? This whole scavenger hunt seemed handcrafted specifically for her, so what did two fake guns and a picture of an actor mean?
Two guns…
When in doubt, check the Internet. She Googled two guns, but got nothing helpful. Some kind of band, an Old West feature in Arizona, and a comic book character called “The Two-Gun Kid.” Really helpful.
Then she punched Costner into Google. She tapped on some of the links, skimmed his Wikipedia entry. Then, for the hell of it, she tried Costner serial killer.
A movie called Mr. Brooks came up. Connie’s eyes widened as she read the description. In the movie, Costner played a sociopath. A Billy Dent type, who went around killing people and even mentored a wannabe serial killer.
That makes some kind of sense. Is Mr. Auto-Tune the Hat-Dog Killer? Is it Billy’s new protégé?
But according to Jazz, Billy had always said that Jazz was his protégé.
Wait. Maybe it’s not Costner. Maybe it’s the role he’s playing in this picture. She compared the image on her phone for Mr. Brooks to the clipping. Costner looked much younger in the clipping, at least ten or twenty years, so she went back to Wikipedia and started looking at older movies.
“Okay to take Atlantic?” the cabbie asked suddenly.
She looked up. They were stuck in traffic and had barely moved since the last time she’d paid attention, almost a half hour ago. At this rate, she would get to the hotel sometime tomorrow morning.
“Yeah, yeah, sure,” Connie said, returning her attention to her phone. And then she found it. The clipping of Costner had been cut from a printout of the poster for the movie The Untouchables.
Kevin Costner had played an FBI agent. Eliot Ness.
This was it. It had to be. It was a clue with multiple levels, designed to lead Connie to this moment, to this name. Eliot Ness. First, the image of Costner led her to Mr. Brooks, assuring her that she was on the right path. Then to Eliot Ness. Was there a further step? Was there something in Ness’s history? Or was Ness himself the clue?
She switched over to Google Maps and punched in Ness. Maybe it was a street name in New York or—
A pin dropped onto the map, spearing an intersection in Brooklyn. Ness Paper Manufacturing, it said.
Connie slid the map around and realized that the glowing blue dot representing her position wasn’t far from the Ness Paper pin. “Hey!” she said to the cabbie. “Can you take me to…” She glanced back down at the phone and read off the intersection.
The cabbie did another one-shoulder shrug and blurted something in Hindi. Probably telling whoever was at the other end of the Bluetooth headset that the crazy girl was changing her mind.
Shortly, the cab pulled up to the intersection. “Where?” the driver asked, and Connie realized he wanted to know which corner to drop her off at.
“Doesn’t matter. Here is fine.” She shoved some money through the little slot in the plastic shield between her and the driver, then hauled her bags out into the cold, relentless rain. Gross.
“Hey, can you stick around for, like, two minutes?” she asked, but the driver—with that inscrutable single-shoulder shrug—just took off into the night. “Oh, terrific.”
Some people milled about under umbrellas, but the streets were almost completely empty. Connie held the laptop bag over her head and stared up at the fa?ade of the Ness Paper building. It looked like every other random building. Nothing exotic or strange about it. There were two large truck bays, closed off with corrugated garage doors, and a flight of steps leading up to a single door illuminated by a bright cone of light from a security lamp. The place was clearly closed.
“Good job, Conscience,” she muttered. The rain chilled down to her bones and then dug deeper.
She turned, looking up and down both streets at the intersection. Cars whizzed by, but no cabs that she could see. She was just about to dig out her phone and look for the nearest subway station when she noticed it, right across the street from the Ness building.
It was just another Brooklyn tenement, notable only due to its severely ramshackle appearance. It was the sort of building they showed in movies to communicate to the audience that you were in a bad part of town, though as near as Connie could tell, this part of Brooklyn wasn’t particularly scary. The building was almost out of place here, its face scarred and pitted, then made up garishly with layers of graffiti.
Only one graffito had caught her attention, though. New, she could tell, or at least newer than the rest because it overlaid them:
Almost as though she couldn’t help herself, Connie stepped off the curb and walked across the street, stepping carefully over a puddle as she went.
CHAPTER 57
Jazz couldn’t move. Harsh static buzzed in his ears. A lake of blood spread along his left flank, and that entire side of his body flamed with pain. He couldn’t even tell where he’d been shot—it could have been anywhere inside the creeping red stain that stretched from his waist to mid-thigh.
Why? he asked no one in the confines of his head. Why?
And then another of the flat cracks dragged Jazz’s attention away from his own pain. Morales was down on the floor, still. A man crouched over her, slightly winded, and Jazz realized—they’d struggled. For the gun. The man had come up behind them. Morales hadn’t shot him. Not on purpose, at least.
“Good,” said Belsamo. “Nicely done.”