“How much would this trip cost?” her father asked, and Connie knew she had them.
“I can stay with Larissa for free. And you’ll always be able to reach me on my cell.” With a couple of texts, she could easily get Larissa to cover for her. And she figured Jazz would have a hotel room. Just the two of them… in a hotel room… The thought made her head spin and did things to her body she couldn’t enjoy right now. “I can probably fly standby since it’s last minute, and I can help pay for it—I have money from babysitting and Grampa’s Christmas check.”
Her father stroked his jaw and exchanged another look with her mother.
“She shouldn’t get to go to New York all on her own!” Whiz complained. “That’s not fair! I don’t get to go anywhere!”
Dad rolled his eyes in exasperation, and Connie knew she had him.
So this was how Jazz felt. All the time. Every day.
Connie had to admit it was pretty spectacular.
CHAPTER 8
“Can’t say as I like this idea,” G. William told Jazz, settling with a sigh into the chair behind his desk. The chair wheezed and squeaked with complaint, and Jazz wondered—as he always did—if he would be there on that inevitable day when the chair gave up entirely and dumped its occupant to the floor. Today was not that day, apparently.
“Connie agrees with you,” Jazz told him. “She thinks I shouldn’t be going alone.”
“Then this is one of the few times I disagree with your girlfriend. Because I don’t think you should be going at all. You’re seventeen. You—”
“ ‘—should be thinking about college applications and getting into your girlfriend’s pants, not gallivantin’ all over God’s creation,’ ” Jazz quoted, finishing the riot act G. William read to him on a regular basis. “I know. I’ve heard it all before.”
“I’m not gonna deny you were a big help with Frederick Thurber”—the Impressionist’s real name, finally dug up after some intense detective work on G. William’s part—“but that was a special case. He was imitating your daddy. Someone whose methods and special blend of crazy you knew real well. What makes you think you got any special insight into this Hot Dog?”
“The Hat-Dog Killer,” Jazz corrected him.
“All crazy people don’t think the same,” G. William went on. “It’s hubris to think otherwise in your case.”
“Hubris? Been hitting the word-a-day calendar, G. William?”
The sheriff cracked a smile for the first time since Jazz had walked into the office and told him of his intention to go to New York with Hughes. “That trick doesn’t work on me. The one where you insult someone, try to get them off their game, rattled? File that away as one way you can’t manipulate ol’ G. William.”
“Look,” Jazz said, leaning forward urgently, as if he’d never even tried manipulating the sheriff, “you caught Billy, right? You figured out the connections between all of his victims and the ones here in Lobo’s Nod, and then you went out and caught him when no one else in the world could have. But if someone else—someone other than the Impressionist, someone not copying Billy—started stacking up bodies in the Nod again, it’s not like you would just throw your hands up in the air and say, ‘Oh, well—all crazy people don’t think the same. I guess I won’t even try to catch this new guy.’ Would you?”
The sheriff drew one of his impeccably laundered, monogrammed handkerchiefs from a pocket and snorted heartily into it. “Nah. All that tells me is that I oughtta be the one headed to New York, not you.”
Was that a joke? Sometimes Jazz couldn’t tell. The sheriff had sworn that catching Billy Dent had been one serial killer too many for him, but maybe G. William was jealous that Jazz was getting called up to the big leagues.
“I could put in a good word for you,” he said lightly.
G. William waved the very idea out of the air like a bad smell. “If I wanted to go to the city, I’d’ve taken up the FBI on their offer when I was a much younger man and could still make the pretty girls swoon. You want to go to New York and try to help these folks, that’s your business.”
“Well, yeah.”
“But”—and here G. William leaned across the desk, pointing a stubby finger—“you listen and listen good, Jasper Francis: No good will come of this. You think you’re gonna find something there in New York.”
“No kidding. A serial killer.”
“No. More than that. You think you’re gonna find your soul. Ever since I’ve known you, you’ve been thinkin’ that someday you’re gonna crack and end up like your daddy. And you’ve been looking for proof that you won’t. What you don’t realize is this: The looking is the proof. Trust me when I tell you that Billy Dent never had a moment’s doubt in his life about what he was and what he was doing. Your doubt is your soul, kid.”
It made all the sense in the world, and Jazz wished he could believe it. But he knew too much. He knew of too many serial killers who’d been horrified by their own actions, ones who’d acted on impulse and later didn’t understand that impulse. And, of course, the ones who’d acted on impulse and then discovered—to their delight—that they loved it, that the blood and the torture and the other things fulfilled them and assuaged their longings in ways that nothing else could.
“I’m just looking for a killer in New York. And I hear they have good bagels.”
G. William regarded him in silence for a moment, then sighed. “Bring me back a knish,” he said at last. “Haven’t had a decent one in ten years.”
Going to New York should have been as easy as packing a suitcase and heading to the airport, but Jazz didn’t even own a suitcase. The closest thing in the house was a dusty, mothball-reeking valise that Gramma had probably used on her honeymoon back in 1887. Or whenever she’d been young. The idea of accompanying an NYPD detective to New York with Gramma’s beaten, smelly brick of a suitcase was a nonstarter. So Jazz did what he always did when he needed help.
“This here,” Howie said, hefting a sleek black roller bag as if it contained purloined diamonds from some fantasy kingdom, “is the latest and greatest in travel technology. Guaranteed not to tip over. Mesh pocket for water bottle. Separate exterior compartment for laptop—”
“I don’t have a laptop.”
“—single-post handle construction for pushing or pulling,” Howie went on, undeterred. “Extra-lubricated ball bearings for smooth gliding action.” Howie waggled his eyebrows. “That’s what she said.”
Jazz took the roller bag from Howie, unzipped it, and peered inside. “Plenty of room, and I won’t be embarrassed with it in the airport. That’s all I care about.”
“ ‘Who’s going to watch your grandmother while you’re gone?’ he asked, knowing the answer already,” Howie said drily.
“Yeah, about that…”