Blood of My Blood (12 page)

Persuaded
might be too strong a word. It hadn’t been difficult to lure Morales into going. Like so many of those who’d stalked Billy, she had more vengeance and rage pumping through her veins than blood. Billy had humiliated her as Hand-in-Glove, leading her on a merry chase through Kansas and Oklahoma, teasing her with false evidence and fruitless leads. It wasn’t personal, Jazz knew. Billy didn’t care about individual pursuers. They were—despite their rank, position, title, or agency—“bastard cops,” one and all. Morales, though, had taken it personally. She’d sacrificed her marriage in pursuit of Billy Dent, a law enforcement cliché if ever there was one, but that would have been little comfort to Morales and her ex-husband.

Charlie. She called him Charlie, and she packed a framed picture of him that she took on assignments
.

Yeah, his days of getting assistance from law enforcement were over. Hughes would probably insist on throwing the switch himself if Jazz were given the death penalty. No one was going to help him.

He had to rely on himself.

That’s the way it’s s’posed to be
, Jazz heard Billy say in his head.

He hated it when his father told the truth.

Aunt Samantha was Ugly J. She fit. Using the name Belle Gunness was the final piece of evidence Jazz needed.

A brother-sister pair of serial killers. And I sat right
across from her at my kitchen table, and she Billy’d me like a pro. I can’t believe I fell for it
.

Billy was on the loose. Sam had disappeared from the Nod. They were reuniting, Jazz was certain.

They had his mother.

It made sick sense. Jazz remembered telling Hughes how the Hat-Dog Killer’s crimes made perfect sense to the murderer. The same held true for Billy and Sam. Billy was obsessed with Jazz becoming the next generation of killer.

Thing I can’t decide
, Billy had said as he left unit 83F,
is whether I’m gonna kill her or I’m gonna watch you kill her
.

At the time, he’d meant Connie. Connie’s death—whether by Jazz’s hand or before his very eyes—would push him over the edge into Billyland.

The antibiotic IV was out. Jazz took a deep breath and reached for the saline needle. This one was in a little deeper.

With Connie out of his grasp, though, Billy would move on to the next best thing: Mom. Jazz was positive that Billy would keep his mother alive for now. Until he could murder her in front of Jazz.

That was the original plan, I bet. That’s why he came to New York. Sam was here looking for her all along. And she was using Hat and Dog, playing with them. Then Billy got to town, and we stupidly called Sam for help. They must have been laughing their asses off at us. I let her right into the house. I left her with Howie, of all people, the most fragile person I know
.

Tears blurred his vision. He rubbed them away savagely,
focusing on removing the needle without tearing the skin or slashing open a blood vessel.

Don’t lose it, Jazz. Not now. Howie’s safe. Connie’s safe. Gramma’s safe. Mom is only safe for now. You have to find her. You have to save her, and you can’t do that from a hospital bed
.

At the name Belle Gunness, he’d remembered more than that she was a serial killer. He’d also remembered what Billy had said in the storage unit. About Gilles de Rais. About Caligula. About “where it started.”

The needle came out. He was now completely free.

Except for the handcuffs.

You’ve got the beginnings of it, boy. Told you as much back at Wammaket. Told you where it started
.

Yes. He understood now. Where it all began. It would lead him to Billy, he was certain.

Carefully, lest he stab himself through a finger, he bent one of the IV needles, giving it a ninety-degree hook at the end. He inserted this into the handcuff’s keyhole and used the edge of the hole for leverage to bend the needle again.

It broke.

Damn it!

Well, that was why it was a good thing he had two needles.

He was more careful with the second needle. The second bend took. Exhaling a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding, Jazz wiggled the needle into place and heard the
click
of the cuff as it opened.

Hughes slumped at a table in the hospital cafeteria, nursing his third Red Bull of the day. He wondered exactly how many cans of the noxious swill he would need to drink before his heart exploded. It seemed, at the moment, an experiment worth conducting. Less than twenty hours since the phone call about Duncan Hershey had awoken him from a deep slumber, the world had turned topsy-turvy in ways he never could have predicted, right down to Jennifer Morales already leaving the morgue for a flight to… to wherever the hell she was from. With Grudzinski handling the logistics of the Billy Dent manhunt for now, Hughes could—in theory—head home and grab some shut-eye.

Truth be told, he didn’t want to shut his eyes. He knew what he would see—the abattoir of unit 83F. And were there scents in dreams? He didn’t know, but he was certain he would smell its noisome human reek, too, with undertones of bleach and preservative.

Hughes scrubbed his face with both hands. Goddamn it. He didn’t even know where Morales was from. Didn’t know if she had family. Didn’t know a damn thing about her, despite them working ass-to-nuts God knows how many months on the Hat-Dog case. And then along came Jasper Dent, killing the ant colony with a grenade.

My fault
, Hughes thought.
My damn fault
.

He had disobeyed orders and gone to Lobo’s Nod to entice the Dent kid to Brooklyn out of sheer desperation, nothing more.

Well, there
was
something more. Hubris.

Pride went before, ambition follows him
. More Shakespeare. One of the Henrys, he thought. Sure, okay. Cards on the table? It was pride, and it was ambition. But they’d been stymied for
months
! People were abjectly terrified. Hughes hadn’t seen fear like that in his city since the days after 9/11, when the streets were damn near empty, the subways echoing, hollow tubes. What few people braved the outdoors had the haunted, shell-shocked looks of soldiers going into battle. Brooklyn had a similar savor to it these past few months. Something had to be done. They were days away from vigilante justice. Mobs in the streets.

And so Hughes had reached out to Jasper Dent, desperate for something—anything—that would bring sanity back to the borough.

It’s not like I turned the investigation over to him. I just showed him the facts. I asked him to draw some conclusions
.

He took another swig of the Red Bull. It burned his throat. Who was he kidding? He’d screwed up. Monumentally.
Bringing the Dent kid to New York had been like dropping napalm on an oil spill.

If only I knew then what I know now
.…

His phone buzzed for his attention. An unfamiliar number. He answered it, only to hear a drawling, booming voice:

“Is this Detective Louis Hughes, NYPD? This here’s G. William Tanner, sheriff of Lobo’s Nod.”

Hughes turned down the volume on his phone. “Sheriff Tanner? What can I do for you?”

“I’ve been doing a little digging on my end of things here in Lobo’s Nod. I understand you’ve got a couple of my kids in the hospital there.”

Hughes weighed what he knew of Tanner from conversations with Dent and from the media. “That’s true, Sheriff. And I have to tell you—the Dent kid is currently under arrest for a whole slew of things.”

He could almost hear the gears ticking over in the sheriff’s head before that booming voice came back again. “I’m sure you’ve done what you think is right, Detective. Ain’t gonna try to convince you otherwise. But look here—I’ve been talking to a boy here in town name of Howard Gersten. Wanted to fill you in on what he told me.”

Ah, the mysterious Howie reared his head. Leave it to Dent to figure out how to cause trouble in two places at once. “Shoot.”

Tanner spoke for a few minutes, rattling off information, most of which Hughes didn’t care about. Lockboxes buried in backyards and toy birds and baby pictures. Secret flights to New York. Dent’s racist grandmother and something about a missing aunt and blah blah blah.

The only thing he
did
care about was the birth certificate.
That
was interesting. Hughes had interrogated any number of criminals, and he knew that one way to break them was to yank some fundamental underpinnings away. Tilt their world askew, force them to see it from a new angle, and sometimes something shook loose.

Hughes was convinced that the Dent kid knew more than he was telling. He couldn’t believe that Billy Dent would show up in the storage unit to sew up his kid’s leg and not let something drop, some important bit of information that Jasper now held tight like a baby blanket.

“Thanks for that information, Sheriff,” Hughes told him, downing the last of the Red Bull. The day wasn’t over yet. “Hey, I have a question for you.”

“Go ’head.”

“Do you mind me asking what the
G
stands for?”

“Don’t mind you askin’ at all. Do mind telling, though.”

Hughes chuckled and signed off. He crumpled the Red Bull can into a ball and surprised himself with a perfect three-pointer into the trash can. A nearby nurse applauded.

Hughes had put Finley on guard duty at Jasper Dent’s hospital room door. She seemed like a good cop; when he’d had that moment in the storage unit where he wanted to put a bullet in Jasper, she’d said nothing. Probably would have backed him up on it, too. That was Hughes’s measure of a
good cop—someone who will back you up if you do something stupid. It was on him not to do the stupid thing, of course. It was just nice to know he had backup, if necessary.

“Anything go down since the lawyer came by?” Hughes asked Finley, who had—almost adorably—stood at attention when he approached.

“Nothing. Couple of nurses. Doctor stopped by. They removed the drain from his leg. Said they’re taking him off the IVs soon.”

Hughes grunted. Dent’s health mattered to him only insofar as he couldn’t indict a dead body.

“How long have you been on?”

Finley shrugged. Hughes knew it had been about ten hours of sitting in front of Dent’s room.

“Go stretch your legs. Get some coffee. Smoke a cigarette.”

“I don’t smoke.”

“You will.”

Finley took a few steps toward the elevator, then hesitated. “How long should I—”

“I’m not leaving him until you’re back, Finley. Take your time.”

He took a deep breath, hand on the doorknob. How best to play this? Dent had lawyered up, and the kid was no dummy—he would refuse to talk unless Hughes could prod him into it. Such prodding would have to be done carefully; anything Dent said at this point would be inadmissible in court… unless Hughes could get him to waive his right to counsel. He’d done it before. There were ways of convincing
a suspect of what Hughes thought of as the Great Lie:
It’ll be easier for you later if you talk to me now
. Many, many, many idiot scumbags had fallen for it in the past.

Jasper Dent wasn’t an idiot, but he wasn’t superhuman, either. He could be broken and twisted into a new shape just like anyone else.

Hughes knocked once and entered. The overhead light was off, as was the TV. The only light came from the dim little reading lamp over the bed. Dent had the sheet drawn up to his chest. In bed, enervated, he looked like any other kid, and Hughes had to suppress a momentary spasm of pity. Serial killer’s son. Bastard never had a chance.

“Evening, Jasper.” Hughes removed his overcoat and hung it on a peg. It was a casual move, designed to communicate how comfortable he was in this situation. And that he planned to be here for a while. He stood near the door. Dent didn’t respond, staring straight ahead.

“I said, evening,” Hughes repeated, more loudly. This time, Dent turned his head, moving as though his neck had rusted. His eyes were heavy, lidded.

Drugged. The painkillers. Or whatever the docs had given him.

Tricky legal ground. Later, Dent’s lawyer could claim that he’d been under the influence when talking to the cops and couldn’t competently waive his rights. Risky.

Screw it. There was a dead FBI agent, and the kid was the son of a serial killer, and Hughes was amped up on an absurd amount of caffeine. He would take his chances.

“I’ve been talking to Sheriff Tanner. Down in Lobo’s Nod.”

Dent stared at him dully.

Hughes groaned. If the kid was too out of it to talk, then this was useless. He came closer to the bed. “The sheriff,” he said loudly and slowly. “In Lobo’s Nod. You know him, right?”

Dent slurred something that Hughes realized was “G. William.”

“Right. Him. Hey,” Hughes said, trying to get the kid to respond, “you know what the
G
stands for?”

More dull staring.

“Believe it or not, I’m trying to help you, Jasper.” Making a connection to the suspect was crucial. “I have some information that could maybe exonerate you. Or at least make a jury see things differently. Maybe I tell you something and you tell me something in return. That’s how it works.”

Jasper cleared his throat. It took forever. A streamer of sputum trailed from his lips to the pillowcase.

“I know I was pretty pissed before, but you have to understand. You have to see it through my eyes, you know? You get me?”

Jasper nodded weakly and whispered something. Exasperated, Hughes dragged a chair over and sat next to the bed. “What was that? What did you say?”

“I’m sorry,” Jasper managed.

Hughes’s toe began tapping on the linoleum, but he succeeded in keeping his face impassive and contemplative.
I’m sorry
sounded a lot like the beginning of a confession. Time to dig a little more, get the kid talking, get him to the point where he couldn’t stop, then pull back.
Can’t talk to you any more unless you waive your right to remain silent
.…

“Sorry for what?” Hughes asked.

“This,” said Jasper Dent, and before Hughes knew what was happening, the Dent kid was going for his throat.

A good choke hold
, Dear Old Dad had once told Jazz,
is all about geometry
.

Jazz had been maybe ten years old at the time. Geometry wasn’t yet in any of his textbooks, but it was part of the special father-son tutoring that went on every day at the Dent house. Geometry helped you figure out the angle of view of security cameras. Geometry told you where to stand and in which shadows. How to position the knife or the saw.

Geometry also guaranteed that your choke hold blocked the blood vessels on both sides of the neck, crucial placement if you wanted your victim unconscious and not merely pissed off and thrashing.

Pretend your elbow is a point
, Billy said,
and that her chin
(for it was always and ever
her
with Billy)
is another. You want to be able to draw a line between ’em. A perfect line
.

Jazz had punched Hughes in the throat first. Not enough to break his windpipe—just enough to silence him and catch him off guard. Then, much to Hughes’s shock, he’d rolled out of bed, his right arm—the one that was allegedly handcuffed—outstretched so that when he finished his roll he was standing behind Hughes, the crook of his arm lined up with the detective’s Adam’s apple.

He bent his arm. His forearm compressed one side of the
neck, his biceps the other. His elbow and Hughes’s chin made a line so straight that surveyors could have used it.

Jazz’s left leg throbbed, but he ignored it. As soon as he’d popped the cuff, he had risked pacing the room, testing his leg. True to Dr. Meskovich’s promise, he could walk. He limped and it hurt, but he could stand and walk, even with the bullet still lodged in the meat of his leg.

He tightened his arm. Hughes gagged and flailed and made sounds and movements that would have eked pity out of almost anyone else. But Jazz knew how to tamp down his pity. How to shove it in a box without any airholes and let it suffocate.

No matter what his birth certificate said or didn’t say, he was Billy Dent’s son.

A rush filled his ears. The ocean. His own blood. Maybe the roar of Hughes’s rage and surprise, psychically transmitted. Or maybe the ghosts of Billy’s victims, howling in betrayal.

Hughes passed out, slumping in the chair. Jazz held him tight for a few more seconds, just in case the cop was playing possum.