“I guess that’s the best news we can expect, huh?”
With a nod, the nurse headed off, but not before flashing a very winning, very welcoming smile at Erickson. He basked in the glow of that smile for a few minutes, calculating his chances and his next reasonable move. Soon his curiosity got the better of him. He’d been guarding this woman for days, and he had no idea what she even looked like. He stood and stretched. No one was around, so he opened the door and poked his head in. A little peek wouldn’t hurt.
From his vantage point at the door, he could barely make out the shape of her on the bed. The lights were out, except for a dim bar mounted above her. Tubes, wires, and cables ran to her from machines and IV stands arrayed around her. It was like watching a car in the shop, hooked up to all manner of monitoring gear. The heart monitor beeped steadily along, and her chest rose and fell in a shallow but reliable rhythm.
If I ever get that old and that bad, Erickson thought, someone pull the plug.
About a half hour later, a second nurse stopped by. This one was older, midforties, with her hair tied back in a severe bun and bright red, chunky glasses that he couldn’t stop staring at. Nice enough–looking woman, but Erickson wasn’t interested in cougars. Still, he stopped her before she could go in—not for conversation, but just to let her know that Mrs. Dent had already been looked in on, just a half hour ago.
“Young pretty thing?” The nurse rolled her eyes when Erickson nodded. “God, these girls right out of school… She used the wrong solution.” She held up an IV bag. “Maybe someday she’ll learn the difference between point zero five percent and five percent.”
Erickson wanted to leap to the nameless young nurse’s defense, but he really had nothing to say. He shrugged and let her through.
In the hospital room, the nurse paused for a moment at the door, waiting to see if the deputy would look in. She gave him only a few seconds. Any longer would be foolish.
Dropping the IV bag in the trash, she went to the bedside and looked down at the patient. She had always been withered and wasted, but in the hospital bed, she took on the appearance of a cadaver, one that hadn’t realized it was time to stop breathing.
“Hello, Mom,” the nurse whispered.
She didn’t expect a response and, indeed, got none.
“Good-bye, Mom,” she said, and withdrew a needle from her pocket. She emptied its contents into the IV line through the port, slid the needle through the slot on the sharps container, and walked out of the room, not bothering to speak to or even look at the deputy as she went.
CHAPTER 28
They stopped somewhere in southwestern Pennsylvania for fuel, both for the rig and for themselves. Jazz delved into Hughes’s wallet and treated Marta to lunch—it was the least he could do, even though it reduced his funds to the depressingly low level of a single twenty and two ones. He couldn’t risk using Culpepper’s or Hughes’s credit cards or debit cards; they would be monitored and give away his location. He cursed himself for not maxing out the ATM cards in New York. There’d been a machine at the bar where he’d met Culpepper. NYPD wouldn’t have known about Culpepper until hours later, so it would have been a risk worth taking. Stupid. Stupid, amateur mistake.
There was no TV in the tiny diner where they’d stopped. Tiny miracles, making life just a wee bit easier every day. He hoped his luck would hold out.
While Marta used the restroom, he—as promised—hosed his vomit off the truck. It wasn’t the most pleasant task, but it had the advantage of being repetitive and brainless, allowing his mind to wander.
He kept coming back to the birth certificate.
Howie had texted it to him before he’d broken out of the hospital, and he’d looked at it several times before dropping his phone on Mark Culpepper in that bar bathroom. It looked legit to him. It had to be legit, right? Why would anyone bury a fake birth certificate in his backyard?
Anyone meaning Billy, of course. He was the only one who could have done it, would have done it. After Mom had escaped the Dent house, Billy had sent her straight into the memory hole, scouring the house for anything reminiscent of her—clothes, books, magazines, photos, the box of tampons under the sink, everything. Jazz had come from school one day, and Mom was just gone. Eradicated from the Dent house. No matter what he asked Billy or how he asked, no matter how he begged, pleaded, or importuned, Billy would not speak of her, and soon enough Jazz learned to go about his day as Billy did, pretending Mom had never existed. If not for the wallet-sized photo of her he’d luckily had in his backpack that day, he might have come to believe that, in fact, she never had existed, that he had been born of no woman, had sprung fully formed from Billy’s fevered brow like a prepubescent Athena.
Billy must have buried the birth certificate, the crow toy, and the pictures at the same time. Why? Why not destroy it all?
The birth certificate had haunted Jazz at first. Initially, he’d been obsessed with—maybe “possessed by” was more accurate—the notion that he might not be Billy’s son. He’d pondered the multitudinous possibilities of his parenthood. If Billy wasn’t his father, then who was? One of Billy’s victims? Some boyfriend or one-night stand of Mom’s?
The more he thought about the birth certificate, the more he came to understand that while it held many potentialities, in the end only one mattered. He knew exactly what the birth certificate meant.
“Looks good,” Marta said, coming up behind him. “You ready?”
Jazz throttled the hose and beheld his handiwork. Marta’s rig glistened, nary a trace of puke to be found.
“Yep. Let’s go.”
Driving straight through from the New Jersey rest stop to Lobo’s Nod would have taken less than fifteen hours, by Jazz’s calculations. Marta was by all accounts addicted to a particular brand of energy booster that came in tiny, shot glass–sized bottles. She slammed them back with a ferocity and frequency that made Jazz fear for the disposition of her heart. Still, even she wasn’t about to drive straight through.
Her route, as best he could tell, would take him to within a couple of hours of the Nod, along I-40. He wouldn’t ask her to take him straight to the Nod; he couldn’t. It was risky enough having her see his face. He couldn’t further risk having her remember by name the one place in the world irrevocably associated with the Dent family. He could picture the interrogation already: The kid who hitched? Yeah, I guess he looked like this Jasper Dent kid. Dropped him off at a place called Lobo’s Nod. And boom. The police, the FBI, the press—they all instantly knew everything they need to know.
Near the Kentucky border, Marta finally hit her limit. Either that, or she ran out of energy shots. One way or the other, she pulled over on the highway and announced that she needed a few hours’ shut-eye. She climbed into the berth behind the seat and curled up, but not before showing Jazz the pistol under her pillow. “You seem like a nice kid and I hate to do this, but if you try something, you should know that I’m a crack shot.”
Jazz had merely nodded. The gun didn’t scare him. Taking a gun away from a sleeping or half-asleep woman was child’s play. He had no intention of harming Marta, anyway, so it was a moot point. He huddled in the passenger seat, nearly vibrating with anticipation and annoyance. Why couldn’t she have bought more energy shots when they’d stopped? Why did they have to stop? He was a fugitive. By definition, he was on the run. “On the run” did not include parking on the side of the highway, waiting for some distressingly dedicated Kentucky state trooper to decide to take a look-see inside the cab of the big rig resting on the shoulder. Peering through the window and—hey, that’s the kid on TV!
Then Jasper would have no choice but to fight again. And now he knew that Marta had a gun. It would be difficult not to go for it, when cornered.
I won’t let it get that far.
It’s already gone that far, Billy said. You choked Hughes. You knocked out that girl cop. You beat up a drunk man in a bathroom. Violence suits you.
Exigent circumstances.
Life is an exigent circumstance, Jasper.
Shut up.
He couldn’t help remembering what Billy had said to him back at Wammaket: Want to know the difference between good and evil, Jasper? And then Billy had snapped his fingers. That’s it, kid. That’s the difference. You won’t even know you’ve crossed the line until it’s way back in your rearview mirror.
And now: You crossed a whole lot of lines today. Got some momentum going. Not many more to cross. Pretty much just the big one.
You’re right, Billy. I’m a violent thug. Always have been. Held back until now. But you’ve proven yourself right. You told me back at Wammaket: I’m a killer who hasn’t killed yet. But that will change when I see you.
I look forward to it. Who knows? Maybe you actually will kill me. That would be sad for me, but good, too. Because then the beast is loose. The god within you is loose. And your next victim is your mother. And then your girlfriend. And then you and Ugly J can walk this world together. Crows.
He slapped himself, both to silence the voices and to keep himself awake. No matter what happened, he did not want to sleep. Not again. No matter how tired he got. Sleep meant dreams and the dream.… His stomach turned in on itself at the thought of the sex dream. Now that he knew his tango partner, he had no desire to relive the dance. He feared dreaming further details, and he didn’t want to know how far he’d gone with his aunt as a child.
Female serial killers rarely committed sexual homicide. Their motivations were typically fear or compassion or greed. Black widows and angels of mercy. They preyed on the weak, the elderly, children. Lacking the physical strength of men, most of them worked in teams. Support staff for a male murderer. Billy’s personal, handpicked handmaiden of slaughter. His own sister.
Best of all, they avoided capture for so long because no one ever suspected them. Jazz himself had never even considered the possibility that Sammy J and Billy were a team.
Fernandez and Beck… She pretended to be his sister in order to lure women to him for the slaughter. They died in dual electric chairs, still proclaiming their love for each other. Hindley and Brady… Two Brits in love with the Nazis. And with killing children.
How many people had Sam killed? When you added her total to Billy’s, what was the final reckoning?
And worst of all: How much of it had she wanted to do? Jazz knew the force of Billy’s charisma firsthand. Was Sam a willing participant in the murders?
In the things she’d done with Jazz?
Was it consensual on her part? Did Billy make her do it with me?
Necessary questions. Reasonable questions.
He didn’t want to come within a mile of the answers.
He wanted only two things: His mother safe. And Billy’s neck in his hands.
It was a comforting brace of thoughts. Despite himself, he drifted off to sleep.
CHAPTER 29
Things were finally looking up, Hughes figured.
While state units were stopping buses all along 495, he had returned to the hospital to sweat the girlfriend for more info, figuring he’d be in for a rough time with the father—goddamn lawyer—but then he’d actually bumped into the guy in the corridor, babbling about his daughter and a phone call. Hughes knew all about the girlfriend and phone calls; the trace on his own stolen phone had revealed that Jasper Dent had called her the previous day, and she hadn’t told anyone.
Hughes didn’t relish the prospect of interrogating a broken-up, terrorized teenage girl in her hospital bed, but she’d been holding out on him, and he was sick of people holding out on him. No matter their age, sex, or medical status. He was prepared to use every trick in the book to break open that girl’s head and scoop out the secrets stored in there.
But then the father had grabbed him and dragged him to the room, and the girl was more than willing to crack her own skull and spill. Miracle of miracles, the lawyer-dad (surely the most frightening combination of words ever) kept his yap shut and let the daughter talk. Her bruises were fading, and much of the swelling on her face had gone down. She was starting to look again like the pretty girl who’d surprised him at JFK.
Hughes pulled up a chair to listen as she recounted the conversation with one of the Dent siblings. No way to know at this point if it was Billy or Samantha, but Connie’s suspicion—which she wasn’t shy about offering—was that it had to have been Samantha.
“She used words like ‘verisimilitude.’ Her whole way of talking was distinct from Billy’s.”
More Patriot Act requests were in his immediate future. The phone on the other end was probably a burner, probably already smashed on the side of the highway somewhere, but he would make the effort. He might be able to pull some location data.
Not that he thought he needed it. It’s time for everyone to come home, don’t you think? That’s what the voice had said. That could mean only one thing: Billy Dent was heading back to Lobo’s Nod.
It’s the last place in the world anyone would think to look for him. No one would think he would be stupid enough to go where the people know him best. So of course, he makes a beeline for it, while we’re searching the rest of the goddamn planet for him. The guy’s a social-engineering savant.
He made a mental note to put out a BOLO for Samantha Dent and to check all the usual law enforcement databases for her.
But first, he needed something else from the girlfriend.
“Connie, we need to talk about Jasper.”
She nodded contritely.
“He’s in a lot of trouble. And I know you think I want to put him down like a dog, but I swear to you: I just want to catch him before he hurts anyone else. Get the truth out of him, whatever it is.”
“He wouldn’t normally hurt anyone,” she said. “But it’s his mom. He’s convinced Billy’s going to kill her.”
“I get that. But that’s what I’m here for. The FBI. He needs to let us handle this.”
Connie’s lips quirked. “With all due respect, it took twenty years to catch him last time. And even then, it wasn’t you guys or the FBI. It was G. William.”
Hughes’s jaw tightened. “Yeah, well, I wasn’t a homicide cop twenty years ago, and Billy hadn’t come to New York yet.” He hated to admit that she was right—Billy had stood right in Hughes’s palm, right in his precinct, and then vanished before Hughes could clench his fist.
“We know Jasper called you here. We have a record of a call from my cell to this hospital, and the attendant at the switchboard says that call was routed to this room. What did you talk about?”
To his surprise, she told him, and he didn’t think she was leaving anything out.
“You think he’s going to kill his father?”
Clearly struggling, Connie eventually settled on a lopsided shrug that made her grimace. “I don’t know. I think he wants to. I think he thinks it’s his only option.” She wiped a tear away. Hughes knew she was an actress, but he didn’t think she was that accomplished. “Can you help him? At all?”
“I have to find him first.”
On his way out of the hospital, Hughes used his borrowed cell phone to call the precinct. He caught Miller at his desk.
“I’ve got good news and bad news,” Miller said in such a way that Hughes knew even the good news wasn’t that good. He rubbed his temple.
“Tell me.”
“Well, we got your cell phone back.”
Hughes groaned. “He ditched it?”
“Yeah, that’s the bad news. Left it on the bus, got out at a rest stop, and never got back on.”
“And we fell for that?” Hughes roared. “We fell for that eighth-grade crap?”
“Hey, don’t blame me. I’m not the one who let the kid escape in the first place.”
Hughes allowed himself a brief, beautiful moment of fantasizing Miller covered with honey and fire ants.
“He went north to lure us that way. He’s really heading south.”
“That’s a big assumption,” Miller said. “He
could have just dumped the phone and kept going.”
“No.” If Hughes could figure out that Billy was headed home, so could Jasper. Assuming they weren’t in cahoots all along. “Daddy’s heading home and so is Junior. It’s the only thing he knows. The only thing he understands. He’s hurt and he’s going home. Montgomery was right—I’ve been overestimating him. He’s running home, like all scared kids do.”
“Well,” Miller said doubtfully, “okay. We’re canvassing the rest stop.”
“Don’t forget to pull video and credit card receipts.”
“Gosh, thanks for the reminder.” Miller’s voice overflowed with sarcasm.
Hughes ignored it. It was best for everyone that way. “And while you’re at it, run every possible database and trace for information on Samantha Dent.”
“And what are you doing while those of us who still have badges are running your errands?” Miller snarked.
Hughes ignored the jibe. Partly because he outranked Miller, but mostly because it still stung. “I’m headed out of town. I’ll clear it with Montgomery on my way to the airport.”
“Helluva time for a vacation, Lou. You gonna send me the paperwork I need for the Patriot Act?”
“Just tell the telecoms and credit card companies this is an ongoing terrorism investigation. Dent killed over a hundred people and his sister probably helped, so it’s no lie. They’ll help you without the paperwork. I’ll e-mail something over when I land.”
“Yessir.” Miller managed to inject several cc’s of sinister disrespect into the nominally respectful sign-off, but Hughes knew he would get the job done, anyway. Miller was a so-so detective, but a world-class paper pusher.
In the cab on the way to JFK, Hughes managed to book his flight. The idea of flying to Lobo’s Nod in the middle of Pennsyltuckessee or whatever the hell they called states down south wasn’t on his top-ten list of things to repeat, but even Montgomery agreed, when Hughes called him, that one or more Dents were most likely headed to Lobo’s Nod and that “someone on our side needs to be on the ground down there.” The last thing they wanted was for the feds to swoop in and snatch up the Dents. And like all good city cops, Hughes and Montgomery shared a mutual distrust of the competence of their rural brethren. That Tanner guy had caught Billy once, sure, but dumb luck bought you only so much respect.