With a relaxed but confident tilt of his head, Jazz replied, “Maybe I learned some new tricks while you were off in solitary.”
Billy laughed again. “That’s your weak-ass attempt at psychology? Here’s a free tip from the expert: You gotta use something the target cares about. Something that disturbs ’em. My prison time weren’t a big deal to me. Gotta find something that hurts.”
“Like Mom escaping from the great Billy Dent? That must’ve been a blow to your ego. No wonder you purged every memory of her from the house.”
“Your momma done what she had to do. And I did what I had to do.”
“Did Samantha help you get over her?” The question nauseated him, but he had to know: Had father and son both shared in Sam’s charms?
“You’re asking all the wrong questions.” He said it almost plaintively, a child frustrated with the adult who will not play the game properly. “I thought you knew things, Jasper. I thought you’d had time to figure it out.”
Static buzzed Jazz’s ears. Stars and spots danced before his eyes. Without realizing it, he’d been holding his breath. His fists were clenched. He had come alive, more alive than he’d ever felt before. As though his whole life had been a test run up until now. He wanted to vault the sofa, race to Billy. Wanted his hands around his father’s throat. Wanted to feel Billy’s last breath wash over his face, wanted those damn blue eyes to roll up inside his head, wanted the trachea in splinters under the force of his grip.
It waits inside you, Billy had said in the visitation room at Wammaket. It pads around like a big cat, and when you least expect it, it comes up behind you. Oh, he could feel it now. Exactly as Billy had described. It was a cougar, a tiger, a lion, prowling his innards, softly growling deep in its—and his—throat. It had the taste of blood on its lips and tongue.
It wanted that taste for him. And God help him, he wanted it, too.
“Maybe starting to feel like it’s time to do something about me?” Billy asked. “You’re welcome to try.”
The hospital guard’s Taser weighed a thousand pounds in Hughes’s pocket. It was his secret weapon, if only he could get to it. It wasn’t one of the ranged models—he would have to get within arm’s reach of Billy to use it. He would have to get it out of the pocket before Billy could come over Weathers’s sofa and take it away from him.
Was Billy armed? Jazz couldn’t imagine his father being here without a weapon, but there were no telltale bulges or shapes in Billy’s pockets. Probably he had a knife tucked into the back of his belt. Billy generally didn’t like guns, preferring the quiet and the up close and personal of a blade. Knife versus Taser. Billy was rested and fit. Jazz, less so. But he had youth on his side, and maybe he had justice, too.
“I want to understand things, Billy. I want to know about the Crows. I saw your father.”
Billy’s eyes lit up. “You did, now! How’s my old man?”
“Decomposed. He had some interesting reading material with him, though.”
“I bet he did. So, you understand it now.”
Whatever it was, Jazz sure as hell did not understand. Meaning had eluded him like a rabbit in the wild.
“Your writing needs some work,” Jazz said.
Billy clucked his tongue, shaking his head. Jazz took the moment to slip his hands into the overcoat pockets, wrapping his fingers around the Taser. It had, as best he could tell, one charge left. One chance to stun Billy.
And then what, Jazz? What do you do with him once he’s helpless at your feet?
He knew the answer to that. It purred.
“You’re disappointing me, boy. Thought you’d get something useful out of your Dear Old Dad’s writing. Wasn’t much older than you when I wrote that stuff. Figured it’d make sense to you.” If Billy noticed the hands in his pockets, he didn’t give any indication of it. Jazz had to assume he had and was already making plans.
“Just looked like more garden-variety crazy to me,” Jazz said lightly.
Billy lost his temper for the first time. “You watch your mouth, boy. You ain’t so old and so big that I can’t whup you for being disrespectful.”
“Come and get me.” He tightened his grip on the Taser. If he could get Billy to make the first move, his chances of getting out of this alive soared.
For a moment, he thought Billy would take the bait, but his father took a deep breath and settled down. “Just thought you’d get it, Jasper. That’s all.”
“Oh, I get it. I just don’t know why. You and your sociopath buddies have a little social club, right? The Crows.” He larded sarcasm onto his voice, slathering it thick. Adults had an intense allergy to teenage snark, and Jazz was hoping that Billy—who’d gone to prison before Jazz had had the opportunity to launch into teen rebellion—would react blindly and stupidly. “You guys like to kill people, and you help each other out when you can. You identify yourselves with those ridiculous code names you all like so much, but at the end of the day, you know each other by the name Jack Dawes. Because jackdaw is another word for crow. You guys are so inventive!”
He’d finally figured out that the repeated references to Jack Dawes in Billy’s book weren’t about an individual. Jack Dawes was a code word, a generic stand-in for a Crow. It was part password, part safe word, part ID. The Crows could shift names and identities as they needed to—Billy had done it repeatedly—but they could always fall back on Jack Dawes, a name bland and generic enough that if there had been more than one in a community, no one would ever blink at the coincidence. But a Crow would know what it meant. It was, Jazz had to admit, brilliant.
But he wouldn’t admit that to Billy.
Billy’s lips quirked, and Jazz thought maybe he’d hit home. He struck again: “I mean, what kind of boogeyman plays Monopoly to decide who gets to join the club?”
“Ain’t always Monopoly.” Was that a defensive tone to Billy’s words? Jazz hoped so. “What matters is that they compete. Can’t have just anyone joining the Crows, you know. Sometimes the game’s been chess. Or Scrabble. Or Mother May I? What matters is that one ascends and one dies.”
The game is ancient, Hat had said. The game goes on forever.
One ascends and one dies.
“Except this time.”
Billy grinned wickedly. “No one ever said life was fair.”
“So the Crows are down one. You guys are gonna need to do a membership drive. Maybe start letting in the arsonists and the pedophiles.”
Another incipient flare from Billy at the mention of pedophiles. It’s not like I hurt kids, Billy had said at Wammaket. Jazz thought maybe he was whittling away at Billy’s reserve.
I can’t kill him. Not right away. He has to tell me where Mom is first.
“We’re doing just fine,” Billy said confidently. “No need to appeal to the riffraff. And that’s the point, Jasper. Why don’t you get it? Can’t you see?”
“Oh, I see all right. I see a bunch of lunatics telling each other they’re okay. A support group for serial killers. Nice.”
The mocking tone only made Billy smile broadly. “You think that’s what it is? You ain’t really seein’ the big picture, are you?”
“Well, explain it to me.”
“Never thought I’d have to spell it out for you, son. Thought you were smarter than this.” Billy sighed, and his stance relaxed, became almost professorial. Jazz inched forward a step, still clutching the Taser.
“You know serial murder used to be relatively rare in this country?” Billy asked. “Relatively. Back in the fifties or so, not a whole lot of it going on. But then something happened. In the eighties, there was a big jump. Almost threefold.”
“It was just better reporting,” Jazz said dismissively. “You can’t—”
“Oh, the reporting got better, but the Crows got better, too. That’s when they started. I learned about them years later. Joined right up, too.”
“When Sam introduced you to the Crow King.” Bang. Jazz didn’t know much, but he knew that much.
>
“There’s a guy at Penn State,” Billy went on, ignoring him, “name of Jenkins. Studies serial killer statistics. Trends. Just like studying baseball or football, ain’t that a hoot? Anyway, you go look up his research. He proves that the last three decades have seen a rise in folks like me. That’s the Crows. Organizing. Becoming more effective. We’re like an epidemic that sweeps across society, see?
“And you’ll be at the front of it, Jasper.” Billy’s face seemed alight with something unholy and powerful. Jazz couldn’t help but to be captivated by it. “You’ll be the next Crow King, the lord of murder, and you will change everything.”
His mouth had gone dry, and he could barely feel the Taser in his hand, so numb were his fingers. In spite of himself, despite the need to find his mother, Jazz couldn’t prevent his curiosity from thrashing for attention. He had thought Billy wanted him to grow up to be a serial killer, but the truth was more damning and more fascinating: Billy wanted him to lead serial killers.
“Why?” he asked, helpless to stop himself. “What’s the point? Why don’t you guys just do your thing and—”
Billy actually raised his palms skyward and looked up as if begging God for a smarter child. Enthralled, Jazz realized too late that he’d missed his chance to attack.
Keep him talking. Focus, Jazz!
“I gave you all the information you needed!” Billy fumed. “I told you to think about Gilles de Rais, remember?”
In the storage unit. “Yeah.”
“And did you?”
“Sure.”
“And?”
“He was a lunatic. Murdered people.”
Billy snorted. “Crap. Tell me something real.”
Dredging up the details from the lessons taught when he was done with his schoolwork each evening, Jazz recited: “He was a French nobleman in the 1400s. He liked going to poor people and pretending to be distraught at the plight of their children. So he would offer to take the young boys back to his manor as servants, giving them a better life. And then he would sodomize them and beat them to death and do horrible things to the bodies, and no one ever knew until he’d killed over a hundred.”
“You said a real important word there.”
“French?” Jazz taunted.
“No. ‘Nobleman.’ ”
They stared across the sofa at each other, silent. Billy’s eyes danced with amusement. Would Jazz figure it out, he was wondering. How bright was his boy? In which bright meant crazy because surely he would have to be crazy to understand any of this. Right?
But, Jazz realized, it did all make a sick sort of sense. Why wouldn’t people with similar interests come together? The Crows were like… a trade union.
Oh, God. This is starting to sound reasonable to me.
He forced his attention back to Gilles de Rais. But Billy had also told him to think about…
“Think about it,” Billy whispered now. “Think about all the lessons I taught you over the years. There’s only one more lesson, Jasper. One more, I promise, and then school’s out and you can do as you please.”
Caligula, the other name from unit 83F, had been an emperor of Rome. Gilles de Rais, a nobleman. Moving though history, stepping through Billy’s teachings, there’d been Elizabeth Bathory, a countess and one of history’s rare female serial killers. And Lucrezia Borgia, the daughter of a pope, who’d murdered husband after husband. Precursors to Belle Gunness and Ugly J.
“I don’t under—”
Billy exploded. “We’re supposed to be kings!” he ranted. “You look back through history, and serial killers were the nobility! Jack the Ripper was most likely—”
“—a member of the royal family,” Jazz whispered.
“Right! Back in the day, back when our craft was first invented, our guild first formed, we were rulers, Jasper! We were nobles and kings and counts and lords. Murder was reserved for the elite, for the cream of society. The Egyptian pharaohs killed who and how they pleased. The Roman emperors. Later, the European and Slavic lords. The myth of Dracula started when a Transylvanian noble drained the blood of his enemies. Vlad Tepes wasn’t a vampire—he was a serial killer, boy. We sat at the top of the pyramid, and everyone else was supposed to be here for our pleasure and nothin’ else!
“But it’s all upside down now.” Billy’s voice took on an aggrieved, offended tone. “They put the kings in jail, and they let the prospects maunder like lobotomized sheep. And worse than that, worse than that, Jasper—there are killers with no grace, no meaning. They wander the world and make it more difficult for the rest of us.”
And Jazz finally understood. The Crows weren’t about gathering together serial killers. The Crows were about gathering together the best of the serial killers. Using “games” to winnow out the radically unstable ones, the unreliable ones, then pulling up the others, indoctrinating them into the group, coordinating them.…
“You want to make a hunting preserve.” Jazz realized the enormity of it in a flash, his mind’s eye conjuring the fields of Kansas covered in blood and bodies. He remembered Hat claiming he would fill the Grand Canyon with corpses. “You want to turn… what, the country? You want to make the country safe for your kind. So that you can stalk and kill whoever you want.”
“We want what is ours,” Billy whispered, low and so convincing. “This is the natural order, Jasper. Our history tells us so. The strong and the noble rule over the prospects and use them for our pleasure. It’s become perverted over the years. More leisure time. More opportunities for the undeserving—like Dog or even Hat—to muck up the works for everyone, make it harder for the rest of us. Used to be only the upper classes had the time, the discipline, the tools. Everyone else was too damn busy tryin’ to stay alive. So it was a naturally self-selecting group. Nowadays, you got too many people with time on their hands, thinkin’ they can be the next Bundy or Speck.”
“Or Dent?”
“Heh. Don’t they wish? I started small, too, Jasper. Ain’t gonna deny it. Always had big aspirations, though. Son of Sam was a mailman! A mailman! No finesse. No style. Just walk up to a car and shoot ’em. Jesus. You call him kin? ’Cause I sure as hell don’t. You and me, Jasper, we’re something special. You are one of the strong. You’re destined to be a Crow. And as the Crows strengthen, as we take on members across the spectrum of society, we get smarter. Harder to catch. Especially when we have highly placed Crows in government. In law enforcement. You ever wonder ’bout when some intern goes missing in Washington and no one can find her? That’s ’cause no one’s lookin’ too hard. It’s tough to catch a killer when another killer has his back.”
Or hers.
The thought jolted him. He’d let Billy worm into his head, seducing him with bleak ideas and bloody notions. But at the end of the day, Billy was the man who killed people with his sister at his side. Billy was a father who’d allowed—compelled?—his own child… and… his own sister…
Not now! Not now! Focus!
Where was Sam? Was she waiting in the bedroom, where Billy had skulked? Was she somewhere with Mom, waiting for a signal from Billy to slit her throat?
Worse: If she didn’t get a signal from Billy at some preapproved time, would she kill Mom then?
His hand went sweaty on the Taser. He feared he would drop it at the worst possible time. He couldn’t keep up this verbal sparring with Billy. The Crows didn’t matter. None of it did. That was a problem for another day. Right now, his father was before him and his mother was missing, and that was all that mattered.
“You’re pathetic, Billy.” He wondered if all kids—if normal kids—had this moment of epiphany, this sudden sensation of understanding that their parents weren’t gods, weren’t even kings. They were just people. Sad, screwed-up people like everyone else. “You think you have some noble cause, but all you do is kill people. And all of your loser friends kill people, too. And you all talk about it. Good for you. You’ve surrounded yourself with people who think like you do. For comfort and security. You know
who else does that? Alcoholics and junkies and sex addicts.” He laughed heartily. “Guess what, Billy? You’re just like a prospect after all!”
His hand slipped on the Taser. He regripped it.
Billy didn’t move. His face was stone.
“You ready to back your words, boy?” he asked slowly.
“Dying to,” Jazz said.
“Then you decide, Jasper. You gonna use that gadget you think you’re hidin’ in your pocket…”
Billy reached around his back and produced a large, wicked knife.
“… or you gonna do this like a Crow?”
And his father held the knife out to him by its blade, the handle perfect and inviting and just within his reach.
CHAPTER 45
Howie opened his eyes. The black sky hung overhead, speckled with stars, the glowing gash of the crescent moon dangling there like a wood shaving. The world was just going on, turning, as if nothing had changed.
The envelope he’d found in Gramma Dent’s mailbox—the one addressed simply to JAZZ—lay torn open on his passenger seat.
Jazz hadn’t said anything about what to do with any evidence he found at Gramma’s house, so he felt no moral compunction at all about opening the envelope addressed to Jazz.
He read it once.
He told himself it was a lie.
He read it again.
He was convinced it was a lie.
He read it a third time.
It wasn’t a lie.
Trade-offs. Life was full of them. Like being basketball tall but blood sick. Like having a best friend who could scare the crap out of anyone… even himself.
Like wanting to help but not knowing how.
He read the letter again. It could so easily be a lie. But it tasted true. Howie didn’t have a bulletproof, built-in lie detector like Jazz did, but he had a brain in his head. The letter made sense. It fit.
And if it was true…