Game (Jasper Dent #2)(28)

“He’s paralyzing them from the waist down. Then cutting open their bellies. Trust me—they felt plenty of pain.”

Connie shivered next to him. “Does this mean he’s getting worse?”

“Escalation like this isn’t unheard of. A lot of these guys take time to refine their fantasies. He’s been thinking about all of this stuff for a long time. Maybe he thought that raping and killing and cutting off the penises would be enough. But by the time he hit number six, it wasn’t doing it for him any more. He needed something else.”

“So he adds in disemboweling.”

“Right. But here’s the thing: When he gutted number six, he was sure, confident. The cuts were precise. Almost surgical. When he killed number seven, there were hesitation cuts.”

“Like he was unsure of himself. Or maybe unsure of what he was doing?”

Jazz squeezed her hand. “Right. And that’s just weird. These guys usually get better, not worse. So why did he hesitate to gut number seven?”

Connie thought for a while. Jazz allowed himself to enjoy the quiet and the radiating warmth of her. “Maybe,” she said, “something distracted or startled him. No one is consistent all the time. Not even your dad.”

Variety’s the spice of life, Billy admitted.

But Jazz wasn’t buying it. “It’s not just the gutting,” he told her. “It’s other things, too. Like the rapes.”

Connie stiffened next to him, and Jazz cursed himself inwardly. To him, rape was just another crime visited upon Hat-Dog’s victims, but of course to Connie it would resonate more viscerally than that. “We really don’t have to talk about this now,” he said as gently as he knew how.

“I want to help,” she told him. “Keep going.”

He drew in a deep breath. “Okay. Well, rape is about power,” he told her. “Power and dominance.” And fun, Billy chortled. Heaps and heaps of fun! “But this guy doesn’t seem to enjoy his power. At least, not all of the time. If you look at the medical examiner’s reports, his rapes fall into two categories—some are violent and repeated while the victims are alive. Others are perimortem.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means at or around the time of death.”

“He’s raping corpses? Jesus Christ.”

“No, not corpses. Just raping them at their weakest, so he doesn’t have to struggle as much. So part of the time, he’s getting off on the power and the domination over them while they’re still alive and fighting. The rest of the time, he waits until they’re practically dead so that he can do it without any trouble. It doesn’t make sense.”

“The guy’s crazy, Jazz. It doesn’t always have to make sense.”

The same thing Hughes had said earlier. And the answer was still the same: “Not to you, no. But to them—to me—yeah, they should always make sense.”

“Are you saying your dad made sense to you?” she asked, horrified.

“I’m saying…”

This is a special thing, Jasper. For us and only us. Not for anyone else.

“I’m saying that I can understand it. I can live in his head. That doesn’t mean I agree with it.” I don’t think.

Because a part of him couldn’t stop thinking about Billy’s voice. Before. Urging him to sucker Connie’s legs apart and slide between them…

“I can live in his head,” Jazz told her, “because that’s where I grew up. With that kind of thinking. It was my normal. Like being in a cult, I guess. All the normal things, all the things that made sense to you or to Howie, were things I was taught didn’t apply to me. Like… like, did your parents ever tell you stories?”

“You mean, like ‘Goldilocks’ or ‘Sleeping Beauty’? Yeah, sure.”

“Well, Billy used to tell me stories, too. Stories about his prospects. And there was even…” He drifted off, suddenly lost in his own past. The Crow King… He had forgotten all about the Crow King. How could he forget that? It had been a mainstay of his childhood, that story. That myth. He’d loved it, not for the story itself but rather for the way Billy had told it, changing his voice and his facial expression to match the different characters as he went.

“You still there? Earth to Jazz…”

“I was just remembering, is all. When I was a kid, after Mom died, Billy used to tell me this story. Like a fairy tale, or a fable. It was about a crow. The king of crows, really.”

“The king of crows?”

“Yeah. It started out with the Crow King, who was surveying all he ruled…”

… and he saw it was good, Jasper. There was peace where there was supposed to be peace, and war where there was supposed to be war. Because the crow is a wise bird, the crow knows that someone’s always killin’ someone else somewhere. That’s the way of the world. That’s the natural order of things. And the Crow King was the wisest of all the wise birds, so there wasn’t no way no how he was gonna dispute the natural order of things. And so the world turned and the crows ate carrion and the young squirrels still a-sleepin’ in their nests and the vegetables growin’ in the fields (and you need to eat your vegetables, too, Jasper, to grow up big and strong).