Game (Jasper Dent #2)(34)

She had always imagined herself here. Here or in LA. If she was going to be an actress, it would have to be one or the other. LA was where you went for the big money and the kind of fame that required bodyguards and came with hot-and-cold-running stalkerazzi: Hollywood. The movies. Endless and eternal.

But New York was home of the stage. Broadway. Performing night after night in front of a live audience. That immediate reaction, that visceral feedback, as relentless and reliable as a tide. She’d first tasted it during a talent show in first grade and she’d hungered for it ever since. While Jazz sought refuge in hideouts and shadows, craving anonymity, Connie longed for the stage, the screen, for everyone in the world to know her face and her name.

Would that keep them together? Would it drive them apart? “We go together ’cause opposites attract,” the old song said, and Connie couldn’t think of two people more opposite than Jazz and herself.

She paused outside a hair boutique that advertised PRODUCTS FOR AFRICAN HAIR in enormous letters in its front window. A woman in a dashiki with braids longer and more impressive than Connie’s stood outside, huddled against the cold, but clearly willing to suffer it for her cigarette.

Just seeing the words African hair in a window made Connie feel warmer. It was the sixth or seventh such shop she’d seen along this stretch of busily trafficked road. The hair salons back in Lobo’s Nod had done the best they could with her hair, but she couldn’t expect much from them. She had eventually turned to her mother for braiding and general hair care, and thanks to the Internet she could have braid spray and detangler delivered, but to live in a neighborhood where dozens of shops catered to her needs? Where she could roll out of bed and walk down the street for balm or relaxer? Have her hair cut and styled by someone who looked like her, someone who knew what it was like to have this hair?

“Can I help you?” the woman asked suddenly. “I’ll just be a second.” She gestured with the cigarette and her expression said, C’mon, kid—don’t make me put this out even a second early.

Connie gazed longingly into the window of the boutique. She could probably spend hours in there, but she had a mission.

“Actually…” she said, and launched into the cover story she’d concocted for herself when prowling around the other crime scenes: She was a high school student writing a paper about the reliability of eyewitness testimony over time. “So, anyway, there was one of the Hat-Dog murders over that way….” She pointed toward the alley less than a block from where they stood. “I was just wondering, Miss—”

“Just call me Rabia.”

“Great. I’m Connie.” They shook hands.

“Who’s Puerto Rican? Mom or Dad?” That caught her off guard for a second. Back in the Nod, almost everyone assumed Connie was short for Constance. She’d never been hit with Consuela before.

“It’s actually Conscience.”

Rabia smiled. “Nice. Who does your hair, honey? It’s not bad, but let me fix you up with some extensions and—”

“I really sort of need to work on the report….” Connie said, biting her lower lip as if she regretted having to interrupt.

“Oh, yeah, that night,” Rabia said. “I remember that.” She dragged on the cigarette with practiced, sensual ease. Her fingernails—visible through the ends of her fingerless gloves—had the hard yellow cast of a serious nicotine fiend. Connie could only imagine what her lungs looked like. “The cops already asked me about it.” She sniffed and snorted smoke out through her nose, waiting expectantly as though for applause.

Connie widened her eyes a bit and said in the tone of a younger sister, “That’s pretty cool.”

Ill concealing her pleasure, Rabia shrugged. “No big deal. Look, it was months ago, okay? A lot warmer.”

“Right,” Connie said, egging her on. “It was warmer. So maybe you were outside later at night. On a smoke break. And…” She let it hang, let Rabia fill it in. Something she’d learned from Jazz: If you leave a sentence unfinished, people will want to finish it for you. It wasn’t a hundred percent guaranteed to work, but more often than not, people would pick up the thread without even thinking about it.

Connie hoped it would work this time. She’d been to five of the crime scenes and hadn’t been able to find anyone who’d been around at the time of the murders. Or at least, anyone who had been willing to admit it to a random teenager on the street. Rabia was her best shot so far.

And Rabia did not disappoint.

“And I was standing right about there,” Rabia said, grabbing the thread of conversation, pointing across a middling busy street. “Over near the mailbox. It wasn’t a bad night. Just having a smoke and looking at my window. Figuring out if it worked from across the way.” She craned her neck to look at the window now. “Still not sure about that display. Do you think—”

“So you were across the street,” Connie said quickly, before she could be dragged into a discussion about retail window displays. “And…”

“And it happened over there.” She pointed again, this time to the alleyway. From the mailbox, it would be a pretty easy sightline. Connie already knew that the victim had been left there, guts in a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket nearby. “I told the police—I saw a guy coming out of there. Maybe six feet, maybe a little less. Wearing a hoodie. Gloves. I remember thinking it was too warm for gloves. That part I remember real well. And that was it.”