Game (Jasper Dent #2)(39)

When he went to call her, though, he saw a text message waiting from her—out 4 a bit back soon—time-stamped a few hours ago. He still wasn’t used to the gadget; he hadn’t even heard the text chime in all the ruckus at the precinct.

Relieved, he plopped down on what he thought of as his bed and stared up at the ceiling. Morales’s offer had been tempting. But in the end, he couldn’t accept. He just wasn’t sure that she would be able to give him the kind of help he needed.

And besides: He didn’t know if he could trust her to follow through.

The thought of being able to kill Billy, though… God! To see the end of his father, to write finis to the man who’d made Jazz the bundle of nerves and fear and frightening strength that he was… It could save him. It could destroy him. Billy’s death could show that Jazz had a soul or prove that he had never had one.

That thought kept him up nights. Some nights because it thrilled him. Others because it terrified him.

He wondered: When next he saw his father, would he be thrilled or terrified?





CHAPTER 19


The killer sat in his easy chair, the remains of a home-cooked meal on the coffee table before him. The TV blathered the sorts of banalities his wife enjoyed—so-called reality TV, in which people competed to prove their superiority over one another. The killer tolerated the show, even pretended to enjoy it. One player and one alone captured his attention, a dental hygienist from Spokane, who spoke with a slight lisp and had hair the color of clarified butter and eyes so big and blue that he wanted to pop them out and eat them.

The killer had never eaten eyes. Or any other part of a human body. But he now desperately, desperately wanted to. The thought consumed him in a familiar, caressing way. He knew this feeling. It had been with him most of his life. He could not remember a time in his life when he could look at a woman and not want to possess her. Possess was an important word. It meant much. It meant to own. It meant to maintain one’s calm. It meant to captivate and enter like a demon, though the killer did not believe in such bogus and repugnant claptrap.

It also meant to have intercourse with.

The killer wanted to own women. In every way. And he had, indeed, owned many. Even the ones he found possessed (that word again!) of subpar appearance he yearned to own, for to own meant to be able to destroy.

Tall, short, thin, fat, ugly, gorgeous, black, white, all shades between and beyond… He wanted them all. For his own. So that no one else could have them. His to use and to keep or discard as he saw fit.

He had spent much of his life dreaming of this. Dreaming of captive women, compelled to do as he commanded. Dreaming of them on their knees before him, subject to his whims—beaten or comforted, killed or succored, raped or loved.

The dreams could not be sated. Not by anything he watched or touched or knew. Only finding her (any “her”) and owning her, making her his in every way, could satisfy his needs.

The first time he’d owned a woman, he’d thought it over at that. Thought that with the realization of his dream, he could and would now be like all the others he saw around him. He would now be what they called “normal.” He discovered relaxation; he learned that with his fantasy fulfilled, he could breathe and settle and close his eyes at last.

But his calm, his repose, did not last. The fantasies returned, first as niggling daydreams, then as all-consuming compulsions, until every woman he saw on the street, on the subway, anywhere, was a target, a victim waiting to happen. And he resisted. He resisted as long as he could. As best as he could. Until…

Until…

Until he no longer had to.

Until the message and the voice…

Just then, a phone rang. The killer stiffened. It was not his cell phone or his wife’s. It was something else.

“Is that yours?” his wife asked.

“Yes,” he said, and swiftly went to the small, cramped bedroom, where he closed the door and dug into the bottom of his chest of drawers. Three cell phones were there. One rang again. The killer answered, trembling.

“The number is six,” the voice said, and the killer felt a trill of anticipation—six!—until the voice said, “Six. Five and one.”

“Six,” the killer repeated. Five and one. Not three and three.

“And,” the voice went on, “a little something special this time.”

Shocked, the killer almost dropped the phone, but held tight and kept listening. He wrote nothing down—that would be foolish—but memorized every word.

“I understand,” he said when the voice had finished, then removed the battery from the phone. On his way back to the TV, he stopped in the kitchen and tossed the phone’s battery into the trash. Then he quickly snapped the cheap plastic hinge and tossed both halves of the broken phone into the garbage compactor.

“Who was that?” his wife asked.

He ignored her. She ignored him back, caught up in her show.

The killer stared at the TV. The dental hygienist from Spokane was staring back at him.





CHAPTER 20


Even though she wanted to, Connie didn’t bring up what had happened between them at the hotel overnight. She said nothing about it in the car on the way to the airport, nor at the airport itself, as they went through security and then waited for their flight. The NYPD—eager to get Jazz out of its jurisdiction as quickly as possible—had made some calls and arranged for his ticket to be switched to Connie’s flight, so they were in a rush from the time she returned to the hotel.