Game (Jasper Dent #2)(69)

Whiz shrugged and dove back into his scrambled eggs. He insisted on eating them topped with a nauseating concoction of ketchup, mustard, and soy sauce.

“What did you think you heard?” Dad wouldn’t let it go.

Connie made a show of being exasperated, even though the direction of the conversation petrified her. Did Dad know she’d sneaked out the previous night? “I don’t know. Something. It was probably a dream. Or the house settling. Or the wind.”

Dad hmphed and checked his watch. That would be one parent out of the way. Mom worked at the Tynan Ridge branch of the state university, and they never called her in on weekends. Connie had to get her and Whiz out of the house so that she could escape. Howie had tormented her earlier this morning with a text that said Ready?, accompanied by a picture of himself standing in overalls, propping up a long-handled shovel like the farmer in Grant Wood’s American Gothic.

After Dad was gone, Connie slipped into Whiz’s bedroom, where he busily slaughtered something vaguely dragonish on his Xbox.

“I need a favor,” she said.

Whiz ignored her. He was good at that when he wanted to be.

She tried again. “I need your help. I need you to get Mom to take you to the mall.” The nearest mall was a half-hour drive away. Connie would prefer that Mom be gone all day, giving her a chance to get out, dig, and come back before being missed. But if Mom just dropped Whiz off and came home, it would still give her plenty of time to get out of the house, cover her tracks, and contemplate the punishment her father would eventually visit upon her.

“I don’t want to go to the mall,” Whiz said, aiming and swiping his on-screen sword with scary precision. Connie idly wondered if Billy Dent had ever owned an Xbox.

“Sure you do. There’s that new movie—”

“Already saw it.”

“And you want to see it again.”

Whiz hit Pause and assessed his sister craftily. “What do you want?”

“I just told you—I want you and Mom out of the house.”

“So that Jazz can come over and you guys can do the nasty?”

Jeez, even my kid brother thinks we’re ready, Jazz! “No. Jazz isn’t even in town. I just need to do some stuff. And I can’t have you guys around.”

“What’s in it for me?” Whiz said, his tone clearly conveying that he knew she had nothing to offer him for such a favor.

Connie drew in a deep breath and played her best card.

“I’ll show you the code to unlock the parental controls on the satellite box,” she said.

Whiz’s eyes grew wide with something akin to worship.





CHAPTER 32


There were two interrogation rooms, one on either side of the observation room. While one suspect was being questioned, the next one would wait in the other room. The observers could look in on either one, and as the day crawled along, Jazz started to feel dizzy as he rotated between the two.

As the morning dragged into a cigarette-stale afternoon, Hughes and Morales ran their good cop/bad cop on four more suspects, all of whom fit the profile in various ways. It was a parade of white guys in their mid-thirties, all of them leading lives of depressingly similar dissatisfaction, all of them as empty as overpumped wells.

It took its toll on the people in the observation room, who’d begun the day with verve and excitement and a sense that New York’s months-long nightmare was one confession away from ending. But as the day wore on, observers drifted out, replaced by others who watched for a little while, then left again as it became obvious to everyone that the guy in the box wasn’t The Guy. Only Jazz and Montgomery stayed the whole time, the captain settling into a chair next to Jazz and leaning forward, elbows on knees, looking for all the world like a baseball manager trying to wish his team into the playoffs.

Jazz’s phone rang in the middle of one interrogation, earning him a nasty glare from just about everyone in the room. He could have sworn he heard one of the loaner FBI agents mutter, “What makes him so special?” to another agent. The caller ID showed Connie’s face, but Jazz fumbled to turn off the ringer, failing miserably. Finally, after what seemed like hours of that damn phone ringing, a cop grabbed it from him, pressed a few times, and shoved it back in his hands, silent and dark.

“Next up,” Montgomery announced, reading off a sheet of paper like it was a scorecard, “is Mikel Angelico. That’s M-I-K-E-L for those of you playing at home. White male—”

“Go figure,” a cop said, to general laughter.

“—twenty-eight years old. Currently unemployed—”

“Say it ain’t so, Cap’n!” someone called out.

Montgomery sighed like a father with newborn triplets who all needed fresh diapers at the same time. “No one’s making you stand here, Wizniewski. There’s boxes of documents need stacking over in the copy room.”

“Sciatica, Cap,” Wizniewski said.

“Christ,” Montgomery muttered. Jazz had just opened his mouth to shoot down Wizniewski—he was tired, the cop was an ass, why not?—when the door to the observation room burst open and a youngish uniformed cop said, “Captain! Captain! You’re not gonna believe this!”




What they wouldn’t believe was Oliver Belsamo.

“And he just walked into the precinct?” Montgomery clarified.