Game (Jasper Dent #2)(80)

“I don’t know. But did you notice the space for father is blank?”

“Yeah. Probably an oversight.”

“An oversight?” Howie struggled to keep his voice down. Gramma was peacefully paging through the album. No point getting her riled. “The guy who got away with killing over a hundred people didn’t make an oversight. There’s a reason it’s blank.”

“There could be a million reasons, not just one. Maybe at one point Billy might not have thought Jazz was his. He was pretty pissed when Janice got pregnant initially. I remember Mom telling me that. But he got over it. But I’m sure they had some reason.”

“Like what?”

Sam shrugged. “I don’t know. Because my brother was completely insane?”

“Was?”

“Is. You know what I mean.” She crossed her arms over her chest, the birth certificate dangling from her fingers like something dead or dying. “Howie, you have to promise me that you and Connie aren’t going to go poking around into this anymore. Let the cops handle it.”

“We’re trying to help Jazz. If it turns out he’s not Billy’s kid—”

“Then what? He’s going to suddenly be all better? His childhood will magically disappear in a puff of smoke? Please. There’s a better chance of you actually getting to first base with me.”

“I already got to first base with you.”

Sam tilted her head to one side. Excuse me? the motion said.

“I touched your butt the other day. When you were washing dishes.”

“You bumped me with your hip. It doesn’t count, and besides, that’s not first base, anyway.”

Howie sighed. “Felt like heaven.”

Sam groaned and massaged her temples with her thumbs. “Look, this birth certificate doesn’t mean anything at all. For all you know, it’s not even legit. It could be something that Billy dummied up to mess with Jazz. Or Connie. Or you. Or just something he did to amuse himself. He’s crazy, Howie. His motivations don’t—”

“Sammy J!” Gramma shouted suddenly. “Sammy J!” She scampered into the kitchen, flush with excitement, the photo album huge and flapping like a giant bird in her withered hands. “Look! Look!”

Sam took the photo album from her breathless mother, who jabbed a finger at a photo. “I found a picture of you, Sammy! See? See?”

“Very good!” Sam said, her voice proud. “Good job!” To Howie, she said, “It actually is me. I’m sort of surprised.”

Howie bent to look at the picture. It was a young girl—maybe four or five years old—in a dress and what looked like dirty sneakers. She was very plain—no indication at all in this picture that she would grow up to be the sexy thang Howie so lusted after. “God bless puberty, huh?” he said.

“Oh, you sweet talker,” Sam drawled with sarcasm. “How do you keep the ladies from throwing their naked bodies at you?”

“Usually I just keeping talking,” Howie admitted.

“Anyway, yeah, I was a late bloomer,” Sam said, turning another page. More middling photos of an awkward prepubescent Sam. “Didn’t really get much better until high school. Buh—” She caught herself. “You-know-who was the good-looking one. From day one, pretty much.”

As if she’d conjured it, the next page had a photo of a younger Gramma, tired but smiling, holding a baby. Howie knew without asking or being told who that baby was.

For what was probably the first time in his life, Howie did not say what immediately came to his mind. Which was: Dude. The Antichrist as a baby…





CHAPTER 37


Morales drove Jazz back to the hotel. The next set of suspects would be coming in soon enough, and things were now doubly crazy due to the new body. A long night stretched ahead of all of them, so Morales was going to sneak a quick nap in the precinct break room. Jazz just wanted some peace and quiet so that he could think.

If he hadn’t known better, he would swear that someone was trying to keep him from thinking. Someone was trying to prevent him from putting together the pieces.

Pieces. Literally, of course. There were body parts in great profusion, some of them taken, some of them not. But if Hat-Dog was a puzzle to be put together, he seemed to use pieces from different boxes, as though he’d opened a bunch of jigsaws and then taken whatever pieces he wanted from them whether they matched or not. It was so chaotic that it almost seemed like it had to be deliberate.

Then again… why couldn’t that be possible?

He wrote UGLY J on a sheet of paper and circled it, then circled it again. Ugly J was at the center of it all. It sounded like a serial killer’s moniker, but no one had heard of such a person. Could this be Billy’s new identity? The Impressionist had said that Ugly J was beautiful, which jibed—the Impressionist worshipped Billy, after all, and would see a free, murdering Billy Dent as something beautiful to behold.

But if Billy was Ugly J—which made the most sense—then what was his connection to Hat-Dog? Jazz could believe his father had planned far enough in advance to set up the Impressionist before going to jail, but to do so twice? To set up a second serial killer, this one in the biggest, most complicated city in the country? Somewhere Billy had—so far as Jazz knew—never visited even once?