Game (Jasper Dent #2)(81)

No. That didn’t track.

So that meant that either Billy hadn’t set up Hat-Dog…

Or that Billy wasn’t Ugly J.

Neither possibility made much sense. Neither possibility was any more or less comforting than the other.

Jazz reached for one of the photos. It was a close-up of one of the carvings, a hat knifed into a woman’s shoulder. He had his theory about the hats and dogs—bitches and gentlemen, he remembered saying—and maybe that was so, but…

He was alternating for a while there. And then…

Jazz consulted the list of victims. Yes. As he remembered: two hats in a row. And then, later, two more hats in a row. No one knew why. The cops had had a theory at one point that had to do with the weather, but it wasn’t a terribly good one, and ultimately it didn’t pan out.

This is the key, Jazz thought. This is where the pattern breaks down. Those are crucial. That’s where we’ll find this guy. What happened there? Why two hats in a row?

And what about Belsamo? He didn’t fit the profile. Other than his age and race, he was a complete mismatch. And yet he had coincidentally showed up to confess right when Hat-Dog decided to dump his latest victim four blocks away?

Right. Jazz could almost hear Howie’s voice: That’s a coincidence the same way I’m the starting forward for the Pistons.

Two of them, Jazz realized. Two of them working together. That’s what it was.

But the cops already eliminated that idea. Every scrap of DNA they found—Hat or Dog—matches. It’s one guy.

He thought of how Belsamo had refused the water. How he had not touched anything in the interrogation room.

Maybe the profile was wrong. Maybe Belsamo was as good an actor as Jazz, as good an actor as Billy. All of that cawing and cackling… a ruse, to make them think he couldn’t possibly be the killer. Coming in voluntarily to distract the cops while someone else dumped a body in their backyard…

He called Hughes. “Hey, what happened to Belsamo?”

“Your little buddy?” Hughes started laughing. “Guy who liked to wave his dingus around?”

“Yeah, him.”

“Man,” Hughes said, gasping for breath, “as long as I live, I will never, ever forget the look on your face when he whipped that little Johnson of his out and—”

“I didn’t know they made them that small,” Jazz deadpanned.

Hughes exploded into deeper laughter, and it took a minute or two for both of them to settle down.

“So what happened to him?” Jazz asked.

“What do you mean? We cut him loose. You saw.”

“Yeah, but did you ever get that DNA sample from him?”

“No. Of course not. You were there; we were still waiting for the court order. Even the feds can’t make a court order appear in the time it took for that body to show up at Baltic and Henry. Well,” he considered, “maybe for a Homeland Security thing they could. But a run-of-the-mill homegrown serial killer? Nah.”

Jazz thought. “What about the interrogation room? Did he leave DNA anywhere?”

“Jasper…”

“He was masturbating. Remember? Did he finish?”

Hughes made a gagging sound. “I am grateful to report: no. No one had to clean up his grungy spooge. I guess once you left the room, he couldn’t keep it up anymore, kid.”

“Ho, ho, ho. How about hairs?”

A sustained, groaning sigh from the other end of the line. “Do you have any idea how many people were in and out of that room all day? I’m sure there are plenty of hairs in there. Which ones belong to your boyfriend, though, I can’t say.”

“So we have nothing?”

“We need nothing. He’s not the guy.”

They hung up, and Jazz stared at the wall until his eyes lost focus. Hughes could be sure. Jazz wasn’t.

What we need, Jazz decided, is a DNA sample from that guy.




Connie paced the length and breadth of her bedroom, thinking. Juggling, more like. She had so many things up in the air right now, so many balls to track…. And some of them, she was afraid, would turn out to be grenades.

She had worried—briefly—that Whiz might rat her out to her parents, but figured she could rely on Mutually Assured Destruction on that front. If Whiz ratted her out, she could tell her parents to change the parental lock on the satellite box, and Whiz knew it. Done and done.

If only all of her dilemmas had such simple, hands-off resolutions.

Just call him. Just call Jazz….

No. She couldn’t do that. This wasn’t the sort of news you delivered over the phone: Your father might not be your father after all…. Uh-uh. She had to do it in person. Look him in the eye. Hold his hands. Show him the birth certificate and be there for him….

Checking the Internet, she assumed he was busy with Hat-Dog in New York, even though there was no mention of him on any of the websites. The task force was definitely keeping his involvement a secret. And the local Lobo’s Nod news had nothing, of course. Not even a mention of Hat-Dog at all. This, she realized, was how guys like Billy got away with it. Most serial killers were local. They only made national news when they did something stupid, like forsaking their “jeopardy surfaces” for new territory. In Billy’s case, he just kept changing methods and signatures as he changed geographic areas. No one was watching the news in—for example—Tennessee and in Utah, so no one made the connections. Until it was too late.