Game (Jasper Dent #2)(94)

It chilled Jazz.

He thought—fantasized, perhaps—that he had plumbed the depths of Dear Old Dad’s sociopathy by dint of growing up in Billy Dent’s house. Now he had to face the frightening possibility that the Dent insanity bored a deeper hole in the core of one’s psyche than he’d ever imagined.

Where does it end? he wondered. Every pit, no matter how deep, had a bottom.

Where was the bottom to Billy’s madness?

Jazz had to know.

How many of them are out there? The Impressionist and Hat-Dog… that’s two. Is Ugly J a third? How many did he train? How much time did he have?

The story of the Crow King went all the way back to Jazz’s childhood. Had this all started then? Was it somehow connected to his recurring nightmares—the death, the sex? Or was the story of the Crow King just something that Billy had made up back then on a whim and was now exploiting for his own amusement?

But then something occurred to Jazz. A nugget of information nudged from the rough walls of his memory:

No one held my hand and taught me how to play.

Billy had said that. When Jazz visited him at Wammaket a few months ago. Jazz had been trying to manipulate Billy and had asked… had asked for help with something relating to the Impressionist. Billy had scoffed.

Dear Old Dad wasn’t interested in teaching. So then what was he doing with Hat-Dog?

Jazz rolled over in bed in frustration. He needed to talk about this. It was no good to ricochet ideas in the spaces of his mind—he needed feedback. The task force was forbidden to him now, through his own actions. So he did the only thing that made sense.

“Lobo’s Nod Sheriff’s Department,” Lana said a moment later. “How may I direct your call?”

“Sheriff Tanner, please,” Jazz said.

“Just a… Jasper? Is that you?”

Jazz groaned inwardly. Leave it to Lana to recognize his voice. Her ability to obsess over a man, combined with her inability to weed out the bad boys, would probably get her killed someday.

“Yeah, it’s me. Can I talk to G. William?”

“Sure. So, how’s it going in New York?” she asked, almost giddy.

“It’s great, Lana,” Jazz said enthusiastically. “I’ve seen the Statue of Liberty, and I’m also tracking a guy who takes people’s eyes, cuts off their dicks, and—on two occasions—leaves their guts in a KFC bucket. It’s awesome.”

A normal person would have quickly transferred the call. “Oh. Okay. Um, when do you come back to the Nod? Kinda quiet around here without you.”

“Lana. G. William. Please?”

The line went silent for a moment and then G. William’s booming drawl: “Haven’t even had my coffee yet. It’s damn indecent to call a man before his coffee.”

Jazz checked the bedside clock again. “I knew I could count on you to be in this early.”

“Old habits. NYPD got you out of bed this early, too?”

Jazz bit his lip. He couldn’t go into his extra-legal activities with G. William. “Well, I’m working hard, that’s for sure,” he said amiably. “But I wanted to run something by you.”

“Shoot.”

“It’s about the Impressionist.”

“Speaking of whom… he’s back to being mute. And all patched up after you last saw him.”

“How nice for him. Remember when we were trying to find him and we were talking about him?”

“Which time?”

“Most of them. I’ve been going over it in my head and I keep thinking how we talked a lot about him playing us.”

“He wasn’t playing us. He was playing at being Billy.”

Jazz grunted. True. “But I keep thinking now… it’s almost like it was a sort of game to him, wasn’t it?” He was falling from a window, grabbing for ledges as they zipped by, trying for some connection between the Impressionist and Hat-Dog.

“You’re not making any sense, Jazz. What game? He wasn’t really cluing us in like some of these guys do. Yeah, he guided us to some of the bodies and he taunted you, but the only rules he followed were the ones your dad laid down years ago. And Billy himself pointed out to you how the guy didn’t even follow them very well. Hell, if he was playing a game, it was… like solitaire, I guess. He was playing a game he could only play by himself.”

Jazz shot out of bed. “That’s it!” he shouted, loud enough that someone on the other side of the wall pounded on it for quiet.

“What’s it?”

“Oh, man, I gotta go, G. William. And thanks,” he said hurriedly, and hung up before the sheriff could say anything more.

He flung himself to the room’s desk, where his copies of the Hat-Dog files lay scattered. He pawed through them, organizing them, riffling through the papers to confirm the details he needed.

It all came together. It was beginning to make an insidious sense.

Just as he’d been saying all along, it made perfect sense to a crazy person. And now Jazz believed he’d found a way to make it make sense to someone rational.

He glanced at the clock again. He’d been working for three hours without even realizing it. He needed one more thing to confirm his suspicions, then probably another couple of hours of work before he could tie it up nice and neat and take it to the task force.