His sarcasm hit home—she knew as well as he did that there was actually no difference at all between an agent and a special agent. The titles were mere flukes of FBI history and meant nothing. Morales’s lips pursed and she narrowed her eyes… then nodded once and slid into a chair. “Okay, good call. Sorry. No BS, then. I was one of the agents involved in hunting down your dad, back when he was going by the name Hand-in-Glove.”
Hand-in-Glove had been Billy’s fourth alias. He had killed mostly in the Midwest, mostly blonds, and had made a practice of swapping their undergarments, so that his fourth victim wore his first victim’s bra, and so on. Jazz didn’t know why he did this. Billy claimed “it was all just in good fun” when he confessed to those murders, and then he’d grinned at the prosecutor.
“You should talk to Special Agent Ray Fleischer,” Jazz told her. “He’s the guy who debriefed me when I was fourteen. Or maybe Special Agent Carl Banning. Or Dr. James Hefner. They’re the guys who talked to me after Billy escaped. They can tell you what I told them—I don’t know anything. I can’t help you find him. I can’t even find him myself.”
Drumming her fingers on the desk, Morales said, “I don’t believe you. Not entirely. I think you know things. They just may not be things you know you know.”
“Well, my subconscious isn’t cooperating these days.”
“You could tell me about growing up with him. You could tell me how he was as a father. Something to give me insight.”
Inwardly, Jazz bristled, but he didn’t let Morales see it. His past was his. It was fractured and weird and a typhoon of emotions and fragments of memories, but it was his and his alone. No one else had the right to go trolling through it, sifting the garbage for the golden memory that could lead to Billy Dent.
“I can’t help you,” he told her with false contrition.
She bought the contrition. Of course she did. Women. Even the ones wearin’ badges and britches still think with their wombs.
Shut the hell up, Dear Old Dad.
“Look,” she said gently, “I think you have a lot to offer. If it was up to me, I’d have you on this task force in a heartbeat. You’ve heard of natural born killers, right? Well, you’re a natural born profiler.”
“There are lots of good profilers out there.” Jazz wasn’t sure where she was headed now.
“Not like you. They get how these guys think, sure. But you get how they feel. What it’s like for them, what they like. Why they like it. You took one look at my legs and you knew what I was trying to do to you. And you called me on it. Most guys wouldn’t have gotten it. Maybe subconsciously they’d’ve understood. Even the ones who understood it consciously wouldn’t have said anything about it. Because they think they can master their impulses. They think, ‘Yeah, she’s trying to distract me with her body, but I can get past that, and if I don’t say anything, I still get to check her out.’ What they don’t realize is—”
“—is that if you’ve gotten that far, you’ve already won,” Jazz finished for her. “I know.”
“See?” Her chair was on wheels and she pulled herself closer to him, squeaking just a bit. “You understand the impulses. You feel them. But you master them. You overcome them. Give me some help.”
“I offered to help Captain Montgomery,” Jazz said with genuine confusion. “He told me he couldn’t use me. Are you going to pull rank on him? In his own precinct?”
She batted away the thought of it. “This stuff? This Hat-Dog guy? He’s nothing. Compared to your dad. I mean, yeah, he’s led the NYPD on a merry chase and we’re still getting our bearings, but we’ll catch him. And soon. They have a dozen good suspects already, and soon we’ll narrow it down. He’s small fry. I want the big game.”
“You want Billy.”
“Everyone wants Billy,” she said. “But he killed three girls while I was hunting him. He knew my name, Jasper. Sent me text messages. ‘Looking good today, Special Agent Morales.’ ‘I like your hair better in a ponytail.’ ‘I walked by you in the Seven-Eleven today. I could have touched you.’ ” She shivered with the memory. “I want him. You want to find him, too. Well, I can help. I have resources. Use me, Jasper. Help me find him and I’ll help you once I have him.”
“What do you mean? Every cop and fed in the world is looking for Billy. You think you’ll make a difference?”
Morales leaned in close, so close that Jazz could taste the old coffee on her breath. “They’re looking for him. You want to do more than find him, don’t you? You want to kill him. Well,” she said, smiling a mirthless smile, “I can help with that.”
On his way out of the precinct, Jazz made sure to pay special attention to the whiteboards and corkboards he’d skipped on his way in. When he spotted the one he wanted, he stooped to tie his shoes, taking his time.
Gazing at the twelve photos—blown up from driver’s licenses—pinned to a board under the double-underlined word SUSPECTS.
Twelve white men. Ages ranging from late twenties to early forties, from the looks of them. Jazz tried to memorize names, but the uniformed cop assigned to return him to the hotel nudged him and said, “C’mon,” and he had to move.
They smuggled him out a side door. By now the New York press had caught wind of the story and had besieged the Seven-six, so Jazz had to sneak back to the hotel. The room was empty when he got there, and a sharp panic jabbed at him. He checked the room quickly but thoroughly: A change of clothes was gone, as were her purse and cell phone. That boded well, but it was entirely possible that someone had forced her to dress and bring her things when abducting her.
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.