He felt poisonous.

Slick and grimy with some contagion.

To speak to Connie now would be to pollute her with the thoughts spinning in his head. Would be to lie to her and not tell her about Belsamo and what he’d done. He couldn’t abide the thought of lying to Connie. Not to her.

He could have called Aunt Samantha or Howie, but he didn’t want to speak to anyone. Not now. All of his focus, all of his attention, was now devoted to recalling the conversation he’d had with Billy.

Jazz’s memory was good. Not eidetic like Billy’s, but better than most people’s. And recalling the things Billy said was sort of a specialty of his. Dear Old Dad had trained his son to lean extra-heavy on the fatherly wisdom he imparted.

Fine. You designed me to be your tape recorder. I’ll use that against you, you bastard.

The problem wasn’t remembering every line in the twisted play of Butcher Billy’s life. The difficulty lay in figuring out which words mattered and which ones were just verbal chaff, noisemakers designed to distract attention and lead Jazz into the corners of Billy’s maze where the walls closed in.

The crows… There’s something there. Something real. Belsamo was into crows. Billy mentioned them. And, yeah, I remember that old story he told me. I just recited it to Connie the other day.

Billy had been adamant that the story of the Crow King wasn’t a fairy tale. He’d called it folklore. Myth. The differences were crucial. Billy sounded like an inbred redneck, but his IQ was in the stratosphere and he wielded words as precisely as he wielded knives and cleavers and hammers.

Fairy tales and fables were stories for children. They involved magic. They weren’t real.

Myths and folklore, though… they weren’t precisely real, but they were designed to explain something that was real. They represented something about the real world. The origin of something.

The Crow King… what did the Crow King represent?

And then Jazz sat up straight in bed. Another chunk of knowledge had just dropped into his brain. More accurately, it had bobbed to the surface of the ocean of his memories, like a body that has broken free of its concrete shoes.

The Impressionist. In his cell in Lobo’s Nod. He’d said something to Jazz….

Jasper Dent. Princeling of Murder. Heir to the Croaking.

Not “the Croaking.” Damn it, Jazz! Did you really think he was that crazy? What’s wrong with you? You missed the connection right there!

The Impressionist had been talking about the Crow King.

Heir to the Crow King.

So… Billy was the Crow King, then. The one who bled the robins until they were dove-white. What the hell was that supposed to mean?

More important… how far back did this craziness stretch? How long had Billy been putting things in motion? The Impressionist knew about the significance of crows. So did Belsamo. Which meant that the lunacy went back at least to before Billy’s arrest and imprisonment. All those years Billy traveled for murder… was he also evangelizing his particular brand of lunacy? If so, how many protégés did he have out there? How many madmen had he programmed to follow in his footsteps?

And if he was able to program them as adults, what chance does his son have?

Jazz had been aware for years now that people existed out there in what he thought of as the “real world” (the world not of Lobo’s Nod or of his grandmother’s house and deepening senility) who admired Billy, who thought he was a patsy for someone else’s murders, who believed he’d been framed. And people who saw in him a strength they lacked and didn’t care that that strength had been turned toward murder.

But he’d never imagined that any of these sad, damaged people would turn out to be killers themselves. Since when do groupies become rock stars? Maybe they end up as roadies, sure. Maybe even an opening act or a one-hit wonder.

But for a groupie to become the main attraction…?

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.”