The only response: a roar of laughter, so familiar, so damning.

“Jasper, if you really wanted me dead, you’d’a killed me when you visited me at Wammaket a couple, three months back. Coulda leaned right over the table and throttled me with your bare hands. Bet them COs woulda been real slow responding to that. Swim through molasses to rescue me, they would. Race like turtles. Lightbulb overhead—you could have gotten to that and broken it and slashed open my carotid before they took you down. Try as I might, I can’t picture a jury in the world—much less the county—that would have convicted you. Poor ol’ Jasper goes and offs his evil sumbitch daddy…. That Sheriff Tanner, he’d’ve given you a medal.

“No, Jasper.” Billy sighed, a professor who’s given the same lecture for too many years. “If I’m alive right now, it’s for one reason and one reason only: ’cause you let me live that day.”

The worst part wasn’t that it was true: The worst part was that Jazz had already known it. A part of him could excuse away the earlier deaths—the ones Billy had committed early on, some of the ones the Impressionist had committed in Lobo’s Nod—but he couldn’t excuse away the later ones.

All on his head. All of it.

“There is blood on my head!” Reverend Hale screamed in The Crucible. Jazz had screamed it, too, and in the end, it didn’t matter—John Proctor still went to the gallows.

All of Jazz’s strength and rage flooded out of him, sucked out by Billy’s cold, twisted rationality. By Billy’s truth.

“If you still got that anger in you, though,” Billy continued, “I’ll tell you what: Next time you see me, you go right ahead and kill me. Don’t dillydally around. Don’t dicker. This is serious business here, son. This is Crow business.”

“Why are you here?” Jazz could only find a whisper in his throat. “Who did you come to New York to find?”

Billy said nothing for a moment, and Jazz wondered if his father had hung up. “That’s not for you to know. Not yet. Tell you what—I’m gonna tell ol’ Doggy. I’m gonna let him in on the secret. And then you can ask him. Doggy needs a bone. But first, Doggy needs to play with his toys.

“Oh, and by the by… thanks so much for movin’ that birdbath. Bet it made my momma real happy.”

Click.

Jazz dropped the makeshift stake. This particular vampire would need more than a stake through the heart, he knew. He stared at the mute cell phone in his hand, then scooped up his own cell and fumbled for a number.

“Where are you?” he asked when the line opened. “I need to see you.”

“At my hotel.”

“I’m on my way.”

CHAPTER 47

Connie spent the flight forgiving Jazz. Was he being an overprotective jerk? Sure. But she had to admit that if ever there was a time to be an overprotective jerk, this was it.

There’s no need to distract him right now. I’ll just go find… whatever it is Mr. Auto-Tune left for me. How dangerous could that be? It’s in an airport, which has got to be, like, the safest place in the world these days. And then I’ll bring it to Jazz. And we’ll figure it out from there. Easy.

When they landed, she turned on her phone. It chirped at her immediately and a text message time-stamped from a couple of hours ago popped up:

go ghosty, girlfriend. 5-0 headed your way

Howie. She would have known even without his name on it.

WTF, Howie? What are you—

5-0. The police. Her parents must have called her bluff. There would be cops waiting for her as soon as she got off the plane. She gnawed her lower lip. What could she do?

The annoyed woman stuck between her and the window asked her rather impolitely to move. Connie automatically tucked her legs up and let the woman through.

Think, Connie. You’re not an action hero. You can’t escape them. So you have to trick them instead. You’re an actress, right? You need to act.

And she remembered something Jazz had said once, during one of his periodic “lessons” on avoiding sudden death at the hands of people like himself: Don’t get distracted by details. She remembered Ted Bundy and his arm-in-a-fake-cast routine. Women had seen that cast and been suckered to their own deaths.

People like details, Jazz had told her. They notice them. They fixate on them. And they let them consume them, to the detriment of the bigger picture.

Connie’s plan formed in seconds. Too little time for her to think it all the way through, but fortunately also too little time for her to doubt it. Worst-case scenario: I get caught. Best-case scenario if I do nothing: I get caught.

The woman who had pushed past her was now struggling with the overhead bin for her suitcase, her large purse resting on the empty aisle seat, unwatched. Connie quickly and efficiently rummaged through the bag. Reading glasses. Okay, cool. Then she silently thanked God that the woman was white as she found exactly what she’d hoped to find—a makeup compact. She palmed it.

As the plane slowly emptied (and her former row mate disappeared down the aisle), Connie ducked low behind the seat and whipped out the compact, with its powdery “neutral” makeup disk. Years of theater experience had taught her how to make makeup seem natural, but now she wanted anything but. It took a little doing, but within a few minutes she had managed to create a blobbish patch of beige skin that started above one eyebrow and leaked down her face, nicked the top of her nose, and came to an uneven end along the ridge of her cheekbone. It looked like a birthmark gone awry and it was pretty hideous, she thought.

Details.

She bound up her long, carefully braided hair and wrapped it in her satin sleeping bonnet. She slipped on the reading glasses and checked herself quickly in the compact’s mirror. It was good, but not good enough.

Hair and makeup, done. Time to raise the curtain and start the show.

The plane had almost entirely emptied out. Connie finally rose from her seat and maneuvered out of her aisle with great difficulty, avoiding coming down on her left foot. Bracing herself on the seatbacks, she managed to shuffle up to the front of the plane, where she made sure to make eye contact with one of the flight attendants who had not told her to turn off her phone at takeoff.

“Are you all right?” the attendant asked, telling Connie instantly that her posture and her faked expression of pain were both working.

“I feel like an idiot,” she started, “but I twisted my ankle running for the plane before. I didn’t think it was that bad, but after sitting all this time…”

“Oh, God, it’s probably even worse after the change in cabin pressure!”

The “let them finish your sentence” trick rides again.

“Yeah, is there any way…”

“I’ll get a wheelchair for you.”

Connie allowed herself to slump against one of the seats a little. “Thank you so much. I’m sorry to be such a pain.”

“Not at all. Just sit in that seat there and I’ll have someone get your bags.”

Soon, the attendant helped her out of her seat and off the plane. There in the jetway, a man waited with a wheelchair. Connie sank into it and thanked the attendant again as she piled Connie’s duffel onto a little rack on the back of the chair.

“Take good care of her,” the attendant told Wheelchair Man.

“No prob.”

On their way up the jetway, Connie unfolded the cheap little airplane blanket she’d grabbed from a nearby seat and wrapped it around herself like a shawl. She figured by this point she probably looked like a cancer patient. She tucked her arms together to make herself as small as possible.