Game (35 page)

Now who’s cheating, jerk wad?

Staring at the photos… Maybe someone was in a background….

Or maybe it’s the person who
took
the pictures….

That was most likely Jazz’s grandmother. Even though the racial nonsense her caller had spewed would have been right at home in Gramma Dent’s mouth, Connie couldn’t imagine her having the sense or stability to make that call.

So what was the clue? None of the photos were illuminating. She switched over to the toy. Just a chunk of plastic.

It’s hollow.

Is there something inside it?

Can I get it open?

Need a knife.

Kitchen.

Time?

Damn it. Who knows what this lunatic is going to do in… ugh… two minutes if you don’t have the special clue?

Or was the clue the crow itself? Raven. Whichever. Maybe that’s all she had to do when the phone rang, was say, “Crow!”

Too easy. She couldn’t believe it was that easy. Or maybe the voice just
wanted
her to think it was too easy….

Once you let them into your head
…

“Don’t go chasing…”

Nothing else left. Nothing except the envelopes. She wasted a futile thirty seconds peering into them, looking for something stuck or written there.

Was the
arrangement
of the items in the lockbox important? No, that was crazy—the contents would have moved when it was unearthed. You couldn’t rely on any particular order once it was buried.

Less than a minute to go.

She stared at the lockbox, now not even seeing it, not even looking for anything because it was pointless, the seconds counting down, and she would never get it and just as her phone rang, she saw it.

She
saw
it.

Oh, thank God.
Thank God she left the lid open.

Another ring. She took in a deep breath, steadied herself so that she would sound calm, then hit Answer.

“Bell,” she said before the voice could speak.

An infinity of silence passed, and Connie was certain that
she’d screwed up, that the small image of a bell she’d spotted carved into the inner lid of the lockbox was really nothing more than a trick of the light, a shadow cast by the latch or…

“Very good, Connie,” the voice said. She thought she detected some surprise through the Auto-Tuning, but couldn’t be sure.

“Time for you to return to New York,” it went on. “You’ll want to fly into JFK if you can. The second clue to my identity is there, at terminal four, Arrivals, on the first floor. Bring cash.”

“What do you—” But the voice was gone, the line as dead as Billy Dent’s victims.

Time for you to return to New York
…

A quick Internet check found a single seat on a flight bound for JFK the next afternoon. A center seat, of course, right smack in the middle of the plane to guarantee the worst possible experience. And booking at the last minute like this would suction the last of her babysitting and summer job money right out of her bank account, but what choice did she have?

None. This was for Jazz.

Besides, paying for the ticket would be the easy part. Connie stared at the closed door to her bedroom, imagining her parents beyond it. Oh, yeah, this was gonna be pleasant….

According to the police file—a copy of which Jazz had of course been given (being an official task-force member was a nice change of pace)—Belsamo lived in a place called Fort Greene. On the cell phone map, it seemed close enough to Carroll Gardens. Clueless as to the subway, Jazz decided to walk it and ended up hopelessly turned around and lost on the stupid Brooklyn streets. His cell phone’s maps only loaded sporadically and he couldn’t get any sort of bearing. Most people were bundled against the cold and rushing along and he couldn’t bring himself to stop one of them for directions. Doing so would probably involve tackling, given how they moved.

He finally managed to get to Fort Greene. The neighborhood itself seemed nice enough, but Belsamo’s building was tucked deep into the darkest end of an alley strewn with trash and debris. Jazz idly checked the walls for the Ugly J graffito, but didn’t see it.

The wind picked up. The sun was going down. Jazz turned
up the collar on his coat, tugged his cap down around the tops of his ears, and slipped on thin but warm leather gloves.

There was a surprisingly strong lock on the door to Belsamo’s building. Ten buzzers lined up in two ranks of five. Belsamo was apartment 4A. When Jazz buzzed, nothing happened.

Good. He’s not in.

The next part—getting into the building—would be easy. Billy had done it dozens of times.

Y’see, most people are lazy. And stupid. Best of all, they like t’think they’re all good people, nice and helpful people.

Jazz started pressing buttons. On the third buzz, someone responded.

“UPS,” Jazz said, making himself sound both bored and annoyed at the same time. “Got somethin’ for Three-C, but no one—”

He didn’t even get to finish the spiel; whoever lived in apartment 2B hit a button and the front door buzzed and unlocked. Jazz slipped into the vestibule.

The entryway was cramped and gray. A sickly yellow bulb gave off enough light for him to see down a short hallway to two doors, as well as up to a landing. Jazz smelled fried onions, strong and persistent.

He made his way up the stairs, moving quickly, but not
too
quickly. If someone saw him, he didn’t want to appear to be in a guilty hurry.

The door to 4A was disappointingly plain. Jazz wasn’t so naive as to hope for a sign reading
SERIAL KILLER WITHIN!
or
WELCOME TO THE GAME, JASPER!
but he’d thought maybe there would be
some
indication….

It was locked. Not a problem. Billy had been teaching Jazz how to force locks, jimmy doors, and shim with credit cards since he could walk. A New York City apartment building didn’t phase Jazz in the slightest. Even if Belsamo had a chain, there were ways around that. A deadbolt or a police bar would be a real challenge, though….

Despite the jog up four flights of stairs and the illegality of what he was in the process of doing, Jazz found his breath coming easily, his heart thudding along with reliable, dull predictability. With his stiff, laminated high school ID, he managed to trip the lock on the third try, not even needing to resort to the collection of hairpins and wires he’d brought with him.

He took a deep breath and stepped into Belsamo’s apartment, closing the door quietly behind him.

As soon as he entered, he knew.

He
knew
.

He couldn’t explain it. If called to testify in court (and he was miserably certain that would happen), he would be able to say nothing beyond, “I just knew. I felt it in my bones.” Comically and pathetically psychic.

Belsamo was Hat-Dog, though. Jazz knew that now. He felt the same undercurrent of
wrong
he’d felt toward the end of his father’s days of freedom. Old memories assaulted him—the teeth in Billy’s nightstand drawer; the knife in the sink; Rusty’s last, dying whimpers as Billy skinned him alive.

Jazz put out a hand and braced himself against a wall for a moment. He didn’t believe in ghosts or demons or other supernatural, superstitious nonsense. Billy had been a hardheaded rationalist, a man who believed only in what he could see and touch and hurt. But in that moment, Jazz wondered if everything he believed and everything he disbelieved should perhaps be reversed. Maybe evil
wasn’t
a chemical trigger in the brain and a jacked-up childhood. Maybe evil was, after all, something vaporous and mystical that could move from place to place on its own….

Stop being an idiot. Stop it. This is just a reaction to figuring it out. To knowing the truth.

Jazz suddenly wished Connie were there with him. Or Howie. He just didn’t want to be alone in this place.

It was the neatness, he decided. For one thing, it lay in stark contrast to the filthy, unkempt near-beggar he’d seen at the precinct. “Slob Oliver” was a put-on, a sham, designed to distract the cops. This apartment… this was the real Oliver Belsamo: The to-a-pin precise placement of everything. The way a decorative mirror on the wall hung perfectly perpendicular to the floor, as if regularly straightened with a level. Such neatness had been Billy’s mania, too, and even though Belsamo’s tiny studio was a fraction the size of the house Jazz had grown up in, the place vibrated and shimmered with the same crazy energy, as if possessed by the spirit of the departed Dent house.

But it went beyond the neatness. The place was neat, yes, but also cramped. Too organized. Preternaturally organized, almost. Piles of magazines, their spines exactingly lined up with one another, set so that the colors of the spines ran from
darkest to lightest. Books placed in precise order of height and thickness, a staircase of pages. Every bit of wall space was claimed with either shelves or piles of reading material or that freakishly perfect mirror, which Jazz avoided gazing into, lest something be in there. Something like horror in his eyes. Or his own monstrous reaction to Belsamo’s lair.

Oliver Belsamo had clearly kept every scrap of paper and every piece of reading material he’d ever owned. And had it organized according to some system that had welled up from deep within.

That makes him a hoarder, not a serial killer.

Jazz had bought a small, cheap flashlight at a convenience store near his hotel, and now he played its beam around the apartment. The apartment was a studio; the only door led to a tiny bathroom that Jazz couldn’t believe was actually usable. In order to get to the toilet, he had to squeeze through a gap of mere inches between the sink and the shower. It was impossible to turn around at the sink at all.

Still wearing his leather gloves, he opened the medicine cabinet and pawed around with impunity. Nothing. Belsamo used Crest toothpaste.
As far as I know
, Howie would have joked,
that’s not one of the diagnostic criteria of sociopathy
.

He abandoned the bathroom. There was a tiny stove with a half-height fridge in a little nook that could not be called a kitchen by any reasonable standard. Jazz realized Belsamo must have to wash his dishes in the bathroom sink.

He opened the fridge, half expecting to see a collection of penises and intestines, and perhaps an eyeball or two. But
no. Just a container of yogurt, some celery, and a pack of energy drinks.

One step up from hobo at the precinct, but in real life… other than the energy drinks, he seemed to eat healthily.

He keeps everything. But what about the trophies? Where does this packrat keep his favorite cheese? Where are they?

Jazz examined the neatly made bed. Nothing out of order. The bookcases were crammed with mostly nonfiction—true crime. That didn’t necessarily mean anything. Lots of people read true crime. He skimmed the collection anyway. No books about Billy. That did seem a bit odd. Wouldn’t a
real
true-crime aficionado have at least one book about the twenty-first century’s greatest living boogeyman?

Maybe. Maybe not.

An end table had a neat stack of mail on it. Bills. Jazz glanced through them. One wasn’t for Belsamo. The address was right, but the name was different. What kind of man didn’t throw away missent mail like that?

Jazz was beginning to regret coming here. He figured he should just go back into the bathroom and see if he could find a hair to bring back for the cops to compare to the DNA found at the various Hat-Dog scenes. Maybe he’d been wrong about Belsamo. Maybe his logic was wrong. His intuition was wrong. And that magical, superstitious buzz he’d felt on entering the apartment—maybe that was wrong, too.

But he decided to check one last place, dropping to his belly to skim the flashlight’s beam under the bed. He didn’t know what he expected to find, but it wasn’t what was there: a laptop. Old and boxy.

He hauled it out from under the bed and opened it. There was only one folder on the desktop.

It was named
Game
.

Jazz swallowed hard. He tried to open the folder, but it asked for a password and he had no idea whatsoever.

WELCOME TO THE GAME, JASPER.

The laptop wasn’t connected to the Internet, but Jazz looked at the browser history anyway. He found a bunch of links to what appeared to be S&M porn sites, but without an Internet connection, he couldn’t check to be sure. He was sort of glad for that.

S&M porn wasn’t Jazz’s particular kink, but it didn’t necessarily mean anything. Plenty of people were into that sort of thing, and the overwhelming majority of them didn’t rape, kill, and gut innocent victims.

There was nothing else of interest on the laptop.

Game.

Not
Games
. You might expect someone to have a folder on their computer labeled
Games
. Solitaire and video poker and Angry Birds and that stupid minesweeper game Howie loved to play.

But “Game”? Singular?

Game
doesn’t just mean something you play
, Jazz realized. Game
also means something you
hunt.

Was he looking at a folder containing information on the Hat-Dog victims? Profiles, dossiers, lists… clippings from websites about the murders? Cyber-trophies for an Internet-age madman?

But where does he keep the
real
trophies? The body parts
he took? Where does he keep his killing gear? Weapons? Rope? Tape? Knives?

Suddenly, Jazz focused beyond the secure folder, noticing for the first time Belsamo’s desktop pattern.

It was a crystal-clear photo of a black bird. Some sort of crow or raven.

He remembered the noise Belsamo had made in the interrogation room. Some sort of cawing sound. Just like a crow…

What is going
on
here?
A chill ran up both of Jazz’s arms and rippled across his shoulders for a split second. He imagined his Yosemite Sam tat shivering. A crow. The Crow King… the story… oh—