Blood of My Blood (23 page)

Before releasing Howie back into the real world beyond the walls of the cemetery, Jazz had him bring the prescriptions he’d filched from his mother. Waiting until Howie left, Jazz greedily gobbled down another painkiller—he was now at twice the recommended dose—and one of the antibiotics, then slumped against a tombstone for a break. The cold ground burned his ass through Mark Culpepper’s pants. Sweaty from his labors, he’d stripped off Hughes’s overcoat, so he folded it up and sat on it.

Before him, his grandfather’s grave looked chewed. He’d broken through the hardest layer of earth in a ragged oval measuring about three feet through its major axis. Now dark, rich dirt welcomed him. Less frozen, sure, but he would need to shovel it out rather than just use momentum and gravity and his own weight to break through it.

He thought—briefly—of Howie. And of his grandmother. He hadn’t believed Howie at first, but it took only moments for him to understand her death to be true and immutable.
Jazz didn’t believe in ghosts or magic or the supernatural; he didn’t cotton to ESP or psychic powers or any of that crap. But he somehow
knew
she was dead, knew beyond and more deeply than Howie’s simple reportage. Something fundamental had shifted. In the universe. Or in him. Maybe in both.

She was gone. He’d fantasized her death, and now it was reality. Just as Billy had dreamed so many murders and then sketched them into the real world by sheer force of will and by dint of his exceptional, lethal prowess.

I didn’t kill her
, he told himself.
I didn’t kill her
.

He wondered: If there was a God or some other sort of figure controlling the universe, was it his/her/its idea of a joke that Jazz would come to exhume his grandfather right after his grandmother’s death?

If so, it was a lousy joke.

Maybe I should dig another hole right next to him for Gramma
.

He hauled himself to his feet. The painkillers made him dizzy and dreamy for a moment, but his leg’s complaints had gone silent, which was welcome. With a small groan, he began digging.

You know more than you think
, Billy had claimed.
You’ve got the beginnings of it, boy
.

He’d invoked Gilles de Rais. But not Belle Gunness. Belle Gunness, one of the first black widows of the modern age, maybe. Late 1800s. Came to America. Killed the men who courted her, lived off their leavings. Killed her own two daughters.

And, in her crowning achievement, vanished from history. Never brought to justice. It was believed she’d faked her own death. Disappeared into some other life.

Like Aunt Samantha, leaving the Nod, disappearing into a new identity.

He should have seen it. Should have recognized her for what she was. Aunt Sam was Ugly J and she was Belle Gunness. Using multiple names, like Billy.

He wondered: Had Billy taught his sister how to evade capture? Or had she taught him?

It had to be the former. Women just didn’t seem to have the constellation of psychological disorders necessary for prolonged strings of murder. Most typical was for them to work with a male partner, like Fred and Rosemary West in England, a couple who had murdered boarders at their house, as well as their own daughter.

Rosemary had claimed Fred forced her into it. Pleaded her innocence.

To their credit, the Brits didn’t buy it, and she was still in prison.

How many had Ugly J killed, wandering the world, utterly free, unsuspected? How many were dead because no one would ever think to point the finger at a woman?

Billy said it all started in the Nod. And it did. This is where he and Sam grew up. Where they learned how to prospect. Maybe over the years they teamed up on occasion. Maybe they gave each other tips. It was a game to them, just like the murder Monopoly Hat and Dog were playing. I bet they stayed in touch, one-upping each other over the years
.

Until Billy ended up in jail. And Sam just couldn’t bear that, could she? Her partner in crime, her brother, locked up? Penned in like a common criminal? Not a chance.

It had taken her years, but she’d been able to get to the Impressionist. Set him on his way, sent him to the Nod. Put Jazz in a position where he would have to seek out Billy’s help.

And then, when Billy was ready, he broke out. By having me send a signal to Sam without even knowing it
.

He remembered that time with Billy in the penitentiary. He’d thought that he was safe from Billy, what with the chains and the guards. But Billy had been in control the whole time. It was like playing checkers, only to learn that your opponent was playing chess all along.

And he told me
…

Told you as much back at Wammaket. Told you where it started
.

Yes. Yes, he had. Jazz just hadn’t realized it at the time. What it meant. It had sounded like more of the verbal chaff Billy vomited into their air, aurally toxic nonsense designed to keep the listener off guard and one step behind.

But not this time. No, this time he had flat out told Jazz where to go and what to do. And Jazz hadn’t listened. He’d been too impressed with himself for bearding Billy in his den, for not only daring to defy his father but also to go to him cloaked in that defiance and ask Billy to help—through Jazz—the police.

And Billy had played him masterfully.

I don’t think you’d be wanting me dead, anyway
, his
father had said.
Know what set me off on my prospecting? My own daddy died
.

It was bull. Jazz’s grandfather had died twenty years ago, and Billy’s first confirmed kill—Cassie Overton—dated to a little more than a year before that. And knowing Billy’s meticulous and conservative nature, that meant he’d been planning and plotting murder for at least a few years before that.

Know what set me off on my prospecting? My own daddy died
.

Not true. Many serial killers were set off by the death of a father or father figure, but not Billy. Which meant there was something
else
about the late Jon Dent—or, more accurately, his death—that Billy had taunted Jazz with. Idiot that he was, Jazz hadn’t even known he was an idiot.

A squirt of pain shot through the barrier of the drugs Howie had delivered, and Jazz realized he was hip deep in dirt, having dug several feet down without pause. He didn’t know how long he’d been digging, and the still night sky offered no clues. Only the ache of his shoulders and neck told him it must have been over an hour.

He leaned on his good leg until the bad one sank back into a dull throb, then kept digging. Soon his shovel clunked against something hard.

Failing to keep his excitement in check, he found himself in a renewed flurry of digging. He didn’t have time to dig a six-foot-deep trench the length of the casket, so he settled on clearing away the dirt covering the upper third, where the hinged lid was divided into a separate door to reveal the
head and upper body for a viewing. His late grandfather, as best he could remember, had died of a stroke. (Gramma, now late herself, had alternated between the stroke story and claiming that her husband had been killed by a bolt of lightning cast by a local witch.) No reason not to have an open casket at the service.

With sharp blows from the pickax, he broke the hinges and clasps on the casket. Took a deep breath and held it. The stench, he knew, would be epically awful. And possibly dangerous—some sort of bacterium or toxin could escape with the uncovering of the body. Jazz figured crossing his fingers would have to pass as disinfectant. And maybe those antibiotics would shield him if Gramps had something to offer from beyond the grave.

Still holding his breath, he wrestled the top section off the casket. An invisible cloud of warm, noisome air wafted up at him, drifting into his nostrils even though he held his breath. Fighting his gag reflex, he set the wooden door aside and then scrambled out of the hole to lay panting on the cold ground. He rolled onto his back and stared up into the night sky. He’d missed the stars while in New York. Too much light pollution there; too few stars. Home in the Nod, the sky fairly exploded with them.

After a few minutes, he ventured back into the hole. The stench of decayed flesh and rotted gas lingered. Jazz tugged his shirt up around the lower half of his face and breathed through his mouth. He didn’t know what inhaling this might do to him. A decomposing body didn’t just disappear—the decomposed parts had to become something; conservation
of matter and energy proved it. So the noxious air swirling around Jazz actually
was
parts of his grandfather, devoured and converted to gases by the population of microorganisms that lived in the intestines.

Jazz remembered the stages of decomposition as Billy had taught them to him the way other kids remembered commercial jingles. “A, P, B, P, F, and DD,” he muttered in a singsong tone under his breath.

Jazz’s grandfather had been in the grave twenty years. He was in the final stage of decomposition, the mayor of Dry Decaytown, no question about it. In the waning moonlight, Jazz spied white bone and the endless-seeming pits of empty eye sockets and nostrils. The casket was old and cheap, not waterproof. Mildew and mold clung to the bones here and there. Jazz wished he’d asked Howie to bring a flashlight.

Not thinking straight. The damn leg. The truck. Marta. Everything else. Nice job, Jazz
.

He crouched down, poised precariously over his grandfather. He didn’t relish the idea of having to fish around in the casket. There could be washes of corpse liquor in there—a foul liquid slick of decomposed remains containing all kinds of nasty bugs.

As he adjusted his position, the pale moonlight fell, illuminating the tattered remains of the lapels of his grandfather’s burial suit. He spied the very edge of something there, something that most likely lay clasped in the dead man’s hand. From the glimmer in the moonlight, it looked like a clear plastic bag.

Reaching into the casket with infinite care, braced cautiously against the side of the pit he’d dug, Jazz brushed his fingertips against the object.

Definitely plastic. A Ziploc bag. With something in it.

It felt like a book.

He tugged at it carefully, not wanting to pull anything other than the book. It stuck fast. He tried a little harder.

Something gave. There was a hollow
snap
and a rattle, and the book came out into his hands.

Fortunately, it was dry. He clambered out of the grave and proceeded to cough until he vomited, steadied against his own grandfather’s headstone as his guts recoiled and contracted until he dry heaved the memory of food long-since digested.

Please let this not be my grandfather’s beloved Bible or diary. Please let it matter
.

He propped himself against the other side of the headstone, avoiding the slick of his puke. The book was black. Or dark green. Or brownish red. It had once been blue. Or gray. Or puce. Who could tell? Protected by the plastic bag, it had suffered less than Grampa himself, but age, decay, and mildew had still taken their respective tolls. Unzipping the bag, he caught a brief whiff of mustiness that was almost pleasant and welcome in comparison to the reek from the grave.

The book was hardcover, its face blank. It looked like a sketchbook of some sort. Jazz cracked it slowly, worrying it would fall apart. Dust filtered down into his lap and the spine split, but the book held together well enough.

No sketches. Not on the first page, at least. Just words. Cramped and diligently scripted from gutter to fore edge.

He recognized his father’s handwriting immediately. The page was clotted with text, impossible to read without decent lighting, but one sentence loomed larger than the others.

Hughes figured he would recognize Sheriff Tanner on sight, and sure enough, he could have picked the guy out of a crowd even without the uniform and ridiculous sheriff’s hat. Tanner looked exactly as Hughes had figured—a corpulent, smashed-nose redneck with a comically absurd mustache. You couldn’t have gotten a better look from central casting.

The airport closest to Lobo’s Nod was two hours from the town itself, in another state, one equally as infamous for its notably lax attitude toward pesky things like civil rights. Hughes had flown into this airport when he’d picked up Jasper—a thousand years ago, that felt like; back when the boy was innocent, it seemed.

He had only his carry-on, so he shrugged through the crowd to Tanner, who actually tipped his hat in greeting, for God’s sake.

“Sheriff. Louis Hughes, NYPD.” Under normal circumstances, he would have shown his badge at this point, just to
make everything official. But he couldn’t do that, because the Dent kid was probably using it to ’jack cars right about now.

And the damn sheriff knew it, too. Hughes detected a hint of a smile beneath that ridiculous mustache. “Pleased to meet you,” Tanner said, and held out a hand. They shook.

As they headed to the sheriff’s car—parked, Hughes noted with grudging respect, in the no-parking zone—Hughes thumbed through his phone, looking for updates from Miller. Nothing yet on Samantha Dent.

“Anything new?” Tanner asked as they pulled away from the airport.

“No. I have my people looking into the sister. All they’ve found so far for the past few years is that time the media got ahold of her and put her on TV. Nothing outstanding. Everything’s boring. Maybe too boring, if you get my drift.”

The sheriff adjusted the heat. Hughes was freezing, but a man of Tanner’s girth probably ran the AC in December. “Maybe I can have one of my people coordinate with you. I’ve got a deputy interviewing people who knew her when she lived in town.”

Hughes’s regard for Tanner almost accidentally slipped up a notch. “Good idea. Anything yet?”

“Not yet. But we have a lot of people to talk to. Folks don’t really move away from the Nod. Not the older ones, at least.”

“Did you know her?”

“No. She left town young. I never met her. Bumped into Billy all the time. You couldn’t live here without bumping into him. Never really spent any time with him until after his wife ran off, though. That’s when I got to know him and met
Jazz and…” He hesitated before going on. “I don’t suppose you had Wi-Fi on the flight?”

Hughes’s internal alerts started flashing. “Why? What happened?” If either Dent had already been found…

“Not sure it’ll matter, but Billy Dent’s mother passed in the hospital earlier today. FBI is already en route.”

Hughes nodded. Of course. Even if Billy weren’t on his way to Lobo’s Nod, the FBI would suppose that the death of his mother might get him to come home—in disguise, of course—for her funeral. Other killers had been caught in just such a fashion.

“I’m sending deputies to start staking out the cemetery and we’re locking down the morgue,” Tanner went on. “Just in case.”

“How’d the old lady go?”

“Still some debate about that. Looks like heart attack, but might could be something else. Medical examiner’s not taking any chances.” When Hughes said nothing, Tanner went on: “A nurse went in shortly before she died. No one at the hospital can seem to account for her.”

Hughes perked up at that. “A woman. So Dent
does
have a partner.”

“Seems like. She matches the description of the sister in terms of age—somewhere in her forties. I’ve got a sketch artist working with my deputy.”

“Why your deputy?”

Tanner shifted his considerable bulk uncomfortably. “Well, it ain’t nothing to be proud of, but my deputy was standing guard when all this happened.”

Hughes uttered a short bark of laughter and shook his head, then gazed out the window at the complete lack of anything to look at. Endless fields, occasionally broken by a tree. “Nicely done. Small-town police work at its finest.” Normally he would be more diplomatic, but he was tired. He was pissed. He was badgeless. And now the Keystone Kops had let an accomplice murder someone literally under their noses.

“Tell me how you really feel,” Tanner said.

Hughes grunted. “Trust me, you don’t want to know.”

“Suit yourself. But you might feel better if you admit your part in this.”

Hughes laughed again, without humor. “My part? Are you kidding me?”

Watching the road, Tanner said mildly, “I’m not.”

Ready to retort, Hughes instead retreated against the passenger door. Tanner was right, of course. The whole thing (
thing
encompassing too much even to imagine at this point) couldn’t be laid at his feet, but he’d played his part. He’d screwed up enough for any ten guys, and even though he’d been well intentioned, it didn’t matter. People were dead. Careers were ending, maybe even his own before this was all over with. If it ever
would
be “over with.” Billy Dent had avoided the law for decades. His sister had gone radar-invisible for just as long. And a teenage kid was proving to be just as tough to find. At this rate, Hughes had no trouble envisioning a future in which he died in an old-age home somewhere, the TV bleating about the still-at-large Dent clan.

Hughes had brought Jazz to New York in the first place. It had seemed so simple and easy at the time, but then, as bad as things were, they got further out of hand
very
quickly. Which made everything that followed
his
fault. He pinched the bridge of his nose, reliving the moment when Finley had accordioned the door to unit 83F up along the ceiling. The kick of the stench. The blood. Morales’s body. Goddamn it.

“I should have kicked him loose the minute he told me about breaking into Belsamo’s apartment,” Hughes whispered, unable to open his eyes, unable to look over at Tanner. Confessions should always be blind.

“I should have locked him up,” he said. “Or at the very least put him on a plane back to Podunktown. But no. No. I gave him the benefit of the doubt. I sent him to his room like a naughty schoolkid, instead of treating him like the jug of nitroglycerin he is. And now Morales is dead and I’m the one on the way to Podunktown and my career’s probably over, but I’m goddamn well bringing the Dents down first.”

Only the hum of road noise greeted his pronouncement. When he opened his eyes, Tanner was still studying the cone of highway illuminated by his high beams.

“Did you hear me? Does that make you happy? Big-city cop admits he screwed the pooch up, down, and sideways?”

“You feel better?” Tanner asked.

“Oh, sure.” The sarcasm dripped thick and bitter. “So much better.”

But as much as he hated to admit it, Hughes did feel just a tiny bit better. It wasn’t that he’d said it out loud—it was that he’d finally
heard
what he was sure everyone was thinking.
It was out in the world now, those words, those ideas. Not bottled up somewhere, hidden away, waiting to spring on him or to be sprung by someone else. He’d spoken them aloud and made them smaller.

“Seems to me you were doing the best you could with what you had,” Tanner said. “But what the hell do I know?”

A lot more than most people—Hughes included—gave him credit for, Hughes suspected.

He sat up straight in the passenger seat and opened the notes app on his phone to go over the checklist he’d made on the plane. He added a few items. “I want to see the Dent house. And the cemetery. And the old lady, for that matter.”

“Of course.”

“But I should find a hotel first.”

“Already got you registered at the one closest to the sheriff’s office.”

Hughes grinned. When he looked over at Tanner, he realized the big man was grinning, too. From this angle, his mustache didn’t look all that ridiculous.