Blood of My Blood (37 page)

“You grew up fine, Jasper.”

Jazz gritted his teeth. He didn’t want Mr. Hall to see his tears, but they came, anyway.

Person to person. Just like Bobby Joe Long, letting Lisa McVey go.

One at a time. One person at a time.

Hall politely said nothing about Jazz’s tears. He just held out the box of tissues to him.

“You asked before if this was the part where I tell you that you can’t see Connie anymore. No, Jasper,” he said. “This is the part where I tell you that…” He paused and shook his head. “Where I tell you that I feel so sorry for you. I just feel so damn sorry for you, son.”

There was a quality in Mr. Hall’s voice that was unfamiliar to Jazz at first. After a moment, he placed it.

It was fatherly.

For the first time in so long, it soothed him, and he felt himself drifting toward gentle sleep.

“You rest now,” Mr. Hall said. “Everything is going to be okay. You deserve it. Rest.”

Jazz closed his eyes.

It was an ugly day. It was an ugly room.

Except for the body.

The book made Jazz rich.

A Murder of Crows: My Life Inside the Serial Killer Conspiracy
by Jasper Dent (as told to Ricardo Sloan, Jazz’s enthusiastic ghostwriter) debuted at number one on the
New York Times
Nonfiction Best Seller list and stayed there for sixteen weeks. It took eight months for the book to drop out of the top five, and another thirty months before it dropped out of the top ten. At random points in time, it would bubble up onto the list again for no particular reason, stay there for a month or so, then drop off. Until the paperback hit, and then the cycle started all over again.

The over-the-top subtitle had been insisted on by the publisher; Jazz hated it.

Jazz didn’t let the money change him. Other than renovating Gramma’s house in the Nod, he tried to live the life he’d always craved: quiet and simple. He would—on those occasions when the mood struck him and the case seemed particularly intractable—offer his services to the FBI or
some local police agency that seemed stymied by a killing. After all, there were still a lot of Crows out there. The deciphering of Billy’s “journal” was a difficult affair, involving language experts, cryptographers, handwriting analysts, and—when all else failed—Jazz himself.

The tattoo across his chest—
I HUNT KILLERS
—still peered out at him every time he looked in a mirror, and sometimes it was still true.

But most of his time was spent overseeing the house renovation and working on his own pet project: a victims’ fund for those left behind by Billy Dent and Ugly J. He had to do it in secret. He didn’t want people to think he was buying forgiveness or understanding.

Those two things should not be for sale, at any price.

Howie, who had graduated college by now with a degree in business administration, was helping Jazz set up the fund. They spent big chunks of the day together, inevitably dissolving into idiotic juvenile laughter. It was like being kids again.

Except Connie wasn’t there.

Connie was in New York, an understudy in a well-received off-Broadway play. She usually got to go onstage a couple of nights a month, and her reviews had been good so far. She and Jazz spoke almost daily. He missed her, yearned for his other half, but he couldn’t take her dream from her. Love could burnish dreams but not substitute for them. She came home to the Nod as often as she could. Jazz visited New York rarely. The city held too many memories for both of them, but only Jazz could cause a minor riot by showing his face anywhere in the five boroughs.

Jazz knew that right now they were on separate paths. This was a good thing. She had seen and suffered too much being at his side. Now she was finally ready to be on her own. Those separate paths would meet again, would intertwine.

He could, of course, manipulate her. Control her. Draw on all those old tricks, those old schemes, so easy and readily available, like the house keys that come out of your pocket almost on their own as you approach the door, without conscious thought.

He had the keys to Connie’s mind and soul and heart. They jangled in his pocket every time he thought of her. Twisting up her emotions, making her cleave to him and making her think it had all been her own idea… Bringing her home for good, her dreams forsaken… That would be the easiest thing in the world.

But that’s what a sociopath would do.

And Jasper Francis Dent was not a sociopath.

Aunt Samantha had vanished. It would not be difficult to find her—innocent people don’t know how to hide—but while Jazz yearned for his only family, he could not bring himself to force himself back into her life. If there could be one Dent living beyond the taint of Butcher Billy and the Crow King, then let that be his aunt. She’d grown up with Billy. And as someone who’d done the same, he decided she deserved her privacy and her anonymity.

Most days—unless something absolutely prevented him or he was out of town—Jazz drove out to the Kettle/Herrara Care Institute, roughly a forty-five minute drive from the Nod. It was the best, most expensive long-term care facility
in the state, a Gothic castle–looking edifice on a field of rolling hills, cherry trees, and oaks. Jazz paid good money to have his mother housed there, hooked up to the machines that breathed for her, fed her, dripped medicine into her.

Alive, but in what the doctors called a “persistent vegetative state.” Lack of oxygen to the brain for a prolonged period of time.

He was such a fixture that Dr. Indari, responsible for his mother’s care, joked about getting him an employee badge.

Kettle/Herrara was expensive, but not luxurious. The room in which his mother lay was ugly, the walls painted a sick green, the lighting dim and bland. He stood over his mother, watching her as she slept the sleep of the brain-dead. He knew that there was no activity in that head of hers—if he didn’t believe the docs, the EEG by her bedside told the tale—but he liked to think that somewhere deep down, she could hear him. Sense him.

“Hello, Mom,” he told her, as he did every time he visited. “It’s Jasper.”

Dr. Indari said that it was a very human thing to do, talking to someone when you know they can’t hear you. If he still had concerns about his own humanity, this would have allayed them.

Beautiful Janice—Ugly J—was beautiful no more. Her skin was dry and sallow, her cheekbones sunken. Machines beeped out her life.

As her only living blood relative, Jazz had medical power of attorney. As Indari reminded him often, he could pull the plug at any time.

A stroke of a pen to sign the orders. That’s all it would take to send Ugly J out of this world.

Every day, Jazz came to Kettle/Herrara CI and sat with his mother. Every day, he listened to her machine-assisted breath, watched her chest rise and fall, watched her closed eyelids occasionally flicker and jump from muscle spasms. The order to pull the plug lay on a clipboard by her bed, a pen sitting atop it.

Every day, he came here. Every day, he thought of what she had done.

“I could kill you anytime I want,” he whispered in her ear, like a lover.

Every day, he decided: Not today.

One more time…

Thanks again to Detective Paul Grudzinski of the NYPD and to Dr. Deborah Mogelof for law enforcement and medical advice, respectively. Where I got it right, it’s all them; where I got it wrong, it’s all me.

I also want to thank my agent, Kathy Anderson, and everyone at Anderson Literary Management for holding on during this wild ride.

I have more gratitude than you can imagine for everyone at Little, Brown who supported this quite crazy endeavor, especially not knowing where I was headed from the very beginning. My editor, Alvina Ling; her team, Bethany Strout, Nikki Garcia, and Pam Gruber; my production editor, Wendy Dopkin; the Sales, Publicity, Marketing, and Promotions folks (including Victoria Stapleton, Faye Bi, Jenny Choy, and Andrew Smith); the foreign sales team, including Amy Habayeb and Kristin Delaney; the designers and production team, who made these books look as creepy and as powerful
as possible; and publisher Megan Tingley. Thank you all so much for your care, your professionalism, your attention to detail, and your faith in me.

Special thanks to Eric Lyga and Morgan Baden for reading the early drafts, and to Libba Bray for “Two Writers, One Bullet.”

Last but not least, thanks to
you
for reading this.

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