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  The new dream…

  It was sex.

  Duh.

  Obviously.

  In the old dream—the dream which now seemed to be relegated to special guest appearances as the new one took over the starring role, yee-haw!—he had been hurting someone. Cutting someone with a knife. And the question for him then had been this: Unless I’ve actually cut someone with a knife before, how could I know what it feels like? How could I dream it so… so… keenly?

  Jazz was a virgin. Despite what Billy chose to believe, Jazz had never had sex. He was terrified by the possibility and the probability of it.

  He longed for it, too, of course. He was, after all, seventeen years old and in good health. He had hormones pumping through his bloodstream like any other seventeen-year-old. Sometimes he wanted sex so bad that he thought he would pass out from the strain of desire. He was dizzy with wanting it.

  But he was afraid of what it could lead to. Yes, there were serial killers out there who had no sexual component to their depredations, but they were few and far between, so rare as to be almost nonexistent. And none of them had been programmed since birth by William Cornelius “Billy” Dent.

  Jazz couldn’t remember much of his childhood. Who knew what time bombs Billy had planted deep down in his subconscious?

  Yeah, it was better to avoid sex. No matter how much he wanted it. No matter how smoking-hot his girlfriend was.

  Would that last forever? Or just until the raging flush of teen hormones abated in his bloodstream? He had no idea. Didn’t even want to speculate. But priests managed to live lifetimes without sex, right?

  Well, some of them managed.

  Poor Connie. She pretended like she didn’t mind missing out on sex, but especially in the last couple of months, it had become obvious to Jazz that she was ready—eager, even—to take things to the next level. And he just couldn’t do it.

  He had to be strong. For both of them.

  Rolling out of bed, he crept down the stairs. There was a bathroom upstairs, but it shared a wall with Gramma’s room, and flushing the toilet would wake her up.

  Washing his hands in the sink, he caught his bare torso in the mirror, and there it was: I HUNT KILLERS, tattooed in a V along his collarbone in those tall, black Gothic letters. It was tattooed backward so that he could read it in the mirror.

  That’s what I thought I was. A stalker of stalkers. A predator preying on predators.

  Sounded good. In theory. But the reality was this: He was just a messed-up kid living in a little town called Lobo’s Nod. What could he do? Hop on a plane to New York at a moment’s notice? Right. Who would watch Gramma? Who would take care of her and keep her deteriorating mental state a secret if he went off gallivanting to the big city to… do what? Sit in a squad room somewhere and regale a bunch of cops with tales of growing up under Billy’s thumb? Would that really accomplish anything?

  He turned this way and that in the mirror. In addition to his own tattoo, he also had four others: a massive pistol-packin’ Yosemite Sam on his back, a stylized CP3 (for basketballer Chris Paul) on one shoulder, a string of Korean characters around his right biceps, and the latest addition: a flaming basketball on the other shoulder. These weren’t really his tats—they were just renting space on his body. Howie’s hemophilia prohibited him from getting tattoos, so Jazz had volunteered his body as Howie’s personal billboard. He had always felt that this gesture was a point in his favor, something a true sociopath would never do. Now he wasn’t so sure. Offering up his body like that? Permanently marring it without even really thinking about it? Was that the height of friendship or the height of lunacy?

  He dried his hands and sneaked back upstairs without waking Gramma.

  He’d gotten lucky with the Impressionist. Simple as that. The man had been obsessed with Billy, and that obsession bled over to Jazz. It would have been nearly impossible not to catch the Impressionist. The man had literally come knocking at Jazz’s front door.

  I don’t hunt killers. I couldn’t save Ginny Davis. I couldn’t save Melissa Hoover. I almost couldn’t save myself. Who am I kidding?

  The Impressionist had been taking pictures and video of Jazz while he’d been in Lobo’s Nod. Where he’d found the time between murdering Helen Myerson and Jazz’s drama teacher and the others, Jazz had no idea. But the cops had recovered the pictures and video from the killer’s cell phone when they’d arrested him. As soon as Jazz found out about them, he’d insisted on seeing them.

  G. William, of course, had resisted. But Jazz was very persuasive. Natural gift for the progeny of a sociopath.

  We’re the most convincing people in the world, Billy liked to say. Everyone wants to do us favors. Everyone wants to make us happy. Until they know what it really takes to make us happy. Then they tend to put up a fight. He grinned here. By then, it’s usually too late for the fighting. But I guess they think they gotta try.

  So it had been a fait accompli—Jazz saw what his stalker had seen. Jazz outside the police station. On his way to the Coff-E-Shop. Hanging out with Howie. Holding hands with Connie on the way to play practice. A shot of his bedroom window at night, the light dimming.

  “This is what it feels like,” Jazz had murmured, clicking through the photos on G. William’s computer.

  “What what feels like?” the sheriff asked.

  Jazz had paused before answering, “To be stalked.” But that was just the kind answer, the answer G. William could accept. And of course he accepted it because it came from Jazz and Jazz was the most convincing person in the world when he needed to be.

  The truth—the real answer—was what he wanted to say but didn’t: This is what it feels like to be one of you. This is what it feels like to be vulnerable. And weak. And merely human.

  This is what it feels like to be a prospect.

  Now Jazz tossed and turned in bed. On his wall were photographs of the one hundred and twenty-three people Billy Dent had admitted to murdering. Plus a photo of his mother.

  His own mother had been a prospect.

  He drifted into that twilight space between wakefulness and sleep, that place where the world is plastic and malleable and unsure.

  His own mother…

  He groaned as sleep fled from him, and stretched to grab up his jeans from the floor where he’d left them. Pawed around until he found the pocket and the card within.

  There was a gold embossed shield to the left, with the words CITY OF NEW YORK POLICE DETECTIVE. The name LOUIS L. HUGHES, with DETECTIVE beneath it, along with two phone numbers, a fax number, and an e-mail address.

  Oh, hell. Jazz reached for the phone. If he was gonna do this, he might as well enjoy waking Hughes up in the middle of the night.

  CHAPTER 7

  “Well,” Connie told Jazz, doing her best to sound both forceful and casual at the same time, “obviously I’m going with you.”

  Jazz’s expression didn’t change. Connie cursed inwardly. It was so difficult to tell whether she’d gotten to him or not. He could conceal his reactions or fake them so well that even for her—even for the person who had gotten closer to him than anyone else in the world—it was impossible more often than not to tell what was going on behind those sexy and enigmatic eyes. Better luck reading a reaction from a portrait of him than the real deal.

  “You’re not going with me,” he said very calmly, with the slightest hint of a smile. That smile… was it to catch her off guard? Was it a slip on his part? Did he want her to think it was a slip? Or was it—

  “You’re such a pain sometimes,” she announced. “Would it kill you just to tell me what you’re thinking and maybe not try to manipulate me?”

  “I’m not trying to manipulate you. But you can’t come to New York with me. For one thing, your dad would go ballistic, and I don’t need that noise in my life.”

  Connie’s father made no secret of his deep and abiding loathing for Jazz. Between Jazz’s racist grandmother and Connie’s dad, she figured they had the makings of
a modern-day Romeo and Juliet on their hands. Only with more blood and death than even Shakespeare’s fertile imagination could conjure.

  “I can handle my dad,” she said confidently. They were at the Hideout, Jazz’s secret sanctum in the woods outside Lobo’s Nod. It was an old moonshining shack that he’d repaired and outfitted with the bare essentials as a getaway from the rest of the world. Connie was pretty sure she was the only person he’d shared it with. She tried not to let him know how much that meant to her—he was constitutionally leery of opening himself to other people, and she didn’t want to frighten him away. Snuggled together on a beanbag chair, they were as entwined as two clothed people could be, warmed by a space heater he’d rescued from his grandmother’s basement.

  “No one can handle your dad. Besides, I don’t know how long I’ll be gone, and you shouldn’t miss school. And besides besides, what are you going to do while I’m off with the cops?”

  “Golly,” she chirped in her very best sorority girl impression, “maybe I’ll go shopping and buy shoes and kicky skirts and makeup! Dumbass,” she said, punching him in the shoulder and dropping her voice. “I’ll be helping you. You think I’m going to see the sights?”

  “I hear they have really tall buildings.”

  “And subways.”

  “And museums.”

  “And more than a dozen black people, too. It’s truly a land of wonder.”

  “A miracle of our modern age,” Jazz agreed, and kissed the back of her neck.

  “Oh, don’t do that,” she admonished in a tone of voice that didn’t convince even herself. “You’re trying to distract me.”

  He kissed where her neck met her shoulder. “Mea culpa.”

  Connie’s head swam. She both hated and loved being so deliriously vulnerable to him. She’d never felt this way with another boy, and she knew Jazz had never felt this way with another girl. Her friends were fond of telling her that she was drawn to Jazz Dent because he was the ultimate bad boy—whereas some girls fell for selfish jerks, Connie was in love with a guy who was quite literally deadly.

  But that wasn’t it. Connie loved him despite his past, despite his darkness, not because of it. She saw in him a light, a light buried so deep that Jazz himself never saw it. But she did. Not always. There were hours and days and sometimes whole weeks that would go by where she lost track of it, but never had it failed to resurface. Connie believed in Jazz’s humanity more than he did.

  A sexy, brooding boyfriend who didn’t realize exactly how sexy and brooding he was? God save her! It was all she could do sometimes not to jump him, but she knew that he wasn’t ready for that, no matter how ready he acted and felt. They’d never discussed it, but it was clear to her. And she understood. Just reading about Billy Dent’s crimes had freaked her out; growing up with a dad whose version of “the talk” included binding techniques and torture tactics would be even worse.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked.

  “I’m thinking,” she managed to say, “that if you keep doing that thing with your tongue on my shoulder, I’m going to force myself on you.”

  He nipped her shoulder playfully and then disentangled from her, rising to adjust the space heater. “We’re running out of kerosene. It’s gonna get really cold in here soon. We should get going.”

  Connie kicked at his shin with the point of her toe. “You jerk. I’m onto you. You think you can make the sexy time with me and get me to forget what we were talking about? Not a chance. I’m going to New York with you.”

  He sighed that very special sigh, the one that said he was exasperated that she couldn’t just be manipulated and stay manipulated like his Dear Old Dad had promised him people would. “Hughes already has my ticket. We’re flying out tonight.”

  “Believe it or not, there are other ways of flying out that don’t rely on Detective Louis L. Hughes. If that’s really who he is.”

  Jazz grunted. “The middle initial? Stands for Lincoln. How do I know? I called his precinct commander to make sure he was an actual cop. I’m not getting Fultoned again.”

  They both fell silent. The Impressionist had suckered Jazz early and easily, claiming to be Jeff Fulton, the father of one of Billy Dent’s victims. Jazz had taken the man at his word and never bothered to check up on him. No one would ever know for sure, but Jazz was convinced that if he’d done some background snooping on Jeff Fulton, Ginny Davis and Helen Myerson and Irene Heller would still be alive.

  “You can’t go on your own.”

  “Why not?” he asked with infuriating aplomb, as though the question had already occurred to him and he was just letting her get it out of her system.

  “You’ve never been in a town bigger than the Nod in your life. I’ve been to New York three times and grew up near Charlotte before we moved here.”

  Jazz snorted and helped her up from the beanbag. “I’ll be with an NYPD detective. Somehow I think I’ll manage to avoid getting lost in the subway system. And even if I do get lost…” He dug into his pocket and proudly held up his new cell phone. After the disaster of the Impressionist, Connie, Howie, and even Sheriff Tanner had all chipped in to get Jazz his first cell.

  “Shows what you know, smart guy: Cell phones don’t work in the subway. Are you taking Howie with you instead of me? Is that it? Two guys out in the big city?”

  “Ha! Yeah, right. Are you kidding? After he got stabbed, his mother won’t let him outside of a ten-mile radius without a bodyguard and a Kevlar vest. I’d have to kidnap him to get him to New York….” Jazz drifted off, stroking his jaw. “Hmm… kidnap him…”

  Coming from anyone else, it would be funny. A brief moment of levity. But Jazz couldn’t quite pull it off, and Connie told him so. “Yeah, I know what you’re going for there, but I just got a chill down my spine.”

  “Really?” Jazz blinked. “That wasn’t funny?”

  “It’s all in the delivery. And you don’t have what it takes to pull off that kind of joke.” She pecked him on the lips, not wanting to tell him that for a moment there she’d actually been in fear for Howie’s life. “Come on, let’s get going. It’s already freezing in here.”

  “Does this mean you’ve given up trying to convince me you’re coming with me?”

  Connie thought for a moment and answered very carefully, very precisely. “Yes. It means I have given up trying to convince you.”

  But, she knew, that didn’t mean that she wasn’t going.

  That night, Connie toyed with her dinner at the Hall house, her appetite somewhere on a future flight with Jazz and Detective Hughes.

  “Something wrong, Conscience?” her father asked gently as she introduced her peas one by one to her untouched pile of mashed potatoes. Only her father ever used her full name. Everyone else, including her mother, called her Connie. Jerome Hall believed that names held power, and he wanted his children to have all the advantages such names conferred. And so Connie was Conscience and her younger brother—nicknamed Whiz—was Wisdom.

  “I’m okay,” Connie lied without even thinking about it. “Just not hungry, I guess.”

  “She was with her boyfriend today,” Whiz said, almost singsonging it. “I saw the text on her phone. They have a hideout somewhere.”

  Connie bristled. Whiz was ten years old, and his favorite pastime these days, it seemed, was spying on his big sister. “You’re a little sneak,” she told him.

  Ignoring Connie, Whiz shoveled a forkful of ham and potatoes into his mouth. “They text all the time,” he went on, “now that he has a cell phone. Jasper Dent,” Whiz added helpfully, in case anyone didn’t already know.

  “Whiz, I know your sister is still seeing that Dent boy. I don’t need you tattling on her.”

  “But, Dad—”

  “A butt is something you sit on and something I’m gonna kick if you don’t mind me.”

  Connie held back a smirk. Her father was all talk. There had never been a spanking in the Hall house that she could remember. It was actually annoying t
hat her father was the kindest, wisest man Connie knew… except for that special and pernicious blind spot he had toward her boyfriend.

  Sure, she understood that Jazz wasn’t the ideal boyfriend. At least, not from a parent’s perspective. Raised by a serial killer—and not just any serial killer, really: the serial killer—Jazz had his share of issues, but she didn’t think his father’s sins should be held against him. In any event, Jazz could have been the son of the local saint and Connie’s dad still would have been against the relationship. The black/white thing. Racial memories that hadn’t yet been purged. Jerome Hall just couldn’t abide seeing his daughter like that.

  For her part, Connie wished someone would invent a drug that would make the world forget the past and get on with the future. Her love life was seriously being messed with, and she couldn’t take it any longer. And now she had before her a nearly impossible task: how to convince her parents to let her take the last few days of winter break and go to New York with Jazz. Jazz had said no way, but who was he to boss her around? She could make her own decisions, and this was the one she’d made. Jazz would have no choice but to deal with it. It’s not like it was against the law for her to go to New York. He couldn’t stop her.

  Only her parents could do that.

  “I know there’s not much more I can do to stop you from seeing him,” her dad was saying, “because you’ll be eighteen soon and because I’ve always treated you like an adult. But I wish you would maybe cool it off a little.”

  “Dad has a point,” Mom said, jumping in before Connie could speak. “I know you feel strongly about Jasper, but you’re young. He’s your first real boyfriend. Maybe you should play the field a little. See what else is out there.”

  Connie sighed. What her parents said made sense. If you assumed she wasn’t in love with Jazz. Which she was. She didn’t know what the future might hold—she hadn’t given herself permission to think beyond the next couple of years—but she did know that she wanted to find out with him at her side.

  So what would Jazz do in this situation? Easy: He would manipulate. Which, of course, was a polite word for lie.