Free I Hunt Killers Neutral Mask by Barry Lyga Page B

moon, okay?”
    “I don’t get it,” she managed, her breath returning in the nick of time.
    “The moon wavers and the moon changes and the moon drives some people crazy, but the moon is always there. That’s Howie Gersten. He’ll drive you nuts, but he’s always there .”
    “He’s your best friend.” Right. Noted. Connie was pretty sure she’d read an article on some website somewhere about not dissing your man’s bestie.
    She had changed the subject quickly.
    And now she thought: Howie Gersten .
    Howie had a social networking profile. He was on Facebook. He was on Twitter. (His bio: “Raconteur. Stealth romantic. Ladies’ Man Supreme. It’s OK to want me so bad.”)
    But nowhere in his list of followers or friends could she find a link to Jazz.
    Other girls might have given up at this point. Other girls might have resigned themselves to the fact that Jazz just wasn’t an online kind of guy. But other girls weren’t as determined as Connie Hall.
    Other girls, she admitted, probably didn’t have so much free time on a random Saturday, either.
    She plugged Jasper Dent into Google, figuring that she would get nothing. After all, what were the odds of a kid without a Facebook profile doing anything Google-able—
    A page of links came up. Connie tried to swallow, but her throat had clogged, had jammed up with something heavy and corrosive, something that blunted her breath and burned the back of her tongue. Something acid and primitive.
    K ILLER ’ S S ON : J UST A NOTHER V ICTIM ? read the first link. An article by a man named Doug Weathers.
    A photo. A boy. Definitely Jazz, though younger.
    And beneath, a caption. Two names. She knew both of them.
    J ASPER D ENT , SONOF W ILLIAM C ORNELIUS D ENT , SEENHEREINASCHOOLYEARBOOKPHOTO .
    Why didn’t...why didn’t anyone tell me? Why didn’t anyone—
    Because you never asked, Connie . Because you never told anyone you were seeing him. You were being careful. You were...
    She closed the laptop and huffed in air through her nose. She forced herself to take a deep, cleansing yoga breath to crush and dissolve and gag down that ball of torment stuck in her gullet.
    Billy Dent. She knew the name. Everyone knew the name. But Dent was such a bland last name that she’d never...
    Oh, God, she thought.
    *****
    C ONNIE READ EVERYTHING SHE could. She read for hours.
    Her mother came by at one point, leaning in the door that way she did, as if not wanting to place a foot in her daughter’s space without permission, and asked if Connie wanted lunch. With one hand scrolling the laptop’s track pad, Connie waved her off with the other, far more dismissive and disrespectful than she normally would have been.
    But Mom was part of some other world, and Connie was currently orbiting a whole different planet.
    The planet of Billy Dent.
    It had only been a few years since Billy Dent’s arrest, but those years to a sixteen year old might as well have been decades. There are eons between thirteen and sixteen. Millennia. The Halls had been living in Charlotte. Billy Dent’s arrest in Lobo’s Nod—a town that might as well announce “The Middle of Nowhere’s bedroom community” on its welcome sign—had not made enough of an impression at that age for her to remember the town, the state. She’d been latched onto her budding interests in yoga and acting. She’d been discovering boys, and they’d been discovering her.
    A madman in the middle of the country held no interest to her.
    And now she was dating his son.
    “Is he black?” her father had asked, and Connie began giggling, snickering as if it could ward off disease or death or even—let’s say— a crazy serial killer.
    Not only is he white, Dad, she could picture herself saying, but you know that guy they call “Butcher Billy” on TV? Guess what?
    On YouTube, there was a clip of Billy Dent coming down the steps of a courthouse with his lawyer. He wore a gray pin-striped suit with a black-and-pale-blue rep tie. And