Game (15 page)

“Can I help you?” the woman asked suddenly. “I’ll just be a second.” She gestured with the cigarette and her expression said,
C’mon, kid—don’t make me put this out even a second early.

Connie gazed longingly into the window of the boutique.
She could probably spend hours in there, but she had a mission.

“Actually…” she said, and launched into the cover story she’d concocted for herself when prowling around the other crime scenes: She was a high school student writing a paper about the reliability of eyewitness testimony over time. “So, anyway, there was one of the Hat-Dog murders over that way….” She pointed toward the alley less than a block from where they stood. “I was just wondering, Miss—”

“Just call me Rabia.”

“Great. I’m Connie.” They shook hands.

“Who’s Puerto Rican? Mom or Dad?” That caught her off guard for a second. Back in the Nod, almost everyone assumed Connie was short for Constance. She’d never been hit with Consuela before.

“It’s actually Conscience.”

Rabia smiled. “Nice. Who does your hair, honey? It’s not bad, but let me fix you up with some extensions and—”

“I really sort of need to work on the report….” Connie said, biting her lower lip as if she regretted having to interrupt.

“Oh, yeah, that night,” Rabia said. “I remember that.” She dragged on the cigarette with practiced, sensual ease. Her fingernails—visible through the ends of her fingerless gloves—had the hard yellow cast of a serious nicotine fiend. Connie could only imagine what her lungs looked like. “The cops already asked me about it.” She sniffed and snorted smoke out through her nose, waiting expectantly as though for applause.

Connie widened her eyes a bit and said in the tone of a younger sister, “That’s pretty cool.”

Ill concealing her pleasure, Rabia shrugged. “No big deal. Look, it was months ago, okay? A lot warmer.”

“Right,” Connie said, egging her on. “It was warmer. So maybe you were outside later at night. On a smoke break. And…” She let it hang, let Rabia fill it in. Something she’d learned from Jazz: If you leave a sentence unfinished, people will want to finish it for you. It wasn’t a hundred percent guaranteed to work, but more often than not, people would pick up the thread without even thinking about it.

Connie hoped it would work this time. She’d been to five of the crime scenes and hadn’t been able to find anyone who’d been around at the time of the murders. Or at least, anyone who had been willing to admit it to a random teenager on the street. Rabia was her best shot so far.

And Rabia did not disappoint.

“And I was standing right about there,” Rabia said, grabbing the thread of conversation, pointing across a middling busy street. “Over near the mailbox. It wasn’t a bad night. Just having a smoke and looking at my window. Figuring out if it worked from across the way.” She craned her neck to look at the window now. “Still not sure about that display. Do you think—”

“So you were across the street,” Connie said quickly, before she could be dragged into a discussion about retail window displays. “And…”

“And it happened over there.” She pointed again, this
time to the alleyway. From the mailbox, it would be a pretty easy sightline. Connie already knew that the victim had been left there, guts in a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket nearby. “I told the police—I saw a guy coming out of there. Maybe six feet, maybe a little less. Wearing a hoodie. Gloves. I remember thinking it was too warm for gloves. That part I remember real well. And that was it.”

“You didn’t see anything else?”

“I told you.”

“Or hear anything?”

“Look—”

“Maybe you saw something that you didn’t really connect to it,” Connie urged her. Then, yanking something from her memory: “Maybe some kind of light or something.”

“No. I told the cops every—” She paused mid-drag, then lowered the cigarette without puffing. “Oh. Oh, wow. I forgot. How could I forget?”

“What didn’t you tell them?”

Rabia looked ill. “Lord, how could I have forgotten? I forgot right until you just asked me. It was so crazy that night….”

“What, Rabia?” Connie’s heart sped up a bit. She felt silly; did she think she would really crack the case all on her own? “What did you not tell them?”

Rabia shuddered, then shrugged, as if deciding then and there that it couldn’t be important. “You said a light, right? But it was probably nothing. Right? The alley lit up. For just a second before he came running out.”

Another flash. He took a picture again. Why? Is Jazz right—are these just his way of taking trophies? Or is it something else?

“That probably wasn’t important, right?” Rabia gnawed at her cuticle, her cigarette dangling ash. “They couldn’t have stopped him with just
that
, right?”

Connie told her probably not, then thanked Rabia and headed to the alleyway. A shiver surprised her as she entered—the body had been dumped here months ago and there wasn’t so much as a scrap of crime-scene tape to mark what had happened, but she still felt as though she trod on either haunted or hallowed ground. She couldn’t be sure which.

The alley looked depressingly like it had in the crime-scene photos, as though time had frozen here when winter came. The Dumpster was the same, although—as she glanced at the pictures on her phone—the bags of garbage spilling out of it were piled differently, of course. And there was no leftover snow in the picture of the original crime scene.

Connie sighed a cloud into the cold air and turned around. She wasn’t Jazz. She had no idea what mattered here and what didn’t. Jazz could imagine crime scenes the way they had been before the criminal left them, before he’d done whatever he could to throw off the cops. Jazz could tell when something was a clue or a coincidence, intentional or accidental. He could think like crazy people. What could Connie do?

Maybe, just maybe, I can think like Jazz.

She paced the alleyway, trying to imagine what Jazz would
do. He would mumble something about Billy. Then he might do that thing he did sometimes, where he silently mouthed what looked like both sides of a conversation. It wasn’t all the time, but she noticed it because she was with him so much. She was pretty sure he didn’t even realize he did it.

He wouldn’t look for something small. He would look for the thing that didn’t fit, no matter what size it was. Or maybe he would look for the thing that fit just a little too well. Sometimes, Jazz said, a killer tried too hard to make the scene look a certain way. In real life, things are rarely perfect, so if you see something at a crime scene that looks too good to be true, it might be.

Connie walked the length and width of the alley. She flicked through the pictures on her phone as she did so, matching up the images with the areas of the alley. It wasn’t easy—without the body and the crime-scene team’s equipment, the alley had a different character. She used marks and graffiti on the alley’s walls to try to match things up, which is how she ended up standing exactly where the body had been propped against the wall.

This is how the killer would have seen it
, she thought.
Right before he took the picture and ran off.

That’s what Jazz would say. And then he would furrow his brow and stare at the space until…

Until what? Until his brain exploded?

So the killer had stood here. Right here. A few years ago—before moving to Lobo’s Nod—Connie’s family had gone on a vacation to London, where they had taken a walking tour of Whitechapel, the London neighborhood haunted in the
Victorian Age by the legendary Jack the Ripper. The tour guide had enjoyed spilling the most lurid details of the crimes and had been sure to remind the tour group—repeatedly—that these parts of London had not changed much if at all since the Victorian Age.

“Jack may have lurked in this very doorway,” he’d said in his heavy English accent. “Jack trod the very cobblestones under your feet right now!”

Hat-Dog lurked in this very alleyway
, she thought.
Hat-Dog stood on the same dirty pavement under my feet right now.

What had he seen? Connie flicked through until she found a picture from her current vantage point. She held the phone out in front of her. The body. Framed by a concrete-block wall festooned with an exploded rainbow of profane, silly, artistic, and just plain incomprehensible graffiti.

Look for the thing that doesn’t belong.

—this very spot
—

For the thing that belongs too well
…

She went ahead and took her own picture, just as Hat-Dog had. The darkness of the alley flared to life for a moment and something caught her attention.

Did something else just light up? Or did I just blink at the right moment or…?

Checking her photo, she didn’t notice anything at first, but then she compared it to the original crime-scene photo. There, in the morass of graffiti on the wall behind where the victim had slumped, there was something new. It wasn’t in the original photo.

It’s just new graffiti. That’s all.

But as best she could tell, it was the
only
change. What were the odds?

She crept closer to the wall. Now that she knew what she was looking for, it was easy to find.

Connie had never tagged a wall in her life, but she knew from TV and movies that guys who tagged used spray paint. Sometimes they did funky stuff with neons, but usually it was just a can of whatever flat matte crap was on sale. She didn’t feel one way or another about graffiti, but she imagined it was tough to make such stable, consistent lines with a spray. It took some skill.

The new graffito, though, was shaky. Thin. Small. And even her untrained eye could discern its major differences from the surrounding tags: This wasn’t spray paint. It was some kind of plain white semi-gloss, like the stuff her dad used to paint the kitchen. It had been layered on with a brush, not sprayed on. It overlapped the original graffiti, so it had been added after the police descended on the alley.

More important, it had no style to it. Most of the other graffiti consisted of loops, whorls, arrows, and daring serifs. This was just slapped up there.

Five letters, in boring, somewhat shaky block print.

And everything—predictably—went to hell for Jazz. Straight to hell, full speed.

This hadn’t been the first time he’d been manhandled by the cops, but it was definitely the coldest. Hauled out of the hotel, he’d started shivering almost immediately, the cold January air nearly choking him. Long shoved him into the backseat of an unmarked car and drove them away.

Minutes later, they pulled up to a dingy brick building with an NYPD shield on the outside and a sign reading
76TH PRECINCT
. Jazz wondered briefly if he was under arrest. But he hadn’t been cuffed or read his rights, just pushed around.

Inside, the precinct was a madhouse, alive with chaos and noise. Uniformed cops, detectives in shirtsleeves, and a couple of men in ties who could only be—based on their stick-up-the-butt bearing—FBI agents milled about. The entrance to the precinct was clearly a sort of gathering area/lobby that had been pressed into duty as a command center; whiteboards and corkboards on wheels were parked against the
walls, pinned and markered and taped with photos, names, dates. Jazz recognized it all from the information Hughes had brought him yesterday. And it was there that Jazz sat for more than an hour, waiting to be seen by… someone. The cops and agents cast cursory and disinterested looks in his direction, until at some point someone must have realized who he was. At that point, a buzz of excited conversation stirred the stale, overheated air of the precinct, making Jazz want to curl up and vanish.

He texted Connie:
I think this is gonna take a while….

Directly across from him, unavoidably in his line of sight, was a series of plaques mounted to the wall, along with various badges and a trifolded American flag in a frame. It was a 9/11 memorial, he realized, reading the plaques. In honor of those from this precinct who’d died that day.

Jazz was too young to remember 9/11 itself, but Billy had been periodically obsessed with it. Throughout Jazz’s youth, he would sometimes sit and watch video of the World Trade Center towers collapsing over and over, the explosion of glass and flame from the side of the North Tower like a gush of arterial blood. Over and over.

So efficient
, Billy would mumble.
But no style. No flair.

It was the difference between serial murder and mass murder, as far as Billy was concerned.

“All these jackasses have done,” Billy told Jazz once, “is make people afraid to fly and afraid of New York. Which they already were in the first place. Takes real talent to get up close and personal and make you afraid of something brand-new.”

Jazz didn’t think the cops here would appreciate Billy’s insights into the tragedy that had claimed their brothers. He kept his mouth shut and waited.

Eventually, a door flew open down a hallway and Hughes stormed out. At first he didn’t see Jazz there, but as he got closer he spied Jazz and his expression softened for an instant.