Game (32 page)

Morales drove Jazz to the crime scene; Hughes stayed behind to coordinate the task force gathering the day’s alibis from their potential suspects.

“We also ran his name as a matter of course,” Morales said, still speaking of Belsamo, clearly pissed off. “He was questioned the night of the S-line murder in connection with a drunk-and-disorderly. Unis confirm he was with them for an hour in Boerum Hill. No way he had time to schlep out to Midtown, find our girl, do his thing, and then leave her on the S.”

“So… it’s definitely not him.”

Morales nodded a tight little nod. “Never even got anyone in there to take a blood sample. All happened too fast. Damn!” She slammed a palm against the steering wheel. “Thought we had this one.” She grabbed her phone and stabbed out a number as they paused at a light, then barked at whoever answered to cancel the court order. “No point wrecking a judge’s weekend for nothing. We might need a happy one later on.”

Jazz could feel the smoldering anger boiling off her like steam. She probably thought it made her tough, but it actually made her vulnerable. Angry people weren’t thinking straight. It would be easy to—

Stop doing that!

Never killed a cop before. Not even a lady cop
, Billy mused.
And this one’s real special, ain’t she? Tried to catch ol’ Hand-in-Glove, didn’t she? Would be great to get to know her from the inside out, get my drift?

Go to hell, Billy.

Hell’s all around, Jasper m’boy?

As Morales had said, the crime scene was mere blocks from the precinct. A crowd had gathered, along with the usual media vultures. Morales handed Jazz a pair of sunglasses and an FBI baseball cap. Crude disguise, but maybe it would work.

NYPD uniforms had set up a perimeter around the scene and now did their level best to keep gawkers and press from getting too close. Jazz looked around quickly as he stepped out of the car. This was brazen, leaving the body here. P.S. 29 was on the corner of Baltic and Henry. Not a busy intersection, from what Jazz could tell, but even a lightly traveled New York intersection got more traffic than the busiest in Lobo’s Nod. Right across the street was a Chinese restaurant—two guys in food-spattered aprons stood in the doorway, gaping at the craziness across the street.

The rest of the buildings within sight looked residential. Smallish, squat apartment buildings and some town houses.

“He’s definitely getting cocky,” Jazz murmured to Morales
as they ducked under the crime-scene tape. “Dumping right out in the open like this?”

“Yeah.” Morales had taken in the surroundings, too. “Safe bet—well, safe-
ish
—that no one’s lingering around a school on the weekend, but even so, he had to figure
someone
would pop up unexpected.”

“Where’s the witness?”

Morales pointed. An NYPD uniform stood near the front door to the school, holding out a cup of what could have been coffee or water or even whiskey to a woman in a winter coat who seemed to be on the verge of hyperventilating. “Dr. Meredith Sinclair. Assistant principal at P.S. Twenty-nine. She’s not going to be any use to us for a few minutes. Let the unis calm her down and then we’ll take a run at her.”

Jazz liked the way she said “we.”

The body lay almost like a snow angel just within a fence that separated the school grounds from the sidewalk along Baltic. Nothing new. Jazz went into instant assessment mode.

Caucasian female, age twenty-five to thirty. Blond. Naked. Slit open from breastbone to waist, the gaping wound of her gut revealing the shiny-slick loops of intestines. Eyelids gone. Eyes missing.

“Left the guts
in
this time,” Morales mumbled, crouching down for a better look, blocking a crime-scene tech. Annoyed, the tech moved a bit and took another photo of the body. Another cop shot video.

“No,” Jazz said. “Put them
back
.”

Morales arched an eyebrow and summoned one of the medical examiner’s men, who probed at the corpse and
confirmed that, yes, the intestines were no longer attached to the body. They’d been removed, then stuffed back inside.

“Evolution of his signature?” Morales wondered aloud.

“Or maybe just expedient,” Jazz said. “Maybe he wanted to leave a clean murder site and he didn’t have anywhere else to put her guts when he moved her.”

“She was left here sometime between ten, ten-fifteen, which is when Dr. Sinclair got here to do some work before the winter break ended, and three, which is when she came out the front door. Nice little five-hour window.” Morales tsked. “Anything else, Boy Wonder? You’re the one who found all the stuff we missed at the other scenes.”

Jazz shook his head. “There’s nothing else to see here. This is just the dump site. Every clue available to you is in or on the body.” He turned a tight circle, scanning the surroundings. “I don’t see any security cameras pointed this way. You won’t see him there. But maybe canvass the surrounding blocks, see if someone saw something as he headed this way. He wouldn’t have been walking, not with a load like that. You’re looking for a car that stopped at this intersection, a guy who got out….”

“Then why check around the other blocks?”

“Because he had to come from
some
where. If you can get an ID on the kind of car, maybe you can figure out which direction he came from. Maybe another camera out there somewhere on his route caught a picture of him or his license plate or something.”

Morales kicked at the ground. “Yeah. Okay.” He could tell by her tone of voice that she thought it was useless. And she
was probably right. But they had to try something. Anything, at this point.

“He’s showing his contempt for us,” Jazz told her. “He knows the investigation is headquartered right down the road. He might have even known we were interviewing suspects.”

Morales clucked her tongue. “How would he know that? You think he’s a cop?”

She asked it so matter-of-factly that it stunned Jazz. No attempt to conceal her thoughts, no attempt to lower her voice. The New York cops within earshot all went stony-faced, offended, angered. If she noticed, Morales didn’t show it.

“Nah,” Jazz said lightly. It was possible, of course. But this seemed like such a risky move…. Would a cop—even a crazy cop—take such a chance? “I think he’s FBI.”

Morales blew out a puff of laughter. “Okay, yeah, right.” She took the woman’s wrist in her hand, almost as though checking for a pulse. “Her extremities are in rigor. Rest of the body’s getting there.”

“Given the cold temperatures, figure she’s been dead six, seven hours?” One of the medical techs looked at Jazz with impressed surprise and nodded, confirming the estimate.

“So he kills her early this morning and dumps her here right away,” Morales said. She moved, carefully, in order to get a better angle on the body. “Raped?”

“Won’t know until we get her on the slab,” the tech said, “but I’m guessing yes, based on some bruising on her inner thighs. Could have just been from rough consensual
intercourse at some point in the last twelve to sixteen hours, but given the circumstances…”

“Let me know what you get,” she told the tech. To Jazz, she said, “Do you need to see anything else?”

Jazz glanced over at the assistant principal again. She was gulping whatever was in the cup, and the cop with her looked bored.

“Are we sure she didn’t see anything when she got here?”

“She says—”

“Witnesses are wrong. Eyewitness testimony is pretty unreliable.”

“I know that.”

“I’m just thinking… if I were a serial killer and I wanted to throw the cops off, I might drop a body so that it’s found when I’m talking to them. Make them think I’m just some kind of crackpot.”

Morales shook her head. “I would buy that if
we
came to
him
. But he approached us. We didn’t suspect him to begin with. Why would anyone—even a lunatic—try to throw off suspicion by
raising
suspicion?”

To that, Jazz had no answer.

Connie didn’t even realize that she was still staring at the birth certificate until a voice suddenly shouted and shocked her back to reality.

“Hey! Hey, what are you doing?”

She looked up and around. Realized that the voice came from through the hedge to the east. A man stood there with a baseball bat.

“That’s private property!” he shouted.

Connie froze. Who the hell was this guy to try to run her off? It wasn’t
his
property. She opened her mouth to say “Buzz off!” but before she could, he said, “I’m calling nine-one-one!” and held up a cell phone as if he needed to prove it.

Oh… crap.

Trespassing. Disturbing evidence. Damaging private property… And those were just the crimes Connie could imagine herself. The justice system probably had plenty of other blanks to fill in.

She stooped down and gathered up the box and its contents,
then took off in the opposite direction, leaving the shovel and pickax behind.
I owe Howie more than twenty bucks now
, some crazy part of her realized.

“Hey!” the guy shouted. “Hey! Stay right there! I’m calling the cops! I’m serious!”

I know you’re serious, dumbass
, Connie thought as she ran like hell for the cover of the woods.
Why do you think I’m running?

She didn’t know the woods and back byways of Lobo’s Nod the way Jazz and Howie did, but Connie
did
have excellent coverage on her phone. Its GPS got her through the woods and into another housing development, where she paused to catch her breath and text Howie while hidden behind someone’s shed. Howie, fortunately, was done at Jazz’s and easily able to pick her up, though he did complain—of course—about the lost shovel and pickax.

He stopped complaining when Connie showed him the lockbox and its contents.

And the birth certificate.

“This is the big one,” she said. “This changes things.”

“Why? So, it’s Jazz’s birth certificate. Now we know he wasn’t born in Kenya. Big deal.”

She pointed to a specific portion of the birth certificate. Howie’s eyes widened immediately and his chest hitched as though he’d been shoved.

“Oh my God.” He stared incredulously where she pointed. “Is this for real?”

“Yeah.”

The birth certificate was completely normal and unassuming. Except for one thing.

The spot for
FATHER
.

It was blank.

“It shows his mom’s name,” Howie breathed, “but there’s nothing for his dad….”

“Which means,” Connie said, speaking the words out loud for the first time, “that Jazz might not be Billy’s son.”

Howie drove Connie home, still processing what she’d told him. “Looks like you lucked out,” he told her as they pulled up. There were no cars in her driveway.

“God, it feels like I’ve been gone for days,” she said. “But it’s just been a couple of hours.”

“Maybe your moms decided to stick around the mall. Run errands or something while your brother’s at the movies.”

“Maybe. I’m not gonna question some good luck.” She got out of the car. “You’re good to take it from here?”

“I’m not a complete screwup,” Howie said, offended. “I can handle my part. Just make sure you send it.”

She waggled her phone. “Already e-mailed. Let me know what happens. And hey—be careful.”

Howie backed out and headed back to the Dent house,
doing his best to pay attention to the road, even though all he could
really
focus on was a notion that he’d never imagined possible: What if Jazz
wasn’t
Billy Dent’s son? What would that mean for his best friend? It seemed impossible, but that blank on the birth certificate… Why leave it blank if you knew who the father was? Had Jazz’s mom had an affair? Or maybe a one-night stand with a man she didn’t even know?

Another thought occurred to Howie, one that tightened his gut so much that he had to pull over for a moment until the tautness in his belly subsided: What if Billy Dent had… well, what if he had forced one of his male victims to rape his own wife? What if that’s how Jazz had been conceived?

Connie had wanted to call Jazz right away. To give what might be the best news of Jazz’s life. And Howie could understand that. Nothing would please him more than to say to Jazz,
Hey, buddy, you know how you’re worried that being Billy’s kid means you’re, like, genetically predisposed to go psycho? Well, guess what? I have good news!