Game (9 page)

You could slaughter a thousand of them and never be caught, Jasper, m’boy. You could do all those things I taught you. You could
—

Connie dragged him into the middle of the room. “You know what? Ten out of ten Lobo’s Nod boys would be splitting their pants right now at the thought of being unsupervised in a hotel room with me. That’s not ego talking—I saw that on someone’s Facebook page. So stop thinking about killing people and start thinking about the fact that we’ve got a couple of hours before Hughes comes back and you have to go to work.” She arched an eyebrow for added effect.

She was trying to distract him. Trying to break the cords of his inherited fears that bound him. He loved her for it.

He pitied her for it. Those cords, he knew, could be loosened and rearranged, but they could never be severed.

“Hughes said to use protection,” he said, smiling weakly. “We don’t have any.”

“We’re not going
that
far,” she said, kissing him hard and sure on the lips. “We’re just gonna get real close and mess up one of the beds, is all.”

He surrendered to her.

True to his word, Hughes was back in a couple of hours. By then, Jazz and Connie had remade the bed and were lounging innocently as if they’d moved not an inch since Hughes had left.

Hughes wasn’t fooled; he cracked a smile as soon as he
walked in the door, then hid it behind his usual stern façade. He bore a huge flat pizza box, topped with another box, as well as a satchel slung over one shoulder. “I come bearing pizza and pictures of death,” he announced.

Soon they had the files spread out over one of the beds, with the pizza and drinks on the smallish hotel table. Jazz was surprised at the dearth of files—fourteen murders should have generated a lot more paperwork.

“Most of it’s scanned in,” Hughes told them, and handed over an iPad. “Crime-scene photos and video, reports, evidence photos, the whole nine yards. Makes it a lot easier to see what’s what, and keeps me from having to schlep a metric ton of paperwork over here.”

“Why are we working here?” Jazz asked. “Why can’t we just go to the”—it wouldn’t be a sheriff’s office, not in New York—“precinct?”

Hughes shook his head. “Trust me, you don’t want to go there. It’s a disaster area. The task force is spread out all over the place. It’s a madhouse.”

Jazz thought of the state of G. William’s building when the Impressionist Task Force had moved in. Yeah, maybe it was better to work here.

“If it turns out there’s something I forgot or something else you need, just let me know,” Hughes said, “and I’ll get it for you.”

“Where do we start?” Connie asked.

Hughes raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean ‘we’?”

“Oh, is this work too manly for a princess like myself?” Connie’s sarcasm was damn near toxic.

“Whoa! Whoa!” Hughes held both hands up in surrender and looked over at Jazz for help. Jazz just gave him a “You’re on your own, pal” smirk. “Damn, I didn’t think there was a girl on this planet who could handle Billy Dent’s kid, but I’ve been proven wrong. Look, Connie—it’s Connie, right?—this has nothing to do with boys versus girls. Jasper here is technically my, well, he’s here at the request of the NYPD. You’re not. I can’t just let you go rummaging through files.”

Connie folded her arms over her chest and fixed Hughes with a glare that said she wasn’t buying it. Jazz figured he’d better jump in before Hughes felt threatened enough to draw his weapon.

“Look, maybe she can’t go through the files with us,” Jazz said, “but there’s nothing that says she can’t stay in the room, right? And if she hears us talking and has ideas, it’s still a free country and she can say what she wants.”

He wasn’t sure Hughes would go for the hair-splitting, but the detective’s face split into a huge, delighted grin. “Bend that rule, Jasper!” he said. “
Bend
it!”

Connie dropped onto one of the beds, and Hughes and Jazz set up at the room’s desk.

“The first thing we need to do,” Jazz said, “is index all of the data. So, for example, organize everything by type of file—picture, video, whatever—and then cross-index it by victim—”

“Already done,” Hughes said, producing a stapled set of papers. “There’s an electronic version in the Master Index file.”

“Okay, then we need to make up a chart of the victims, in the order they were discovered—”

“Victim_Timeline.xls,” Hughes said, producing another printout. “E-version and dead-tree version.” He grinned at Jazz. “This is the big leagues, kid. We know what we’re doing.”

Jazz nodded. He wasn’t in Lobo’s Nod anymore. “Okay, I’m going to start with the paper—those are the most recent, right?” Hughes nodded. “Good. Then that means they show him at his most organized and sophisticated. I’ll start with them and work my way back.”

“What about me?” Hughes asked.

“You’ve already seen all of this. You can help clear up any questions we have. But stick to the facts. I don’t want your suppositions and guesses to pollute my thinking on this.”

“Got it.”

They dug into the reports and photos, as well as the pizza. Soon enough, a picture began to emerge.

The killings had begun seven months ago, long before Billy escaped from Wammaket, long before the Impressionist launched his one-man assault on Lobo’s Nod. Summer in New York. From the way Hughes told it, it had been sweltering since the solstice, with off-and-on rain that crept up on you without warning.

The first two victims had both been found near a place called Connecticut Bagels, a little deli in a neighborhood called Carroll Gardens. They were found two weeks apart, and at first nothing had connected them. The first victim—a
woman named Nicole DiNozzo—had been killed in the alleyway behind the deli, her throat slit with a precision Jazz couldn’t help but admire. A crude hat had been carved into the flesh of DiNozzo’s chest. Since all of the wounds to the body were slashing wounds, there was no way to determine any of the blade characteristics; she could have been cut with a pocketknife or a samurai sword, for all anyone knew. Bruising and general trauma indicated she’d been raped, though no fluids had been found, meaning the killer most likely used a condom.

Pretty simple. Other than the carving, it could have been any number of random rape/murders.

“But this is Carroll Gardens,” Hughes told them. “If this was the nineteen-eighties and DiNozzo was mobbed up, I’d say she screwed someone over and was made an example of. Used to happen all the time back then. The Mob was big around here—Italian neighborhood. Used to find bodies in Carroll Park a few times a year. But things are different now.”

“And DiNozzo’s
not
mobbed up, according to your own data,” Jazz said. “What about the other victims? Give me a preview. How many are white?”

“Thirteen out of fourteen,” Hughes said. “We’re pretty sure our unsub is white.”

“Makes sense. This first murder is pretty controlled.”

“Yeah. Check out the second one.”

The second victim—Harold Spencer—was found dead in the same alley, at the other end. His genitals had been excised. No one had found them. Also dead of a slashing wound across the throat, this one not as precise as DiNozzo’s.

“So what are the odds your crime-scene guys just missed the penis in their search?” Jazz asked.

Hughes shook his head. “Zero. Are you kidding me? Two murders in the same alley in the same number of weeks? We went over that place with a magnifying glass. If it was there, we’d have found it.”

“So what happened?” Connie chimed in from the bed. “Did he—gross—take it with him?”

“Maybe,” Jazz said. “Or maybe he just tossed it somewhere else.”

“The FBI profile says he’s terrified of his own power. Rapes the women, makes up for it by castrating the men. Punishing himself.”

“No,” Jazz said immediately. “Doesn’t track. In that case, why take the penis with him? If he’s punishing himself, he wouldn’t take it. He would shun it. He’s not terrified. He’s proud of his male power. He revels in it. Cuts off the penises to show his dominance.”

“But for the eighth victim,” Hughes pointed out, “he left the penis at the scene. Cut it off and tossed it aside. Same for number eleven. Our profile—”

“No profile is perfect.”

Jazz and Hughes stared at each other. Jazz could have kept it up all night, but he shrugged and flipped to a photo of the second victim. A crude dog had been carved into Spencer’s shoulder.

“These guys usually get better with each murder,” Jazz pointed out. “But the cut that killed the second guy is jagged, not smooth like the first one.”

“We think Spencer fought back. Struggled. Made it tougher to kill him. He was older and he was a guy. The signature led us to connect the two right away,” Hughes went on. “Slashing throat wounds in the same alley… Too much of a coincidence. We checked for a connection between the two vics right away, but there were none.”

“Nothing?”

“Nope. Other than that they were both white. Spencer was forty, DiNozzo in her twenties. It’s all on the timeline. DiNozzo was a neighborhood girl; Spencer lived in Manhattan and was in Brooklyn visiting friends. No work connections. Nothing. Complete strangers to each other.”

Jazz absorbed that, and then they fell silent and went back to work. The only sounds in the room were pages being turned and the occasional slurping of soda and munching on pizza. Eventually, Connie turned on the TV, occasionally offering an opinion when she heard something interesting.

As the victim count increased, the crimes became more and more violent. Slashing wounds gave way to multiple stab wounds, choking, and—later—disembowelment. The women were raped (in some cases, it appeared, repeatedly). Astonishingly, the killer didn’t always bother with a condom—postmortem examinations had recovered good semen samples from some of the victims. It was possible that the killer used a condom with some victims but not others, though there was no trace of spermicide or lubricant.

“Which means nothing,” Hughes said, “because they make condoms without spermicide or lube. So that doesn’t tell us anything.”

“Any match to the DNA in the system?” Jazz asked. The federal government maintained a database (CODIS) of criminal DNA that state and local authorities used to match up potential suspects. Jazz knew the answer already—if there’d been a match, there would be a name for the Hat-Dog Killer—but he wanted to see how Hughes reacted.

The homicide detective shrugged. “No, but that’s not surprising. This guy is careful. He’s stayed out of the system.”

Realistic. Not flying off the handle or getting depressed. Okay, that was good.

“Are we sure it’s just ‘this guy’? Two carvings, two perps?”

“No. We tossed that one around at first. Thought maybe a copycat. But the second murder had characteristics of the first that never made it into the press. And the DNA evidence doesn’t bear it out.”

Jazz skimmed his screen. “You don’t have DNA from every crime scene.” Contrary to what TV and movies made people believe—and despite Locard’s Exchange Principle—not every crime scene was a vast repository of criminal DNA. Sometimes there was no way to find a DNA specimen. Or to isolate it from others. Sometimes it was just a fluke and there was nothing at all.

“That’s true,” Hughes admitted, “but we
do
have DNA from a bunch of them, including both Dog
and
Hat killings. All of the samples match one another, regardless of the kind of killing, regardless of the carving on the body. No tag team. No copycat. Same guy.”

Jazz frowned, studying the file before him. “Well, if you
ever have a good suspect and can get a DNA sample from him, you’ll have something to match it against. I see here that he didn’t ejaculate in all the victims….”

“This is disgusting,” Connie said, as if to herself, and turned up the volume slightly. He could almost hear her stomach lurching.

“Mm-hmm,” he agreed. And it was. The photos. The reports. All of it. No doubt about it. But unlike Connie, Jazz only understood that disgust; he didn’t—couldn’t—feel it. Sure, a picture of a human being with its abdomen cut open and its intestines drawn out like pulled taffy was—definitively—disgusting. Grotesque. But Jazz didn’t have a visceral reaction. There was nothing that made him want to stop scrutinizing the pictures. They were photos of dead people in horrific repose and that was that. End of story for Billy Dent’s kid.

“There’s video of the crime scenes, too,” Hughes said, wiping his grease-slick hands on one of the room’s towels. “Want me to load it up on the laptop?”

Cops weren’t particularly bothered by crime scenes, either, Jazz reminded himself, and they weren’t sociopaths. Then again, they had long careers and years of experience to inure them to the horrors of the defiled human body. Jazz had both nature and nurture.

“What are you thinking?” Connie asked. “Do you need to see the video?”

He couldn’t tell her what he’d really been thinking, so he shrugged and waved one of the photos in the air. It was the tenth victim, a woman—Monica Allgood—found near a church in a neighborhood called Park Slope. She’d been
raped, slashed across the throat so deeply that her head almost came off, her gut cut open, her intestines piled neatly beside her. A hat had been carved on her forehead.