I Hunt Killers (10 page)

There were no false clues here. No clues at all. The cops had walked at least half a mile in a grid pattern to search for evidence. They’d come up empty-handed. Locard was a smart guy, but out in a field like this, the exchange of evidence could mean a thread from the killer’s pants clinging to and blending in with a tall weed. It was worse than looking for a needle in a haystack.

“Mind telling me what we’re looking for?” Howie asked. “Maybe I can help.”

“I’m trying to think like the killer,” Jazz admitted after a moment, a bit frustrated that he was having trouble doing just that. “The most important thing is to figure out how the guy entered or left the scene. If he was smart, he did both the same way. Easier to keep from leaving evidence that way.”

“Look!” Howie’s voice broke with excitement and he pointed. “A footprint! And oh my God—there’s another one!”

Jazz shook his head. “Those are from the cops. They tried to be careful, but the ground was soft when they got here.”

“So maybe the killer guy left footprints,” Howie said, sulking a little bit.

“Cops didn’t find any. Makes sense. He would have been here before sunup. This time of year, the ground would be too hard at night from the cold.” To illustrate, he pointed to the path he and Howie had taken—there were no footprints from their own shoes.

Howie sniffed. “Well, if it’s that cold, she could have been out here for days. Or weeks.”

“Nah, it’s not
that
cold yet. Animals and bacteria can devour every scrap of flesh in a month. She didn’t even have flies on her yet. She was fresh.

“So he came here at night,” Jazz went on, thinking aloud. “If you were coming here at night, which direction would
you
come from?”

Howie pointed. “Back the way we came. Duh. It’s the easiest way.”

“Yeah, but it’s only the easiest way because we know about it. We grew up around here, so we know about the access road.”

“So you’re saying he couldn’t have come that way?”

Jazz shrugged. “I’m saying we can’t assume it. But if he
did
come that way, it means something about him. It means he’s either a local or he scouted Lobo’s Nod and this field for a long time before he did this.”

“Whoa. You think he’s someone in town? Someone we know? What are the odds?”

He meant the odds of a town the size of Lobo’s Nod having two resident serial killers, of course. Jazz was no math whiz, but he figured those odds to be something like a jillion to one, to be technical about it. Jazz ignored Howie for a moment and crept forward in the dark until he found the spot he was looking for. He glanced over his shoulder; only twenty yards away, in the direction he now looked, he had hidden and watched the cops the day before. He was now standing exactly where Deputy Erickson had been standing then, unaware that Jazz was observing him. Erickson, Jazz realized now, had had the best view of the entire crime scene as the investigators worked.

“Maybe he just scouted the area,” Jazz said. “The access road isn’t on any maps, but maybe it shows up on Google Earth or something. I didn’t notice before; I’ll have to check.”

“No one knows her, so she’s not from around here,” Howie said. “He killed her somewhere else and just dumped her here in the Nod. The highway’s thataway.” He pointed off to their left. “And the farmhouse is thataway”—to the right now—“so you know he didn’t come from
that
direction. So it makes sense he’d be driving by on the highway, see this nice empty field, and think,
Oh, cool—I’ll leave the body there.
Right?”

Jazz blinked. Of course. He was an idiot. The answer was in front of him the whole time!

“He came up the hill,” he whispered.

“What?”

Still crouched, Jazz pointed down the grade, past the flat spot where the body had been found, to a slightly steeper grade that rolled down to a copse of trees. “This guy is no dummy. He knew the cops would make two assumptions, just like you did. That he came from the highway or from the access road. Look—from here you can see where the cops did their grid search, and they only came
up
the hill to the left and toward you and me. Because that’s where the roads are, and that’s where it’s easiest. Path of least resistance. When you’re carrying a dead body, do you want to carry it up a hill or down a hill?”

“Me, personally?” Howie asked. “I usually carry all my corpses downhill. Easier on the back.”

“Right. That’s like Forensics 101—body-dumpers go downhill. But this guy…” Jazz stood up and clapped his hands together. “I guarantee you he came
up
the hill from those trees. Because he knew the cops wouldn’t think to look there. Come on.”

They loped down the grade in a circular pathway that avoided contaminating the crime scene. “I can’t imagine carrying a body up this hill,” Howie complained. “I would have just burned it up. Why didn’t he just burn it?”

“Are you kidding? A crematorium gets up to fifteen hundred degrees for two hours, and bones and teeth
still
survive. Billy learned that one the hard way. Tried burning his tenth victim. Didn’t go well.”

“What about that lime stuff? Dissolve it.”

“Quicklime? Takes a long time. And you need a lot of it. And while it’s happening, the body can get dehydrated and might actually end up preserved, not dissolved. So there’s no guarantee you can get rid of the body. Your best bet is to make sure you’ve removed all connections from it to you.”

“Well, now I know who to call if I ever need to get rid of a body,” Howie said. At the bottom of the hill, he paused and looked ahead at the trees. “This doesn’t make sense. How would he get into the trees in the first place? There’s no road. There’s no—”

“I don’t know how,” Jazz said, his voice rising in excitement as they took off running across the field under the light of the moon. “He just did. I know he did!” His heart thrummed with something more than the exertion of running. Something deeper. More primal. He didn’t know what it was, not yet, but he liked it.

In moments, they’d crossed the tree line. Jazz warned Howie to be careful, playing a flashlight beam along the ground and up the trunks of trees. Howie complained until Jazz gave him a flashlight, too, and soon the two of them were creeping along through the trees, picking out roots and moss and shrubbery with their flashlights. Suddenly, Jazz stopped dead in his tracks and motioned for Howie to stop, too, hissing, “Ssshh! Don’t say anything!”

“I
didn’t
say anything!” Howie argued.

“You just did.”

“Yeah, because
you
said—”

“Just shut up and listen!” Jazz waved his hand manically for emphasis and Howie shut up. They both strained, leaning into the air, listening.

“Do you hear it?” Jazz whispered.

“Hear what? All I hear is the creek. What do you hear, Super-Hearing Guy?”

“Exactly. The creek.” A grin split Jazz’s face. He shined his light right in Howie’s face so he could see the expression when the facts collided in Howie’s head. “Where does the creek lead?”

“Lead?” Howie frowned. Like most kids in the Nod, he’d played in and around these fields when he was younger. “Doesn’t
lead
anywhere. It cuts through the farm and goes west to…Oh.” Howie’s jaw dropped. “Holy…It goes to the highway!”

The creek in question—no more than thirty yards from where they stood—ran across the farm property east to west, passing under the highway and then petering out to a trickle. The killer could have left his car along the highway late at night when no one from Lobo’s Nod would be on the roads, then carried Jane Doe through the creek to the trees, then up the hill to dump her body. The water was no more than a foot high at the creek’s greatest depth. Would it be easy work? Not at all. But serial killers tended to be dedicated types, real overachievers. Wading the creek would leave less of a scent for dogs (if the cops ever got this far), and trace evidence would just be washed away or dissolved. Put Jane Doe in a plastic bag, and she would even bob along in the water a little without getting wet. When it was time to leave, he would go back the same way he’d come. It was a pretty decent plan.

“This guy is a hell of an organized killer,” Jazz said as they walked. “He thought of everything. Didn’t leave anything behind he didn’t want found.”

“So we can’t learn anything about him.”

“We can always learn something. Even if there’s nothing there, that still tells us something. Disorganized killers go nuts and leave all kinds of evidence. So we can assume things about them. Organized killers don’t leave evidence, but that tells us something about their personalities. Like our guy. He’s highly organized. Probably firstborn or an only child. Probably had a decent relationship with his father. Stable. Did well in school, but most likely dropped out.”

“He’s starting to sound like your dad,” Howie said.

Jazz laughed. “Pretty sure Dear Old Dad is still locked up. I think we would have heard if he was out.” Jazz refused to communicate with Billy, but G. William made a point of calling once a month and confirming that—yes—Billy was still locked up in the penitentiary.

They reached the creek and rushed to explore its borders. Jazz wasn’t so naive as to hope for footprints in the softer ground near the water, but he did see two or three spots that looked as though they’d been swept and brushed with leaves or branches. Had the killer entered or exited the water at one or more of these points, then covered up his tracks?

The faster thud of Jazz’s heart told him yes. Yes, he had.

But there was nothing else to see. Jazz knew that—despite what Billy had taught him—there was really no such thing as a perfect crime or a perfect crime scene. Everyone left some clue, some trace, some trail to follow. Something. Maybe the cops would miss it, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. Jazz had something the cops didn’t have, though. It went beyond just being able to think like a killer, though that was a big part of it.

Most natural thing in the world
, his father’s voice whispered from the past.
Cain slew Abel, all under God’s eye.
One of those memories that wouldn’t go away, no matter how much Jazz tried to make it. Rusty—poor Rusty—was long dead. Mom—poor Mom—was long gone. It was just Jazz and Billy and regular lessons in how to murder. Twelve years old, and Jazz was learning very well, learning blood-spatter patterns, learning anatomy, learning knives and garrotes and hammers and screwdrivers and more.

Standing perfectly still, he drew in a deep breath and tried to see the scene the way the killer would have. Tried to see it the way Billy would have. It wasn’t difficult.

Good cover. Even during the day, you combine the tree cover with the remote location, and the odds of being seen are slim. A pain to haul her up that hill—even as tiny as she was, she was still dead weight—but worth it, to throw the cops off the trail. And before you go, you drop the middle finger there, you stick it to the cops, but you keep the other two because…Because they’re small. Portable. Stick a finger in your pocket and no one will notice. “Say, is that a severed finger in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?” Ho ho ho. But why keep two of them? Why—

“Hey, Jazz?” Howie said, a note of curiosity in his voice.

Jazz turned and aimed his flashlight at the sound. Howie was balanced precariously on some wet rocks jutting from the creek, stooping low to gaze into the water at his feet. Jazz bit his bottom lip and tried not to picture Howie slipping and cracking his skull. “Hey, be careful, okay?” He didn’t want to imagine how quickly Howie would bleed out.

“When you said clues,” Howie went on, ignoring him, “did you mean something like this?”

With that, Howie did the worst, stupidest thing he could do, reaching out between two rocks even as Jazz shouted, “Don’t touch anything!”

But it was too late.

A moment later, Howie, with a puzzled expression on his face, offered a glittering
something
in one outstretched hand. “What? What did I do wrong?” he asked.

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Jazz said, a little more grumpily than was probably necessary. Even seasoned cops occasionally screwed up and forgot or just plain ignored proper evidence-handling procedures. He picked his way through the soft dirt and wet rocks to Howie’s side and shined his flashlight on Howie’s hand. It was a ring. Jazz consoled himself that the water would probably have washed away any evidence or fingerprints, anyway. Still, it sucked that his first actual break in the case was now irrevocably contaminated.

“It looks like a kid’s ring,” Howie said. “It’s so small.”

“Not a kid’s ring,” Jazz said. He held out his hand and let Howie drop the ring into his palm. “It’s hers. I bet it’s a toe ring.”

Howie growled. “Sexy!” Then he remembered who had owned the toe ring. “Oh, gross! Gross. Forget I said that.”

Jazz held the flashlight at a new angle. The ring, a slender circle of slightly dull gold, had two channel-set stones adorning it. They might have been rubies or garnets…or just chips of red plastic. There was no way to tell right now.

“What does red mean?” Howie asked excitedly. “You said we need to understand the victim, right? So what does red tell us?”