Game (Jasper Dent #2)(21)



“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.

“Is this when he started paralyzing them?” Jazz asked, brandishing the photo.

Hughes’s jaw dropped. “What did you say?”

“I said, is this when he started paralyzing them? Or, I’m sorry, was I not supposed to figure that part out yet? Did I pass your test, Detective?”

Hughes blushed but had the grace and decency to look Jazz in the eye as he apologized. “I’m sorry. I had to be sure. I deleted the paralysis references from these copies of the reports. He actually started paralyzing with victim eight—Harry Glidden. Guy was a freakin’ tax attorney, can you believe it? Most boring guy in the world, dies like that.” He passed over a sheet of paper. “Here’s the missing deets.”

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