Game (Jasper Dent #2)(24)

“He changed his mind. But it was close.”

“I’ll see what I can do about that. The fake-witness idea. We’ll see.” Hughes stood and stretched.

Jazz took the momentary break to change the subject. “I’ve gotten everything I’m going to get out of papers and screens. I need to see the crime scenes. I need to be where it happened.”

Hughes nodded slowly. “Yeah. Yeah, I know. You have to understand: We have dump sites, but only some of them are also murder scenes.”

Jazz understood. Most crimes had three actual “scenes”—where the crime was planned, where it took place, and where it ended. Sometimes they overlapped.

“And furthermore,” Hughes continued, “a lot of these crimes happened months ago. He’d sometimes go weeks between murders. He’s accelerating.”

“All the more reason—”

“But what I’m saying is, these dump sites were mostly public areas. After we finished up our forensics and everything, we had to turn them back over to the public, you know?”

“I get it. I still need to see them.”

“No problem. I’ll show you everything you need.”





CHAPTER 13


His first big-city crime scene. Maybe it should have been special or memorable somehow, but it was just an alleyway. Nothing remarkable about it. Nothing to distinguish it from any alleyway in any city in any country in the world.

Except that the Hat-Dog Killer had left his first two victims here.

Crime scene meant a lot of things. Technically, it was the place where a crime was committed. But a crime scene doesn’t necessarily mean the only place where a crime was committed. Each individual act of murder could have multiple related crimes: Where the victim was first taken. Where the victim was raped or harmed or injured. Where the victim was actually killed. And where the victim’s body was left. Each one could be a separate scene. Or one scene could combine any or all of them.

Right now, the sun was going down, but the day wasn’t finished blushing, and the alley was cold. Jazz tried to picture it as it had been months ago, in the hottest, dampest days of summer, with the sun gone, the moon high, and the heat rising from the streets in tortuous waves. What had drawn the killer to this alley, to this place behind—what was it called?—Connecticut Bagels? And why, a weirdly nagging part of his brain insisted on wondering, was the place called Connecticut Bagels when it was in New York?

“Two of them here,” he murmured.

They say lightning never strikes twice, Billy’s voice whispered. But that ain’t actually true. It can and it does; that’s science. But not us. We don’t. We don’t drop bodies in the same place. We don’t pick up prospects at the same place. That’s a routine, Jasper. And routines get you killed.

“We’re not sure why,” Hughes confessed. “Might have just been opportunity…. It’s a good dump site. No street cameras nearby.”

“Subway entrance over there,” Jazz said, pointing. “So he picked them up coming out of the subway, I guess? Everyone I see here, they come up the stairs with their iPods on, or the first thing they do is check their phones. They’re not paying attention to anything. Easy prey.”

Hughes turned and looked at the subway stairs as though seeing them for the first time. “That makes a lot of sense, but… no. That stop, this stop here, it was closed all summer long. For maintenance and upgrades. The closest working station is about, uh, eight blocks that way.” He pointed west. At least, Jazz thought it was west. He was having trouble orienting himself—Brooklyn looked the same in every direction.

So. No watering hole for the lion in the summer, then. It had been dry. Why leave your prey here, then, in this alley?

“The alley means something to him,” Jazz said, pacing its width. He stroked his fingers lightly against one concrete wall, as if he could read something written there in Braille. “There’s a significance to it. Otherwise, why bring them here?”

“Like I said—it’s a good dumping ground. It’s—”

“He didn’t just dump them here. He killed them here, too.”

“What?” Hughes shook his head. “No. You have to remember the chronology. He started out dumping bodies. It’s only later that he evolves to killing them and leaving them at the murder site.”

“Wrong.”

“Wrong? Wrong? Are you going to tell me that the sun rises in the north, too? I’m talking facts, Jasper. There was no evidence, no blood, no—”

“There wouldn’t have been. It rained the first night, right?”

Hughes paused, then—clearly frustrated—skimmed through the iPad. “Ah, hell. Okay, yeah. I forgot that. It was months ago. First body, it rained, so no blood, but the second body—”

Jazz hushed Hughes and closed his eyes; the crime-scene photos floated before him, a garish, ghoulish panorama of phosphenes. “DiNozzo’s heel. Her left heel. It was broken.”

“You remember that? Seriously?” Almost more exasperated than impressed. Almost.

“It’s visible in the third photo taken at the scene,” Jazz said, and walked over to where her body had been found. There was no trace of it now, of course. She had been moved months ago. Still, he sank to one knee and put his palm where her chest would have been, as though he could somehow feel the last beats of her heart. “Right here. And her left heel was broken. But you didn’t find it here. It wasn’t on the invoice.”