Game (Jasper Dent #2)(25)

Hughes stood over Jazz with the tablet, skimming through data. “It’s not that I don’t trust your memory….”

“You never found the heel, and rain wouldn’t wash that away. Not on a flat surface like this. Blood, sure. Not something solid. She broke it when he grabbed her somewhere else. Or when he dragged her here.”

“It could have broken when he dragged her dead body,” Hughes pointed out.

“No. The lividity’s all wrong. If he dragged her so that her left heel broke when she was dead, there would have been evidence of blood pooling along her left side. But there wasn’t. She was alive when he brought her here.”

“Sonofa…” Hughes looked as though he wished he could literally kick himself. “Spencer, too, then? Was he alive?”

“I don’t know. Probably.” Jazz remembered something new. “The newspapers reported the first one as a dump job, didn’t they?”

“Yes.”

“And your crime-scene guys,” he said, turning to a Dumpster at the end of the alley, “they found a spot of Spencer’s blood on the Dumpster, right?”

Hughes swallowed, looked as though he wanted to say something about Jazz’s memory… then consulted the iPad. “Right. Spot of blood. Probably… we thought it flew off the body when our guy dropped it.”

“No. He saw the newspaper story. Realized what he’d done, that he’d gotten lucky and thrown you off, had you running around looking for a murder site when it was right here all along. So he kept it up. The second time, he was prepared. A drop cloth, probably. Covered the alley floor with it to make it look like a dump job. But a little spatter got away from him when he cut the throat. Hit the Dumpster.”

“You’re basing a hell of a lot on a spot of blood and some rain.” But Hughes wasn’t protesting very hard.

“This was more than just a dump site to him, Hughes. He brought them here—and here specifically—to kill them. It’s holy ground to him, for some reason.”

“I hear you. The only problem is, given the other dozen murders we’ve got… so is about half of Brooklyn.”




The NYPD and the feds had been working under the assumption that Hat-Dog’s earliest victims were killed at one site and dumped at another, that as he became more comfortable with his skills and his kills (and, no doubt, his selection of sites), he began to leave his victims where he’d murdered them.

Jazz’s observation destroyed that pattern. It became clear as he visited the sites where the various bodies had been found that Hat-Dog’s decision to leave a body in a particular place had nothing to do with his evolution as a killer. Each decision made sense only to him.

A rooftop in Brooklyn, for example, didn’t seem like the sort of place for a murder, but the medical examiner was certain that Marvin Candless had been killed up there, and Jazz tended to agree. Literally pints of blood had pooled around the body, and a void pattern that fit the body precisely—poor old Marvin had died on that rooftop, the second to die atop a building (along with an earlier victim named Jerome Herrington). Jazz noted that the ME speculated Mr. Candless had lived long enough to experience his own intestines being removed, based on the amount of blood at the scene. That was probably right.

“Why not just tie them down instead of paralyzing them?” Hughes asked, staring up at the sky. He clearly had no need or desire to look at this crime scene again, even though it had been weeks since Candless’s death and anyone on the rooftop wouldn’t find anything to indicate a crime had ever happened here.

“Probably more fun for him this way,” Jazz said. He peered around. “Candless died when it was warmer. What have we got over there?”

“Where?” Hughes asked.

Jazz pointed to two large, squarish wooden structures, covered in plastic tarps against the winter.

“Oh. Roof gardens.”

“Roof gardens?” It was as alien a concept to country-boy Jazz as life on a desert island.

Hughes shrugged. “City folk like green, too. Gotta get it where you can.”

“Nothing here. Let’s move on.”

And they did. Moving on, then on, then on. Alleyways. An open-air parking space tucked behind an old ramshackle fence that provided just enough privacy for dirty business. Some of the crime scenes, Jazz believed, were clearly thought out and picked out far in advance. Some, it seemed, were chosen on the fly, as good opportunities. Like the new alleyway he stood in.

“He took his time,” Jazz muttered, remembering the file on Aimee Ventnor, the fifth victim. Aimee had been on her way home from a friend’s house. A judiciously placed subway camera showed her making a bad turn coming off the R train, one that took her to a locked subway gate. The cops believed—and Jazz thought it, too—that Hat-Dog had probably “acquired” her then, watching her head down that blind passageway, knowing she would have to come back his way.

“Grabbed her right when she left view of the camera,” Jazz said.

“That’s what we think,” Hughes agreed. “Then it’s a straight shot up to the alley, if you’re willing to dance around some trash cans from the bodega on the corner.”

Oh, he’s willing to dance, I bet! Billy crowed.

Like so many of the Hat-Dog crime scenes, this one was a public space. It had been months since Ventnor was found, so the space had long since been released back to the public. Hughes stood at the end of the alleyway to keep away any onlookers as Jazz paced and watched and thought.