Game (Jasper Dent #2)(26)

“Anything?” Hughes asked eventually, joining Jazz.

“It stinks.”

“It’s an alleyway in Brooklyn. I’m not sure what you expected.”

“No, it’s just… it stinks even in the winter. He killed her in the late summer. It would have smelled even worse then, right?”

“Probably.”

“Showing his contempt for her. Not leaving her in a nice place. She meant nothing to him.”

“Right. He killed her.”

“Some killers have feelings for their victims. Take care of the bodies. Close the eyes, stuff like that.”

“Well, this guy cut off her eyelids, so he didn’t care about that.” Without even looking at a file, Hughes rattled off the various crimes committed in this alley by Hat-Dog. “Last victim before we started recovering semen.”

“So, condom for her, but not others?”

“Maybe he thinks some are clean and some aren’t? Gibbs—the next vic—was married. Maybe he figured she wouldn’t have an STD?”

That made some sort of sense, but it wasn’t anything Jazz could solve now. “I think I’m done here.” They toured the rest of the crime scenes as the early winter night fell around them.

One of the body sites wasn’t outside at all—it was inside what had been an abandoned office building, now being refurbished and converted into apartments. Hughes flashed his tin to a security guard and they trooped inside, where they found that the crime scene was now a half-painted, half-completed studio unit.

Hughes handed Jazz the iPad. “By the time we got to this one, we had the FBI involved. They did some computer hoodoo on all the photos on here. It’s supposed to work like some kind of augmented-reality thing….”

Jazz fiddled with it and soon saw what Hughes meant—the camera on the back of the tablet picked up whatever he pointed it at, and showed him on its screen what that part of the studio had looked like when the police had arrived. Very cool. Jazz walked the perimeter of the apartment, unraveling the past as he went.

“Broken window.” The screen showed glass on the floor, and footprints consistent with footprints found at some of the other scenes.

“Yeah. He broke the glass and came in through the window.”

Jazz stared at the image from the past in front of him. Something was wrong….

Something’s always wrong, Billy said. I make sure something’s wrong….

“He didn’t come in through the window. He broke it after the fact.”

“But, Jasper,” Hughes protested, “the glass was on the inside. That means he had to break it from the outside—”

“Right. So he opened it from in here, crawled out onto the fire escape, and broke it then.”

“Why do you say that? There’s not a shred of forensic evidence—”

“Ha! You know what Billy used to say about forensic evidence? Hell”—he dropped into an eerily perfect impression of his father—“forensic evidence is like snappin’ together five pieces from a hundred-piece puzzle and sayin’, ‘That’s close enough.’

“You can’t trust anything you find,” he went on in his own voice. “Especially the obvious stuff. Check out this picture. It shows a partial footprint under one of the shards of glass. If he’d broken the window and then come in, he would have either stepped on the glass or avoided it. But the only way for his footprint to be under the glass is if he was already in the room.”

Hughes stared.

“Every conclusion we draw is based on something we find, Billy used to say.” If you start muckin’ up what they find, then you’re muckin’ up their conclusions, too, Jasper. It’s basic chaos theory—outcomes depend on initial conditions.

“What do you know about chaos theory?” Jazz asked, and Hughes sighed. “Never mind. Not important.”

“I actually know all about chaos theory,” the detective said. “Sensitive dependence on initial conditions, right? I’m just aggravated that we missed this somehow.”

“Well, I’m not sure what it means. It’s just him trying to throw us off. I’m not sure it gets us any closer to him, but it shows how he thinks. A little.”

Hughes made a note in a little notebook he carried in his breast pocket. “I’ll get some guys to come talk to the workers tomorrow. See if anyone noticed anything when they started working. Also interview some of the building people, nose around, see if we can figure out how he did get in, if not through the window.”

“What’s next?”

Hughes checked his watch. “It’s late. The only place you haven’t seen yet is the one way down in Coney Island.”

“Is that far?”

“Far enough. Let me get you back to the hotel. Get some rest. We’ll hit the Tilt-A-Whirl tomorrow, okay?”

Jazz checked the time. “Yeah. I better call my aunt. I totally forgot to do that today.”

When Hughes dropped him off at the hotel, Jazz found a quiet corner of the lobby to call home. Aunt Samantha picked up. They talked briefly about Gramma, who seemed to be doing well, having apparently forgotten that her daughter hadn’t been home in decades. “We sort of picked up right where we left off,” Samantha said.