Game (Jasper Dent #2)(35)

“You didn’t see anything else?”

“I told you.”

“Or hear anything?”

“Look—”

“Maybe you saw something that you didn’t really connect to it,” Connie urged her. Then, yanking something from her memory: “Maybe some kind of light or something.”

“No. I told the cops every—” She paused mid-drag, then lowered the cigarette without puffing. “Oh. Oh, wow. I forgot. How could I forget?”

“What didn’t you tell them?”

Rabia looked ill. “Lord, how could I have forgotten? I forgot right until you just asked me. It was so crazy that night….”

“What, Rabia?” Connie’s heart sped up a bit. She felt silly; did she think she would really crack the case all on her own? “What did you not tell them?”

Rabia shuddered, then shrugged, as if deciding then and there that it couldn’t be important. “You said a light, right? But it was probably nothing. Right? The alley lit up. For just a second before he came running out.”

Another flash. He took a picture again. Why? Is Jazz right—are these just his way of taking trophies? Or is it something else?

“That probably wasn’t important, right?” Rabia gnawed at her cuticle, her cigarette dangling ash. “They couldn’t have stopped him with just that, right?”

Connie told her probably not, then thanked Rabia and headed to the alleyway. A shiver surprised her as she entered—the body had been dumped here months ago and there wasn’t so much as a scrap of crime-scene tape to mark what had happened, but she still felt as though she trod on either haunted or hallowed ground. She couldn’t be sure which.

The alley looked depressingly like it had in the crime-scene photos, as though time had frozen here when winter came. The Dumpster was the same, although—as she glanced at the pictures on her phone—the bags of garbage spilling out of it were piled differently, of course. And there was no leftover snow in the picture of the original crime scene.

Connie sighed a cloud into the cold air and turned around. She wasn’t Jazz. She had no idea what mattered here and what didn’t. Jazz could imagine crime scenes the way they had been before the criminal left them, before he’d done whatever he could to throw off the cops. Jazz could tell when something was a clue or a coincidence, intentional or accidental. He could think like crazy people. What could Connie do?

Maybe, just maybe, I can think like Jazz.

She paced the alleyway, trying to imagine what Jazz would do. He would mumble something about Billy. Then he might do that thing he did sometimes, where he silently mouthed what looked like both sides of a conversation. It wasn’t all the time, but she noticed it because she was with him so much. She was pretty sure he didn’t even realize he did it.

He wouldn’t look for something small. He would look for the thing that didn’t fit, no matter what size it was. Or maybe he would look for the thing that fit just a little too well. Sometimes, Jazz said, a killer tried too hard to make the scene look a certain way. In real life, things are rarely perfect, so if you see something at a crime scene that looks too good to be true, it might be.

Connie walked the length and width of the alley. She flicked through the pictures on her phone as she did so, matching up the images with the areas of the alley. It wasn’t easy—without the body and the crime-scene team’s equipment, the alley had a different character. She used marks and graffiti on the alley’s walls to try to match things up, which is how she ended up standing exactly where the body had been propped against the wall.

This is how the killer would have seen it, she thought. Right before he took the picture and ran off.

That’s what Jazz would say. And then he would furrow his brow and stare at the space until…

Until what? Until his brain exploded?

So the killer had stood here. Right here. A few years ago—before moving to Lobo’s Nod—Connie’s family had gone on a vacation to London, where they had taken a walking tour of Whitechapel, the London neighborhood haunted in the Victorian Age by the legendary Jack the Ripper. The tour guide had enjoyed spilling the most lurid details of the crimes and had been sure to remind the tour group—repeatedly—that these parts of London had not changed much if at all since the Victorian Age.

“Jack may have lurked in this very doorway,” he’d said in his heavy English accent. “Jack trod the very cobblestones under your feet right now!”

Hat-Dog lurked in this very alleyway, she thought. Hat-Dog stood on the same dirty pavement under my feet right now.

What had he seen? Connie flicked through until she found a picture from her current vantage point. She held the phone out in front of her. The body. Framed by a concrete-block wall festooned with an exploded rainbow of profane, silly, artistic, and just plain incomprehensible graffiti.

Look for the thing that doesn’t belong.

—this very spot—

For the thing that belongs too well…

She went ahead and took her own picture, just as Hat-Dog had. The darkness of the alley flared to life for a moment and something caught her attention.

Did something else just light up? Or did I just blink at the right moment or…?

Checking her photo, she didn’t notice anything at first, but then she compared it to the original crime-scene photo. There, in the morass of graffiti on the wall behind where the victim had slumped, there was something new. It wasn’t in the original photo.