Game (Jasper Dent #2)(6)

“Last person I opened this door for turned out to be doing his best impersonation of my father. You understand why I’m hesitant.”

The man flipped open a small leather folder to reveal his badge. “I came all the way from New York to see you. Should be, like, a two-hour flight, but the department’s so damn cheap, would you believe I had to make two connections? Took more like five hours. Plus, I had to rent a car. And I hate driving like you hate your pops. Five minutes. I swear on my badge.”

Jazz scrutinized the badge. Looked authentic, as best he could tell. He’d never seen an actual NYPD badge, but he knew the basics. The ID card next to it had a lousy photo of the man on the porch, along with his name and rank: LOUIS L. HUGHES, DET. 2ND/GRADE. NYPD. BROOKLYN SOUTH. HOMICIDE DIVISION.

Despite himself, he was intrigued. New York. A New York cop. What could he—

Ah. Ah, he got it.

“This is about Hat-Dog, isn’t it?”

“Five minutes. That’s all.”

That toe wasn’t going anywhere, and as long as it stayed, Hughes would stay, too. Jazz sighed and opened the door. Before Hughes could step in, Jazz pushed him back and joined him on the porch, closing the door behind.

“It’s getting cold out here,” Hughes complained.

“I would invite you in, but my grandmother is an insane racist.”

A snort. “As opposed to all those nice, sane racists out there?”

Jazz folded his arms over his chest. “Your five minutes started thirty seconds ago. We can talk about the historic injustices that continue to be visited upon the African American community to this day, or you can talk about Hat-Dog.”

Hughes nodded. “What do you know already?”

Jazz shrugged. “Just what’s been on the news. Which means probably less than anything real or relevant.” They shared a grimace of disdain for the media. “First killing was about seven months ago. There’ve been a total of fourteen so far. Most in Brooklyn. All show signs of a mixed organization killer—he’s good at covering his tracks, but he goes buck wild on the bodies. Lots of mutilation. Maiming. Details withheld by the police ‘to weed out possible false leads.’ ” Jazz thought for a moment. “I bet he’s started disemboweling them, right?”

Hughes did a good job covering his surprise, but not so good that Jazz couldn’t tell. “Yeah. How did you know that? That’s one of the things we kept out of the news.”

“Reading between the lines. There was a quote in one news story from the medical examiner, talking about ‘a real mess.’ And in the background of one of the pictures in the paper, you can see a CSI with a covered bucket. I played the odds.”

Hughes pressed his lips together. “Not bad. Yeah, he’s started disemboweling them.”

“And his deal is he marks them, right? Didn’t I read that? Some of them with a hat, some with a dog? Cuts it into them.”

“Yeah. There’s no pattern to that. At first we thought he was alternating, or marking the women with hats and the men with dogs. That would fit a certain sort of pathology. But then we got a dog on a woman. Then two hats in a row. And a hat on a man. And then another couple of hats in a row. There’s no pattern to it.”

“There’s a pattern to it,” Jazz said. “It’s just not one that you can see.”

“And you can?”

“I didn’t say that. It makes sense to him, though.”

“I know,” Hughes said testily. “I’m not right out of the academy. In this guy’s head, the most sensible thing in the world is to grab up people and torture them and kill them and carve hats and dogs on them. I get it.”

Jazz looked at his watch. “There’s your five. I hope it was worth it.”

“Wait!” Hughes threw out a beefy arm, blocking the front door. “Look, I didn’t come here to gab with you on your front porch. I need—we, that is. We need your help.”

Jazz laughed. “My help? What, because I caught the Impressionist? That was sort of a special circumstance.”

“Oh? How so?”

“He was imitating my father. He was practically killing people in my backyard.”

“I get it—so you only take the easy ones. And the people of New York just don’t count. They might as well not be real to you.”

People are real. People matter.

Words to live by, for Jazz. He had no other choice—the moment he stopped believing that (and it would be depressingly easy to do so, he feared) would be the moment he turned into his father.

But, yeah, people were real and people mattered, but Jazz couldn’t save them all. Flush off his success of capturing the Impressionist, he’d gone and tattooed I HUNT KILLERS in gigantic black Gothic letters on his chest. A new mantra, this one inked directly into flesh so that he couldn’t forget.

But in the months since the Impressionist’s arrest, Jazz had hunted nothing more than his own self-doubt. Sure, “I hunt killers” sounded great and made for a nice little slogan, but at the end of the day, he was still seventeen. Still dealing with his disintegrating grandmother and her dilapidated house. Still trying to get through school. To figure out what the hell he would do when he graduated. The million mundane details of everyday life had made him feel old before his time, as though the promise of that tattoo had begun to fade the instant the ink dried. Maybe even while it was still wet.