Game (Jasper Dent #2)(67)

“Billy would laugh at it.”

“Not every serial killer is your dad.” The captain put a hand on Jazz’s shoulder. “Let me show you our fine accommodations.”

He guided Jazz to a small observation room. Through a one-way mirror, Jazz could see into the interrogation room, a dingy, dull-walled box with a table and three chairs. There were more boxes stacked around here. For all Jazz knew, they were packed with old take-out menus and blank copier paper. But what mattered was that they were all labeled HAT-DOG. If Hat-Dog came into this room, especially after being walked through the “command center,” he would be overwhelmed by the mountains of evidence accumulated against him, possibly so shaken that he would confess. Or at the very least, drop some sort of clue.

That was the theory. Jazz wondered if it would actually work. Billy had once been interrogated by the police, in association with a Green Jack murder. They thought they had me fooled, he said, but all they did was show me how desperate they were.

Jazz realized his upper lip was damp. He wiped at the sweat. Montgomery was right—not every serial killer was Billy. Billy was the exception, not the rule.

Just as he settled into a chair for a day of watching interrogations, Morales came in. She was wearing a severe black pantsuit with a white blouse buttoned almost to the throat. Her hair was tied back in a bun.

“Any last-minute advice?” she asked Jazz. He was both flattered and relieved that a seasoned FBI agent was looking to him for help.

He gave her a quick up-and-down appraisal. The nearly sexless look was the right approach. Hat-Dog had serious sexual issues. Gender hang-ups. His rapes of women varied from violent and desperate to perfunctory and almost gentle. The penectomies of his male victims indicated either a fear or an exaltation of male sexual power and prowess. He was a messed-up dude, as Howie would say.

So going with a sexually neutral image to start was best for Morales. If she felt like the interview was headed in a certain direction where her feminine charms could be of assistance, it would be easy to remove the jacket, let down the hair, unbutton an extra button or two. Far more difficult to go from sexy to dowdy; that genie never goes back into the bottle quietly or easily.

“You know what you’re doing,” Jazz told her. “Is Hughes going in with you?”

“Yeah. He’s gonna be bad cop.”

“Good luck.”

Jazz settled back with Montgomery and a couple of other observers, including a civilian psychiatrist who was consulting on the case. “I would love to interview you sometime,” he whispered, slipping Jazz a business card. Jazz just sighed and put the card in his pocket, making a mental note to throw it away later.

The first suspect was a man named Duncan Hershey. He wore dirty jeans and a surprisingly clean black T-shirt. His winter coat was hung on a peg on the back of the door, well out of his reach. Hershey’s hair was long, unkempt in the manner of a man unfamiliar with long hair. He had been forgoing haircuts for a while. “Lost his job last summer,” Montgomery said, bringing everyone in the room up to speed. “About two weeks before the first murder. Could have been the inciting incident.”

Jazz had the particulars committed to memory already. Hershey was white, thirty-five years old. Married for six years with two children, a four-year-old and a six-year-old. Had been a construction foreman until last summer. Now he picked up piecemeal freelance work and handyman jobs.

He had especially been flagged by the NYPD because he worked in the building where Monica Allgood had been found, the building where the glass had been deliberately broken from the outside to screw up the cops.

Duncan didn’t look particularly tired as Morales and Hughes came into the room. The old cop trick of getting a guilty suspect to fall asleep in the interrogation room clearly hadn’t worked on this guy. Which could mean something or nothing, really.

He was hunched over a paper cup of water, which he’d drained almost immediately. If Hershey turned out to be the Hat-Dog Killer, he’d just made a rookie mistake. Never drink something the cops ask you to drink. For one thing, they can withhold bathroom privileges to stress you. For another—

“You done with that?” Morales asked, indicating the cup.

“Oh, yeah.” Hershey’s voice was higher than Jazz had expected.

“Need a refill?” she asked, sounding for all the world like a waitress. Hughes had said absolutely nothing since walking in, pausing to flip through a folder and sigh theatrically.

“Nah, I’m done,” Hershey said, glancing at Hughes.

“Let’s just get this out of the way, then….” Morales deftly guided the paper cup away from Hershey, pushing it down the table with the tip of a pen. It looked utterly natural, but Jazz knew she was avoiding touching it.

“He’s not the guy,” Jazz announced. “He just voluntarily gave you guys his fingerprints and his DNA on that cup. It’s not him.”

“People screw up,” Montgomery reminded him. “Don’t be so quick.”

“Not him,” Jazz said, and folded his arms over his chest. “He’s smarter than that.”

They watched the interrogation in all its mind-numbing details. Hershey had alibis for some of the murders, no alibis for others. His memory was neither particularly good nor particularly bad, which is to say he seemed like anyone else pulled into a police station and suddenly asked to account for their lives over the past several months. If the police had hauled Jazz into an interrogation room and said to him, “On Monday September second, where were you at or about ten PM?” Jazz was pretty sure he wouldn’t know, either.