Game (24 page)

“Between Hat-Dog and the Impressionist?” Jazz gave Hughes a moment to catch up; the detective did not disappoint. “Oh, Lord. Then there would be a connection to your dad, wouldn’t there?”

“Maybe. It all depends what Ugly J means. If it’s some random urban legend or something, it could just be something Hat-Dog and the Impressionist both happened upon. Billy might not be involved at all. Does it mean anything to you?”

Hughes pondered. “No. How about you guys?” he asked the uniforms. They walked beats—they would know.

Fancy-ass detectives with their shiny gold shields and their shiny suit pants from sittin’ on those fancy asses all day long,
Billy said,
ain’t the real problem. The real problem’s the bastard cop in the bag, the guy on the street who notices your car don’t belong on that block. The guy who realizes you drove past the same building twice and slowed down both times. He’s your real enemy.

The uniforms gathered around. Head shakes from everyone. “Nah. Nothing. Maybe check with IU?”

“What’s IU?” Jazz asked.

“Intelligence Unit. They handle gang stuff,” one of the uniforms answered. “But it doesn’t look like a gang tag to me.”

“Like you’re an expert,” Hughes said. “Can’t hurt to check.”

“What’s the deal here?” the second cop asked. “There’s graffiti all over this city, a lot of it the same.”

Jazz told them what Connie had seen.

“Jesus,” the first cop said, “now the
girlfriend
is a profiler, too? Maybe we should just turn this over to the kids at P.S. One-thirty-eight.”

“Settle down,” Hughes told him. To Jazz, he said, “E-mail Connie’s photo to me and I’ll have IU look at it.”

“I didn’t see Ugly J anywhere, but that doesn’t mean anything. It seems like he comes back and adds it later.”

“We’ll get a hidden camera set up in here. Keep some undercovers circulating after we leave. Maybe we’ll get lucky. I’ll also have some unis recheck a bunch of the crime scenes. Just in case.”

Jazz looked up and down the track. “Tell me about this again? This S line? Does the
S
stand for something?”

“Short,” one of the cops joked feebly.

“It’s just a letter,” Hughes said. “I guess it might stand for
shuttle
. This is a short shuttle line from Grand Central to Times Square. Just a couple of blocks.”

“Anything unique about it?”

“Depends on your definition of unique. It’s unique in that it isn’t unique, really.” Before Jazz could even splutter, “Huh?” Hughes continued: “Unlike the other trains, there are actually
three
S lines. This is just one of them. There’s another S shuttle in Queens that goes out to Rockaway Park,
and a third one in Brooklyn, runs… where does the Brooklyn S run?” he called over his shoulder.

Three cops started to answer. One spoke loudest: “Starts on Franklin, runs through Park Place to Prospect Park.”

Prospect Park
, Billy said.
Sounds like my kinda place. Heh.

But Jazz actually couldn’t believe the other name mentioned, and laughed out loud despite himself and despite Billy’s intrusion. “
Park Place?
There’s actually a Park Place? Is it near Boardwalk?”

“Ha, ha. You’re a riot, kid. No, Park Place is where we found victim number… seven.”

Number seven. Marie Leydecker. White female, twenty-seven years old. Raped. Strangled. Gutted. It was almost like checking things off on a list. Jazz remembered now. Remembered walking the crime scene. Hat-Dog had waited more than two weeks after killing Leydecker before moving on to Harry Glidden, the poor, boring tax man, white male, thirty-one. Throat slit. Etc. Same tune, different key. Except for the paralysis, which began with Glidden. Had Leydecker done something to make Hat-Dog think he should start paralyzing victims?

Hughes hustled him out of the subway so that the crime scene guys could work undisturbed. Back in the car, Jazz settled into the seat and watched Manhattan drift by him. Even late at night, the city’s streets were clogged and choked. In the distance, he saw what he now knew to be the Brooklyn Bridge and experienced a strange feeling of homecoming. His hotel room and bed waited on the other side of that bridge, and he was bone-tired.

“We have too much information,” he said. “It’s like this guy has decided to drown us in evidence and theories and ideas. So much crap that we can’t figure out what’s really important.”

“That’s why I wanted you on board,” Hughes told him. “To cut through the nonsense.”

“You guys have already done a great job,” Jazz said, and meant it. Sure, he’d found some things and noticed some details that they hadn’t, but in general the NYPD and the FBI had done an incredible job. They’d gathered not just a mountain, but a mountain
range
of evidence, collated it, narrowed down a possible suspect pool of millions to a mere dozen…. He was blown away by them. Raised to fear and respect law enforcement, yet hold it in contempt, Jazz had never thought he could be impressed by cops. Billy had told too many stories of hoodwinking them. Yet Billy had never ventured to New York. How would Green Jack and Hand-in-Glove and the Artist have fared against the NYPD?

Ugly J. The Impressionist. Hat-Dog.

Jazz wondered: If there was a link, then maybe—just
maybe
—they were finding out right now how Billy would do against the NYPD.

Even this late at night, the 76th Precinct was surrounded by press. Hughes, having planned ahead, arranged to sneak Jazz in through a back door.

Montgomery and Morales pulled him into a conference
room littered with papers, cardboard file boxes, and dead laptops. It smelled of printer toner, stale coffee, and body odor. He got a crash course on the Hat-Dog Task Force and how it worked.

Montgomery was in charge. No question about that. When it came down to “Do we do X or do we do Y?” he was the man with the authority. It was his jurisdiction and his original case, his Homicide detectives putting in double overtime. The FBI had come in on request—Montgomery and Morales knew each other from a previous case.

“We divvied up the job, basically,” Montgomery explained. “My guys know the neighborhood, so they’re handling interviews, canvassing, stuff like that. We’re sharing evidence collection, depending on how spread thin we are at any point in time.”

“There are four agents assigned to the task force on a more or less permanent basis,” Morales said, “including me. I can pull in others as needed. We help out with evidence collection when we have to. And since the Bureau has better analysis resources and computer resources, we’re in charge of collating and analyzing the data the NYPD brings in.”

“And profiling,” Jazz added.

“Yeah. We have a BAU guy who’s seen everything. You saw the profile report, I assume?”

Jazz had, indeed, read the profile from the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. Parts of it he agreed with. Parts of it he didn’t. They would get to that shortly, he figured.

They took him out to the main lobby of the precinct, where there were more bodies in motion. There was a large
whiteboard against one wall, divided into a grid. It was nearly identical to the document Hughes had shown Jazz at the hotel, but with one difference—pictures. Down the leftmost column, there were fourteen crime scene photos, shot to show the entire body of the victim. Each body had a row of information associated with it:

“The delta is—”

“How long between killings,” Jazz said, standing before the whiteboard, staring. “In days. The deltas are generally shrinking, so he’s getting more and more comfortable. Getting better at what he’s doing.”
Preparation is everything, Jasper
, Billy had said so many times.
Spend a month gettin’ ready for what’ll only take ten minutes. Or an hour. Measure twice, cut once, I always say. Unless you want to cut a whole bunch, in which case, sweet God, there’s so many
places to cut!
Pity swelled inside him. When hunting a serial killer, you looked for patterns. Elements that connected under the surface, sometimes, but they were there anyway. You looked for a killer who killed due to certain triggers. There were guys who murdered when their wives had their periods. Guys who killed when they got their paychecks. Guys who killed like clockwork every three weeks, or when the moon was full or whatever. Even if the timing wasn’t regular, there were patterns in the victims, in the signature, in
something
.

But there was no pattern Jazz could find. The poor cops and feds had spent months with this data, poring over it, massaging it, running it through computers and databases. And all they had to show for it was a dead body on the—what was it called?—the S line.

“You can see,” Montgomery said, “that we have matching DNA from a variety of both Hat and Dog killings. Still waiting to see if we get anything tonight. All of the hairs indicate Caucasian male, brown hair. No dyes. Nothing to really hang our hats on there.”

“We’re going to modify the chart tomorrow morning,” Hughes said. “While we were on our way back from the city, unis were checking the other crime scenes for that Ugly J tag.”

“Oh? And?”

“Found evidence of it at some of them. Not all. And get this—only at sites identified as Dog killings.”

“I’m still not convinced this ties in,” Morales said.

“It’s something,” Hughes argued. “It’s finally something
that distinguishes Hats and Dogs. There have been no Ugly J tags at any Hat sites.”

“Or you just missed them,” Morales countered. “Or they were painted over. And they weren’t at
all
of the Dog sites.”

“Or we just missed them,” Hughes mimicked pointedly. “Or they were painted over.”

Jazz groaned. One more mystery piece in a puzzle growing more and more bizarre. It sparked nothing for him, to his frustration.

The victims ranged in age from fourteen to fifty-two. In some cases, the body had been found at the murder site. In others, it had been moved. There were days between some murders, weeks between others. Penis cut off and taken; penis cut off and left at the scene. Guts removed and left piled on the rooftop. Guts removed and gone, gone, gone. Guts removed and left at the scene twice in—believe it or not—those KFC buckets.

“Guy must
love
KFC,” someone deadpanned. “There’s a better fried chicken joint just three blocks over. He had to go all the way to Fort Greene to get an actual—”

“Shut up,” Montgomery advised.

Jazz appreciated the silence. Guts. And eyelids. And penises.

And now, the eyes missing.

“He’s escalating,” Jazz said, and then felt idiotic for saying it out loud.
Obviously
he was escalating. That’s what serial killers did—they started slow and small, then expanded their domain as their confidence increased. And, more important, as living out their original fantasy proved not to quell
whatever raged and rioted within them, they added new elements, like an addict who needed more and more drugs to get the same old high.

“Penis, guts, eyes. What connects them?”

“The FBI profile says—” Montgomery began.

“Yeah, I read the profile.” It was a good profile, as profiles went. The killer was considered mixed organized, based on his moving of the bodies and ability to evade capture for so long, but also his propensity to leave messy crime scenes. Jazz differed there. He thought the killer was actually highly organized. The messy crime scenes weren’t showing a lack of control—they were the ultimate expression of Hat-Dog’s control. He could make a crime scene look any way he wanted, as organized or as disorganized as he wanted, when he wanted.

WELCOME TO THE GAME, JASPER.

He’s playing.

Definitely male, as semen had been found in some of the raped women. No semen in the male victims, so no male rape, so…

“He’s expressing male power,” Jazz murmured.

“Yeah, we think that’s why he cuts off the penises,” Morales said. “As a way of defining himself as the alpha male.”

“But then why take some and leave others?”

“He takes them when they’re dogs, leaves them when they’re hats. But we’re not sure what that might mean.”

Jazz furrowed his brow and stared at the whiteboard until
his eyes lost focus and all the gridded boxes blended on top of one another.
Is this what it’s like inside his head? Is it all mixed up and mashed up? Chaotic? Is that why it makes no sense?