Текст книги "Game"

Автор книги: Barry Lyga

Соавторы: Barry Lyga
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CHAPTER 27

By now, she knew, Jazz had made it to New York. Connie tried to focus on getting through her punishment and thinking good thoughts in the general direction of Brooklyn, but no matter what she did, she kept coming back to that message. She stared at her phone.

r u game?

WELCOME TO THE GAME, JASPER.

What in the hell was going on here?

r u game?

It could mean a couple of things. Game was something you hunted in order to eat it. So, hell, no, she wasn’t that kind of game.

But it could also mean “Are you up for something?” “Are you ready?”

To which Connie could say only, “Hells, yes.”

She was sick of being told to sit on the sidelines, play the good girlfriend, “stand by your man.” Sick of watching the crazy stuff from the outside. She had sneaked off to New York to help and that had worked out pretty well, right? Her exploration had discovered… something. And now it appeared that someone knew what she’d found. How?

I could have been followed in Brooklyn. Someone could have been watching. She shivered at the idea that she might have been under observation the whole time. Who could it have been? The Hat-Dog Killer himself? Billy Dent? Someone named Ugly J?

Her first instinct was to call Jazz and tell him about the text, but she knew exactly what he would say. Jazz would assume he had all the answers because Jazz always assumed he had all the answers. One day shortly after their encounter with the Impressionist, he had sat down with her and very seriously explained to her how to survive a serial killer.

“First thing is,” he told her, “run. Just get the hell away. Even if he’s small or seems weak or crippled somehow. It’s all an act. These guys don’t come after you unless they’re sure they can take you, so run. Bundy used to wear his arm in a sling. Fooled people. Made him seem helpless and harmless.”

“I know to run away,” she’d said, more than a little bit exasperated.

“If you can’t run, if he’s already got you,” Jazz pressed on, ignoring her, “then your next line of defense is verbal. Be firm. Tell him to leave you alone. Don’t try to hit him or attack him. Not yet. He’s probably stronger than you and hitting him will just flip his switch. But there’s a chance he might not be used to a woman being firm with him.”

“Or maybe tough chicks make his little pee-pee hard,” Connie said.

“I’m trying to help you,” Jazz said, and then proceeded to describe the escalation of her options: from moderate physical force if possible to verbally puncturing the fantasy (“Nah, why rape me? Let’s go get a drink instead”) to absolute fight-for-your-life, scratch-his-eyes-out panic.

“It’s all going to depend on the situation,” he’d admitted at last. “Some guys will get turned on by you fighting back. Some will be scared by it.”

“So, basically, be careful and don’t do anything stupid,” she’d said, and he had agreed.

Be careful. Don’t do anything stupid. Exactly what Jazz would say right now. Along with: Show it to G. William.

Well, she would show it G. William. Eventually.

But right now… there wasn’t really anything to show, was there? Just a random text. It could be anything. It might even have been a mistake, something not meant for her, something not even remotely related to what was happening in New York. That had happened to her before, people accidentally texting the wrong number.

You’re making excuses, Connie. Excuses to keep this to yourself.

Yeah. Yeah, she was. Because… because…

Because I’m sick and tired of being treated like I’m a doll made out of cheap plastic, like I could break at any moment. By Jazz, always trying to protect me. By my dad, who doesn’t even trust me to pick a boyfriend. Even by Howie. And Howie’s the most breakable person I know! Jazz and Howie go off and break the rules whenever they want. But I’m supposed to be the rule follower. The good girl. Since when did I become the freakin’ mom? Just once I want—

Her phone vibrated in her hand.

i kno something abt ur boyfriend

Chills radiated up Connie’s arms, and the fine, light hairs there stood on their ends. She shivered involuntarily.

“Don’t go chasing…”

Another vibration. Another message.

no police no parents

She figured that went without saying. And for now she was fine with it. She would call G. William when she knew more, she decided.

Another vibration.

Whoever was at the other end was just going to keep sending her messages, apparently. She could play or not, but she would be given the pieces to put on the board either way.

let’s play came next, followed by more.

CHAPTER 28

Hughes drove carefully but quickly, wending their way through what he called Queens, then to Brooklyn, then to a bridge that seemed vaguely familiar to Jazz. He was sure he’d seen it in movies.

“This is the East River we’re driving over,” Hughes lectured, “and yeah, this is the world-famous Brooklyn Bridge.”

“I’m not here for a geography lesson,” Jazz said.

“Just thought I’d give you the tourist package as long as you’re in town.”

“Whatever.”

In silence, they headed to the most recent crime scene, in Midtown Manhattan, far out of Hat-Dog’s comfort zone. This is where they’d found the woman in the picture Morales had sent to Jazz. They were loading the body into a body bag as they arrived. “She was ready to be moved a while ago. I can stop them, though. Do you need to see her?” Hughes asked.

“Sure. Why not?” Even though it was January, it was still hot and humid in the subway. Jazz stripped off his heavy coat and handed it to a nearby cop, then went to duck under the crime-scene tape. The area was cordoned off and crawling with crime-scene techs. Jazz idly checked his cell phone and saw that he had no signal. Connie had been right about that.

“Whoa!” Hughes stopped him. “Can’t have you stomping around in there.”

Jazz grinned. “I’ll be a ghost. Believe me, I know how to walk around crime scenes. I’ve been doing it since I was a kid.”

At a flash of Hughes’s badge, the techs allowed Jazz to crouch down next to the body bag. It wasn’t zipped up yet, so he could see the victim. He flashed back to a few months ago, when he and Howie had broken into the Lobo’s Nod morgue to see the body of Fiona Goodling, the Impressionist’s first victim in Jazz’s hometown. Back then—it seemed so long ago already!—Jazz had refused to see her as a person, preferring to imagine her as a thing. Now, though, he knew better.

I’m not going to rest, he thought, gazing at where her eyes should have been, staring into the black pits. I’m going to get him. Because that’s the only thing in this world I’m any good at, I think.

The medical examiner, noticing where Jazz was staring, cleared her throat. “As you can see, she’s been enucleated.”

That was a new word to Jazz.

“Try it in Spanish,” Hughes said. “I’m more fluent in that.”

“Sorry,” the ME said, “it’s just that you don’t get to use that word a lot. Means her eyes were taken out.”

“Are they still here?” Jazz asked, glancing around as though he might see them lying on the ground.

“I just said—”

“You said that they were taken out. This guy cuts off penises, too, but he doesn’t always take them with him.”

The ME, clearly miffed at being upbraided by a kid, went stiff and formal. “Immediate area canvass found no eyeballs with the body or in the immediate vicinity. But that doesn’t mean one of the unis won’t stumble across them somewhere. There’s also a chance we’ll find them during the autopsy. I had a case once where some toes were missing and we found them in the victim’s throat. They were stuffed down there postmortem.”

If the ME was expecting a reaction, Jazz disappointed her, merely nodding at the thought of severed toes jammed down a dead man’s throat.

“Did a decent job removing the eyeballs…” Hughes commented. “I mean, the eye sockets and the skin around the sockets don’t even look disturbed.”

“Yeah,” Jazz agreed with a shrug, “but it’s not that difficult, really. Billy used to do it with one of those grapefruit spoons. You know, the kind that are serrated?” He mimed dishing out a spoonful of grapefruit and was rewarded with—for the first time—a nauseated look from the Homicide cop. “All that’s back there are a couple of muscles and a big optic nerve. Piece of cake. Your eyes aren’t really all that secure in the first place.”

“It’s true,” the medical examiner agreed grimly, as though personally offended by the fragility of the human body. “You just cut the lateral tendon—same thing as in a lateral canthotomy—and you can pop—”

“Enough!” Hughes said, pressing his thumb and forefinger lightly against his eyelids, as if assuring himself that his eyes weren’t about to spontaneously pop out. “I get it. I get it. We done here?” he said to Jazz.

“Give me a few minutes.” He prowled the crime scene, playing a borrowed flashlight over the walls and ceiling, along dripping pipes. He even hopped down from the platform, avoiding touching the rails because he didn’t know which one was the electrified one, and walked a hundred feet or so in either direction. Other than smashed-up plastic bottles and discarded chip bags, he didn’t find anything.

Well, he did see the single largest rat he’d ever seen in his life. It glared at him with defiant, completely unscared eyes before scampering off into a crevice somewhere.

“Find anything?” Hughes asked, giving him a hand back onto the platform.

“Just the biggest rat in God’s creation.” Jazz measured off the rat’s length with his hands.

Hughes chuckled and said, “That’s not big, Jasper. That’s average.”

“I was looking for…” Should he tell Hughes about Ugly J? Yeah, he decided. It might not turn out to be connected—there was still a chance that Ugly J had multiple meanings, after all—but it wouldn’t hurt. He filled in Hughes about Connie’s discovery and the acrostic on the Impressionist’s letter. “I guess it could be a coincidence. It might just be an Impressionist thing and also be some kind of New York thing and they might have nothing to do with each other. But maybe there’s a connection.”

“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?

No. That’s what he wants me to think. Even if he’s not consciously aware of it. He wants me to think none of this makes sense because if it doesn’t make sense, then I stop trying to figure it out. And then he gets to keep on doing what he wants.

“He’s the alpha male,” Jazz murmured. “Top dog. Top dog? Top hat?”

“Yeah, someone mentioned that a while back,” Montgomery said. “Anyone remember who?” he called out to the precinct in general.

“Doesn’t matter,” Jazz said. “I’m just thinking out loud. Somehow, it makes sense to him. It’s the most obvious thing in the world to him.” He stared at the whiteboard a little while longer, then rubbed his eyes. “Tell me what you have planned for your next step.”

“We’ve got a dozen possibles,” Hughes said. “Guys who fit the profile—”

“More or less,” Morales inserted.

“Agent Morales thinks we’re being a little too liberal in our interpretation of the profile,” Montgomery explained. “We prefer to think of it as casting our net a little wider. Just to be sure.”

“Anyway,” Hughes went on, “there’s a dozen guys. We’re bringing them in one by one, starting tomorrow. Setting it up so that they’ll never see one another. Each guy will think he’s our only suspect.”

Jazz nodded. Good.

“We notified them tonight that we’d like to speak with them first thing tomorrow.”

“Then you’ll stick ’em in a room and watch ’em for an hour or so, right?” Jazz speculated. “The guilty guy won’t be able to sleep tonight, so there’s a chance he’ll nod off while waiting for you.”

“That’s the theory.”

“It might work.” Jazz shrugged. “But Hat-Dog is cold-blooded. There’s every chance he got your call and rolled over and slept like a drunk baby.”

“We’re just using everything in our arsenal.”

“Who’s conducting the actual interrogations?” Jazz asked.

Without a moment’s hesitation, Morales spoke up. “I am. Along with a male NYPD detective. This guy has issues with both sexes. We’re going to play off of that.”

“I want to be in the room, too.”

“Not a chance in hell,” Montgomery pronounced, in a tone that said he was used to having even jaded New Yorkers obey him. “Not risking it, for one thing. For another thing, you’re like a celebrity. These guys see you, recognize you, who knows what it’s gonna do to the interrogation?” Before Jazz could protest, he held up a hand. “You watch with the rest of us through the glass. If you have a problem with it, don’t even bother leaving the hotel tomorrow. That’s it.”

Jazz appealed to Morales, hoping for an override, but the special agent shook her head. “It’s the right call, Jasper. You know it.”

“Fine. Give me whatever you have on these suspects. I’ll look at it all tonight. For now, I need some sleep.” He hadn’t even realized how tired he was until the words were out of his mouth. But something like fifteen hours ago, he’d been sitting on the floor of his father’s old room in the Nod, talking to Connie on the phone. He’d done so much since then that he couldn’t sort through it yet.

“Yeah, sure. Let me take you to the hotel,” Hughes offered.

Hughes ended up staying with Jazz at the hotel. Hat-Dog knew that Jazz was involved in the investigation, after all, and the last thing the task force needed was for Billy Dent’s kid to be killed while assisting on the case. The detective sacked out on a rollaway cot while Jazz slipped into the bathroom for some privacy while calling Connie.

But Connie didn’t answer. Jazz wondered if maybe her dad had confiscated her phone again. He left her a quick voice mail, ending with, “Miss you. I love you.” As he hung up, he wondered about that. When had it become so easy to say “I love you”? At first, he had stuttered and struggled to say it in person. Now he could toss it out to voice mail. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? It could go either way, he realized. It could be that the words passed so effortlessly through his lips because he meant them deeply and truly.

Or it could be that he didn’t mean them at all. And that—like all the lies we tell ourselves—it was easy to repeat.

He crawled into bed. It was better this way, he knew, the two of them separated. With Connie back in the Nod, it was safe for Jazz to lust after her, to yearn for her, to be weak for her. No one could be hurt if they were apart. And that was good.

Hughes’s snores already filled the room. Even though it was still relatively early and he was slightly horny from the mere thought of Connie, Jazz drifted right off to sleep.