Текст книги "Game"

Автор книги: Barry Lyga

Соавторы: Barry Lyga
сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

Part Three

5 Players, 3 Sides

CHAPTER 9

The killer sat quietly in his apartment. The walls were thin. Through them, he could hear two different television programs. One, from the sound of it, was some sort of singing competition. The other could have been a movie or a cartoon of some sort—high-pitched zinging noises that were either laser beams or the zip of something moving fast.

Children, in either case.

The killer shuddered.

On the table in front of the killer, there were four cell phones. Cheap. Disposable. The killer did not know which one would ring, so he kept them all charged. They had come to him along with several others in a box delivered from somewhere upstate, with instructions to keep them charged and turned on at all times. “Upstate,” to the killer, might as well be the moon.

New York City was home.

New York City was safe.

New York City was the hunting preserve.

One of the phones rang. Third from the left. The killer let it ring two more times, then snatched it up.

“Hello?” The killer wondered, idly, which voice it would be this time.

“Eleven,” came the response. The new voice again. It had been the new voice for a while now.

The killer did not wonder what had happened to the old voice.

“Eleven,” the voice repeated calmly. “Six and five. Eleven.”

The killer’s eyes flicked to the part of the table beyond the phones. His lips moved silently…. Eight… nine… ten… and…

“Eleven,” he said back to the phone. “Eleven.” In a sudden fit of inspiration, he added, “As the crow flies.”

The voice at the other end was gone already, leaving silence in the killer’s ear.

The killer took the battery out of the phone. Then he put the phone on the floor and smashed it to pieces with a hammer.

“Eleven,” he said again. Well. So it would be.

CHAPTER 10

Billy held a cell phone in one hand and a pair of dice in the other. He tucked the dice into his coat pocket, followed by the phone’s battery.

He looked around. At three in the morning in early January, Union Square Park in lower Manhattan was no one’s idea of a comfortable hangout. Still, there were a few junkies doing their nervous dance over in the shadows, waiting for the connection they prayed would come.

Billy didn’t care about the junkies. He made sure he was out of the cone of light thrown by a streetlight and dropped the phone, crushing it under his foot. Stooping, he picked up the pieces and discarded them in a half-dozen different trash cans as he made his way to the NQR subway entrance.

Eleven, he thought. Eleven as the crow flies…

CHAPTER 11

Before returning to the Dent house the next day, Howie realized he would need armor to deal with Jazz’s crazy grandmother. He had seen her slap and punch Jazz, as well as throw everything from stuffed teddy bears to skillets. She was surprisingly strong for a woman who looked to be five or six inches away from death. Maybe it was some kind of death adrenaline. Whatever the case, Howie didn’t plan on letting her turn his hemophiliac body into her own personal bruise-n-contuse plaything.

Since it was January, he got away with wearing long sleeves—flannel. Nice and thick, for protection. Just in case, he strapped on some wrist guards underneath. They were supposed to be for people who typed a lot, but they had hard steel inserts and would do him well if he had to suddenly protect his face. He also wore gloves, which he promised himself he would leave on even while inside. Heavy denim jeans, of course: That stuff really felt like armor. Howie figured he could go ride out in the Crusades with his heavy-duty Levi’s on. He scrounged around the house until he found his dad’s old hunting cap, right down to the earflaps. Oh, yeah. He would look like a serious dork, but he didn’t care—his skull would be protected.

“I can’t believe the crap I go through for this guy….” Howie muttered to himself as he parked at the Dent house. He had spoken to Jazz’s aunt Samantha briefly over the phone before coming over. She had said little about her flight or rental car drive to the Nod or anything at all, really, despite Howie’s endless, helpful patter. Taciturn ran in the family. Well, except for Billy. Howie remembered hanging out at Jazz’s house when they were kids. Billy never stopped talking. Howie’s mom used the phrase “talk a blue streak” to mean someone who talked incessantly. Billy Dent talked streaks in all kinds of shades of blue: sky blue, navy blue, midnight blue. You name it, Billy Dent said it. The man never shut up.

Howie marched up the front steps, gave a warning knock at the front door, then let himself in with the key Jazz had given him, steeling himself for the crazy that was Gramma Dent.

Instead, he found Gramma Dent and Samantha sitting cross-legged on the parlor floor, playing “patty-cake.”

“Bake me a cake as fast as you can!” Gramma chanted in time with Samantha. “Roll it! And prick it! And mark it with an A. And put it in the oven for me and Sammy J!”

Jazz’s grandmother hooted with delight.

“Josephine,” Sam explained to Howie.

“What’s the A for, then?” he asked.

Sam shrugged. “She likes it to rhyme.”

“Again!” Gramma shrieked. “Again!”

Howie ended up on the floor with them, playing a nearly endless round of patty-cake that concluded only when Gramma mumbled “Nappy time” and crawled over to the couch to conk out.

“I’ve never seen her like this,” Howie told Samantha moments later in the kitchen, where Jazz’s aunt was washing dishes. “She gets childlike sometimes, but she usually goes all temper-tantrum at some point, you know?”

“I wasn’t sure what to expect,” Samantha confessed. “I knew she was getting worse—I had stopped writing and calling years ago, before all of the… well, you know. But I knew… I knew that she wasn’t going to be getting better as time went on, you know?”

“Was she always like this?”

Samantha shrugged. “She was always crazy. But you know… you know, the whole family was crazy, so it didn’t really stand out. I mean, Billy was going around”—she shuddered—“being Billy. And back in the seventies, you could be some crazy lady spouting all of her nutty racist crap and people would just sort of nod politely and pretend they didn’t hear it. She was never delusional, not like now. But crazy? Always?” Samantha smiled ruefully. “How do you think Billy ended up the way he did?”

Howie returned the smile. Samantha was in her late forties, he knew, but she looked good. Prime cougar material, really, and he had to admit he liked what he saw. His hemophilia having marked him as a freak from early days, not many girls in Lobo’s Nod paid him any mind, much less were willing to get naked and sweaty with him in the way nature prescribed. But hey—maybe he’d have a shot with someone who didn’t have the hang-ups and the history of those who’d known him for years.

“It’s sort of a miracle that you ended up normal,” Howie told her as smoothly as he could, leaning against the counter with as much savoir faire as he could muster. He figured he cut a pretty dashing figure in his jeans and heavy shirt. And gloves. And hat. Not like a page out of a catalog or anything, but it showed how he thought ahead. He was prepared. Women dug guys who were prepared.

His advance preparations were lost on Samantha, who was paying attention to the dishes.

“Normal?” Samantha’s laugh was short and harsh. “Normal. Not a chance. I got the hell out of this house and this town as fast as I could, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t know how to be around normal people by that point. I’ve spent my whole life figuring it out. And once Billy got caught, suddenly it was like I had to start all over again.”

Howie saw his chance; he took off his gloves and nabbed a wet, clean dish from Samantha’s hands, allowing his fingers to linger on hers for a moment. It was a good, subtle move—he’d seen it in a bunch of movies.

“What the hell are you doing?” Samantha asked.

“Taking this dish.”

“Why?”

He was still touching her. He realized he didn’t have a towel to dry the dish with. “Um.”

“Howie, you’re the same age as my nephew.”

“Actually, I’m six weeks older.”

She shook her head. “It’s not going to happen.”

“You say that now.”

“I do.”

“We’re both two lonely people,” Howie said seductively, “trapped in a world created by Billy Dent.”

Samantha howled with laughter. Howie figured that wasn’t a good sign.

CHAPTER 12

Jazz was surprised that he absolutely hated New York City.

No, that wasn’t quite accurate. Being from a small town like Lobo’s Nod, it was no surprise that he hated New York. What really surprised him was how much he hated it. He didn’t dislike New York with the simple diffidence of a small-town kid or the tragic ignorance of a yokel—he loathed it with the entirety of what he hoped was his soul.

The streets—cramped with cars and buses; with all the traffic, it took them almost two hours to get from the airport to some place called Red Hook, which looked like every bad ’hood in every action movie Jazz had ever seen.

The buildings—either run-down to the point of ruin or so overwrought that he felt like they’d been built not to serve any purpose but rather just to prove a point.

The smell—Jazz figured even New Yorkers had to hate the garbage and urine smells, but it wasn’t just that. The city managed to ruin even the good smells; at one point, while walking from the cab to the hotel, Jazz had smelled the most delightful bread baking, but the smell vanished as quickly as it teased his nose, and no matter where he looked or how much he tried, he couldn’t recapture it. He had never realized how odorless Lobo’s Nod was. Other than the occasional car exhaust, the town smelled utterly neutral.

The noise—it was perpetual.

But the worst thing about the city, the thing that poleaxed him, the thing Hughes had warned him about, the thing he should have been prepared for and yet—he acknowledged—never could have been prepared for…

The people.

Look at ’em all, Jasper, Billy whispered in his head.

So… many… people.

Look at ’em. You could take one. Easy. Or more than one. As many as you want, really. There’s so many, it’s not like anyone would miss one. Couple thousand go missing every year in this country—man, woman, and child alike. So many. Most of ’em, no one knows. No one cares. It’s like grabbin’ up blades of grass in the park. One more, one less. Makes no difference.

“You all right?” Hughes asked suddenly, and Jazz whipped around like a kid caught unscrambling the adult channels.

“I’m fine,” Jazz said. It came out weak and unconvincing.

“He’s overwhelmed,” Connie jumped in, grabbing his hand. “He’ll be fine.”

Connie. She’d been here before for short trips and seemed to be in love with New York already. She had managed to grab an earlier flight, a direct one, beating Hughes and him to JFK. An important lesson for Jazz: Connie wouldn’t stay put just because he said so.

There’s ways to change that, Jasper. Ways to make her listen. And the best part is, you know them ways already. You know them real well….

“I’m fine,” Jazz said again, and tightened his grip on Connie’s hand as Hughes led them into the hotel.

Movies and TV shows had prepared Jazz for two kinds of big-city hotels. There were the ostentatious, gilded palaces for the wealthy, and the rank, decrepit hovels for the itinerants and the junkies and the hookers. So he was mildly disappointed to find himself ensconced in neither—the hotel the NYPD had chosen for him was a bog-standard Holiday Inn that wouldn’t have looked out of place along the highway that ran past and beyond Lobo’s Nod.

“You okay?” Connie whispered as they waited for Hughes to check them in.

“Yeah.”

“You’ve been squeezing my hand like it’s putty.”

“Sorry.” He released her. “Trying to find amusement in our setting.”

She looked around. “Yeah, doesn’t feel very New York, does it?”

Maybe that was a good thing.

Hughes approached them, brandishing two keycards. He hesitated for a moment and sized them up. “How old are you guys again?”

“Seventeen,” Connie answered.

The detective clucked his tongue, then shrugged. “I only have the one room. Use protection.” He handed over the cards and left them to find the room and get settled in while he attended to some other business, promising to return by lunchtime to get started on the case.

As Hughes retreated, Jazz stared slack-jawed at Connie, well and truly shocked by something not involving blood for the first time in a long time. “Can you believe that? He’s just gonna let us stay in the same—”

“We’re practically adults,” Connie said with an air of urbane sophistication. “What did you think he was going to do—call our parents? It’s New York. It’s a whole different world.” She waved her card in the air and led him off to the elevator.

The room had two beds. Jazz wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. He had stayed in hotels only as a child, on occasional “road trips” with Billy. Billy never flew anywhere, if he could help it. Too many security checks. Too many people checkin’ your ID. Too much damn nosiness, Jasper. So they had driven to any number of places, usually so that Billy could impart some sort of lesson to his son. Hands-on experience, Billy called it, turning Jazz into his assistant and his accomplice on more than one occasion.

Those hotels had usually been out-of-the-way rattraps, the sheets musty, the bathtubs stained even before Billy showered off the grime and the blood of his most recent prospect. This place was pleasant, if boring. There was a large framed photo of the Statue of Liberty over the bed.

“Why would you want to look at a picture of the Statue of Liberty when you’re in New York?” Connie demanded. “You can go see the real thing.”

Jazz shrugged and poked his head into the bathroom, half expecting to see his father emerging from the shower, dripping wet and grinning.

“On a scale of one to ten,” Connie said, “how pissed are you at me?”

“I don’t have time to be pissed at you,” Jazz said, more curtly than he’d intended. “I need to help the NYPD and then get the hell out of this city.”

“Settle down, big guy. You’ve seen a chunk of Brooklyn from the cab and a grand total of two whole blocks on your feet. Give it a chance before you hate it.”

“It’s not that.” He pushed away her comforting hands, forcing himself to do it gently. “This place isn’t good for me. It’s a hunting ground. It’s a… It’s a prospecting gold mine.”

“You’re not a killer,” she told him, grabbing a hand and imprisoning it with both of hers, then holding it to her chest. “Listen to me: You’re not a killer. It doesn’t matter what this place is.”

He stared at the Statue of Liberty. Flicked his eyes to the lamp on the nightstand between the two beds. Anything to avoid looking at Connie. “Remember how I told you once that the problem with people is that when there’s so many of them, they stop being special?” She nodded. “Well, take a look around and do the math.”

You could slaughter a thousand of them and never be caught, Jasper, m’boy. You could do all those things I taught you. You could—

Connie dragged him into the middle of the room. “You know what? Ten out of ten Lobo’s Nod boys would be splitting their pants right now at the thought of being unsupervised in a hotel room with me. That’s not ego talking—I saw that on someone’s Facebook page. So stop thinking about killing people and start thinking about the fact that we’ve got a couple of hours before Hughes comes back and you have to go to work.” She arched an eyebrow for added effect.

She was trying to distract him. Trying to break the cords of his inherited fears that bound him. He loved her for it.

He pitied her for it. Those cords, he knew, could be loosened and rearranged, but they could never be severed.

“Hughes said to use protection,” he said, smiling weakly. “We don’t have any.”

“We’re not going that far,” she said, kissing him hard and sure on the lips. “We’re just gonna get real close and mess up one of the beds, is all.”

He surrendered to her.

True to his word, Hughes was back in a couple of hours. By then, Jazz and Connie had remade the bed and were lounging innocently as if they’d moved not an inch since Hughes had left.

Hughes wasn’t fooled; he cracked a smile as soon as he walked in the door, then hid it behind his usual stern façade. He bore a huge flat pizza box, topped with another box, as well as a satchel slung over one shoulder. “I come bearing pizza and pictures of death,” he announced.

Soon they had the files spread out over one of the beds, with the pizza and drinks on the smallish hotel table. Jazz was surprised at the dearth of files—fourteen murders should have generated a lot more paperwork.

“Most of it’s scanned in,” Hughes told them, and handed over an iPad. “Crime-scene photos and video, reports, evidence photos, the whole nine yards. Makes it a lot easier to see what’s what, and keeps me from having to schlep a metric ton of paperwork over here.”

“Why are we working here?” Jazz asked. “Why can’t we just go to the”—it wouldn’t be a sheriff’s office, not in New York—“precinct?”

Hughes shook his head. “Trust me, you don’t want to go there. It’s a disaster area. The task force is spread out all over the place. It’s a madhouse.”

Jazz thought of the state of G. William’s building when the Impressionist Task Force had moved in. Yeah, maybe it was better to work here.

“If it turns out there’s something I forgot or something else you need, just let me know,” Hughes said, “and I’ll get it for you.”

“Where do we start?” Connie asked.

Hughes raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean ‘we’?”

“Oh, is this work too manly for a princess like myself?” Connie’s sarcasm was damn near toxic.

“Whoa! Whoa!” Hughes held both hands up in surrender and looked over at Jazz for help. Jazz just gave him a “You’re on your own, pal” smirk. “Damn, I didn’t think there was a girl on this planet who could handle Billy Dent’s kid, but I’ve been proven wrong. Look, Connie—it’s Connie, right?—this has nothing to do with boys versus girls. Jasper here is technically my, well, he’s here at the request of the NYPD. You’re not. I can’t just let you go rummaging through files.”

Connie folded her arms over her chest and fixed Hughes with a glare that said she wasn’t buying it. Jazz figured he’d better jump in before Hughes felt threatened enough to draw his weapon.

“Look, maybe she can’t go through the files with us,” Jazz said, “but there’s nothing that says she can’t stay in the room, right? And if she hears us talking and has ideas, it’s still a free country and she can say what she wants.”

He wasn’t sure Hughes would go for the hair-splitting, but the detective’s face split into a huge, delighted grin. “Bend that rule, Jasper!” he said. “Bend it!”

Connie dropped onto one of the beds, and Hughes and Jazz set up at the room’s desk.

“The first thing we need to do,” Jazz said, “is index all of the data. So, for example, organize everything by type of file—picture, video, whatever—and then cross-index it by victim—”

“Already done,” Hughes said, producing a stapled set of papers. “There’s an electronic version in the Master Index file.”

“Okay, then we need to make up a chart of the victims, in the order they were discovered—”

“Victim_Timeline.xls,” Hughes said, producing another printout. “E-version and dead-tree version.” He grinned at Jazz. “This is the big leagues, kid. We know what we’re doing.”

Jazz nodded. He wasn’t in Lobo’s Nod anymore. “Okay, I’m going to start with the paper—those are the most recent, right?” Hughes nodded. “Good. Then that means they show him at his most organized and sophisticated. I’ll start with them and work my way back.”

“What about me?” Hughes asked.

“You’ve already seen all of this. You can help clear up any questions we have. But stick to the facts. I don’t want your suppositions and guesses to pollute my thinking on this.”

“Got it.”

They dug into the reports and photos, as well as the pizza. Soon enough, a picture began to emerge.

The killings had begun seven months ago, long before Billy escaped from Wammaket, long before the Impressionist launched his one-man assault on Lobo’s Nod. Summer in New York. From the way Hughes told it, it had been sweltering since the solstice, with off-and-on rain that crept up on you without warning.

The first two victims had both been found near a place called Connecticut Bagels, a little deli in a neighborhood called Carroll Gardens. They were found two weeks apart, and at first nothing had connected them. The first victim—a woman named Nicole DiNozzo—had been killed in the alleyway behind the deli, her throat slit with a precision Jazz couldn’t help but admire. A crude hat had been carved into the flesh of DiNozzo’s chest. Since all of the wounds to the body were slashing wounds, there was no way to determine any of the blade characteristics; she could have been cut with a pocketknife or a samurai sword, for all anyone knew. Bruising and general trauma indicated she’d been raped, though no fluids had been found, meaning the killer most likely used a condom.

Pretty simple. Other than the carving, it could have been any number of random rape/murders.

“But this is Carroll Gardens,” Hughes told them. “If this was the nineteen-eighties and DiNozzo was mobbed up, I’d say she screwed someone over and was made an example of. Used to happen all the time back then. The Mob was big around here—Italian neighborhood. Used to find bodies in Carroll Park a few times a year. But things are different now.”

“And DiNozzo’s not mobbed up, according to your own data,” Jazz said. “What about the other victims? Give me a preview. How many are white?”

“Thirteen out of fourteen,” Hughes said. “We’re pretty sure our unsub is white.”

“Makes sense. This first murder is pretty controlled.”

“Yeah. Check out the second one.”

The second victim—Harold Spencer—was found dead in the same alley, at the other end. His genitals had been excised. No one had found them. Also dead of a slashing wound across the throat, this one not as precise as DiNozzo’s.

“So what are the odds your crime-scene guys just missed the penis in their search?” Jazz asked.

Hughes shook his head. “Zero. Are you kidding me? Two murders in the same alley in the same number of weeks? We went over that place with a magnifying glass. If it was there, we’d have found it.”

“So what happened?” Connie chimed in from the bed. “Did he—gross—take it with him?”

“Maybe,” Jazz said. “Or maybe he just tossed it somewhere else.”

“The FBI profile says he’s terrified of his own power. Rapes the women, makes up for it by castrating the men. Punishing himself.”

“No,” Jazz said immediately. “Doesn’t track. In that case, why take the penis with him? If he’s punishing himself, he wouldn’t take it. He would shun it. He’s not terrified. He’s proud of his male power. He revels in it. Cuts off the penises to show his dominance.”

“But for the eighth victim,” Hughes pointed out, “he left the penis at the scene. Cut it off and tossed it aside. Same for number eleven. Our profile—”

“No profile is perfect.”

Jazz and Hughes stared at each other. Jazz could have kept it up all night, but he shrugged and flipped to a photo of the second victim. A crude dog had been carved into Spencer’s shoulder.

“These guys usually get better with each murder,” Jazz pointed out. “But the cut that killed the second guy is jagged, not smooth like the first one.”

“We think Spencer fought back. Struggled. Made it tougher to kill him. He was older and he was a guy. The signature led us to connect the two right away,” Hughes went on. “Slashing throat wounds in the same alley… Too much of a coincidence. We checked for a connection between the two vics right away, but there were none.”

“Nothing?”

“Nope. Other than that they were both white. Spencer was forty, DiNozzo in her twenties. It’s all on the timeline. DiNozzo was a neighborhood girl; Spencer lived in Manhattan and was in Brooklyn visiting friends. No work connections. Nothing. Complete strangers to each other.”

Jazz absorbed that, and then they fell silent and went back to work. The only sounds in the room were pages being turned and the occasional slurping of soda and munching on pizza. Eventually, Connie turned on the TV, occasionally offering an opinion when she heard something interesting.

As the victim count increased, the crimes became more and more violent. Slashing wounds gave way to multiple stab wounds, choking, and—later—disembowelment. The women were raped (in some cases, it appeared, repeatedly). Astonishingly, the killer didn’t always bother with a condom—postmortem examinations had recovered good semen samples from some of the victims. It was possible that the killer used a condom with some victims but not others, though there was no trace of spermicide or lubricant.

“Which means nothing,” Hughes said, “because they make condoms without spermicide or lube. So that doesn’t tell us anything.”

“Any match to the DNA in the system?” Jazz asked. The federal government maintained a database (CODIS) of criminal DNA that state and local authorities used to match up potential suspects. Jazz knew the answer already—if there’d been a match, there would be a name for the Hat-Dog Killer—but he wanted to see how Hughes reacted.

The homicide detective shrugged. “No, but that’s not surprising. This guy is careful. He’s stayed out of the system.”

Realistic. Not flying off the handle or getting depressed. Okay, that was good.

“Are we sure it’s just ‘this guy’? Two carvings, two perps?”

“No. We tossed that one around at first. Thought maybe a copycat. But the second murder had characteristics of the first that never made it into the press. And the DNA evidence doesn’t bear it out.”

Jazz skimmed his screen. “You don’t have DNA from every crime scene.” Contrary to what TV and movies made people believe—and despite Locard’s Exchange Principle—not every crime scene was a vast repository of criminal DNA. Sometimes there was no way to find a DNA specimen. Or to isolate it from others. Sometimes it was just a fluke and there was nothing at all.

“That’s true,” Hughes admitted, “but we do have DNA from a bunch of them, including both Dog and Hat killings. All of the samples match one another, regardless of the kind of killing, regardless of the carving on the body. No tag team. No copycat. Same guy.”

Jazz frowned, studying the file before him. “Well, if you ever have a good suspect and can get a DNA sample from him, you’ll have something to match it against. I see here that he didn’t ejaculate in all the victims….”

“This is disgusting,” Connie said, as if to herself, and turned up the volume slightly. He could almost hear her stomach lurching.

“Mm-hmm,” he agreed. And it was. The photos. The reports. All of it. No doubt about it. But unlike Connie, Jazz only understood that disgust; he didn’t—couldn’t—feel it. Sure, a picture of a human being with its abdomen cut open and its intestines drawn out like pulled taffy was—definitively—disgusting. Grotesque. But Jazz didn’t have a visceral reaction. There was nothing that made him want to stop scrutinizing the pictures. They were photos of dead people in horrific repose and that was that. End of story for Billy Dent’s kid.

“There’s video of the crime scenes, too,” Hughes said, wiping his grease-slick hands on one of the room’s towels. “Want me to load it up on the laptop?”

Cops weren’t particularly bothered by crime scenes, either, Jazz reminded himself, and they weren’t sociopaths. Then again, they had long careers and years of experience to inure them to the horrors of the defiled human body. Jazz had both nature and nurture.

“What are you thinking?” Connie asked. “Do you need to see the video?”

He couldn’t tell her what he’d really been thinking, so he shrugged and waved one of the photos in the air. It was the tenth victim, a woman—Monica Allgood—found near a church in a neighborhood called Park Slope. She’d been raped, slashed across the throat so deeply that her head almost came off, her gut cut open, her intestines piled neatly beside her. A hat had been carved on her forehead.

“Is this when he started paralyzing them?” Jazz asked, brandishing the photo.

Hughes’s jaw dropped. “What did you say?”

“I said, is this when he started paralyzing them? Or, I’m sorry, was I not supposed to figure that part out yet? Did I pass your test, Detective?”

Hughes blushed but had the grace and decency to look Jazz in the eye as he apologized. “I’m sorry. I had to be sure. I deleted the paralysis references from these copies of the reports. He actually started paralyzing with victim eight—Harry Glidden. Guy was a freakin’ tax attorney, can you believe it? Most boring guy in the world, dies like that.” He passed over a sheet of paper. “Here’s the missing deets.”

“You wanted to see if I would pick up on it. That’s okay. I get it.” His respect for Hughes rose a notch. He hoped the detective was returning the favor.

Connie leaned over. “Paralysis?” She stared at the crime-scene photo. “How can you tell? It’s a picture. Nothing moves.”

Hughes didn’t tell Connie to back off, so Jazz let her keep looking over his shoulder. “Void pattern,” he said. A void pattern was an area defined by lack of blood where blood should have spattered… meaning that something had been sitting there at the time of the bloodletting, then moved. In the crime-scene photo, there was a void pattern that outlined a pair of human legs. The victim’s. “In the early crime scenes, there was blood smeared all over the place as he disemboweled them and they thrashed and kicked and fought. But at later scenes, there’s a void pattern instead, indicating that they weren’t moving their legs when they bled out.”

“Maybe he drugged them,” Connie suggested. “Or knocked them out.”

“No. Toxicology shows nothing exotic in their systems. No blunt-force trauma to the head that would indicate a blow strong enough to result in unconsciousness.” Aware of Hughes’s eyes on him, Jazz reconsidered. “Well, no consistent blows to the head. Some of them were hit hard, but not all of them. So I’m saying paralysis. It’s probably not hard, if you know what you’re doing.” He studied the new report for a moment. “ ‘Knife wound at thoracolumbar junction… T-twelve, L-one…’ Slip a knife into the spine, I guess. Right above where the belly button would be from behind.” He twisted to point to the spot on his own back as best he could. “Am I right?” he asked, turning to Hughes.