Текст книги "Game"

Автор книги: Barry Lyga

Соавторы: Barry Lyga
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CHAPTER 17

In a depressingly short amount of time, Connie’s father called back to let her know that he had managed to get her a seat on a flight out of LaGuardia late that night. It had cost him $150 more than the cost of the original ticket, a sum he made sure she understood would be deducted piecemeal from her future allowances and summer jobs until paid back.

An hour went by, and Jazz still wasn’t back from the police station, though he did text to say nothing more helpful than that he thought he would be a while. Connie had hours to kill and nothing to do. She couldn’t stand the idea of being cooped up in the hotel room all day by herself, with only the TV and its pathetic selection of cable channels for company. Even through the grayish window, Brooklyn looked hard and bright in the winter sunshine. Despite the bundled pedestrians, she could hardly believe it was cold out at all, so warm was the sunlight.

The police had confiscated all of the materials Detective Hughes had brought the day before, but they hadn’t taken anything actually belonging to Jazz or Connie. Just stuff that had NYPD markings or logos on it.

Which meant that they’d left Connie’s laptop.

The police didn’t know that the previous night, Connie had taken pictures of much of the evidence and then transferred the photos to her laptop, along with notes she’d taken while listening to Jazz and Hughes. She hadn’t minded pretending to play secretary as long as she got something out of it. She was pretty sure even Jazz and Hughes weren’t aware of what she’d been doing. The two of them had been off in some kind of grim, downbeat type of Narnia reserved for those obsessed with crime, an alternate reality where shadows concealed murderers and the sewers clogged with unreadable clues.

She skimmed through the images and notes, then double-checked some things on the maps app on her cell phone. Sure enough, many of the crime scenes were nearby—within walking distance, even.

Connie told herself that she was just going to get out of the hotel room. Get some fresh air. Wander the streets a little and see whatever it was Brooklyn had to offer. She had been to New York before, but always with her family and always to Manhattan, never Brooklyn.

If her perambulations took her to some of the closest crime scenes, well… that was just a happy coincidence, right?

A man pushing a baby carriage nearly collided with Connie on the sidewalk, swerving at the last minute. He wore a wide smile and hilariously awful facial hair and the same heavy-framed retro-hipster glasses as half the guys she’d seen. He seemed so obliviously happy that she didn’t even feel the need to shout, “Watch where you’re going!” after him as he trundled down the street with the carriage. Instead, she just took a moment to look around her, taking in the city.

Connie liked the city, at least what she’d seen of it so far on her impromptu tour of old crime scenes. She had spent some time in Charlotte before her family moved to Lobo’s Nod, but even a big city like Charlotte had nothing on the Big City of Big Cities: NYC. She liked seeing black faces as she strolled the streets, liked not feeling as alone as she sometimes did in Lobo’s Nod, where she often felt conspicuous for more than just the infamy of her boyfriend’s father. Here in New York, she was one more tile in a mosaic of black, white, yellow, brown…. It was exhilarating.

She had always imagined herself here. Here or in LA. If she was going to be an actress, it would have to be one or the other. LA was where you went for the big money and the kind of fame that required bodyguards and came with hot-and-cold-running stalkerazzi: Hollywood. The movies. Endless and eternal.

But New York was home of the stage. Broadway. Performing night after night in front of a live audience. That immediate reaction, that visceral feedback, as relentless and reliable as a tide. She’d first tasted it during a talent show in first grade and she’d hungered for it ever since. While Jazz sought refuge in hideouts and shadows, craving anonymity, Connie longed for the stage, the screen, for everyone in the world to know her face and her name.

Would that keep them together? Would it drive them apart? “We go together ’cause opposites attract,” the old song said, and Connie couldn’t think of two people more opposite than Jazz and herself.

She paused outside a hair boutique that advertised PRODUCTS FOR AFRICAN HAIR in enormous letters in its front window. A woman in a dashiki with braids longer and more impressive than Connie’s stood outside, huddled against the cold, but clearly willing to suffer it for her cigarette.

Just seeing the words African hair in a window made Connie feel warmer. It was the sixth or seventh such shop she’d seen along this stretch of busily trafficked road. The hair salons back in Lobo’s Nod had done the best they could with her hair, but she couldn’t expect much from them. She had eventually turned to her mother for braiding and general hair care, and thanks to the Internet she could have braid spray and detangler delivered, but to live in a neighborhood where dozens of shops catered to her needs? Where she could roll out of bed and walk down the street for balm or relaxer? Have her hair cut and styled by someone who looked like her, someone who knew what it was like to have this hair?

“Can I help you?” the woman asked suddenly. “I’ll just be a second.” She gestured with the cigarette and her expression said, C’mon, kid—don’t make me put this out even a second early.

Connie gazed longingly into the window of the boutique. She could probably spend hours in there, but she had a mission.

“Actually…” she said, and launched into the cover story she’d concocted for herself when prowling around the other crime scenes: She was a high school student writing a paper about the reliability of eyewitness testimony over time. “So, anyway, there was one of the Hat-Dog murders over that way….” She pointed toward the alley less than a block from where they stood. “I was just wondering, Miss—”

“Just call me Rabia.”

“Great. I’m Connie.” They shook hands.

“Who’s Puerto Rican? Mom or Dad?” That caught her off guard for a second. Back in the Nod, almost everyone assumed Connie was short for Constance. She’d never been hit with Consuela before.

“It’s actually Conscience.”

Rabia smiled. “Nice. Who does your hair, honey? It’s not bad, but let me fix you up with some extensions and—”

“I really sort of need to work on the report….” Connie said, biting her lower lip as if she regretted having to interrupt.

“Oh, yeah, that night,” Rabia said. “I remember that.” She dragged on the cigarette with practiced, sensual ease. Her fingernails—visible through the ends of her fingerless gloves—had the hard yellow cast of a serious nicotine fiend. Connie could only imagine what her lungs looked like. “The cops already asked me about it.” She sniffed and snorted smoke out through her nose, waiting expectantly as though for applause.

Connie widened her eyes a bit and said in the tone of a younger sister, “That’s pretty cool.”

Ill concealing her pleasure, Rabia shrugged. “No big deal. Look, it was months ago, okay? A lot warmer.”

“Right,” Connie said, egging her on. “It was warmer. So maybe you were outside later at night. On a smoke break. And…” She let it hang, let Rabia fill it in. Something she’d learned from Jazz: If you leave a sentence unfinished, people will want to finish it for you. It wasn’t a hundred percent guaranteed to work, but more often than not, people would pick up the thread without even thinking about it.

Connie hoped it would work this time. She’d been to five of the crime scenes and hadn’t been able to find anyone who’d been around at the time of the murders. Or at least, anyone who had been willing to admit it to a random teenager on the street. Rabia was her best shot so far.

And Rabia did not disappoint.

“And I was standing right about there,” Rabia said, grabbing the thread of conversation, pointing across a middling busy street. “Over near the mailbox. It wasn’t a bad night. Just having a smoke and looking at my window. Figuring out if it worked from across the way.” She craned her neck to look at the window now. “Still not sure about that display. Do you think—”

“So you were across the street,” Connie said quickly, before she could be dragged into a discussion about retail window displays. “And…”

“And it happened over there.” She pointed again, this time to the alleyway. From the mailbox, it would be a pretty easy sightline. Connie already knew that the victim had been left there, guts in a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket nearby. “I told the police—I saw a guy coming out of there. Maybe six feet, maybe a little less. Wearing a hoodie. Gloves. I remember thinking it was too warm for gloves. That part I remember real well. And that was it.”

“You didn’t see anything else?”

“I told you.”

“Or hear anything?”

“Look—”

“Maybe you saw something that you didn’t really connect to it,” Connie urged her. Then, yanking something from her memory: “Maybe some kind of light or something.”

“No. I told the cops every—” She paused mid-drag, then lowered the cigarette without puffing. “Oh. Oh, wow. I forgot. How could I forget?”

“What didn’t you tell them?”

Rabia looked ill. “Lord, how could I have forgotten? I forgot right until you just asked me. It was so crazy that night….”

“What, Rabia?” Connie’s heart sped up a bit. She felt silly; did she think she would really crack the case all on her own? “What did you not tell them?”

Rabia shuddered, then shrugged, as if deciding then and there that it couldn’t be important. “You said a light, right? But it was probably nothing. Right? The alley lit up. For just a second before he came running out.”

Another flash. He took a picture again. Why? Is Jazz right—are these just his way of taking trophies? Or is it something else?

“That probably wasn’t important, right?” Rabia gnawed at her cuticle, her cigarette dangling ash. “They couldn’t have stopped him with just that, right?”

Connie told her probably not, then thanked Rabia and headed to the alleyway. A shiver surprised her as she entered—the body had been dumped here months ago and there wasn’t so much as a scrap of crime-scene tape to mark what had happened, but she still felt as though she trod on either haunted or hallowed ground. She couldn’t be sure which.

The alley looked depressingly like it had in the crime-scene photos, as though time had frozen here when winter came. The Dumpster was the same, although—as she glanced at the pictures on her phone—the bags of garbage spilling out of it were piled differently, of course. And there was no leftover snow in the picture of the original crime scene.

Connie sighed a cloud into the cold air and turned around. She wasn’t Jazz. She had no idea what mattered here and what didn’t. Jazz could imagine crime scenes the way they had been before the criminal left them, before he’d done whatever he could to throw off the cops. Jazz could tell when something was a clue or a coincidence, intentional or accidental. He could think like crazy people. What could Connie do?

Maybe, just maybe, I can think like Jazz.

She paced the alleyway, trying to imagine what Jazz would do. He would mumble something about Billy. Then he might do that thing he did sometimes, where he silently mouthed what looked like both sides of a conversation. It wasn’t all the time, but she noticed it because she was with him so much. She was pretty sure he didn’t even realize he did it.

He wouldn’t look for something small. He would look for the thing that didn’t fit, no matter what size it was. Or maybe he would look for the thing that fit just a little too well. Sometimes, Jazz said, a killer tried too hard to make the scene look a certain way. In real life, things are rarely perfect, so if you see something at a crime scene that looks too good to be true, it might be.

Connie walked the length and width of the alley. She flicked through the pictures on her phone as she did so, matching up the images with the areas of the alley. It wasn’t easy—without the body and the crime-scene team’s equipment, the alley had a different character. She used marks and graffiti on the alley’s walls to try to match things up, which is how she ended up standing exactly where the body had been propped against the wall.

This is how the killer would have seen it, she thought. Right before he took the picture and ran off.

That’s what Jazz would say. And then he would furrow his brow and stare at the space until…

Until what? Until his brain exploded?

So the killer had stood here. Right here. A few years ago—before moving to Lobo’s Nod—Connie’s family had gone on a vacation to London, where they had taken a walking tour of Whitechapel, the London neighborhood haunted in the Victorian Age by the legendary Jack the Ripper. The tour guide had enjoyed spilling the most lurid details of the crimes and had been sure to remind the tour group—repeatedly—that these parts of London had not changed much if at all since the Victorian Age.

“Jack may have lurked in this very doorway,” he’d said in his heavy English accent. “Jack trod the very cobblestones under your feet right now!”

Hat-Dog lurked in this very alleyway, she thought. Hat-Dog stood on the same dirty pavement under my feet right now.

What had he seen? Connie flicked through until she found a picture from her current vantage point. She held the phone out in front of her. The body. Framed by a concrete-block wall festooned with an exploded rainbow of profane, silly, artistic, and just plain incomprehensible graffiti.

Look for the thing that doesn’t belong.

—this very spot—

For the thing that belongs too well…

She went ahead and took her own picture, just as Hat-Dog had. The darkness of the alley flared to life for a moment and something caught her attention.

Did something else just light up? Or did I just blink at the right moment or…?

Checking her photo, she didn’t notice anything at first, but then she compared it to the original crime-scene photo. There, in the morass of graffiti on the wall behind where the victim had slumped, there was something new. It wasn’t in the original photo.

It’s just new graffiti. That’s all.

But as best she could tell, it was the only change. What were the odds?

She crept closer to the wall. Now that she knew what she was looking for, it was easy to find.

Connie had never tagged a wall in her life, but she knew from TV and movies that guys who tagged used spray paint. Sometimes they did funky stuff with neons, but usually it was just a can of whatever flat matte crap was on sale. She didn’t feel one way or another about graffiti, but she imagined it was tough to make such stable, consistent lines with a spray. It took some skill.

The new graffito, though, was shaky. Thin. Small. And even her untrained eye could discern its major differences from the surrounding tags: This wasn’t spray paint. It was some kind of plain white semi-gloss, like the stuff her dad used to paint the kitchen. It had been layered on with a brush, not sprayed on. It overlapped the original graffiti, so it had been added after the police descended on the alley.

More important, it had no style to it. Most of the other graffiti consisted of loops, whorls, arrows, and daring serifs. This was just slapped up there.

Five letters, in boring, somewhat shaky block print.

CHAPTER 18

And everything—predictably—went to hell for Jazz. Straight to hell, full speed.

This hadn’t been the first time he’d been manhandled by the cops, but it was definitely the coldest. Hauled out of the hotel, he’d started shivering almost immediately, the cold January air nearly choking him. Long shoved him into the backseat of an unmarked car and drove them away.

Minutes later, they pulled up to a dingy brick building with an NYPD shield on the outside and a sign reading 76TH PRECINCT. Jazz wondered briefly if he was under arrest. But he hadn’t been cuffed or read his rights, just pushed around.

Inside, the precinct was a madhouse, alive with chaos and noise. Uniformed cops, detectives in shirtsleeves, and a couple of men in ties who could only be—based on their stick-up-the-butt bearing—FBI agents milled about. The entrance to the precinct was clearly a sort of gathering area/lobby that had been pressed into duty as a command center; whiteboards and corkboards on wheels were parked against the walls, pinned and markered and taped with photos, names, dates. Jazz recognized it all from the information Hughes had brought him yesterday. And it was there that Jazz sat for more than an hour, waiting to be seen by… someone. The cops and agents cast cursory and disinterested looks in his direction, until at some point someone must have realized who he was. At that point, a buzz of excited conversation stirred the stale, overheated air of the precinct, making Jazz want to curl up and vanish.

He texted Connie: I think this is gonna take a while….

Directly across from him, unavoidably in his line of sight, was a series of plaques mounted to the wall, along with various badges and a trifolded American flag in a frame. It was a 9/11 memorial, he realized, reading the plaques. In honor of those from this precinct who’d died that day.

Jazz was too young to remember 9/11 itself, but Billy had been periodically obsessed with it. Throughout Jazz’s youth, he would sometimes sit and watch video of the World Trade Center towers collapsing over and over, the explosion of glass and flame from the side of the North Tower like a gush of arterial blood. Over and over.

So efficient, Billy would mumble. But no style. No flair.

It was the difference between serial murder and mass murder, as far as Billy was concerned.

“All these jackasses have done,” Billy told Jazz once, “is make people afraid to fly and afraid of New York. Which they already were in the first place. Takes real talent to get up close and personal and make you afraid of something brand-new.”

Jazz didn’t think the cops here would appreciate Billy’s insights into the tragedy that had claimed their brothers. He kept his mouth shut and waited.

Eventually, a door flew open down a hallway and Hughes stormed out. At first he didn’t see Jazz there, but as he got closer he spied Jazz and his expression softened for an instant.

“Sorry, kid,” he said, passing by.

Jazz realized in an instant what had happened.

I wish I had more to tell you. But this is why I wanted you involved.

I?

I. Me. We. Whatever. I was the one who lobbied to bring you in, is all.

Long dragged Jazz into the office Hughes had vacated, much more harshly than was necessary for someone coming willingly. Nothing like a little embarrassment to ramp up the aggression, Jazz thought.

A cop sat behind a desk, his uniform festooned with more bric-a-brac than the other cops Jazz had seen. CPT. NILES MONTGOMERY read the sign on his desk.

“Here he is, Cap,” Long said, shaking Jazz a bit by his arm.

“Easy, Long. Don’t take it out on the kid. Have a seat, Jasper. Long? Give us a minute.”

Long left, closing the door. After a brief hesitation, Jazz decided to sit.

Sighing, the captain said, “I’m sorry to do this. You’re not supposed to be here. You were never supposed to be here….”

And then it all came out, just as Jazz had imagined it: Doug Weathers’s story—headlined NYPD SEEKS TO “DENT” HAT-DOG?—had hit the Lobo’s Nod newspaper’s website overnight. It was a matter of a couple of hours before a New York reporter came across it and, scanning it, realized its implications. The reporter called the New York mayor’s office and woke up a press person there, demanding a comment on the insertion of Billy Dent’s son into the Hat-Dog Killer investigation. The mayor’s office, caught completely off guard and totally flabbergasted by the very idea of involving Jasper Dent, had immediately contacted Captain Montgomery, the titular head of the task force, waking him up an hour before his alarm.

“As you can imagine,” Montgomery told Jazz, “I was a bit surprised to find out that a newspaper was reporting you were helping my investigation.”

Jazz said nothing. He knew what would come next.

“I don’t know what Detective Hughes told you, but the fact of the matter is this: He doesn’t speak for this precinct, this department, or this task force. He was supposed to visit you in Lobo’s Nod and show you a limited subset of our investigatory data. He certainly wasn’t supposed to open his kimono. And especially not to bring you to New York.”

Jazz still said nothing.

“I’m sorry that it had to come to this. This neighborhood… these neighborhoods, really… the ones that are at the center of this. Nice, peaceful. For the most part. Biggest crime we usually get around here is purse snatching. Now we’ve had seven months of bodies. Gun permit applications are up—literally—four thousand percent. Every couple of nights, I get to go to a different school auditorium and try to calm people down, and they just yell and scream and demand answers I can’t give them. They’re scared. It’s my job to reassure them, and it’s not very reassuring when the media starts saying that now I’m relying on the teenage son of a serial killer for help. It reeks of desperation. You understand?”

Jazz shrugged.

“This isn’t about you. You didn’t do anything wrong,” Montgomery assured him. “But I can’t have you involved in this. I’m going to send you home.”

Now it was time to speak. Jazz picked his words with cautious precision and leaned forward in the most urgent yet restrained way he could. He’d perfected this pose/expression combination over years of practice. It almost always worked. “Captain? Sir?” he began. “I understand everything you’ve said, but can I suggest you keep me on anyway? I know you think it’s crazy, but I really am good at this. You can call Sheriff Tanner back in Lobo’s Nod—he’ll tell you. I’ve already helped get one of these guys. If you let me, I can lead you places you’d never go otherwise. And no one has to know it’s me. You can keep me in that little hotel where Hughes set me up. I’ll never set foot in this building again. The press will never see me. And God knows I will never talk to them. Not once. Let me help. Please.”

Montgomery leaned back in his chair. “Look, it’s not like I’m saying we don’t need help—”

“Exactly,” Jazz said, pouncing. “Not that you guys aren’t qualified or anything,” he added hurriedly, “but when you get something like this, in a neighborhood like this, it’s all hands on deck, right? So you’ve got your local guys and your Homicide guys and you pull in the FBI. Why not go all the way?”

The captain was on the edge, Jazz could tell; he could go either way.

“When you stand up in those schools, I bet you tell people you’re doing everything possible, don’t you?” Jazz said, and when Montgomery’s head inclined in the slightest nod, Jazz knew he had him. One more push. “How can you go back out there and tell them that if it’s not the truth? You’ve got one more resource sitting right in front of you. How can you not use it?”

On a good day, Jazz could talk his way into or out of just about anything. This was a good day.

But he hadn’t counted on one thing.

“I can’t do it,” Montgomery said, with a tone of real regret. “The mayor, the commissioner, the chief of Ds… they’ve made it clear: They want my head or they want yours. And I’ve grown attached to mine.”

“But—”

“Thanks, but no thanks. And please stop talking. Your freakin’ Jedi mind tricks are giving me a headache. I’m going to ask you not to talk to any of the media in New York or when you get back home. Not about this case, at least. And please turn over anything Detective Hughes may have given you.”

Jazz wasn’t sure what to do, how to react. He’d never been shot down like this. Bureaucracy. Who knew that bureaucracy would be my kryptonite?

“I told you,” he said, “I never talk to the press. And your guys took everything Hughes gave me. Unless you count the pizza and pop from yesterday.”

Montgomery cracked a grin at that. “No, no. You can keep the pizza and, uh, pop. I’ll have someone drive you back to the hotel. But first, if you don’t mind, one of the FBI agents would like to speak with you.”

Moments later, Jazz found himself in a tiny office jammed with four desks. A Hispanic-looking woman in a skirt and blazer, her hair tied back in a bun, closed the door behind her and perched on the edge of a desk, crossing two shapely and distracting legs.

“I’m Special Agent Jennifer Morales,” she said. “Thanks for talking to me.”

“Just because I’m a hormonal teenage male doesn’t mean you can use your legs to get me to talk,” Jazz said, offended. “What was your next move? Taking down your hair? Is that a special tactic they only teach to the special agents?”

His sarcasm hit home—she knew as well as he did that there was actually no difference at all between an agent and a special agent. The titles were mere flukes of FBI history and meant nothing. Morales’s lips pursed and she narrowed her eyes… then nodded once and slid into a chair. “Okay, good call. Sorry. No BS, then. I was one of the agents involved in hunting down your dad, back when he was going by the name Hand-in-Glove.”

Hand-in-Glove had been Billy’s fourth alias. He had killed mostly in the Midwest, mostly blonds, and had made a practice of swapping their undergarments, so that his fourth victim wore his first victim’s bra, and so on. Jazz didn’t know why he did this. Billy claimed “it was all just in good fun” when he confessed to those murders, and then he’d grinned at the prosecutor.

“You should talk to Special Agent Ray Fleischer,” Jazz told her. “He’s the guy who debriefed me when I was fourteen. Or maybe Special Agent Carl Banning. Or Dr. James Hefner. They’re the guys who talked to me after Billy escaped. They can tell you what I told them—I don’t know anything. I can’t help you find him. I can’t even find him myself.”

Drumming her fingers on the desk, Morales said, “I don’t believe you. Not entirely. I think you know things. They just may not be things you know you know.”

“Well, my subconscious isn’t cooperating these days.”

“You could tell me about growing up with him. You could tell me how he was as a father. Something to give me insight.”

Inwardly, Jazz bristled, but he didn’t let Morales see it. His past was his. It was fractured and weird and a typhoon of emotions and fragments of memories, but it was his and his alone. No one else had the right to go trolling through it, sifting the garbage for the golden memory that could lead to Billy Dent.

“I can’t help you,” he told her with false contrition.

She bought the contrition. Of course she did. Women. Even the ones wearin’ badges and britches still think with their wombs.

Shut the hell up, Dear Old Dad.

“Look,” she said gently, “I think you have a lot to offer. If it was up to me, I’d have you on this task force in a heartbeat. You’ve heard of natural born killers, right? Well, you’re a natural born profiler.”

“There are lots of good profilers out there.” Jazz wasn’t sure where she was headed now.

“Not like you. They get how these guys think, sure. But you get how they feel. What it’s like for them, what they like. Why they like it. You took one look at my legs and you knew what I was trying to do to you. And you called me on it. Most guys wouldn’t have gotten it. Maybe subconsciously they’d’ve understood. Even the ones who understood it consciously wouldn’t have said anything about it. Because they think they can master their impulses. They think, ‘Yeah, she’s trying to distract me with her body, but I can get past that, and if I don’t say anything, I still get to check her out.’ What they don’t realize is—”

“—is that if you’ve gotten that far, you’ve already won,” Jazz finished for her. “I know.”

“See?” Her chair was on wheels and she pulled herself closer to him, squeaking just a bit. “You understand the impulses. You feel them. But you master them. You overcome them. Give me some help.”

“I offered to help Captain Montgomery,” Jazz said with genuine confusion. “He told me he couldn’t use me. Are you going to pull rank on him? In his own precinct?”

She batted away the thought of it. “This stuff? This Hat-Dog guy? He’s nothing. Compared to your dad. I mean, yeah, he’s led the NYPD on a merry chase and we’re still getting our bearings, but we’ll catch him. And soon. They have a dozen good suspects already, and soon we’ll narrow it down. He’s small fry. I want the big game.”

“You want Billy.”

“Everyone wants Billy,” she said. “But he killed three girls while I was hunting him. He knew my name, Jasper. Sent me text messages. ‘Looking good today, Special Agent Morales.’ ‘I like your hair better in a ponytail.’ ‘I walked by you in the Seven-Eleven today. I could have touched you.’ ” She shivered with the memory. “I want him. You want to find him, too. Well, I can help. I have resources. Use me, Jasper. Help me find him and I’ll help you once I have him.”

“What do you mean? Every cop and fed in the world is looking for Billy. You think you’ll make a difference?”

Morales leaned in close, so close that Jazz could taste the old coffee on her breath. “They’re looking for him. You want to do more than find him, don’t you? You want to kill him. Well,” she said, smiling a mirthless smile, “I can help with that.”

On his way out of the precinct, Jazz made sure to pay special attention to the whiteboards and corkboards he’d skipped on his way in. When he spotted the one he wanted, he stooped to tie his shoes, taking his time.

Gazing at the twelve photos—blown up from driver’s licenses—pinned to a board under the double-underlined word SUSPECTS.

Twelve white men. Ages ranging from late twenties to early forties, from the looks of them. Jazz tried to memorize names, but the uniformed cop assigned to return him to the hotel nudged him and said, “C’mon,” and he had to move.

They smuggled him out a side door. By now the New York press had caught wind of the story and had besieged the Seven-six, so Jazz had to sneak back to the hotel. The room was empty when he got there, and a sharp panic jabbed at him. He checked the room quickly but thoroughly: A change of clothes was gone, as were her purse and cell phone. That boded well, but it was entirely possible that someone had forced her to dress and bring her things when abducting her.