“It’s an alleyway in Brooklyn. I’m not sure what you expected.”
“No, it’s just… it stinks even in the winter. He killed her in the late summer. It would have smelled even worse then, right?”
“Probably.”
“Showing his contempt for her. Not leaving her in a nice place. She meant nothing to him.”
“Right. He killed her.”
“Some killers have feelings for their victims. Take care of the bodies. Close the eyes, stuff like that.”
“Well, this guy cut off her eyelids, so he didn’t care about that.” Without even looking at a file, Hughes rattled off the various crimes committed in this alley by Hat-Dog. “Last victim before we started recovering semen.”
“So, condom for her, but not others?”
“Maybe he thinks some are clean and some aren’t? Gibbs—the next vic—was married. Maybe he figured she wouldn’t have an STD?”
That made some sort of sense, but it wasn’t anything Jazz could solve now. “I think I’m done here.” They toured the rest of the crime scenes as the early winter night fell around them.
One of the body sites wasn’t outside at all—it was inside what had been an abandoned office building, now being refurbished and converted into apartments. Hughes flashed his tin to a security guard and they trooped inside, where they found that the crime scene was now a half-painted, half-completed studio unit.
Hughes handed Jazz the iPad. “By the time we got to this one, we had the FBI involved. They did some computer hoodoo on all the photos on here. It’s supposed to work like some kind of augmented-reality thing….”
Jazz fiddled with it and soon saw what Hughes meant—the camera on the back of the tablet picked up whatever he pointed it at, and showed him on its screen what that part of the studio had looked like when the police had arrived. Very cool. Jazz walked the perimeter of the apartment, unraveling the past as he went.
“Broken window.” The screen showed glass on the floor, and footprints consistent with footprints found at some of the other scenes.
“Yeah. He broke the glass and came in through the window.”
Jazz stared at the image from the past in front of him. Something was wrong….
Something’s always wrong, Billy said. I make sure something’s wrong….
“He didn’t come in through the window. He broke it after the fact.”
“But, Jasper,” Hughes protested, “the glass was on the inside. That means he had to break it from the outside—”
“Right. So he opened it from in here, crawled out onto the fire escape, and broke it then.”
“Why do you say that? There’s not a shred of forensic evidence—”
“Ha! You know what Billy used to say about forensic evidence? Hell”—he dropped into an eerily perfect impression of his father—“forensic evidence is like snappin’ together five pieces from a hundred-piece puzzle and sayin’, ‘That’s close enough.’
“You can’t trust anything you find,” he went on in his own voice. “Especially the obvious stuff. Check out this picture. It shows a partial footprint under one of the shards of glass. If he’d broken the window and then come in, he would have either stepped on the glass or avoided it. But the only way for his footprint to be under the glass is if he was already in the room.”
Hughes stared.
“Every conclusion we draw is based on something we find, Billy used to say.” If you start muckin’ up what they find, then you’re muckin’ up their conclusions, too, Jasper. It’s basic chaos theory—outcomes depend on initial conditions.
“What do you know about chaos theory?” Jazz asked, and Hughes sighed. “Never mind. Not important.”
“I actually know all about chaos theory,” the detective said. “Sensitive dependence on initial conditions, right? I’m just aggravated that we missed this somehow.”
“Well, I’m not sure what it means. It’s just him trying to throw us off. I’m not sure it gets us any closer to him, but it shows how he thinks. A little.”
Hughes made a note in a little notebook he carried in his breast pocket. “I’ll get some guys to come talk to the workers tomorrow. See if anyone noticed anything when they started working. Also interview some of the building people, nose around, see if we can figure out how he did get in, if not through the window.”
“What’s next?”
Hughes checked his watch. “It’s late. The only place you haven’t seen yet is the one way down in Coney Island.”
“Is that far?”
“Far enough. Let me get you back to the hotel. Get some rest. We’ll hit the Tilt-A-Whirl tomorrow, okay?”
Jazz checked the time. “Yeah. I better call my aunt. I totally forgot to do that today.”
When Hughes dropped him off at the hotel, Jazz found a quiet corner of the lobby to call home. Aunt Samantha picked up. They talked briefly about Gramma, who seemed to be doing well, having apparently forgotten that her daughter hadn’t been home in decades. “We sort of picked up right where we left off,” Samantha said.
“I guess that’s good. And Howie’s helping?”
“Um, yeah. He’s… friendly.”
That sounded like Howie. “Good. Look, just one more thing, Aunt Samantha. I don’t think this’ll be an issue, but just in case—don’t talk to any reporters, okay?”
“Oh,” she said, as if the idea hadn’t even occurred to her. “Right. Okay. I won’t.” A moment passed, and then she said, “Not even the ones you’re friends with?”
Friends?
Before she could answer his next question—before he even asked it—Jazz knew what was about to happen. “What friends?” He had made it an unbreakable policy not to befriend anyone in the media.
“The guy…” she said, uncertain. “The guy from the local paper. Weathers.”
Of course. Doug Weathers. Jazz nearly went blind as his vision turned red. “Doug Weathers,” he said. “You talked to Doug Weathers.”
“He came by this afternoon. He didn’t seem like the national people. Just wanted to check in, he said. He said he hadn’t talked to you in a while and was wondering—oh, Jesus. Jasper, what did I do?”
You gave information to the enemy, you idiot! Jazz wanted to scream. He took a deep breath, then another. She didn’t know. Aunt Samantha had been hit with the media sledgehammer four years ago, but that had been it. She hadn’t lived under the constant threat of press intrusion like Jazz had.
“What did you tell him?”
“I am so sorry,” Samantha said. “God, I was an idiot, wasn’t I? He seemed so nice. And I thought, I thought, well, He’s just a local paper. And he said he knew you, that you were friends.”
“He was telling half the truth. Which, to be fair, is about fifty percent more than usual. What did you tell him?”
“Nothing. Well, not nothing. But nothing important. He asked if you were around and I told him you were out of town.”
“Is that it? Did you tell him where I went?”
She sighed, resigned and defeated. “I said you were in New York. But,” she said hurriedly, “I didn’t tell him you were there for the police.”
It didn’t matter. Weathers was a sleaze, a bottom-feeder, and a poor speller, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew that if you added Jasper Dent and New York, you could only come up with one solution: the Hat-Dog Killer.
“Okay, thanks, Aunt Samantha,” Jazz said as calmly as he could. Connie walked through the lobby just then, carrying two bottles of soda and a bag of chips. She arched an eyebrow at him as she headed to the elevator.
“I’m so sorry,” Samantha said again.
“Don’t worry about it. Tuck Gramma in, and I’ll talk to you again tomorrow.”
In the room, Connie was at the desk, a neatly ordered stack of paperwork before her. “I can’t believe I came all this way to play secretary,” she began, but when she saw the look on his face, her snark fell away and she went to him, wrapping him in her arms. “What happened?”
“I think it’s all gonna hit the fan,” he told her.