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?”