“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.