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?”