“No. He saw the newspaper story. Realized what he’d done, that he’d gotten lucky and thrown you off, had you running around looking for a murder site when it was right here all along. So he kept it up. The second time, he was prepared. A drop cloth, probably. Covered the alley floor with it to make it look like a dump job. But a little spatter got away from him when he cut the throat. Hit the Dumpster.”
“You’re basing a hell of a lot on a spot of blood and some rain.” But Hughes wasn’t protesting very hard.
“This was more than just a dump site to him, Hughes. He brought them here—and here specifically—to kill them. It’s holy ground to him, for some reason.”
“I hear you. The only problem is, given the other dozen murders we’ve got… so is about half of Brooklyn.”
The NYPD and the feds had been working under the assumption that Hat-Dog’s earliest victims were killed at one site and dumped at another, that as he became more comfortable with his skills and his kills (and, no doubt, his selection of sites), he began to leave his victims where he’d murdered them.
Jazz’s observation destroyed that pattern. It became clear as he visited the sites where the various bodies had been found that Hat-Dog’s decision to leave a body in a particular place had nothing to do with his evolution as a killer. Each decision made sense only to him.
A rooftop in Brooklyn, for example, didn’t seem like the sort of place for a murder, but the medical examiner was certain that Marvin Candless had been killed up there, and Jazz tended to agree. Literally pints of blood had pooled around the body, and a void pattern that fit the body precisely—poor old Marvin had died on that rooftop, the second to die atop a building (along with an earlier victim named Jerome Herrington). Jazz noted that the ME speculated Mr. Candless had lived long enough to experience his own intestines being removed, based on the amount of blood at the scene. That was probably right.
“Why not just tie them down instead of paralyzing them?” Hughes asked, staring up at the sky. He clearly had no need or desire to look at this crime scene again, even though it had been weeks since Candless’s death and anyone on the rooftop wouldn’t find anything to indicate a crime had ever happened here.
“Probably more fun for him this way,” Jazz said. He peered around. “Candless died when it was warmer. What have we got over there?”
“Where?” Hughes asked.
Jazz pointed to two large, squarish wooden structures, covered in plastic tarps against the winter.
“Oh. Roof gardens.”
“Roof gardens?” It was as alien a concept to country-boy Jazz as life on a desert island.
Hughes shrugged. “City folk like green, too. Gotta get it where you can.”
“Nothing here. Let’s move on.”
And they did. Moving on, then on, then on. Alleyways. An open-air parking space tucked behind an old ramshackle fence that provided just enough privacy for dirty business. Some of the crime scenes, Jazz believed, were clearly thought out and picked out far in advance. Some, it seemed, were chosen on the fly, as good opportunities. Like the new alleyway he stood in.
“He took his time,” Jazz muttered, remembering the file on Aimee Ventnor, the fifth victim. Aimee had been on her way home from a friend’s house. A judiciously placed subway camera showed her making a bad turn coming off the R train, one that took her to a locked subway gate. The cops believed—and Jazz thought it, too—that Hat-Dog had probably “acquired” her then, watching her head down that blind passageway, knowing she would have to come back his way.
“Grabbed her right when she left view of the camera,” Jazz said.
“That’s what we think,” Hughes agreed. “Then it’s a straight shot up to the alley, if you’re willing to dance around some trash cans from the bodega on the corner.”
Oh, he’s willing to dance, I bet! Billy crowed.
Like so many of the Hat-Dog crime scenes, this one was a public space. It had been months since Ventnor was found, so the space had long since been released back to the public. Hughes stood at the end of the alleyway to keep away any onlookers as Jazz paced and watched and thought.
“Anything?” Hughes asked eventually, joining Jazz.
“It stinks.”
“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.