Connie sighed a cloud into the cold air and turned around. She wasn’t Jazz. She had no idea what mattered here and what didn’t. Jazz could imagine crime scenes the way they had been before the criminal left them, before he’d done whatever he could to throw off the cops. Jazz could tell when something was a clue or a coincidence, intentional or accidental. He could think like crazy people. What could Connie do?
Maybe, just maybe, I can think like Jazz.
She paced the alleyway, trying to imagine what Jazz would do. He would mumble something about Billy. Then he might do that thing he did sometimes, where he silently mouthed what looked like both sides of a conversation. It wasn’t all the time, but she noticed it because she was with him so much. She was pretty sure he didn’t even realize he did it.
He wouldn’t look for something small. He would look for the thing that didn’t fit, no matter what size it was. Or maybe he would look for the thing that fit just a little too well. Sometimes, Jazz said, a killer tried too hard to make the scene look a certain way. In real life, things are rarely perfect, so if you see something at a crime scene that looks too good to be true, it might be.
Connie walked the length and width of the alley. She flicked through the pictures on her phone as she did so, matching up the images with the areas of the alley. It wasn’t easy—without the body and the crime-scene team’s equipment, the alley had a different character. She used marks and graffiti on the alley’s walls to try to match things up, which is how she ended up standing exactly where the body had been propped against the wall.
This is how the killer would have seen it, she thought. Right before he took the picture and ran off.
That’s what Jazz would say. And then he would furrow his brow and stare at the space until…
Until what? Until his brain exploded?
So the killer had stood here. Right here. A few years ago—before moving to Lobo’s Nod—Connie’s family had gone on a vacation to London, where they had taken a walking tour of Whitechapel, the London neighborhood haunted in the Victorian Age by the legendary Jack the Ripper. The tour guide had enjoyed spilling the most lurid details of the crimes and had been sure to remind the tour group—repeatedly—that these parts of London had not changed much if at all since the Victorian Age.
“Jack may have lurked in this very doorway,” he’d said in his heavy English accent. “Jack trod the very cobblestones under your feet right now!”
Hat-Dog lurked in this very alleyway, she thought. Hat-Dog stood on the same dirty pavement under my feet right now.
What had he seen? Connie flicked through until she found a picture from her current vantage point. She held the phone out in front of her. The body. Framed by a concrete-block wall festooned with an exploded rainbow of profane, silly, artistic, and just plain incomprehensible graffiti.
Look for the thing that doesn’t belong.
—this very spot—
For the thing that belongs too well…
She went ahead and took her own picture, just as Hat-Dog had. The darkness of the alley flared to life for a moment and something caught her attention.
Did something else just light up? Or did I just blink at the right moment or…?
Checking her photo, she didn’t notice anything at first, but then she compared it to the original crime-scene photo. There, in the morass of graffiti on the wall behind where the victim had slumped, there was something new. It wasn’t in the original photo.
It’s just new graffiti. That’s all.
But as best she could tell, it was the only change. What were the odds?
She crept closer to the wall. Now that she knew what she was looking for, it was easy to find.
Connie had never tagged a wall in her life, but she knew from TV and movies that guys who tagged used spray paint. Sometimes they did funky stuff with neons, but usually it was just a can of whatever flat matte crap was on sale. She didn’t feel one way or another about graffiti, but she imagined it was tough to make such stable, consistent lines with a spray. It took some skill.
The new graffito, though, was shaky. Thin. Small. And even her untrained eye could discern its major differences from the surrounding tags: This wasn’t spray paint. It was some kind of plain white semi-gloss, like the stuff her dad used to paint the kitchen. It had been layered on with a brush, not sprayed on. It overlapped the original graffiti, so it had been added after the police descended on the alley.
More important, it had no style to it. Most of the other graffiti consisted of loops, whorls, arrows, and daring serifs. This was just slapped up there.
Five letters, in boring, somewhat shaky block print.
CHAPTER 18
And everything—predictably—went to hell for Jazz. Straight to hell, full speed.
This hadn’t been the first time he’d been manhandled by the cops, but it was definitely the coldest. Hauled out of the hotel, he’d started shivering almost immediately, the cold January air nearly choking him. Long shoved him into the backseat of an unmarked car and drove them away.
Minutes later, they pulled up to a dingy brick building with an NYPD shield on the outside and a sign reading 76TH PRECINCT. Jazz wondered briefly if he was under arrest. But he hadn’t been cuffed or read his rights, just pushed around.
Inside, the precinct was a madhouse, alive with chaos and noise. Uniformed cops, detectives in shirtsleeves, and a couple of men in ties who could only be—based on their stick-up-the-butt bearing—FBI agents milled about. The entrance to the precinct was clearly a sort of gathering area/lobby that had been pressed into duty as a command center; whiteboards and corkboards on wheels were parked against the walls, pinned and markered and taped with photos, names, dates. Jazz recognized it all from the information Hughes had brought him yesterday. And it was there that Jazz sat for more than an hour, waiting to be seen by… someone. The cops and agents cast cursory and disinterested looks in his direction, until at some point someone must have realized who he was. At that point, a buzz of excited conversation stirred the stale, overheated air of the precinct, making Jazz want to curl up and vanish.
He texted Connie: I think this is gonna take a while….
Directly across from him, unavoidably in his line of sight, was a series of plaques mounted to the wall, along with various badges and a trifolded American flag in a frame. It was a 9/11 memorial, he realized, reading the plaques. In honor of those from this precinct who’d died that day.
Jazz was too young to remember 9/11 itself, but Billy had been periodically obsessed with it. Throughout Jazz’s youth, he would sometimes sit and watch video of the World Trade Center towers collapsing over and over, the explosion of glass and flame from the side of the North Tower like a gush of arterial blood. Over and over.
So efficient, Billy would mumble. But no style. No flair.
It was the difference between serial murder and mass murder, as far as Billy was concerned.
“All these jackasses have done,” Billy told Jazz once, “is make people afraid to fly and afraid of New York. Which they already were in the first place. Takes real talent to get up close and personal and make you afraid of something brand-new.”
Jazz didn’t think the cops here would appreciate Billy’s insights into the tragedy that had claimed their brothers. He kept his mouth shut and waited.
Eventually, a door flew open down a hallway and Hughes stormed out. At first he didn’t see Jazz there, but as he got closer he spied Jazz and his expression softened for an instant.