And because it wouldn’t be the Hat-Dog Killer without some kind of escalation: The eyes were missing. Jazz sighed. He knew from Billy’s stories over the years what was involved in that. Eyes were actually pretty easy to scoop out, assuming you had your victim conveniently unconscious or dead. Just some tendons and nerves holding the eyes in; nothing you couldn’t cut easily with whatever was lying around the house. He wondered if they’d been removed pre-or postmortem? He supposed the autopsy would tell them.
So, he killed her and gutted her and de-… eyed her somewhere else. De-eyed? Un-eyed. Anyway. Then hauled her to the S line and dumped her.
A hat was carved into her sternum, between her breasts. Above was written the message to Jazz.
WELCOME TO THE GAME, JASPER.
Game.
It’s not a game, you sick lunatic.
The best estimates as to the death were that the victim had died in the early morning hours. So that meant she’d been killed before the New York press had glommed on to Jazz’s presence in the city and (unofficial) involvement in the Hat-Dog case.
“So there’s no way to know,” Morales had told him, “if this guy left the message for you before the press reported you were in town or after. If before, then that means he saw the story Weathers did on the Lobo’s Nod website. If after, then he’s still calling you out. Either way, he’s obsessed with you.”
WELCOME TO THE GAME, JASPER.
It almost—almost—sounded like something Billy would say. If not for that word—game. Billy never thought of what he did as a game. It was fun, yes, but the sort of fun to be taken deadly serious. There was a reason he referred to it as “prospecting.” The prospectors of olden times had been involved in life-or-death stakes for the most part, and when they succeeded, they celebrated.
Jazz could remember Billy returning from prospecting trips, flush with excitement and success. He would dump out of his suitcase a mélange of clothes, trophies, newspaper clippings of his exploits, and the occasional body part, then collapse in the big easy chair in the living room to obsessively watch TV coverage of his “adventures” while eating take-out Chinese food and drinking bottle after bottle of cream soda (one of Billy’s other obsessions).
Jazz would innocently play with the contents of Dear Old Dad’s suitcase, then arrange the trophies carefully in the rumpus room.
When the plane landed, Jazz was surprised to find Hughes standing there at the gate, waiting for him.
“Didn’t bring the girlfriend this time?” the detective asked.
“Thought for sure you’d be on suspension after the reaming out your captain gave you.”
“I’m too valuable,” Hughes joked. “But, yeah, sorry about that,” he went on as they walked to his car, which was parked obnoxiously in a no-parking zone, watched over by a TSA agent. “I didn’t mean to lie to you. But I’d been banging my head against this case for months and getting nowhere and I wanted to bring you, but Montgomery—”
“I get it,” Jazz said, climbing in. “It’s not like I’ve never broken the rules before.”
Hughes nodded and gunned the engine. “So, I understand you’ve met our FBI liaison?”
Jazz wondered briefly if he should mention Morales’s offer to help kill Billy. But no. Hughes might be maverick-y, but he didn’t think the detective would countenance outright murder. “Yeah. She tried some mind-screwing on me, but changed her tune pretty quick.”
“She likes doing that. Messing with guys. She’s a dyke, you know.”
Jazz squirmed at the word. “Didn’t know that,” he said casually, wondering how Hughes would feel if he went all Gramma and dropped the N-bomb.
“It’s statistically proven that of all the law enforcement agencies in the country, the FBI has the largest percentage of lesbians. Isn’t that interesting?”
That actually was interesting. “Really?”
Hughes guffawed. “No. I made that up. But it sounds like it could be true, doesn’t it?”
Dyke. Invented FBI stats. Hughes had his psychological guard up again. Jazz didn’t blame him.
“You’re a true wit. Anything new happen while I was in the air?”
“Nope. Still waiting on toxicology, autopsy, all that stuff. Still going over the scene.”
“What’s the plan?” It was getting dark outside, but Jazz didn’t want to let the fall of night slow him down. He was buzzing to get out on the street.
“Well, first I’m going to get you to the crime scene. The S doesn’t even run some weekends, and this is one of them. So we’re taking our time with crime-scene analysis. Body was still on-site, last I checked. I asked them to hold her there as long as they could, so you could see.”
“Good. Then what?”
“Then back to the precinct. Montgomery and Morales want to bring you up to speed on everything. Officially.”
Jazz nodded, staring at the photo on his phone. “This guy. Whoever he is…”
“He’s getting cocky,” Hughes said. “Which means he’ll slip up.”
“Maybe. I hope so. Sometimes they get cocky because they deserve to be.”
CHAPTER 27
By now, she knew, Jazz had made it to New York. Connie tried to focus on getting through her punishment and thinking good thoughts in the general direction of Brooklyn, but no matter what she did, she kept coming back to that message. She stared at her phone.
r u game?
WELCOME TO THE GAME, JASPER.
What in the hell was going on here?
r u game?
It could mean a couple of things. Game was something you hunted in order to eat it. So, hell, no, she wasn’t that kind of game.
But it could also mean “Are you up for something?” “Are you ready?”
To which Connie could say only, “Hells, yes.”
She was sick of being told to sit on the sidelines, play the good girlfriend, “stand by your man.” Sick of watching the crazy stuff from the outside. She had sneaked off to New York to help and that had worked out pretty well, right? Her exploration had discovered… something. And now it appeared that someone knew what she’d found. How?
I could have been followed in Brooklyn. Someone could have been watching. She shivered at the idea that she might have been under observation the whole time. Who could it have been? The Hat-Dog Killer himself? Billy Dent? Someone named Ugly J?
Her first instinct was to call Jazz and tell him about the text, but she knew exactly what he would say. Jazz would assume he had all the answers because Jazz always assumed he had all the answers. One day shortly after their encounter with the Impressionist, he had sat down with her and very seriously explained to her how to survive a serial killer.
“First thing is,” he told her, “run. Just get the hell away. Even if he’s small or seems weak or crippled somehow. It’s all an act. These guys don’t come after you unless they’re sure they can take you, so run. Bundy used to wear his arm in a sling. Fooled people. Made him seem helpless and harmless.”
“I know to run away,” she’d said, more than a little bit exasperated.
“If you can’t run, if he’s already got you,” Jazz pressed on, ignoring her, “then your next line of defense is verbal. Be firm. Tell him to leave you alone. Don’t try to hit him or attack him. Not yet. He’s probably stronger than you and hitting him will just flip his switch. But there’s a chance he might not be used to a woman being firm with him.”