“What? Oh, yeah. Much better.” He scanned the entryway. “Got a minute?”
“Headed out,” she said, putting on the other sneaker and dropping her heels into a bag. “Field office wants a report in person, and you don’t keep the field office waiting. First rule of the FBI.”
“But—”
“First rule,” she said again, and breezed out the door.
Jazz ground his teeth together. Should he follow her? She was the one he should convince now, because there was no way Hughes would listen—
“Dent!”
Speaking of Hughes…
Jazz grinned apologetically in Hughes’s direction as the detective bulled through the lobby toward him. “Sorry! I was just leaving.” Yeah, he’d go after Morales and—
“You’re not going anywhere.” To prove it, Hughes clamped a powerful grip on Jazz’s wrist. Jazz tamped down his first reaction, to break the grip in the most painful way possible. Crippling an NYPD detective wouldn’t solve this case any sooner.
“I can go,” Jazz whispered. “Let me—”
“I told you to stay away from here.” Hughes dragged Jazz unwillingly into a smallish office. “Everyone thinks you have food poisoning. And I still haven’t figured out what to do about you after last night.”
Jazz calculated the odds of being able to persuade Hughes that he’d figured out the Hat-Dog Killer before the pissed-off cop tossed him out of the precinct. Hit him with something he won’t expect.
“Belsamo’s on Atlantic,” Jazz said, and Hughes released him immediately. He was in control right now, whether Hughes liked it or not. “There’s an Atlantic Avenue around here, right?”
If Hughes’s reaction weren’t so predictable, it would have been fascinating to watch as he visibly deflated, his face realigning from righteous anger to incredulous shock. “How do you do that?” It was as close to a whine as Jazz could imagine coming from the detective. “He’s been walking up and down Atlantic Avenue all day. Not doing anything illegal. Just walking from the river to over by Flatbush, over and over. Like he’s casing the whole avenue.”
“Not the whole avenue,” Jazz said. “He’s looking for his next dump site.”
It was raw, bloody meat to a starving wolf, and Hughes could do nothing but bite into it. “So it’s him? He’s definitely the Hat-Dog Killer?”
Jazz considered taking mercy on Hughes and just spilling it all at once. But… nah. Where was the fun in that?
“He’s not the Hat-Dog Killer,” Jazz said with authority, and watched the shock return to Hughes’s face, along with a soul-crushing distress.
Jazz gave it a couple of seconds to sink in, then said, “He’s the Dog Killer.”
“There can’t be two of them,” Hughes said. “We’ve been through this already. We considered that months ago and had to discard it. We’ve got DNA from various scenes and it’s all a match. It’s one guy.”
“You found that DNA because they wanted you to find it,” Jazz explained. “They planted it. To make it look like one guy was doing this. This is a game and there are two players: Hat and Dog. You have Dog’s DNA. So even if you catch him, Hat is still free and clear.”
Jazz could imagine it perfectly, as though he’d been eavesdropping on the phone call. It must have been a panicked call, from Dog to Billy, the games master.
“There’s a problem.” Dog would have done his best to cover his worry with calm and reserve. Because that was how Billy would have taught him to act.
“I don’t like problems.” Jazz imagined Billy saying it jovially, with a slight lilt to his voice. A dad ruffling his kid’s hair after a tough Little League at bat. “Why don’t you fill me in and we’ll see what we can do.”
“I didn’t realize. Until I came home. But… he scratched me.”
“What?”
“I have a scratch. On my hand.”
“Didn’t you wear gloves?”
“Yes. The scratch is high up on the hand. Over the wrist. He must have clawed down the glove. I didn’t expect it. He fought like a bitch, not a man. I didn’t realize until just now….”
And Billy would sigh, resigned to working with amateurs. “Okay. Okay, let me think. Let me think.”
“They have my DNA now.”
“I know. That’s not actually a problem. Evidence is only good when you have something to compare it to.”
“So we make sure they never have anything to compare it to?”
And Jazz could hear the familiar chuckle emanating deep within Billy’s chest, low and rumbly. “No. Are you kidding me? That’s what they expect. No. We want to make sure they have something to compare it to….”
“It’s a game,” Jazz told Hughes. “And Billy’s playing, but he’s not on any one side or another. There are three players, but only two sides, you see? But there’s a game on top of the game—Hat and Dog are playing each other with Billy watching them, but at the same time, Billy’s playing with us. Four players. Three sides.”
Hughes wiped down his face with both hands. “Jasper, our forensic people are really good. Every criminal makes a mistake, and when they do, we find them.”
“Exactly! Don’t you get it? That’s what Billy was counting on. Look.” He held up a sheet of paper on which he’d plotted the evidence found at the various crime scenes. “You had no DNA evidence at all until the fourth victim, the guy found at the subway station on, what was it, Pennsylvania and Liberty Avenues, right? That’s when you found some blood and skin cells under the victim’s fingernails.”
“Right. And then we found semen at the sixth crime scene—”
“But not the fifth! That was a Hat crime. The sixth victim was Dog’s first woman. Raped because he had to make it look like one guy, not two. Hat rapes and Dog doesn’t, but for you guys not to catch on, they occasionally had to mimic each other. Dog raped the sixth victim and was so disgusted with himself that he had to reduce her to something less than human—that’s why he disemboweled her. Then Hat had to keep it up. Every time one of them added something to the signature, the other one had to pick it up and run with it.”
“That’s crazy. He deliberately left evidence—”
“It’s so crazy that it worked. Dog was giving DNA to Hat—hairs, semen samples—and letting him plant them so that you guys would think there was one guy, the Hat-Dog Killer, not two, Hat and Dog.”
“If they’re playing a game, what kind of game is it? And why would Belsamo voluntarily walk into—” He broke off at the enormity of Jazz’s grin. Jazz silently lifted his cell phone and held it up to Hughes. A bright Monopoly board filled the screen.
“Jasper, no!” Hughes groaned. “Park Place… that’s just a name. It’s not—”
“I’ve got it on my phone. I bet Belsamo has it on his laptop, in the folder titled Game. They’re playing Monopoly,” Jazz insisted, now shoving another paper at Hughes. “Hat and Dog. Two of the player pieces in the game. They carve their symbol into the victims to prove they did it. First two victims, remember? Found behind some place called Connecticut Bagel. Well, both killers started at Go and rolled nines. Bang. Connecticut Avenue. Third victim, in an empty parking space. Free Parking. That’s a Hat. They take turns. Fourth victim, first DNA: a rail stop on Pennsylvania Avenue. That’s the Pennsylvania Railroad, man.”
Hughes scanned the paper, but Jazz could tell he was being humored, not believed. “They don’t always alternate. There are two hats in a row.”