Game

“You didn’t see anything else?”

“I told you.”

“Or hear anything?”

“Look—”

“Maybe you saw something that you didn’t really co

“No. I told the cops every—” She paused mid-drag, then lowered the cigarette without puffing. “Oh. Oh, wow. I forgot. How could I forget?”

“What didn’t you tell them?”

Rabia looked ill. “Lord, how could I have forgotten? I forgot right until you just asked me. It was so crazy that night….”

“What, Rabia?” Co

Rabia shuddered, then shrugged, as if deciding then and there that it couldn’t be important. “You said a light, right? But it was probably nothing. Right? The alley lit up. For just a second before he came ru

Another flash. He took a picture again. Why? Is Jazz right—are these just his way of taking trophies? Or is it something else?

“That probably wasn’t important, right?” Rabia gnawed at her cuticle, her cigarette dangling ash. “They couldn’t have stopped him with just that, right?”

Co

The alley looked depressingly like it had in the crime-scene photos, as though time had frozen here when winter came. The Dumpster was the same, although—as she glanced at the pictures on her phone—the bags of garbage spilling out of it were piled differently, of course. And there was no leftover snow in the picture of the original crime scene.

Co

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.

Co

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—Co

“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? Co

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.

Co

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, pi