Game

Go to hell, Billy.

Hell’s all around, Jasper m’boy?

As Morales had said, the crime scene was mere blocks from the precinct. A crowd had gathered, along with the usual media vultures. Morales handed Jazz a pair of sunglasses and an FBI baseball cap. Crude disguise, but maybe it would work.

NYPD uniforms had set up a perimeter around the scene and now did their level best to keep gawkers and press from getting too close. Jazz looked around quickly as he stepped out of the car. This was brazen, leaving the body here. P.S. 29 was on the corner of Baltic and Henry. Not a busy intersection, from what Jazz could tell, but even a lightly traveled New York intersection got more traffic than the busiest in Lobo’s Nod. Right across the street was a Chinese restaurant—two guys in food-spattered aprons stood in the doorway, gaping at the craziness across the street.

The rest of the buildings within sight looked residential. Smallish, squat apartment buildings and some town houses.

“He’s definitely getting cocky,” Jazz murmured to Morales as they ducked under the crime-scene tape. “Dumping right out in the open like this?”

“Yeah.” Morales had taken in the surroundings, too. “Safe bet—well, safe-ish—that no one’s lingering around a school on the weekend, but even so, he had to figure someone would pop up unexpected.”

“Where’s the witness?”

Morales pointed. An NYPD uniform stood near the front door to the school, holding out a cup of what could have been coffee or water or even whiskey to a woman in a winter coat who seemed to be on the verge of hyperventilating. “Dr. Meredith Sinclair. Assistant principal at P.S. Twenty-nine. She’s not going to be any use to us for a few minutes. Let the unis calm her down and then we’ll take a run at her.”

Jazz liked the way she said “we.”

The body lay almost like a snow angel just within a fence that separated the school grounds from the sidewalk along Baltic. Nothing new. Jazz went into instant assessment mode.

Caucasian female, age twenty-five to thirty. Blond. Naked. Slit open from breastbone to waist, the gaping wound of her gut revealing the shiny-slick loops of intestines. Eyelids gone. Eyes missing.

“Left the guts in this time,” Morales mumbled, crouching down for a better look, blocking a crime-scene tech. A

“No,” Jazz said. “Put them back.”

Morales arched an eyebrow and summoned one of the medical examiner’s men, who probed at the corpse and confirmed that, yes, the intestines were no longer attached to the body. They’d been removed, then stuffed back inside.

“Evolution of his signature?” Morales wondered aloud.

“Or maybe just expedient,” Jazz said. “Maybe he wanted to leave a clean murder site and he didn’t have anywhere else to put her guts when he moved her.”

“She was left here sometime between ten, ten-fifteen, which is when Dr. Sinclair got here to do some work before the winter break ended, and three, which is when she came out the front door. Nice little five-hour window.” Morales tsked. “Anything else, Boy Wonder? You’re the one who found all the stuff we missed at the other scenes.”

Jazz shook his head. “There’s nothing else to see here. This is just the dump site. Every clue available to you is in or on the body.” He turned a tight circle, sca

“Then why check around the other blocks?”

“Because he had to come from somewhere. If you can get an ID on the kind of car, maybe you can figure out which direction he came from. Maybe another camera out there somewhere on his route caught a picture of him or his license plate or something.”

Morales kicked at the ground. “Yeah. Okay.” He could tell by her tone of voice that she thought it was useless. And she was probably right. But they had to try something. Anything, at this point.

“He’s showing his contempt for us,” Jazz told her. “He knows the investigation is headquartered right down the road. He might have even known we were interviewing suspects.”

Morales clucked her tongue. “How would he know that? You think he’s a cop?”

She asked it so matter-of-factly that it stu

“Nah,” Jazz said lightly. It was possible, of course. But this seemed like such a risky move…. Would a cop—even a crazy cop—take such a chance? “I think he’s FBI.”

Morales blew out a puff of laughter. “Okay, yeah, right.” She took the woman’s wrist in her hand, almost as though checking for a pulse. “Her extremities are in rigor. Rest of the body’s getting there.”

“Given the cold temperatures, figure she’s been dead six, seven hours?” One of the medical techs looked at Jazz with impressed surprise and nodded, confirming the estimate.

“So he kills her early this morning and dumps her here right away,” Morales said. She moved, carefully, in order to get a better angle on the body. “Raped?”

“Won’t know until we get her on the slab,” the tech said, “but I’m guessing yes, based on some bruising on her i

“Let me know what you get,” she told the tech. To Jazz, she said, “Do you need to see anything else?”

Jazz glanced over at the assistant principal again. She was gulping whatever was in the cup, and the cop with her looked bored.

“Are we sure she didn’t see anything when she got here?”

“She says—”

“Witnesses are wrong. Eyewitness testimony is pretty unreliable.”

“I know that.”

“I’m just thinking… if I were a serial killer and I wanted to throw the cops off, I might drop a body so that it’s found when I’m talking to them. Make them think I’m just some kind of crackpot.”

Morales shook her head. “I would buy that if we came to him. But he approached us. We didn’t suspect him to begin with. Why would anyone—even a lunatic—try to throw off suspicion by raising suspicion?”

To that, Jazz had no answer.

CHAPTER 36

Co

“Hey! Hey, what are you doing?”

She looked up and around. Realized that the voice came from through the hedge to the east. A man stood there with a baseball bat.

“That’s private property!” he shouted.

Co

Oh… crap.

Trespassing. Disturbing evidence. Damaging private property… And those were just the crimes Co

She stooped down and gathered up the box and its contents, then took off in the opposite direction, leaving the shovel and pickax behind. I owe Howie more than twenty bucks now, some crazy part of her realized.