I Hunt Killers (3 page)

“You should be looking at bugs and soil samples, and I didn’t see anyone casting footprint molds, and—”

“There weren’t any footprints,” G. William said, exasperated. “And the other stuff…We have to contract out to the state for forensic odontology, for botanical services, for anthropology and entomology. We’re a small town in a small jurisdiction. Stop comparing us to the big boys. We’ll get the job done.”

“Not if you don’t know what the job is in the first place.”

“A serial killer,” G. William said, skepticism dripping from every syllable.

“How did you find the body?” Jazz asked, desperate for something that would prove his point. “You didn’t trip over it out there. Was it an anonymous call? If you got a call, that’s totally a serial killer making sure you see his handiwork. You know that, right?”

He’d gone too far—G. William could take a lot of abuse, but he didn’t cotton to condescension. “Yeah, Jazz. I know that. I also know that serial killers like to stick around and watch the cops work.”

The words slammed Jazz full in the chest, no less powerful and painful than if G. William had drawn his service revolver and put two slugs into his center of mass. Jazz was afraid of two things in the world, and two things only. One of them was that people thought that his upbringing meant that he was cursed by nature, nurture, and predestination to be a serial killer like his father.

The second thing…was that they were right.

And with the discovery of this new body, who could blame them? The odds of two separate serial killers picking a tiny town like Lobo’s Nod were beyond astronomical, so far beyond that it didn’t even bear serious consideration. Billy Dent was locked up. Thirty-two consecutive life sentences. The joke around town was that he wouldn’t even be eligible for parole until five years after he was dead. He was on total lockdown—twenty-three hours a day in a five-by-eight cinder-block cell—and had been since the moment he set foot in the penitentiary. He’d had no visitors other than his lawyer in that whole time.

When the original devil couldn’t do the crime, who did you look at next? His son, of course. If Jazz didn’t know for certain that he
wasn’t
involved in this murder, he would have pointed the finger (
ha, ha
) at himself. It made complete sense that the son of the local serial killer would kill someone. But just because it made sense didn’t make the thought any easier to bear.

“Th-that,” he stammered, “is over the line. I learned a lot from Billy, and I can use that to—”

“You go skulking around a crime scene, spying on me and my people. You march into my office and violate my privacy by reading my personal notes,” G. William said, ticking points off on his fingers as he went. Jazz couldn’t help thinking of the severed finger in its pristine plastic evidence bag, just sitting there like leftovers. “I could probably bring you up on some kind of charge, if I wanted to take five minutes to think about it. Demanding I let you in on a case, which would be
highly
improper, even if you weren’t a kid, and even if you weren’t Billy Dent’s kid.” He had lost track of the counting—his whole right hand was splayed out. “All those reasons, Jazz, and plenty more. All of them say I won’t let you help out.”

“Come on! You bring in experts all the—”

“You’re an expert all of a sudden?”

Jazz leaned in and they met over the desk, almost bumping into each other. G. William’s mustache and jowls quivered.

“I know things,” Jazz said in his strongest voice.

“You know too much and not enough,” the sheriff said, so softly that it caught Jazz off-guard.

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying”—deep breath—“you learned a lot from him, but you want to be careful you don’t act too much like your daddy, now don’t you?”

Jazz glared at him, then wheeled around and stomped out of the office, slamming the door behind him as he went.

“Let me do this my way!” G. William called through the closed door. “That’s my job. Your job is to try to be normal!”

“Um, Jasper,” Lana said nervously as he flew past her desk. “Uh, good-bye?”

He didn’t even realize he’d ignored her until he was next to the Jeep, seething. He kicked the bumper with the flat of his foot; it complained with a metallic, grinding squeal and threatened to drop off.

I’ll show you what I learned from my father
, he thought.

Whenever Jazz needed to do something risky or vaguely illegal, he made sure to bring Howie along. This did not endear him to Howie’s parents, but if Jazz wanted to stay as human as possible, it was necessary: Howie kept Jazz close to the line of safety and legality. That’s because Howie was Jazz’s best (and only) friend. And also because Howie was so fragile that Jazz had to hold back in his presence.

Howie Gersten was a type-A hemophiliac, which meant that he bled if you looked at him too hard. The two had met when they were younger, when Jazz had come across Howie being tormented by a trio of older kids who weren’t quite stupid enough to cause any serious harm, but who reveled in poking at Howie’s exposed arms, then chortling over the bruises that blossomed almost immediately. Howie’s arms had taken on an almost lizardlike appearance, with overlapping bruises of blue and purple that looked like scales.

Jazz had been smaller than the other kids, younger, and they outnumbered him three to one, but even then—at the age of ten—Jazz had a rudimentary understanding of some of the more important weak spots in the human body. He’d sent the older kids packing with their own fine collection of bruises, including a couple of black eyes and fat lips, as well as one knee sprained just right—it would plague the kid for months. For his troubles, Jazz earned himself a bloody nose and an undying, unstinting friendship.

And the kind of friend who would come along when you had to break in to a morgue.

The police station was open twenty-four hours a day because it was a nerve center for the county’s law enforcement efforts. But at night, many hours after Jazz had left in a huff, it was just a skeleton crew, consisting of a deputy on duty and a dispatcher. Lana was still at the desk, having pulled the night shift. Jazz knew that would make this easy. Lana thought he was cute. She was right out of high school and he was a junior, so only a couple of years separated them.

“I’ll distract Lana,” Jazz told Howie, “and then you work your magic.”

“You sure you can keep her occupied?”

Jazz rolled his eyes. “Puh-lease.”

“The ladies love bad boys,” Howie said, striking what was supposed to be a tough-guy pose. “Gotcha. I will be your magic trick. Misdirection!” He waggled his fingers. “Abracadaver! Get it?” he added as they headed for the door. “Abra
cadaver
? Get it?”

Jazz sighed. “I got it, Howie.”

Together, they walked into the police station, which was quiet this late at night. Lana looked up, then grinned a wide grin when she saw Jazz.

“Hi there!” she chirped.

Jazz sauntered over to her cubicle and leaned on the half-wall with both elbows. “Hi, Lana.”

“What brings you back?” she asked, her eyes very wide and earnest. This was going to be way too easy. “You stormed out of here before.”

“I just wanted to—”

Just then Howie came up to them, clearing his throat. “Okay if I get a Coke?” he asked, pointing to the back corridor, where an ancient Coke machine loomed large.

“Go ahead,” Lana said, not even flicking her eyes in his direction as he walked past them.

“I just wanted to apologize for the way I went out of here before,” Jazz said, pretending to give Lana all his attention. He cranked up the wattage on his smile. “I didn’t even say good-bye to you.”

As he chatted with Lana—who assured him that his apology wasn’t necessary, all the while lapping it up—Jazz watched Howie head for the second desk in the row behind Lana. He looked up at Jazz, who nodded quickly. Howie opened the top desk drawer, fished around, then closed it. A moment later, he rejoined Jazz at Lana’s cubicle.

“Done,” Howie said.

“Well,” Jazz said to Lana, “I guess we have to go. School tomorrow, you know. But I just knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight if I didn’t say something to you.” Another big smile.

Howie and Jazz were almost to the door when Lana called out, “Hey, Howie, I thought you were getting a Coke?”

Jazz shot a glare at Howie, who shrugged meekly. “Turns out I don’t have any change.”

They got outside before Lana could say anything more. “You’re an idiot,” Jazz told him.

“And yet, I recover well.” He dug into his pocket and produced the block of wax Jazz had given him earlier. “Still an idiot?”

“Yes,” Jazz said, grabbing the wax. In it was a perfect impression of the morgue key Howie had found in the desk drawer. “Just somewhat competent. Let’s go.”

Making a duplicate key from a wax impression was an extremely useful skill to have if you were the sort of person who liked invading other people’s homes and killing them. Billy Dent felt it was important for Jazz to know how to do this, and for once Jazz was grateful for Billy’s lessons. It didn’t take long before he’d turned Howie’s wax block into an actual key—he had a selection of blanks and cutting tools that Billy had given him on his eleventh birthday. Match up the right blank with the wax impression, then file away everything that isn’t in the right place until the notches fit the wax. Simple. He’d been practicing most of his life, after all.

The police station abutted the Giancci Funeral Home on one side, the two buildings joined by the briefest of outdoor corridors. The Lobo’s Nod morgue was half the basement of the funeral parlor.

With Howie at his side, Jazz strode into the morgue like he lived there, flicking on one of the overhead lights to bathe the place in cold white light. Because there were no windows to the outside, he and Howie would be able to mill about with confidence.

“We need to move quickly,” Jazz said. “There’s a rent-a-cop who comes by every hour.”

Howie craned his neck, gawking. “This place is nothing like on
CSI
.”

“What did you expect?”

“I guess I expected
CSI
,” Howie said, miffed. “Otherwise, why would I have said—”

Jazz snaked a pair of purple, powdered latex gloves from an open box on a metal tray. He threw them at Howie, who bobbled them, but managed to catch them. “Put these on. Fingerprints.”

“I hope they fit.…”

He watched Howie cram his oversized mitts into the gloves, which looked like they were stretched just slightly beyond their tolerance. Howie had the build of an NBA player: gangly, loose limbs, rope-thin frame, hands that seemed preternaturally grasping. But Howie’s hemophilia saw to it that he would never play basketball on a team, not even Little League.

Still, Howie loved the game. He obsessed over the stats and the standings. Every March, Jazz had to tune out Howie’s endless droning about the Sweet Sixteen, the Elite Eight, the Final Four, etc. Still, it was worth it—not many kids would willingly pal around with “that Dent kid.” Before Billy had been arrested and exposed as the Artist (or Gentle Killer or Satan’s Eye or Hand-in-Glove or Green Jack—take your pick of Billy’s media-assigned nicknames), Jazz had been a pretty popular kid. Then the arrest had come, and Jazz became a pariah.

Except to Howie.

Howie had been the constant in Jazz’s life, the kid he’d come to rely on to keep him grounded and sane when the world threatened to tip him over into Billy-style craziness. When he’d started dating his girlfriend, Connie, several months ago, he’d been a little worried that maybe he and Howie would become less close, but if anything, they’d become even tighter, as though Jazz doing something as amazingly normal as dating a girl made him a better, stronger friend.

The sound of Howie—now gloved—pawing around on a tray of medical instruments brought Jazz back to the present. “Stop it,” Jazz said.

“Bro, I’m wearing gloves.” Howie waved to prove his point.

Jazz jammed a shower cap on Howie’s head. “We’re not here to mess around with their stuff. Stick to the mission.” He settled a cap on his own head, too.

“‘Stick to the mission,’” Howie mocked, but he left the instruments alone and instead joined Jazz at a large steel door set with a surprisingly modern digital lock. The keypad was numbered 0 through 9 and also included the letters A to F. Howie frowned at it. “This isn’t going to be easy,” he said. “‘Tonight, on
CSI: Hicksville
, Dent and Gersten encounter their toughest case yet.…’”

“How much do you want to bet I can get that door open on the first try?” Jazz said.

Howie pursed his lips, thinking. “You pay for burgers next time. And we have to eat at Grasser’s.”

Jazz scowled. He hated the food at Grasser’s, a local burger joint more appropriately nicknamed “Grosser’s,” but Howie loved the place with a lust that bordered on the irrational. “Okay, fine. And what if I can get it open on the first try?”

Howie thought. “We don’t eat at Grasser’s for a month.”

Totally worth it. “Watch,” Jazz said, grinning. He reached for the door handle and twisted. The steel door opened with only a tiny squeak.

“Oh, come on!” Howie protested. “Not fair! It wasn’t even locked.”

“A deal’s a deal.” They slipped into a small refrigerated room, where the bodies were stored while awaiting autopsy, reclamation, or burial. Right now, there was a single body in the freezer, zipped into a new body bag (the one on the scene had been bright yellow; this one was black) and resting on a wheeled stretcher.

“Is that her?” Howie whispered, shivering slightly.

“It,” Jazz corrected. “It stopped being a ‘her’ a while ago.”

Screwed to the wall of the freezer room was a plastic file holder, in which sat a lonely pale green folder. The tab read
DOE, JANE (1)
, the number denoting that this was the year’s first Jane Doe. Probably the only one, too. In a place like New York City, there might be upwards of fifteen hundred unidentified bodies in a year. There had been bodies in the Nod before, of course, but they’d always been identified. For this town, a single Doe broke the long-standing record of none.

Jazz plucked the file from the holder and flipped through it, scanning the report.

“Have the lambs stopped screaming, Clarice?” Howie said suddenly in a dead-on Hannibal Lecter impression.

“Stop that!”

“Well, I don’t understand why you have to see the body,” Howie complained, hugging himself for warmth. “She’s dead. She had a finger chopped off. You knew that already.”

The report was short. As G. William had indicated, it was just preliminary. Jazz went back to the first page and started reading. “Ever hear of Locard’s Exchange Principle?”

“Oh, sure,” Howie said. “I saw them open for Green Day last year. They rocked.” He played a little air guitar.

“L-O-L,” Jazz deadpanned. “Locard was this French guy who said that any time a person comes into contact with anything at all, there’s a two-way trip involved. Stuff from the guy gets on the thing—hair, maybe, or skin cells, dandruff, whatever—and the thing gets stuff on the guy—like dust or paint or dirt or something. Stuff is exchanged. Get it?”

“French guy. Stuff exchanged. Got it.” Howie saluted, then went back to hugging himself against the cold.

“So I thought maybe the killer left some kind of evidence,” Jazz went on, then sighed. “But according to this report, nothing. No fibers, no hairs, no fluids…Clean.”

“As clean as you can be after lying out in a field,” Howie said. “Can we go now?”

There were crime-scene photos paper-clipped to the inside of the folder. Jazz stared at them. It was almost eerie, the perfect poise of that body. Unnatural. Perfect, save for the missing fingers, and even they had been neatly “excised” (the police report’s antiseptic language) postmortem, with no blood loss. No pain.

If there had been some sort of savagery before death—torture, cutting, mutilation—it might somehow be easier to believe that something once living was now dead. As it was, the word
dead
seemed somehow…inaccurate.

“Earth to Jazz. Can we go?”

“Not yet.” Jazz slipped the coroner’s report back into its holder and started to unzip the bag.

“Oh, man!” Howie took a step back. “Totally not into checking out the corpses today.”

“You can wait outside if you want.” He got the zipper all the way down, and there lay Jane Doe, eyes closed, skin a waxy white. After roughly forty-eight hours, bacterial action turns skin a greenish hue, so Jazz figured it had been less than two days since the murder, and the early report agreed with him.

“Oh, man,” Howie said from behind him, his voice hushed. “God. Look at her.”

“It,” Jazz reminded him again, staring down. He knew he was supposed to feel something here. Even coroners felt a momentary glimmer of regret when someone so young and healthy was laid out before them. But Jazz looked down at the body and felt…nothing. Exactly, precisely nothing.

Well, that wasn’t completely true. A tiny part of him registered that, when alive, Jane Doe would have been an easy victim. Simple prey. To a killer’s eye, the smallish frame and lack of obvious strength would have been attractive. Short fingernails meant less risk of being scratched. According to the report, Jane Doe stood no more than five foot one—when standing was still possible. A killer’s dream victim. You couldn’t custom-order one better.

“Man, this sucks, doesn’t it?” Howie whispered. “She was like this little bitty thing and someone just came along and—”