I Hunt Killers (4 page)

“Yeah, sucks,” Jazz interrupted. “Now be quiet. I’m working.”

No bruises, no cuts or contusions or scrapes. All he could do was a cursory examination, and the report had most of that data already. Autopsies were conducted in a specific sequence: ID the body, photograph it, remove any trace evidence, measure and weigh it, then x-ray it and examine the outside. That’s as far as they’d gotten tonight, with just old Dr. Garvin on call. The real medical examiner would come in the morning to cut her open, then look at tissues under a microscope and prepare the toxicology samples. In the meantime, according to the folder, the cops thought strangulation. Jazz thought that made sense; strangling was a relatively easy way to kill someone. No weapons needed. Just hands. As long as you wore gloves, you wouldn’t leave any incriminating evidence.

The report said that Jane Doe was a “Caucasian female, between 18 and 25, no distinguishing tattoos, birthmarks, scars.” Jazz scanned quickly, agreeing with the assessment. He took a moment to peel open the eyelids, causing Howie to gag and take a step back. The eyes—light brown—stared out at nothing. It was possible, Jazz knew, for red blood cells in the retinal veins to keep moving hours after death, one of the last gasps of life in an already-dead body. But the dead eyes betrayed no movement, so he checked what he’d come here for, what he’d really needed to see with his own eyes: the right hand. He wanted to make certain what he’d seen in the report was accurate.

It was.

Three fingers on the right hand were missing—the index finger, the middle finger, and the ring finger. The thumb and pinky were all that remained; that hand would flash devil horns while the corpse rotted in the ground somewhere. But according to what Jazz had seen in the Harrison field with his own eyes and Billy’s gift binocs, the cops had recovered only one finger—the one he’d seen in the evidence bag.

The killer had taken the other two with him. According to the woefully thin report, he’d taken the ring and index fingers.

Howie cleared his throat. “Man, are you sure about this? What if the whole thing was just an accident? Like, what if it was just two people out in the field? Like, having sex and stuff? And she hits her head or has a heart attack or something and the guy is scared, so he runs away.”

“And what? Accidentally cuts off three fingers postmortem? ‘Oops, oh, no, my girlfriend just died! Clumsy me, in trying to perform CPR, I chopped off some fingers! Guess I’ll take them with me.…Oh, darn, where did that middle finger go?’”

Howie sniffed in offense. “Fine. Maybe an animal came along and—”

“Look at the cleavage plane here.”

“Cleavage?” Howie perked up, then immediately winced and shrank back as Jazz grabbed Jane’s wrist and held up the mutilated hand.

“Cleavage
plane
,” Jazz said again, shaking the hand just slightly. “The cut. It’s smooth. An animal would have gnawed away at it; the wound would be ragged and chewed.”

“But there’s more than one finger missing. So maybe an animal ate them—”

“No. The killer took them. As a trophy.”

“Why the fingers? Your pops never took body parts. Say what you want about him, but—”

“Projective identification.”

“What?”

“It’s when the killer projects his worst characteristics on the victim and then kills for it. So, why the fingers? Was he caught touching something he wasn’t supposed to? Some
one
he wasn’t supposed to? Is this his way of punishing himself?”

“Put that away,” Howie said, and Jazz realized he was still holding the corpse by the wrist.

Jazz tucked the hand back into the bag, and Howie visibly relaxed. “So, fine. Why does it have to be a serial killer? It could be a onetime thing.”

Jazz shook his head. “No. The fingers. Your average murderer doesn’t mutilate a body like that. And he especially doesn’t take trophies. But it’s more than that. It’s that he left one behind. He left the middle one behind.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah. He
literally
gave the cops the finger. He’s saying, ‘Come and get me. Catch me if you can.’ That’s a serial killer.”

For a moment, there was nothing but silence in the freezer, as Jazz stared at the body and Howie stared at Jazz.

Jazz gazed down at the eyes, at the lips pressed together in a pale pink line. When people saw dead bodies like this, they said it looked like the person was sleeping. Jazz thought that was crazy. He’d never seen a dead body that looked like it was sleeping. He’d never seen a dead body that didn’t look like exactly what it was—a corpse. A husk. A thing.

Wrapped my hands around her throat
, Billy whispered in Jazz’s mind.
Just squeezed and squeezed…

Jazz looked closely at the neck. Howie leaned in, curious despite himself, and said, “Was she choked to death?” He mimed throttling someone.

“
Strangled
is the right term,” Jazz told him. “Choking is when something blocks your airway from the inside. And, yeah, I think so. Can’t be sure yet.” A good strangulation left few signs. The medical examiner would have to drain all the blood from the neck, then slowly and meticulously peel back layers of tissue, looking for telltale small bruises.

“Can they, like, get fingerprints from her neck? Can they catch the guy that way?”

“This guy isn’t an amateur. He probably used gloves.”

“How do you know he isn’t an amateur, Sherlock?”

“There’s bruising on the left-hand knuckles, and on the sides of both hands. Probably would be on the right-hand knuckles, too, if we had them.”

“She hit him,” Howie said. “She fought back.”

“And that means this guy has done this before. If you’re a newbie, you don’t want a fight on your hands. You sneak up behind them and you knock them out and
then
you start the nasty stuff. If you confront someone while they’re awake, you’re a badass.”

Struggling is what makes it worth doing
, Billy said. Jazz closed his eyes, trying to chase away his father’s voice, but it was no good. Billy was on a roll, dispensing what he thought of as honest fatherly wisdom, baring what passed for his soul.
Sometimes I can’t tell the difference between living and dead. Sometimes I look at a pretty little girlie and I think to myself,
Is she a living, breathing thing? Or is she just a doll? Are those actual tears she’s crying? Are those real screams coming out of her mouth?
And it’s like a fog in my mind, like I get all confused and frustrated and mixed up, so I start doing things. Start small at first, like maybe with the ears or the lips or the toes. And then move on to the bigger things, and there’s blood, so I keep going and my hands are wet and my mouth is warm and I keep going and then something real magical happens, Jasper. It’s real magical and special and beautiful. See, they stop moving. They stop struggling. All the fight just goes away and that’s when it’s all clear to me: She’s dead. And if she’s dead, then that means that she used to be alive. So then I know: This was a living one, a real one. And I feel good after that ’cause I figured it out.

Jazz realized that his own gloved hands—

This guy isn’t an amateur. He probably used gloves.

—had come to rest on either side of the neck. With just the right movement, he could have that neck in his hands—

This guy isn’t an amateur.

—and he could feel the muscles and the windpipe and the—

This guy

He jerked away and grabbed the steel lip of the stretcher to steady himself. “You were right,” he told Howie.

“Um, I was?”

“Yeah.”

“Score for me. Beauty. But what was I right about?”

“She’s a she. Not an it. She’s always been a she.”

“Yeah, no kidding.”

“Don’t ever let me call her an it again,” Jazz told him. “Actually, don’t ever let me call
anyone
an it, okay?”

Jazz finished his examination of the body while Howie crept into the nearby funeral home business office to make a photocopy of the anemic preliminary report. There was nothing substantial in the file, but Jazz figured it couldn’t hurt to have a copy. Besides, he didn’t want Howie around when he rolled the body.

The human body holds about ten pints of blood when everything is going right, and Jane still had enough of hers when she died to cause dark purplish areas, almost like bruises, when the blood pooled postmortem. Jane had been found on her back, but there was evidence of blood-pooling on her front and side, giving the flesh of her lower abdomen and left hip an almost mottled appearance. Jazz reached into the bag, slipping his hands under her, one near the shoulders, the other near her buttocks. He paused for a moment. It was so strange. He was touching a woman’s
ass
. It was wrong on so many levels.

“People matter,” he whispered to himself. “People matter. People are real. Remember Bobby Joe Long.”

His personal mantra, whispered every morning. A reminder. His own magic spell, casting a shield against his own evil.

It was tough to turn her, as her body was still going into rigor mortis. Rigor usually started about two hours after death. It started in the face and hands—the small muscles—and spread to the entire body over about twelve hours. If her big muscles were just freezing up now…Jazz did some quick math, factored in the pliability he’d observed in the field when the cops moved Jane’s body, and decided that she must have been killed no more than an hour or two before the cops arrived on the scene. Just before daybreak, then.

He turned her onto her left side. Her back was pale.

If she’d been killed in the field and left there on her back, all the blood in her body would have settled in her back and buttocks, making them purple and slightly swollen. But the blood had pooled elsewhere in her body. That meant she’d been killed somewhere else and then transported, her blood sloshing around in her dead body like the grains in a piece of sand art every time she was moved.

So the killer killed her…then moved her…then called the cops right away.…

Yeah. Definitely not a newbie.

The killer
was
a badass. Talk about supreme confidence. Jazz couldn’t help it; he sort of admired the guy.

People matter. People are real. People matter.…

The spot in the field where Jane had been dumped wasn’t just the sort of place you stumbled upon while carrying a corpse around. The killer must have scoped it out in advance. Did it have some significance to him? And why that particular spot? Moving a body was risky, but also necessary.
You want distance between you and the cops, so you have to—

Shut up, Billy
, Jazz thought fiercely.

“Uh-oh,” Howie said from behind him, his voice panicked. “Jazz?”

Jazz turned and saw that Howie’s face was covered in blood.

For a split second, Jazz thought someone had attacked Howie, but then Howie tilted his head back and said, “Oh, no. Crap!”

Howie had twice-weekly shots to boost his clotting factor, but he was still prone to random nosebleeds. This one was a real flood, twin red rivulets running out of his nose, gushing over his mouth and chin. Howie had the report in one hand and the photocopy in the other, his arms spread wide to keep him from bleeding on either of them. Jazz dashed over and cupped his hand under Howie’s chin to catch the blood before it could hit the floor. Even so, a few drops spattered against the cold tile, almost perfect circles of red.

Howie’s blood was warm, especially in the cold freezer.
Special kinda warm
, Billy said, and Jazz grimaced, then used his free hand to pinch Howie’s nose shut and stanch the flow.

“Danks,” Howie said.

“How long since your last desmopressin shot?”

“Uh…Dursday?”

“Must have been the cold in here,” Jazz said. “Back up to the other room. There were some Kleenex on the desk.”

They carefully edged out of the freezer and back into the office, Jazz still pinching with one hand and cupping with the other, all while watching his feet so as not to smear and track the blood all over the place. Blood was the worst bit of evidence to leave behind: Blood is chockablock with DNA, and it’s almost impossible to remove every trace from most surfaces.

Ten pints
, he thought again. Ten pints. How easy to lose track of a few drops, and a few drops were sometimes enough to give you away.

Once they were in the office, Jazz had Howie drop the papers and take over pinching duty. He couldn’t walk around with bloody gloves, and he couldn’t just throw them away covered like this, so he stripped them off and rinsed them in the nearby sink, watching the rusty red water swirl down the drain. It was hypnotic, taking him back to a time he could scarcely remember and yet could never forget: his own childhood. His own childhood, and another time when rusty red water had swirled.

Billy Dent’s fathering skills—such as they were—resembled brainwashing techniques more than parenting. As a result, Jazz mostly remembered bits and pieces, like now—a memory of blood running into a sink drain; the pungent smell of it thick in his nose; a sharp, stained knife resting in the sink. Jazz had a terror of knives left in sinks. He couldn’t stand seeing them there. At home, every time he used a knife, he had to clean it and stow it in a drawer or knife block immediately; just the sight of a knife in a sink made him shiver and quake.

Nice job, son…Nice, good cut. Clean…

—just like chicken—

He forced himself back to the present, drying his hands and tossing the gloves into one of the morgue’s medical-waste containers. Then he helped Howie jam some tissue between his upper lip and his gums—a big blood vessel ran through there, the one that supplied the nose with blood, so putting pressure on that would stop a nosebleed faster than anything else.

Sure enough, soon Howie’s bleeding ebbed, and then stopped entirely. “Sorry,” Howie said miserably, stooping to pick up the papers.

Jazz grabbed them instead. “Don’t worry about it.” But deep down, he was worried. Despite taking all the precautions with gloves and caps, now they risked contaminating the place with Howie’s DNA. “Toss your gloves and tissues into the waste container, then take the bag. We’ll take it all with us and burn it.”

They put on fresh gloves and got back to business. Jazz wiped up the blood spatters in the freezer and tossed the tissues in with the rest of Howie’s waste. It bothered him that he was leaving evidence behind—without some sort of oxygenated bleach, those blood spatters would still show up under Luminol. Of course, the odds of anyone deciding to spray down the morgue freezer and switch on an ultraviolet light were pretty minimal, so it’s not like it was evidence that anyone would ever find or use. Still: Billy Dent’s First Commandment was “Thou shalt not leave evidence.”

“Stay out there,” Jazz said when he saw Howie coming back to the freezer. “I’ll finish up in here. I don’t want you gushing again.”

He replaced the report, then took one final look at the body. She’d been young. Pretty. She was, he couldn’t help thinking, the kind of victim Billy had preferred. Billy wouldn’t have even minded her fighting back. That just made it more fun. More challenging.

He checked that the body was in the same position he’d found it in, then zipped up the bag, returning her to the darkness.

“They don’t know who she is,” Howie said from the door, where he was flipping through the copy of the report. His upper lip was still stained red. “Can’t they just take her fingerprints?” He paused. “Well,
most
of her fingerprints?”

“Not until she comes out of rigor. That could take a while. Might even be another day.” Jazz left the freezer and shut the door, careful not to lock it, since they’d found it unlocked. Details mattered. “And it takes a while for fingerprints to come back, anyway. If there’s nothing in the state database, they’ll send it to the feds. And fingerprints are only good if you have something to compare them to. If she’s not in the system, they won’t get a hit.”

Howie nodded thoughtfully. “They found her naked,” he said, his voice low and serious. “Do you think whoever did this…Do you think he did stuff to her?”

Jazz swallowed hard. He knew Howie was asking about Jane, but somehow he couldn’t help thinking of Billy’s victims. Howie was pretty good about not asking for details of what Billy had done to his victims or what growing up with Billy had been like. But then again, if he wanted details, all he had to do was go to any of the websites devoted to Billy Dent. Or turn on a random cable channel during sweeps for a two-hour documentary on “Butcher Billy” (the preferred nickname these days, it seemed). Still, it was one thing to read about hacking and slashing and beating. The other stuff—the sex stuff—was usually glossed over.
Sexual assault
was the preferred term, a conveniently neutral phrase that allowed the audience’s imagination to run amok without the hair-sprayed, shiny-toothed news anchors having to sully the airwaves with actual descriptions. It covered a vast multitude of sins that would have made Howie puke.

“Not according to this,” Jazz said, taking the report. “No evidence of sexual activity or anything like that.”

“Well, there’s that,” Howie said, sounding relieved. Jazz wondered at that—was it really so much better to be unmolested, but still murdered in a horrible fashion? To die in pain and terror, stripped, left in a field, your fingers cut off? But as long as you weren’t raped, well, that was all right, then? Did it really matter at that point?

“Why leave her naked, then?” Howie asked.

Jazz wondered. Not why the killer had taken her clothes, but what he’d done with them. He had his trophies—the fingers. Had he burned the clothes? Buried them?

He thought of Arthur John Shawcross, a real sick puppy if ever there’d been one. Killed a bunch of people in upstate New York. He used to fold his victims’ clothes and leave them near the bodies. Sometimes he would have the victim fold her own clothes. It probably made the poor women think they would be getting dressed again as long as they cooperated. Made them more compliant, thinking they would live.

Had Jane Doe thought that? Had she willingly stripped down and put her clothes aside, thinking she would live if she could just suffer through a rape?

Those bruises on her hands…No. Not Jane. Jane had fought like hell, he knew.

“Any number of reasons,” he told Howie as they moved around the morgue to make sure everything was back in place as they’d found it. “Could have been to slow the cops down. It could mean that he’s trying to humiliate her. He might have hated her. Maybe she snubbed him, or maybe she looked like someone who snubbed him, so this was his revenge. Or maybe he
wanted
to do something to her but couldn’t perform, couldn’t get it up, so he decided to embarrass her by leaving her naked.”

“That all makes sense.” Howie paused. “Well, crazy sense, y’know?”

“Sure. But most likely he just didn’t want to leave any evidence behind. See all these seams and linings in your clothes? They can gather trace evidence, and even if it looks clean to you, you could be carrying around all kinds of stuff. Heck, every hour three or four hairs just drop out of your head. That’s a lot of evidence.”

Howie put a hand to his head, as if he could hold his hairs in place. “Is that why your dad shaved his head sometimes?”

“Yeah. Well, and he thought it looked cool, too.”

“Excuse me,” said a new voice. Howie shrieked like a little girl, and even Jazz jumped at the sound.

The rent-a-cop! There was no way it had been an hour! How could he have—

Standing at the door was anything but a rent-a-cop. It was the real deal—the deputy Jazz had seen earlier. The one standing off to one side at the crime scene. He blocked the one door out of the morgue, his hand resting on his holster, and he looked anything but vulnerable.

Jazz and Howie sat on a bench in the hallway of the funeral home, cuffed together. The cuffs were too tight, even though Howie had immediately brought up his hemophilia, and a bruise was already forming on his wrist. Howie bore it with his usual stoicism.

“My mom is gonna kill me,” he whined. “Seriously. She’s gonna see this bruise and be like, ‘How did you get that?’ And then I’m gonna have to tell her that I let you talk me into this crazy idea and then she’s gonna…”

Jazz tuned him out, instead watching the deputy, who was poking around inside the morgue, just barely within visual range. Making sure nothing was out of order or missing. He’d already confiscated the copy of the report in Jazz’s possession.

How had he so misread this guy? At the crime scene, he’d seemed nervous and fidgety. Now he was just fine. He—

The deputy came out of the morgue. “You kids are in a lot of trouble,” he said. “You moved the body, didn’t you?”

Jazz shrugged.

“Do you know who you’re talking to?” Howie demanded.

“Well, yeah,” said the deputy. “I took your wallets when I cuffed you. Remember?”

“Oh. Right.”

The deputy grinned. “Don’t go thinking that just because your buddy is some kind of local celebrity that you’re going to get off easy.”

Jazz laughed. Local celebrity? That was the first time he’d ever been described that way.

“You think this is funny?” The deputy turned his attention to Jazz. “This is serious business here. Breaking and entering. Contaminating evidence. Theft. What did you think you were doing here?”

What are
you
doing here?
Jazz wanted to ask. It’s never a bad tactic to put someone on the defensive, if you can. No deputy should be lingering around the morgue at night.

But before Jazz could say anything, a door opened at the other end of the corridor and G. William trundled in, dressed in jeans and an old Windbreaker, his hair a bird’s nest of tangles and offshoots.

“Oh, great,” Howie muttered.

The deputy looked up, mingled relief and concern flashing across his face. “Sorry to get you out of bed for something like this, Sheriff. But being as it’s my first day and all, I didn’t want to assume too much authority right off the bat. Especially since I know you have a…” He stumbled for a moment. “Well, a relationship with one of these guys.”

G. William stood before Jazz and Howie, hands on hips. “Well, well. Looks like you boys have met Deputy Erickson already. Just transferred in from out of state. Lindenberg, right, Erickson?”

“Yes, sir. Just up past the state line.”

G. William grinned at the boys. “Grooming him to be my second-in-command. Damn good cop, wouldn’t you say?”

“Lucky, more like,” Jazz said.

Erickson stiffened.

“He didn’t track us down,” Jazz pointed out. “He didn’t have an inkling that something was going on in the morgue. He just wandered in there and saw us. Speaking of which, why
was
—”

“You’re missing the point here, Jazz,” G. William interrupted. “The point being that I don’t care how or why he got you. What matters is that you’re busted. Now. I’m gonna ask you how you got in here, and if I don’t like your answer, I’m gonna ask Howie, because I know Howie will tell me the truth. Won’t you, Howie?”

Howie gulped.

Jazz thought quickly. There was no point getting Lana in trouble by telling G. William how they’d sneaked a copy of the key out right in front of her. “I made a dupe last month,” Jazz said. “When you had that car-accident victim in here. I was curious.”

G. William’s eyes narrowed and he looked from Jazz to Howie and back again. Then: “Erickson, take Howie upstairs and start the paperwork on him. Be careful on account of his illness.”

“Got it.”

“Jazz, you and me are gonna talk.” He led Jazz into the morgue as Erickson led Howie away. Jazz tried not to let the wounded-puppy look on Howie’s face affect him. He had more immediate concerns.

“So, you were just curious about that body last month, eh?” G. William said once they were in the morgue. “And did you satisfy that curiosity?”