Free Precious Blood by Jonathan Hayes

with confidential informants.
    He wondered how Ana was holding up. She’d been quiet on the ride down, gazing out at life on the lower Bowery—
    jewelry stores filled with Chinese gold, lighting shops, fruit stalls, all bright and bustling under the winter drizzle. Rad had explained the process to her—IAB would show her mug shots as well as current NYPD ID photos. He told her again he didn’t think the guy was a cop.
    “He was no cop,” Roggetti had declared. “Cop wouldn’t have let you get away.”
    She’d leaned her head against the glass and hadn’t seen Garcia jab Roggetti in the ribs.
    Precious Blood
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    She’d been in there for three hours now.
    The car smelled of beef with broccoli and sweet and sour pork. Jenner gathered the white paper takeout containers, climbed out and dumped them into the trash at the corner, then got back in.
    Roggetti was looking dopey and well-fed. He handed Jenner the case file, then folded his jacket into triangles, tucked it against the headrest, and tried to find a comfortable position for a nap.
    Jenner looked at the Polaroids again, flipping through the fat stack slowly one by one. He’d never seen anything like it. He’d spent three months on a fellowship at the Behavioral Analysis Unit at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, endless hours in the serial killer archives, wired on coffee and horror. In all that time, in all those murders, he’d never come across anything so meticulously planned and executed, so theatrical , as the Delore killing. And if the killing itself was unprecedented, the body display was extraordinary; the bastard was rewriting the serial killer handbook.
    Serial killer . No question. He was looking at the girl hung on the wall; there was no way that a first-timer had created something so sophisticated, so evolved . Every element in the killing had profound meaning, from the way he’d killed her through to the way he’d displayed her body. He’d have killed before; maybe not as fully developed, probably not with the same level of content, but there’d be other victims out there.
    He looked up to see Roggetti peering over the seat back.
    “So, Doc—why do you think he did that? Turn that girl upside down and nail her to a wall?”
    “I don’t know. Part of the problem is we don’t know what else he would have done to her if Ana hadn’t interrupted him.”
    Roggetti looked disappointed, so Jenner said, “But we can speculate a bit, based on what we have here.” He held the photo up to show Roggetti. “She was upside down and vul-60
    j o n at h a n h ay e s
    nerable. It’s possible that this was a purely sexual display—
    maybe he was showing off his ownership of the body, his complete power over it. Or maybe he had a particular fantasy image he was trying to create when he was disturbed.”
    Roggetti muttered, “Well, the whole fucking thing looks pretty disturbed to me.”
    Jenner nodded. “One thing that’s really interesting about this man: he has zero fear of being caught. None. His fingerprints are everywhere, he doesn’t run when he sees Ana getting away. Either he doesn’t care, or he believes that he won’t—or can’t—be caught.”
    “So why did he pick Andie Delore?”
    “That’s the ten-million-dollar question, Joey. We know that, we have motive, and once we have motive, well, then we’re on the first rung of the ladder.”
    Jenner scooped up the photos. He’d found a headshot of the girl alive, among all of these images of her dead. She was pretty, but not strikingly so. Wealthy background, but money was a completely unlikely motive in a crime like this.
    Boyfriend? Ana said that Andie hadn’t dated for at least six months, maybe more. Revenge—on her, on her lawyer dad?
    That seemed absurd, given the extreme circumstances.
    Yes. The ten-million-dollar question . . .
    There was a tap on the window. He slid over, quickly slipping the photographs back into the thick brown folder as Ana squeezed in next to