Free Game by Barry Lyga Page B

forty, DiNozzo in her twenties. It’s all on the timeline. DiNozzo was a neighborhood girl; Spencer lived in Manhattan and was in Brooklyn visiting friends. No work connections. Nothing. Complete strangers to each other.”
    Jazz absorbed that, and then they fell silent and went back to work. The only sounds in the room were pages being turned and the occasional slurping of soda and munching on pizza. Eventually, Connie turned on the TV, occasionally offering an opinion when she heard something interesting.
    As the victim count increased, the crimes became more and more violent. Slashing wounds gave way to multiple stab wounds, choking, and—later—disembowelment. The women were raped (in some cases, it appeared, repeatedly). Astonishingly, the killer didn’t always bother with a condom—postmortem examinations had recovered good semen samples from some of the victims. It was possible that the killer used a condom with some victims but not others, though there was no trace of spermicide or lubricant.
    “Which means nothing,” Hughes said, “because they make condoms without spermicide or lube. So that doesn’t tell us anything.”
    “Any match to the DNA in the system?” Jazz asked. The federal government maintained a database (CODIS) of criminal DNA that state and local authorities used to match up potential suspects. Jazz knew the answer already—if there’d been a match, there would be a name for the Hat-Dog Killer—but he wanted to see how Hughes reacted.
    The homicide detective shrugged. “No, but that’s not surprising. This guy is careful. He’s stayed out of the system.”
    Realistic. Not flying off the handle or getting depressed. Okay, that was good.
    “Are we sure it’s just ‘this guy’? Two carvings, two perps?”
    “No. We tossed that one around at first. Thought maybe a copycat. But the second murder had characteristics of the first that never made it into the press. And the DNA evidence doesn’t bear it out.”
    Jazz skimmed his screen. “You don’t have DNA from every crime scene.” Contrary to what TV and movies made people believe—and despite Locard’s Exchange Principle—not every crime scene was a vast repository of criminal DNA. Sometimes there was no way to find a DNA specimen. Or to isolate it from others. Sometimes it was just a fluke and there was nothing at all.
    “That’s true,” Hughes admitted, “but we
do
have DNA from a bunch of them, including both Dog
and
Hat killings. All of the samples match one another, regardless of the kind of killing, regardless of the carving on the body. No tag team. No copycat. Same guy.”
    Jazz frowned, studying the file before him. “Well, if youever have a good suspect and can get a DNA sample from him, you’ll have something to match it against. I see here that he didn’t ejaculate in all the victims….”
    “This is disgusting,” Connie said, as if to herself, and turned up the volume slightly. He could almost hear her stomach lurching.
    “Mm-hmm,” he agreed. And it was. The photos. The reports. All of it. No doubt about it. But unlike Connie, Jazz only understood that disgust; he didn’t—couldn’t—feel it. Sure, a picture of a human being with its abdomen cut open and its intestines drawn out like pulled taffy was—definitively—disgusting. Grotesque. But Jazz didn’t have a visceral reaction. There was nothing that made him want to stop scrutinizing the pictures. They were photos of dead people in horrific repose and that was that. End of story for Billy Dent’s kid.
    “There’s video of the crime scenes, too,” Hughes said, wiping his grease-slick hands on one of the room’s towels. “Want me to load it up on the laptop?”
    Cops weren’t particularly bothered by crime scenes, either, Jazz reminded himself, and they weren’t sociopaths. Then again, they had long careers and years of experience to inure them to the horrors of the defiled human body. Jazz had both nature and nurture.
    “What are you