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already?”
    Jazz shrugged. “Just what’s been on the news. Which means probably less than anything real or relevant.” They shared a grimace of disdain for the media. “First killing was about seven months ago. There’ve been a total of fourteen so far. Most in Brooklyn. All show signs of a mixed organization killer—he’s good at covering his tracks, but he goes buck wild on the bodies. Lots of mutilation. Maiming. Details withheld by the police ‘to weed out possible false leads.’ ” Jazz thought for a moment. “I bet he’s started disemboweling them, right?”
    Hughes did a good job covering his surprise, but not so good that Jazz couldn’t tell. “Yeah. How did you know that? That’s one of the things we kept out of the news.”
    “Reading between the lines. There was a quote in one news story from the medical examiner, talking about ‘a real mess.’ And in the background of one of the pictures in the paper, you can see a CSI with a covered bucket. I played the odds.”
    Hughes pressed his lips together. “Not bad. Yeah, he’s started disemboweling them.”
    “And his deal is he marks them, right? Didn’t I read that? Some of them with a hat, some with a dog? Cuts it into them.”
    “Yeah. There’s no pattern to that. At first we thought he was alternating, or marking the women with hats and the men with dogs. That would fit a certain sort of pathology.But then we got a dog on a woman. Then two hats in a row. And a hat on a man. And then another couple of hats in a row. There’s no pattern to it.”
    “There’s a pattern to it,” Jazz said. “It’s just not one that you can see.”
    “And you can?”
    “I didn’t say that. It makes sense to
him
, though.”
    “I know,” Hughes said testily. “I’m not right out of the academy. In this guy’s head, the most sensible thing in the world is to grab up people and torture them and kill them and carve hats and dogs on them. I get it.”
    Jazz looked at his watch. “There’s your five. I hope it was worth it.”
    “Wait!” Hughes threw out a beefy arm, blocking the front door. “Look, I didn’t come here to gab with you on your front porch. I need—we, that is. We need your help.”
    Jazz laughed. “My help? What, because I caught the Impressionist? That was sort of a special circumstance.”
    “Oh? How so?”
    “He was imitating my father. He was practically killing people in my backyard.”
    “I get it—so you only take the easy ones. And the people of New York just don’t count. They might as well not be real to you.”
    People are real. People matter.
    Words to live by, for Jazz. He had no other choice—the moment he stopped believing that (and it would be depressingly easy to do so, he feared) would be the moment he turned into his father.
    But, yeah, people were real and people mattered, but Jazz couldn’t save them all. Flush off his success of capturing the Impressionist, he’d gone and tattooed I HUNT KILLERS in gigantic black Gothic letters on his chest. A new mantra, this one inked directly into flesh so that he couldn’t forget.
    But in the months since the Impressionist’s arrest, Jazz had hunted nothing more than his own self-doubt. Sure, “I hunt killers”
sounded
great and made for a nice little slogan, but at the end of the day, he was still seventeen. Still dealing with his disintegrating grandmother and her dilapidated house. Still trying to get through school. To figure out what the hell he would do when he graduated. The million mundane details of everyday life had made him feel old before his time, as though the promise of that tattoo had begun to fade the instant the ink dried. Maybe even while it was still wet.
    Jazz sighed and watched his breath drift off and dissipate. “Look, Detective Hughes. I got… I got lucky. Once. I’m sure you guys are doing the best you can. You have the FBI and all the resources of the NYPD. I’m not going to be much more help.”
    “I disagree.” Hughes leaned