I Hunt Killers Read Online Free PDF Page A

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