I Hunt Killers Read Online Free PDF

it?” Howie whispered. “She was like this little bitty thing and someone just came along and—”
    “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