I Hunt Killers Read Online Free PDF Page B

average murderer doesn’t mutilate a body like that. And he especially doesn’t take trophies. But it’s more than that. It’s that he left one behind. He left the middle one behind.”
    “Are you serious?”
    “Yeah. He literally gave the cops the finger. He’s saying, ‘Come and get me. Catch me if you can.’ That’s a serial killer.”
    For a moment, there was nothing but silence in the freezer, as Jazz stared at the body and Howie stared at Jazz.
    Jazz gazed down at the eyes, at the lips pressed together in a pale pink line. When people saw dead bodies like this, they said it looked like the person was sleeping. Jazz thought that was crazy. He’d never seen a dead body that looked like it was sleeping. He’d never seen a dead body that didn’t look like exactly what it was—a corpse. A husk. A thing.
    Wrapped my hands around her throat , Billy whispered in Jazz’s mind. Just squeezed and squeezed…
    Jazz looked closely at the neck. Howie leaned in, curious despite himself, and said, “Was she choked to death?” He mimed throttling someone.
    “ Strangled is the right term,” Jazz told him. “Choking is when something blocks your airway from the inside. And, yeah, I think so. Can’t be sure yet.” A good strangulation left few signs. The medical examiner would have to drain all the blood from the neck, then slowly and meticulously peel back layers of tissue, looking for telltale small bruises.
    “Can they, like, get fingerprints from her neck? Can they catch the guy that way?”
    “This guy isn’t an amateur. He probably used gloves.”
    “How do you know he isn’t an amateur, Sherlock?”
    “There’s bruising on the left-hand knuckles, and on the sides of both hands. Probably would be on the right-hand knuckles, too, if we had them.”
    “She hit him,” Howie said. “She fought back.”
    “And that means this guy has done this before. If you’re a newbie, you don’t want a fight on your hands. You sneak up behind them and you knock them out and then you start the nasty stuff. If you confront someone while they’re awake, you’re a badass.”
    Struggling is what makes it worth doing , Billy said. Jazz closed his eyes, trying to chase away his father’s voice, but it was no good. Billy was on a roll, dispensing what he thought of as honest fatherly wisdom, baring what passed for his soul. Sometimes I can’t tell the difference between living and dead. Sometimes I look at a pretty little girlie and I think to myself, Is she a living, breathing thing? Or is she just a doll? Are those actual tears she’s crying? Are those real screams coming out of her mouth? And it’s like a fog in my mind, like I get all confused and frustrated and mixed up, so I start doing things. Start small at first, like maybe with the ears or the lips or the toes. And then move on to the bigger things, and there’s blood, so I keep going and my hands are wet and my mouth is warm and I keep going and then something real magical happens, Jasper. It’s real magical and special and beautiful. See, they stop moving. They stop struggling. All the fight just goes away and that’s when it’s all clear to me: She’s dead. And if she’s dead, then that means that she used to be alive. So then I know: This was a living one, a real one. And I feel good after that ’cause I figured it out.
    Jazz realized that his own gloved hands—
    This guy isn’t an amateur. He probably used gloves.
    —had come to rest on either side of the neck. With just the right movement, he could have that neck in his hands—
    This guy isn’t an amateur.
    —and he could feel the muscles and the windpipe and the—
    This guy
    He jerked away and grabbed the steel lip of the stretcher to steady himself. “You were right,” he told Howie.
    “Um, I was?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Score for me. Beauty. But what was I right about?”
    “She’s a she. Not an it. She’s always been a she.”
    “Yeah, no kidding.”
    “Don’t ever let me call her