Game by Barry Lyga

thinking?” Connie asked. “Do you need to see the video?”
    He couldn’t tell her what he’d really been thinking, so he shrugged and waved one of the photos in the air. It was the tenth victim, a woman—Monica Allgood—found near a church in a neighborhood called Park Slope. She’d beenraped, slashed across the throat so deeply that her head almost came off, her gut cut open, her intestines piled neatly beside her. A hat had been carved on her forehead.
    “Is this when he started paralyzing them?” Jazz asked, brandishing the photo.
    Hughes’s jaw dropped. “What did you say?”
    “I said, is this when he started paralyzing them? Or, I’m sorry, was I not supposed to figure that part out yet? Did I pass your test, Detective?”
    Hughes blushed but had the grace and decency to look Jazz in the eye as he apologized. “I’m sorry. I had to be sure. I deleted the paralysis references from these copies of the reports. He actually started paralyzing with victim eight—Harry Glidden. Guy was a freakin’ tax attorney, can you believe it? Most boring guy in the world, dies like that.” He passed over a sheet of paper. “Here’s the missing deets.”
    “You wanted to see if I would pick up on it. That’s okay. I get it.” His respect for Hughes rose a notch. He hoped the detective was returning the favor.
    Connie leaned over. “Paralysis?” She stared at the crime-scene photo. “How can you tell? It’s a picture.
Nothing
moves.”
    Hughes didn’t tell Connie to back off, so Jazz let her keep looking over his shoulder. “Void pattern,” he said. A void pattern was an area defined by lack of blood where blood should have spattered… meaning that something had been sitting there at the time of the bloodletting, then moved. In the crime-scene photo, there was a void pattern that outlined a pair of human legs. The victim’s. “In the early crime scenes,there was blood smeared all over the place as he disemboweled them and they thrashed and kicked and fought. But at later scenes, there’s a void pattern instead, indicating that they weren’t moving their legs when they bled out.”
    “Maybe he drugged them,” Connie suggested. “Or knocked them out.”
    “No. Toxicology shows nothing exotic in their systems. No blunt-force trauma to the head that would indicate a blow strong enough to result in unconsciousness.” Aware of Hughes’s eyes on him, Jazz reconsidered. “Well, no
consistent
blows to the head. Some of them were hit hard, but not all of them. So I’m saying paralysis. It’s probably not hard, if you know what you’re doing.” He studied the new report for a moment. “ ‘Knife wound at thoracolumbar junction… T-twelve, L-one…’ Slip a knife into the spine, I guess. Right above where the belly button would be from behind.” He twisted to point to the spot on his own back as best he could. “Am I right?” he asked, turning to Hughes.
    “Yeah. ME says severed spinal cord at L-one/L-two,” Hughes said. “Damn,” he said, almost involuntarily.
    “It’s just a little thing,” Jazz said modestly.
    Little things can mean nothin’ or little things can mean everythin’
, Dear Old Dad whispered.
And the only one who knows for sure is me. Ain’t that special?
    “Yeah, but what does it mean?”
    “Mean?” Jazz shrugged. “It probably means he was tired of them kicking and getting blood all over the place while he gutted them. Just making his job easier, is all.”
    “Just making his job easier?” Hughes blew out a long,exasperated breath, and Jazz finally saw the annoyance and anger that had been lurking under the surface. “Just making his
job
easier? So I’m looking for a lazy serial killer? Is that it? It just doesn’t make any sense. None of it makes sense.”
    It makes sense to us,
Billy said.
And that’s all that matters. Don’t matter what anyone else thinks.
    “It makes perfect sense to him, though,” Jazz said. “It’s probably the only thing in the world