There was none of the usual boisterous shouting and jibing in the halls before homeroom; the buzz of conversation had been replaced with the occasional sound of a hiccupping sob. Jazz wondered how they would all feel if they knew that Ginny’s death—as devastating as it had been to them—was only one pearl in a bloody strand. In two more days, a woman with the initials I.H. would die. She would be sexually assaulted, invaded both vaginally and rectally, then injected with drain cleaner (the penultimate victim to be so injected) and posed via a system of nails and fishing line so that she stood in a hotel shower as though washing. That’s what Billy had done as the Artist, and that’s what the Impressionist would do, down to a T, adding only the subtraction of six fingers for his own sick reasons. Waiting for the first bell in homeroom, Jazz flipped open a notebook to a fresh page and started scribbling names and facts, hoping that his writing hand would figure out what his brain could not.
