Текст книги "The 9th Girl"

Автор книги: Tami Hoag

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

9

Sonya Porter was one angry young woman. She came into Patrick’s bar with narrowed eyes homed in on Tippen like a pair of dark lasers. She came across the room to their booth with all the purpose of a heat-seeking missile and clipped him upside the head with the back of a hand.

Tippen winced. “Ouch! What was that for?”

“I don’t remember,” she said, clearly annoyed he would ask. “I was pissed off the second I heard the sound of your voice on the phone.”

“You were annoyed because you were hungover,” Tippen said. “That wasn’t my fault.”

“Yes, it was,” she snapped, then softened a bit. “Well, maybe not this time. But it was your fault that other time, and I never hit you for that.”

“So we’re even.”

She gave him a look of disgust. “Oh, hardly.”

Kovac looked from one to the other and back and forth. The girl—he put her around twenty-two—was a stylized character from a postmodern noir film. Jet-black hair cut in a sleek bob that played up the angles of her face. Dark purple lipstick on Kewpie-doll lips contrasted sharply with the perfect milk white of her skin.

She shrugged out of her heavy trench coat and hung it on a hook at the end of the booth. Bright-colored tattoos peeked out of the V-neck of her sweater. A green-inked vine with a purple morning glory flower crept up one side of her neck. A tiny steel barbell pierced the severe arch of one eyebrow. A matching steel ring went like a fish hook through her plump lower lip.

There was a part of Kovac that wanted to get up and leave this circus sideshow now. He was exhausted and out of what little patience he ever had. He had already dealt with two reporters over the phone, carefully doling out the information he wanted to let go of. Just enough detail, just enough insinuation that their Jane Doe’s murder might be tied to others. No, they couldn’t quote him. No, he didn’t have a name for the victim. And now he had to hope they didn’t fuck it up or fuck him over.

Now this: a Tippen family reunion.

“Oh, well,” Tippen said. “I have something to look forward to.”

“Maiming, for instance,” the girl said.

Tippen was unconcerned with the threat. “Sonya, this is my colleague Sergeant Sam Kovac. Sam, my niece, Sonya Porter, activist, feminist, anarchist, and freelance journalist.”

The girl narrowed her eyes at Kovac as she slid into the booth. “Do you have a problem with any of that?”

“I don’t like journalists,” he said. “The rest of it is none of my business.”

“That’s fair enough,” she said. “I don’t like cops.”

“Wow, this is gonna work out for everyone,” Kovac said sarcastically.

A waitress pissed off to be working New Year’s came over and asked if they wanted anything. The girl ordered a shot and a beer. Kovac ordered his usual burger and fries, a heart attack on a plate. Liska usually ate half of his fries, which he figured took the damage down to a minor stroke.

They had chosen Patrick’s for the meeting—and for the greasy food. An Irish-named bar owned by Swedes that catered to cops. Strategically located halfway between the police department and the sheriff’s office, the pub was open 365 days a year from lunch ’til the last possible moment allowed by the city—and sometimes later, depending on circumstance.

It was a place for meals, camaraderie, and the drowning of sorrows and stress for people not understood by civilian society. Even on a holiday the place was busy with cops coming off their shift, dogwatch uniforms grabbing dinner before heading out, and the retired and otherwise disenfranchised hanging out because they had nowhere else to go. College football was playing on the big-screen TVs above the bar and pool tables.

“Who do you freelance for?” Kovac asked.

“Whoever. That would be the definition of ‘freelance,’ wouldn’t it?”

“I can do without the attitude.”

She shrugged. “I can do without being here. You need me. I don’t need you.”

Kovac looked at Tippen. “And I figured you for the least charming member of your family.”

“Oh, I’m a peach,” Tippen said.

“This is about the zombie, right?” the girl said.

Kovac gave her a hard look. “This is about a Jane Doe murder victim. There is no fucking zombie. There’s a teenage girl lying dead on a steel table in the morgue with half her face dissolved by acid. She has a name, but we don’t know what it is. We can assume she has a family somewhere, but we don’t know who they are. How about that?”

Porter stared at him. “The zombie is the angle. You want people to get to the rest of what you just said? Embrace the zombie. We live in a society of self-absorbed, unaware drones desensitized to the suffering of others. You have to hit them in the fucking face to get their attention.”

Kovac thought about it. He had to grudgingly admit he liked that she wasn’t intimidated by him. “You have a poor outlook on humanity.”

“Don’t you?”

“I’ve lived longer than you have. I’ve earned the right to be bitter. You’re not old enough to be bitter.”

“Oh, I’m bitter,” she assured him. “Bitter and outraged.”

“Outraged by what?”

“Pretty much everything except puppies and kittens. The economy, ecology, foreign policy, social policy, women’s rights, gay rights. The list goes on. There’s a lot to be outraged about, including the lack of outrage exhibited by the average American.”

“Well, good for you,” Kovac said. “Hang on to that. But tell me, what good are you to me, Miss Outrage? I always think ‘freelance’ is just another word for unemployed. I need information disseminated.”

“Why don’t you call a press conference, then?”

“It’s delicate.”

The brow with the barbell sketched upward. “Ah. ‘Sources close to the investigation’ delicate?”

“Yeah, like that,” he said. “Do you have a problem with that?”

“That depends. Is what you’re going to tell me true?”

Kovac sat back, pretending confusion. “You’re a reporter, right? What’s truth got to do with it?”

“Oh, nothing,” she said. “I live to compromise my journalistic integrity the same way you live to beat confessions out of innocent people.”

“I’ve never beaten a confession out of an innocent person.”

“And I don’t knowingly lie to my readers.”

The sulky waitress returned with a tray of drinks and Kovac’s dinner. He shook the ketchup bottle as Sonya Porter tossed back her shot. They never took their eyes off each other.

“What readers?” Kovac asked. “Tip tells me you do stuff on the Internet. What does that mean?”

“Online news sources. Twitter. Facebook. My blog.”

“And people actually read this stuff?”

She looked at her uncle with an expression that clearly said, Are you kidding me with this guy? Tippen shrugged.

“No one under the age of thirty reads an actual newspaper,” she said. “Seriously. How old are you?”

Kovac felt like a dinosaur. In the technological revolution, he usually felt like he had chosen the wrong side. He could make a computer do what he needed it to do—which wasn’t much—but in the last couple of years, with the meteoric rise of online social media, he felt like he had been run over on the information superhighway and left in the dust. Tinks stayed more current because of her boys, but as far as Kovac was concerned, tweeting came from birds, and a post was something that held up a fence.

“It doesn’t matter how old I am,” he said. “It matters that my victim is a teenager. And the other victims have been in their teens or early twenties.”

She sat up at that. “Other victims? What other victims?”

“We could be dealing with a serial killer,” Tippen said. “But the department is going to want to downplay that angle. From a public relations standpoint, a serial killer is a bad way to set the tone for the New Year.”

That was a good angle, Kovac thought. Play to her desire to be outraged. She could rage against the establishment, rage against his generation. Whatever would put words on the page—or the screen—worked for him.

“This is the third victim dumped in Minneapolis,” he said. “And there was one in St. Paul. None of them were from here. They were abducted in other states and dumped here when their killer was through with them.

“He’s dumped bodies in other states too,” he said. “This new one makes nine. You want to be outraged about something, be outraged about this: young women being abducted, raped, tortured, disfigured, murdered, and chucked out along the road like a sack of garbage. This girl’s face is so destroyed it’s anybody’s guess what she looked like before this asshole got hold of her.”

He paused to take a bite of his dinner while he let Sonya Porter digest the information he’d fed her. Sonya Porter, twenty-young, with her lip ring and her anger; the illustrated girl from a generation that could have been from another planet as far as he was concerned.

“What do you need from me?” she asked.

“I need to reach the people who might have known this girl. Kids she went to school with, hung out with. Siblings, maybe. Anyone. Anyone who might know anything,” he said. “And I need this information to go out as far and as wide as possible, because I don’t have any idea in hell where this girl came from.”

“What have you got to go on?”

“A tattoo.” Kovac picked his phone up off the tabletop and brought up the photograph Tinks had taken at the autopsy and texted to him. “Any idea what it means?”

Sonya Porter’s expression changed as she spread her thumb and forefinger across the screen to enlarge the picture of the Chinese characters. From interest to confusion to recognition to sadness.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “I know what it means.”

She put the phone down on the tabletop and pushed up the sleeve of her sweater to reveal the same set of Chinese characters inked into the delicate skin on the inside of her forearm.

“It means acceptance.”

10

Kyle sat on his bed with his back against the headboard and his knees pulled up. The light on his nightstand glowed amber, holding at bay the cold black night beyond his window.

The artwork on his walls took on a sinister feel in the dim light. His own renditions of characters from his favorite comic books and graphic novels, 300 and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, loomed large. Leonidas, the Spartan king, fierce and bearded. Xerxes I of Persia, beautiful and evil, with his elaborate body piercings and glowing eyes. Batman and the Joker.

Characters of Kyle’s own creation looked down on him as well. Most notably, Ultor, defender and avenger of the downtrodden and the disenfranchised. Ultor, a man of chiseled muscle with an iron jaw and narrowed eyes, was loosely fashioned after Kyle’s favorite mixed martial arts fighter, Georges St-Pierre.

With GSP, a man of few words, with swift and terrible punishment in his hands, there was no bullshit, no trash talk, no preening or posing. He was a gentleman, a man of honor. He wasn’t the biggest fighter. At five feet ten inches, 170 pounds, he had a compact body cut with lean muscle. He had been a small kid, bullied mercilessly by older schoolmates. Now, as a world champion fighter with millions of fans, he spoke out against bullying, which made Kyle admire him all the more.

A black belt in Kyokushin karate and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, GSP came, he saw, he conquered with a superior mind, superior skill, and conditioning. And when he won, he was thankful and gracious. Ultor was like that: a man who fought with honor, a man of the people and for the people. He was a man Kyle had created to fill a need in his own life.

He could hear the voices downstairs: his mother’s and his dad’s. They were talking about him, he supposed, though he couldn’t make out any of the words, just the cadence of conversation in the living room below.

He preferred to live under their radar. They didn’t understand anything about his life. They were both obsessed with the idea of drugs, which was an insult to him. Like they thought he was stupid enough to do shit like that.

He had smoked pot, but he didn’t like it. Everyone smoked pot. His dad did (Kyle had seen the evidence in his dad’s apartment, had smelled it) and he was a narc. A narc and a hypocrite. He drank, he smoked, he smoked pot, he had cheated on Mom. Kyle hadn’t exactly understood about that at the time because he was just a little kid, but he had known it wasn’t right. He had heard their arguments, listened to his mom cry after the fight, when his dad had left and she thought she was alone.

Speed Hatcher wasn’t a good father. He lied. He let them down. He showed up when it suited him and made excuses the rest of the time. He would make it if Kyle or R.J. was in a sporting event, but he had never made it to a single art show Kyle had been a part of. He had never come to see Kyle get an academic award.

He took them to see the Twins and the Vikings and the Timberwolves and the Wild because those were things he liked to do and he looked like a hero. And for sure, those were fun things to do, but Kyle saw it for what it was—part bribery and part self-indulgence. R.J. fell for all that crap because he was still a little kid and because he wanted to, but Kyle didn’t.

So it didn’t impress Kyle that his dad had come to his room, all serious and wanting to have a talk with him. It hadn’t concerned his father all that much when he had first shown up earlier in the day and saw Kyle’s face busted up. He had accepted Kyle’s excuse with an offhand comment about how he expected the other guy to look worse.

His sudden concern tonight was Mom’s doing. She hadn’t been satisfied with the story Kyle had told, and she had sent Dad in for the second interrogation. Bad cop, good cop. She thought Kyle might confess something to his father, man-to-man. But his father wasn’t the kind of man Kyle admired or wanted to be. No confession would be confidential. His father would go straight to his mother and spill everything. No confession would be forthcoming.

His parents understood nothing about the world he lived in, the pressures he was under. He lived in a world of extremes. He was smart. His teachers and his mom pressured him to perform academically. He was gifted. His art instructors pushed him to become a more commercial, traditional artist, to not “waste his time” on tattoo designs and comic book characters. He was athletic. His dad wanted him to play football, to play hockey, to play baseball, to be a part of a team, to be a guy’s guy. Kyle wanted to study Muay Thai kickboxing and Brazilian jiu-jitsu and do his own thing for his own reasons.

Because he was good-looking and talented, socially he was expected to be cool, to be popular, to act a certain way, to like certain kinds of girls—and, more important, to not like certain people, to not like the kids who were misfits. He didn’t care about being cool. He definitely didn’t run with the popular crowd. And because he didn’t care about those things, he was generally disliked by the kids who did.

He had thought it would be different when he started going to PSI. Theoretically, Performance Scholastic Institute was the biggest geek school in town. It was the place for brainiacs and kids in the arts—kids who always got picked on and beat up at public school. But it was no different. Every clique hated another clique. There were still cool kids who picked on the kids who didn’t fit in.

In fact, in some ways it was worse at PSI because the smarter the kids, the meaner they could be. At least in public school the meanest kids tended to be stupid. The cruelty was less sophisticated.

Kyle had been excited to win his scholarship. He had been excited to be challenged academically and encouraged in his art. But now he wished he could just take his GED and be done with school. He didn’t believe he needed an education to succeed as an artist. Talent was all that mattered. And he sure as hell didn’t need the rest of the high school bullshit.

He wanted to work on his drawing without anyone pushing their opinions on him. He wanted not to be forced into a mold that didn’t fit him. He wanted to be with the people he wanted to know, and not have others judge him or his friends. He dreamed about having his own place to live where he never had to explain himself to anybody, where he could be who he was and live how he wanted.

But he couldn’t tell his parents any of that . . . or anything else about his life.

He dug his cell phone out from under his pillow, went to his contacts, and touched a name.

The phone on the other end rang and rang and went to voice mail. Again. Kyle ended the call without leaving a message and went to his text messages instead. The message he had first sent late two nights before, then again and again and again, remained unanswered.

Where r u? R u ok?

He sent it again, just in case.

No answer returned.

The voices downstairs were droning on. Kyle got up and stuck his head out in the hall. R.J.’s door was closed, his television mumbling on the other side. With the coast clear, he went down the hall to the bathroom, locked himself inside, and turned on the shower as hot as he could stand it.

The water stung the abrasions on his face and his knuckles but soothed some of the aches in his body. He examined himself as he dried off. The bruises were starting to come to the surface. At least that was all he had—bruises. No broken bones. No open wounds to try to explain away. The worst of the damage was invisible. The damage done to his heart, to his spirit. The thousand cuts of cruel words.

Why did people have to be so full of hate and ignorance? Why couldn’t they just let everyone be who they were?

He glanced over his shoulder at his reflection in the mirror and the two small symbols tattooed on his shoulder. This was what he believed so strongly that he had saved up his own money and had the ideal etched into his flesh with ink: acceptance.

11

“Which one of you is the ‘source close to the investigation’?”

Captain Ullrich Kasselmann sat behind his desk looking like a banker: well-tailored charcoal suit, crisp white shirt, stylish orange tie knotted just so, every silver hair in place. Only the faintest sheen of perspiration on his forehead suggested he even noticed that the office was as hot as Florida in August.

Kasselmann was a man with a solid build and an immovable, brick-wall quality about him that was a physical manifestation of his character. He’d been the head of the Criminal Investigative Division long enough to have substantiated his initial paranoia regarding his employees.

“Don’t look at me,” Tinks said irritably. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

Kovac gave her a sideways glance. She looked like maybe she had tried to catch an hour’s sleep on a bench at a bus stop—hair more disheveled than usual, dark smudges under bloodshot eyes, pasty complexion.

“The lead story on the early morning news, channels five and eleven,” Kasselmann said. “‘Zombie Possible Victim of Serial Killer.’ You don’t know anything about that?”

He turned his laser gaze on Kovac.

“Yeah, right,” Kovac said sarcastically. “I have such a close personal relationship with the media.”

Kasselmann was poker-faced. “Then who?”

“How should I know?” Kovac asked. “Call Culbertson,” he said, readily throwing the ME’s investigator under the bus. Culbertson didn’t answer to Kasselmann. Nothing would come of it. And frankly, Steve Culbertson loved to play the role of subversive. This could work out for everyone.

“Is it true?” the captain asked.

“Could be. Yes. Definitely could be,” Kovac said, resisting the urge to glance again at his partner. Liska had argued against the possibility of Zombie Doe being one of Doc Holiday’s victims. She said nothing now.

“New Year’s Eve, stabbed repeatedly, sexual overtones, facial disfigurement,” he said. “More pieces fit than don’t.”

“She came out of the trunk of a car,” Kasselmann said. “In traffic.”

“Looks like the car hit a pothole, the trunk popped open, and the body bounced out,” Kovac said. “Then again, Möller says there’s a slim chance she might have still been alive at the time. Maybe she escaped. It certainly wasn’t anybody’s plan for her to get out of that trunk when she did.”

“We don’t have a plate on the car?”

“The limo driver was distracted. He’s coming in today to get hypnotized.” He shrugged. “Maybe he’ll come up with something.”

“But you’re not hopeful.”

“He had two hot half-naked babes making out with each other in his backseat. What do you think he was looking at?”

Kasselmann heaved a sigh, disapproval set in the chiseled lines of his face. “I’ve had phone calls from three deputy chiefs already this morning. And I’ve been called to the chief’s office for an urgent meeting in twenty minutes. He’s not going to be in a good mood.”

“Yeah?” Liska piped up aggressively. “Well, imagine what a good mood he’d be in if this was his daughter lying on a slab in the morgue with her face burned off from the acid her killer tried to force down her throat. He should think about that, shouldn’t he?”

Kasselmann’s silver brows climbed his forehead.

“This is somebody’s daughter,” she went on emphatically. “Just like Rose Reiser was someone’s daughter, and the victim from Iowa—who was not only someone’s daughter but someone’s mother. The chief should maybe think about those things, shouldn’t he?”

“You seem to have an ax to grind, Sergeant,” Kasselmann said.

“I’m a mother. I’m a woman. Do I need something more than a vagina to be outraged that we’re letting a serial killer run around loose destroying the lives of young women because the mayor doesn’t want his constituents to think we live in a dangerous place?”

The captain looked pointedly at Kovac.

Kovac spread his hands. “What? You think I have some control over her? She’s gonna go fifty shades of whoop-ass all over the both of us.”

“Rein it in,” Kasselmann warned, turning his attention to the offender.

Tinks looked like she might just hurl herself across his desk and bite an ear off him. Kovac stepped a little in front of her, cutting off her direct route.

“I’m not saying we don’t want this case solved—or the other two, for that matter,” Kasselmann said. “But there are considerations to be made in how we go about doing it and how it gets presented to the public. There are protocols to be considered. There are proper channels to go through. The two of you have been at this long enough to know better than to end-around the brass on a high-profile case.”

No one pointed out that it hadn’t been a high-profile case until now, until the sensational headline.

“Look, boss, the horse is out of the barn,” Kovac said. “We’ve just got to deal with this and go forward. I need manpower. We’ve got to identify this vic. All I’ve got to go on at this point is a tattoo. I need people canvassing the local ink shops. I need eyes going over the other cases, looking for some kind of thread.”

“You want a task force.”

“I don’t care what you call it.”

“Our hand is being forced now,” Kasselmann said. “The public is going to expect a task force. The media is going to be crawling up our asses like cheap underwear. You know how this goes. You went through this with the Cremator cases. You want to do that again?”

“Like I want a colonoscopy,” Kovac admitted. “I just want to run my investigation. I want the time and the warm bodies to do it right. Why should anybody be against that?”

Kasselmann pushed to his feet. “Because it costs money. Because a multi-agency task force is a logistical nightmare. Because it draws the wrong kind of attention—”

Liska stepped back into the fray. “And a dead girl with no face doesn’t? With all due respect, sir, that is fucked-up.”

The captain gave her a hard-eyed stare. Liska pushed it right back at him. Kovac held his breath, feeling like he was caught between a she-wolf and an angry bull.

Kasselmann blinked first. He looked at Kovac. “Set up a room. You get Tippen and Elwood for starters. The rest remains to be seen. I have a meeting to get to.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And I don’t want anybody talking to the press about anything. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Redistribute whatever other cases you’ve got going on that aren’t a priority.”

“Yes, sir,” Kovac said, wondering just which murder on his caseload wasn’t a priority and how he would explain that to the families involved. Maybe he would foist off some of his assaults on a couple of the younger guys.

He put the matter to the back of his mind and herded Liska out of the captain’s office and past the cubicles, steering her into the conference room he and Tippen had set up the night before.

“Do I need to inject coffee into you intravenously?” he asked, shrugging out of his sport coat. “Or would you prefer the hair of the dog? In which case we should leave the building because, despite all evidence to the contrary, I would prefer not to be fired and lose my pension.”

“I’m not hungover.”

Kovac raised an eyebrow as he rolled up his shirtsleeves. “How long have we known each other?”

“All right,” she admitted grudgingly as she slipped out of her wool blazer and hung it on the back of a chair. “I’m a little hungover. And I haven’t slept in two days,” she confessed, melting into a chair at the long table. “I thought a glass of wine might help.”

“A glass?”

“A glass . . . as in bottle. Red wine is good for you,” she added defensively.

“Yeah, you’re the freaking picture of health here. Is this still to do with Kyle?”

She pulled in a long breath and let it back out. “Yes. Speed tried to talk to him last night, but he didn’t get anywhere.”

Kovac perched a hip on the table, settling in to offer his sage wisdom. “You’re not going to know everything that goes on in a teenage boy’s life, Tinks. Trust me, you don’t want to know.”

She gave him a look. “Oh, that’s reassuring. Thanks.”

“What I mean to say is, he’s fifteen. He’s not a little boy anymore.”

“He’s not a man either.”

“He’s a guy now. Guys have their own shit going on that they aren’t going to share with their mothers—unless they’re weird or gay.”

“Spoken like a guy.”

“See?” he said. “I wouldn’t tell you my shit either.”

“You don’t have any shit to tell about.”

“That’s beside the point.”

“You don’t get it, Sam,” she said. “Do you know the stuff kids get into today? Drugs, guns, sex. Every day is like another chapter in Lord of the Flies.”

“At the pansy-ass private brainiac school,” Kovac said. “PSI is not exactly the mean streets. I mean, what are the gangs in that school? The math club versus the science club?” He sat back and held his hands up as if to fend off an attacker. “Ooooooo . . . Look out! They’re packing fountain pens and slide rules!”

Liska tried to rally up a sense of humor, but the attempted smile looked more like a result of gas pain.

“Slide rules went out with the dinosaurs, T. rex.”

“Whatever.”

“I just don’t want to see him make a hard mistake,” she admitted. A sheen of uncharacteristic tears brightened her eyes. “He’s my baby, Sam. I look at him and I see him when he was two, when he was five, when he was ten. I don’t want him to grow up. I don’t want him to get hurt.”

“But we all do, Tinks,” Kovac said gently. “That’s part of the deal. We grow up. We make mistakes and we learn from them. That’s how it works.

“Look at the two of us,” he said. “We smoked weed and drank ’til we puked, and had sex, and flunked algebra. Look how we turned out. We’re not dead. We’re not in prison. We’ve lived long enough to fuck up a million more times.

“He got in a fight,” he said. “No lives were lost. Let it go. You can’t keep him on a leash like a dog.”

“It’s so hard.” She put her elbows on the table and rubbed her hands over her face, messing up her makeup.

“Jesus Christ,” Kovac grumbled with a phony gruffness meant to cover his actual concern. He dug a clean handkerchief out of his hip pocket and offered it to her. “Now you look like the Joker. Go fix yourself, and put your cop face on. We’ve got work to do.”

Taking the handkerchief, she swept it under each eye and around her mouth, scrubbing off smeared mascara and lipstick. She looked up at the wall with the victim photos, seeing it for the first time and looking like she welcomed the distraction. “What’s all this?”

“Tip and I did this last night. We wanted to hit the ground running today.”

He moved off the table for a closer look at the photographs.

“You’ve got a kid with a black eye,” he said, tapping a finger beneath the sickening close-up of what was left of the face of Zombie Doe. “Someone out there has a daughter who looks like this. Count yourself lucky and get your head in the game, kiddo.”

Tippen stuck his homely head in the door. “Are we a go?”

“One way or another,” Kovac said.

The detective walked in, tossed a bag of bagels on the table, and arched a brow at Liska. “Did you spend the night in the drunk tank or is this a new look for you?”

She flipped him off.

“Admitting you have a problem is the first step,” he said, then turned to Kovac. “Sonya e-mailed me her first piece. It’s going up on her blog this morning as soon as we give it the thumbs-up.”

“Who’s Sonya?” Liska asked, grabbing an iced coffee from the carrier Elwood brought in with him.

“Tip’s niece,” Kovac said.

“God help her,” Liska muttered. “I always figured you for someone’s creepy uncle, Tip.”

“She’s some kind of cyberjournalist,” Kovac explained. “Our liaison to the victim pool.”

“She’s got a lot of readers,” Tippen said. “And contacts. She’s hooked in to every online page the sixteen– to twentysomethings read. Web news sites, Facebook, Twitter. And she’s reaching out to people she knows in the tattoo business.”

“She says the tattoo on our vic is the Chinese symbol for acceptance,” Kovac explained to the others as he stood looking at the close-up he had taped to the wall with the rest of the autopsy photos. “She has the same thing on her arm. Apparently, it’s something the young people are doing these days to make a statement.”

“For kids the victim’s age, that’s not even legal in this state,” Tippen pointed out. “Minors can’t get tattoos, even with parental consent.”

“Thank God,” Liska said, digging a cinnamon-raisin bagel out of the bag. “Kyle wanted a tattoo for his last birthday. I said absolutely not until he runs away and joins the circus.”

“It’s an artistic form of self-expression,” Elwood said. “Tattoos are a road map of the bearer’s personal journey.”