Detective Carson Ryder Thriller Series Books 1–3: The Hundredth Man, The Death Collectors, The Broken Souls. J. Kerley A.
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again. “Nah, man, not Jimmy. It was a temp-tat, like a decal. You put it on with water, rub it off with alcohol. You can tell they’re fake usually, the color’s so, like, intense.”
“Did Jimmy wear them much?”
A long pause. “Um, like, just when we’d hit a party. We’d get back and he’d wipe it off, worried his dad or mom’d drop in without calling—they did that sometimes—and he was afraid they’d flip out thinking he’d turned, like, biker or something.”
“Just a couple more questions, Dale. Jimmy probably sent out photographs of himself with some of his personals letters, right?”
Again the long pause as gears engaged. “Pictures. Yeah. I even took some at the beach last spring.”
“Was his shirt off?”
“He was just in swim trunks.”
“Think hard, Dale. Was he wearing a tat in the photo? He liked the swordfish. Was he wearing it?”
We drove three blocks. I said, “Dale, are you there?”
“I’m like, thinking.”
I apologized for disturbing him. Three more blocks passed. “I remembered now, man,” McFetters blurted. “He told me some chicks dug tats and some didn’t. He didn’t want to turn any of them off with the picture, y’know?”
No tattoo.
Not in the photos sent to NewsBeat. Jimmy Farrier’s chest was as unmarked as a baby’s. But he’d pasted a temp-tat on for the rave, probably figuring it’d be cool there. I turned the phone off, dropped it in my pocket. Harry’s eyes studied me in the rear-view; he had questions, but knew I was working on the answers. I settled back down in the seat, closed my eyes.
Walk the scene, I told my mind. See the rave…
I stood in a watermelon field and watched the dancers, sweating apparitions with glowing necklaces and water bottles in their hands. In the distance I saw a baby-faced kid bobbing his head to the music and sucking at a beer, self-conscious, not one with the crowd. Waiting for someone; at least that’s what he hopes. From the black pool of the woods a shadow glides to him. Something’s whispered or maybe shown: a beer, a blunt, a tab.
“Come on, brother, lighten up, it’s a party, be cool…”
Be cool, the piper’s incandescent call to the young. The pair stumble through the vines, step over a copulating couple, skirt a man whispering to a melon about God. In the whirling, grinding, music-blind mass, the pair are invisible. Then the trees brush their faces and the rave becomes a bonfire in the distance. A tap on Farrier’s shoulder and he turns into an explosion of pain and a dark, seeping taste far above his tongue. He’s on the ground in a tight copse at the edge of the field, on his side in a dry gully. The shadow has a flashlight, a pen, and somewhere a long sharp blade. Farrier’s pants are unzipped, prepared for the writing. His shirt is pulled up…
Tattoo.
Out of nowhere; unexpected. Blue and red and green against the pink-brown flesh. It’s all wrong, all the work, all the stalking, all the chances. All desperately wrong. Enraged, the killer kicks Farrier twice and leaves him to die, head on, his damaged brain spilling memories until there’s nothing left but primal impulse; Farrier dies with his mouth in the dirt, trying to nurse.
Suddenly I was bolt upright, slapping Harry’s shoulder. “The Farrier the killer wanted wasn’t the Farrier he got,” I said. “Pull over.”
He yanked the wheel and we skidded into a car wash lot. A half dozen black guys were toweling off a white Mercedes. Curious faces watched me exit the backseat to sit up front. They looked at Harry, saw the cop eyes, and turned back to serious towel action.
“Cutter selected Farrier from a photo the kid sent with his letter,” I said, closing the door. “Farrier wasn’t tattooed in the picture; he used fake tats, like decals. But he only wore them occasionally, like at the rave. Cutter culled Farrier out and killed him, but when he lifted the shirt to write…”
Harry nodded. “Surprise. It appears the boy’s got ink.”
“For some reason the tattoo kept him from decapitating Farrier.”
Harry held up his hand to slow me down, did devil’s advocate. “Maybe Cutter just got interrupted.”
“According to Sergeant Tate, Cutter could have done anything he wanted.”
Harry thought a moment. “Jerry-boy had a tattoo, Carson, the dragon; he still lost his head. How you explain that?”
My spine started tingling with the feeling of another sense coming on. It happens when I think there’s an invisible line nearby, and we have to walk blindly with our hands out until we touch it. I saw the morgue photos in my mind and rifled through them. Posterior stains on Deschamps and Nelson, two backs dark as bruises. But the anterior bodies were lighter, almost natural, free of settled blood.
“Livor mortis,” I whispered. “Deschamps and Nelson were on their backs, Harry. The blood wouldn’t pool on their anterior bodies, discolor them. He doesn’t just want them on their back so he can write on them—the appearance of the front of the bodies is crucial.”
Harry’s thumbs drummed the steering wheel. “Farrier was on his side because it didn’t matter?”
“Exactly. Once Cutter saw the tattoo, figured it was real, Farrier became useless.”
“Appearance,” Harry mused. “Body art, the body as art. Could that be his thing? His treasure? Something as simple as a photo of the perfect body? The perfect corpse to deliver his perfect message to whoever?”
“The perfect messenger. Damn, Harry, what if he’s sending avatars?”
“Copies of himself?” Harry asked.
“More like stand-ins,” I said.
“Where do we go from here, Carson? Your call.”
I felt something glide over my palm, a strand of web. I closed my hand but it was gone. I told Harry about the scheduling records at the morgue and that I’d finesse them from Will Lindy. We turned our attention to Farrier and his connection to the NewsBeat. I looked at my copy of Farrier’s responses.
“I have dates Farrier responded to ads, but no ads to cross-check against.”
Harry frowned. “Just the ads, that’s all you need? The ones in the paper itself?”
“The records are smoke, but we’d know which ads Farrier responded to by the numbers; each ad has a code number. It’s straws in the wind, but…”
Harry thought for a moment. He said, “Remember that guy up by Flomaton? Lived in a house full of every kind of map he could get his hands on? It was in the newspaper last year.”
I remembered; too strange to forget. I’d snipped the article and filed it in my Weird World folder. “Maps from everywhere that would send him one. Tokyo. Murmansk. Ulan Bator. Satellite maps, topo maps, maps of geologic faults, population density, dogs per square acre.”
“Collecting maps. What’s your take on that?”
I searched my jargon file. “Obsessive-compulsive behavior. Maybe even delusional depending on what purpose he ascribed to the maps.”
Harry jammed the car into drive and we squealed from the lot just ahead of a pack of vehicles released from a red light. Irritated horn blasts followed us down the street.
“Talk about purpose,” Harry said, oblivious to the cacophony. “I want you to see a place and tell me if it really exists.”
The two-story clapboard