Face of Fear (A Zoe Prime Mystery—Book 3)

by Blake Pierce

  “The tiger,” Zoe said, almost without meaning to, breaking the rapport of the conversation that was only between Shelley and Violet.

  Violet responded, all the same. “He said it was more symbolic. There were different numbers of stripes on each part of its body, and a black spot around the nose. That represented the number that had been there originally, but also gave it a new meaning. One he didn’t feel so sad to look at.”

  “If it still represents the numbers, then how did it change anything?” Zoe asked. Then wished she hadn’t.

  Violet was frowning, but she answered, her tone a little flatter. “He didn’t want her to be remembered for the numbers. That wasn’t who she was. It was a part of her life, yes, but it didn’t define her. She was strong. A tiger spirit who fought to the end. That’s how it changed.”

  Zoe nodded, saying nothing. She had said enough. Any more feet in her mouth, and she was liable to get them both kicked out of the house.

  “Do you know where he got these tattoos done?” Shelley asked, taking the conversation in hand again. “Either of them?”

  Violet shook his head. “That wasn’t relevant, I suppose. I never got tempted to get a tattoo, so I didn’t ask him. I guess it was somewhere local. I don’t remember him going out of town to get it done.”

  Shelley made a few pleasantries, taking the framed photograph out of Zoe’s hands and handing it firmly back to Violet. Then she made their excuses, and they left, Zoe feeling strangely like she was leaving behind a ghost.

  ***

  Zoe flicked through the now-familiar sequence of images on John Dowling’s social media feed, looking for the one she had seen before. The tattoo artist who had done his tiger. “Here it is,” she said, leaning over the gearstick to show it Shelley. “It is downtown. A parlor called Dead Eye Dave’s.”

  “What’s the address?” Shelley asked. “We can go there now.”

  “Wait just a second. We do not know if we have the right lead here. What if it was the original tattoo that marked him out? The serial number, not the tiger?”

  Shelley hesitated. “Do we know who did that one?”

  Zoe shook her head. “I already looked. He never put up an announcement post about getting the original tattoo. He had it already when he started his account. The artist was never tagged.”

  “What about Callie Everard?” Shelley picked up her own cell and started tapping on the screen. “The fonts looked kind of similar, didn’t they? On John’s and Callie’s, both.”

  “You are right,” Zoe agreed, examining the image she had seen before of John with his arm raised. She did not need to check it against Callie’s. She had seen that enough times that the image was engraved on her mind. They were a good match, possibly even the same hand. The height of the digits appeared the same, the scale of the tattoo, the distance between each numeral.

  “It’s here,” Shelley said, clicking on the image of Callie’s tattoo when it was newly done. “Yes, the tattoo artist is tagged… wait… Dead Eye Dave’s. It’s the same place.”

  Zoe looked up and exchanged a meaningful glance with her. “Looks like we know where we need to go next,” she said, then paused. “This is significant, is it not? The same artist? We should be thinking about finding a suspect right there at the parlor. Maybe we want to go in with a little more caution.”

  “I don’t know,” Shelley mused. “It’s a bit of a taboo subject, isn’t it? Holocaust tattoos. Maybe not every parlor in town is willing to do it. There are a lot of tattoo artists in LA. For both of our victims to have gone there, there has to be a strong connection. Either the killer works there, or they didn’t have another choice, which seems only semi-likely.”

  “How can we be sure?” Zoe asked. She felt out of her depth on this subject. Taboo tattoos—what did that even mean? When a prison inmate could be tattooed with a list of the number of kills he had made, or an image of a dead child, what was taboo?

  “I can do a quick straw poll,” Shelley said. She was typing on her screen again, bringing up some details and then lifting the cell to her ear. “Find me a few more parlors other than Dead Eye Dave’s. I’ll see if they’ll allow me to make a booking for a Holocaust tattoo.”

  Zoe nodded, starting her own search to prepare for when Shelley finished her first conversation.

  Five parlors later, they had something of a consensus. It wasn’t a truly representative sample, given how many of them there were in LA as a whole, but it was a good indicator of the trouble it might possibly take to get a tattoo of the Holocaust prisoner number of a relative. Of the five Shelley had called, all but one of them had said they flat-out refused to undertake the controversial design.

  The last had said it was down to the discretion of the artist, and let Shelley know they would call her back in the unlikely event that one of their artists was willing to take it on.

  “So, that complicates things,” Shelley said, shifting toward Zoe on her seat. “It could be that they were picked out because of the tattoo parlor itself, or it could be because of their heritage. We still don’t really know. They might have both gone to Dead Eye Dave’s because it was the only option.”

  “Well, there is one way to find out for sure,” Zoe said.

  “What’s that?”

  “We go there and ask them if they tattooed Naomi Karling.”

  With a nod of agreement from Shelley, Zoe put the car into drive and pulled out into the street. They were getting closer now—she could feel it.

  Maybe they were about to meet their killer face to face.

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  “What did they say?” Zoe asked, not taking her eyes off the car in front of them.

  Shelley put her cell back into her pocket, clearing her throat. “They said we might want backup, if we’re on the right track.”

  Zoe shook her head. “Ignore that. We do not want to go in with great force right now. We just want to see if we can find something out. Maybe the killer will get spooked and decide not to kill someone tonight, and we can all win.”

  “I agree with that,” Shelley said. “But you will want to hear the rest. I asked them to look up the specific tattoo artist who worked on both Callie and John. He goes by the name OctopusArtistica online, but his real name is Jasper Franks. Apparently, he has a bit of a record.”

  “Oh?” Zoe quirked an eyebrow, swinging a left and steering the car in the direction indicated by their GPS. “You have my attention.”

  “He’s known to the local LAPD precinct, to say the least. They’ve had to bring him in a few times. He was causing trouble by tattooing some pretty suspicious customers, and there were rumors that he was part of a white supremacist group. He was even arrested at a supposed meeting of this group, but they were never able to get any charges to stick. They covered their tracks well enough.”

  Zoe nodded, mentally chewing this over. “A white supremacist happens to be one of the only tattoo artists in LA willing to do Holocaust tattoos, and the people who get them start turning up dead. Not just dead, but burned. Obliterated. Sounds like a good match-up for a hate crime to me.”

  “Me, too,” Shelley agreed. “But if he is part of a hate group, he’s not going to just admit it right up front. He put up with a grilling from the LAPD without giving anything away. He won’t be an easy one to crack.”

  Zoe eased the rental car into a spot three stores down from the tattoo parlor, which boasted an all-black façade with a 3D-effect skull—complete with staring eyes—spray-painted on the brickwork above the door. It was two feet tall, a huge figure looming over the seven feet of the doorframe. “Are you asking me for permission?” she said, turning to Shelley with a glint in her eyes.

  “Will I get it?”

  Zoe grinned. “Do your worst, Agent Rose. Come on, we will nail this killer to the wall. Got your cuffs ready?”

  Shelley only chuckled and got out of the car, waiting for Zoe to join her before she moved forward.

  “Let me take the lead on this,” she
said. “You just do your usual job of looking angry and anti-social.”

  Zoe realized she should probably be offended by that, but coming from Shelley, she found she didn’t really mind at all.

  ***

  Zoe watched with amusement concealed behind a blank facial expression—not hard for her to achieve—as Shelley worked her magic.

  Jasper Franks had been hard at work when they entered the parlor, set up at the last of six stations in the open space, right at the back of the room. The bored eighteen-year-old on reception pointed them in his direction with an emery file, telling them in dull tones that he was busy right now, but did not stop them from going over to him.

  He was inking some kind of snakelike design onto the calf of a robust Latino man wearing knee-length baggy denim shorts and a baseball cap. Zoe could see right through the two-inch gauge in his ear. It made her feel a little queasy, so she looked away and focused on the room.

  There were tattoo artists at every station, and a customer lying or sitting in front of each of them. The whole room was awash with the incessant buzzing of the needles, like little insects. Zoe quite liked it. It was disorientating, made the rest of the noises around her disappear. She couldn’t count how many there were by sound alone, or even pinpoint exactly where they were with her eyes closed. It was almost blissful.

  Jasper Franks himself was not a disappointment. Six feet tall, white, with dark hair cut into a short style. He was easily close to what their one eyewitness had described at the Naomi Karling crime scene. Not only that, but he also met Zoe’s expectations: the right height to get a good angle on each of the victims as he approached them from behind, well-muscled enough to be able to drag a body around without a problem. He could easily be their guy.

  The one thing she was having trouble with was not fixating on his tattoos. They covered his body, crawling down his arms and across his hands, up his neck, down the parts of his legs that were visible below the board shorts he was wearing. Even his face bore several marks, although none of them were gang signs that Zoe recognized. Just his screen name above each of his eyebrows, the word split in two, and a heart beside his left ear in miniature.

  “I can’t talk right now, ladies. I’m with a customer.” The first thing that he said to them was dismissive. It would have been rude, except that he did it in a regretful tone. He barely looked up at them. “You can schedule in an appointment with the receptionist. Consultations are free.”

  Zoe hesitated. How was Shelley going to play this? Were they going to have to go back to the waiting area and sit with the three people reading trashy magazines or scrolling through their phones until he was done?

  Apparently, Shelley had other ideas—and they involved making as much of a scene as possible.

  “Actually, Mr. Franks, we’d like to speak to you right now,” she said, flipping out her badge. “I’m Special Agent Shelley Rose with the FBI, and this is Special Agent Zoe Prime. We have some questions for you about your membership in the Aryan Brotherhood.”

  There was an audible reaction around the room. A couple of the other tattoo artists stopped working, their needles going quiet. The conversations ceased.

  Shelley hadn’t just said it. She had announced it, in a voice that carried across the room. All faces were turning to them, spreading like a virus as each person realized that the others were looking at something. Franks himself had stopped moving, looking up at them with the needle gun held in his hand, pointing at them. Almost like a threat.

  “You can’t come in here and say that in front of my customers,” he said. His voice was level and flat, but his face had changed color. First pale, and now a steadily ripening red. Zoe knew the signs of anger well enough. This was pure fury.

  “Actually, Mr. Franks, I can,” Shelley said. “Do you need me to show you the badge again?”

  Franks slammed the gun down on a side table with a clatter, making the six other tools on the metal surface jump slightly. “I am not a member of the Aryan Brotherhood. Do your research. The LAPD file on me should tell you that. I was cleared of any connection.”

  “That’s not quite the same thing as not having any connection at all, is it, Mr. Franks? It just means you’ve been smart enough so far not to get caught.”

  “Get out,” Franks snarled. His hands were resting on his upper thighs, as if he was ready to push off and lunge for them. “I’m not talking to you about anything. That whole thing was just a misunderstanding, and it got cleared up. I’m innocent.”

  “We haven’t even told you what we want to question you about yet,” Shelley pointed out, her tone deceptively mild. “How do you know we think you’re guilty of something?”

  “You just accused me of being a fucking Nazi.” Franks got up, his six-foot frame with all of its musculature now towering over them. He had only two inches on Zoe, and four on Shelley, but it was the width of his shoulders and the clear rage on his face that made him seem so much bigger. “I know I’m innocent of that. So get out of this store and stop sabotaging my business before I report you for harassment.”

  “I’m afraid we’re not going anywhere, Mr. Franks. I would ask to go somewhere less public, but since you aren’t giving me that option, I’ll just come out and say it.” Shelley paused for effect. “We’re here to talk about the murders you committed.”

  There were actual gasps across the room, now deathly silent except for their conversation. Franks’s eyes swept the room, taking in his customers and his co-workers, the way each of them was looking at him with concern. If Zoe was in his shoes, she would be wondering if they all believed it. If they really thought he was capable. She would have been appalled at the thought. But then again, she wasn’t really a murderer.

  “I haven’t done anything,” Franks said, his voice rising in volume, a shout now. “You can’t accuse me of that! Get the hell out of here!”

  “Do I take it, Mr. Franks, that you are declining our request for a conversation?” Shelley asked. She was calm, unflappable. Even Zoe felt like taking a step back, out of the range of his powerful arms. The tattooist behind them certainly had. But Shelley looked as though she was dealing with nothing more than a tantrum-throwing toddler—something that she had actual experience in.

  “You’re goddamn right I’m declining your request!” Franks swept his arm toward the door, another violently sharp motion that could easily be interpreted as a threat. “Get out!”

  Shelley looked at Zoe for a brief moment, their eyes meeting. Zoe appreciated the drama of the moment—and part of her wondered if Shelley was enjoying it. After all, she knew she didn’t need to ask permission. Zoe had told her to do her worst.

  “Jasper Franks,” she said, pulling a pair of handcuffs out of her pocket, “I’m placing you under arrest on suspicion of murder.”

  She continued to read him his rights as she snapped the handcuffs on, Zoe helping by moving forward to restrain his arms as he initially attempted to resist. Then she used the radio she and Shelley had been given at the precinct to let them know they were coming in. At this rate, it was entirely possible that they would need backup to contain him. He was furious, and he wanted them to know it.

  “Hey! Call my brother!” he yelled at one of his fellow tattooists as they passed by, Zoe behind and Shelley in front, blocking any potential routes of escape he might have tried for. “Tell him to get me a lawyer. I didn’t do anything. Call him!”

  Zoe couldn’t help but smirk to herself for just a brief moment, trying on the expression that she had seen on others in a moment of victory. He couldn’t see her face, wouldn’t know that she was being unprofessional.

  They had their guy. And for Zoe, walking him out of the tattoo parlor and toward the car as he continued to yell about his innocence, it felt pretty sweet to know that the streets were going to be safe—at least for a few hours, if he really did manage to get a good lawyer.

  They had him for now. And Zoe was determined: she wasn’t going to let him weasel his way out of this during
questioning.

  No—if she had any say at all in the matter, Jasper Franks was going behind bars—and he was going to stay there, no matter what she had to do to make that happen.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  Shelley slammed the file down on the table, the paper making a flat slapping noise against the metal. “Explain this to me, Jasper,” she said. “Mr. Franks” was gone. In spite of the lawyer sitting beside Franks, a weasel-faced man with thinning hair named Smith, she had evidently decided that playing hardball was the way to go.

  Zoe didn’t interfere. She trusted her partner to know the right approach. She was only in the room so that she could step in if it seemed like they weren’t getting anywhere.

  The top sheet of paper in the file was an image taken from a surveillance camera. Jasper Franks, a little younger but unmistakable, the shape of the tattoos above his eyebrows able to be made out even on the grainy shot. He was standing in front of a swath of fabric that displayed a giant swastika, slapped across the front of what looked like the Confederate flag. The group of men that stood around him were all peaches and sweethearts, no doubt.

  “I have explained it,” Jasper said, gritting his teeth. “I’ve explained it many times.”

  “My client has already been investigated on charges of belonging to the Aryan Brotherhood,” the lawyer piped up imperiously. “You will need more than that if you intend to keep him here for further questioning.”

  “Oh, I have more than that,” Shelley said, smiling tauntingly. “Don’t I, Jasper?”

  “I don’t know what you’ve got,” Jasper said, then caught his lawyer’s eye and corrected himself. “You can’t have anything, because I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “Not ever?” Shelley asked, raising her eyebrows. “Not even morally?”

  Jasper looked like he was about to respond something ugly, but the lawyer cut across him. “Stop playing with my client, Agent. You either have a basis for questioning or you don’t. Get to the point, or I’m walking him out of here.”