Skin Deep

by Jerome Preisler

  Josh wouldn’t recall running over. But the next thing he knew, he was there alongside them, peering through the fence.

  “What?” he said. “What is it?”

  None of them could answer.

  “Nick, Detective Vartan, take a look.”

  Nick Stokes was already doing that. He had never seen anything like this dump job—not as an experienced criminalist for the Las Vegas police, not in his three years with the crime lab back in Dallas.

  He moved past the detective and squatted over it with his digital camera. The victim’s hard-core body mod was grotesque but masterfully intricate—his eyeballs dyed black around their irises, a large round monocle tattooed over one eye, the area from the middle of the brow up transformed into a gold crown. It curved around the front of the head from temple to temple, its five evenly spaced points raised above the hairline.

  “Implants,” Nick said.

  “You mean the crown points?”

  “They’re subdermals.” Nick took some snapshots. “Inserted under the skin, that is.”

  Dressed in a sport jacket and jeans, Louis Vartan stood with his arms crossed and an expression of weary horror on his face.

  “The Tattoo Man strikes again,” he said. “At least, the third case in as many months that fits the profile.”

  “Except none of the others left anyone dead.”

  Vartan expelled a breath. “True enough,” he said, looking down at the vic. “His eyes… were they inked that color?”

  Nick nodded and adjusted his lens for a close-up. “Eye tats have been around for a while,” he said. “There’re also legit medical procedures for tinting the eyes of people with visible defects.” Of course, he’d never heard of a doctor who’d tattoo anyone’s eyeballs solid black, though anything was possible these days, especially in this town.

  Letting his camera hang from its neck strap, Nick ran his latex-gloved fingers over the points of the crown. A moment later, he noticed a circle of high-intensity white light to his left, turned in that direction, and saw Sara Sidle approaching from the periphery of the crime scene, where LVPD cops were busily working to secure it with barricades and yellow tape. Beyond them in the predawn dimness, row upon row of parked semi-trailers were lined up like a herd of somnolent dinosaurs.

  “Find anything?” he asked her.

  She doused the forensic lamp and offered a half shrug. “No footprints or tire marks,” she said. “There are two places on Koval where the fencing’s separated from the posts.”

  Making the lot easily accessible from the street. Nick could imagine how thrilled all the insurance companies covering the trailers for theft and damage would be over such airtight security. “Those openings close by?”

  “The nearest one’s about ten yards away toward Sands Avenue.”

  “And the other?”

  “Fifteen or twenty yards farther along.”

  “Either of them wide enough for the body? And whoever brought it here?”

  “I haven’t taken measurements yet,” she said. “My guess is that both would allow entry. But you’d have to push back the fencing to get through.”

  “Wouldn’t be too hard for someone strong enough to carry more than two hundred pounds of dead weight,” Nick said. Before becoming so much decomposing meat, fluid, and bone, their vic had been an older man, about six feet tall, and paunchy around the middle.

  Sara stood regarding the corpse over Nick’s broad shoulders. Her wedge-cut brown hair was tucked back behind her ears, and she had on a black crime-scene vest, a CSI ball cap, and matching slacks.

  “The gaps in the fence aren’t new,” she said. “I didn’t see the sort of clean, shiny edges you’d get from a chain cutter on the severed linkages.”

  “Vandalism?”

  “Could be. But the loose panel closest to us buckles outward… like maybe a truck backed into the fence while it was pulling in or out.”

  Nick nodded his agreement. With giant rigs maneuvering around the depot all day, he figured that would be a commonplace occurrence.

  “He came, he saw, he ditched the corpse,” he said. “Whether or not our killer scouted the depot ahead of time, it’s probably just an opportune site.”

  “As opposed to one that has emotional or psychological significance.”

  “Right.” Nick caught her hesitancy. “You disagree?”

  She shrugged. “Why leave the body right along the sidewalk? It would have stayed hidden longer if he’d pulled it between the trailers.”

  “He might’ve had trouble carrying it. Or been in a hurry.”

  “Or wanted it on display.”

  Nick considered that as David Phillips, the assistant coroner, came ducking under the tape with his aluminum crime-scene kit, one hand on the small of his back. He acknowledged Vartan with a glance, knelt beside Nick, and set down his case. “Hail to the king,” he said. “This man looks like he jumped off a deck of cards.”

  Now, there’s an expert observation. Nick saw him rub his lower back again. “Something hurt, Dave?”

  “Always.” He shrugged. “The wife buys me new insoles for chronic backache. I’d get better relief if corpses would occasionally turn up where I don’t have to bend or crawl to examine them.”

  Nick gave a slight smile. He unhooked his ultraviolet flash from his gear belt, flipped the amber goggles down from over his close-cropped brown hair, and shone the light on the dead man’s head. “The incisions are well healed,” he said, carefully running his finger over the points of the crown. “There’s no bruising, very little swelling. And there aren’t any scabs. My guess is the work was done a couple of weeks ago.” He looked at Phillips. “You think whoever did this used dissolving sutures?”

  “And gel bandages,” Phillips said with a nod. “Basically the type applied to burn victims. They help prevent scar tissue from forming as the skin heals.”

  “A perfectionist,” Sara said. “Our man’s proud of his artistry.”

  “Yeah,” Nick said slowly.

  Phillips had opened his kit, taken a pair of gloves from it, and put them on. Now he lifted the dead man’s eyelid with a fingertip, wobbled his jaw, and brought an arm off the ground to manipulate the wrist and elbow. “Rigor’s at an early stage. There’s considerable stiffness in the head, almost none in the extremities.”

  This indicated that the time of death fell within the past twelve hours. He’d lived to see what was done to him, Nick thought.

  He noticed Phillips lowering the victim’s arm and motioned for him to keep it raised. “Hang on a sec,” he said, shining his flash on the back of the hand. “What do you make of this little red spot right here?”

  Phillips peered down at the area in the circle of light. “A puncture wound over a dorsal vein.” He ran a finger over it. “Looks as if he had a peripheral intravenous line running into him.”

  Nick considered that. After a moment, he turned off his flash, clipped it back onto his belt, and felt around in the corpse’s pockets for identification. It didn’t surprise him to find them empty.

  “He’s wearing a good suit,” Sara said. “Very conservative but expensive.”

  Nick checked out the tag under the collar. Brooks Brothers, sure enough.

  Her eyes narrowed. “He’s clean-shaven. If he’s been missing for a couple of weeks, wouldn’t you expect to see stubble on his cheeks?”

  Nick raised an eyebrow. “Somebody cleaned him up so he’d look his best.”

  “Or so the tattoos would.”

  Nick nodded silently and turned toward the group that had discovered the body. They were outside the taped-off crime-scene area, standing in the gray twilight with one of the cops who’d responded to their nine-eleven.

  “What’s their story?” he asked Vartan.

  “They’re out-of-town partyers,” the detective said. “They pick up a cab outside a dance club, head back toward their motel outside McCarran. Then one of them hears a song on the radio, insists the driver crank up the music so they
can sing to it.”

  “They think they’re in some television commercial?”

  “Everybody’s got a Vegas fantasy,” Vartan said with a bemused shrug. “Anyway, the driver gets annoyed, boots them from his taxi about a half block up, takes off. They start arguing over who’s to blame, our singer takes off in a snit, walks back in this direction to find another cab. His girlfriend follows him and finds the DB.”

  “That’s it?”

  “From their preliminary statement, right,” Vartan said. “I don’t think there’ll be much more from them.”

  “How about witnesses to the body dump? Isn’t there a guard booth?”

  “Around the block on East Harmon.” Vartan motioned across the lot with his head. “We had a hell of a time waking the night watchman up from his snooze.”

  Nick smiled thinly. “Anything else?”

  “I’m running a missing-persons check on the vic,” Vartan said. “I’ll copy you once I have the list of possibles.”

  “I’d also appreciate any updates you might have on the other Tattoo Man case—Stacy Ebstein and Mitchell Noble. Whatever’s in your files. Just to make sure the lab’s current.”

  “They’ll reach it before you do.”

  Nick was rubbing his chin thoughtfully. He continued to study the corpse for a few seconds, then rose from his crouch.

  “I posted men at the fence openings,” Sara said. “They’re setting up floodlights. I didn’t recover any contact evidence but thought you’d want a look.”

  Nick nodded to indicate he would. But Sara was too methodical to miss anything significant, and their killer seemed very thorough. That didn’t leave him optimistic about his chances.

  “I’ll head over right now,” he said, moving off toward the brilliance of the floods.

  Forensic professionals weren’t known for their sentimentality. The processing of evidence began not at the lab but at the crime scene, where the fluids, decompositions, and other untidy leftovers of murder were found and tabbed for analysis. Seen through scientific eyes, the butchery and carnage became a lush harvest there for the picking. You had to stick to that perspective.

  Still, criminalists were human. It was empathy for the victims that got Nick Stokes through the long, dark hours of the night, when one door of inquiry usually led to another. Who are you? Who did this? How?

  Sometimes the very emotions you’d taught yourself to contain reminded you why the work mattered. Sometimes it didn’t hurt to bring them up for air.

  Returning to his office from the Koval Lane trailer depot, Nick paused in the entrance and briefly saw it not as it was but as it had been. Such moments no longer took him by surprise, and he kind of liked rolling with them. The office had, after all, once belonged to Gil Grissom, who had been much more than just his mentor. Nick knew the day he couldn’t feel his presence would probably be the day the human emotions in his tank had been depleted. If it ever reached that point, he would have to move on.

  Grissom. The metal plaques visible outside the entry had identified him as the supervisor of the Clark County, Nevada, criminalistics bureau. As distinguished by another engraved plate on the wall, he was also an esteemed member of the Entomological Society of America. But those titles formed too small a suit for the substance of the man—his wide-ranging interests, his depth of insight, his probing, restless intellect. It was apt, then, that Grissom’s meditative sanctuary within the criminalistics bureau had been a repository of jarred, bagged, mounted, and variously preserved taxonomic and histological specimens representing virtually every known kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species of life on the planet.

  Nick’s memories of the collection crowded in on him now, filling his mind the way its contents had filled the room. Grissom had insisted he kept it ordered and catalogued, an assertion many held in doubt—though no one at the lab would admit to the widespread suspicion that he had long since forgotten about certain acquisitions and was hazy on others he’d stashed away. Here was a jar of cicadas, there the eyeballs somebody had once confused with Cerignola olives, as rumor had it, mistaking their pinkish, shriveled optic-nerve clusters for pimientos. On this shelf were reptiles and amphibians; on that larvae, grubs, and worms; on a third a fish tank holding only brittle aquatic plants Grissom had netted and dried with chemical desiccants. Behind the desk were his mounted butterflies, a South American tarantula displayed in clear acetate, and Peg-Boards covered with glassine envelopes full of tiny insects and crustaceans. In every available corner, reference books teetered against heavier volumes stacked ten or fifteen high, the texts crammed between Rolodexes and file folders, bottled organs, tissue samples, skulls, and free-floating appendages in odorless phenoxetols and Nipa esters. Some of the older biological specimens, acquired from dusty museum storerooms, hung pale and gray in formalin suspensions. Whenever Gris opened their bottles, it had conjured pungent associations of the mortuary and, for a few unwary visitors, had led to coughing, gagging, wheezing, and generalized skin rashes.

  David Hodges, the trace tech, insisted he could still smell traces of formaldehyde in the office. But the CSIs took that with a larger handful of salt than Grissom’s claims that he’d kept it organized according to his own mysterious scheme. Hodges had helped solve a murder a while back by sniffing out the bitter-almond scent of cyanide, a genetic ability shared by about forty percent of the population. It was nevertheless an open question whether his nose was as hypersensitive to other chemicals as he later claimed or if he was milking his moment of olfactory glory for all it was worth…

  “Daydreaming?”

  Nick turned with a mild start and found himself looking into the face of Jim Brass. It was a familiar one around the crime lab, and no wonder. Brass was captain of the homicide squad operating out of LVPD headquarters next door, his rank seemingly evidenced by the fact that his suits were always sharper and better tailored than those of the detectives under his command. The navy-blue cashmere he had on now was no exception.

  “I usually wait till it’s daytime.” Nick showed him the dial of his wristwatch. “We’ve got a few hours to go.”

  Brass grunted out a chuckle from the corridor.

  “What’s up?” said Nick.

  “You requested our updates on the Tattoo Man case, right?”

  Nick nodded. He’d noticed the detective was holding several manila file folders against his side.

  “Here’s everything.” Brass passed him the files. “Excluding tonight’s report. It’s still being completed.”

  Nick regarded him quietly. Brass was no errand runner. “I figured Williams would e-mail these to me.”

  “He would’ve.” Brass shrugged. “I was coming to see you anyway. Decided I might as well bring along the hard copies.”

  Nick waited. Brass nodded past him at the office.

  “I just came from the morgue,” he said. “We need to talk about the latest vic—it won’t take long.”

  Nick moved aside to let him through the door and followed him in. Suddenly, Grissom’s collection was cleared out, gone, or mostly gone, leaving only the room in its present functional incarnation. The walls of the so-called bullpen now shared by Nick, Greg, and Langston were bare, its shelves disassembled, the bulk of his things packed away in storage, and the rest shipped to Costa Rica, where he’d been conducting research of some kind or another in the tropical rain forest. All that was left was Gris’s former mascot, the jarred fetal pig he’d said he used to test the effects of radiation on skin tissue. It had surprised everybody when Hodges, who’d seemed unaffected by Grissom’s departure, revealed he’d held on to the pickled pig and returned it to the office, explaining that was its rightful place.

  Nick hadn’t given him an argument, and there it rested on a counter, immersed in its bath of preservative fluids, blindly greeting everyone who entered.

  “Sidle here?” Brass asked.

  “She’s logging physical evidence,” Nick said. “We haven’t recovered much from the scene. So
me hairs and fibers that might or might not be associated with the dead man. Nothing to identify him right off.”

  Brass was quiet. Nick dropped the case files onto his desk and gestured him toward a chair.

  “No, thanks,” Brass said, remaining where he stood. “Like I told you, I intend to make this quick.”

  Nick looked at the detective curiously. He wasn’t positive what to make of his silence. But he had an inkling. “You have a name to go with our victim?” he said.

  “Quentin Dorset,” Brass said. “Ring a bell?”

  Nick immediately realized it did. “The judge.”

  “Retired judge,” Brass said. “There’s been a four-eighteen out on him for a week.”

  Nick nodded. Four-eighteen was the LVPD radio code for a missing-persons report. “The body work on Dorset wasn’t done overnight,” he said. “It’s almost healed.”

  “I noticed.” Brass sighed. “Dorset’s an acquaintance of mine. His wife died of cancer a couple of years back. Not long afterward, he stepped down from the bench.”

  “He lived alone?”

  “Yeah.” Brass reached into his pocket for a notepad, flipped it open, and scanned its pages. “Kept busy, though. Social functions, Chinese food with friends every Friday, Saturdays on the green, occasional travel… he got out of the house.”

  “How long since he was last seen?”

  Brass was studying his notes. “Three weeks ago, Dorset said good night to his Friday dinner group at a restaurant called Wu Liang’s. Drove home but didn’t show up at the country club on Saturday. The weather’s been on the cool side, so nobody there thought much of it. But when he missed his next Chinatown get-together without canceling with his pals, they became a little concerned.”

  “Just a little? Didn’t you say this was a regular thing with them?”

  “Dorset’s the type who’d leave his cell phone in his jacket pocket, hang the jacket in a closet, and forget about it till the battery died,” Brass said. “He also liked going on spur-of-the-moment jaunts. Nobody would’ve been too surprised to find out he’d left on an amateur fossil-hunting expedition or something.”

  Nick digested that. “Still seems odd that it was another seven days before the police were notified.”