Skin Deep

by Jerome Preisler

  “Hi, Mr. Stokes.” She smiled pleasantly, rose from behind her desk, and took his hand. “Let me bring you something to drink.”

  “That’s all right, Karen.”

  “Are you sure? We have soda, juice, coffee…”

  “I’m fine, really,” Nick said. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to get right to what you dug out of your files.”

  Karen nodded, motioned him into a chair in front of her desk, then went back around to her side and sat down. She was a good-looking blonde, maybe in her thirties, wearing white pearl-drop earrings, a smart charcoal-gray pantsuit, and suede peep-toe heels.

  “I can’t tell you how fortunate we are, Mr. Stokes,” she said. “When we spoke on the phone, it didn’t even occur to me that our offices had completely relocated since Stacy first started working at the resort. This entire floor wasn’t even here. I believe the building only went up twelve stories at the time.”

  “But you were able to find Stacy’s records in your computer system?”

  “Only the recent ones. Going back a couple of years.”

  “I don’t understand.” Nick hesitated, recalling their brief conversation. “You told me—”

  “Yes, that I’d located all of her files,” she said. “They weren’t in the system, though. That’s the lucky part.”

  Nick waited as she opened a bottom drawer, leaned over to reach inside, and produced a thick stack of manila index folders.

  “These and a few other batches of folders—I’m having my assistant bring them up to us right now—cover an entire decade’s worth of special-events reservations,” she said. “They run almost from Stacy’s first day on the job until our data-storage system went entirely paperless. That coincided with the hotel’s last major overhaul. At that time, virtually every scrap of information in the computers more than five years old—relating to conference and party banquets, I mean—was deleted without backup.”

  Nick crossed his ankle over his knee. “Doesn’t seem to make sense. They flush what’s in the computers but hang on to records that take up all kinds of space?”

  “That’s just it,” Karen said. “I gather there are corporate assessments showing how the names of patrons aren’t relevant after so-and-so many years. You know, surveys on how they choose the places they hold their affairs, executive turnover rates for business clients, averages on the number of private bookers wishing to change banquet venues rather than return even after successful experiences…” Her voice dropped a notch. “But Stacy was the best. She stayed in touch with clients. Cultivated relationships with them. Bent over backward to make their events memorable. Sent cards on holidays, wedding anniversaries. She was full of get-up-and-go.”

  Nick tried to associate the person Karen was talking about with the broken, embittered woman he’d seen in the depressing gloom behind her blackout shades. It wasn’t easy.

  “These records—” he began.

  “They were in a filing cabinet that didn’t even belong where I found it.”

  “Which was?”

  “At the rear of a basement storage area for our floral and catering supplies. It’s massive, several rooms, closets galore,” Karen said. “I’d forgotten all about the cabinet. Then it came to me that Stacy had it brought there when the hotel was renovated—and a short while after I was hired. She’d showed me around as part of my training.” A pause. “The resort’s lawyers were very quick to approve my showing you its contents once they reviewed it. Everyone here wants the person who kidnapped her caught.”

  Nick took a folder from the pile, saw that it was tabbed “Alderson Wedding/December 20, 2002,” and spread it open. It was stuffed with paperwork for the affair—printed contracts, checklists, letters, and expense logs, plus Stacy Ebstein’s hand-penciled floor layouts, seating arrangements, floral design sketches, price estimates, and scribbled notes.

  “I told you over the phone that Stacy was meticulous,” Karen said. “She took care of people the way she’d have wanted to be taken care of. That’s probably the most important thing she impressed on me.”

  Nick closed the folder and put it back on the pile. He was thinking he could still make the press conference if he hurried, then get busy sorting through the files at the lab ASAP.

  “You mentioned the rest of these were on the way,” he said. “I don’t mean to rush you. But I’d like to—”

  Nick heard the wheels rolling up outside the office an instant before Karen nodded toward the door. He turned around in his chair and saw a young man standing in the hall with a large delivery cart, its upper basket filled with index folders, its bottom rack loaded with cardboard boxes.

  It occurred to him that Hodges was going to go nuclear at the lab unless the evidence clerk serendipitously reappeared from wherever he might have scrammed.

  “Andy can help you bring the files to your car,” she said. “I’d only ask that you return them when you’re finished.”

  Nick looked at her. “Sticking with tradition?”

  “Something like that.”

  He nodded and stood. “You’re a good friend to Stacy,” he said. “I also want you to know how much I personally appreciate this.”

  Karen waved him off. “That’s okay,” she said, her eyes overbright with moisture as she rose to show him to the door. “Find the person who ruined an innocent woman’s life, and I promise it will be thanks enough.”

  “… and speaking on behalf of my office and the sheriff’s department, I pledge to everyone in this town, residents and visitors, inked or not, pierced or otherwise, that your government and law-enforcement agencies have been galvanized by the recent spate of tattoo-related homicides,” His Honor Fred Stancroft, former casino showroom manager and recently elected mayor of the city of Las Vegas, was saying from his podium. “As I said during my campaign, I am committed to lowering our violent-crime rate, whatever the particulars. Our skin belongs to us! And no—I repeat, no—bloodthirsty, maniacal tattoo killer or killer cult will deny us our basic right to safety and self-expression…”

  Her hair blowing around her face, Catherine sat in the plaza outside city hall along with Jim Brass, a handful of LVPD officers, and fifteen or twenty reporters who’d been thrown out in the cold to hear Stancroft spout endlessly through his manicured Van Dyke beard, all of them looking irritated as they trembled in the brutal crosswinds between the building’s tower and curved outer wing. Flanking Stancroft, meanwhile, was a coterie of aides and police officials, Ecklie among them, the undersheriff looking as if he wanted to drill himself into the pavement and stay out of sight until the mayor’s rambling, disjointed statement, or perhaps that shivery Sunday in March, reached a merciful conclusion, whichever came first.

  “I do not know the reason for the murderer’s tattoo fixation,” Stancroft went on. “I do not know whether these crimes are a vicious means of asserting power, sending a warped message, or possibly settling a feud. But to whoever may be orchestrating them, I want to be clear about my own message.” Stancroft paused, sought out a television video operator hunched in front of him, and looked straight into the lens of the camera balanced on her shoulder. “We will take you down. We will bring you to trial and impose the maximum penalties the law permits. Tattoo violence is unacceptable, and rest assured, we will stem the tide. In a free and open society, you will be reminded that the colors on a man’s skin are as irrelevant as the color of his skin…”

  Catherine thought she saw Ecklie cringe at that. But maybe a wayward gust had just spun up beneath his overcoat. Tough call from her vantage.

  She felt an elbow poke her side. Brass.

  “Yeah?” she whispered.

  “I’ve got a tip about politics,” he said through the upturned collar of his coat. “Something this press conference establishes for a fact in my own head.”

  Catherine waited, looking at him out of the corner of her eye.

  “When dicks like Stancroft can be voted into office,” he said, “we’ve got serious goddamned problems.”
<
br />   Minutes after loading up his trunk with Stacy Ebstein’s files, Nick was headed over to city hall on North Fourth Street when a voice crackled from the dashboard radio.

  “CSI Stokes?”

  He grabbed the mike. “Right, what’s up?”

  “This is Operator Conroy. You received a phone call about the Dorset case.”

  “ ‘You’ meaning the lab?”

  “It was for you specifically, sir,” Conroy said. “The person had seen your name in a newspaper article. I gathered it indicated you’re the primary investigator.”

  Nick grunted and braked for a stoplight at the East Ogden intersection. Williams had probably passed his name along to a reporter.

  “What’d he say?”

  “She, sir,” the operator said. “Her name was—I hope I’m not mangling it—Beshlesko. Spelled B-e-s—”

  “That her first name?”

  “No, sorry. The first’s Anabelle.”

  “Annabelle Beshlesko. Rolls right off the tongue.”

  “You see what I meant, sir. A tricky one. She said I could call her Miss Annabelle.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Claimed to have some information about the murder but wouldn’t give it to me or speak with anybody besides you. I assume because—”

  “I know.” Nick inwardly vowed to get back at Williams. “I’m the supposed primary.”

  “Yes, sir.” The PCO paused. “The woman insisted on talking to you in person, sir. She’s on West Charleston.”

  Nick asked for her exact location and frowned even before punching it into his GPS unit. “Okay, thanks. Out.”

  He racked his mike. Miss Annabelle was easily fifteen miles away. In fact, he’d have to stay on North Fourth and shoot onto the highway to get there.

  The light changed, and Nick drove through the intersection. City hall was just a block up ahead on his right. He considered phoning Catherine to tell her about his radio call but knew she’d have her phone off at the press conference. Besides, what would it accomplish? And how much longer would the mayor jabber on, anyway? Well, now that he thought about it, the question reminded him of a joke somebody once told him. “How long can a horse run? Till it stops.”

  Be that as it may, he’d been on a hot streak. And meant to ride that streak till it stopped.

  As Nick reached city hall, he saw the news vans with their satellite uplink dishes parked outside under some trees. It made him feel the slightest bit guilty for not joining Cath. Of course, she had Brass to commiserate with her. No point in all three of them sharing the misery.

  He bore left driving by the vans, went on beneath the freeway overpass, then took the ramp for I-95 North out toward West Charleston. Miss Annabelle, here I come.

  Nick reached the address he’d gotten from the PCO to find it belonged to Miss Annabelle’s Psychic Readings, a tiny storefront squeezed between a discount drugstore and a pet groomer in a shabby strip mall that resembled one of a trillion in outer Vegas, its window decorated with a palmistry chart, tarot cards, some neon planets and crescent moons and stars, and a hokey, crackling blue-plasma-light crystal ball that likewise made it anything but a standout among spiritualist joints the world over.

  He cut the engine and smiled a little ruefully as he gazed out his windshield at the shop. A woman was bent there in the recessed entryway picking windblown fast-food wrappers up off the ground, wearing a babushka around her head, a shawl over her mouth, enormous dark sunglasses, and a shapeless no-color peasant dress.

  “Miss Annabelle, I presume,” Nick muttered to himself. Then he shook his head, thinking there might be bigger wastes of time than attending press conferences after all. Hoping, in fact, that she’d climb aboard a broom and fly off toward the Belarusian forest or someplace equally remote before he wound up wasting even more time than had already been lost to the haunted winds driving out to this part of town.

  He exited the car and walked to the shop. Speaking of the wind, it had gotten downright blustery out, the chill gusts plucking at the bill of his black ball cap with the CSI patch displayed in front just in case anybody mistook him for a shortstop on the New York Yankees. Besides probably having blown the trash up to her door, the wind was also snapping and flapping the presumptive Miss Anna-belle’s dress around her small, scrawny body, giving Nick the sudden thought that she might not even need a magic broom to whisk her away to parts mysterious and ghostly.

  “Miss Annabelle?” he said from a few steps in front of her, leaning over to snag a burger wrapper that had skittered away from her grasping fingers

  The woman reached a hand out as he straightened and took the crumpled waxed paper into it. “Thank you,” she said, speaking with a strong eastern European accent. Da’ank you. “You are Mr. Stokes, yes?”

  He nodded, seeing her up close now. Looking at the portions of her face that the sunglasses, kerchief, and scarf hadn’t hidden. And realizing at once that he hadn’t wasted a moment heading out here.

  “Come with me into the ofisa,” she said. “We must talk.”

  Nick could not have imagined a greater understatement if he’d tried.

  “H’llo, crime lab. Greg Sanders speaking.”

  “Mr. Sanders,” said the voice on the phone, “this is Hastings Watney, Flash Ink ’s publisher and editor in chief.”

  Greg pulled himself up out of his habitual investigator’s slouch at the multipurpose workstation he occasionally called his desk, holding the receiver closer to his ear. He’d left more voice messages than he could count at the magazine’s main office number and shot off a similarly profuse barrage of e-mails to Watney’s corporate address, explaining that he was a criminalist with the Vegas police and that he looked forward to somebody getting in touch with him before the weekend was over, all the while expecting there wouldn’t be a soul who read or listened to anything he’d sent till Monday morning.

  “I really appreciate you getting right back to me,” he said. “As you know from my message—”

  “Which one? The first, second, or thirty-seventh?”

  “Ah, yeah,” Greg said. “I did leave a few. But I’m sure you realize we have something to discuss.”

  “Why’s that, bro?”

  “Well, if you’ve heard what’s happening here in Las Vegas…”

  “We do get national news feeds here in Frisco,” Watney said curtly. “Shame your town has a problem involving people with tattoos. I just don’t see what it has to do with my magazine—”

  “And Toronto,” Greg interrupted.

  “What?”

  “There’s also a problem up in Toronto.”

  “Toronto? I don’t know anything about that.”

  “At least three people were killed north of the border after participating in last year’s Flash Ink tattoo competition. They’re all registered users of your social-media site.”

  “Hang on a second… I can’t believe… are you serious?”

  “This definitely isn’t my idea of a practical joke,” Greg said.

  “I didn’t say you were j—”

  “Then take my word for it,” Greg said. “Also, we’ve had three murders within the last twenty-four hours whose victims were your subscribers… and Flash Ink: Las Vegas contestants.”

  “Are you talking about that judge? Because I heard them talk about his body mods on TV and think I’d remember him.”

  “We consider his death a separate case. I can’t be specific about it with you right now,” Greg said. “But add the three deaths in Canada to what we’ve got on our hands, and that’s a half-dozen known homicides linked to your website and reality show.”

  “It isn’t my show,” Watney said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, if you think we can have a give-and-take without specifics, cool. That’s how cops work. On the other hand, I’m no cop. And I want it upfront that the show’s a separate and distinct entity from the e-zine. We license our name to a production company with certain terms written into our contract. Cre
ative input, approvals, but the contest format’s their deal.”

  Greg took a breath, considered underscoring that he wasn’t a cop, and decided it would probably fall on deaf ears. He’d identified himself as a criminalist in every one of his messages to Watney, and that was beside the point right now, anyway. “Mr. Watney, let’s start over,” he said. “If you’ll excuse my saying so, you sound kind of defensive—”

  “Damn right, bro. The tattoo community gets enough horseshit pinned on it. You throw around hints my subscribers are offing each other like raged-out Neanderthals, it isn’t appreciated.”

  “We aren’t pinning anything on your community or the website,” Greg said. “What we believe is that the killer might be trawling its photo galleries for his victims. And if you don’t mind, we’d like to get in and see who’s poked around certain areas.”

  “Get in?”

  “Access your system logs.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “I already told you I wasn’t,” Greg said. “We’re trying to find whoever’s responsible for the killings.”

  “And trample all over our members’ rights to confidentiality,” Watney said. “Maybe you don’t get it. Flash Ink ’s into body-evo culture and techniques, but we’re mainly about lifestyle advocacy.”

  “Yeah,” Greg said. “And I’m thinking murder tops the list for putting a cramp in someone’s lifestyle.”

  “Like I said, you don’t get it. Not everywhere’s New York, California, or Vegas. We got subscribers all over the place. They’re either treated like they belong in Geekville or hide their mods because they worry their friends, families, and bosses might start treating them that way. They join the site, they can be themselves, network with people who won’t tell them what to do with their own bodies. We blow that trust, we’re done—”

  “Your magazine’s known for pushing the envelope,” Greg cut in. “It was banned by a government oversight committee in Germany. If it features adult content—nudity, anything considered mutilating or sadomasochistic—and even if some of those people you’re talking about are minors who subscribed without proof of age, you could be in violation of antiporn legislation.”