Skin Deep

by Jerome Preisler

  In front of him now, Internet service providers and address protocols flashed on a grid chart, the network packets revealing their information in alphanumeric sequences, compiling more data with each hop of his trace.

  Ten thousand Flash Ink members sounded intimidating. But Greg only sought the usage habits of some of them, and the questions he needed answered were fundamental. Who had visited the photo galleries of Laurel Whitsen, Daichi Sato, and Lynda Griffith? And the galleries of the Canadian victims? How often had their visits come, how long had they lasted, and had they participated in chats?

  Message-board posts might or might not prove important, and reading through them could be protracted and laborious. But determining whose messages were significant would greatly winnow down the numbers.

  Frequency and percentages. Simple arithmetic. And the software would do the cooking for him, making him feel almost lazy.

  Definitely not worth waiting in line for, Greg thought.

  “I want you to know up front, this don’t feel right,” Cody Vaega said.

  “What doesn’t?” Langston said.

  “Me talking to cops.”

  “We aren’t cops,” Sara said.

  “Isn’t this here laboratory next door to police headquarters?”

  “Yes.”

  “And,” Vaega said, gesturing toward the hard-card ID clipped to her breast pocket, “aren’t those the words ‘Las Vegas Police Department’ on your name tag there?”

  “Correct.”

  “And a gold LVPD badge printed behind your name, right?”

  “Correct.”

  “A gun holster on your side there?”

  “An empty one, yes.”

  Vaega shrugged. “Well, you total it up, and it means…”

  “We’re scientists who deal in criminal investigations and deputies of the LVPD licensed to carry firearms,” Langston said. “It’s an appreciable distinction.”

  Vaega looked at him. Wearing a black leather biker jacket over a black sweatshirt and jeans, he was a barrel-chested, thick-necked, dark-complected man of twenty-five or thirty, his long black hair pulled up in a tight Sumo-style knot, the intertwined black tribal patterns covering his face in monochromatic accord with his clothes and hair. And while the rings and studs in his nose, lips, eyebrows, ears, and tongue weren’t black but metallic and might therefore have been considered aesthetic departures—or even distractions—from his overall body motif, Langston’s personal opinion was that they, in fact, provided some well-placed and necessary accents.

  “Look, I’m here to help,” Vaega said. “I’m not telling you I didn’t know what to expect. But I’m just sayin’ I don’t usually…”

  “Trust the police,” Sara said. “And that you aren’t too fond of talking to anybody associated with them, even if we’re only trying to stop your people from getting killed.”

  He leaned backward. “What you mean my —”

  “She just means people in the tattoo community,” Langston said, wanting to take him off the defensive. He was glad there’d been an available conference room, with its potted plants and relatively comfortable chairs to help put Vaega at ease. This was not, after all, an interrogation. But everyone at the lab, including Sara, was frazzled from overwork and fatigue. “I can’t tell you enough how much we appreciate your coming in here after a long flight from Texas.”

  Vaega looked into his face. “No problem, man. I just want us to be straight.”

  Langston nodded. “Cody—it is okay if I call you by your first name, by the way?”

  “Yeah, please, man.”

  “Cody, I’m sure you know there’ve been several recent instances where people were abducted, drugged for a period of time, and involuntarily tattooed. In two cases, there was what might be considered extreme facial modification. A couple of nights ago—”

  “I heard about the judge who died.”

  “From Mick Aztec?”

  “Yeah. But even before,” Vaega said. “There was talk down in Houston. About that and then those skinnings.”

  “At present, we view them as separate investigations,” Langston said. “You might hear differently on the news tomorrow morning. But I’m giving it to you from our perspective here at the lab.”

  “Which is telling you something that could give us burn marks if it leaves these four walls,” Sara said. “Just FYI.”

  Vaega gave a nod. “Reason I’m here is body art is supposed to be a beautiful thing,” he said. “For me, it’s about kindness and respect and making people what they want to be. Whoever’s doing this, he’s turning it inside out. Making it about him.”

  “And he’s killed someone,” she said.

  “Like we just talked about a second ago, right,” he replied, a note of exasperation in his voice.

  Langston looked at Sidle, then Vaega. “I think it might be best to show you some photos now,” he said, reaching for a folder on the table between them. “Then ask a question or two about epithelial samples. They’re taken from—”

  “The outer layer of skin, I know,” Vaega said.

  Langston smiled at him, nodding as he produced close-ups of Dorset’s lip tattoos and Noble’s face.

  Vaega shuffled through the photos. “These lips…”

  “Were tattooed on the judge’s body where the sun doesn’t shine,” Sidle said.

  He sat studying them. “Wow,” he said under his breath. “This is vivid.”

  “What’s that?” Langston said.

  “The red. The photo ain’t enhanced, right? Color saturation boosted, anything like that?”

  “No.”

  “Wow.”

  “Cody, is this important?”

  “Yeah, sorry,” Vaega said, glancing up at Langston. “Red’s the hardest color to find in a pure, high-quality ink.”

  “The shade, you mean?”

  “No, like, chemically.”

  Langston shook his head to show he still wasn’t following.

  “Most commercial red dyes are naphtha-based,” Vaega said.

  “The petroleum derivative?”

  “Same as they use in acrylic paint, high-octane gas, plastics… that’s why you get so many allergic reactions to red ink,” Vaega said. “Look at my inks. Red’s the only nonorganic I use. You know the color wheel, right?”

  “Goes back to Isaac Newton.”

  “Right, right. Even before that apple conked his head, made him forget colors, waste his time with useless shit like gravity.”

  Langston grinned. So did Vaega.

  “Red’s your primary for purple, pink, magenta down the blue end of the color spectrum,” Vaega went on after a moment. “Gives you oranges and yellow-oranges at the other end.”

  “How about black? Would you use it for that?”

  “For accents, yeah. If you really have a fine touch.”

  “Mick Aztec told me the colors that the Tattoo Man uses are distinctive,” Langston said. “You’ve seen the photos of his victims online?”

  Vaega hesitated.

  “Something wrong?”

  “No, no.”

  “Oh,” Langston said. “Because I know he saw them. And that, putting aside everything that surrounds the work, it’s created a buzz in the tattoo community.”

  “Definitely, definitely.”

  “So you know the photos we mean,” Sara said. “The guy with the camera head. The woman whose face got turned into a clock straight out of a Salvador Dalí wet dream…”

  “I seen ’em,” Vaega said. “And you want some free advice, you can do without the ’tude.”

  “I wasn’t—”

  “We’re talkin’ some serious shit, you don’t gotta be scoffin’,” Vaega said, shifting his attention to Langston. “I always used to tell him, you mass-produce an organic red ink, it’s gonna rock the market.”

  “Him?” Langston asked. “Who’s ‘him’?”

  Vaega started to say something, appeared to waver again, sat there in silence.

  “Ha
ve you ever heard of hematite?” Sara asked.

  More silence.

  Langston began, “Cody—”

  “Sounds like some kinda stone,” he said. “That right?”

  “It’s an unusually red iron oxide,” Sara said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Found in Red Rock Canyon.”

  Vaega glanced at her briefly but didn’t respond.

  “Cody,” Langston said. “Tell us who you were talking about a second ago.”

  Vaega remained silent.

  Langston reached for the folder and pulled out several more snapshots, these taken of Dorset’s body in the trailer depot where it was found in the nether hours between Friday night and Saturday morning. He set the photos down on the table in front of Vaega, who did not lower his gaze to look at them but kept it fixed on a blank spot on the wall across the room.

  “Go on,” Langston said. “You need to see them.”

  More hesitation. At last, his eyes went down to the exposures. “Serious shit,” he said.

  “I think that’s why you came here tonight,” Langston said. “That the photos are just reminders.”

  Vaega’s head slumped, moving slowly from side to side. Then came back up. “Tell you somethin’,” he said. “Travelin’ around, I learned there’s three types of tattoo artists. You got the ones like to party… outgoin’, you know. Then the laid-back brothers—I kinda fit in there. And then you got the scary dudes, the ones you don’t want to mess with. But I never met a tattoo artist isn’t all about emotion, inside and out, like it’s vibratin’ right off the skin… never in my life. And sometimes emotions, they take you places you better off not goin’.”

  Langston nodded, encouraging him to continue.

  “Brother goes rogue, the whole community’s harassed. Next thing you know, we’re cited for colorin’ with crayons,” he said. “Ain’t right, he takes us down with him.”

  Langston nodded again.

  “About five years ago, I met a guy at an expo out in Reno,” Vaega said. “Quiet like me, but superintense, an’ still learnin’ the trade. You can tell he’s got some history, forgot more comes to color than most people ever know. First vegan artist I met, says he won’t kill no innocents.”

  “Does he have a name?”

  “I hear people callin’ him the Master. So that’s what I call him, too.”

  “Because of his expertise with color.”

  “Color, design… the whole deal.”

  “And he mixes his own ink?”

  “Has it down to a science,” Vaega said. “Understandin’ what to use for pigments, how to extract and mix them, that’s jus’ part of it. You got to have the right carriers, sterilize the inks… it takes knowledge.”

  “You stay in touch with him after the show?” Sara asked.

  “Oh, yeah. I pick his brain about color, he asks questions about technique. How to calibrate the machine—”

  “Say that again?”

  “Tattoo machine, gun, whatever…”

  “So he can develop a light touch,” Langston said. “Work with the healing cycle.”

  Vaega looked at him. “I can see m’boy Aztec liked you.”

  Langston nodded, smiling slightly.

  “The Master, he learned fast,” Vaega said. “I wasn’t the only one he was talkin’ to.”

  “This is in Reno?”

  “Like I said, that’s where we met—I seen him in different places on the road,” Vaega said. “Couple years after Reno, he’s elite. People from all over are seekin’ him out. Has a private studio. No name, no ads, nothin’. Everythin’s by appointment.” A shrug. “Then, you know, maybe six months back, I stop seein’ him around. But word is, he’s still here. It’s like, you’ll be hanging out, and somebody or other’ll say, ‘I had me a Master sightin’.’”

  “Wait.” Langston’s brow furrowed. “ ‘Still here,’ meaning Vegas?”

  Vaega paused. Took a very deep breath. And nodded. “North side,” he said. “The Master’s got a warehouse out by Poppy Lane.”

  It was twenty past eight when Catherine received Langston’s phone call in Archie Johnson’s lab, where she and Nick had just finished reviewing decade-old traffic-cam composites. Less than one minute later, she phoned Brass, who contacted Ecklie with an immediate request for manpower, which included several patrol cars and a Zebra tactical unit.

  A swift title search revealed the warehouse near Poppy Lane was owned by Casa de Coral Ltd. after having been purchased from a small, family-owned moving-and-storage outfit that had packed up and left the location seven years earlier.

  Brass and Catherine figured they would have time enough to worry about the intricacies of the property sale. Their immediate concern was bringing in a psychotic killer.

  It took Ecklie less than twenty minutes to rouse a judge for a search warrant. By then, the various units had assembled at headquarters, and Catherine, Nick, Langston, and Sara had gotten their assault vests and sidearms out of their lockers.

  Sirens muted, flashers off, the LVPD vehicles were soon speeding north.

  The warehouse was a square, flat cinder-block structure on a dead-end street behind a chain-link fence, a row of broken streetlamps running up to it, the night there black as slate, the lights of the police cars disclosing graffiti-splashed walls and sudden, skittering movement amid the trash bags heaped along the sidewalk. This was not the beckoning Vegas of neon and wishful sins; this was a neglected, impoverished hellhole, where the sins were desperate and violent and got you fifteen to twenty assuming leniency for good behavior and overcrowded cell blocks.

  The six-man Z unit pulled up in the lead, silently exiting their van. Clad in black coveralls, they slipped toward the fence like shadows cut out of the surrounding darkness, thermal night-vision goggles attached to their helmets on flip-up mounts, Sig556 rifles at the ready. Right behind them, Brass and the CSIs grabbed their own NVGs, leaving their unmarked cars as the unis formed a hasty perimeter.

  One of the tac cops jogged around the left side of the place, another went to the right, a third scouted the rear. All three returned without seeing anyone. There were no lights on inside or outside. No guard dogs beyond the fencing. No alarm wiring. The warehouse looked unoccupied.

  Brass and the Zebra commander exchanged nods at the gate, and a chain cutter was brought out. A tac cop clipped its links, the chain slackening in his gloved hand like a dead metal snake, and then the group was moving through the gate toward the warehouse.

  There were very few windows, and all were barred. They would enter through the front.

  Another gate now, this over the entrance—a rusty pull-down, padlocked to its metal frame. The tac produced a second pair of cutters. Moments later, Nick helped him bring up the security gate with a rattle.

  Now the Z unit again took the lead, a pair of tacs at the door, three more crouched to one side, Brass and the CSIs on the other wearing NVG headsets.

  A whispered countdown, and they hit the door with the ram. It flung inward into pitch blackness, and they made their entry, a practiced crossover maneuver, the Z commander cutting to the right of the door, another tac buttonhooking to the left, the rest storming into the center of the room and coming back-to-back, Sig assault rifles sweeping their sectors of fire.

  “This is the LVPD!” Brass said. “We have a warrant to search the premises! Is anyone here?”

  Silence. They all sensed vacancy.

  The group moved from one large, lightless room to another, goggles down, making rapid adjustments to their diopters and monocular front lenses as the warehouse’s interior sharpened out in shades of gray. It was unfurnished, its walls bare. They went down the hallways, passed through unused storage areas, found only emptiness on emptiness at every turn.

  And then they stopped short at an interior door. Metal. A wide sectional overhead on a galvanized steel track, with an electronic keypad lock.

  “Goddamn,” Brass muttered with a glance at the Z commander.
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  He slid out of the way, waited down the hall with the CSIs as the tacs took breaching charges from their gear bags, peeled off the foil, and molded the triangular slices of plastique around the door enclosure. One of them linked the saddle charges with det cord, attached a longer length of cord to a handheld timer, winding it out as he and the entire group backed toward the CSIs.

  “Give it thirty,” said the Z commander.

  The tac turned the timer’s dial.

  A half minute later, there was an explosive flump, the groan of contorting steel, a crash as the door frame was torn from the wall, the overhead twisting and falling. Their thermal goggles automatically compensating for the glare of the blast, the team waited as a train of smoke churned up the hall and then hustled into the room.

  Catherine paused inside the entry, looked around. “Found the light switch,” she said. “I’m hitting it.”

  Her hand went to the switch, and banks of overhead fluorescents came on.

  Goggles flipped up, the CSIs, tacs, and Brass stood in a gallery of nightmares. Colored pencil drawings lined the walls—the sketches alternating with photos of Stacy Ebstein, Mitchell Noble, Annabelle Beshlesko, and Quentin Dorset at various stages of their modification and healing processes.

  The words graffitied on the wall above Ebstein’s drawn and photographic images said, “The Tick Tock Woman.” Over Noble…

  “The Camera Man,” Catherine mouthed. Her eyes went to Dorset’s images. “The King,” she read. And then she looked at Beshlesko’s. “Sanzaru…”

  “The three monkeys of Asian folklore,” Langston said beside her. “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”

  Catherine’s gaze went to a fifth collection of drawings—these not accompanied by photographs. Meanwhile, across the immense room, Sara stood looking around at a massage table, medical utility carts, intravenous solution bags on upright metal stands, and counters and shelves busy with neatly organized inks and equipment—the whole area surrounded by gooseneck standing lamps.

  “Looks like we found our man’s studio,” she said. “I—”

  “Jesus Christ!” This from one of the tacs who’d roved to the left side of the storage space, kicking open a locked door that was as black as the night outside.