Tattooed

by Pamela Callow

  “Great.” She needed that. She needed to take her mind off her mother. “Where’s my station?”

  Yoshi led her to a far corner with an exposed brick wall, and a bonsai garden in a gray bowl on a shelf. Kenzie was pleased to see that the tattoo chair was fully adjustable and hydraulic. She placed her kit bag next to the metal-and-glass workstation, and gave it a quick check. Thermal paper, green soap, inks, ultrasonic cleaner, razors, Vaseline, surgical gloves. Good. She had her own needles, power supply, needle tubes and sketch pad in her bag. “Nice place, Yoshi.” Perfect for zoning out and tuning in to inking her clients.

  “Gracias.” Yoshi grinned. “Glad you like it.”

  “What does Yakusoku mean again?”

  Yoshi’s eyes gleamed. “It means the promise one has between a customer and the tattooist.”

  “Cool.” She liked that. The client trusted the tattooist in so many ways: to perform a safe procedure, to create the design they want, to not hurt them. But the biggest promise was to create something they would be satisfied with for the rest of their lives.

  She had just settled Foo on his fleece blanket in the corner, and laid out her equipment when her first client arrived, a burly teddy bear of a guy who asked her to tattoo a portrait of his cat on his chest. “He’s been with me through some tough times,” he told her, handing her a photo of a fluffy gray cat with white socks and quartzlike eyes.

  Kenzie nodded to Foo, who snored gently on his blanket. “I hear ya.”

  His cat was cute, and Kenzie’s spirits lifted as she began the outline work of his tattoo.

  An hour and a half later, she surveyed her work with satisfaction. “This is amazing!” her client declared, studying the tattoo of his cat curled on his chest.

  After he left, she broke down her workstation, disposing of her single-use items, then cleaned and sterilized her equipment. She glanced at her watch. Her next client was due any minute, but hopefully he was late and she could grab a bite of the muffin she had packed in her bag. Foo watched her, knowing that his best chances of a treat were after her clients had left.

  “Your next client is here,” announced the receptionist, with an impressive collection of piercings.

  Any frustration at not having her muffin vanished at the sight of her new client. Tall, tanned (how could he get a tan in this weather? she wondered), well-muscled with an easy grin and shaggy blond hair, he was definitely an acceptable substitute for her muffin.

  “Hi, I’m Kenzie.”

  “Finn.” He shoved his hands in his front pockets.

  * * *

  “Can you tell how long the victim would have had the tattoo before she was killed?” Ethan asked Dr. Guthro.

  Dr. Guthro shook his head. “No. Did your missing girl have one?”

  Dr. Hughes threw a glance at Ethan.

  He rubbed his jaw. “There is no tattoo listed under identifying marks.” And he certainly could not recall one from his university class. Back in the ’90s, a neck tattoo on a Halifax university student would have been memorable. But Heather had long hair. The tattoo was on the back of her neck, so it might have been covered. “But I’ll have to check with the family.”

  “We are lucky that the teeth are intact. You don’t have to worry so much about identifying marks if we can get a positive match with the dental records.”

  “May we have a look at the mark, Doctor?” Ferguson asked.

  Dr. Guthro handed her the magnifying glass. Ethan and Lamond stood behind the sergeant. The mark on the victim’s skin was faint, just a blurry outline. “Looks homemade,” Lamond said. “It isn’t even shaded.”

  “What do you think it is?” Ethan asked. “Some kind of triad?”

  Ferguson shrugged. “Maybe.” Ethan knew from past experience that when she said “Maybe,” she meant “Not likely.” Ferguson glanced up at Dr. Guthro. “Is there any way to get an enhancement of this?”

  “We can try infrared camera. If that doesn’t work, sometimes an amber filter on the lens will work. If the ink is black, it will absorb the light and darken the image.”

  “When will you be able to look at that?”

  “I have to check when our camera technician is in.” Dr. Guthro made a note of it on the whiteboard hanging by the autopsy table.

  The rest of the external exam was completed without any more findings of note. With the exception of the victim’s neck, there were no signs of external trauma and no more unusual markings.

  The body was rolled back onto its back. “Let’s remove the rope and see what we can find,” Dr. Guthro said. He worked the slipknot, trying to avoid damage to the rope and any evidence that might have survived. The homicide team knew it was extremely unlikely that fingerprints would have lasted in the bog environment, but they were hoping there might be blood or fibers caught in the rope.

  A deep groove encircled the victim’s throat. Dr. Guthro leaned in for closer inspection. “Given the amount of force that would have been applied to create this kind of damage, some of the bones of her neck would have sustained small fractures. We’ll have a look under the skin at the end of the autopsy.” He gazed over the rim of his glasses at the onlookers. “Shall we break for lunch? Or keep going?”

  “I’m all for retrieving that bullet, Dr. Guthro,” Ferguson said, her tone brisk.

  “Me, too.” He gave a broad smile.

  The morgue attendant set up the body, and Dr. Guthro began the Y incision. The skin was like leather, and he had a fine sheet of sweat on his forehead by the time he removed the chest plate.

  The organs were surprisingly recognizable. “Don’t judge a book by its cover, heh.” Dr. Guthro chuckled. He studied the X-ray of the bullet, then examined the exposed lungs. “Hmmm… The entrance wound looks to be about…here.” He stuck his gloved finger in a tiny hole. “See?”

  He peered down into the chest cavity. “Looks like it hit some large blood vessels—” he checked the X-ray again “—and is lodged in the muscles of the vertebral column. Let’s see if we can map the ballistic trajectory.”

  The morgue attendant handed him a bright pink rod. He eased one end into the hole, and gently probed downward into the tissue. “Easy does it…” he murmured. “Yes, my initial hypothesis was correct.”

  He removed the rod and dug his finger into the tissue. Everyone watched. No one dared breathe. “I can feel it… .” He grunted a few times. His face shone with sweat. “Hold on…here it comes…”

  He hooked the bullet upwards with his finger, and placed it on a tray.

  Ethan studied the bullet. “A .38 S&W would be my guess.”

  “That narrows it down,” Lamond said.

  Ethan gave him a look. “I was just about to add that it looks like a vintage bullet. Probably from the second World War.”

  Dr. Guthro removed the organs, one by one. After he weighed and measured them, he placed a large hypodermic into a pool of fluid in the abdominal cavity. “We’ll see if the lab can run a toxicology screen on the decomposition fluid.”

  Science never ceased to amaze Ethan. This corpse was in the bog for years, he guessed, and there was still a chance that they could test it for drugs.

  The morgue attendant peeled back the skin on the skull, and removed the skull cap. Liquid streamed out of the skull onto a towel. Lamond wrinkled his nose. At the unspoken question in the homicide team’s eyes, Dr. Guthro said, “That was the brain.”

  Brain drain.

  Stop it, Drake.

  He gave himself a shake, and threw a quick glance at Lamond. His former partner’s eyes were wide, his gaze fixed tightly on the victim’s face.

  The pathologist examined the skull and dura. “No fractures, no sign of hemorrhage. Doesn’t look like someone hit her on the head.”

  He finished the exam.

  “One last thing.” He sliced through the skin on the neck, peeling it back to examine the bone and cartilage. “I’m not seeing any obvious fractures, but I’ll remove the neck and section it. We might see more under the m
icroscope.”

  “Can you make a guess at cause of death?” Ferguson asked.

  Dr. Guthro shook his head. “No. The bullet clearly caused hemorrhaging, but whether she was dead before she was strangled, I can’t tell. The COD may be inconclusive.” He made a note on the whiteboard. “The forensic odontologist said he’d have a look at her teeth today. And if you get the dental records for your missing girl ASAP, we’ll see if we can at least get a match.”

  “I’ll start tracking them down,” Ethan said.

  “I’ll stay here while they look at the bog sections,” Ferguson said. The excavating team had brought in parts of the bog that had been under the body. “Lamond, you take the bullet to ballistics. Let me know what you find out. Ethan, be as quick as you can.”

  Relief flashed in Lamond’s eyes that he didn’t have to stay to watch the sectioning of the victim’s neck.

  He, on the other hand, wanted to know everything he could learn about the tattoo.

  If the dental records matched those of Heather Rigby, then she had gotten the tattoo just before she disappeared.

  And if that was the case…

  They had just gotten their first break in seventeen years.

  12

  Nervous.

  Kenzie could pick up the vibes a mile away. Either this guy, Finn, had never had a tattoo or the last one was done by a scratcher.

  “Hear you want a custom piece.” She led him back to her station. “What are you thinking?”

  “I want a Foo Dog.” Kenzie bit back a smile. First a cat tattoo, now a dog tattoo. Haligonians loved their pets.

  As if on cue, Foo jumped off his blanket and rushed over to check out her new client.

  “A Foo Dog, huh?” she grinned. “Well, you can’t have mine.”

  Finn crouched down and scratched Foo behind the ears. “Even though he seems to really like you.” Foo practically melted against this guy’s knee, his pink tongue peeking between his lips as he snorted his pleasure at Finn’s deft ear massage.

  “I work with dogs,” Finn said. “I’m a dog walker.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. What’s your dog’s name?”

  Kenzie smiled. “Foo Dog.”

  He grinned. “Seriously?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He kind of looks like a Foo Dog.”

  “Well, he’s got the attitude down, that’s for sure.” Foo Dogs were actually not dogs at all, but “Lions of Buddha.” They were symbols of protection and courage in both Chinese and Japanese Shinto mythology.

  Finn stood, sliding a picture from his pocket. “I was thinking of something like this.” It wasn’t the standard tattoo design of a crawling Foo Dog. Rather, it was a picture of a stone Foo Dog statue, sitting on its haunches, a large paw on a sphere.

  “Nice,” Kenzie said. “Where do you want it?”

  Finn pointed to the back of his shoulder. “Right on my shoulder blade. So that he guards my back.”

  “Right on.” She studied the posture of the statue. It was static, stolid. If it wasn’t positioned just right, it would look like he had a postage stamp stuck on his back. “Can you turn around and take off your shirt?”

  Finn flushed. “Sure.” He pulled his T-shirt over his head, and turned around, revealing a broad, smooth back tapering down to narrow hips. Perfect material.

  “The Foo Dog will look awesome on your shoulder blade. Although you know what would look even better?”

  “No.”

  “Two. Traditionally, there is a pair of Foo Dogs that guard the entrance to sacred buildings and houses. If you had the male on one side,” she ran her palm over one shoulder blade, “and the female on the other, they would symbolically guard your soul—and they would be symmetrical.”

  She felt his shoulders tense under her hand. “Uh…I don’t know. I’m not sure I’m ready to make that commitment.”

  He had completely unmarked skin. She bet this was his first tattoo. “You want to be sure.” She had a hunch that once he saw the design, he’d be in for both, but she would never push a client. “It will be yours for life.” Too often she’d seen clients jump into a tattoo they would later regret. “I’m thinking it will cover about this much,” Kenzie circled her finger on his skin.

  “Maybe a bit smaller?”

  He isn’t ready. “You sure you want to do this?”

  “Yeah.” His gaze was steady. Good. Nothing worse than having a client who started sweating halfway through the tattoo because they had changed their mind. Once the ink was in, it was in. Couldn’t use an eraser on it.

  “You want to make sure it looks good in ten, twenty years. If you do it too small, you won’t get the detail,” she said. “And over time the lines will fade, so you want to make sure the tattoo isn’t so small it just looks like a blob.” He still looked uncertain. “Look, I’ll show you.” She lifted the edge of her tank top and pulled down the waistband of her cargo pants to reveal her left hip. On it was a brilliant blue-and-green Foo Dog, curving around her body, crawling toward her heart.

  “Wow,” Finn said. “Very cool.”

  “You see the detail in this? You are going to lose all that if you shrink it down.”

  She pulled her tank back over her hip.

  “So if it’s too small it will look like this?” He pointed to her chest.

  What the—? She may have her insecurities, but not with her breasts.

  Then she grinned. He was pointing to the silkscreen on her tank top. It was a picture of the back of the cover from the Talking Heads Remain in Light album. The four members of the group were masked with red blocks painted over their faces. The overall effect was to render their feature indistinguishable. Blobs.

  “Yeah. Exactly.” She pulled out her sketchbook. “Give me twenty minutes to come up with something.”

  It took about twenty-five minutes, but she was happy with the results. “That’s amazing,” Finn said. She had sketched a Foo Dog with a paw pushing off a sphere, its mane curling and flowing, its snout open in a protective snarl. Instead of the dog sitting—which looked too blocklike to her—she drew the dog springing from its haunches, the sphere about to roll away.

  “Trust me, it’s going to rock!” Energy charged her blood. She had outdone herself with the design and she had the perfect canvas to work on. She couldn’t wait to get started.

  She traced the design onto transfer paper. “Okay, now we are going to put the design on your shoulder. So you need to take off your shirt.”

  He yanked off his shirt, so excited that the shirt whipped over his head. They both grinned. Kenzie gloved, then wiped his shoulder blade with green soap and shaved the skin with a razor. “This will make sure that the lines are really smooth,” she said. She wiped the skin down again and applied a generous coating of adherent. “This will make the stencil stick.” Now was the moment of truth. She had that feeling of sick excitement that comes when you know something you’ve created is really hot. She pressed the stencil on Finn’s shoulder blade, patted it down and peeled it off.

  “Nice,” she breathed. “Take a look.” She grabbed his arm and led him to the full-length mirror hanging on the wall. “Don’t you think the size works?” she asked, handing him a mirror so he could see his reflection.