by Blake Pierce
“I was the only tattoo artist in this area who was willing to tattoo gang signs out of prison,” he said, his words cautious and slow, as if he was unsure he was doing the right thing by giving them the information. “I mean, I just wanted the money. I didn’t care what people wanted put on them, so long as they paid well.”
Shelley flipped through a few pages, pulling out an image of a swastika drawn large across someone’s back. “That included neo-Nazi symbolism, didn’t it?”
“Yes.” Jasper’s head dropped between his shoulders, his expression hangdog. “I was willing to tattoo anything. I did other gangs, too. LA gangs. National gangs. Prison gangs. Whatever people wanted. And I covered over gang signs, too. There were all kinds of people coming to me for work. I just didn’t discriminate. Money was money.”
“If it was all so innocent, tell me how you ended up at a meeting of the Aryan Brotherhood.”
The lawyer raised a hand. “I object to that question, Agent Rose. It was never proven that my client was at a meeting of the Aryan Brotherhood.”
“Let me,” Franks sighed, ignoring the shaking head the lawyer turned on him. “It was a mistake. That’s all. I didn’t know it was going to be a meeting. I went there because they wanted me to give someone a tattoo, and they didn’t want to do it at the parlor. I figured it was probably going to be something nasty, something they didn’t want outsiders knowing they had. I charged them double and they agreed, so I went over there.”
“You’re expecting us to believe that you walked into an Aryan Brotherhood base, in the middle of a meeting… by accident?” Shelley laid the emphasis on thick, making it clear just how ridiculous she thought the idea was.
“Yes!” Franks said, exhaling a frustrated whoosh of air. “I had no idea what I was walking into. I was naïve, yes. But I’m not a Nazi. Those guys disgust me. I just wanted their money. The second I realized what was going on, I walked away and never did any of that kind of work again.”
Shelley gave a half-laugh, devoid of real humor. “Isn’t it a funny coincidence that this revelation of yours happened exactly when you were arrested in connection with the group? You never stopped working with them, did you, Franks? You just went underground so you wouldn’t get arrested again.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Franks scoffed. “I’m not a fucking Nazi.”
“All right,” Smith said, holding up a hand of caution to stop Franks from going any further.
“No, this bitch thinks I’m a racist asshole,” Franks said. “I’m not going to just sit here and take it!”
Zoe almost thought Shelley had gone too far. They weren’t going to get any cooperation out of Franks, not with him taking this attitude. They were more likely to meet resistance at every step of the way. If he was the killer, and now that was starting to look like it could really be an “if,” he wasn’t going to admit to it easily.
“All right,” Shelley said, mirroring the lawyer, one hand up in deference. “Let’s say that you’re telling the truth. That you aren’t connected to the murders in any way. Where were you last night?”
Franks blinked at the change of pace, cast around himself for the facts. “I finished my last client about half past six. Then I went home.”
“Straight home? No stop-offs or diversions?”
Franks nodded. “Straight home. I stayed in all night. I was tired from the day’s work.”
“And someone can corroborate this?” Shelley asked. She had a pen in her hand, hovering in midair over a piece of paper, her eyebrow raised as if waiting for him to give her the names to write down.
Franks hesitated. “… I live on my own,” he said.
Shelley put the pen down, her shoulders angling backward, facing him head on, the intention to write disappearing. “So you’re telling me that no one can confirm you went straight home and stayed there.”
“Maybe the neighbors saw me,” Franks offered.
Shelley shook her head. “I’ll need something much stronger than that, Jasper. Even if someone saw you get home, who’s to say you didn’t go back out again later?”
He struggled, shaking his head. “I didn’t go anywhere. Is that when the murder happened?”
“What about two days ago, midday?” Shelley pressed on, ignoring his question.
“Two days ago…?” Franks tracked it back in his head, his eyes racing side to side as he figured it out internally. “It was my day off. We’re open weekends, so we tend to take a day off in the week.”
“And what did you do?”
Franks spluttered, his composure shaken in a different way now. Shelley had deftly diffused his rage by taking him on a tangent that shot away from his previous contentions, and now he was rattled, unsure of himself. It was masterfully done. Zoe couldn’t help but sit in awe. Franks was losing it, his posture sinking, the lines of his body smoothing downwards into dejection. “I stayed at home all day. On my own.”
“Let’s stop beating around the bush here, Jasper,” Shelley said. She pulled three photographs out from the inside of her file and splayed them out in front of him. Three portraits, all faced so that they looked out at him from the print. One for each of the three victims. “You know these people, don’t you?”
Jasper looked at the photographs, confusion and disorientation clouding his features. He blinked a couple of times, then looked at his lawyer.
After some form of silent communication had passed between them, something that Zoe couldn’t interpret, Jasper nodded his head slowly.
“Him, and her,” he said, pointing at John Dowling and Callie Everard. “I know them. I gave them tattoos. I don’t know the other one.”
Zoe exchanged a glance with Shelley. Curiouser and curiouser. If her budding theory was right, and Naomi Karling had been a random attack in which the killer had no intention at all of setting her alight, then it would fit.
Jasper Franks could be the man who set Callie and John on fire after cutting their throats, for all his skillful denial and anger.
There was a knock on the door, and all four parties in the room looked up to see one of the local LAPD officers poking his head through the newly opened gap. “Agent Rose?” he said. He had chosen the wrong agent, of course, since Zoe was the one in charge of the investigation; still, it wasn’t as though she minded. It was a common mistake. “There’s something you need to see.”
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
Zoe joined Shelley in looking over the box of items that had been pulled out of Franks’s apartment, a search conducted at the same time as their interview. They had paused the tape, left Franks sweating alone with his lawyer, to examine what had been found.
The LAPD search had been thorough. They found some things that Franks probably never thought anyone was going to find.
Captain Warburton had personally overseen the sweep, and had stayed with the boxes to brief them. “These were all in a cupboard, hidden away behind a false back. It was a fairly poor job. The wood colors didn’t even match, and it was bowing out from the weight of everything stacked behind it.”
Zoe lifted a few items out of the box in her gloved hands, examining them. A World War Two–era pistol, the metal dull and scuffed from use in combat. Several medals, each with faded ribbons and tarnished metal, but clearly from the same timeframe.
More disturbing was the fact that one of them, a dull bronze cross with a red, white, and black striped ribbon, bore a swastika imprinted in the center.
A Nazi medal.
“This proves his connection to the white supremacists,” Zoe said, holding it up for Shelley to see. “He may not be a member of the group, but he clearly sympathizes with their outlook.”
“There’s more where that came from,” Warburton said grimly. “The front of the cabinet was more innocuous stuff, old postcards and rations tins, stuff from allied countries. We found fifteen different Nazi medals, and some old uniform pieces and armbands.”
Zoe sifted through the box, gingerly lifting up one
of the infamous red swatches of fabric, made to be the right size to fit around an adult male bicep. “Why hide it, if it was an innocent thing to own?” she asked.
“We can use this,” Shelley said. She grabbed an evidence bag and put the armband inside, doing the same with a couple of the medals. “Watch his face, Z. He’ll be sweating once he sees these.”
Zoe nodded mechanically; she did not feel the need to explain to Shelley that she was not the best person to watch for facial expressions, and that in fact it was Shelley herself who was most qualified for the task. Shelley knew that. If she said a thing like that out loud, it was either for a reason or because she was being metaphorical.
Shelley swept out of the investigation room they had been assigned, leaving the other boxes of seized materials behind, and strode back toward Franks. As she opened the door with a decisive and sharp movement, Zoe only just caught up in time to see Franks half-jump with surprise.
“Mr. Franks,” Shelley said, back to formalities again—though this time with a kind of smug undertone that said she was confident they had him now. “You have no links to white supremacist movements, and only got mistakenly connected by these wonderful local officers because you accidentally tattooed the wrong person, is that what you want us to believe?”
“That’s the truth,” Franks insisted, straightening his back and looking her in the eye.
“All right,” Shelley said, and threw the evidence bags onto the table in front of him. “So how do you explain these?”
Franks paled, and the lawyer swore under his breath.
“I’d like to confer with my client for a moment,” Smith said, studiously not looking at the artifacts on the table now that he had realized what they were.
“If your client is innocent, then he doesn’t need to confer. He can simply tell us the truth,” Shelley said, looking head-on at Franks, challenging him to argue.
“It’s his legal right to counsel, Agent. I don’t expect you to try to take that away from him.”
“I’m not taking it away. I’m just saying that it looks suspicious if he needs it.”
Franks raised his hand, looking between Shelley and Smith. His face had not regained color, and the lines of his body were slumped, his elbows resting on the table. As soon as the evidence bags were thrown down he had lifted his hands, as if not wanting to touch what was there, and he had not dropped them. “I don’t need counsel right now. I… I can explain. This isn’t what it looks like.”
“As your lawyer, I really advise that you talk with me.”
“Explain it, then. Because it looks like you’re a Nazi sympathizer yourself. A fan, one could say,” Shelley said. She had completely ignored Smith’s words, and it looked as though Franks was determined to do the same.
“I collect stuff, okay?” Franks exhaled, starting one word and then halting before trying again. “This was—it was part of my collection. That’s all. I don’t—I’m not a Nazi. I collect historical artifacts. War stuff, especially.”
“You had a number of other items in your collection from both the First and Second World Wars,” Shelley conceded. “But these things weren’t on display in cabinets like the others were, were they?”
Franks exhaled again, a sound of panic and frustration. “I know it isn’t right to have them.” He shook his head, then corrected himself. “No, I mean, I know it doesn’t look good. After I got arrested the first time for being at that Aryan Brotherhood meeting, I hid it all away. I thought people would jump to conclusions if they were found. I wanted to sell them on, but no one would deal with me. They heard I got arrested. There’s not a great deal of people around who trade in this stuff. Word got around.”
“Why did you have them in the first place?” Shelley pressed. Zoe watched him closely, trying to work out if he was telling the truth. She only had her gut to go on, and it wasn’t reliable when it came to humans.
But that was something in itself, wasn’t it? She had a good sense for killers, for murderers who used the logic of numbers to seek out their victims. She had studied human behavior to try to master it, to learn the things that came naturally to others. She could work out which way someone would jump for a gun, or which was the logical path to take across a crowded room to intercept someone coming through it.
And even with all of that, she had no sense of Jasper Franks. Whether he was lying or not, what his motives were, who he was underneath.
She wasn’t getting a clear read on him at all.
Did that mean he wasn’t the killer, or just that he was good at masking his real intent?
“I’m a history buff,” Franks said. His hands moved in front of him incessantly, gestures intended to help explain that might as well have been magic gestures in the sky for all they meant to Zoe. “I got really into it, you know? The wars, the strategy and the politics. All the lives lost, the heroism and the sacrifices. I wanted to collect all these things. Plus, I get a lot of clients who are the same. They want historic tattoos. I’ve built my reputation on that, and I’ve earned a lot of business through it. My accuracy. I have the real thing to draw a design from, not just photos online.”
“You’re telling me, Mr. Franks, that you collect Nazi memorabilia to make you a better tattoo artist?” Shelley said. Her tone was deadpan, clearly disbelieving. “Are you expecting us to just let you go on hearing that?”
“No, I know it’s…” Franks groaned desperately. “Look, I’m telling the truth, okay? I’m not like them. I don’t worship the Nazis. If I did, why would I be willing to tattoo Holocaust prisoner numbers on people?”
Zoe raised an eyebrow. She couldn’t help herself. She opened her mouth before Shelley had the chance to reply. “It sounds like that is exactly the kind of thing a Nazi would enjoy doing.”
“No!” Franks’s eyes opened wide in alarm. “No, it’s not—it’s not like that. It’s a tribute. To their bravery, their suffering. I feel for the people who went through that. It’s meant to be a tribute.”
“Maybe that’s what you tell the people who come in to have the tattoos done,” Shelley argued, leaning forward subtly. Getting more in his face. “Maybe that’s how you find your victims. You give them the tattoo that marks them out as a descendant of a survivor. You take their names, their payment details, their home addresses. You find them on social media. You can track them down whenever you want to. And you can finish the job that your beloved Fuhrer started.”
“But I’ve tattooed dozens of those numbers,” Franks protested. “Maybe fifty! You only showed me three photos. If I was killing them, surely I would have killed more?”
“Maybe you only just got started,” Shelley told him. “And you were stupid enough to get caught. Tell me, does that make you feel angry? Angry enough to kill?”
“That’s enough,” Smith blustered, shaking his head furiously. “You’re stopping this interview now. I demand some time to confer with my client!”
Shelley leaned back in her chair, looking at the two of them. Smith all bristling authority, Franks pale and shaking. A beat passed, then two. Then she looked at Zoe and stood. “You boys take your time,” she said. “Make sure to tell your client that he’ll get a lighter sentence if he does the right thing and confesses.”
***
Zoe shook her head, chewing on her lower lip. There was something off here, but she couldn’t put her finger on it yet.
“This is a done deal, Zoe,” Shelley said. “I’ll call SAIC Maitland in an hour or so. I’m guessing he’ll want to get us on a plane back tonight, rather than paying for longer at the motel.”
“There is one thing we have not yet ascertained,” Zoe pointed out. “We know that he gave Callie Everard her number, and that he did both the number and then the later tiger cover-up for John Dowling. But what about Naomi Karling? He claimed not to have recognized her.”
Shelley paused a moment, tapping a pen against her open palm. Then she turned to one of the evidence boxes and slipped on a pair of gloves to start unpacking it.
“Captain Warburton indicated they had taken his appointment book from the tattoo parlor. It should be in here somewhere. Apparently it goes back a couple of years.”
She pulled out a thick tome, heavy leather binding with 3D depictions of a grotesque, laughing devil’s skull on both the front and back covers. When she laid it down on the table, the textile elements propped the book up, tilting it slightly forward toward the reader. A clever design, if one that lacked taste.
There was a blood-crimson ribbon tucked into one of the pages as a bookmark, and Shelley pulled it to open up the pages on the present day. The whole week was seen at a glance, with only a few notations—it seemed that most of Franks’s clients were booked in for larger pieces that were set to take hours.
“This is today. Nothing notable, really.”
Zoe ignored that and flicked ahead a few pages, scanning the coming weeks. There were a few names scheduled in. Not too many. Franks was busy, but he wasn’t booked solid.
“What is this, here?” Zoe asked, frowning. She was pointing to a notation in one of the boxes. “Naomi K, 12:30pm, 46535.”
Shelley frowned too, reading the notation and flicking forward a few pages to see if she could spot any other clues. “It doesn’t give the full name. Do you think it’s her?”
“Hell of a coincidence if it is not,” Zoe said. “You have two past customers show up dead, and the third body belongs to someone with the same name and initial as one of your customers—but is not the same person?”
“I think we have her phone,” Shelley said, heading over to another box of evidence—one that the techs had left with them after going through everything. They hadn’t reported any cyber threats or mysterious activity on Naomi Karling’s phone. Maybe they just hadn’t known what to look for.