by Tami Hoag
“Probably a Minnesota plate,” Tippen suggested. “Something unusual would have stood out.”
“Great,” Kovac said. “That narrows it down to what? A million vehicles? Two million?”
“Probably only thirty or forty thousand dark sedans.”
“I’ll put you right on that, then.”
The door opened and Elwood walked in with a handful of papers.
“Sixty-seven girls between the ages of fourteen and eighteen absent from metro-area schools today,” he said. “We can pare the list down pretty quickly. Two people on the phone. A couple of hours or so, if all goes well.”
“Let’s get on that, then,” Kovac said. “Kasselmann wrangled us two uniforms to help out. You and Tip get with them and cut the call time in half, then hit the streets with any follow-up. Maybe by then we’ll have the sketch.”
Liska came in looking unhappy. “I was hoping for him to remember at least a partial tag number on the car,” she said with a big sigh. “Valerie says we can try again in a day or two. Now that Jamar knows we’re not going to make him put his underpants on his head and bark like a dog, he’ll be more relaxed next time. Something might come to the surface for him.”
“Yeah,” Kovac said without hope. “Like if that chick in the backseat maybe had a pussy piercing. That’s where his head was at.”
“We can’t pick our witnesses, Kojak,” she said. “And by the way, that’s where your head would have been too.”
“My head’s there now,” Tippen remarked.
Liska gave him the stink eye. “You’re disgusting.”
“I’m honest.”
“You’re honestly disgusting.”
“You have a talent for overstating the obvious, Tinks,” Elwood said.
Kovac held up his hands. “Can we all agree Tippen is a pig and get on with our day? I want out of this building before I get a freaking heat rash.”
“Where are we going?” Liska asked as they headed back to their cubicle.
“We’re meeting Tip’s niece at a tattoo parlor,” he said, grabbing his heavy coat off the rack. He made no move to put it on. The idea of stepping out into below-zero weather was, for once, almost appealing. “Will the artist have the sketch done by the end of the day?”
“He said he would, but he’s afraid of me, so he could just be buying time to flee the state. He didn’t want to do it at all,” she said as they left the CID offices. It was only marginally cooler in the hall. “He said the same thing I did: A bad sketch could be worse than no sketch at all.”
“I get that,” Kovac said, “except this girl has a few extra distinguishing characteristics. How many young women are running around with multiple piercings, half their head shaved, and a Chinese tattoo?”
“Spoken like a man who doesn’t have teenagers,” Liska said. “That probably describes a quarter of the kids Kyle knows—male and female. I’m lucky he hasn’t had something pierced by now.”
“Maybe he has. It’s just somewhere you can’t see it.”
“I hate you sometimes.”
Kovac was immune to the comment. “I’m driving.”
“Great. Then there’s a good chance I won’t live long enough to find out my son has a Prince Albert.”
“Do me a favor,” he said as they stepped out into the ball-numbing cold. “If you find out your son had his dick pierced, don’t tell me.”
“I won’t have to tell you. You’ll get the call out to the homicide.”
• • •
THE HELM OF AWE SOCIAL CLUB was barely large enough for the name to fit across the front awning. Crammed between a coffeehouse and a funky vintage clothing store, it was located on a run-down side street near the University of Minnesota’s West Bank campus. The buildings were brick, two and three stories high; shops and hole-in-the-wall restaurants with apartments overhead, probably mostly student housing.
The street was a mess—half-plowed, rutted, dirty cars parked at screwy angles. How any vehicle survived a winter in Minneapolis intact and dent-free had to be a miracle. Kovac wedged the sedan into a loading zone, pointing the wrong way on the far side of the street, and they trudged across the ruts, both of them cursing the conditions as snow went into their shoes and up their pants legs.
A bell rang as they opened the door of the shop and stepped inside. The walls of the place were glossy Chinese red, the floors old checkerboard linoleum. The place smelled as clean as a hospital. Photographs lined one wall—close-ups of elaborate tattoos, shots of customers posing with tattoo artists. Kovac recognized a couple of professional athletes. Other subjects looked like they might have been members of rock bands. A few looked like suburban grandmas, smiling happily as they displayed their body art.
Sonya Porter was shooting the shit at the front counter with an enormous bald guy. He turned away from them to reach for something on a shelf. His hairless dome was tatted out with a terrifying black-and-gray face of a Chinese foo dog. The thick folds of flesh in the back of his neck undulated as he moved his head, animating the creature.
He turned around and glared at them with narrow, vaguely Asian eyes, his face no less frightening than his tattoo. A thick, wiry, white-blond Fu Manchu mustache bracketed his downturned mouth, making him look like an angry walrus. The shop’s namesake, a Viking helm of awe tattoo, was inked into his forehead like a third eye. Black disks the size of dimes stretched his earlobes. The overall impression was of a Viking sumo wrestler.
Liska leaned into Kovac’s shoulder and murmured, “I’ll bet he has a Prince Albert.”
“He could be your next boyfriend, Tinks,” Kovac muttered back.
Sonya, perched on a tall stool, sat up at attention as they crossed the narrow room. She wore purple-and-white cat-eye glasses and had deep blue streaks through her shiny dark hair that caught the light like a blackbird’s wing. Her lipstick was royal blue.
“It’s Sam the Man,” she announced. “You’re late.”
“Sorry,” he said without real apology. “I’ve just been sitting around on my ass eating doughnuts and running a homicide investigation.”
He pointed a finger at Liska—“My partner, Sergeant Liska”—and tipped his head in Sonya’s direction—“Sonya Porter, Tippen’s niece.”
Liska nodded. “My condolences.”
Sonya Porter chuckled, a dark, slightly sultry sound. “I hold my own.”
“So does he, but when he says that, he’s talking about something else entirely.”
The girl laughed out loud at that, delighted. “I like you!”
Kovac turned to the big man. “Sam Kovac. Homicide.”
“This is Pooch,” Sonya Porter said. “This is his place.”
“Pooch Halvorsen.” He reached out an elaborately tattooed hand the size of a catcher’s mitt. Kovac met it and shook it, wondering if the lettering on the sausage-link fingers had begun as prison tats. You R on the right hand, NEXT on the left. His fingernails were impeccably manicured. “Sonya tells me you have a murder victim with an acceptance tattoo.”
“That’s what she tells me too,” Kovac said. “I’m taking her word for it. I don’t read Chinese.”
“I do,” Pooch Halvorsen said. “The odd symbol, at least. People come in here all the time wanting this or that in Chinese. I run it all past my grandma on my mother’s side. She’s from Hong Kong.”
“I always wondered about that,” Liska said. “How do these people really know what they’re putting on their bodies if they don’t know Chinese? It could say I’m a moron for all they know.”
“Research,” Halvorsen said. “You’re going to wear a tattoo for the rest of your life, you’d damn well better take the time to know what it really says.”
“So, for sure the tattoo on our victim says acceptance?” Liska asked.
“Absolutely. I started that here.” He pulled down one side of the V-neck of his black T-shirt to show the same symbols incorporated into the complicated design on his chest. “I wanted to make a statement and see how many pe
ople would take it up as their own. Spread the message.”
“Pooch did mine,” Sonya said, pushing up the sleeve of her purple sweater to show Liska.
“I’ve done a couple hundred of these, at least,” the artist said proudly. “It’s big with the college crowd. People want to think this younger generation is completely egocentric, but that’s not so. Acceptance is an important message for a lot of them. Acceptance of race, gender, religion, sexual preference.”
“What about teenagers?” Kovac asked.
Halvorsen pointed to a big sign on the wall behind him:
YOU MUST BE 18 TO GET A TATTOO.
PHOTO ID REQUIRED.
NO EXCEPTIONS.
“Let’s say a kid was really determined,” Liska said.
The big man shrugged. “Nothing is foolproof to a really determined fool. Somebody wants something badly enough, they’ll find someone willing to do it for a price.”
“Do you happen to know any of those someones?”
“I hear things,” he conceded. “Young artists just starting out. Guys who are hard up for money do stuff on the side. People who have no business owning machines think they can learn by doing on their friends.
“There’s a boom in the business now,” he explained. “Everyone wants ink. Demand will find supply. It’s basic economics. When I started out, there were a handful of shops in the Twin Cities. Now these places sprout up like mushrooms—and die just as quick. You’ve got to know what you’re doing to run a business in this economy. People get into it because they think it’ll be fun. They think it’ll make them cool to run a tattoo shop the same way people think it’ll make them cool if they own a bar.”
The buzz of tattoo machines and muffled conversations coming from the back of the shop gave credence to his claim of a booming business. A narrow hall on one side of the space led back to hidden rooms where the magic happened.
“You didn’t do the tattoo on our victim?” Kovac asked.
“No. That didn’t happen in my shop. Sonya showed me the picture. That’s none of my people.”
“Any idea whose work it might be?”
He shook his head. “There’s not enough to it to show a particular style. You get into real art, I can recognize whose work it is.”
Sonya tugged down the scoop neck of her sweater, revealing a full-color heart with elaborate wings reaching across the width of her chest edged with a subtle leopard print. In the center of the heart was an ornately detailed gold-colored padlock with the words Try Harder delicately drawn in an arch above the keyhole. The shading of the ink was masterfully done, the outlining impeccable. The longer Kovac looked at the tattoo, the more he saw.
“This is Pooch,” she said. “Everyone who knows tattoos in this town knows Pooch did this.”
Halvorsen nodded, proud. “My foo dog is the work of a friend of mine from Florida. He specializes in traditional Chinese and Japanese art. Everyone in the business knows Shane’s work.
“But it takes years and a true artist to develop a distinctive signature look,” he said. “Most people—even really good technicians—never do.”
“And not the person who did our dead girl’s tattoo,” Kovac said.
“No. That’s an amateurish job. The outlines aren’t as sharp as they should be. There’s no artistry, no shading. Any newbie could have done that.”
“And do you know if this symbol is being used in other parts of the country?” Liska asked.
“Absolutely. It’s everywhere now. Half a dozen of us started doing it at the same time—East Coast, West Coast, middle America.”
“So our victim could have come from anywhere,” Kovac said.
Liska’s phone rang, and she dug it out of her pocket, frowning at it as she excused herself and stepped toward the door.
Pooch Halvorsen spread his hands. “I can’t help you there. But I’ll sniff around, ask some questions, see if I can get a lead on anyone here in town.”
“We’d appreciate that,” Kovac said. He sighed, not sure what he had been hoping for. Zombie Doe’s photograph on the Helm of Awe Social Club’s wall of fame, perhaps.
He turned to Sonya. “You’ll get together with Tip later and go over any kind of response you might have gotten to your story, right?”
Even as he asked, his eyes darted to Liska, who was in conversation, her expression tense. Jaw set, she jammed the phone back in her coat pocket and looked up at him.
“I have to go,” she said. “Now. I need to commit an infanticide.”
16
As with any good interrogation, the suspects had been separated and taken to different rooms so as not to be able to get their stories straight. The downside of that was that Liska was not in charge of this investigation and had access to only one side of the story. That did not sit well. She was coming into the situation with no background, and she wasn’t going to be able to hear both sides of the story to decide which parts of the individual tales to piece together into what was probably the truth.
If the culprit had been her younger son, R.J. would have readily spilled his guts, openly and honestly portraying his own culpability in the incident. Kyle sat sullen and silent, avoiding eye contact.
“You need to tell me what this about, Kyle,” Nikki said firmly, pacing at the end of the table with her arms crossed tight over her chest. “Principal Rodgers is going to come in here and I’m not going to be able to help you if I don’t have a clear picture of what happened.”
“It was nothing,” he said, staring at the tabletop. “Guys were just horsing around.”
“‘Just horsing around’ doesn’t end up in a fight.”
“It wasn’t a fight,” he said. “There was no fight.”
“You realize how serious this is, don’t you?” she asked. “This school has a zero-tolerance policy for fighting. That means you can be expelled.”
“I wasn’t fighting!” he insisted, finally looking at her. “Jeez, could you believe me for a change?”
“How can I believe you if you won’t tell me what happened? I have to piece this together from what other people tell me, Kyle. I can’t read your mind. I wasn’t there. I don’t know what happened.”
Quick tears filled her son’s blue eyes and he looked down at the tabletop again, trying to stare a hole through it. His face was red with the effort to wrestle the emotions back into their box.
As exasperated as she was, Nikki wanted to go to him and put her arms around him as she had done when he was a little boy. It physically hurt to see him in emotional pain. But she knew her touch would not be welcome, not here, not now when he was trying so hard to be a man and take whatever fate was about to deal out to him.
Sighing, trying to release some of her own tension, she pulled a chair out and sat down, close enough to him that their knees touched beneath the table. Maybe if they were at the same eye level, he would confide in her. Maybe if she wasn’t physically asserting her position of authority, he wouldn’t feel so defensive. Advanced Interrogation Skills 2.0.
“So what’s with this Fogelman kid?” she asked. “You have some beef with him?”
He tipped his head, tilting his chin toward her but looking the other way. “He’s a jerk.”
“In what way?”
“In every way.”
“Did you hit him?”
“No.”
“Did you knock him down?”
Hesitation. He was about to twist the truth into something he thought would be more acceptable. “I banged into him and he tripped and fell, and I fell on top of him.”
“Kyle . . . ,” Nikki said. “Who do you think you’re talking to? Not the mother who writes the checks for your jiu-jitsu lessons. You took him down.”
He didn’t deny it. “He had my sketchbook. I was just trying to get it back. He’s bigger than me. I couldn’t reach.”
“He took your sketchbook,” Nikki said. Now the picture started to come together. “You wanted it back.”
“It’s my work,” he sa
id, his face gravely serious.
“I know.”
She also knew it wasn’t just his schoolwork. Kyle’s drawings were to him no different than a writer’s journal, or a teenage girl’s diary. He was in those drawings—his feelings, his struggles. He might have been stingy with his words, but his art told his story eloquently. To Kyle, having his sketchbook taken, pawed over, passed around, made fun of, was a personal assault.
At conference time the guidance counselor had told her Kyle was having difficulties getting along with some of the students. He hadn’t offered anything in the way of explanation, no specific incidents, just hearsay. And Kyle had brushed the topic off again and again.
“Is this the same kid you got in the fight with New Year’s Eve?”
“I wasn’t in a fight.”
“Right. You banged into his fist with your face and accidentally scraped your knuckles across his teeth.”
Silence.
“Why don’t you get along with this guy?” she asked.
“Because he’s an asshole.”
She didn’t chide him for his language. He would have welcomed the diversion, and honestly, she could think of worse things than her fifteen-year-old son using the same bad language she used on a daily basis. This was not a conversation about manners and etiquette.
“Why is he an asshole?” she asked. “And don’t say because he stole your sketchbook. I think it’s safe to assume he’s been an asshole for a while. Why don’t you get along with him?”
“Because he does stuff like this all the time.”
“To you?”
“To lots of kids.”
Now they were getting to the heart of it. Aaron Fogelman was a bully.
Bullies had been Kyle’s big hot button for most of his life. He had always been small for his age, which made him a natural target for bigger kids. But he had also always been tough and athletic, which meant anyone planning on trying to intimidate him physically had their work cut out for them. Because he knew what it was like to get picked on, he often took the role of champion for weaker kids who were targets.