Grave Markings: 20th Anniversary Edition

by Arnzen, Michael A.

  He knew full well that his objective—to beat the living daylights out of the Killer—was against the very laws he supposedly enforced, but he also knew he was feeling very much like a criminal himself lately, a convict doing time, awaiting that moment of freedom when he could purge his hatred for the faceless murderer and administer true justice. He had been victimized, he had been stolen from…he was an innocent man incarcerated by time and facts and truth…and when he found his man he’d use more than just the long arm of the law to club the sick bastard to a pulp.

  Lockerman was drinking his morning coffee at the station when the call from the museum came. The complaint at first was nothing out of the ordinary, just a routine breaking and entering.

  He knew that the City Historical Museum was nothing like most big city repositories: there were no marble columns or beautiful domes, no huge walls of etched rock. It was a simple adobe hut, smaller than the average house in Colorado Springs, surrounded by Kentucky Bluegrass and three flagpoles: the U.S. banner, the Colorado State Golden C, and a city municipal flag that everyone ignored. No grand masterpieces were housed in the museum; it was a tourist trap more than anything else, with tidbits from archaeological digs and token donations from wealthy families of historical oddities of the first settlers. It had a purposely Wild West feel to it: cowboys and Indians, spurs and barbed wire, rusty gold pans and arrowheads.

  That was it. No big deal. No cultural Mecca. Nothing that should attract burglars.

  Lockerman had made up his mind before he even got into his black-and-white squad car that the museum was probably just broken into by some dumb high school kids—a common occurrence in the city before any of this tattoo business. He responded to the call personally, wanting to be alone. He needed to get away from the cold concrete wall of the station that he’d been staring at for days, the prison of his job, trying to make time go by exploring record books and computer files for the mysterious MKI. He needed the air—and a break to check out the little hovel of culture wouldn’t hurt, either. To look at real art, done the way art was supposed to be. With craftsmanship, effort, purpose. Art that was on his side, art to benefit society.

  He stepped beneath the adobe arch, opened an out-of-place wooden door, and noticed how weak the hinges were. Anyone could have entered with ease, locked or not, just as he was doing now.

  The air conditioner was on full-blast, refrigerating the room, and it felt soothing as it coursed across his skin like an ocean wave. A wooden Indian, the type that used to stand before cigar stores, stared over the top of his head. In the space behind an interior arch, he could see glass cases lined up in rows and columns, framed paintings orbiting the walls. It was simple, cute.

  He walked through the arch, approached the nearest glass case and looked inside. Arrowheads were lined up, in increasing sizes, made from differing stones. The huge size of some of the ones at the end of the case surprised him; they were bigger than some of the switchblades he’d taken off arrestees.

  Violence has always been with us, he thought uncomfortably. Society or not.

  “Sergeant Lockerman, I presume?”

  He pivoted on a heel, and faced a short, balding Hispanic man with pitch black facial hair trimmed perfectly around his jawline and upper lip. The man looked like an exiled college professor, gaining weight from too many visits to the vending machines during the off-season. Lockerman thought the man belonged in the museum, fitting in perfectly with the stereotypical exhibits. “Yes, were you the one who called in a breaking and entering?”

  “Yes, I’m Michael Rodriquez. I’m sure I left my name when I phoned in…” The odd man stroked his beard. “No matter. Please call me Mike.” They shook hands. “Come here, please, and sign in.”

  “Mister…uh, Mike, I understand you have a crime to report…”

  “Please.” Rodriquez stood at an antique desk beside the interior arch, holding out a pen. “Sign in. We don’t get very many people here, and every signature in this register counts when state budget appropriations come around. I’m sure you understand.” He extended his arm robotically.

  Lockerman shrugged, sighed, took the pen, and signed a page in the leather book. As he finished his signature, he said: “You said there had been a breaking and entering. Was there anything stolen from the museum?” He set the pen down in the crease of the book, turned and look sourly at the man.

  “Well, I’m not sure. Let me show you.” Rodriquez stepped away, and Lockerman followed. They marched past Indian jewelry, wagon wheels, Victorian and Indian dresses. Rodriquez walked up to a framed painting in the center of the far wall, almost bumping into it. The man looked up at the glass-covered, gold-framed painting up close, almost pressing his face against it. Lockerman thought it peculiar that a man half blind would be an art caretaker, but he’d seen sillier sights before, especially at work. Government jobs can be filled by anyone even remotely qualified. Bureaucracy strikes again, Lockerman thought.

  “This morning I did the routine dusting, same as usual, checking over the holdings, when I came upon this odd painting here. At first I thought it was just a new acquisition, but the art is just so…I dunno…disturbing, I suppose you’d call it. So I checked the books. Our records are impeccable, understand. And we have absolutely no record of this painting on file.”

  Lockerman scribbled some notes down in a pocket steno pad (the damned thing always made him feel like some flatfoot from a bad mystery novel), and then he looked up at the painting in question.

  He recognized the style of the artist immediately, of course. Those same broad, jagged lines that violently curved and hooked together like shards of broken glass randomly strewn on pavement. The sloppiness of it all, the patterns that stood out as the various elements conjoined.

  It was the same sort of style he’d been studying all week, searching for underlying meanings inside the haphazard carnage. It was the work of the Tattoo Killer, no doubt about it, and damn if it didn’t piss Lockerman off that he was at the point where he could recognize the psycho’s work immediately, like the face of an old friend.

  And this particular face, the bloated visage of the framed portrait, stared back at him, almost smiling, as if enjoying Lockerman’s torment.

  The bloated body of a man, sagging with heavy wet wrinkles and dripping fleshy bags of pustules and abscesses sat…or rather, ran from the edges of a jeweled throne, pooling in its seat, a grotesque blob of cankerous flesh mounted above a pair of gigantic, hairless testicles. The chair itself was an erection of splintered broken bones, yellowed with age, and skin was stretched between the gaps in the architecture, tied down like a tarpaulin with wiry blue and red veins. The jewels that encrusted the throne of bone weren’t jewels at all, he soon discovered, but oddly colored organs of blue and green that shined metallically around the beast. It was as if the skeleton of the thing sitting in the throne had been removed to create the throne that supported it, and by the look on the creature’s face it seemed that the ugly being had created the throne itself, and was proud of its abomination.

  The face: eyeless sockets—not skeletal at all in structure, but abyssal dark caverns of shadow and bright pink gore—and Lockerman was seeing eyes inside, nevertheless; the grin—absent of teeth, absent of jawbone carvings—a fat pile of writhing flesh like melting wax, yellow and purple-veined like an anorexic breast; and the tip of the horror’s head, anvil-shaped, encircled by a barbed-wire crown of vicious razor blades.

  It took determined might for Lockerman to pull his eyes away from the throned disgust to look at the bottom of the frame to find what he already knew was there. Initials, a title.

  Archaic lettering—Greek or Roman, Lockerman couldn’t be sure—was printed at the bottom of the grotesquerie:

  mEET YOUR mAkER

  RULER OF FLESH AND ivORY!

  The title was followed by those same initials: MKI.

 
Lockerman didn’t want to look at it anymore. He turned to the curator. Rodriquez was peering up at the framed portrait as if studying it. Lockerman doubted he could see the thing for what it was at all.

  “How’d this…this thing…get in here?”

  Rodriquez squinted his eyes as he turned from the picture. “Like I said, no record of this piece was in the files. It just showed up overnight! I have no knowledge of how it arrived here, or who put it up. The culprit must have broke in last night and put it there. That’s the only way it could have gotten here. But, having checked for signs of burglary, there are none. I don’t know how he entered the museum, but he did. And he didn’t steal anything, either. It’s quite odd.”

  “Maybe someone put it up when you weren’t looking,” Lockerman said, realizing that Rodriquez was hardly an observant person.

  “Doubtfully, Sergeant. We get so few people here, that when we do get the occasional visitor, I give them a personal tour, explaining the history behind each piece. And you’re the first person who has been here in a week.”

  Lockerman muttered a curse under his breath—he had hoped that Rodriquez had seen the Tattoo Killer, so he could get a physical description.

  “Okay, Mr. Rodriquez. Here’s the deal. I’m going to go back to my squad car and call an investigative unit, and to get some equipment. You’re going to have to close the museum for today, I think, since it will take a few hours.”

  “I understand.”

  “Additionally, we’ll need to remove that piece from the wall after we check for prints and so on. Do you have something here in the museum to cover that portrait with?”

  “Yes, there’s a drop cloth in the storeroom.”

  Lockerman went out to his black-and-white, and Rodriquez fetched the drop cloth. He called in the unit over the radio, and then grabbed a kit from the trunk of the car: it contained gloves, fingerprint dust, body chalk, and other minor tools to conduct an initial “on-the-scene” investigation. But the only tool Lockerman really wanted from the kit was a Polaroid camera.

  He returned to the end of the museum and took the snapshot, the bright light momentarily blinding him, burning the afterimage of the horrible artwork on the inside of his eyes. An image he couldn’t blink away.

  Rodriquez covered the frame with the drop cloth after

  Lockerman took his photographs. “So what do you think we have here, Sergeant? Is it a burglar or not?”

  Lockerman lied, not wanting to divulge to the nearsighted man that an insane killer had violated the museum to put his disgusting artwork on display for the world to see. “Just looks like we have a very frustrated artist out there, somewhere. Nothing to worry about.”

  As the cloth covered the frame, Lockerman prayed that Rodriquez didn’t notice the flaws in the canvas he’d noticed after recognizing the picture’s signature: pores, tiny blonde hairs, freckles.

  II.

  Judy Thomas took the knifelike letter opener and viciously slashed open an envelope as if tearing out its heart. She peered inside and withdrew a sheet of college-ruled paper with the requisite three-hole punch on the left side and the red-and-blue lines.

  Penciled scribbles peppered the page in childlike penmanship. She only had to read the salutation at the top of the page to know what the letter was about: “My Beautiful Princess…” She balled it up and tossed it in a box of paper to be taken to the shredder.

  She positively hated fan mail. Especially the Fuck-Me letters from lustful couch potatoes. Being an anchorwoman wasn’t easy; the horrible fan letters almost made the job unbearable. The mail vindicated her paranoia, the fear of the public that comes hand in hand with being a media celebrity.

  Schoenmacher opened the door to her office and stuck his head inside. Now she had him to contend with again. Couldn’t men ever stop trying to get into a woman’s pants?

  “Got a few minutes?” he asked, broadly smiling.

  She stood up and walked toward him, blocking his entrance. “I don’t think so. Not today. I’m up to my ears right now, and…”

  He barged inside and pulled a chair around to face her. “I’ll just be a minute,” he said, still grinning. Judy felt the familiar twinge of having her personal domain usurped by a territorial male. She twisted around and faced him.

  She could feel Schoenmacher sizing up her body, his eyes drifting up and down her body like someone might admire drapery. Dan was a good looking man, but this was one of a number of little behavioral twitches that just nagged at her whenever she considered him. She cocked her hips to one side and brought her fingers out of the pocket of her dress to run them through the curls of her perm—an attempt to get him to look her in the eyes.

  Judy waited, then deduced from the grin still plastered on his face that he was going to ask her out for the fifth time this afternoon. “Listen, Dan. I’m just not ready for anything too close right now, okay? I’ve been down that road before with you, and I think it’s a dead end.”

  Schoenmacher’s grin melted. Slowly. Till he was pouting, his gaze drifting emotionless down her body and down to the floor.

  The look was familiar. She’d seen it on him when she broke it off after a one night fling months ago. Schoenmacher seemed almost close to tears. She didn’t want the weatherman to start bawling in her office; it would be embarrassing and difficult to explain to the coworkers. She placed a hand on his shoulder, forcing her voice to sound warm and soothing. “I didn’t mean to be rude, Danny. It’s just that…I don’t know. What happened last time was…” She wanted to say that the one time they had slept together had been one big drunken mistake, but she couldn’t put it that way, not with the way he was looking at her, like a drowning man reaching for help. It was cute and effective, but a bit too adolescent for her taste. “It was all wrong. We should have waited.”

  “Listen, Judy. All I want to do is cook you dinner. That’s all. A nice, quiet evening, with just the two of us relaxing. That’s what you really need, ya know, to relax.” He stressed his words like he did on the air. “I promise. No commitments, no fooling around, no nothing. We’ll get to know each other a little bit better. We can wait or whatever you want to do, but let’s at least try to make something work, okay?”

  Skeptical, she looked into his eyes and found them warm and honest. This was a side she hadn’t seen of him before. Cooking? Maybe he wasn’t as bad as she assumed. Her stiff shoulders fell, slumped. “Oh, all right.” She provided him with a thin pink smile, and then leaned over toward him, pecking his cheek. She leaned into his ear. “But I’m gonna hold you to that promise. No nothing.”

  He lingered in her hair. “Got it,” he replied, almost too eager.

  “Good,” she said, playfully slapping his shoulder. “Now will you get the hell out of here so I can get back to work?”

  “Yes, ma’am!” He stood and nearly sprinted from the room.

  Judy returned to slashing her letters. The work wasn’t pressing; she didn’t have any urgent business. She was just glad that Schoenmacher would no longer be bugging her like a hungry dog. She’d give him one chance at proving to her that every suspicion she had about him was wrong: that he was not some smooth-talking snake oil salesman, that he was not as emotionally insecure and self-effacing as he pretended to be; that he was a real, living man with strengths as well as weaknesses beneath his slick veneer.

  And most importantly, that he wasn’t some freakazoid sicko like the people who wrote her these nasty letters.

  III.

  “New suit?”

  Roberts looked up from his typewriter and saw Dan Schoenmacher, who was nodding in approval with one arched eyebrow. Not knowing how to respond, Roberts imitated the expression and nodded back. “Yup. Not bad, eh?”

  Schoenmacher came around the desk and patted him gently on the back. “Not bad at all. The clothes make the man, my friend—though I’m not
so sure they’ll make up for that new hairdo you’re sportin’.” He laughed at his own insult and slapped him on the back again.

  His hand had landed a direct hit on Roberts’ tattooed shoulder blade. Roberts winced from the sting.

  “Sorry, Roy. Forgot you were sunburned.”

  Roberts chuckled as the pain evaporated. The tattoo was a week old, but for some reason the flesh was still a tad raw. Roberts guessed he had washed his shoulder a bit too vigorously the day afterward, and that was why his back felt as though branded by a hot iron.

  Roberts figured it was time to let Schoenmacher in on the secret. The week-old lie about having sunburn just wasn’t making the grade. He’d withheld the information, wanting to reveal the tattoo to both Schoenmacher and Lockerman at the next barbecue, unveiling it without ceremony—probably under the guise of taking off his shirt to get a tan. More than show-off, he had wanted to shock them, to catch them off guard. But he couldn’t wait any longer. Not with Schoenmacher slapping him on the back every time he saw him.

  “I’ve got some good news for you, Roy.” Schoenmacher was grinning, wiggling his eyebrows like Groucho Marx.

  “I have a surprise for you, too, bud. Let’s go to the break room, eh?”

  They made their way past the glass cubicles toward the dingy room that housed snack machines and ashtrays in the back of the building. Once they got there, Roy lit up and Schoenmacher didn’t waste any time spilling his guts. “Your idea worked, Roy! I’m gonna cook for Judy this Sunday. Got a story cooking up about my tattoo, too. She’s mine, man. I can feel it.” He nervously jiggled the change in his pocket and then pulled out a few coins to buy a can of soda, singing the words to an old Bad Company song about how much he felt like making love.