Tattoo

by Paul E. Cooley

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Author's Note

  Acknowledgements

  About The Author

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  This is the FiendMaster.

  Dear Tattoo. I have watched your leavings for years. I have seen the pattern emerge. It is beautiful and terrible, and exquisitely delicious.

  You meander from location to location, event to event, to find your actors. Your show is never the same, never the same costume goes missing from the actor's wardrobe. But you are not random. You are not without some semblance of predictability. Heed my caution, Tattoo, you must invent a new show, or be caught, imprisoned, and flayed for your own efforts.

  There are those, Tattoo, who will see what I have seen in your movements, your actions. They are not all fools, Tattoo. You are safe for now, I believe, but eventually you will be caught unless you heed my warnings. The large stages cannot be the only venues for your performances. Competent actors will work on the smaller stages-- you only need find them.

  The actors in your dramas must disappear after their soliloquies, take a bow and exit the stage. Actors can be interviewed after a show. The blue paparazzi clamors for their words, wondering how they learned their lines and to discover the play's missing manuscript.

  You wish to act, direct, and produce your own plays. With natural skill, you do so. But there are those in the audience who are going to see behind the facade, and realize that this play is naught more than one person holding the puppet strings of its other actors. You must employ misdirection.

  You must thicken your own plot. And you must choose the Off-Broadway, small-stages to open your new productions.

  Dear Tattoo. Heed my words. I know the next play is being rehearsed as I speak. If you continue your Broadway shows, there are only 5 venues available to you. This is too small a pool of talent, my friend. Look elsewhere to find your actor and stage your production. You can contact me through TOR. You will know the address if you look for it.

  Chapter 2

  He'd gotten the tip from this week's FiendCast, a source no one else on earth took seriously. Jackson hadn't thought it was real at first either, but after listening to the growling, digitized voice of the FiendMaster and splicing together the hints as well as references to actual crimes, Jackson had started to believe.

  It was by pure accident he'd found out about the FiendCast--just an email in his spam folder. He'd made it a habit to check the folder before sending its contents to digital oblivion. There were always too many emails in the folder for him to verify each and every one as spam, but he did his best to at least offer a cursory glance. If not for the fact it was the latest in the folder, it probably would have gone unnoticed. But there it was. "FiendCast-- Chronicles of Crime," a title too intriguing to ignore.

  The text of the email had been perfunctory--nothing more than "Visit the website for more details" and a rather long URL. He had known it was probably a malware site, but clicked on the link anyway. His browser window had filled with porn ads mingled with crime scene photos Jackson had never seen published in any newspaper. They had looked like originals to him. Not sepia toned or line scanned messes of drippy color, but the actual pixels. A photo of a corpse torn in half, knitting needles jammed into its flesh, even had a time-stamp digitally inscribed in the corner.

  Jackson had had no reason to believe the photo was real; he'd copied it to his hard-drive and emailed it to the Photoshop Kid. The Photoshop Kid was a grad student who'd interned at the paper and had been a great source when Jackson had tried to verify a photo's veracity in the past. After the kid pronounced the photo as genuine, Jackson never missed a FiendCast.

  He listened to the latest FiendCast, Tattoo, three times. He scrawled what he thought were the relevant clues in his notebook. Stage. Venue. Productions. Actors. Actors? He thought that was the important bit. The FiendCast never came out and said exactly what a fiend was doing. The riddles were part of its charm. But if you substituted "Actors" for "Victims" and "productions" for "murders", it became more clear.

  The previous FiendCast, Canvas, was more obvious than Tattoo. Some sick fuck had started sending tanned and painted human skins to churches around the US. Each "work of art" was arranged in a macabre rendering of biblical torture. The cops, the FBI, everyone seemed completely unable to piece together what was going on. The case had been in the national news for a couple of years now, and the authorities were no closer to catching the bastard.

  The Canvas FiendCast teemed with details much less subtle than Tattoo. Jackson figured that was because the Canvas killer tanned, scrubbed, and completely sanitized the "art," removing most, if not all, of the forensic evidence. The FiendMaster didn't think Canvas was going to get caught. Jackson didn't either.

  But Tattoo... There was no national news on this one, or at least nothing Jackson remembered reading. That's when he decided to start digging.

  Google, Jackson repeatedly told the older reporters, was a journalist's best friend. They still didn't see the merit in using the internet for exhaustive research, and that was why Jackson was certain he would win the damned Pulitzer while those old farts simply faded away. Once you found the crimes, it wasn't too difficult to make some calls and maybe get access to crime scene photos.

  The Google search had returned a slew of news items related to deaths involving tattoos. Most were labeled "gang-related" and trolling through them all had taken patience and cup after cup of coffee. After getting nowhere, he finally searched against a date-time stamp from one of the Tattoo FiendCast photos. He hit pay dirt.

  The top entry was an article about a crime scene in Houston. He added the words "removed cut flayed" to the search criteria and the articles piled up.

  Jackson flipped through the crime scene photos he'd printed from the FiendCast site and correlated each with the news articles he'd found through Google. The first photo showed a prone woman on a concrete floor. Jacqueline Pierce, a Houstonian. A patch of skin above her left breast had been surgically removed. Jackson didn't have access to the Houston Police Department report...yet. He'd call Dewhurst soon and hound him for it.

  The next printed photo was brilliantly colored. A large man, Thomas Reed according to the article, lay on his stomach. A patch of skin on the right shoulder blade was missing, revealing raw red flesh. Tattoos covered the rest of the man's back-- a skull with a fiery halo; a dagger piercing a severed head; a tapestry of lines and shapes. Jackson shook his head. He didn't understand why anyone would cover themselves in such shit. Whatever happened to a heart with "Mom" in the middle of it?

  The third photo was by far the most disturbing. A young man from Detroit, Harry Renquist, lay spread upon a beige Berber-covered floor. The man's face was locked into a shriek of terror and pain. His penis was nothing more than a bloody remnant. A wave of nausea broke over Jackson. Someone had skinned the man's cock.

  Of all the victims, this was the only one that looked as though he'd felt the trauma. Jackson knew why--the penis had to be hard in order to properly skin it. He shivered. He grasped the sheet of paper between his index finger and thumb and flipped it over. He didn't need to look at that one again.

  He'd already printed out a half dozen more articles and was still finding new ones to match up against the photos from the FiendCast site. These crimes had taken place in seven cities over the last five years. No w
onder the feds hadn't closed in on the guy.

  The FBI probably had competing profiles for the killer and a massive folder filled with speculation and not much else. With so much time between crimes, Jackson was certain it had already been relegated to at least the "cool" case file. Since 9/11, the FBI spent more time and resources on the terrorist angle than serial killers.

  As Jackson gathered the dates from the internet for the crimes, he searched for corresponding events in each city where they took place. Sure enough, his suspicions had been confirmed--the killer always acted during the week of a tattoo convention or trade show. Always.

  In addition to Houston, similar crimes had taken place in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Detroit. The murder in New York--victim asphyxiated, Celtic tattoo excised from the left ankle. Chicago--man bludgeoned to death, tattoo of wolf baying at a yellow moon stripped from the middle of the back. Los Angeles--woman stabbed through the heart, fire tattoo removed from the throat.

  Excited, Jackson searched for Houston events on the calendar for 2009. There it was. The Houston Tattoo convention. It was in 2 days.

  Jackson thrummed his fingers against the marred wooden table- top and stared at the phone. He took a sip of Coke and picked up the receiver. He punched an extension and listened to the warbling dial tone.

  "Yeah, Mr. Jackson?" a surly voice said.

  "Scott. You got a sec?"

  "Yeah. Where?"

  "How about Room 1?" Jackson asked.

  "Yeah. In five," the husky voice replied and hung up.

  Jackson put the receiver back in its cradle and sighed. Scott would be able to tell him something. Then maybe he'd call Tony.

  Chapter 3

  The meeting room was small. It housed a circular table, a desktop computer on a shelf in the corner, and two very uncomfortable chairs. Scott was already waiting in the room when Jackson arrived. The tall man had a cigarette clamped behind his pierced ear. The fluorescent lights bounced off his bald pate, leaving a glowing sheen atop his skull.

  Scott stood with one foot purposefully placed on the seat of a chair. He wore a long sleeved heavy cotton shirt, the same type he wore even in the oppressive Houston summer heat. Jackson knew it was only for work--the man was literally covered in tattoos.

  "Scott," Jackson said as he closed the door.

  The tall man harrumphed. "I only got a few minutes, Mr. Jackson."

  Jackson nodded and smiled. "Of course. I have a question regarding tattoos."

  The bored, stoned look on Scott's face disappeared, his eyes lighting up. "Sure, man. Sure. What you thinking of gettin'?" Scott drawled.

  Jackson shook his head. "Not for me, son."

  "Then...what?"

  "I'm doing some research. I need to ask about the process and maybe find a good tattoo artist." Jackson gestured toward him. "Figured you were the person to ask?"

  Scott nodded. "Sure, man. Sure. What you need to know?"

  "Well," Jackson said, "I guess I need to know about depth and such."

  "Depth?" Scott blinked. "Uh, I don't understand."

  "Well, how far into the flesh does the ink go?"

  "Oh," Scott said, his smile returning. "Yeah, I get it. I know it goes pretty damned deep. When my grandfather died, we had the mortician strip his tat off so we could keep it. And he had to--"

  "What?" Jackson interrupted. "What do you mean 'keep it'?"

  With a sigh, Scott took his foot off the seat of the chair and straightened his back. At his full 6 feet 4 inches, he towered over Jackson. "My grandfather. He had this bad-ass tattoo done in Japan while he was on leave from Korea." Jackson just stared at Scott. Scott shook his head. "Close your mouth, man. It ain't as bad as it sounds."

  "You wanted to--"

  Scott shook his head. "No, man. Granddad wrote in his will that he wanted that tattoo preserved. He was in great shape until the day he died, man, and the tat was still well-defined. He wanted to make sure it ended up being with the family, sort of for the future gens, you know?"

  The prideful expression on Scott's face horrified him. Jackson cleared his throat, doing his best to appear nonplussed. "So the mortician--"

  "Yeah, we asked the mortician to take it off his back. It's a really thick bit of skin, man. We dried it out. It's hanging above my old man's mantle piece in a big oak frame."

  The reporter gulped, trying to wipe the image from his mind. "How long ago was this?"

  "About seven years ago," Scott said. "Still looks great, man. Here, hand me your notebook."

  Jackson passed it to him. Scott pulled the pen clipped to the notebook and scrawled a phone number and address on the front page.

  "That's my man Nige. He'll talk to you." Scott handed back the small notebook to Jackson.

  "He handle all your tatts?"

  Scott nodded and smiled. "Yeah. Nige is the best in Houston, man. Best artist around. He knows his shit."

  "Cool. Thanks, Scott."

  "Yeah, man," he said, shaking Jackson's offered hand. "Got a question for you though. What you doing researching tatts?"

  Jackson blinked. He wasn't sure he wanted to tell Scott anything. A little gossip around the water cooler and he'd have more competition than he could shake a stick at.

  "Found something interesting in the archives. That's all."

  Scott nodded, one eyebrow raised. "Yeah. Okay. Well, tell Nige I sent you. But be ready to have a little scratch for him," Scott said, rubbing his index finger and thumb together.

  Jackson nodded weakly, the idea of a tattoo stripped from a corpse still left him shaking. He left the meeting room and headed back to his office.

  Chapter 4

  The tattoo parlor stank of cigarette smoke, sweat, and pain. Jackson stood near the glass counter. Beaded curtains covered the entryway into the back rooms where customers got pierced and inked. As he waited for someone to come to the counter, he looked down through the glass.

  Several leather-bound photo albums were spread open. Photos of freshly inked, shiny flesh stared back at him from beneath plastic linings. Tribal designs. Celtic runes. In one album, a dragon in full flight with rippling scales and a jutting head stared back at him, taking up the entire album page. It took him a moment, but Jackson finally realized why the head appeared to pop outward.

  He recoiled at the sight of the inked penis and scrotum, the dragon's midsection and tail curling up from the pubis toward the chest. The head of the penis was pierced with a black and red jewel, giving the dragon a fearsome, live eye. The underside of the head flared with scales while the top of the penis gave the dragon head its features. Jackson shivered.

  "Like that one?"

  Jackson looked up from the glass counter to regard a short, shirtless man peering through an opening in the curtains. The man's black and gray beard was tied into three separate strands and reached his nipples. The man walked through the curtains and stood behind the counter.

  Jackson tried to speak, but his voice cracked. He cleared his throat, and gave a nervous smile, holding up his hand. "I, um. I'm looking for Nigel."

  The bearded man smiled and raised his hands up in the air. "That's me, mate, but I didn't do it." He slowly lowered his hands back to his side. "Or, I'm not admitting to it!" he chuckled. His pupils were much too dilated for him to be sober.

  Jackson coughed into his hand and tried to return the smile. "Sure, sure. My name is Jackson." Nigel blinked at him. "Look, Scott Bertram sent--"

  "Scott?" Nigel asked. Jackson nodded. "Big fucker, ain't he?"

  "Yeah, he--"

  "Okay, so if Scott sent you, I guess you're cool and all."

  Nigel looked him up and down starting with his shoes. He frowned slightly as he did so. As he made his way past Jackson's belt-line and to the well-worn collared shirt, he shook his head. "You're a reporter," the Brit said.

  A sudden flush of embarrassment rose in his cheeks. "That obvious?"

  Nigel nodded. "Yeah, mate. You dress like shit, your clothes are fucking old as sin, it's pretty o
bvious they don't pay you enough. And," he said with a grin, "you look very, very hungry. Ambitious." For a moment, neither spoke. Jackson coughed into his hand again and Nigel sighed. "Let's, um, go back into my office, yeah?"

  Jackson relaxed a little. "That'd be cool," he said.

  "Humph," Nigel said. He turned his back and made his way through the curtains. "Yo, mate," he said without turning his head, "don't try and be something you're not. It doesn't work."

  Jackson stiffened again. He was a pro when dealing with hookers, corrupt politicians, and confidential sources, but something about this world made him feel like a novice. The smell of sweat mingled with a healthy dose of pot and tobacco smoke was overpowering. It was alien to him and he didn't understand why.

  He swallowed hard as he walked through the beaded curtains, star- ing at the packs of disposable needles, the inking guns, and the barber shop style chairs. He imagined a body in one of the chairs, some arcane instrument scarring skin, dragging through the flesh like sharpened canines.

  Jackson shook his head to clear away the image. He didn't like blood. Didn't like pain. The idea of scarring his body for art was anathema to him. And guys like this Nigel, Christ, this is what they did for a living? Inflict pain and call it art?

  "In here," Nigel said pointing to a small room past the tattoo area. Nigel entered the room without waiting for Jackson to catch up. As Jackson entered, the click of a lighter and the sudden tang of fresh cigarette smoke filled his nostrils. Nigel sat in the chair behind a desk, puffing away on a hand-rolled cigarette. "Have a seat, mate," Nigel said. Jackson looked down at the ripped black leather seat cover and shrugged. He sat and crossed his left khaki-clad leg over his right.

  "What you want to know?" Nigel asked, eyes glittering, smile wide.

  Jackson cleared his throat and tried not to cough. The city of Houston had already outlawed smoking in businesses and restaurants, but he guessed Nigel wasn't too concerned about it. Blue puffs of smoke rose into the air above him and he watched them as they headed toward the ceiling. "I need to understand a couple of things."