Rapture (Fallen Angels #4)(51)
Author: J.R. Ward

“What’s up with the puss?”

“I’m just wondering how it’s physiologically possible for scars to remove themselves from a dead body.”

Okay, not the question she’d actually been thinking about, but a fine, socially acceptable substitute. She’d also have asked it eventually. Tony was a walking encyclopedia.

Now it was his turn to ease back and stare at nothing. “Not possible. Scars are scars.”

“So how could you explain two sets of photographs, one that showed a pattern on the skin and one that didn’t?”

“Easy. Someone got busy with Photoshop.”

“That’s what I’m thinking.”

What she didn’t get was the “why.” Although she had her suspicions as to the “who.”

Mels let her head fall to the side. Any tampering wouldn’t have been done by the official photographer—while the woman had been snapping away, there’d been half a dozen men in that room with her, and if she’d changed anything in the images later, they would have hollered about the discrepancy the second they saw the pictures.

So that left Monty, a man who masturbated his ego by talking to the press when he shouldn’t and trying to create drama where there was none. What were the chances that he’d tinkered just for kicks and giggles?

Mels snapped into action, going into the CCJ’s database.

“Either that,” Tony tacked on, “or it was a case of divine intervention.”

“I got the tattoo.”

At five o’clock, Mels looked up from the final version of her story on the prostitute. Eric was standing in front of her, a folder in his hand, a shit-eater on his face.

“From the Marriott victim who disappeared from the morgue?”

“The very one.”

“Lemme see?” she said, holding out her hand.

“It’s, ah…yeah.” He passed the pictures over. “Not my style. I’m more of a tribal guy.”

As she popped the top fold, Mels’s brows lifted. The photograph was in color, but that wasn’t necessary—at least not where the ink was concerned. The tattoo’s depiction of the Grim Reaper was done in black and white, and with eerie detail…to the point where even in the photograph, the glowing eyes under the ragged hood and the bony hand pointing out to the viewer seemed to call upon her specifically.

“Pretty gruesome, huh,” Eric remarked. “And nice cemetery, too, don’t you think.”

True enough on the background: The horrible figure was standing in a field of graves, the headstones stretching far into the landscape beyond, the decaying robes sweeping out and obscuring that which seemed to go on forever.

“What are these hash marks at the bottom?” she wondered.

“It’s got to be a count of something—and not loaves of bread, I’m willing to bet.”

“Could be gang related.”

“That’s what I was thinking, especially given that there was a body recently in the morgue with something similar on it—according to my source.”

“What does the CPD think?”

“I’m looking for the answer to that right now.”

Mels glanced up. “So you’ve done an Internet search on the image?”

“There are a thousand representations of the Grim Reaper on the Web—and some of them are in people’s skin. From what I could find, none look exactly like that, but all of them sort of look like that, if it makes any sense.”

“How did your source get these? I heard that everything was wiped cleaned from the intake file.”

St. Francis was in an uproar over the incident; it was as if the man had never been through their system at all.

Clean. Very clean.

“My buddy happens to be a tattoo buff. He took the pics on his own phone as the body came in.”

“Handy dandy,” she murmured as she returned the folder. “So, if we assume the ink is gang related—what the hell was the guy doing wearing a state-of-the-art bulletproof vest? And what about the disappear? Gangs aren’t that sophisticated, financed or dogged about their dead—breaking into a hospital to get a body back? And then pulling an IT scrub? Not going to happen. Mob’s the same.”

Eric chewed on that mangled Bic of his. “It’s got to be government of some sort. I mean, who else could pull it off?”

She thought of Matthias’s empty autoloader. “I hear the bullets were from a forty?”

“The gun that was used against the guy? Yeah—and the good news is that the police took the vest along with the clothes and boots into evidence so they’re still around.” Her colleague’s eyes narrowed. “So, are you going to tell me why you’re so interested now?”

“My dead girl got slit in the throat as well.” Although, really, what were the chances the two killings were related?

“Ah, so you’re collecting neck injuries.”

“Just being thorough.”

“And how’s your story coming on that prostitute? Anything new?”

“I’m working on some things.”

“Let me know if you need any help.”

“Back at you.”

As Eric walked off, she realized that the newsroom was largely vacant. And she was nearly out of time when it came to her deadline.

Rereading her article, she was dissatisfied. No new information other than the victim’s identity, and when she’d called the family, she’d gotten a rather shockingly uninterested no comment.

How could you not be upset at your daughter’s death?

Mels didn’t like sending her piece in as it was. The writing was fine, and spell-check had done its job, but the real story was with Monty and his photographs and she couldn’t put any of that in yet.

With a curse, she hit send, and vowed that she was going to get to the bottom of it all. Even if it didn’t go into print.

Switching her screens, she reassessed the side-by-side of two images that she’d put together an hour before: they were both of similar markings carved into abdominal skin. One was from that Cecilia Barten girl who’d been found at the quarry on the outskirts of town just days before…and the other was what Monty contended had been on the prostitute’s belly.

The pattern of scratches looked like some kind of language: There were identical characters in both photographs, although they were not in the same sequence—which in her mind didn’t rule out in the slightest the Monty-as-Photoshopper theory. If anything, it was perfect, tying the death at the motel to that of the Barten girl without making the manipulation a one-for-one obvious.