Michael Prescott: Last Breath

“He is an okay guy. As long as you don’t trust him too much.”

Autopsies weren’t the only things Walsh hated. Running a meeting was another. He sometimes wondered why he had ever accepted a promotion to the rank of Detective-3. What he loved was being out in the field, and now, in his supervisory capacity, he rarely had time to investigate a case personally. Then again, at fifty-two, he supposed he had better leave the legwork to the next generation.

At the moment he was surrounded by representatives of that generation, who crowded three desks pushed together to make a single long table in the Robbery-Homicide squad room at Parker Center, the LAPD’s downtown headquarters. He had called a meeting of the Hourglass Killer task force, or at least its core members. Over the past two months, since the abduction of Nikki Carter, the task force had grown to include liaison personnel from the Homicide Bureau of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department-Carter’s body had been dumped in an auto graveyard in East LA, territory which was under the Sheriff’s jurisdiction-as well as miscellaneous bureaucrats from the County Probation Department and the State Department of Corrections.

So far the FBI had been kept out of it, except for the obligatory psychological profile of the killer supplied by the Behavioral Science Section at Quantico.

If everybody connected with the investigation had been assembled, the squad room would have been filled to capacity. Walsh restricted most meetings to the LAPD Robbery-Homicide detectives who did the heavy lifting on the case.

Today’s meeting had been scheduled to start promptly at 4:00 P.M. Naturally it was almost four-thirty when the last stragglers wandered in. Walsh knew he ought to dress them down for their tardiness, but he had never been much good as a disciplinarian. He had reared three kids without once raising his voice, and he figured he could handle a half-dozen Metro detectives with equal self-restraint.

“Okay,” he said, silencing the chatter around the table, “now that we’re all here, we can get started.” Crisply he summarized the autopsy of Martha Eversol. “Anything new on the tats?” he asked when he had finished, directing his inquiry at Detectives Stark and Merriwether, who were working that angle.

“Nothing much,” Stark answered. “We’ve visited every tattoo parlor in town, and I mean every goddamn one. No hourglass patterns. A lot of snakes, flags, hearts with arrows through them.”

“And the style isn’t recognizable,” Merriwether added. “Most of the pros say it’s an amateur working with a homemade stencil, applying the ink by hand.”

“Like jailhouse tats?” Len Sotheby wondered. “Could mean our guy has a rap sheet.”

“No, not jailhouse. Those are almost always gray and black, ’cause the scratchers can’t get hold of any colored pigments. It’s what the experts call blackwork. What we’re looking at here is bold color in a geometrical design. They tell me it’s similar to the original tattoo technique used in the Pacific-the Philippines, Samoa, Tahiti, places like that. In Samoa it’s still done.”

“What is the technique exactly?” Walsh asked, jotting down notes.

“Traditionally, the artist takes a piece of bone and files one end to, like, a serrated edge-you know, like a comb. Then he attaches it to a wooden handle, dips the pointy end in pigment, and drives it into the skin with a mallet.”

Expressions of dismay and a grunted “ouch” made their way around the table.

“They tattoo every part of the body that way,” Merriwether went on imperturbably, “even the genitals. It’s a test of manhood.”

“Really?” Donna Cellini said with a smile. “That’s a test none of you guys would pass.”

Laughter broke through the temporary discomfort in the room.

“Anyway,” Merriwether said, “instead of chiseled bone, our guy has needles, and instead of soot and water, which the Polynesians and the Samoans used, he buys ink. It would take him maybe half an hour to apply the tattoo postmortem. He uses a 0.3-inch diameter needle for line work, 0.36 for coloring. Standard sizes, don’t lead us anywhere. The ink is standard too-couple hundred thousand bottles sold each year.”

“How about the hourglass design?” Walsh asked.

“It could be a stencil, which would speed up the process, but if so, it’s one he made himself, not a commercially available variety. The fact that it’s a geometric pattern-two triangles-might or might not be significant. The Polynesians were really into geometrical designs. They had this pottery done in what’s called the Lapita style, and they used the same designs when making tattoos. So our guy might be knowledgeable about ancient Polynesian culture, but it’s just as likely to be a coincidence. Most of the Polynesian designs were a lot more complicated than an hourglass. It was a real art form, the way they did it.”

“Sounds like you’re really getting into this stuff,” Ed Lopez remarked. “You sure you haven’t got ‘To Protect and Serve’ tattooed on your butt?”

“Ask your wife,” Merriwether responded placidly, to general amusement.

“Okay,” Walsh said, “since the tats are a dead end, I want you two to go back to working the index cards.”

“Shit,” Stark groused, “that got us nowhere. They’re ordinary three-by-five cards. You can buy ’em in any stationery store.”

“Work them anyway.” Walsh sank back in his seat. “Ed, Gary, you have any better luck with the victims’ background checks?”

Ed Lopez fielded the question. “We haven’t found anything that ties Nikki Carter to Martha Eversol.” Eversol had been assumed to be the Hourglass Killer’s second victim even before her body was found; the date of her disappearance had fit the pattern begun by Nikki Carter. “Checked out their doctors, dentists, employers and their colleagues at work, neighbors, landlords, boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, every damn thing we could think of. No links.”

“There’s supposed to be six degrees of separation between any two people on earth,” Gary Boyle added, “but not here.”

Walsh shook his head. “Donna and Len, give me some good news.”

Len Sotheby simply threw up his hands and said, “Nada.”

Donna Cellini was more forthcoming. “There are unsolved stranglings all over the map, obviously. But we didn’t find any parallel with the tattoos anywhere. Either our guy is new at this, or the tats are a new twist. I’m guessing the latter.”

Lopez asked why.

“Didn’t you read the profile?” Cellini sounded irritated. “It said the unsub was experienced.”

“Unsub,” Stark echoed with a smirk. The term was FBI jargon for Unknown Suspect. “Maybe you’ll be enrolling in Quantico before long, huh, Cellini?”

“At least I’d associate with a better class of people.”

“Any of the unsolved cases look promising?” Walsh asked.

Cellini consulted her notes. “There’s a bunch of stuff that has possibilities. Serial strangulations of prostitutes in Portland, Oregon, 1996 to 1998. A coyote-you know, a guy who smuggles illegals across the border-suspected of strangling female clients in the southern Arizona desert near Nogales, circa 1995. Never caught. Guy named Charles William Baron, real estate broker in Philadelphia, strangled his wife and his mistress in the same night and disappeared. Still at large. That happened in 1993.”

“He’s probably in South America by now,” Sotheby interjected. “He had a passport and overseas bank accounts.”

“Anything else?” Walsh pressed.

“Janitor who strangled three female students at a junior college in Nebraska, 1989 and 1990. Still on the loose. Strangler of children who roamed the Mojave Desert, 1985 and