Blake Pierce - Face of Fear

Zoe clicked his name on the system to go through to the records of the investigation. She was still waiting for the page to load in when Shelley spoke up. To the surprise of none, any and all search engines on the internet worked quicker than the county police system.

“Here’s something. Clay Jackson memorial social media page. It has a smattering of posts every year on the anniversary of his death and birthdays, but there’s pictures, too. He had a lot of tattoos.”

“A lot?”

“More than Callie. And I think I might recognize one or two of them as having particular street meaning. This gang theory could hold some water.”

Zoe snorted, shaking her head. She got up to look over Shelley’s shoulder, taking in the images of Clay Jackson. He was six foot one, a hundred and forty pounds in his last images. Strung out, barely eating between fixes. He had the look of someone who had been fit and healthy, muscular, before his addiction took over his life. He was slowly shrinking in the photographs. He had never followed that course through to its conclusion—he was killed midway through the transformation.

“Why do criminals do that?” she asked.

“Do what?”

“Mark themselves out for us. Make it easy with their gang tattoos.”

“I don’t think that’s the point of the practice,” Shelley said, giving her a wry smile over her own shoulder. “It’s social conformity. Showing that you belong to a particular group. Sometimes, the boost of loyalty and companionship that someone gets from that sense of belonging overrides the need to protect themselves or the logic to avoid arrest.”

“I would never get a gang tattoo. Even if it was a requirement for joining the gang. In fact, especially so if that was the case. What a stupid rule to have.”

Shelley swiveled her chair slightly, giving Zoe an amused look now. “You wouldn’t join a gang anyway, would you? It would require a lot of small talk. I don’t think you would like that.”

“I would not get a tattoo under any circumstance, anyway,” Zoe replied, pointing out the other part of the problem with what she had said. “I do not understand why anyone would. What could possibly be so significant that it requires inking onto the body in a permanent fashion?”

“You really don’t like tattoos, do you?”

Zoe couldn’t tell if Shelley was laughing at her or not. “They are a mark of lower intelligence. Offenders are far more statistically likely to have tattoos than law-abiding citizens are. And after time passes, they inevitably look stupid. Why are you smiling like that?”

“Because there’s something about me that you don’t know.” Shelley pushed her chair a little way back from her desk and lifted her foot up onto the seat of her chair. Before Zoe had a chance to protest or ask her what she was doing, Shelley had lifted up the hem of her trousers to reveal the bare skin on her lower leg.

A miniature poppy was etched there, in brilliant red and black, almost realistic enough for Zoe to think she could reach out and pluck it.

“You have a tattoo?” Zoe said, even though it was stating the obvious. It was too much of a shock. She would never have imagined Shelley to be someone who would defile her body with ink.

“Still looks pretty good, I think,” Shelley said. She was smiling, and though Zoe thought it might be good-naturedly, she couldn’t completely tell. “I got it when I was in college. My grandmother’s name was Poppy. After she passed, I thought it might be a nice way to remember her.”

Zoe returned to her own chair and sank down into it. She felt like the wind had been blown out of her sails. “Do you have any others?”

“No,” Shelley laughed. “This one hurt like hell. I swore off them after that.”

“I did not know about… this part of you.”

“What part? The criminal, low intelligence part?”

Zoe swallowed. She may have struggled with human emotions and social norms a lot of the time, but she knew this: there was an apology owed.

“I did not mean that about you,” she said. “I did not know that…”

“You made an assumption,” Shelley said. “I know you don’t think I’m a bad person, so you must see already that your assumption wasn’t totally correct. It’s not just criminals and idiots who get tattoos.”

Zoe nodded, measuring her words carefully. “I concede that a mark of respect and remembrance toward a lost loved one may also be a valid reason to commit to such a thing.”

“That’s progress, at least,” Shelley said. She was still smiling, and Zoe got the feeling that it was still at her expense. But she had messed up and said something that might have been hurtful, so that seemed fair. “How’s your search going?”

Zoe took the unsubtle hint and returned to her monitor, where Clay Jackson’s police records had finally loaded. She gave a low whistle, shaking her head at the sheer length of the results that had come up. “He has a record, all right. Looks as though he was affiliated with a local gang as we suspected.”

Now it was Shelley’s turn to come over and lean over Zoe’s shoulder. They read the results together. They didn’t tell a pretty tale.

Clay Jackson had been a member of a gang in LA, a notorious street crew who were heavily involved in the trade of illegal drugs, amongst other things. The kind of drugs that Callie had been messing around with. It wasn’t hard to see where she might have gotten her supply.

Clay’s tattoos were just the start of it. He was a key member of the gang, suspected of leading attacks on rival turf and of being the mastermind behind several deals that went down to connect the gang with suppliers and buyers. He had multiple cautions, for drug possession and for possession of weapons, each of which was followed by an actual arrest and various punishments. He had spent some time in jail, in and out after a few months each time, never quite getting caught badly enough to go down for good.

Until the moment it had all ended—gunned down in an alleyway, his body left in a bloody heap to be discovered by the police after shots were reported by residents in the area. There was never any real evidence as to who did it, only circumstantial links and suspicions, which were easily visible in the pattern of interviews and arrests that followed the crime.

“Look at this,” Zoe pointed out, tapping on her screen. “The only charge they managed to make stick during the entire investigation was possession of an illegal firearm. The guy they thought was most likely to have done it, only they could not prove it. This was all they could get him for. He got five years.”

“Search him up,” Shelley said. “What’s his name? Cesar Diaz?”

“That is right,” Zoe replied, waiting for the page to load again. “His gang had close links with Mexican smugglers. It seems they would have been fighting over territory. Who got the right to sell in that area.”

“It all fits. If Clay was a big shot in his organization, getting new deals and closing new sales, then their rivals would have wanted him taken out in particular. Make a big statement about who owns what.”

Cesar Diaz’s information blinked up on the screen.

They both read the latest update, then paused and looked at one another.

This was big.

“Cesar Diaz was paroled a few months ago,” Shelley said, voicing it out loud.

“Cesar Diaz is out on the streets, and maybe looking for revenge. It explains Callie. Erase the things Clay cared about in order to make a noise about being back, show that he has not softened. That he is still in charge.”

“But what about John Dowling? That still doesn’t make sense to me.” Shelley frowned. “Is there any connection between John and Cesar?”