Blake Pierce - Face of Fear

“There is one thing they have in common,” Zoe said, tapping the pictures. “Tattoos. Dowling had a tiger on his left bicep. Everard had a rose on her right thigh, picked out in dotwork. She was on her way to see a friend about getting another one, too.”

Shelley shrugged. “Does that really warrant a connection? A lot of people have tattoos.”

Zoe was flipping through more photos, noticing more marks on areas of skin that were visible in different shots. They were almost all taken from the victims’ social media profiles, and it looked as though they were both proud of their tattoos. Of showing them off. Did that mean something? “It was not just one tattoo each. Look. Both of them were covered in them. Dowling had the whole of one leg done, right down to the foot. And Everard, here, on her back and stomach.”

“I still don’t know that it means anything. It’s just a cultural thing nowadays.”

Zoe wrinkled her nose. “A cultural thing?”

“Yeah. You haven’t noticed? A lot of people are getting inked in their early twenties now. Covering their whole bodies. Even faces and hands. There’ve been a lot of celebrities getting it done. Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, you know? Rappers and singers and sports players. It’s considered cool right now.”

“Face and hand tattoos sound like remarkably bad ideas,” Zoe said, making a face. “Imagine never being able to hide the mistake that you made at a young age, of choosing to get something stupid put onto your body forever.”

“There must be some kind of connection between them somewhere,” Shelley breezed on. “I’m betting it would be in their personal lives. Maybe they both knew the same people, somewhere in their lives. A bar or a club, a group of friends, a cousin who knew a cousin. Maybe they were at the same event together without even knowing it. We just have to keep digging until we get to it.”

Zoe nodded. “Well, then, I know where we should start.” She lifted Callie Everard’s file, made a note of the address listed in it. “The friend she was going to see: Javier Santos.”

Zoe walked around the small studio space, taking in the illustrations and drawings that littered every possible surface. Whether Javier was talented or not was for someone else who had more interest in the arts to say. The fact that he was prolific, however, was not up for debate.

“These are all for tattoos?” she asked, scanning them mentally.

“Yeah, sure.” Javier nodded. “Most of them have been used. I can whip you up something unique, though, if you’d like.”

Zoe shot him a look to see if he was joking. He seemed earnest, which was worse.

“I do not think so,” she said, settling for these simple words and hoping that he would not press the issue. She would not like to spoil the interview before it even properly kicked off by telling him exactly what she thought of people who would get tattoos.

Especially tattoos like these: random, indiscriminate pieces of art. Zoe could understand someone liking the cartoonish form of a woman’s face as a piece of art, something to put on a wall or in a book. But to have it inked onto one’s body for the rest of your life? To wear this person’s face—this fictional person, who meant nothing to you or to anyone else, who was only born from an artist’s random daydreams?

It was strange beyond measure, and she did not know if she could trust someone who would be willing to make a permanent statement out of something so meaningless.

“Suit yourself.” Javier shrugged, apparently not bothered by her disinterest. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with the design I made for Callie. I was thinking about putting it on myself, but that might be kinda weird.”

“Why so?” Zoe asked, latching onto his words. In her experience, if someone involved in a murder case thought that something seemed “weird,” it was usually worth checking out.

“Well, it was a memoriam piece in the first place. Look, I’ll show you.” Javier began rooting around on a desk littered with stray scraps of designs on tracing paper, and pulled out a more finished-looking design on an artist’s pad. It was inked with heavy black strokes, outlining the shape of a bird in flight.

“What is it?” Zoe asked, ignoring the dirty look that Javier shot her for not immediately getting his art.

“It’s a raven. Based on the myth of Muninn,” he began.

“From the Old Norse, memory,” Zoe cut him off. Here, at least, she could demonstrate that she knew something. “A bird who attended the god Odin. This is why you called it a memoriam piece.”

“That and the flowers.” Javier pointed to sprays of flowers behind the black bird, carefully colored in shades of lilac and violet. “They’re zinnias, representing the memory of a lost friend.”

“In whose memory?” Shelley asked softly, examining the design from over Zoe’s shoulder.

“An old friend.” Javier twisted his mouth, shrugged. “An old boyfriend, really. Back when Callie was, um…”

“On drugs?” Zoe supplied. She sensed Shelley physically wince slightly beside her, but did not react. What was the point in beating around the bush? They all knew what they were talking about. It was no secret to any of them.

“Yeah,” Javier said, one of his hands going up to rub the back of his neck. “I was going to say in with a bad crowd, but yeah.”

“What’s the story?” Shelley asked. Her tone was much more sympathetic than Zoe’s had been. Somehow, she had the knack of asking those same direct questions but making them sound so much… nicer.

“He was bad news. One of the group that got her into drugs in the first place. From what I understand, if they weren’t stoned, they were drunk. And if they weren’t stoned or drunk, they were snorting coke in the bathrooms and screwing each other.” Javier shook his head, taking a deep breath. “Sorry. I don’t like thinking of her like that. That’s not who she really is. Who she’s been, these past years that I’ve known her.”

“She got herself cleaned up after college, isn’t that right?” Shelley asked.

“Right. I helped. She couldn’t afford the rehab at first, so we did an art fair. Raised some money for her, me and some of the others from our class. We stayed in touch since then.”

“This ex-boyfriend,” Zoe pressed, trying to keep him on track.

“He was killed, I think. Or, I don’t know. Callie didn’t like to talk about him much back then. The past few years, she started to come to terms with it, move on. I think she’d finally accepted that he was bad for her, toxic. But that what they had also mattered. That’s why the flowers. Not lost love, but just a lost friend.”

Killed? That sparked Zoe’s attention in a very real way. “Do you know what the circumstances of his death were?”

“It wasn’t an overdose. The police were investigating, but I don’t know if they ever caught anyone. That’s it. That’s all I know.”

Zoe mused on the idea. It would be a very tempting thread, if first this mysterious boyfriend was murdered and then Callie. All they needed to do was find a connection to Dowling, and they’d have something. Maybe something to do with the drugs.

Shelley said it was all just popular culture, but the tattoos… Zoe had never been a fan. They represented a subsection of society that she more often saw behind bars than in respectable positions. You couldn’t get a good job with a tattoo. Certainly couldn’t be in law enforcement, not with prison teardrops on your face or your kid’s name all across your throat.

The tattoo that Javier had designed for Callie was big. Seven point three inches, top to bottom. It wasn’t something you would be able to hide away. It was designed to be seen. People with visible tattoos, like hers and like Dowling’s—they weren’t usually good people.