Black notice (25 page)

Pit stood still and pondered this, his face screwed.up as if he were in pain. .

"Ibey got pupils, like eyes would?" he asked.

"No," I said, glancing at Chuck to see if he was in range of our conversation.

He was sitting on a couch, flipping through a magazine.

"Gosh," Pit said. "That's a hard one. No pupils. Can't think of anything without pupils if it's an animal or bird of some kind. Sounds to me you aren't talking flash. More likely it's custom."

He swept both hands over his shop, conducting his own orchestra of outrageous design.

"Now all that's sheets of flash," he said, "as opposed to a tattoo artist's original work, like Grime. I'm saying, you can look at some tattoos and recognize a particular style. No different than Van Gogh or Picasso. For example, I could spot a Jack Rudy or Tin Tin anywhere, most beautiful gray work you'll ever see."

Pit led me across the shop into what looked like a typical examining room in a doctor's office. It was equipped with an autoclave, ultrasonic cleaner, surgical soap, Biowrap, A & D ointment, tongue depressors and packs of sterile needles in big glass jars. The actual tattooing machine looked like something an electrologist would use, and there was a cart with squirt bottles of bright paints and caps for mixing. Central to all this was a gynecological chair. I supposed stirrups made it easier to work on legs and other parts of the body I didn't want to think about.

Pit spread a towel on a countertop, and we pulled on surgical gloves. He switched on a surgical lamp, pulling it close as I unscrewed the lid from the jar, my nose instantly assaulted by formalin's acrid bite. I dipped into the pink chemical and pulled out the block of skin. It was rubbery, the tissue permanently preserved, and Pit took it from me without pause and held it up in the light. He turned it this way and that and looked at it through a magnifying glass.

"Oh, yeah," he said. "I see those little suckers. Yup, there's claws holding on a branch. If you kinda lift the image out of the background, you can see the tail feathers."

"A bird?"

"It's a bird all right," he said. "Maybe an owl. You know, it's the eyes that jump out at you, and I think they were bigger than this at one time. The shading gives it away. Right here."

I leaned closer, his gloved finger moving over the skin in brushstrokes.

"See it?" No.

"It's very faint. Eyes have dark circles, like a bandit, sort of, kind of uneven, not very skillfully drawn. Someone tried to make them a whole lot smaller, and there's stripes radiating out from the edges of the bird. You wouldn't notice it unless you've worked with this sort of thing before, because all of it's so dark, you know, in such bad shape.

"But if you really scrutinize, you can see it's darker and heavier around the eyes, for lack of anything to call them. Yup. The more I look at it, I think it's an owl, and the yellow dots are a messy attempt to cover them up by turning them into owl eyes. Or something like owl eyes."

I was beginning to see the stripes, the feathers in the dark shading he was describing, and the way the bright yellow eyes were lined with dark ink as if someone had wanted to make them smaller.

"Someone gets something with yellow dots, doesn't want it anymore arid has something else put on top of it," Pit said. "Since the top layer of skin's gone, most of the new tattoo-the owl--came off. I guess the needles didn't go in as deep on that one. But they went in real deep with the yellow dots. A lot deeper than necessary, which tells me two different artists are involved."

He studied the block of skin some more.

"You can never really cover up an old tattoo," he resumed. "But if you know what you're doing, you can work over and around it so the eye is taken away from it. That's the trick. I guess you could almost call it an, optical illusion."

"Is there any way we can figure out what the yellow eyes might originally have been part of?" I asked him.

Pit looked disappointed and sighed.

"It's just a damn shame it's in such bad shape," he muttered, placing the skin on the towel and blinking several times. "Man, those fumes will get you. How do you work around that all the time?"

"Very, very carefully," :I said. "Would you mind if I use your phone?"

"Help yourself."

I stepped behind the counter, keeping an uneasy eye on Taxi as she sat up in her bed. She stared at me as if daring me to make one move she didn't like.

"It's okay," I told her in a soothing voice. "Pit? Is it all right if I page someone and give him this, number?"

"It ain't a secret. Help yourself."

"You're a good girl." I encouraged Taxi to be one as I stepped around the counter to use .the phone.

Her small, dull eyes reminded me of a shark's, her head hick and triangular like a snake's. She looked like something primitive that had evolved no further since the beginning of time, and I thought of what was written on the box inside the container.

"Could it be a wolf?" I said to Pit. "Even a werewolf?"

Pit sighed again, the hard work of payday weekend shadowing his eyes.

"Well, wolves are real popular. You know, pack instinct, lone wolf," he told me. "Hard to cover up one of those with a bird, an owl or whatever."

"Yeah:' Marino's voice came over the line.

"Hell, it could be so many things." Pit kept on talking loudly. "Coyote, dog, cat. Whatever's got a furry coat and yellow eyes with no pupils. Had to be small to cover it up with an owl, though. Real small."

"Who the hell is that talking about a furry coat?" Marino rudely asked.

I told him where I was and why, Pit rambling on all the while, pointing out all sorts of furry flash on a wall.

"Great."- Marino got mad right away. "Why don't you get one while you're there."

"Maybe another time."

"I can't believe you would go to a tattoo parlor alone. You got an idea the kind of people who go in a place like that? Drug dealers, assholes out on parole, motorcycle gangs.11'41t's all right."

"Oh, no, it ain't all right!' Marino erupted.

He was upset about something that went beyond my visiting a tattoo parlor.

"What's wrong, Marino?"

"Not a damn thing unless you consider being suspended without pay something wrong."

"There's nojustification for that," I angrily said, although I'd been afraid it was inevitable.

"Bray thinks so. I guess I ruined her dinner last night.

She says if I do one more thing, I'm fired. The good news is I'm having fun thinking what the one more thing is I might decide to do."

"Hey! Let me show you something," Pit called out to me from across the room.

"We'll do something about this," I promised Marino.

'Yeah."

Taxi's eyes followed me as I hung up and picked my way around her. I scanned the flash on the wall and only felt worse. I wanted the tattoo to be a wolf, a werewolf, a small one, when in fact it could be something else entirely and probably was. I couldn't tolerate it when a question remained unanswered, when science and rational thinking went as far as they could go and quit.

1 couldn't remember ever feeling this discouraged and unsettled. The walls seemed to move in on me and sheets of flash jumped out like demons. Daggers through hearts and skulls, gravestones, skeletons, evil animals and ghastly ghouls played "Ring Around the Rosie" with me.

"Why do people want to wear death?" I raised my voice and Taxi raised her head. "Isn't living with it enough? Why would someone want to spend the rest of his life looking at death on his arm?"

Pit shrugged and didn't seem bothered in the least that I was questioning his art.

"See," he said, "when you think about it, Doc, there's nothing to fear but fear. So people want death tattoos so they won't be afraid of death. It's kind of like people who are terrified by snakes and then touch one in the zoo. In a way, you wear death every day, too," he said to me. "Don't you think you might fear it more if you didn't look at it every day?"

I didn't know how to answer that.

"See, you got a piece of a dead person's skin in that jar and you're not afraid of it," he went on. "But someone else walking in here and seeing that would probably scream or puke. Now, I'm no psychologist"-he vigorously chewed gum-"but there's something real important behind what someone chooses to have permanently drawn on his body. So you take this dead guy? That owl says something about him. What went on inside him. Most of all, .what he was scared of, which may have more to do with whatever's under that owl."

"It would seem that quite a lot of your clients are afraid of voluptuous naked women," I commented.

Pit chewed his gum as if it were trying to get away, and he pondered what I'd said for a moment.

"Hadn't thought about that one," he said, "but it fits. Most of these guys with nudies all over them are really scared of women. Scared. of the emotional part."

Chuck had turned on the TV and was watching Rosie O'Donnell, the volume low. I had seen thousands of tattoos on bodies, but I had never thought of them as a symbol of fear. Pit tapped the lid of the jar of formaliu.

"Ibis guy was afraid of something," he said. "Looks like he might have had a good reason to be."

I'd been home only long enough to hang up my coat and drop my briefcase by the door when the telephone rang. It was twenty minutes past eight, and my first thought was Lucy. The only update I'd gotten was that Jo would be transferred to MCV sometime this weekend.

I was frightened and becoming resentful. No matter what policies, protocols or judgment dictated, Lucy could contact me. She could let me know she and Jo were all right. She could tell me where she was.

I quickly grabbed the phone and was both surprised and uneasy when former Deputy Chief Al Carson's voice came over the line. I knew he would not contact me, especially at home, unless it was very important, the news very bad.

"I'm not supposed to be doing this but someone has to," he said right off. "There's been a homicide at the Quik Cary. That convenience store off Cary, near Libbie. You know which one I mean? Kind of a neighborhood market?"

He was talking rapidly and nervously. He sounded scared.

"Yes," I said. "It's close to my house."

I picked up a clipboard and began writing notes on a call sheet.

"An apparent robbery. Somebody came in, cleaned out the drawer and shot the clerk. A female."

I thought of the videotape I had looked at yesterday.

"When did this happen?" I asked.

"We think she got shot not more than an hour ago. I'm calling you myself because your office doesn't know yet."

I paused, not quite sure what he meant. In fact, what he'd just said couldn't possibly be right.

"I called Marino, too," he went on. "I guess there's nothing more they can do to me anymore."

"What do you mean my office doesn't know yet?" I asked.

"Police aren't supposed to be calling the M. E. anymore until we finish with the scene. Until the crime techs do, and they're just now getting there. So it could be hours . . ."

"Where the hell is this coming from?" I asked, although I knew.

"Dr. Scarpetta, I was pretty much forced to resign, but I would have anyway," Carson told me. "There are changes I can't live with. You know my guys have always gotten along really well with your office. But Bray's put in all these new people-what she did to Marino, that was enough to make me quit right there. But what matters right now is this makes two convenience store killings in a month. I don't want anything messed up. If it's the same guy, he's gonna do it again."

I called Fielding at home and told him what was going on.

"You want me to . . . ?" he started to say.

"No," I cut him off. "I'm going right now. We're getting goddamn screwed, Jack."

I drove fast. Bruce Springsteen was singing "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town," and I thought of Bray. I had never really hated anyone before. Hate was poison. I had always resisted it. To hate was to lose, and it was all I could do right now to resist the heat of its flames.

The news came on, the homicide the lead story, covered live at the scene.

". . . in what is the second convenience store murder in three weeks. Deputy Chief Bray, what can you tell us?"

"Details are sketchy at this time," her voice sounded inside my car. "We do know that several hours earlier, an unknown suspect entered the Quik Cary here and robbed it and shot the clerk."

My car phone rang.

"Where are you?" Marino said.

"Getting close to Libbie.deg'

"I'm going to pull into the Cary Town parking lot. I need to tell you what's going on because nobody's gonna tell you the time of day when you get there."

"We'll see about that."

Minutes later, I turned into the small shopping center and parked in front of Schwarzchild Jewelers, where Marino was sitting in his truck. Then he was inside my car, wearing jeans and boots, and a scuffed leather coat with a broken zipper and fleece lining as bald as his head. He had splashed on a lot of cologne, meaning he had been drinking beer. He tossed a cigarette butt and red ashes sailed through the night.