“What do I think what is?” Schilling searched the screen for some kind of revelation.
James lowered his face to her forearm. “Hm.” He stood up and looked at the screen, paused for a few moments, and then bent over her arm again.
“What is it?” Catherine asked, confused. “What do you see?”
“It’s some type of scratch.” James erected himself. “But it’s a lot easier to see in the picture than it is on her. You guys don’t see it?”
They each shook their head.
James spilled the file onto a nearby empty exam table. “That.” He thrust a finger onto the hardcopy of the picture that appeared on the screen.
“Huh.” Schilling picked up the photo and held it away from his aging eyes. The lines in his forehead deepened, his expression growing more puzzled. “Some sort of strange ridges on top of one of the tree limbs.” He passed the picture to Pierce.
Her cheeks slowly turned pink. “Fuck me. Good eye, Graham. I’m pissed I missed it.”
“You can make up for it by helping me get a better look at those ridges.”
A smile tipped the corners of her mouth.
“We need to see this part of the tattoo.” His finger floated over the victim’s forearm, circling the area of interest.
Catherine rotated the arm so the palm was flat against the table. Gnarled branches continued on the back of the arm, and James examined them closely. “Now they’re easier to see.”
“Looks like they’re supposed to be part of the tattoo.” Schilling’s sour coffee breath hit the back of James’s neck as he spoke. “But you can’t see any ink.”
James lifted his gaze to meet Pierce’s. “Do you have any idea what these marks are?”
Her short bob bounced as she shook her head. “To be honest, I was hoping you would know.”
? ? ?
James drummed his fingers on his desk as he perused web pages for clues. They came back to the station after visiting the M.E.’s office to fill out some paperwork and so James could get his car. That had been three hours ago. Most of the officers and other detectives had cleared out. Only a few remained hunched over their keyboards sipping energy drinks while quietly mumbling to themselves. Finished for the night, Schilling sat at his desk across from James fidgeting impatiently. James tried unsuccessfully to ignore him.
“You don’t have to wait for me,” he said without taking his gaze off of the monitor. “But if you’re going to sit there, you could always straighten up all of those piles. They look like they’re about to topple over.” The suggestion sounded harsher than he meant, but he didn’t apologize.
Folders, fishing magazines, pale yellow Post-it notes, and newspapers from every day for the past two weeks covered Schilling’s desk. In comparison to James’s neatly organized and labeled workspace, it was a mess.
“You do know pretty much everything you have on there you can look at online?” James added.
Schilling eyeballed the heaps and grumbled. “Rookie cop mistake number seventy-three.”
“I’m not a rookie,” James said under his breath.
“Look Graham, sometimes you just got to know when to stop for the night. You need sleep. Hell, we both do. Cases like this aren’t solved in one day, so there’s no point in driving yourself crazy searching for needles in haystacks.” Schilling stood and draped his jacket over his arm. “The body’s not going anywhere. We’ll find out more tomorrow.”
“You ever see anything like that before?” he asked before Schilling started for the exit.
Schilling leaned against the back of his chair and thought for a moment. “I’ve seen a lot of things more brutal, but nothing so calculated.”
“It’s going to happen again, and it’s probably happened before.”
Schilling bristled. “Now don’t rush to an assumption. You start doing that, and you’re likely to twist all the evidence to support it. Rookie mistake number forty-one.”
“It’s specific and calculated, like you said. He practically left his signature on the body and washed away any other evidence. That kind of thing doesn’t randomly happen one time. I guarantee it wasn’t his first.” James turned his attention back to the computer screen.
“I will say that he seems to have gone through a lot of trouble.”
“Hey, I think I found something,” James said.
“What is it?” Schilling tossed his coat on his desk and pulled out his chair. It squeaked and sank a few inches under his weight.
“At first I was focusing on the meaning behind the tree, but that led me nowhere. Nothing seemed to make any sense. So I changed gears and started researching tattoos. More specifically, the types of ink used.”
“To explain the ridges found on the vic?” Schilling asked, wheeling his creaky chair next to James.
“Exactly.” James rotated the monitor to accommodate his partner. “And I found a type of tattoo ink that’s pretty much invisible in normal light, but when it’s put under a UV light, it glows.”