“You want to explain to me what you’re doing in the damned bull’s-eye of this case?”
“Not my fault,” Michael said into his phone. Detective Mason Callahan could bitch all he wanted, but Michael knew the man held a grudging respect for him. And vice versa.
“I could swear I told you to stay away from the Jacobs woman.”
Michael ignored him. “They told you he beat her up pretty good?”
“Yeah, she okay?”
“She will be.” Michael leaned against the fender of his truck, twisting to catch sight of Jamie. She still sat on her lawn, the Mylar blanket next to her on the grass, trying to recall the tats she’d seen. A cop handed her a bottled water and squatted beside her as she sketched, studying her drawing.
“I was told the attacker wanted to know the whereabouts of Chris Jacobs. And that he told her he’d made the scars on her brother’s face.”
“That’s right,” said Michael. “And threatened to do the same to her.”
“Doesn’t mean he’s the one who actually made the marks on her brother. It was even in newspaper articles back then that the boy had been burned with cigarettes,” Callahan stated.
Michael didn’t have an answer for that.
“What reason could he have to want her brother if it’s not because Chris might get some of his memory back and identify him?” Michael argued.
“Maybe he owes him money,” Callahan quipped.
“Fuck you.”
Callahan laughed. “I’ll interview Jamie. Hear what she has to say.”
Michael wasn’t done. “She thinks he was in his late forties, maybe early fifties. That’d put him at the right age to pull that shit twenty years ago.”
“I’m not saying he didn’t. Christ, Brody. I’ll follow up. Right now I’ve got a stack of children’s autopsy reports on my desk. I take a break from reading them every fifteen minutes to go punch the wall, I get so pissed. After I get through those reports, I have a smaller stack from the pit with the adult remains. I’ll make you a deal. I’ll swap jobs with you. You read, and I’ll drive around town in the sun, getting a tan and sticking my nose into other people’s business.”
“I get it, Callahan.”
The detective’s voice lowered. “I’ll get to her, Brody. I want the bastard as bad as you do.”
“Impossible,” Michael muttered.
“Too bad he’s so average looking. Nothing really stands out visually.”
“What?” Michael stood straighter. “Didn’t they mention the tattoos?”
“Tattoos?” Callahan asked sharply.
“Tats on the backs of his wrists. Jamie got the impression they went a lot farther up his arms.”
Callahan’s swearing made Michael pull the phone away from his ear.
“What?” Michael said when Callahan stopped to catch a breath. “What the fuck is up with the tats?”
“We’ve got pictures.”
“Pictures? Pictures from what?”
Callahan had turned away from his phone and was urgently talking to someone in the background.
“Callahan. What pictures?” Michael spoke through clenched teeth.
“Lusco’s pulling them up. Fucking pervert.”
“Lusco?” Michael could hear the other detective’s voice in the background now.
“No, Jamie’s attacker.”
Michael was ready to strangle the detective. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
Callahan cleared his throat. “We found pictures in the bunker. Old Polaroids. Sick Polaroids. They weren’t even hidden. They were just left on one of the shelves for anyone to find.”
Michael’s stomach turned to pure acid. Daniel?
“The creep took some nasty pics of those kids. His hands, or someone’s hands, show in some of them. There’re tats on the wrists.”
“His wrists?”
“Yeah, they don’t look like they go up his arms. Forearms are clear. It’s just a few Asian characters on the backs of the wrists. Pretty big, though. About an inch and a half in diameter.”
“You can’t see his face?” Michael asked. His head suddenly felt weightless. He leaned on his elbows on his hood, head down.
“Not of him. Just the kids. Nothing else shows of the adult.”
Michael didn’t want to know any more. No details. His brain was supplying too many details of its own.
“What’d Jamie say the tattoos looked like?” Callahan asked.
“She didn’t say. She’s working on some sketches with the cops. I don’t know if she saw specifics. She said there were a lot of them.”
“He could have added to them.”
“Hang on, Callahan.” Michael strode over to the lawn where Jamie sat. “Hey, princess, you come up with any images yet?”
Jamie gave him a weak smile. “Don’t call me princess, please.” She looked down at her paper. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I can’t picture them.”
“I told her to start with just colors,” the cop next to her said. “Then add stark lines or shapes.”
“Let me see.” Michael held his hand out for the paper.
It appeared she’d traced her own hands and wrists for the outlines. She’d made muted multicolored swirls that started at mid-forearm and spread nearly to the knuckles. The colors intensified on the backs of the hands. Blues, reds, greens.
Directly on the wrists, over the colors, she’d drawn thick black crisscrossing slashes, like pound signs.
Acid from Michael’s stomach burned up his esophagus.
“It’s him,” he said into the phone. “We’ll be downtown in thirty minutes.”