No one pointed out that it hadn’t been a high-profile case until now, until the sensational headline.

“Look, boss, the horse is out of the barn,” Kovac said. “We’ve just got to deal with this and go forward. I need manpower. We’ve got to identify this vic. All I’ve got to go on at this point is a tattoo. I need people canvassing the local ink shops. I need eyes going over the other cases, looking for some kind of thread.”

“You want a task force.”

“I don’t care what you call it.”

“Our hand is being forced now,” Kasselmann said. “The public is going to expect a task force. The media is going to be crawling up our asses like cheap underwear. You know how this goes. You went through this with the Cremator cases. You want to do that again?”

“Like I want a colonoscopy,” Kovac admitted. “I just want to run my investigation. I want the time and the warm bodies to do it right. Why should anybody be against that?”

Kasselmann pushed to his feet. “Because it costs money. Because a multi-agency task force is a logistical nightmare. Because it draws the wrong kind of attention—”

Liska stepped back into the fray. “And a dead girl with no face doesn’t? With all due respect, sir, that is fucked-up.”

The captain gave her a hard-eyed stare. Liska pushed it right back at him. Kovac held his breath, feeling like he was caught between a she-wolf and an angry bull.

Kasselmann blinked first. He looked at Kovac. “Set up a room. You get Tippen and Elwood for starters. The rest remains to be seen. I have a meeting to get to.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And I don’t want anybody talking to the press about anything. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Redistribute whatever other cases you’ve got going on that aren’t a priority.”

“Yes, sir,” Kovac said, wondering just which murder on his caseload wasn’t a priority and how he would explain that to the families involved. Maybe he would foist off some of his assaults on a couple of the younger guys.

He put the matter to the back of his mind and herded Liska out of the captain’s office and past the cubicles, steering her into the conference room he and Tippen had set up the night before.

“Do I need to inject coffee into you intravenously?” he asked, shrugging out of his sport coat. “Or would you prefer the hair of the dog? In which case we should leave the building because, despite all evidence to the contrary, I would prefer not to be fired and lose my pension.”

“I’m not hungover.”

Kovac raised an eyebrow as he rolled up his shirtsleeves. “How long have we known each other?”

“All right,” she admitted grudgingly as she slipped out of her wool blazer and hung it on the back of a chair. “I’m a little hungover. And I haven’t slept in two days,” she confessed, melting into a chair at the long table. “I thought a glass of wine might help.”

“A glass?”

“A glass . . . as in bottle. Red wine is good for you,” she added defensively.

“Yeah, you’re the freaking picture of health here. Is this still to do with Kyle?”

She pulled in a long breath and let it back out. “Yes. Speed tried to talk to him last night, but he didn’t get anywhere.”

Kovac perched a hip on the table, settling in to offer his sage wisdom. “You’re not going to know everything that goes on in a teenage boy’s life, Tinks. Trust me, you don’t want to know.”

She gave him a look. “Oh, that’s reassuring. Thanks.”

“What I mean to say is, he’s fifteen. He’s not a little boy anymore.”

“He’s not a man either.”

“He’s a guy now. Guys have their own shit going on that they aren’t going to share with their mothers—unless they’re weird or gay.”

“Spoken like a guy.”

“See?” he said. “I wouldn’t tell you my shit either.”

“You don’t have any shit to tell about.”

“That’s beside the point.”

“You don’t get it, Sam,” she said. “Do you know the stuff kids get into today? Drugs, guns, sex. Every day is like another chapter in Lord of the Flies.”

“At the pansy-ass private brainiac school,” Kovac said. “PSI is not exactly the mean streets. I mean, what are the gangs in that school? The math club versus the science club?” He sat back and held his hands up as if to fend off an attacker. “Ooooooo . . . Look out! They’re packing fountain pens and slide rules!”

Liska tried to rally up a sense of humor, but the attempted smile looked more like a result of gas pain.

“Slide rules went out with the dinosaurs, T. rex.”

“Whatever.”

“I just don’t want to see him make a hard mistake,” she admitted. A sheen of uncharacteristic tears brightened her eyes. “He’s my baby, Sam. I look at him and I see him when he was two, when he was five, when he was ten. I don’t want him to grow up. I don’t want him to get hurt.”

“But we all do, Tinks,” Kovac said gently. “That’s part of the deal. We grow up. We make mistakes and we learn from them. That’s how it works.

“Look at the two of us,” he said. “We smoked weed and drank ’til we puked, and had sex, and flunked algebra. Look how we turned out. We’re not dead. We’re not in prison. We’ve lived long enough to fuck up a million more times.

“He got in a fight,” he said. “No lives were lost. Let it go. You can’t keep him on a leash like a dog.”

“It’s so hard.” She put her elbows on the table and rubbed her hands over her face, messing up her makeup.

“Jesus Christ,” Kovac grumbled with a phony gruffness meant to cover his actual concern. He dug a clean handkerchief out of his hip pocket and offered it to her. “Now you look like the Joker. Go fix yourself, and put your cop face on. We’ve got work to do.”

Taking the handkerchief, she swept it under each eye and around her mouth, scrubbing off smeared mascara and lipstick. She looked up at the wall with the victim photos, seeing it for the first time and looking like she welcomed the distraction. “What’s all this?”

“Tip and I did this last night. We wanted to hit the ground running today.”

He moved off the table for a closer look at the photographs.

“You’ve got a kid with a black eye,” he said, tapping a finger beneath the sickening close-up of what was left of the face of Zombie Doe. “Someone out there has a daughter who looks like this. Count yourself lucky and get your head in the game, kiddo.”

Tippen stuck his homely head in the door. “Are we a go?”

“One way or another,” Kovac said.

The detective walked in, tossed a bag of bagels on the table, and arched a brow at Liska. “Did you spend the night in the drunk tank or is this a new look for you?”

She flipped him off.

“Admitting you have a problem is the first step,” he said, then turned to Kovac. “Sonya e-mailed me her first piece. It’s going up on her blog this morning as soon as we give it the thumbs-up.”

“Who’s Sonya?” Liska asked, grabbing an iced coffee from the carrier Elwood brought in with him.

“Tip’s niece,” Kovac said.

“God help her,” Liska muttered. “I always figured you for someone’s creepy uncle, Tip.”

“She’s some kind of cyberjournalist,” Kovac explained. “Our liaison to the victim pool.”

“She’s got a lot of readers,” Tippen said. “And contacts. She’s hooked in to every online page the sixteen- to twentysomethings read. Web news sites, Facebook, Twitter. And she’s reaching out to people she knows in the tattoo business.”

“She says the tattoo on our vic is the Chinese symbol for acceptance,” Kovac explained to the others as he stood looking at the close-up he had taped to the wall with the rest of the autopsy photos. “She has the same thing on her arm. Apparently, it’s something the young people are doing these days to make a statement.”

“For kids the victim’s age, that’s not even legal in this state,” Tippen pointed out. “Minors can’t get tattoos, even with parental consent.”

“Thank God,” Liska said, digging a cinnamon-raisin bagel out of the bag. “Kyle wanted a tattoo for his last birthday. I said absolutely not until he runs away and joins the circus.”