“It’s an artistic form of self-expression,” Elwood said. “Tattoos are a road map of the bearer’s personal journey.”

“The kid who works the counter nights at my local convenience store has a tat of a snake wrapped around his throat,” Kovac said. “Apparently, his personal journey took a detour through hell.”

“Possibly,” Elwood said seriously.

“The girl I work out with at the gym has a leprechaun on her stomach,” Liska said. “She’s twenty-two and you could bounce quarters off her abs. She thinks it’s cute. I wonder how cute she’ll think it is after she’s had a couple of kids and the thing has morphed into Larry the Cable Guy.”

“Not everyone gives their choice as much consideration as they should,” Elwood conceded. “Each of my tattoos has a deep personal meaning.”

Kovac made a face. “Please don’t tell us where they are on your person.”

“I want to know how the artist negotiated all the body hair,” Tippen said.

Liska wrinkled her nose. “Eeeww.”

“I waxed first,” Elwood said nobly, making everyone moan in unison.

“Speed has that whole sleeve on one arm,” Liska said. “And I get what it means, what it represents for him. The struggle between good and evil; the juxtaposition of himself as the avenging angel or the devil. And, of course, he wants to look badass at the gym. But he’s allegedly a grown man, so if he wants to illustrate himself, that’s his choice. Kyle is fifteen. Should a fifteen-year-old permanently etch something into his body?”

“That depends on what it is,” Elwood said.

“He’s into comic books and samurai warriors. When he’s an adult and working as an attorney, is he going to thank me for letting him get a giant tattoo of Spider-Man?”

“What’s more disturbing is that you’d let your kid become a lawyer,” Tippen said. “And you think I’m sick?”

Kovac brought them back on topic. “So the question here is: If by law minors can’t get a tattoo in this state, and our victim is only fifteen or sixteen, does that mean she came from out of state? Or did she just have a good fake ID? Or are there tattoo artists around town who just don’t give a shit what the law says?”

“You’re not exactly talking about a group of straight-arrow conformists,” Tippen said.

“No,” Elwood agreed, “but the majority are very defensive of both their art form and their integrity as businesspeople. The artists I know were glad for the law restricting minors. They want their work to be respected and meaningful, not some idiotic drunk-ass whim.”

“Sonya tells us this particular tat is about acceptance and tolerance,” Tippen said. “Racial tolerance, religious tolerance, tolerance of sexual preference. It’s a statement, part of a social movement. Given the gravity of the meaning, I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine there could be an artist or two willing to bend the rules to put it on younger kids in order to further the message.”

“How many tattoo parlors are we talking about?” Kovac asked.

“About twenty close in on Minneapolis proper,” Elwood said. “Plus St. Paul, plus the outer burbs. And we’re not taking into account that artists will freelance outside the studios. There’s our likely culprit for tattooing underage kids—some young artist trying to make a few extra bucks on the side. This is a simple, straightforward design requiring minimal skill and minimal equipment.”

“Meaning this is going to be a long process,” Liska said. “Quicker if we just post a photo of the tattoo and get it to the media and ask if anyone is missing a daughter with this tattoo.”

“Assuming all parents know whether or not their kid has an illegal tattoo,” Tippen said.

Liska conceded the point. “Okay. Is anyone missing a best friend, a sister, a teammate, a girlfriend . . .”

“And this is where Sonya comes in,” Tippen said. “She’ll reach that peer group.”

“In the meantime, we have to reach out to the schools,” Kovac said. “I want lists of absentees from every school we can hit in the metro area. Girls, fourteen to eighteen, just to cover as many bases as possible.”

“What kind of manpower are we getting?” Elwood asked.

“Remains to be seen,” Kovac said. “Kasselmann is meeting with the brass assholes as we speak. He’s not happy, but he’ll get over it. Or not. Whatever.

“For now, we’re it,” he said. “My gut feeling is we won’t get a full-on task force, which is fine with me. I don’t want to lose time with all the front-end bullshit and red tape of a multi-agency thing. I’m hoping we keep it in-house but pull in a couple of detectives from Sex Crimes or somewhere else.

“In the meantime, we just have to get on it. Hopefully, we’ll end up with enough manpower to revisit the first two Doc Holiday cases, but our priority for now is to get an ID on our new girl.”

All eyes went to the horror-movie still of Zombie Doe’s face taped to the wall as the centerpiece of a macabre montage.

“God help us,” Tinks muttered.

“He’d better,” Kovac said. “He already missed his chance with her.”

12

Gerald Fitzgerald never missed the news if he could help it. It was a Minnesota thing. Minnesotans, from childhood, watch the news daily. He had not realized there was anything unusual in that until he heard Garrison Keillor make jokes about it on A Prairie Home Companion. He still didn’t get why people thought that was funny.

Some of his earliest memories were of sitting on the living room floor watching Walter Cronkite while his mother banged pots and pans together in the kitchen, making supper. As an adult, the first thing he did upon waking up was turn on the TV to catch the news. Lunch and dinner happened in front of the television, watching the local news. The day officially ended with the ten o’clock news.

The news was the scale of the day, the place to find out if society was in balance or out of whack. People trusted the news, and they trusted the people who delivered the news. News was truth. At least it had been in Cronkite’s day.

Nowadays, you couldn’t trust the news. Used to be you went to the news to get the facts. Now you had to fact-check everything that came over the airwaves yourself. News personalities seemed to have no compunction lying outright to slant things in the favor of whomever they worked for. Cronkite had to be rolling over in his grave. It was disgraceful.

The headline on the screen caught his attention first.

ZOMBIE MURDER.

He grabbed the remote off the nightstand and jacked up the volume. The perky blonde seemed to look right at him as she spoke.

“Sources close to the investigation of a New Year’s Eve homicide in Minneapolis say this murder may be the work of a serial killer law enforcement agencies have dubbed ‘Doc Holiday.’

“The partially nude body of an unidentified female fell from the trunk of a vehicle New Year’s Eve in the Loring Park area. The gruesome condition of the disfigured corpse led one witness to describe the deceased woman as a zombie!”

Film footage showed the New Year’s Eve scene. A giant white Hummer sitting crosswise in the road. Emergency vehicles with strobe lights rolling. Uniformed officers walking around.

“No official statement has been made by the Minneapolis Police Department regarding the victim or the possibility of a serial killer in the metro area. The detective in charge of this most recent case would neither confirm nor deny any possible connection to several similar crimes committed over the course of the last year with the bodies of victims being discovered on holidays.”

He spotted the detective. Kovac. He knew him. He had met him, had spoken with him. Decent guy, Kovac. A straight shooter, an old-school cop. Appropriately suspicious, thorough. But, like all cops, he was not an original thinker. He put one foot in front of the other and plodded along.