The detail Jamar Jackson was very clear about was the image of the girl coming out of the trunk of the dark car in front of him. That image had seemingly blinded him to all else. Even in his relaxed hypnotic state, he had nothing to say about the make or model of the vehicle, and no memory of the license plate.

“Probably a Minnesota plate,” Tippen suggested. “Something unusual would have stood out.”

“Great,” Kovac said. “That narrows it down to what? A million vehicles? Two million?”

“Probably only thirty or forty thousand dark sedans.”

“I’ll put you right on that, then.”

The door opened and Elwood walked in with a handful of papers.

“Sixty-seven girls between the ages of fourteen and eighteen absent from metro-area schools today,” he said. “We can pare the list down pretty quickly. Two people on the phone. A couple of hours or so, if all goes well.”

“Let’s get on that, then,” Kovac said. “Kasselmann wrangled us two uniforms to help out. You and Tip get with them and cut the call time in half, then hit the streets with any follow-up. Maybe by then we’ll have the sketch.”

Liska came in looking unhappy. “I was hoping for him to remember at least a partial tag number on the car,” she said with a big sigh. “Valerie says we can try again in a day or two. Now that Jamar knows we’re not going to make him put his underpants on his head and bark like a dog, he’ll be more relaxed next time. Something might come to the surface for him.”

“Yeah,” Kovac said without hope. “Like if that chick in the backseat maybe had a pussy piercing. That’s where his head was at.”

“We can’t pick our witnesses, Kojak,” she said. “And by the way, that’s where your head would have been too.”

“My head’s there now,” Tippen remarked.

Liska gave him the stink eye. “You’re disgusting.”

“I’m honest.”

“You’re honestly disgusting.”

“You have a talent for overstating the obvious, Tinks,” Elwood said.

Kovac held up his hands. “Can we all agree Tippen is a pig and get on with our day? I want out of this building before I get a freaking heat rash.”

“Where are we going?” Liska asked as they headed back to their cubicle.

“We’re meeting Tip’s niece at a tattoo parlor,” he said, grabbing his heavy coat off the rack. He made no move to put it on. The idea of stepping out into below-zero weather was, for once, almost appealing. “Will the artist have the sketch done by the end of the day?”

“He said he would, but he’s afraid of me, so he could just be buying time to flee the state. He didn’t want to do it at all,” she said as they left the CID offices. It was only marginally cooler in the hall. “He said the same thing I did: A bad sketch could be worse than no sketch at all.”

“I get that,” Kovac said, “except this girl has a few extra distinguishing characteristics. How many young women are running around with multiple piercings, half their head shaved, and a Chinese tattoo?”

“Spoken like a man who doesn’t have teenagers,” Liska said. “That probably describes a quarter of the kids Kyle knows—male and female. I’m lucky he hasn’t had something pierced by now.”

“Maybe he has. It’s just somewhere you can’t see it.”

“I hate you sometimes.”

Kovac was immune to the comment. “I’m driving.”

“Great. Then there’s a good chance I won’t live long enough to find out my son has a Prince Albert.”

“Do me a favor,” he said as they stepped out into the ball-numbing cold. “If you find out your son had his dick pierced, don’t tell me.”

“I won’t have to tell you. You’ll get the call out to the homicide.”

•   •   •

THE HELM OF AWE SOCIAL CLUB was barely large enough for the name to fit across the front awning. Crammed between a coffeehouse and a funky vintage clothing store, it was located on a run-down side street near the University of Minnesota’s West Bank campus. The buildings were brick, two and three stories high; shops and hole-in-the-wall restaurants with apartments overhead, probably mostly student housing.

The street was a mess—half-plowed, rutted, dirty cars parked at screwy angles. How any vehicle survived a winter in Minneapolis intact and dent-free had to be a miracle. Kovac wedged the sedan into a loading zone, pointing the wrong way on the far side of the street, and they trudged across the ruts, both of them cursing the conditions as snow went into their shoes and up their pants legs.

A bell rang as they opened the door of the shop and stepped inside. The walls of the place were glossy Chinese red, the floors old checkerboard linoleum. The place smelled as clean as a hospital. Photographs lined one wall—close-ups of elaborate tattoos, shots of customers posing with tattoo artists. Kovac recognized a couple of professional athletes. Other subjects looked like they might have been members of rock bands. A few looked like suburban grandmas, smiling happily as they displayed their body art.

Sonya Porter was shooting the shit at the front counter with an enormous bald guy. He turned away from them to reach for something on a shelf. His hairless dome was tatted out with a terrifying black-and-gray face of a Chinese foo dog. The thick folds of flesh in the back of his neck undulated as he moved his head, animating the creature.

He turned around and glared at them with narrow, vaguely Asian eyes, his face no less frightening than his tattoo. A thick, wiry, white-blond Fu Manchu mustache bracketed his downturned mouth, making him look like an angry walrus. The shop’s namesake, a Viking helm of awe tattoo, was inked into his forehead like a third eye. Black disks the size of dimes stretched his earlobes. The overall impression was of a Viking sumo wrestler.

Liska leaned into Kovac’s shoulder and murmured, “I’ll bet he has a Prince Albert.”

“He could be your next boyfriend, Tinks,” Kovac muttered back.

Sonya, perched on a tall stool, sat up at attention as they crossed the narrow room. She wore purple-and-white cat-eye glasses and had deep blue streaks through her shiny dark hair that caught the light like a blackbird’s wing. Her lipstick was royal blue.

“It’s Sam the Man,” she announced. “You’re late.”

“Sorry,” he said without real apology. “I’ve just been sitting around on my ass eating doughnuts and running a homicide investigation.”

He pointed a finger at Liska—“My partner, Sergeant Liska”—and tipped his head in Sonya’s direction—“Sonya Porter, Tippen’s niece.”

Liska nodded. “My condolences.”

Sonya Porter chuckled, a dark, slightly sultry sound. “I hold my own.”

“So does he, but when he says that, he’s talking about something else entirely.”

The girl laughed out loud at that, delighted. “I like you!”

Kovac turned to the big man. “Sam Kovac. Homicide.”

“This is Pooch,” Sonya Porter said. “This is his place.”

“Pooch Halvorsen.” He reached out an elaborately tattooed hand the size of a catcher’s mitt. Kovac met it and shook it, wondering if the lettering on the sausage-link fingers had begun as prison tats. You R on the right hand, NEXT on the left. His fingernails were impeccably manicured. “Sonya tells me you have a murder victim with an acceptance tattoo.”

“That’s what she tells me too,” Kovac said. “I’m taking her word for it. I don’t read Chinese.”

“I do,” Pooch Halvorsen said. “The odd symbol, at least. People come in here all the time wanting this or that in Chinese. I run it all past my grandma on my mother’s side. She’s from Hong Kong.”

“I always wondered about that,” Liska said. “How do these people really know what they’re putting on their bodies if they don’t know Chinese? It could say I’m a moron for all they know.”

“Research,” Halvorsen said. “You’re going to wear a tattoo for the rest of your life, you’d damn well better take the time to know what it really says.”

“So, for sure the tattoo on our victim says acceptance?” Liska asked.