Robert B. Parker’s The Devil Wins

10

He had seen human bodies in all states of disrepair, but the face of the man in the blue tarp was a particular mess. Jesse was beyond sickness or disgust. He accepted that about himself. He found looking at bodies in the morgue to be more difficult than doing so at the crime scene. A body was just one element of a crime scene, one part of the activity. The morgue, with its somber, antiseptic chill and stainless steel, was a different experience. Somehow the sterility of the place, the forced distancing of the bodies from their humanity, had a paradoxical effect on Jesse. They became more than cases to him here.

Jesse found himself looking from the near-faceless body on the metal table to the face of the ME. Hers was an attractive face, somewhere between pretty and striking, not beautiful. She had high cheekbones, a strong, square chin, and polished-copper eyes. Her nose was slightly flattened, her lips were thin, but nicely shaped. She wore her dark brown, impossibly curly hair pulled back so tightly that it seemed as if she was trying to make a statement. It was hard for Jesse to know what she was trying to say. And he wondered if her spare use of makeup was part of the same statement or whether there was a different message in that.

He’d run into Tamara Elkin a few times since she’d taken the job in early summer, but they hadn’t really exchanged more than hellos. Their conversations had been such that Jesse hadn’t gotten any sense of her. It wasn’t easy getting a sense of her, though there was a hint of mischief and flirt in her eyes. She didn’t talk much and she seemed pleased to wait for him to speak first.

“His face is in bad shape,” Jesse said.

“Your powers of observation are keen ones, Chief Stone. Next you’ll point out the victim’s farmer tan.”

“I did notice that. And it’s Jesse, not Chief Stone.”

“How nice for you.”

“I could live without the sarcasm, Doc.”

“And I could do without the flirting.”

Jesse laughed. “If asking you to call me by my first name is flirting, you’ve got a low threshold, Doc.”

She smiled, and there it was, he thought, that mischief in her eyes.

“Whatever. Entrance wounds from very near the rear of the skull here,” she said, tapping the back of Jesse’s head with the tip of her index finger, “and here.” She touched Jesse behind his left ear. “The shots were from very close range.”

Her touch was gentle and lingered a beat longer than he expected. In spite of her denial, it felt like flirting. If it was, he was flattered by it. Under a different set of circumstances, Jesse might have encouraged her and pursued things. But he was still carrying a torch for Diana Evans, the former FBI agent he had been involved with last spring. She was back in the D.C. area, still getting her life back in order. He’d been with a lot of women during his long breakup with Jenn, but before Diana, only Sunny Randall had really lit the spark in him. Unfortunately, Sunny had been as entangled with her ex as Jesse had been with Jenn. He wasn’t about to throw another chance at love away, whether Tamara Elkin was flirting with him or not.

“We found charred and soot-laden canvas fibers in the entrance wounds and bloodied canvas fibers elsewhere. We’ve sent it all to the state crime lab.”

“The shooter didn’t want a mess,” Jesse said. “Two wounds and all that damage, must have been large-caliber. Maybe hollow-points.”

“Definitely hollow-points. Sounds like you’ve done this once or twice.”

“Once or twice.”

“Yes, I’ve heard all about you, Chief Stone,” she said, and left it at that. “Unless your department is willing to pay for forensic facial reconstruction, there’s little hope of photo identification.”

“Or dental. What’s left of his mouth is a train wreck,” Jesse said. He pointed to an indentation and nasty dark mark on John Doe’s lower jaw. “That wasn’t caused by gunshots.”

“Blunt-instrument trauma prior to death. He was bound as well. Look at his wrists and ankles.”

“Ligature marks.”

She nodded. “It’s in the report. Other marks, too, but of his own making,” she said, running her gloved fingertip along the body’s left forearm. “Intravenous drug user, but not recently. The scarring looks to be several years old. He had been a heavy drinker at some point as well. His liver was almost as much of a mess as his face.”

“Any identifying marks, Doc?”

She smiled. It was a crooked smile, one with a surprising amount of playfulness in it, Jesse thought.

She said, “Lift up his left arm.”

Jesse saw the tattoo: a two-headed rattlesnake, forked tongues extended, its body wrapped around the horizontal beam of a cross, the snake’s rattle sticking skyward at one end of the cross. The snake’s heads hung below the other end. The cross was done in dark blue ink, the snake in bright red. It was about four inches long by three inches wide and ran from the bottom of the dead man’s left armpit along the top of his rib cage.

“That can’t be a very common tattoo,” she said.

“We’ll find out soon enough. Can I get a photograph of—”

“Already done. There’s a hard copy with the file and I can send you a JPEG. Let’s go into my office and I’ll get you the reports of the girls.”

As Jesse followed Tamara Elkin down the hall, he found he had as many questions in his head about her as he did the dead.