Anxious looks were coming from the unit of human and Breed officers and the newly arrived coroner. Mathias grunted. “I thought uncomfortable and twitchy was standard operating procedure for you JUSTIS folks.”
Sloane smirked. “You turn anything up, let me know, yeah?”
“Sure,” Mathias agreed. “God knows, you need all the help you can get.”
With a low laugh and a one-fingered salute, Sloane pivoted and shuffled off to join his colleagues.
“You see all the ink on this guy?” Deacon said when the warriors were alone with the body. “He’s sporting some seriously hardcore tattoos.”
Mathias glanced down at the elaborate artwork, cold words and cryptic symbols. The meanings of a few were easy enough to comprehend--grim indicators of kill counts and carnage, glorified, bloody depictions of violence and death.
He took out his comm unit and snapped a few quick photos of the dead man and his collection of body art.
Peering closer, Mathias noticed something interesting about one of his tattoos.
“Look at the Celtic cross on his left forearm. The six-pointed star behind it is fresh.”
“And only half-finished,” Thane added, staring down at the reddened skin and black ink.
Even incomplete, the star was intricate, rendered by a highly skilled hand and an artist’s eye for detail.
“Hope the dumb f**k didn’t pay in full for half a job,” Callahan joked lamely.
None of the warriors laughed along with him. Thane and Deacon were looking at Mathias with the same glint of possibility.
“Something’s not right about this whole situation,” Mathias said, thinking out loud. “Six dead members of a gang no one’s ever heard of, now a seventh body turns up days later. Why?”
Callahan shrugged. “Gangs kill each other all the time. If you ask me, we should let them carry on and thank them for saving us the trouble.”
The kid had a point, albeit a wrong-headed one. And dangerous besides. If a gang had ideas about bringing their war into Mathias’s city, under the Order’s watch, they would need to think again.
And something was nagging him about the slayings, even before this last body was pulled out of the Thames. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on yet. He needed more information. Seemed to him, the best place to begin that quest was the place where tonight’s floater might have spent some of his final hours.
“Wherever he had this work started was likely one of the last places anyone saw him alive,” Mathias said. “I want to find that tattoo shop. As in, tonight.”
Deacon cast a skeptical look in his direction. “London is full of tattoo shops. We’ll be looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.”
“We can eliminate the tourist traps and celebrity-hound studios right off the bat,” Thane said. “This guy would go to the real deal. Somewhere discreet, off the beaten path. Somewhere no one would raise an eyebrow if a thug like him walked in.”
Mathias agreed. “Callahan, take the Rover back to base. Thane and Deacon, we’ll cover the most ground if we split up, each of us taking the city a section at a time.”
He swiveled his head upriver, against the current that would have carried the body out to sea before long. Southwark’s least prosperous section of town loomed all around them, darkened buildings set against an even darker night sky.
He supposed it was as good a place to start as any.
CHAPTER 2
The buzzing drone of the tattoo machine vibrated through Nova’s gloved fingertips as she inked the delicate line of a spider’s web onto the left pectoral of her final client of the night.
The design was a favorite of many who came to Ozzy’s studio in Southwark, men and women who’d known little else but struggles and hard times, even a long stint in prison, like the middle aged man seated in Nova’s chair now.
Folks who frequented the hole-in-the-wall shop weren’t going to win any humanitarian awards or keys to the city, but most of them were good people at heart.
Fancy clothes and big, sparkling mansions didn’t make someone good. Nova had known that at a very young age. It had taken longer to recognize that there were plenty of good people walking around with ink all over their skin and miles of hard road in their weary eyes.
Ozzy had helped on that score.
Nova glanced over at him, puffing out her breath to blow aside the wisp of her asymmetrically cut, black-and-blue-dyed hair that had fallen into her face as she worked. The wiry, grayed and grizzled, tattooed old man who owned the shop was hunched over his latest creation, his bony, age-spotted hand as steady as a rock.
Oz had been focused on the piece for more than three hours now, the seventy-two-year-old artist working as meticulously--as reverently--as Michelangelo on the Sistine Chapel. Ozzy’s canvas tonight was the masterfully designed, tattooed sleeve of an ex-con who’d lost his only grandson to cancer the weekend before last.
By hand, Oz had painstakingly reproduced the toddler’s smiling face, turning the child’s likeness into the tender image of a winged pixie, cavorting blissfully in the forbidding, Gothic forest that had already existed on the man’s arm.
As Ozzy wiped away the running ink and blood from the final details, the shop’s young apprentice took the opportunity to stop cleaning equipment and come over to have a look. Nine-year-old Eddie’s freckled face lit up as he took in the finished design.
“Fuckin’ righteous, Oz!” the street-wise kid exclaimed. Ozzy had taken in the former juvenile delinquent last year, much the same way he had Nova a decade ago. Eddie grinned through snaggled teeth and a scabbed lip healing over from a recent brawl at school. “Man, I cannot wait until you let me have my own chair and iron.”