‘You must be TT Gordon,’ Rhyme said.
‘Yeah. And, hey, you’re the dude in the wheelchair.’
CHAPTER 14
Rhyme took in the bizarre beard, the steel rods in the ears and eyebrows.
Parts of tats were visible on the backs of Gordon’s hands; the rest of the inking vanished under his pullover. Rhyme believed he could make out POW! on the right wrist.
He drew no conclusions about the man’s appearance. He’d long ago given up on the spurious practice of equating the essence of a person with his or her physical incarnation. His own condition was the prototype for this way of thinking.
His main reaction was: How badly had the piercings hurt? This was something Rhyme could relate to; his ears and brows were places in which he could feel pain. And the other thought: If TT Gordon ever got busted he’d be picked out of a lineup in an instant.
A nod to Sellitto, who reciprocated.
‘Hey. The wheelchair thing I said? It wasn’t as stupid as it sounded,’ Gordon said, smiling and looking at everyone in the room. His eyes returned to Rhyme’s. ‘Obviously you’re in a wheelchair. I meant, hey, you’re the famous dude in the wheelchair. I didn’t make the connection before. When he’ — a nod at Sellitto — ‘came to my shop, he said “consultant”. You’re in the papers. I’ve seen you on TV. Why don’t you do that Nancy Grace show? That’d be very cool. Do you watch it?’
This was just natural rambling, Rhyme deduced, not awkward, I-don’t-want-to-be-with-a-gimp rambling. The disability seemed to Gordon merely another aspect of Rhyme, like his dark hair and fleshy nose and intense eyes and trim fingernails.
An identifying marker, not a political one.
Gordon greeted the others, Sachs, Cooper and Pulaski. Then he gazed around the room, whose decor Rhyme had once described as Hewlett-Packard Victorian. ‘Hm. Well. Cool.’
Sachs said, ‘We appreciate your coming here to help us.’
‘Like, no problem. I want this guy taken down. This dude, what he’s doing? It’s bad for everybody who mods for a living.’
‘What does that mean? “Mods”?’ Sachs asked.
‘Modifying bodies, you know. Inking people, piercing, cutting.’ He tapped his ear bars. ‘Everything. “Modding” covers the gamut.’ He frowned. ‘Whatever a gamut is. I don’t really know.’
Rhyme said, ‘Lon says you’re pretty well connected in the tattoo community here and that you don’t have any specific idea who it might be.’
Gordon confirmed this.
Sellitto added that Gordon had looked over a picture of the victim’s tattoo but wanted a better image; the printout hadn’t been that clear.
Cooper said, ‘I’ll call up the raw.nef files and save them as enhanced.tiffs.’
Rhyme had no clue what he was talking about. In the days when he worked crime scenes himself he used actual thirty-five-millimeter film that had to be developed in chemicals and printed in a darkroom. Back then you made every frame count. Now? You shot the hell out of a crime scene and culled.
Cooper said, ‘I’ll send them to the Nvidia computer — the big screen there.’
‘Whatever, dude. As long as it’s clear.’
Pulaski asked, ‘You seen The Big Lebowski?’
‘Oh, man.’ Gordon grinned and punched a fist Pulaski’s way. The rookie reciprocated.
Rhyme wondered: Maybe Tarantino.
The pictures appeared on the largest monitor in the room. They were extremely high-definition images of the tattoo on Chloe Moore’s abdomen. TT Gordon gave one blink of shock at the worried skin, the welts, the discoloration. ‘Worse than I thought, the poisoning and everything. Like he created his own hot zone.’
‘What’s that?’
Gordon explained that tattoo parlors were divided into zones, hot and cold. The cold zone was where there was no risk of contamination by one customer’s blood getting into another’s. No unsterilized needles or machine parts or chairs, for instance. Hot, obviously, was the opposite, where the tattoo machine and needles were tainted by customers’ blood and body fluids. ‘We do everything we can to keep the two separate. But here, this dude did the opposite — intentionally infected, well, poisoned her. Man. Fucked up.’
But then the artist settled into an analytic mode that Rhyme found encouraging. Gordon eyed a computer. ‘Can I?’
‘Sure,’ Cooper said.
The artist hit keys and scrolled through the images, enlarging some.
Rhyme asked, ‘TT, are the words “the second” significant in any way in the tattoo world?’
‘No. Has no meaning that I know about and I’ve been inking for nearly twenty years. Guess it’s something significant to the dude who killed her. Or maybe the victim.’
‘Probably the perp,’ Amelia Sachs explained to Gordon. ‘There’s no evidence that he knew Chloe before he killed her.’
‘Oh. She was Chloe.’ Gordon said this softly. He touched his beard. Then scrolled once more. ‘Well, it’s weird for a client to make up a phrase or a passage for a modding. Sometimes I’ll ink a poem they’ve written. I’ll tell you, mostly they suck, big time. Usually, though, if somebody wants text, it’s a passage from something like their favorite book. The Bible. Or a famous quote. Or a saying, you know. “Live Free or Die.” “Born to Ride.” Things like that.’ Then he frowned. ‘Hm. Okay.’
‘What?’
‘Could be a splitter.’
‘And that is?’ Rhyme asked.
‘Some clients split their mods. They get half a word on one arm, the other half on another. Sometimes they’ll get part of the tat inked on their body, and their girlfriend or boyfriend get the other part on theirs.’
‘Why?’ Pulaski asked.
‘Why?’ Gordon seemed perplexed by the question. ‘Tats connect people. That’s one of the whole points of getting inked. Even if you’ve got unique works, you’re still part of the ink world. You got something in common, you know. That connects you, see, dude?’
Sachs said, ‘You seem to’ve done some thinking about all this.’
Gordon laughed. ‘Oh, I could be a shrink, I tell you.’
‘Freud,’ Sellitto said.
‘Dude,’ Gordon responded with a grin. That fist again. Sellitto didn’t take the offer.
Sachs asked, ‘And can you tell us anything concrete about him?’
Sellitto added, ‘We’re not going to quote you. Or get you on the witness stand. We just want to know who this guy is. Get into his head.’
Gordon was looking at the equipment, hesitating.
‘Well, okay. First, he’s a natural, a total talent as an artist, not just a technician. A lot of inkers are paint-by-numbers guys. They slap on a stencil somebody else did and fill it in. But’ — a nod at the picture — ‘there’s no evidence of a stencil there. He used a bloodline.’
‘Which is what?’ Rhyme asked.
‘If they’re not using a stencil, most artists draw an outline of the work on the skin first. Some draw freehand with a pen — water-soluble ink. But there’s no sign of that here. Your guy didn’t do that. He just turned on his tattoo machine and used a lining needle for the outline, so instead of ink you have a line of blood that’s the outer perimeter of your design. So, bloodline. Only the best tat artists do that.’
Pulaski asked, ‘A pro then?’
‘Oh, yeah, dude’d have to be a pro. Like I told him.’ A nod at Sellitto. ‘Or was at some point. That level of skill? He could open his own shop in a blind second. And probably he’s a real artist too — I mean like with paint and pen and ink and everything. And I don’t think he’s from here. For one thing, I probably would’ve heard. Not from the tristate area, either. Doing this in fifteen minutes? Man, that’s lightning. His name’d get around. Then, look at the typeface.’