“Easy now, Kay, you hear me? You’re stressed out. What’s going on there? What have you found?”
—
Kay drew a breath and then let it out again. Saw it freeze and hang in the air a moment before disappearing.
“A body,” she answered.
“We just lost the signal. Did you say a body?”
“Yes.”
“Whose body?”
“I don’t know. I’m guessing one of Tomás Gomez’s victims. We got information that he was seen here.”
“Okay,” said Bob. “You’re sure this is a murder?” He spoke slowly, calm and quiet, as though he was talking to someone who was hysterical, not a colleague in the Homicide Unit just doingher job. Normally she wouldn’t have tolerated it, but right now it was something she appreciated.
“No,” she said, feeling her pulse start to slow down. “But I think so.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t see how he died.” She looked at the man in the chair and again lost control of her voice.
“But?” said Bob, calm but insistent.
“But he couldn’t exactly have done it himself.” Kay felt a sudden urge to laugh. There were no marks on the body of the naked man sitting bound to the chair. But the face had been skinned. The eyes glowed white in the frozen red flesh where the skin had been. The same for the hands. He looked like he’d pulled on a pair of red rubber gloves that reached halfway up his forearms.
“Kay?” said Bob. “This line is very bad. Are you…”
“I’m still here. If this is Tomás Gomez’s work then he really is a sadistic bastard.”
“The dead person—what about the age? The ethnicity?”
“A lot of stuff is missing here, but I think maybe Latino,” said Kay. She felt calmer now. Bob’s questions had helped her back into professional mode and now she was just annoyed with herself for briefly losing control like that. “Age is a guess too but I would think maybe forty or fifty.”
“Okay. Can you do something for me: can you take a look at his back?”
“His back?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll try.”
“Try?”
“He’s tied to a chair. I just need to loosen the strap around his chest.”
Bob said nothing.
Kay had to tighten the strap before she could loosen it. The frozen corpse creaked as she did so. She stood behind the wooden chair and pushed at the back. The body didn’t move. She pushed harder. She felt as though the corpse might snap in two if she used too much force. Then the buttocks and thighs seemed to lift from the seat of the chair and the whole body slid forward a few inches. Enough for her to see.
“He has tattoos.”
“What kind?”
“Gang tattoos. X-11. And Black Wolves.”
“I thought so.”
