“Whatever you need to help us identify him, Doctor,” Lestrade replied.
The dentist touched the lips, jerked her hands back from the shock of dead flesh, reached again and, using just her fingertips, eased the mouth open for a look inside. “Ahh!” she breathed. She turned her head to look from a slightly different angle. “Ahh! Yes…yes, I’ve worked on these teeth. I remember the gap between his upper left lateral incisor and cuspid—tiny, but distinctive. And I put that big filling in the lower right second molar just a few weeks ago. Thought…I thought it’d last him for years. I remember the day he got it, he was talking about maybe getting a real tattoo, if he could figure out a design that’d work for both his Hallowe’en costume this year and the rest of his…life…afterwards. Yes…what was—is?—was?—his name? Sorry, I’ve got so many patients…Jack… No, Harry…Harry Jackson…Harry Carter Jackson! Oh, dammit to hell, Harry Jackson!”
“Thank you, Dr. O’Connor,” Lestrade told her gently. “We’ll have to check your dental records for our official books. But when we catch whoever did this, it’ll be largely thanks to you. If they still watch us from…whatever name you give it…Harry must be cheering for you now.”
“Sergeant Lestrade… They said on the news…it was torture? Not just murder, but…”
“We don’t know that for sure,” Lestrade replied, swearing the news media out in her mind. “Long as his body lay leaching out in the water, all those marks could just as well have been made post-mortem.”
Thank the Lady the damn media had at least cooperated far enough to keep that tattoo out of the news. A secret Lestrade refused to break now. Not even to draw back the white sheet and get the dentist’s opinion whether or not it could have been the one the late M. Jackson had talked about maybe getting.
Somehow, she didn’t think it was.
* * * *
The body definitely identified, next thing Lestrade did was make a call to Chris Grunewald back in Chicago. Chris was out of town. Some kind of forensic examiners’ conference in Denver, followed by a few vacation days to visit a brother in Chillicothe. Try again Thursday.
All right. Body into coldest possible storage for a little longer before it could be released for burial. Another unwelcome job for the family. Who had to be told right now. The “formality” identification.
Of everything Lestrade hated about her workline, this part was the worst. She’d cheated a little by trying to sneak in her call to Chris first. No more excuses to put off notifying the family.
They had a nice house in the Joliet Park area. Turned out the late M. Harry Jackson had been re-alighting at his old home nest while he sent out feelers for a position that could use his brand new Ph.D. in Astrophysics.
The Jackson-Carters had thought their second-born was overnighting with a young lady downtown. They hadn’t started worrying until news of the murder hit the media. Another hour without at least a phone call from Harry, and they’d have called the police station themselves.
People reacted in different ways. Harry’s mother turned white, left her husband to ask the usual questions of shock and disbelief and “no possible mistake?” and walked slowly out of the room. To return in a little under ten minutes, carrying a thick book that could have been from Ward and Roebuck but turned out to be a sample book of tattoo designs.
She looked back and forth a couple of times between Lestrade and Clayton before handing her burden to the junior partner. “Just last Wednesday,” she told them numbly, “he borrowed this from a local tattoo artist. I don’t know which one. We…we’ve always been tolerant about it, it’s so popular what else do you do? but never really interested, nobody else in the family. Except Linda, who got a tasteful little rose last year. Along with the rest of her graduating class. Harry thought he had narrowed it down to Egghead McJones, the solar system as an atom, or…or…”
Linda Jackson of the tasteful rose tattoo supplied, “Or ‘Love and Peace’ in Elvish script.”
“Or ‘Love and Peace’ in Elvish script. I think he may have decided, forgotten to take the catalog back. It should go back now. This catalog. Harry was always so careful to get his library materials back on time. This should go back, too. I’m sorry, I don’t know which…body artist. Somebody local. I know it’s somebody local.”
They thanked the family, explained about releasing the body as soon as they could…it might be two or three weeks, maybe even as long as a month, but it was absolutely necessary for them to keep it until it could get a second examination. Not necessarily a full autopsy, no, and everything would be kept as integral as possible, but these things needed a second opinion, and it’d be much better if they kept the body now instead of having to exhume it later. Meanwhile, could they have one or two recent photos of Harry?
And, very sorry about this, M.’s, but some member of the family would need to come in to make the formal identification.
Some families liked to hold memorial services right away, even if full interment had to wait.
While Lestrade took her turn driving, Dave sat silently for a couple of miles through city traffic, the sample book in his lap. She knew he didn’t like informing the survivors any better than she did. Any polly who liked that duty, wasn’t fit to serve as a polly.
At last, halfway to the station, Dave said, “Egghead McJones, the solar system as an atom, or ‘Love and Peace’ in Elvish script.” Her peripheral vision caught his slow headshake. “Nope. I can’t connect any of those with the one he actually has.”
“I can’t either, Dave,” said Lestrade. “I can’t, either.”
* * * *
Chicago had a body artist on every corner, but Forest Green had four to serve the whole town and surrounding area. Tattoos were usually permanent, and people had only so much skin area to cover, no matter how popular good body art might be among about forty percent of the population. And then, there were some groups, like rolegamers, who as often as not preferred the paint-on or peel-off versions, so as to change their body art with the scenario.
Three of the town’s body artists were as legitimate as their business. Only two of the fifty-five Reformed States had ever outlawed tattoos—Rhode Island, which probably did it to be quaint, and Texacali, which probably did it to give her tattoo enthusiasts the thrill of mild and harmless lawbreaking.
Lestrade hated having that kind of law on the books. Helped blunt the force of the real laws, the laws every society needed. The law against murder, for one. The law against what had been done to Harry Carter Jackson.
Come to think of it, about the only thing Rosemary Lestrade liked about her workline was getting to clear the occasional innocent party.
Sydney Naismith was known only to his clients and the police. Thirty-eight years ago, when he was starting up in Toronto, he’d been a little too careless about sterilizing his needles, and tattoos had gotten infected. Three people needed hospitalization, one of them died, and Naismith ended up blacklisted for life by the International Association of Body Artists.
Lestrade had decided to tackle Naismith first.
Moving farther and farther down the ladder as his hair got thinner and grayer, he had sunk into a one and a half room basement apartment in what Forest Green liked to think of as its slum district: four square blocks that any self-disrespecting
