The Sketcher's Mark (Lara McBride Thrillers Book 1) (18 page)

“I need to call Brenner in LA,” she said to the Inspector, getting up and, for the first time, feeling like she was a step closer to this man.

“Who’s Brenner?” Brouchard asked.

“He does body art in LA. I need to talk to him about these scars on our boy.  The scars are the key.  To everything.”

Chapter Thirty Six

Brouchard had the Skype call set up and waiting for Lara half an hour later.  Beth had been taken downstairs with the Photofit artist and Lara was confident she would be able to give a better physical description than what she could muster from her still cloudy memory of the events under the bridge.  The number she had given Brouchard to contact Brenner was a Hollywood area code and the man who answered was pale, stocky, with short cropped hair and tattoos up and down his arms and all across his chest.  The Inspector took an instant dislike to the man.  He was British, his accent pure south London.  He moved when he spoke, unable to stay still for longer than three or four seconds at a time.  If he was a tattoo artist, the Inspector thought to himself, he wondered if his work was the only thing that could make him stay in one place.

“Hello, Lara, luv,” the tattooed man said from his shop in California.

“Hi, Brenner,” Lara replied, a fondness in her tone that Brouchard had not heard until now.  They had obviously known each other for some time.  He sensed that she had a genuine affection for him but was keeping him at arm’s length.

“What can I do for you, darling?”  Brenner asked, a huge grin exploding across his face.

“What can you tell me about body scarring?”

“How do you mean?”

“People who scar themselves in patterns.  On purpose.”

“You mean scarification?  Skin tattoos?  It’s for nutters.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“It is body art, but instead of using ink you use your own skin to make patterns.”

“That’s disgusting,” Brouchard commented, more to himself than anyone else.  Lara ignored him and pursued her line of questioning.

“Go on,” Lara encouraged Brenner.  She saw him take a gulp of what looked suspiciously like scotch and gather his thoughts.

“Well, it’s fucking hardcore,” he decided, searching his mind for what he thought about the process.  “I mean, the true nutjobs do it to themselves without a professional handy.  It has more meaning that way if they cut up their own bodies.”

“Are there shops that will do that for them?”  Lara asked.

“Sure, but you’re crossing over in to fetishism and the S&M community and they’re a secretive lot so good luck trying to get someone to talk.  It’s not hugely popular, as you can imagine, so the clientele tend to value their anonymity and they pay accordingly.  Like I said, good luck finding anyone who’d spill the beans.”

“Why would somebody do this to themself?”  Lara threw the question out there, already starting to form an opinion of her own.

“People get tattoos to commemorate something.  An event.  A holiday.  A person.  Something that they want to remember because it means something to them.  Scarification is the same thing.  Except it’s not usually a fucking vacation they’re commemorating, you know what I mean?  Has anyone told you today you are bloody gorgeous, Lara McBride?”

“Yes.  I am in Paris.  How do you do it?”

“You have to traumatize the flesh.  Cut it, burn it, then meld it in to shapes and patterns.  You do that enough and you kill all the nerve endings.  You can’t even feel it anymore.  Like when you turn me down for a drink.  Tell me about the ones you’re talking about.”

“They’re very intricate,” Lara said, trying to remember as much detail about them as she could.  “They’re thick, like lips, almost tribal.  Multiple lacerations.”

“Where does he have them?  I’m assuming it’s a man you’re after,” Brenner inquired.

“They’re on his face.  He may have others on his body, but all I saw were the ones on his face.  Both sides, on the cheeks.”

“Damn,”  Brenner commented.  “I’m not a psychologist, as you know, but in this trade, you get to learn a lot about people and how messed up their internal wiring is.  I’d say your fella probably really hates himself.  Or did at some point.  He might have started out just hurting himself then somewhere along the line, he’s turned it in to an art form.”

Brouchard turned to Lara, speaking low.

“When Beth is finished with the Photofit, we should get the picture out to the tattoo and fetish shops in Paris.  We might get a hit if somebody remembers him.”

“Yeah, that’s probably a waste of your time, Francois,” Brenner called from the monitor, slugging down another hit of scotch.  Brouchard looked caught off guard.

“I’m sorry?” he prompted.

“Like I said, they’re probably not going to talk to you anyway, but if these scars are as intense as you say, the fella you’re looking for sounds like a strictly DIY do it at home kinda fella. So, he wouldn’t have had anyone else do it for him, know what I mean?  Don’t touch the merchandise sort of thing. And he probably doesn’t live in Paris.”

“What makes you say that?” Lara asked, intrigued.  She had had some ideas of where his home base might be before now but had not considered he was out of town.

“Logically speaking, you’d need somewhere private to recover from facial scarring like that.  You’d want to stay out of sight, not draw attention to yourself, so he’d stay home.  Probably lives out in the boonies where he can chop himself til his heart’s content and nobody can hear him scream.  God, there’s some sick fuckers out there.  And I thought LA was bad.”

“That’s an interesting point,”  Lara said to Brouchard, who was trying to keep up with a woman whom he had already accepted was operating on a level far higher than his own. He thought it wise to just watch her and take mental notes.

“If he has these girls, these Angels,” Lara thought aloud, “then he’s got to be keeping them somewhere.  He’d need privacy and I’d been thinking a house with a basement somewhere in the city but he’s suggesting our man just visits and does his main work out of town.  Maybe he has a place in Paris for when he comes in for special occasions.”

“You mean to hunt,”  Brouchard said, following her.

“Exactly.  Melinda said she was in a van in a garage.”

“Listen, I’ve got some tourists want Lakers tattoos on their arses,” Brenner called.

“Sure.  Thanks, Brenner.  See you when I get back,” Lara said, moving to the keyboard to disconnect the call.  Brenner moved in closer to the camera so his eyes filled the screen.

“Is that a promise, luv?”

“Goodbye, Brenner,” she said and hit “End” on the display.  The screen terminated the call and she stood, looking over to see Jason leaning against the office doorway, no telling how much of the call he had heard.

“So he’s punishing himself?”  Jason asked.

“My god, Englishmen on the computer, Englishmen in my office.  Everywhere, it’s Englishmen,”  Brouchard exclaimed.

“I looked up this idea of ‘scarification’,”  Lara said, pulling up a window on the computer that showed high resolution pictures of facial scars on African villagers.  Jason moved in closer to see. 

“In their culture, it’s a tribal rite of passage.  It marks the journey of transcendence from boy to man.  Like hunters blooding their faces after a kill.  In Western culture, it can be a more aggressive form of ‘cutting’.”

“I went out with a lass who did that,” Jason said.  “Nice girl.  Y’know, beneath the crazy.”

“Why did she do it to herself?”  Brouchard asked.

“She said she felt worthless.  Her parents got inside her head.  Made her feel like a failure, unloved, unwanted.  They did a good job on her because her self-esteem was almost completely gone and she was big on self-destruction.”

“Sounds like a good time,”  Brouchard smiled, trying to alleviate the situation.

“Yeah, it didn’t last long,” Jason said, lost in thought, betraying his own pain.

“Patterns.  Shapes.  Art…”  Lara mumbled, her eyes trailing out to look beyond the window of the squad room.  She saw the night was closing in outside, the dark drawing nearer.  She saw the rain falling on the window making crazed patterns that had no logic but their own, the buildings that crowded the city, walling in the people on the streets and boulevards below in a concrete maze.  She was suddenly aware of all the shapes around her. And that every last one of them had been designed.

“He’s turning himself in to a work of art.  No more nerves.  He doesn’t have to feel his pain anymore.”

Her words hung in the air a moment and she felt that she was right, rolling the theory over in her mind, finding it smooth and impenetrable and suddenly she felt as though she were standing over this man’s shoulder, peering in to his soul.  This man’s scars had meaning only to him and she was absolutely convinced that they connected to the very reason he could kill so viciously and without remorse.  He simply couldn’t feel it anymore.  That was the ultimate nerve he had desensitized through his work.  Perhaps he marked himself after every kill with a fresh scar.  His true art was hurting and pain. Capturing these Angels and making them suffer was his way of trying to feel again. Because all great art made people feel.

Beth entered the squad room with a petite woman in combat pants, black sweater and very dark purple lipstick on her full lips.  Lara had seen a young woman similarly attired in LA.  She called herself an “Office Goth”.  She saw the petite woman’s combat boots and wondered how she would react if she knew of her doppelganger halfway around the world. 

“I think she got it pretty close,” Beth said as the petite woman produced a print out with the Photofit of the man Beth had spent the last hour describing to her at her computer.  She put the print out down on Brouchard’s desk.  The Inspector looked at it with interest, Jason moved closer to get a look.  Lara saw the paper and studied the petite woman, who looked uncomfortable being scrutinized.

“You’re very good,” Lara said and turned to Brouchard.  “That’s him.”

Brouchard looked down at the paper where Guillotine’s face stared right back at him.

Chapter Thirty Seven

Brouchard walked them out to the front of the station.  An Officer was pulling a squad car around to take Beth back to the hotel.  He watched Lara and Jason, his intuition telling him they were planning something.  Conspiring.  He couldn’t imagine what they were up to and dismissed it as just another byproduct of his increasing exhaustion.  Eight coffees had not helped keep his mind straight and he knew he needed some rest.  Lara McBride seemed wired and ready to go.  She would not stop, not now they had a face in the crowd to find.

“Beth, you will be escorted to the hotel by one of my most promising young officers.  Don’t mind if he flatters you with compliments; it is simply his nature.”  Brouchard smiled, thinking of the young man in question, constantly hitting on as many women as passed him by.

“I gotta make some calls,” Beth said, trying to create a schedule and a check list in her head.  “Get things straight.  We were supposed to leave tomorrow.  And shit, I have to call the designer.  I gotta get this contract signed or the whole thing was for nothing.  Damnit, I almost forgot,” she exclaimed, mentally chiding herself.

“And where are you two going?”  Brouchard asked Lara.

“I need to go home and change,” Jason said.

“Then we’re gonna meet you at the Pompidou Centre,” Lara said to Brouchard.

“Are you, indeed?”  He hadn’t been sleeping properly for some time now.  He wondered if it was all the years of backed up memories, the faces of the dead he had been unable to put to rest stealing sleep from him, forcing him to get up and live because they could not.

“Give us an hour.” Lara said and he almost believed her.  She was set on some course of action she had decided he would not be privy to and he let it go because he knew he would never get anywhere trying to get the truth out of her.

“We really should get this Photofit out to the media,”  Brouchard addressed Lara, recalling their heated discussion in his office a few minutes earlier.  She shook her head.

“I’m telling you, if we do that he’s gonna go to ground and we’ll never find him.”

“And what do I tell my superiors when they find out we had a picture of this man and we held it back?”  Brouchard asked, already envisioning the trouble he was going to get in to when his direct boss found out they had a Photofit of a serial killer who had gone undetected for so long as he terrorized Paris.

“Blame me, I’m the American,” she said.

Jason took Beth by the hands and pulled her in close.  She put her head on his chest and he kissed her softly.  Her arms went around his waist and she wished she could fall in to him and let the world become a vague and distant memory of somebody else’s past.  It was a sweet fantasy.  When she opened her eyes, the squad car was at the curb and a trim, energetic young officer leaped out of the driver’s seat and opened the passenger door for her with a big smile.

“Hey,” Jason said and she looked up at him.  She hadn’t noticed before how blue his eyes were, seemingly more intensely the more passionate he was feeling.  An odd chemical mix was clearly at work inside him creating something beautiful.  She wondered if he even knew.  “Don’t worry.  Go back to the hotel.  Have a shower, make your calls, eat something.  We’ll be there later.”