Still, he wasn’t sure what to make of tonight’s floater. “I don’t feel anything unusual here, but that only means the killing didn’t occur nearby.”
“But you’d know if it did,” Sloane prompted.
Mathias nodded. “Violence leaves a psychic mark on a place, the same way a physical blow leaves a bruise. The trick is finding it before it fades.”
One of Sloane’s men called to him from across the way. He raised a hand in acknowledgment, but kept his gaze trained on Mathias. Shaking his head, he blew out a chuckle. “I tell ya, Rowan, life just isn’t fair. My best parlor trick is the ability to tie a decent sailor’s knot without using my hands. A gift like yours, I’d have gotten promoted to JUSTIS Commissioner by now. Instead, I’m stuck bagging and tagging the city’s dregs on the shit side of town.”
Another vehicle rolled on to the scene, and Sloane’s fellow officer shouted for him again. “About time the medical examiner showed up,” he muttered. “I gotta go handle this. As for you and your team, I know I don’t need to tell you that the Order’s presence down here is going to make some people uncomfortable and twitchy.”
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 fuck 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.