“This is a photograph of the victim’s face. It will appear … reasonably unpleasant at first.”
Jinnah opened his eyes as fully as he dared. There were Thad Golway’s lifeless eyes, his reddish, matted hair. His mouth, open slightly, showing cracked, nicotine-stained teeth. But it was not these details that Jinnah found disturbing. It was the marks on Thad’s cheeks. At first, all he registered were the wounds. Someone had carved the kid’s cheeks with a knife. For a moment, he thought he would need the bucket, but he managed to keep his stomach under control.
“You will notice, Mister Jinnah, that the pattern of scarring is quite plainly visible. Which is extremely odd, don’t you think?”
Jinnah looked at Aikens, but his pale face gave nothing away. This was one of Aikens’s little quizzes. He made Jinnah think for his stories. It irritated him, but it took his mind of the dreadful sight before his eyes.
“Where’s the blood, Doc?”
Aikens smiled, framing his dark eyes with a latticework of wrinkles. “Spot on, my man. There was none. Someone carved the victim’s cheeks post mortem, then washed away the blood so his handiwork could be seen.”
“Name of God,” said Jinnah, sweating and wondering why he never thought to pop a tranquilizer before coming here.
“I used the word ‘carved’ deliberately, by the way,” Aikens continued. “Have you noticed the pattern?”
Jinnah stared as Aikens traced the design on Thad’s cheeks with a capped ballpoint pen. A crooked line ran vertically up either side, from chin to the top of the broad cheekbone. Cutting across the axis of these were three, wavy lines. They looked like a series of lopsided Ws: jagged crosses, macabre Christmas trees.
“Identical on both cheeks,” said Jinnah.
“Rather like trees, don’t you think?” said Aikens, voicing Jinnah’s thoughts.
Jinnah’s inherent instincts started to tingle. His stomach was forgotten. “Have you ever seen a signature like this before, Doc?”
“Not in my long service here in the first circle of hell, Jinnah,” said Aikens, a touch sadly. “It is not any known gang or cult sign that I can identify.”
Jinnah took out his notepad and made a sketch of the markings. He knew this was a breach of the usual protocol with Aikens: no attribution and no note taking. It had an immediate effect on Aikens, who began mopping his receding hairline with a linen handkerchief.
“Look, my man — do you think that’s wise?” he said, a shade nervously.
“Hey! Graham said a full briefing, didn’t he?”
“Indeed. Quite right.”
“Besides,” said Jinnah. “You want to know whose signature this is, hmm? Well, I’m pretty sure I know where to find out.”
“You do?” said Aikens querulously. “Pray, where?”
Jinnah snapped his notebook shut. God, he needed a cigarette. “The scene of the crime,” he said.
* * *
By the time Jinnah returned to Main and Terminal, the circus was breaking up. Most of the media had gone. So, mercifully, had the Reverend Hobbes. The CSU guys were finishing up. But the people who Jinnah wanted to talk to were there, of course. They lived there.
He looked at the small knots of people still hanging around the lawn. One was composed of emerging alcoholics, led by the bare-chested, well-muscled mule man who had challenged Graham. Another of older street people, chatting and leaning over the handles of their shopping carts the way people in the suburbs leaned over their fences to gossip. The third group was mostly younger people in faded and ripped jeans and T-shirts. Several were holding squeegees. Jinnah strolled up to them with what he thought was just the right mixture of casual coolness and understated authority.
“Gentlemen, ladies,” he said. “Making much money today?”
The half-dozen squeegee kids glared at Jinnah and fell silent.
“Did any of you know Thad?” asked Jinnah, keeping a verbal foot in the door.
A scrawny young man of about twenty, wearing a red bandanna that covered most of his long, greasy brown hair, turned to face Jinnah. A spokesman. Good. The rest watched as Red Bandanna challenged Jinnah.
“You a cop?” he demanded.
Jinnah laughed and fished his cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. “Do I look like one?” he said, offering his cigarettes.
Red Bandanna looked at the package suspiciously, hesitating. “These regulars or Mother Nature?”
“Sadly, just tobacco,” said Jinnah.
“We live in hope, man.”
Red Bandanna took one. So did a very thin, pale young woman who Jinnah took to be his girlfriend. Jinnah lit both their cigarettes.
“Was Thad a squeegee kid?” he asked.
Red Bandanna scowled. “Why you wanna know? You’re not a cop. You an undertaker?”
“No, I’m Hakeem Jinnah, crime reporter for the Tribune.” Jinnah had waved a red flag in front of Red Bandanna, who had his soap box ready.
“Why don’t you assholes in the corporate media tell the truth about what’s happening down here instead of parroting the fucking fascist cops who are owned and operated by the global money men who are ruining our planet, huh?”
Jinnah kept his face carefully neutral. Just as long as they didn’t identify him as the author of last month’s piece of fascist police propaganda, he might just get something out of this. Simultaneously, he wondered if he could claim expenses for two cigarettes.
“We can’t tell the truth if you don’t talk to us, my friend. For instance, I assume most of my colleagues in the corporate media will refer to Thad as a street person or a junkie. Is he either?”
“Labels!” spat Red Bandanna’s girlfriend through skinny, magenta lips. “Cut-price tags to put on a person so you can write them off as no loss. What does it mean?”
This was a little too esoteric for Jinnah to follow, so he kept roughly to the subject. “So are you saying you didn’t know Thad? That he wasn’t a squeegee kid?”
“He’d blown the scene, man,” said Red Bandanna. “He wasn’t one of us.”
“Ah, but he used to be. And was he a dealer or a user?”
“We don’t deal, asshole of the corporate media!”
“Look, I don’t give a shit if he was either,” said Jinnah sharply. “He was a human being and he didn’t deserve to end up under a tree with his head cut off.”
This took Red Bandanna aback for a second. Girlfriend stepped up to the plate. “He wasn’t around much. So don’t try and label him.”
“I just want to know a little bit about him, as a person,” persisted Jinnah. “Was he part of a gang or something?”
“We don’t have gangs, apologist for the state!” Red Bandanna had recovered. “We’re like a family down here.”
Jinnah found this rich. Well, as long as they pretended to be a nuclear family, he might as well drop the bomb on them. He flipped open his notebook to the sketch of the marks on Thad’s cheeks. “So what’s this then? The family coat of arms?”
Red Bandanna and Girlfriend could not hide the look of surprise and fear that flickered briefly across their faces and was mirrored in the rest of the gang. They recovered their collective cool quickly, however.