Marked Excerpt

I never told my parents about the Mark.

Of course, they knew it was there on their adopted little girl’s back. Some of my earliest memories are of the man who would become my dad taking me to strange places to have strange people look at the strange patterns drawn across his strange little girl’s back.

My parents never learned the origin of the tattoo, much less what it might mean, and by the time I grew into puberty, I was too self-conscious in my desire for normalcy to ever allow the Mark to be uncovered in anyone else’s presence, even to those who loved me.

Much as I wished otherwise, I wasn’t normal, and the Mark on my back was more than a simple tattoo. I was nearly an adult myself before I understood that, even on the simplest level.

So I never told them.

* * *

Four days after my mom’s funeral, the temperatures reached up into the mid-nineties and stayed there, the air pressing down on everything like a wet towel. We were on the road five minutes before the AC on the unmarked ten-year-old Crown Victoria cruiser sputtered and died, the air from the vents turning from barely cool to burning-asphalt hot.

Jacob Hightower, my partner, reached over from the wheel and tried to adjust the controls, to no effect. “Doesn’t the garage ever check these before signing them out?” He shut off the vents, and the airflow died with a shuddering wheeze. He toggled the windows and they reluctantly slid down. “Makes you wish you worked for a city with a maintenance budget.”

“Yeah.”

“Want to take this back to the motor pool?”

“We can switch cars after we meet Mrs. Kim. After what she’s been through, I don’t want to make her wait.” Right now I was too aware of what it was like when you lost part of your family. I didn’t want to be responsible for dragging out this experience for her.

I turned to look out the open passenger window. The wind tore into the car, carrying the smells of diesel exhaust and hot tar. It made my eyes water.

Jacob said something that I lost in the sound of the wind. “What?” I yelled, still facing the Cleveland skyline rolling by past the freeway guardrail.

“I asked, are you up for this, Dana?” he yelled back at me, sounding very far away beyond the roaring wind.

“I’m fine!”

After working together for three years, he was probably aware that I was lying to him. Even so, he didn’t press the point. I was grateful for that.

I was the junior member of the team, and Jacob had an irritating protective streak that I tried not to hold against him. He knew that I had just come back to work after saying goodbye to the only family I had left. He should have been concerned about me; it was part of his job.

It wasn’t his fault if that type of concern grated against something very basic inside me. Even from him. Especially from him.

It was just past rush hour, and traffic moved quickly along the freeway as we headed toward the West Side. We were silent until we hit the exit and the wind died down, the stillness resurrecting the oppressive heat. Jacob squinted at the traffic light and said, “We should have taken your car.”

“Oh, no. That baby is strictly for civilian use.”

“I thought you got it because you liked the patrol cars in Solon.”

“The places we have to park? No, thank you.”

“I’m sure you could—”

“Jacob, you aren’t going to get to drive my Charger.”

He wove the car through the surface streets while I did my best to undo the violence the wind had done to my hair, getting the scary blonde halo back into a semicontrolled ponytail. It made me envious of Jacob’s short brown military cut. By the time I had gotten my appearance a few notches back under horrifying, Jacob had parked the car in front of our destination.

The storefront was tucked between a liquor store hiding behind vistas of yellowing cigarette and lottery ads, and a payday loan office that was so antiseptic and sterile it looked like a set from an old Star Trek episode. Between them, Asia FX stood out like a drag queen at an Amish funeral.

The name loomed over the store, drawn in a chromed graffiti font three times the height of the sans serif gracing its drab siblings. Behind the window and unlit neon signs proclaiming “tattoos” and “piercings” were panels of artwork: skulls, Buddhas, tigers, dragons, and elaborate inscriptions in Kanji and Indian script.

Hanging on the door was a plastic sign apologizing for being closed—as if the yellow police tape wasn’t enough of a clue.

I stared at the place and felt uncomfortably aware of the Mark on my back. I could almost feel phantom fingers tracing the black whorls and branches etched into my skin. I wondered if this had been one of the places my dad had brought me to when he was still trying to identify it, trying to identify me.

“Are you all right, Dana?”

I tried to laugh it off. “Just some déjà vu.”

He looked at my face, and I couldn’t help returning the look. He had a strong face, as if a confident artist had drawn it with just a few bold perfectly-placed strokes. He had a shadow of a beard, just enough to be masculine, not enough to look messy. His hazel eyes gave me the uncomfortable sense that he saw my emotions better than I did.

“You’re due for some time off,” he told me. “The funeral was only—”

“I’m fine,” I snapped, too defensively. He turned from me, and my bitchiness made me feel even worse. I belatedly realized I was taking things out on him. “I’m sorry.”

“I know. Don’t worry about it.” He faced Asia FX, squinting in the morning light. “Mrs. Kim should be here soon to let us in.”

He was right. I wasn’t up for this. I was just too stubborn to admit it to him—or maybe I had just become too accustomed to keeping uncomfortable secrets.

When I had come to work the Monday after Mom’s funeral, I had honestly thought I could handle it. I wasn’t a teenager anymore, not like when Dad had been shot.

But parked across from Asia FX, it felt as if the past ten years hadn’t happened. I was a teenager again, and it wasn’t my mom that had just been buried—it was my dad. I could feel the irrational guilt as a physical presence filling my stomach and my throat, making it hard to breathe. I rubbed my eyes and told myself that they still burned from riding with the windows open.

“Here she comes,” Jacob said, stepping out of the car.

The victim’s daughter looked like hell. She was a tiny Korean woman, about fifty. Rogue strands of hair trailed across her face. Her frown looked out of place, a foreign invader in unfamiliar territory. It was painful to watch it turn to a forced smile as she acknowledged Jacob’s presence. “Detective Hightower?”

“Yes. Mrs. Kim?”

I spent a few moments composing myself as the two of them exchanged faux pleasantries. However I felt, I still had a job to do. I sucked in a few breaths, told myself to cowgirl up, and got out of the passenger side in time for Jacob to gesture my way and say, “And this is Detective Rohan.”

“Thank you for meeting us, Mrs. Kim,” I said.

“You’re welcome,” she responded, turning immediately back to Jacob. “What can I do for you?” she asked.

Some people of a certain generation, especially women of a certain generation, really had trouble accepting a female police detective. Over the three years since I’d become one, I had learned to let Jacob take the lead in questioning in those situations. Normally it irritated me, but right now I was grateful that Jacob bore the brunt of dealing with the grieving family member.

“Well,” Jacob said, “I have a few more questions, and Detective Rohan would like to look at the scene.”

They both turned to look at me, and I suddenly felt that I wouldn’t like to see the scene of the crime, not at all. But I needed to. If I was going to bring my skills to bear, I needed to get the lay of the land, plan out how I was going to confront the suspect.

Everything I felt right now was beside the point.

Ms. Kim turned to me and said, “The officers took pictures already. They said we could clean up.” There was almost a pleading tone in her voice. And I read in her face, please, just let this part of it be over.

I knew how she felt. It wasn’t just the grieving; she probably hadn’t even dealt with that part yet. There was the legal stuff, the insurance, tracking down all the bills, dealing with the incompetent funeral director, realizing that you were the one who had to tell all your mom’s friends that she had gone into the hospital and no, she hadn’t made it. . . .

Oh, hell.

I tried my best reassuring smile, mentally shoving away all the issues I had been dealing with. “I’m just looking at the physical layout of the scene.”

“She’s very good at what she does,” Jacob said.

Mrs. Kim nodded, one of the stray trails of hair pulling free in the morning breeze. I could see the individual strands of white mixing in with the black.

While Jacob removed the crime-scene tape, she pulled a massive key ring from her purse and began a long ritual of unlocking the door. I glanced at Jacob, looking for a sign that he saw how rattled I was.

I decided I was being paranoid. Jacob was good at taking me at my word, perhaps even when he shouldn’t have. He wasn’t paying attention to me as he watched Mrs. Kim open the door to Asia FX.

I felt more comfortable studying his face when he wasn’t looking at me. I always had liked his face. He only had about six years on me, but he had begun getting a premature dusting of gray at the temples though his short brown hair was so light that it was easy to miss it. Rather than aging him, it gave him an almost subliminal air of authority that suited a cop.

I think that’s why I liked working with him, liked him. He looked and acted the part of a cop—the kind of cop that I had wanted to be ever since the year Dad died. He wouldn’t look out of place in a picture with Joe Friday or Eliot Ness.

Or my dad.

I hoped that at least some of that had rubbed off on me over the past three years.

Mrs. Kim turned around in the now open doorway and asked, “What do you want to see?” The interior was dark behind her, the shadows gaping like a hungry mouth.

“Where are the security cameras?”

“The officers took the tapes.”

“I know,” I told her. Back at the station, I’d reviewed the security footage with Jacob. The video of the shooting had a time stamp of 11:05 and showed a male suspect—white or Hispanic—wearing a gray hoodie and a pair of jeans with a hole torn in the right knee. The video was bad quality, probably because it was an ancient system that had been reusing the same VHS tape for years. “Can you show me where the cameras are?” I asked.

She nodded and led me into the dark. Even in the gloom, I could see her whole body tense as we walked into the place where her father had been murdered. The only light came from the morning sun leaking through the front windows, and that didn’t penetrate very deep into the room beyond. In the gloom, she almost became a ghost herself.

Around us, gods and monsters covered the walls watching.

She stopped in front of a counter, which bore the first visible sign of the tragedy that had happened to her family last night. It was a small, glass-fronted case like you’d see in a jewelry store. The front had been smashed and the contents emptied. A small cash register sat on top of the busted display case, turned toward us, the drawer half open.

Behind the case, a padded stool lay on its side next to a dark stain in the carpet. The air in here felt dry and still as a tomb, the only sound the buzzing of a few flies.

“What was in the case?” I asked, stepping around the broken glass.

“Nothing. It was all costume jewelry . . .” Her voice caught. She paused before pointing up into the darkness above the counter. “There.”

I looked up at where a small security camera poked from the acoustical tile, covering the register and the entrance. The thing was obvious and bulky, probably at least twenty years old. I looked at the register again and realized that it had come from another decade as well. Mrs. Kim’s father had been in business here for a long time.

“Is that the only one?” I asked.

“Yes,” she waved toward the back, past a folding oriental screen that made a private alcove back past the counter. I couldn’t see anything past it. “He has a TV back there so that he can see people come in when he is working alone . . . was working alone.”

Mrs. Kim stood there and made a small sound somewhere between a gasp and a sob. I looked at her and could feel everything I had felt when I knew that someone had killed my dad, and there was nothing that could ever fix it.

“I know,” I whispered to myself. In the still confines of the tattoo parlor, I might as well have shouted.

She turned to face me with an expression that looked lost in the shadows. “You know?”

“How you feel,” I said, feeling very unlike the detective I was supposed to be at the moment.

“I suppose you do. You must see things like this every day.”

“I—” I lost my father, too. It was just as stupid and pointless. I just buried my mom and I’m still trying to deal with that. . . . I didn’t say any of it, but she must have seen something in my face.

“Detective Rohan, are you all right?”

“I’m fine. But you don’t need to be here. Why don’t you go and talk to Detective Hightower? I’m just going to look around here for a few minutes.”

“Okay,” she said uncertainly.

I reached out and touched her arm, saying, “I promise you, we will get the guy who did this.”

She nodded, but from her lost expression, I could tell she didn’t have any faith in my reassurance. She walked back toward the doorway, toward Jacob’s silhouette. As I watched her walk away from me, I found myself gripped by an unexpected anger at the person who had done this to her father. She was right. I dealt with things like this all the time. This wasn’t any different. No matter how I felt right now, this was just another armed robbery that had ended badly.

That’s what I kept telling myself.

At the door, she turned around and pointed past me, toward the far wall. “The light switches are by the back door there.”

“Thank you.”

She vanished into the daylight with Jacob, leaving me alone in the tattoo parlor. I turned around and walked into the darkness.

Past the screen, I bumped into a padded chair and had to feel around to find the back door. After some fumbling, I found the switches.

When I flipped on the lights, I suddenly found myself facing a photo of a full back piece of a blue-skinned Shiva: fangs, bloody swords, skull necklace, and all. The picture’s appearance was so sudden and violent that I took an involuntary step back.

That brought more pictures into my field of vision, dozens of them, photos of this guy’s work. He was good. Very good. The intricacy of what he did was awe-inspiring at every level of detail, mandalas and Buddhas, tigers and dragons, abstract floral designs, and at least one demonic creature that must have come from a seventeenth century Japanese print.

I turned around and faced the alcove where he had done his work. There was one adjustable padded chair behind the screen, a magnifying lamp on a swinging arm, and a rolling cart with needles, ink, and various other tools laid out with surgical precision. It was spotless and orderly back here, and if it wasn’t for the pictures on the wall, I could have been standing in a hospital’s examination room.

I felt as if I stood in the heart of a man’s life.

I glanced up and looked past the screen. It blocked the front of the shop, but I could see the shadows of Jacob and Mrs. Kim moving across the flash posted in the front of the shop.

I was completely hidden from them.

I shouldn’t do this now.

I felt raw and angry. Just being here, standing in this place, was driving splinters into my need to do something. The Mark felt it as well; I could feel it rippling across my skin, long hot fingers pushing at me, wanting to be used. I bit my lip.

Now wasn’t the time.

Then my gaze fell on one particular picture. The image showed a unique tribal pattern across someone’s back. The stark black pattern of the abstract lines stood out amid the other, more colorful pieces. I saw the swirls and arcs of a branching design that never self-intersected.

Ever since I had walked into Asia FX, I had felt the memories bubbling up, memories of my dad taking me to places like this, showing my back to men marked in their own ways. I remembered how my own Mark seemed to frighten and fascinate them.

Seeing that stark black pattern in the midst of all that color, I couldn’t help imagining the artist being influenced by the bizarre pattern he had seen on the skin of a lost little girl. It was easy to believe that I had once stood on this spot while Mrs. Kim’s father tried to give my dad some clue as to who had drawn the Mark on my back and where it had come from.

That man who had tried to help me now had his life taken as senselessly as my dad’s had been. His daughter had been dropped without warning into the same chaos of grief and bureaucracy I had just gone through with Mom.

I wanted to deal with the punk that had killed Mrs. Kim’s father, and I wanted to do it now.

I decided to hell with what time it was.