Buried Secrets (Nick Heller) by Finder Joseph

Author:Finder, Joseph [Finder, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2011-06-20T16:00:00+00:00

DIANA ANSWERED on the first ring.

“Who took the picture?” I said.

“Alexandra Marcus. This came from her iPhone, taken the night she disappeared.”

“When?”

“At 2:36 A.M. Apparently all iPhone photos are encoded with metadata that tell you the date and time. And something called a geotag, which gives you the GPS coordinates of the phone at the time the picture was taken.”

“Leominster?”

“Straight down the road about a mile from where you found it.”

“That’s an owl.”

“Right. I wasn’t sure whether you’d be able to make it out on your BlackBerry. But if you enlarge the photo it appears that the tattoo covers his head and neck and probably a good portion of his upper back as well.”

“You already searched NCIC?”

“Sure. One of the fields in the database is for scars and marks and tattoos. No hits.”

“Did you send it to your Gang Intelligence Center?”

“Sure. But no luck.”

“Isn’t there some central database of criminal tattoos?”

“There should be, but there isn’t.”

I thought a moment. “Ever see the Latin Kings tattoos?” The Latin Kings were the biggest Hispanic street gang in the country.

“It’s a five-pointed crown or something?”

“That’s one of them. There’s also a tattoo of a lion wearing a crown. Sharp teeth, big eyes. Some gang members get it tattooed on their backs. It’s huge.”

“You think he’s part of a Latino gang?”

“Some kind of gang, anyway.”

“I’ve sent the photo to our seventy-five legal attachés around the world. Asking them to run it by local law enforcement. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said dubiously. “You’d think a guy with an owl on his head and neck would be fairly memorable. People aren’t likely to forget a sight like that.”

“That’s not smart. Owls are supposed to be smart.”

“Your average street pigeon is ten times smarter than the smartest owl. It’s not about smart. It’s about scary. In some cultures, an owl is a symbol of death,” I said. “A bad omen. A prophecy of death.”

“Where? Which countries?”

I thought for a moment. “Mexico. Japan. Romania, I think. Maybe Russia. Ever see an owl hunt?” I said.

“Oddly enough, I haven’t.”

“It moves its head side to side and up and down, looking and listening, triangulating on its prey. You really can’t find a more perfect, more ruthless killer.”

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