Free Last Breath by Michael Prescott

couldn’t possibly think there was any chance of reconciliation ... could he?
    Well, one night with Adam wouldn’t kill her. And she had always liked his company, even if, in the end, he’d shown himself to be someone other than the man she’d thought he was.
    Her car was in the station house parking lot. She walked back to the station and entered through the lobby.
    Delano was still at the desk. He smiled when she came in. “That’s your ex, huh, Killer?”
    “None of your business, but yeah.”
    “I was talking to him before. Seems like an okay guy.”
    “He is an okay guy. As long as you don’t trust him too much.”

11
     
     
    Autopsies weren’t the only things Walsh hated. Running a meeting was another. He sometimes wondered why he had ever accepted a promotion to the rank of Detective-3. What he loved was being out in the field, and now, in his supervisory capacity, he rarely had time to investigate a case personally. Then again, at fifty-two, he supposed he had better leave the legwork to the next generation.
    At the moment he was surrounded by representatives of that generation, who crowded three desks pushed together to make a single long table in the Robbery-Homicide squad room at Parker Center, the LAPD’s downtown headquarters. He had called a meeting of the Hourglass Killer task force, or at least its core members. Over the past two months, since the abduction of Nikki Carter, the task force had grown to include liaison personnel from the Homicide Bureau of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department—Carter’s body had been dumped in an auto graveyard in East LA, territory which was under the Sheriff’s jurisdiction—as well as miscellaneous bureaucrats from the County Probation Department and the State Department of Corrections.
    So far the FBI had been kept out of it, except for the obligatory psychological profile of the killer supplied by the Behavioral Science Section at Quantico.
    If everybody connected with the investigation had been assembled, the squad room would have been filled to capacity. Walsh restricted most meetings to the LAPD Robbery-Homicide detectives who did the heavy lifting on the case.
    Today’s meeting had been scheduled to start promptly at 4:00 P.M. Naturally it was almost four-thirty when the last stragglers wandered in. Walsh knew he ought to dress them down for their tardiness, but he had never been much good as a disciplinarian. He had reared three kids without once raising his voice, and he figured he could handle a half-dozen Metro detectives with equal self-restraint.
    “Okay,” he said, silencing the chatter around the table, “now that we’re all here, we can get started.” Crisply he summarized the autopsy of Martha Eversol. “Anything new on the tats?” he asked when he had finished, directing his inquiry at Detectives Stark and Merriwether, who were working that angle.
    “Nothing much,” Stark answered. “We’ve visited every tattoo parlor in town, and I mean every goddamn one. No hourglass patterns. A lot of snakes, flags, hearts with arrows through them.”
    “And the style isn’t recognizable,” Merriwether added. “Most of the pros say it’s an amateur working with a homemade stencil, applying the ink by hand.”
    “Like jailhouse tats?” Len Sotheby wondered. “Could mean our guy has a rap sheet.”
    “No, not jailhouse. Those are almost always gray and black, ’cause the scratchers can’t get hold of any colored pigments. It’s what the experts call blackwork. What we’re looking at here is bold color in a geometrical design. They tell me it’s similar to the original tattoo technique used in the Pacific—the Philippines, Samoa, Tahiti, places like that. In Samoa it’s still done.”
    “What is the technique exactly?” Walsh asked, jotting down notes.
    “Traditionally, the artist takes a piece of bone and files one end to, like, a serrated edge—you know, like a comb. Then he attaches it to a wooden handle, dips the