The Skin Worshipper Page 11

Chapter 11

  Hawk arrives first at the police station the following day and sends Collins home to rest. He opens a bottle of Tylenol he keeps in his drawer and takes three together with the coffee he has bought on the way there.

  After reading the night log and seeing nothing exciting has happened he picks up the phone and calls Doc Martin.

  "Good morning Doc, anything yet?"

  "Jesus Hawk, it’s only eight in the morning."

  "So? You have no social life anyway, and I know you were up early working."

  Doc Martin is a divorcee from Seattle, and moved to town to start a new life. Back in the city he was a well-known doctor at one of the big hospitals. He did some private work too, and made some money. During the divorce his wife took everything, since Doc Martin had done something he shouldn’t have. He never talks about it, but one late night during a Thanksgiving party, he confided in Hawk and told him he had taken off to Las Vegas alone one weekend. He gambled away close to $200,000 and slept with several hookers. At the time he was a sex addict, and had managed to keep it a secret from his wife, usually by going out of town. This time he had fucked up big time. He got one of the girls pregnant, and she had a friend in the hotel where he stayed. The girl got his home address and one morning she showed up at his house. His wife opened the door and found a young girl, barely out of her teens standing there demanding to see him. She put two and two together and the next day she filed for divorce. The girl had an abortion and was never heard from again, but Doc Martin’s life was never the same again.

  "You got me. I've been working since four this morning. I think you better come here, there are a few things you need to see."

  "Anything interesting?"

  "You could say that."

  Hawk hangs up and bumps into Mrs. Winter on his way out.

  "I’m off to see Doc. I’ll call in later."

  "Have fun," she says in her usual happy way.

  The town is awake. People are walking to and from their houses, and Hawk waves as he drives along the main street. He knows almost all of them by their first name, and some only by their last. The town is quiet with little crime. During the weekends there are some fights and sometimes domestic disputes, usually concerning a wife or a girlfriend screaming at her drunk man who just came in from a late night. The last murder was recorded ten years earlier. A miner had gotten drunk in one of the few bars and after molesting one of the girls working there, he was found dead in a back street. The crime was quickly solved when the girl’s boyfriend walked in to the station the following day and admitted what he had done. It was a crime of passion, but the guy still got ten to fifteen at the state penitentiary.

  The day is beautiful. The sun is shining and there is no wind. Summer is coming, and with it the tourists. They come to fish and hike in the mountains, and with them come more work for Hawk and his deputies.

  He parks outside the medical center and enters. There is no one in the reception waiting, just Jill the nurse at her station.

  "Good morning Chief," she says with a yawn.

  "Morning Jill, is Doc in the back?"

  "Yep, he is waiting for you."

  Hawk finds Doc in one of the two rooms the center has. It’s full of equipment and shelves of bandages, syringes and other medical supplies. In the middle there is a metal table and on it is the girl from last night under a white sheet.

  "What do you have for me?"

  "This," says Doc and pulls down the sheet.

  "Wow, interesting," says Hawk.

  "I agree, I’ve never seen anything like it."

  Hawk looks at the body, and smiles. Between her breast and her pubic hair are several tattoos. They are slightly damaged from the Y insertion from the autopsy, but he can see the tattoos are no more than a year or so.

  "What is it?" asks Doc.

  "Gang tattoos, I saw plenty when I was working in LA."

  Hawk leans in closer, there are two large letters and then a small script under it, it’s in Spanish.

  "She belonged to a Latin gang; I’m not sure which, but defiantly Latin."

  "How the heck did she end up here? Maybe someone killed her somewhere else and dumped the body?"

  "I doubt it, gangs don’t usually drive hundreds of miles to dump a body, and they don’t use crossbows to kill with. No, someone shot her close to where we found her. She was alive and running through the forest, just look at all the scratch marks on her face and arms."

  Doc nods his head and says, "what still bothers me is the cause of death. It wasn’t the bolt itself, it didn’t hit any important parts. It entered her cheek and bounced off her molars and then went out the other side."

  "Any ideas?"

  "Well," Doc rubs his cheek and runs his hand over his hair, "I’d say a heart attack killed her."

  "What? She is too young for heart problems. C’mon, you can’t be serious."

  Doc nods his head, and says, "sorry Hawk, that’s as close as I can get. I will send samples to Seattle so they can run more tests on her, but to me she died of a massive heart attack."

  Hawk leaves the medical center and on the drive back to the police station he decides to check around with some old colleagues in LA, maybe they have some information about the girl. Before he had left, he took photos of the tattoos and her face.

  "Burt, Hawk here, how are you?"

  He is sitting at his desk with the phone cradled between his shoulder and good ear. There is a soda can in front of him and he has an unlit cigarette in his mouth. His desk is a clutter of paper and old coffee cups.

  "My man in the wilderness, how are you doing Hawk?" A rough voice says in his ear.

  Burt is ten years older than Hawk and they became good friends in LA. He worked the gangs and since their cases often crossed, drugs being a big money maker for the gangs, they spent a lot of time together.

  "I’m fine, listen I have a dead girl up here and I need your help."

  He tells Burt a short version of what happened the previous night and what he knows so far.

  "OK. E-mail me the photos and a description of her, and I’ll find out if we have anything on her.

  He hangs up and is just about to reach for his soda when Mrs. Winter sticks her head in.

  "Chief, I think you want to come out here for a second; there is something you need to hear."

  He gets up and follows her into the reception area and there is a tall blonde woman sitting on a chair. Her nose is reddish and so are her eyes, she has been crying.

  "This is Mrs. Read, her husband is kind of missing."

  Hawk sits down next to the woman and says, "tell me what happened."

  She takes a deep breath, "my husband, Alex, works as a counselor at the Juvenile Center outside town, and he took some kids in to the mountains a few days ago, and no one has heard from them since."

  "Have you contacted the Center?"

  "Yes, several times, and they haven’t heard anything either. They insist nothing is wrong. They are due back today or tomorrow at the latest."

  "So, why do you think something is wrong?"

  She snivels and says, "Alex always calls in, he makes sure he has a signal at least every second day, and now I haven’t heard from him in almost three days, something is wrong."

  Hawks sighs and says, "look Mrs. Read, I’m sure everything is fine, but I’ll drive to the Center and have a talk with them, OK?"

  "Thank you Chief," she gets up and walks out, Hawk watching her.

  "What do you think?" asks Mrs. Winter.

  "I have only met Alex Read a few times, but he seems like a nice enough guy. He is not the best outdoors man, so there is a possibility he got lost with the group. It was raining hard the other day and it’s easy to lose track of your directions on ground level."

  He walks back to his office and grabs his jacket, then leaves for the one hour drive to the Juvenile Center.