Kovac gave her a hard look. "This is about a Jane Doe murder victim. There is no f.u.c.king zombie. There's a teenage girl lying dead on a steel table in the morgue with half her face dissolved by acid. She has a name, but we don't know what it is. We can a.s.sume she has a family somewhere, but we don't know who they are. How about that?"

Porter stared at him. "The zombie is the angle. You want people to get to the rest of what you just said? Embrace the zombie. We live in a society of self-absorbed, unaware drones desensitized to the suffering of others. You have to hit them in the f.u.c.king face to get their attention."

Kovac thought about it. He had to grudgingly admit he liked that she wasn't intimidated by him. "You have a poor outlook on humanity."

"Don't you?"

"I've lived longer than you have. I've earned the right to be bitter. You're not old enough to be bitter."

"Oh, I'm bitter," she a.s.sured him. "Bitter and outraged."

"Outraged by what?"

"Pretty much everything except puppies and kittens. The economy, ecology, foreign policy, social policy, women's rights, gay rights. The list goes on. There's a lot to be outraged about, including the lack of outrage exhibited by the average American."

"Well, good for you," Kovac said. "Hang on to that. But tell me, what good are you to me, Miss Outrage? I always think 'freelance' is just another word for unemployed. I need information disseminated."

"Why don't you call a press conference, then?"

"It's delicate."

The brow with the barbell sketched upward. "Ah. 'Sources close to the investigation' delicate?"

"Yeah, like that," he said. "Do you have a problem with that?"

"That depends. Is what you're going to tell me true?"

Kovac sat back, pretending confusion. "You're a reporter, right? What's truth got to do with it?"

"Oh, nothing," she said. "I live to compromise my journalistic integrity the same way you live to beat confessions out of innocent people."

"I've never beaten a confession out of an innocent person."

"And I don't knowingly lie to my readers."

The sulky waitress returned with a tray of drinks and Kovac's dinner. He shook the ketchup bottle as Sonya Porter tossed back her shot. They never took their eyes off each other.

"What readers?" Kovac asked. "Tip tells me you do stuff on the Internet. What does that mean?"

"Online news sources. Twitter. Facebook. My blog."

"And people actually read this stuff?"

She looked at her uncle with an expression that clearly said, Are you kidding me with this guy? Tippen shrugged.

"No one under the age of thirty reads an actual newspaper," she said. "Seriously. How old are you?"

Kovac felt like a dinosaur. In the technological revolution, he usually felt like he had chosen the wrong side. He could make a computer do what he needed it to do-which wasn't much-but in the last couple of years, with the meteoric rise of online social media, he felt like he had been run over on the information superhighway and left in the dust. Tinks stayed more current because of her boys, but as far as Kovac was concerned, tweeting came from birds, and a post was something that held up a fence.

"It doesn't matter how old I am," he said. "It matters that my victim is a teenager. And the other victims have been in their teens or early twenties."

She sat up at that. "Other victims? What other victims?"

"We could be dealing with a serial killer," Tippen said. "But the department is going to want to downplay that angle. From a public relations standpoint, a serial killer is a bad way to set the tone for the New Year."

That was a good angle, Kovac thought. Play to her desire to be outraged. She could rage against the establishment, rage against his generation. Whatever would put words on the page-or the screen-worked for him.

"This is the third victim dumped in Minneapolis," he said. "And there was one in St. Paul. None of them were from here. They were abducted in other states and dumped here when their killer was through with them.

"He's dumped bodies in other states too," he said. "This new one makes nine. You want to be outraged about something, be outraged about this: young women being abducted, raped, tortured, disfigured, murdered, and chucked out along the road like a sack of garbage. This girl's face is so destroyed it's anybody's guess what she looked like before this a.s.shole got hold of her."

He paused to take a bite of his dinner while he let Sonya Porter digest the information he'd fed her. Sonya Porter, twenty-young, with her lip ring and her anger; the ill.u.s.trated girl from a generation that could have been from another planet as far as he was concerned.

"What do you need from me?" she asked.

"I need to reach the people who might have known this girl. Kids she went to school with, hung out with. Siblings, maybe. Anyone. Anyone who might know anything," he said. "And I need this information to go out as far and as wide as possible, because I don't have any idea in h.e.l.l where this girl came from."

"What have you got to go on?"

"A tattoo." Kovac picked his phone up off the tabletop and brought up the photograph Tinks had taken at the autopsy and texted to him. "Any idea what it means?"

Sonya Porter's expression changed as she spread her thumb and forefinger across the screen to enlarge the picture of the Chinese characters. From interest to confusion to recognition to sadness.

"Yes," she said quietly. "I know what it means."

She put the phone down on the tabletop and pushed up the sleeve of her sweater to reveal the same set of Chinese characters inked into the delicate skin on the inside of her forearm.

"It means acceptance."

10.

Kyle sat on his bed with his back against the headboard and his knees pulled up. The light on his nightstand glowed amber, holding at bay the cold black night beyond his window.

The artwork on his walls took on a sinister feel in the dim light. His own renditions of characters from his favorite comic books and graphic novels, 300 and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, loomed large. Leonidas, the Spartan king, fierce and bearded. Xerxes I of Persia, beautiful and evil, with his elaborate body piercings and glowing eyes. Batman and the Joker.

Characters of Kyle's own creation looked down on him as well. Most notably, Ultor, defender and avenger of the downtrodden and the disenfranchised. Ultor, a man of chiseled muscle with an iron jaw and narrowed eyes, was loosely fashioned after Kyle's favorite mixed martial arts fighter, Georges St-Pierre.

With GSP, a man of few words, with swift and terrible punishment in his hands, there was no bulls.h.i.t, no trash talk, no preening or posing. He was a gentleman, a man of honor. He wasn't the biggest fighter. At five feet ten inches, 170 pounds, he had a compact body cut with lean muscle. He had been a small kid, bullied mercilessly by older schoolmates. Now, as a world champion fighter with millions of fans, he spoke out against bullying, which made Kyle admire him all the more.

A black belt in Kyokushin karate and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, GSP came, he saw, he conquered with a superior mind, superior skill, and conditioning. And when he won, he was thankful and gracious. Ultor was like that: a man who fought with honor, a man of the people and for the people. He was a man Kyle had created to fill a need in his own life.

He could hear the voices downstairs: his mother's and his dad's. They were talking about him, he supposed, though he couldn't make out any of the words, just the cadence of conversation in the living room below.

He preferred to live under their radar. They didn't understand anything about his life. They were both obsessed with the idea of drugs, which was an insult to him. Like they thought he was stupid enough to do s.h.i.t like that.

He had smoked pot, but he didn't like it. Everyone smoked pot. His dad did (Kyle had seen the evidence in his dad's apartment, had smelled it) and he was a narc. A narc and a hypocrite. He drank, he smoked, he smoked pot, he had cheated on Mom. Kyle hadn't exactly understood about that at the time because he was just a little kid, but he had known it wasn't right. He had heard their arguments, listened to his mom cry after the fight, when his dad had left and she thought she was alone.

Speed Hatcher wasn't a good father. He lied. He let them down. He showed up when it suited him and made excuses the rest of the time. He would make it if Kyle or R.J. was in a sporting event, but he had never made it to a single art show Kyle had been a part of. He had never come to see Kyle get an academic award.

He took them to see the Twins and the Vikings and the Timberwolves and the Wild because those were things he liked to do and he looked like a hero. And for sure, those were fun things to do, but Kyle saw it for what it was-part bribery and part self-indulgence. R.J. fell for all that c.r.a.p because he was still a little kid and because he wanted to, but Kyle didn't.

So it didn't impress Kyle that his dad had come to his room, all serious and wanting to have a talk with him. It hadn't concerned his father all that much when he had first shown up earlier in the day and saw Kyle's face busted up. He had accepted Kyle's excuse with an offhand comment about how he expected the other guy to look worse.

His sudden concern tonight was Mom's doing. She hadn't been satisfied with the story Kyle had told, and she had sent Dad in for the second interrogation. Bad cop, good cop. She thought Kyle might confess something to his father, man-to-man. But his father wasn't the kind of man Kyle admired or wanted to be. No confession would be confidential. His father would go straight to his mother and spill everything. No confession would be forthcoming.

His parents understood nothing about the world he lived in, the pressures he was under. He lived in a world of extremes. He was smart. His teachers and his mom pressured him to perform academically. He was gifted. His art instructors pushed him to become a more commercial, traditional artist, to not "waste his time" on tattoo designs and comic book characters. He was athletic. His dad wanted him to play football, to play hockey, to play baseball, to be a part of a team, to be a guy's guy. Kyle wanted to study Muay Thai kickboxing and Brazilian jiu-jitsu and do his own thing for his own reasons.

Because he was good-looking and talented, socially he was expected to be cool, to be popular, to act a certain way, to like certain kinds of girls-and, more important, to not like certain people, to not like the kids who were misfits. He didn't care about being cool. He definitely didn't run with the popular crowd. And because he didn't care about those things, he was generally disliked by the kids who did.

He had thought it would be different when he started going to PSI. Theoretically, Performance Scholastic Inst.i.tute was the biggest geek school in town. It was the place for brainiacs and kids in the arts-kids who always got picked on and beat up at public school. But it was no different. Every clique hated another clique. There were still cool kids who picked on the kids who didn't fit in.

In fact, in some ways it was worse at PSI because the smarter the kids, the meaner they could be. At least in public school the meanest kids tended to be stupid. The cruelty was less sophisticated.

Kyle had been excited to win his scholarship. He had been excited to be challenged academically and encouraged in his art. But now he wished he could just take his GED and be done with school. He didn't believe he needed an education to succeed as an artist. Talent was all that mattered. And he sure as h.e.l.l didn't need the rest of the high school bulls.h.i.t.

He wanted to work on his drawing without anyone pushing their opinions on him. He wanted not to be forced into a mold that didn't fit him. He wanted to be with the people he wanted to know, and not have others judge him or his friends. He dreamed about having his own place to live where he never had to explain himself to anybody, where he could be who he was and live how he wanted.

But he couldn't tell his parents any of that . . . or anything else about his life.

He dug his cell phone out from under his pillow, went to his contacts, and touched a name.

The phone on the other end rang and rang and went to voice mail. Again. Kyle ended the call without leaving a message and went to his text messages instead. The message he had first sent late two nights before, then again and again and again, remained unanswered.

Where r u? R u ok?

He sent it again, just in case.

No answer returned.

The voices downstairs were droning on. Kyle got up and stuck his head out in the hall. R.J.'s door was closed, his television mumbling on the other side. With the coast clear, he went down the hall to the bathroom, locked himself inside, and turned on the shower as hot as he could stand it.

The water stung the abrasions on his face and his knuckles but soothed some of the aches in his body. He examined himself as he dried off. The bruises were starting to come to the surface. At least that was all he had-bruises. No broken bones. No open wounds to try to explain away. The worst of the damage was invisible. The damage done to his heart, to his spirit. The thousand cuts of cruel words.

Why did people have to be so full of hate and ignorance? Why couldn't they just let everyone be who they were?

He glanced over his shoulder at his reflection in the mirror and the two small symbols tattooed on his shoulder. This was what he believed so strongly that he had saved up his own money and had the ideal etched into his flesh with ink: acceptance.

11.

"Which one of you is the 'source close to the investigation'?"

Captain Ullrich Ka.s.selmann sat behind his desk looking like a banker: well-tailored charcoal suit, crisp white shirt, stylish orange tie knotted just so, every silver hair in place. Only the faintest sheen of perspiration on his forehead suggested he even noticed that the office was as hot as Florida in August.

Ka.s.selmann was a man with a solid build and an immovable, brick-wall quality about him that was a physical manifestation of his character. He'd been the head of the Criminal Investigative Division long enough to have substantiated his initial paranoia regarding his employees.

"Don't look at me," Tinks said irritably. "I don't even know what you're talking about."

Kovac gave her a sideways glance. She looked like maybe she had tried to catch an hour's sleep on a bench at a bus stop-hair more disheveled than usual, dark smudges under bloodshot eyes, pasty complexion.

"The lead story on the early morning news, channels five and eleven," Ka.s.selmann said. "'Zombie Possible Victim of Serial Killer.' You don't know anything about that?"

He turned his laser gaze on Kovac.

"Yeah, right," Kovac said sarcastically. "I have such a close personal relationship with the media."

Ka.s.selmann was poker-faced. "Then who?"

"How should I know?" Kovac asked. "Call Culbertson," he said, readily throwing the ME's investigator under the bus. Culbertson didn't answer to Ka.s.selmann. Nothing would come of it. And frankly, Steve Culbertson loved to play the role of subversive. This could work out for everyone.

"Is it true?" the captain asked.

"Could be. Yes. Definitely could be," Kovac said, resisting the urge to glance again at his partner. Liska had argued against the possibility of Zombie Doe being one of Doc Holiday's victims. She said nothing now.

"New Year's Eve, stabbed repeatedly, s.e.xual overtones, facial disfigurement," he said. "More pieces fit than don't."

"She came out of the trunk of a car," Ka.s.selmann said. "In traffic."

"Looks like the car hit a pothole, the trunk popped open, and the body bounced out," Kovac said. "Then again, Moller says there's a slim chance she might have still been alive at the time. Maybe she escaped. It certainly wasn't anybody's plan for her to get out of that trunk when she did."

"We don't have a plate on the car?"

"The limo driver was distracted. He's coming in today to get hypnotized." He shrugged. "Maybe he'll come up with something."

"But you're not hopeful."

"He had two hot half-naked babes making out with each other in his backseat. What do you think he was looking at?"

Ka.s.selmann heaved a sigh, disapproval set in the chiseled lines of his face. "I've had phone calls from three deputy chiefs already this morning. And I've been called to the chief's office for an urgent meeting in twenty minutes. He's not going to be in a good mood."

"Yeah?" Liska piped up aggressively. "Well, imagine what a good mood he'd be in if this was his daughter lying on a slab in the morgue with her face burned off from the acid her killer tried to force down her throat. He should think about that, shouldn't he?"

Ka.s.selmann's silver brows climbed his forehead.

"This is somebody's daughter," she went on emphatically. "Just like Rose Reiser was someone's daughter, and the victim from Iowa-who was not only someone's daughter but someone's mother. The chief should maybe think about those things, shouldn't he?"

"You seem to have an ax to grind, Sergeant," Ka.s.selmann said.