‘Modifying bodies, you know. Inking people, piercing, cutting.’ He tapped his ear bars. ‘Everything. “Modding” covers the gamut.’ He frowned. ‘Whatever a gamut is. I don’t really know.’

Rhyme said, ‘Lon says you’re pretty well connected in the tattoo community here and that you don’t have any specific idea who it might be.’

Gordon confirmed this.

Sellitto added that Gordon had looked over a picture of the victim’s tattoo but wanted a better image; the printout hadn’t been that clear.

Cooper said, ‘I’ll call up the raw .nef files and save them as enhanced .tiffs.’

Rhyme had no clue what he was talking about. In the days when he worked crime scenes himself he used actual thirty-five-millimeter film that had to be developed in chemicals and printed in a darkroom. Back then you made every frame count. Now? You shot the hell out of a crime scene and culled.

Cooper said, ‘I’ll send them to the Nvidia computer – the big screen there.’

‘Whatever, dude. As long as it’s clear.’

Pulaski asked, ‘You seen The Big Lebowski?’

‘Oh, man.’ Gordon grinned and punched a fist Pulaski’s way. The rookie reciprocated.

Rhyme wondered: Maybe Tarantino.

The pictures appeared on the largest monitor in the room. They were extremely high-definition images of the tattoo on Chloe Moore’s abdomen. TT Gordon gave one blink of shock at the worried skin, the welts, the discoloration. ‘Worse than I thought, the poisoning and everything. Like he created his own hot zone.’

‘What’s that?’

Gordon explained that tattoo parlors were divided into zones, hot and cold. The cold zone was where there was no risk of contamination by one customer’s blood getting into another’s. No unsterilized needles or machine parts or chairs, for instance. Hot, obviously, was the opposite, where the tattoo machine and needles were tainted by customers’ blood and body fluids. ‘We do everything we can to keep the two separate. But here, this dude did the opposite – intentionally infected, well, poisoned her. Man. Fucked up.’

But then the artist settled into an analytic mode that Rhyme found encouraging. Gordon eyed a computer. ‘Can I?’

‘Sure,’ Cooper said.

The artist hit keys and scrolled through the images, enlarging some.

Rhyme asked, ‘TT, are the words “the second” significant in any way in the tattoo world?’

‘No. Has no meaning that I know about and I’ve been inking for nearly twenty years. Guess it’s something significant to the dude who killed her. Or maybe the victim.’

‘Probably the perp,’ Amelia Sachs explained to Gordon. ‘There’s no evidence that he knew Chloe before he killed her.’