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The skinny man rubbed at Batman's face on his lean arm. Rhyme could see a portion of another superhero on the other. Why those particular two comic characters? he wondered.
But then: Why not?
'Implants're, they're sort of an extreme form of modding. You cut slits into the skin and feed them in. Eventually the skin shrinks and you can see the shape or the letters raised. You don't find 'em much. But inkings're a dime a dozen nowadays - like I was saying yesterday. Every clerk, public relations assistant and lawyer has a tat now. You need implants and scars to be different. Who knows what it'll be in ten years. Actually, I don't think I want to know.'
Sachs asked, 'Does it tell us anything about the unsub?'
'Confirms what I was saying before. They're rare here. I don't know any artists who do them in the area. It's technically, you know, a surgical procedure and you need good training. You see them mostly in the Midwest and Appalachia, West Virginia, mountains of North Carolina. People who want to lead a more alternative life. I mean, more alternative than I,' said TT Gordon, the grammarian tattoo artist.
'You'd think implants were a macho thing but, fact is, women go for them more. They're pretty dangerous. They're made out of materials where there's not much chance of rejection but there's the infection issue. And, worse, they'll migrate. And then you're in trouble.'
'And,' Mel Cooper said, regarding a computer, attached to the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, 'you're also in trouble if the implants happen to contain extremely concentrated doses of nicotine. Which these do.'
'Nicotine,' Rhyme mused.
'That's poison?' Ron Pulaski asked.
'Oh, yes,' Cooper said. 'I worked a case a few years ago. Nicotine used to be applied as an insecticide. You could buy it raw, concentrated. The perp in that case got his hands on some. He wanted to dispatch his mother for the inheritance and, since she smoked, he thought it'd be a good idea to lace her food with it. She was dead in about a half hour. If he'd done small doses instead of a single large one he might've gotten away with it. We found out that it was as if she'd smoked eight hundred cigarettes in an hour and covered her arm with patches.'
'What's the formula?' Rhyme asked.
'A parasympathomimetic alkaloid. Comes from the nightshade family of plants.'
Sachs said, 'The implants don't look that big. How concentrated was the dosage?'
Regarding the mass spectrum, Cooper said, 'Huge. If he'd implanted these in the dermis, the victim would have been dead within twenty minutes, I'm estimating.'
'God almighty.' From superhero man.
'A painful death?' Sachs asked.
'Would be,' Rhyme said, uninterested in that. He cared more about origins: 'Where would he've gotten the implants?'
Gordon shrugged. 'I don't know any sources here. Mostly you want them, you go online.'
'No,' Rhyme countered, 'he'd buy them in a brick-and-mortar store, again. And pay cash.'
He gazed at the bits of metal again. What they represented, Rhyme reflected, was obvious. A simple rearrangement resulted in yet another number. The ordinal '17th'.
Sachs had donned a face mask and double gloves. She was examining one metal character. The number 7. 'We've got tool marks. Distinctive filing. That's something.'
It might be possible to link the poisoned implants to a metal file in the suspect's possession - provided that they found the file, of course; there was no national registry of tool marks, as there was for fingerprints, DNA and rifle slugs.
'Source of the poison?' Rhyme inquired.
Sachs went online and reported, 'Well, this's interesting. You know e-cigarettes?'
'No.'
'Smokeless cigarettes. They have batteries and a flavor capsule. There's sort of a vapor you inhale. You can buy commercial nicotine, unflavored and in flavors, to add to the capsules. It's in liquid form. They call it "juice".'
What people do to their bodies, Rhyme reflected. 'How many sources?'
'Several dozen.' Mel Cooper looked over the computer. 'What's for sale on the market is toxic, yeah, but nothing like this. The unsub either distilled that or made his own.'
'Okay. What else do we have?'
Sachs had explained that wading through the ground floor of the parking garage and the tunnel had yielded nothing; the flood had been massive. Still, they had found some evidence on and inside the bag containing the implants.
