“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 asshole 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 illustrated 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 hell 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 bullshit, 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 shit 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 crap 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.