Page 57 of Bone’s Choice

Taco threw both hands up. “This is fucking bullshit.”

“Can we talk about the dead guy?” I asked.

Taco muttered something under his breath and shut up.

Dave leaned toward his camera. “Hose sent me everything he had. Photos. Approximate age. Height. Old scars. Tattoos. Anything we could use.”

Hose crossed his arms. “And?”

“The condition of the face made normal image matching pretty useless.”

“Figured,” Hose said.

Dave nodded. “But you got a decent picture of the tattoo on his left shoulder.”

I remembered it. Nothing particularly memorable. Some kind of compass with coordinates underneath it.

“Coordinates helped,” Dave continued. “They pointed to a little park outside Waukesha.”

Bull leaned closer. “That’s what those numbers were?”

“Yeah. From there, I started looking through missing-person reports and public posts from the last couple weeks.”

I didn’t ask exactly what else Dave had looked through. There were places he could get into that the rest of us had no business knowing about. Better that way.

“You got a match?” I asked.

Dave tapped something offscreen. A photograph appeared. Alive, the dead guy looked completely ordinary. Brown hair beginning to gray at the temples. Clean-shaven. Average build.

The kind of man I could’ve passed in a grocery store and forgotten five seconds later.

“Name is Owen Mercer,” Dave said. “Forty-four. Lives in Waukesha. Married. Two kids.”

The room got quiet. That wasn’t what I’d expected.

I wasn’t sure what I’d expected. Gang member? Dealer? Some asshole with a mile-long criminal record who’d pissed off the wrong person.

Not somebody’s husband with a normal family picture.

“When was he reported missing?” Myth asked.

“Eight days ago. Wife filed it after he didn’t come home from work. Apparently, that wasn’t something he did.”

“Criminal record?” I asked.

“Nothing worth mentioning. Speeding ticket. One disorderly conduct charge in his twenties that got tossed.”

Taco frowned. “So why the fuck was Mr. Suburban Dad decomposing in one of our coffins?”

“That,” Dave said, “is where it gets interesting.”

I leaned closer. “What’d you find?”

“Owen worked for Northline Security Systems.”

I waited. Dave apparently wanted us to ask.

Dealer did. “What the fuck is Northline Security Systems?”