The tattoo collector, p.1
The Tattoo Collector, page 1
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
The Tattoo Collector
D. H. Jonathan
Naturale Publishing
2024
Copyright © 2024 by D.H. Jonathan
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
Cover design by Paramita Bhattacharjee (www.creativeparamita.com)
Visit the author’s website at www.dhjonathan.com
First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-7330908-2-7
For my brothers Garon and Brian.
CHAPTER ONE
WHEN DONALD WHITE saw the murdered girl’s photo on the news website, his already waning motivation for work disappeared. She looked exactly like the girl from his last nightmare about a month before, one of a series of nightmares that were more like visions and that had plagued him on and off for the last fifteen years. The photo appeared to be a high school yearbook picture of an eighteen-year-old brunette. She wore glasses, the frames black with green highlights in the corners. The girl in his nightmare had worn identical glasses. The girl in his nightmare had also had a small scar that split her left eyebrow, identical to the scar on the girl in the photo.
Donald had only just sat down and logged into his computer. The first thing he checked each morning was Outlook, but on this particular morning, he had seen nothing in his Inbox that required his immediate attention, so he opened his web browser. The default home page, which he had never bothered to change in the two and a half years he had been working here, was an MSN news site that included a section for local and regional stories. It was the photo that captured his attention more than the headline, “Police identify body of young woman found at Holland Lake Park.”
The young woman in the photo was Elena Robles from Saginaw, Texas. The story described how her parents had reported her missing after she had failed to return home from a Saturday night graduation party in the stockyards area of Fort Worth. Two of her best friends said that she had left the party at about 12:30 AM in her black Hyundai Accent. That Hyundai had been found abandoned on the shoulder of Interstate 30 near the Ridgmar Mall in west Fort Worth the following morning, its front left tire flat.
Donald’s mouse cursor was jumping all over the screen, and he realized that he was trembling. He took his hand off the mouse and took a deep breath as he continued reading. Elena had remained missing for three weeks despite televised pleas from her parents and siblings. A partly decomposed body had been found two days ago at Holland Lake Park in Weatherford, about thirty miles west of Fort Worth, and that body had recently been identified as Elena Robles’s.
Donald pushed himself away from his desk and stood up.
“You all right?” Jeff asked from the cubicle next to his.
Donald looked at Jeff without saying anything and started walking toward the elevators.
“Don, what’s wrong?” Jeff asked, but Donald kept walking.
His stomach cramped up before he got to the elevators, so he turned and made a beeline for the men’s room. He just made it into the stall and bent over the commode before the breakfast burrito he had eaten on the drive to the office shot up and out along with whatever else had been in his stomach. Once he had retched what he hoped was his last, he flushed and exited the stall. He was bent over the sink rinsing his mouth when Jeff walked in.
“Shit,” he said, waving his hand in front of his face as if to push the stench away. “Are you OK?”
“Yeah,” Donald replied. “Breakfast didn’t agree with me, apparently.”
Jeff made use of the urinal, but his gaze remained on Donald. “You still look pretty pale.”
“Yeah. I think I’m gonna take the rest of the day off.”
Donald wiped his face with a paper towel, wishing he had a toothbrush and toothpaste at his desk. Or at least a bottle of mouthwash. He took a look at himself in the mirror, noting how pale his normally tanned face looked. His dark brown hair was unkempt, and he tried to brush it back with his fingers.
“You gotta take care of yourself,” Jeff said.
“Yeah.” Donald, still feeling queasy, walked out of the restroom and to his manager’s office.
“Hey Vanessa,” he said from her open door.
Vanessa, blonde hair pushed back into a ponytail, was nearing fifty but still looked to be in her thirties. She had never married as far as anyone knew because she never talked about her personal life at the office. Jeff had mused aloud to Donald on more than one occasion whether she might be batting for the other team, not that it mattered much to Donald since he was happily married. Vanessa looked up from her screen, and Donald could register the change of her expression to one of mild shock. “Hey, what’s up?”
“I’m not feeling so well. I mean, I know I just got here, but something hit me all of the sudden.”
“Yeah, you don’t look well,” Vanessa said.
“I think I’m going to turn around and use a PTO day. If that’s OK.”
“Yeah sure,” Vanessa said. “Do you have anything outstanding right now?”
“Just a couple of new phone configurations. I’ll send those tickets to Jeff.” Donald was transferring them on the ticketing app on his phone even as he spoke to Vanessa.
“All right. Get to feeling better.”
“Thanks.”
Donald stopped by his cubicle to get his regular morning 20 ounce bottle of Diet Mountain Dew and saw his screen still open. He had left his workstation unlocked and unattended for the first time in years. The news story with Elena Robles’s picture was still on the screen. He leaned over and skimmed the article without sitting down, trying to figure out the timeline. Elena had disappeared June 3rd, almost a month ago. Donald shuddered when he realized that his nightmare of her had occurred at about that same time. What if it had been that night, the night she was killed? And what if it wasn’t really a dream at all?
Donald pushed such thoughts aside as he hit Control-Alt-Delete and locked his workstation.
“You leaving?” Jeff asked, arriving back from the restroom.
“Yeah,” Donald said. “I sent you over a couple of tickets. Just cell phones for a couple of new hires.”
“No problem. You take it easy.”
Donald left, taking the elevator down to his blue Corolla. The name Elena Robles echoed in his mind. The girl in the nightmare couldn’t have been her, he told himself as he drove out of the parking garage. People didn’t just dream about real people that they’ve never seen or met. Or perhaps Donald had seen Elena somewhere. The article said she lived in Saginaw, and Donald lived in Lewisville, in the same metro area. It was not inconceivable that their paths would have crossed. But if he had seen her somewhere why would his subconscious mind have taken such note of her?
“It really does not make sense,” Donald said out loud as he turned onto the access road of State Highway 114.
What Donald had to grudgingly admit was that the nightmares had been getting worse over the past seven years, more violent, more depraved. What made the nightmares so horrendous was that it appeared to be Donald himself who was raping and killing the women in them. He saw everything through the killer’s eyes, and the few times he had looked in the rear-view mirror, the face he saw was his own. Yet he was powerless to stop anything from happening. The last dream, the one with the girl who looked like Elena Robles (it couldn’t really be her) had been the worst. He had done things to her that he couldn’t even acknowledge while he was awake. It was more than unsettling that his subconscious mind could even conceive of such things. The only comforting thing about those dreams were their infrequency, coming only once every two to ten months.
Donald gave a quick thought to calling Jean to tell her that he had left work, in case she began to wonder why their daily email exchanges weren’t happening as normal. But he didn’t call her and didn’t realize the reason for that until he passed the exit for Highway 121 north which he would have taken if he were going home. Instead, he continued west past the northern edge of DFW Airport and then turned south. If he was sick, Jean would expect him to be home. And since he wasn’t going home, he figured he shouldn’t call her. Instead, Dona
“Holland Lake Park in Weatherford,” he said, after activating the voice command.
He saw the route trace itself on the screen and then said, “Go,” to enable the navigation. The female voice told him to remain on 121 until it merged into 183.
Unlike most of what he called his normal dreams, the ones Donald referred to as the nightmare murders were vivid in every way, and he always remembered every little detail long after he had awakened. Unlike normal dreams, the memories of those nightmare murders didn’t fade over time. Donald sometimes had more trouble remembering actual events than he had recalling incidents that had occurred in these nightmares. He and Jean had been married for three years when he’d had the first one. That one had started out like a regular erotic dream. The girl had been almost the opposite of Jean, black hair and smooth, dark skin as opposed to Jean’s red hair and freckled pale complexion, younger and fitter than Jean who always seemed to be fighting to loose a few pounds. As he progressed to intercourse with the girl in the dream, she had started resisting until he’d had to put his hands around her throat to hold her down.
Stop thinking about it, he told himself. Recalling the details of the nightmare would only make him sick.
Given this morning’s revelation, it was the victims that he had to be concerned about. If this last one had been a real person and not some figment of his imagination, then might the others have been real too? How many had there been over the last fifteen years? Without dwelling on the details, Donald started going through their faces. He counted twenty-three. Twenty-three women murdered in his subconscious. Or had they only ever lived and died there? God, he hoped so. They were a lot easier for him to dismiss when he thought they were figments of his warped imagination.
“Bullshit,” he said aloud, aware that he would look like a lunatic if anyone else had been in the car with him. Just because the last nightmare victim had the same complexion and hairstyle and wore similar glasses to a girl who had just been murdered didn’t mean that it was really her. So why was he driving all the way out to Weatherford? He knew the answer though. Donald had to see the place, see if anything about it seemed even a tiny bit familiar. He had to make sure that his nightmare had really been just a nightmare.
As he drove, he fought to keep the images from that last one, with the face that looked just like that photo of Elena Robles, out of his conscious thoughts. Forty minutes later, he turned right from the Interstate exit onto Holland Lake Drive. Nothing about the drive out here had seemed at all familiar, thankfully. He’d only ever been to Weatherford one time, and that had been at least a dozen years ago. Holland Lake Park was on his left with a small office building of some kind on the right. Just past the entrance to the parking lot of that office building was a Parker County Sheriff’s Department patrol car parked in front of a barricade with a sign that read “Park Closed Until Further Notice”. A young officer in uniform stepped out of the car and held up his hand. Donald stopped, and the deputy walked to the drivers side window.
“I’m sorry sir, but the park is closed,” he said.
“Oh, OK,” Donald replied.
“Do you have business here?”
“No, not really. I just wanted to see the park. Maybe walk the trails or something.”
The officer looked down at Donald, seeming to take note of his business casual attire which didn’t look comfortable for walking any trail. “Could I ask your name?”
“What?”
“Your name?”
“Donald White.”
The deputy wrote something in a notebook.
“Do you have business here in the park?” the officer asked again.
“Business? Um, no. I was just curious. I mean, yeah, I saw what happened on the news.”
“The investigation is still ongoing.”
“Oh, OK.”
“Did you know the victim?”
“Know her? Um, no. I didn’t. I mean… No, I didn’t know her.”
The deputy’s gaze shifted from him to his car. Donald was flustered, letting the officer intimidate him when he should be getting a sense of the place and if he had ever been here. He looked around as the deputy seemed to peer into his back seat. Nothing here looked anywhere close to familiar which gave him a sense of relief.
“Well, OK,” he said to the deputy. “I guess I’ll turn around.”
“All right.”
The officer stepped back toward his patrol car without turning around as Donald slipped his Corolla into reverse. It took four switches from reverse to drive to reverse again before he got the Corolla pointed in the right direction. As he put it into drive the last time, he saw in his rear-view mirror the deputy snapping a photo of the Corolla with his cell phone. Feeling like he had just put his name on a suspect list for no reason, he drove back the way he had come, wondering how he’d come up with such a boneheaded idea, coming to a murder scene during an active investigation.
CHAPTER TWO
JEAN WHITE’S WORK day had been dominated by a series of mostly useless meetings that had kept her from making much progress on either of the big projects she was managing. She had considered staying at the office to try to get at least a little work done, but her husband had uncharacteristically not answered any of the four emails she had sent him. Since she was sending and receiving email from everyone else, she wondered if his company was having email issues. He worked in IT, so she could imagine that such a thing would make for a difficult day for him. Once Jean got in the car and out of the parking garage, she called his cell.
“Hey babe,” Donald answered after the second ring.
“Hey, are you OK? Where are you?”
“I’m home. I wasn’t feeling well this morning.”
“Oh. And you didn’t call or text me?”
“I didn’t want you to worry.”
Something didn’t sound right in the tone of Donald’s voice. He’d recently been diagnosed pre-diabetic. Donald had been prescribed Metformin pills, and they’d had to change their diet. Jean thought that was a good thing, healthier for both of them, but she knew that Donald was still adjusting to the idea that he had any kind of chronic medical condition.
“Well,” she said, “how are you feeling now?”
“I don’t know. Are you on your way home?”
“I am.”
“OK, good. I have something I want to show you.”
“What is it?”
“I’ll show you when you get here.”
“Can you give me a hint?”
“No. I have to show you.”
“Fine,” she said after a pause. This, coming from someone who just said he didn’t want her to worry.
“Hurry home. But be careful.”
“I will,” she said.
“Love you.”
“Love you too, you dork.” Jean disconnected the call and sighed.
When she finally did get home, she found Donald on the computer in the study. He seemed agitated. His brown hair, normally parted on his left side, was a jumbled mess, sticking up in places almost as if he had been trying to pull chunks of it from his scalp, and instead of the customary household nudity they practiced when home alone, especially during the summer months, he was still in the slacks and polo shirt he had worn to the office.
“Hey,” she said to him, kissing him on the top of his head. “What time did you leave work?”
“Early. I think I was only there for fifteen minutes.”
Jean walked around the corner and into their bedroom to put her bag down and empty her pockets.
“You left that early, and you didn’t tell me?” she called from the bedroom. “What have you been doing all day?”
“Come here, and I’ll show you.”
Jean walked past the study to the laundry room, unbuttoning her blouse, intent on at least getting her accursed bra off.
“Hold on just a minute.” She dropped the blouse into the hamper and unfastened her bra straps. “Ah,” she said out loud in relief. Since she was right there, she went ahead and took off the rest of her clothes, throwing everything on top of her blouse.
“So how are you feeling now?” Jean asked as she walked back into the study.
She expected him to say “Fine,” but he instead said, “Not good.”
