The 9th Girl by Tami Hoag

uncharacteristic tears brightened her eyes. “He’s my baby, Sam. I look at him and I see him when he was two, when he was five, when he was ten. I don’t want him to grow up. I don’t want him to get hurt.”
    “But we all do, Tinks,” Kovac said gently. “That’s part of the deal. We grow up. We make mistakes and we learn from them. That’s how it works.
    “Look at the two of us,” he said. “We smoked weed and drank ’til we puked, and had sex, and flunked algebra. Look how we turned out. We’re not dead. We’re not in prison. We’ve lived long enough to fuck up a million more times.
    “He got in a fight,” he said. “No lives were lost. Let it go. You can’t keep him on a leash like a dog.”
    “It’s so hard.” She put her elbows on the table and rubbed her hands over her face, messing up her makeup.
    “Jesus Christ,” Kovac grumbled with a phony gruffness meant to cover his actual concern. He dug a clean handkerchief out of his hip pocket and offered it to her. “Now you look like the Joker. Go fix yourself, and put your cop face on. We’ve got work to do.”
    Taking the handkerchief, she swept it under each eye and around her mouth, scrubbing off smeared mascara and lipstick. She looked up at the wall with the victim photos, seeing it for the first time and looking like she welcomed the distraction. “What’s all this?”
    “Tip and I did this last night. We wanted to hit the ground running today.”
    He moved off the table for a closer look at the photographs.
    “You’ve got a kid with a black eye,” he said, tapping a finger beneath the sickening close-up of what was left of the face of Zombie Doe. “Someone out there has a daughter who looks like this. Count yourself lucky and get your head in the game, kiddo.”
    Tippen stuck his homely head in the door. “Are we a go?”
    “One way or another,” Kovac said.
    The detective walked in, tossed a bag of bagels on the table, and arched a brow at Liska. “Did you spend the night in the drunk tank or is this a new look for you?”
    She flipped him off.
    “Admitting you have a problem is the first step,” he said, then turned to Kovac. “Sonya e-mailed me her first piece. It’s going up on her blog this morning as soon as we give it the thumbs-up.”
    “Who’s Sonya?” Liska asked, grabbing an iced coffee from the carrier Elwood brought in with him.
    “Tip’s niece,” Kovac said.
    “God help her,” Liska muttered. “I always figured you for someone’s creepy uncle, Tip.”
    “She’s some kind of cyberjournalist,” Kovac explained. “Our liaison to the victim pool.”
    “She’s got a lot of readers,” Tippen said. “And contacts. She’s hooked in to every online page the sixteen- to twentysomethings read. Web news sites, Facebook, Twitter. And she’s reaching out to people she knows in the tattoo business.”
    “She says the tattoo on our vic is the Chinese symbol for acceptance,” Kovac explained to the others as he stood looking at the close-up he had taped to the wall with the rest of the autopsy photos. “She has the same thing on her arm. Apparently, it’s something the young people are doing these days to make a statement.”
    “For kids the victim’s age, that’s not even legal in this state,” Tippen pointed out. “Minors can’t get tattoos, even with parental consent.”
    “Thank God,” Liska said, digging a cinnamon-raisin bagel out of the bag. “Kyle wanted a tattoo for his last birthday. I said absolutely not until he runs away and joins the circus.”
    “It’s an artistic form of self-expression,” Elwood said. “Tattoos are a road map of the bearer’s personal journey.”
    “The kid who works the counter nights at my local convenience store has a tat of a snake wrapped around his throat,” Kovac said. “Apparently, his personal journey took a detour through hell.”
    “Possibly,” Elwood said seriously.
    “The girl I work out with at the gym has a leprechaun on her stomach,”