Driven to Ink

by Karen E. Olson

  I was about to put the wallet back when I noticed a plastic card that didn’t look like a credit card. I slid it out. An ID card from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Laboratory Animal Care Services.

  Dan Franklin was wearing a lab coat in the picture. He looked less like Ray Lucci here.

  As I studied it, I flashed back to the rat found with Lucci in my trunk.

  Rats are lab animals, aren’t they?

  A banging startled me. Tossing the wallet back in the locker and shutting it as quietly as I could, I tried to figure out where the banging was coming from.

  It was the ladies’ room. Jeff must have been wondering where I was.

  In a few strides, I was at the door I’d come in from. I put my hand on the knob and turned it.

  But nothing happened.

  I shouldn’t have let the door close. Because it was locked. From the inside.

  Chapter 13

  I twirled around and assessed my situation.

  There were two other doors. One not far from the ladies’ room door, and the one that wore the mirror across the room. I went to the closest one and opened it.

  The men’s room.

  Figures.

  How would I explain that I went into the ladies’ room and came out the men’s?

  I had to see where the other door led.

  But before I could reach it, it swung open by itself. Well, not really by itself—there was a person behind it.

  He stepped around the door and his mouth formed a small “O” when he spotted me standing next to the lockers.

  “Who are you?” he asked, his eyes skittering to the lockers and then back to me.

  He was onto me. I thought quickly. “I came here to get married, but I got cold feet and went into the ladies’ room, and I was trying sneak out so my fiancé wouldn’t find me.” Hey, sounded like a plan.

  “Happens all the time,” he said.

  Really? Interesting.

  I noticed now his resemblance to Dean Martin—and by extension Ray Lucci and Dan Franklin—but it could’ve been the wig and the tux. Maybe this was Franklin.

  He looked from me to the lockers again, a frown etched in his forehead. Being nosy wasn’t a crime, although I hoped he didn’t think I’d taken anything.

  “This way,” he said, crooking his finger at me so I’d follow.

  He didn’t believe my story. Best-case scenario: He’d kick me out and tell me never to come back. I could hear even more banging behind us as we went out into a dark hallway. I heard voices now, Jeff’s and DellaRocco’s.

  “It’s my fiancé,” I whispered. Maybe now my story would seem more credible.

  “This way,” he repeated, and we moved down the hall and turned a corner.

  The light blinded me for a second, and I blinked a few times before I realized we were going out into a back parking lot. He stopped in front of a blue Ford, unlocking it with a key fob and opening the door for me. I hesitated, and he looked at me quizzically.

  “Don’t you want to get away?” he asked.

  My dad always told me not to get into a car with a stranger. “I don’t even know you.”

  “My name’s Will Parker.” He tugged at the wig until it came off, and he tossed it into the backseat. He ran his hand through a mass of dark blond curls, and he unbuttoned the top button of his dress shirt. “I’ll take you wherever you want to go.”

  He didn’t look like Dean Martin anymore. He had a rakish look about him, sort of like the high school football quarterback who knew he’d get the head cheerleader in a compromising position at the prom.

  I wasn’t quite ready to be compromised, and I had a can of Mace in my bag along with my cell phone.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I hope you understand.” I paused a second before asking, “You probably have a girlfriend or something waiting for you anyway, right?” Might as well try to lighten up the mood—let him think I was more worried about his personal commitments than my own safety.

  An expression that I couldn’t read crossed his face, but then he shut the door. He gave me a cautious smile. “Do you have a name, or will the media start calling you the runaway bride?”

  “Brett Kavanaugh,” I said without thinking. He hadn’t answered my question.

  He cocked his head, indicating the tattoo on my arm, the koi in a sea of blues and greens. “I like your tattoo.” He shrugged off his jacket and shoved the sleeve of his shirt up. A skull with daggers through its eye sockets adorned his arm. It was faded with time, but it wasn’t bad work.

  “You should have that touched up,” I said, reaching into my bag and producing a business card.

  He studied it a second, then grinned and put it in his pocket. “I’ll keep that in mind. Thanks.” He paused. “Want me to call you a cab?”

  I thought about Jeff Coleman and how he totally would not approve of what I was doing. But did I care?

  “That would be nice,” I said, “but I think by the time the cab gets here, my fiancé”—my voice caught on the word in a little cough—“will have found me out here with you.”

  And speak of the devil, but didn’t Jeff Coleman bound right out of the door we’d come through. He didn’t look too upset, though, maybe even slightly amused.

  “There you are, sweetheart,” he said, his arm snaking around my waist. “What’s going on?” He looked at Will. “Who is this?”

  I shrugged him off and stepped back. “Will Parker. He’s one of the—um—performers here. I got locked out.” I hoped he wouldn’t press as to where I was locked out from.

  “Thanks for taking care of her,” Jeff said to Will. “I wouldn’t want to lose her.”

  I was going to be sick. He didn’t have to lay it on that thick. Especially since the longer I was looking at Will Parker, the longer I thought maybe I would like to take a ride in that car at some point.

  “No problem, man,” Will said, nodding, then turned to me with a concerned expression. “Are you going to be okay?” Now that I had a “real” fiancé, he seemed ready to forget about my snooping.

  I nodded, although the thought of being engaged to Jeff Coleman still made me woozy.

  “She wanted to get married in a church. This is all my fault,” Jeff told Will before giving me a wink Will Parker couldn’t see, then added, “We can go back home and talk about this.”

  “Hope to see you again,” Will said, his eyes twinkling as he nodded at me.

  I had a sudden urge to tell him to definitely call me. Jeff must have sensed my hesitation because again I felt his hand on my lower back, and he steered me back around to the front of the building. He gave Will a little finger waggle as we went.

  “What was that all about?” he asked as we settled into the Pontiac. “Flirting with another man on our wedding day?” he teased.

  “I was trying to get some information out of him,” I said, strapping myself in with the seat belt.

  “That wasn’t all you were after,” he said.

  “You’re not really my fiancé, so what do you care?”

  He cocked his head at me and looked at me for a couple of seconds before saying, “You’re right. Why should I care?”

  And then he gunned the engine, and the tires screeched as the car slid out of the parking lot.

  “So what did you find out from Mr. Studly?” Jeff asked when we stopped at a light. Neither of us had said a word to the other for the last five minutes.

  “Nothing,” I admitted, kicking myself that Will Parker now knew far more about me than I knew about him. “But there was this other door that led out from the bathroom into the Dean Martin changing room. There were lockers, and I found Dan Franklin’s wallet. He looks exactly like Ray Lucci. It was a little creepy, but it explains why Lucci might tell people he’s Franklin.”

  “Interesting,” Jeff said. “I’m surprised his wallet was in the locker.”

  “Why?”

  “DellaRocco said he hasn’t seen Franklin in two days.”

&nb
sp; Chapter 14

  I thought about my conversation with Dan Franklin. How he’d said he and Lucci didn’t get along.

  “Franklin had an ID card in his wallet,” I said. “He’s some sort of lab-animal technician or something at UNLV.”

  Jeff immediately caught on. “That rat. You think Franklin offed Lucci and stuck that rat in there for some reason?”

  “Crossed my mind.”

  “And now the guy’s in hiding.”

  “Except that he did get Bitsy’s phone message, so he must be at home.”

  “Or he has a cell phone. He could be anywhere.”

  Right. Cell phone. “But why would he leave his wallet in his locker?” And then I had another thought. Maybe he killed Lucci, stuck him in my trunk, and then took off without getting his stuff. Because maybe someone saw him. Like Sylvia and Bernie. Maybe he went after them next.

  My imagination was getting the better of me. This was stuff that made a bad TV movie. Except it made sense. It would explain everything.

  But then again, it probably wasn’t that easy.

  I could see Jeff’s brain was working overtime, too.

  “Where does this Franklin live?”

  I flashed back on the file folder with Franklin’s information. I remembered the address because it was only a couple of blocks away from my house in Henderson. I told Jeff as much.

  “You want to go over there, don’t you?” I asked.

  Jeff didn’t answer, but in seconds he was pulling into a parking lot and swerving around, putting the car in the opposite direction.

  “We have no business going over there,” I said.

  “The man hasn’t been to work. His wallet’s in his locker.”

  “I talked to him yesterday, so he’s not dead, like Lucci,” I said.

  “He wasn’t dead as of yesterday,” Jeff said. “Who knows about today?”

  The Pontiac came to a stop at a light. A trail of Asian tourists following a man holding up a big orange flag moved across the intersection. A few heavyset couples wearing fanny packs got caught in the middle of the Asian group but managed to separate themselves on the other side.

  Jeff shook his head sadly. “They’re like sheep, aren’t they?”

  His question was rhetorical, and I merely nodded as the light changed and we started moving again.

  The Strip was taking too long, so at the next block, Jeff hung a left and went down Koval. No scenery, only the backs of the resorts and casinos, but it moved faster.

  “So did you get anything out of DellaRocco about Franklin?” I asked when we got onto 215 heading toward Henderson.

  “I tried to find out if Lucci had any enemies, and that’s when Franklin came up. Apparently there was no love lost between them. DellaRocco was pretty vague about it, though. We didn’t get much further than that, because he got really suspicious as to why the water was running in the bathroom and you weren’t coming out.”

  “So now it’s my fault?”

  “Has to be someone’s,” he said.

  I was regretting this little adventure more and more.

  We were quiet until Jeff reached my street. “Where to from here?” he asked.

  I directed him a couple of blocks up and over.

  The neighborhood was similar to mine: rows of stucco houses, the occasional palm tree, banana yuccas. Some houses had lawns, real lawns that would need watering. Since Vegas was in the middle of a drought and Lake Mead was way lower than it should be, this upset me. We were in the desert, with beautiful desert flora that was perfectly fine as a yard. No need to drain the water system just because someone wanted to pretend he was living in another part of the country.

  I opened my mouth to say something, but I guess I’d said it before because Jeff held up his hand and said, “I get it, Kavanaugh. Water shortage. You’re a broken record, you know?”

  I was thinking about a smart retort when I spotted the address we had for Dan Franklin. I pointed. “That one, there.”

  Jeff eased the Pontiac against the curb across the street and a couple of houses down. But it wasn’t exactly as if we were incognito. It was a bright gold car. Sort of like how Starsky and Hutch were driving around undercover in that bright red Gran Torino with the white stripe. Stick out much?

  An old blue Ford Taurus sat in the driveway.

  “Looks like someone’s home,” Jeff said, indicating the car.

  “I don’t think so.” The house was closed up: shutters drawn; the mailbox hanging open, leaking envelopes and advertisements; three newspapers on the front step.

  I climbed out of the car and walked up to the driveway and around the Taurus, peering into the windows. It was immaculate inside, no litter of any sort. There was a university parking sticker stuck to the back bumper.

  “Kavanaugh,” Jeff hissed behind me. “What are you doing?”

  I waved him off and went to the mailbox, reaching in and pulling out the mail. I leafed through it. Electric bill, a couple of credit card bills, junk mail. Jeff peered around my shoulder—I was a couple inches taller than him—and stuck out his hand, grabbing one of the envelopes.

  “Hey,” I said, twirling around, trying to get it back.

  Jeff grinned and waved it around. “What? You’re going to take the stolen mail from me?”

  His words stopped me, and I realized what I was doing. Right. I was messing with the U.S. mail. I could get thrown in jail for this.

  “Let’s leave it,” I said.

  “Now you want to leave it,” Jeff said. “You wouldn’t want to if you saw what it was.”

  Against my better judgment, he’d piqued my interest. “Okay, I’ll give. What is it?”

  He stuffed it in his back pocket and took the rest of the mail from me, shoving it back into the mailbox. “This way,” he said, going up to the front steps and actually ringing the doorbell.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Just in case the neighbors are watching.”

  Okay, that was a good idea.

  We stood a few seconds, and Jeff punched at the doorbell a couple more times. He leaned around and tried to look in the windows, but the shutters were closed tight. “Let’s go around back,” he said.

  I looked up and down the street, because now I worried we’d be perceived as burglars and the cops would show up any second. But nothing. Maybe the neighbors were all at work.

  The back was as deserted as the front. A stone patio, a small grill perched at the corner, stuck off the back of the house as if it were unfinished. I thought about Dan Franklin, living alone and grilling his little piece of steak on it. And then I had a vision of myself doing the same thing. I shuddered as I checked out the steps that went up to a back door. A curtain hung over the window, but Jeff indicated a window to the left of it and just out of reach for him. “Can you see in there?” he asked me.

  Nice to know he didn’t have any sort of Napoleon issues when it came to my height.

  I got on the top step, stood on my tiptoes, leaned over, and looked into a kitchen. No dirty dishes, nothing out of place, like that car. “It seems fine,” I said.

  “But what about this?”

  Jeff was no longer standing right behind me. I spun around to see him bending over, picking something up.

  When he stood and turned around to face me, I caught my breath.

  He was holding what looked like an empty animal cage.

  Chapter 15

  “That doesn’t prove anything,”I said.“It’s an empty cage.

  Could’ve been a cat or a small dog in there.”

  Jeff brought it over and we studied it a minute.

  “You’re right,” he admitted, “but it does seem a little suspicious.”

  “The man works with lab animals,” I said. “Of course he might have cages and critters around. We don’t know for sure that the dead rat belonged to him.”

  “Who else would have a rat?” Jeff asked.

  I sighed. He was probably right. It was possible that rat h
ad lived in this very cage while he was alive. “I wonder why he put the cage out here,” I said, stepping around Jeff and around the side of the house where he’d found it. A trash can was shoved up against the side of the garage.

  “It was right next to the trash can,” Jeff said, putting the cage back down. He leaned over and wiped the handle with the tail of his shirt. “Fingerprints,” he said when he saw me watching.

  Oh, right. We were trespassing. If Flanigan ever found out we were poking around Dan Franklin’s rat cage, he might have issues with that.

  “When you looked inside, did you see any sort of security keypad?” Jeff asked.

  I shook my head. “No. What—” I stopped. “You want to get into the house, don’t you? Like you got into my house last night?”

  “You really need to talk to Tim about better security,” he said as he walked past me and up the steps to the door. “You might not want to watch.”

  I turned my back and looked out over Dan Franklin’s small patch of yard and into the backyard of the house on the next street over. A flutter in a window caught my eye.

  “Jeff,” I hissed. “Jeff!”

  “It’s open.”

  I swung around and saw Jeff in the doorway.

  “We have to leave,” I said as I hurried over to him. I indicated the house where I’d seen the curtain move. “Someone’s watching us. The cops could be on their way.”

  Disappointment crossed Jeff’s face, but he closed the door with his hand over the tail of his shirt to get rid of those pesky fingerprints, and we ran back around the house to the Pontiac. Jeff had just started the engine when I glimpsed a cruiser coming down the opposite street.

  “Get going!” I said, and the car shot forward, the tires screeching across the pavement.

  I caught the cop car in the side-view mirror as we turned the corner.

  I took a deep breath and leaned back in my seat. “That was close.”

  Jeff grinned. “Don’t you like living on the fast side, Kavanaugh?”

  “I could live without it,” I said.

  “But you got your rocks off going through that guy’s mail, all right, didn’t you?”