“When was she last here?” I asked Bitsy. I tried to think of the last tattoo I had given her. A tree branch that wove its way around her arm from her wrist to her shoulder.
“October,” Bitsy said without consulting the appointment book. She had a memory like the proverbial steel trap.
Since I’d designed her first tattoo, every time she was in town, Daisy would have another one done. I’d done ten so far. The flamingo was number eight. There hadn’t been any color the last two times she’d come in.
So sometime between October and now—it was the second week of February—Daisy had had another tattooist do that color.
“What’s wrong, Brett?” Joel asked.
I went over to the light table, where my laptop lay. I booted it up, hooked up to the Internet, and found Skin Deep. I pointed to the picture of the flamingo tattoo. I noticed that the picture had been posted just a little more than an hour earlier.
Joel peered over my shoulder at the computer screen.
“When did she come back for the colors, Brett?” he asked.
I shook my head, puzzled. “She didn’t. She can’t have color. She’s allergic to the dye, so she’s got only black tattoos.”
“So maybe it’s not her. Maybe it’s not yours,” he suggested, plopping down next to me, his hefty frame testing the boundaries of the chair.
“It’s mine,” I said, pointing to the four flowers in the tip of the wing. “She wanted one for each of her bandmates. Who else could this be?”
I mulled the picture of the tattoo. I knew this was Daisy.
“Is the blogger Ainsley a woman?” Joel asked, startling me out of my thoughts. I’d almost forgotten he was there, if you could forget that a man weighing about three hundred pounds was sitting next to you.
I shrugged. “Have no idea. Could be a man, too, I guess. It’s sort of androgynous name.”
“So would she”—Joel indicated the flamingo—“have gone elsewhere to get the color done?”
My ego wished that she hadn’t. But clearly, she had. I peered more closely at the photograph. The tattoo hadn’t started to get infected. If it had, it would have looked like a boil or a bad burn, perhaps even oozing. Maybe she wasn’t even really allergic. She’d told me she’d had a reaction to the red dye in an ibuprofen tablet several years ago, which was how her doctors had found out about the allergy. She said that to be on the safe side, she’d prefer to just have black tattoos.
Daisy was a canvas of black lines and curves, which made her tattoos stand out more than others, I thought.
Maybe she’d been in another tattoo shop in another city and the artist had talked her into adding the color. It was possible. It was also possible to get organic inks. I’d suggested that to her, but she’d rejected the idea. Maybe someone else had been more convincing.
I heard Bruce Springsteen singing “Born to Run.” Glancing around the staff room, I spotted my messenger bag slung over the back of a chair. I grabbed it and pulled my cell phone out, flipping it open after noting the caller ID.
“Hey, Tim,” I said. My brother, Tim Kavanaugh, was a Las Vegas police detective. I had a bad feeling about this.
“You hear about Dee Carmichael?” He didn’t mince words.
“Watching it on TV right now. What happened?”
“That’s what I’d like to ask you.”
I stopped breathing for a second. “What do you mean?”
“We’ve got a witness who says she saw a tall redhead leaving the hotel room about two hours ago.” He paused, and even if my mouth hadn’t felt as though it were filled with sand, I knew he wasn’t done yet. I waited as I curled one of my own red locks around my finger.
“We found some ink pots and tattoo needles in the trash.”
Driven to Ink Page 28
