The Missing Ink

by Karen E. Olson

  “Did you really believe that I would love her more than you?” Chip was asking. “Did you think I’d marry that slut instead of you? You should’ve just stayed home, and we would’ve been married right now.”

  “I couldn’t marry you.”

  “Oh, that’s right. Matt was the love of your life. I thought he was being a good friend, offering to come out here to find you, and the next thing I know you’re getting a tattoo with his name on it.”

  “That’s-”

  I crinkled the needle package in my hand by mistake. The machine stopped.

  “Is she coming back?”

  I couldn’t risk peering around the door again.

  “Maybe she’s in the bathroom,” Elise suggested.

  The machine started again.

  “Owwww. Watch it.”

  “Did you think it wouldn’t hurt, Elise?” I wondered if he was talking about the tat or about Matt Powell. “Finding out that my best friend was my fiancée’s secret lover?” Okay, question answered. “What did you think I was going to do? Sit around and watch him take you from me?”

  “You had Kelly.” Her voice was barely above a whisper.

  “She meant nothing. That’s why I did what I did, to show you that she was nothing. She was to me what Chase was to you. We had it all, Elise, and you destroyed it.”

  “I didn’t kill Simon, though. But you killed her. I was glad she told me about you, how you met in L.A. and couldn’t keep your hands off each other. She was pregnant, Chip.” Desperation laced Elise’s voice.

  He didn’t seem to notice. “With her out of the way, you and I can get married. Anyway, I found out it wasn’t my baby. It was her ex-husband’s. I got lucky that she had his gun. Now everyone thinks he killed her.”

  “But without Kelly, I wouldn’t-” She stopped suddenly. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to put my name in this heart. That way you’ll never forget your promises to me.”

  “It’s too late, Chip.”

  “My father will fix it. He fixes everything.”

  “Did he fix Matt? Was that him, or was that you?” I heard a catch in her voice. “Matt was innocent, Chip.”

  I didn’t wait around to hear his answer, figuring that the machine’s noise would mask my footsteps. I heard more talking, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying.

  Simon Chase’s phone was in my bag on the light table. I took it out and saw that the screen was blank. Uh-oh. Guess it hadn’t been charged in a while. We didn’t have a landline extension back here, since someone, usually Bitsy, was always in the front of the shop to answer the phone.

  It might not be that hard getting out of the shop. Chip was one guy. He wasn’t nearly as big as Matthew, and I’d managed to slip past him-well, it wasn’t easy, but I did it.

  I opened one of the packages I’d set down, sliding the long, silver needle out of its casing. While I hoped I didn’t have any use for it, I had to have something, and Elise had left that gun in the truck.

  I walked as quietly as I could, stopping just outside the room again.

  “Tell me where the diamond is,” Chip was saying.

  “The police have it.” Elise’s voice was stronger now, anger weaving through her words.

  I peeked around the door to see Chip finishing up the heart; it was rough around the edges. Elise’s voice had been firm, but her eyes were laced with tears. It was possible she’d been too jittery, moving too much.

  Elise caught my eye, shaking her head slightly.

  Before I could duck back, the machine cut off and Chip swung around in the chair. I turned to get away, but he was fast. He grabbed the back of my shirt and yanked me into the room as he held the machine over my face.

  “Have you ever tattooed someone’s eyeballs?” he hissed.

  He fell onto me then and I twisted my head slightly, the needle in the machine raking me just behind my ear, sliding on my hair. After a second, I realized what had happened: Elise had lunged toward him, and they both ended up on the floor, the impact knocking the machine out of Chip’s hand.

  I stood over them, hesitating for a second.

  It was too long. Chip threw Elise off him, grabbed the machine again, and plunged it into my thigh, but its design kept it from going in too deep.

  The needle in my hand, however, had no restrictions. I swung it around and stabbed Chip’s shoulder. The needle went in the front and stuck out the back. Sort of like a live shish kebab.

  He made a yowling sound, dropping the tattoo machine-but not before it slid across my calf, drawing a crooked black line-his hand reaching around to pull the needle out of his shoulder. He screamed as blood spurted across his chest.

  I grabbed Elise’s hand and pulled her out the door, to the front of the shop, toward the doors. I glanced back to see Chip holding the needle, chasing us.

  I reached for the front door handle when everything got dark.

  Matthew Masters stood on the other side of the glass, glowering with anger. He pulled the door open and stepped inside. But to my surprise, he pushed us aside and went after Chip, who’d stopped suddenly. Matthew grabbed the shoulder I’d stabbed, causing Chip to scream again and drop the needle.

  Matthew turned and looked at me, studying my face for a second before his eyes moved to Elise. I saw what he saw: Elise’s bare torso, the bra hanging open, exposing her breasts, the beads of blood slipping down over the black outline of the heart and the start of the “C” that Chip had drawn.

  “Are you okay?”

  His voice wasn’t what I remembered from our earlier encounter. While it still had its gravelly tone, the roughness was replaced with a gentleness. His eyes matched his voice as he gazed at her, and Elise began to sob, reaching her arms out to him.

  He shook his head, but I saw a glint in his eye, too, a tear in the corner that he blinked away as he yanked harder on Chip’s shoulder.

  “You,” he said loudly to me. “You-call the cops.”

  Before I could move, though, the door swung open and Simon Chase came into the shop.

  Chapter 61

  He took one look at Matthew and Chip and muttered, “I may have to find another job.” He then looked at me, at Elise and put his arm around her. She clung to him, the sobs more audible now. “Brett, can you call the police?” he asked, his eyes again moving to mine.

  Everything started falling into place. I’d seen it in Matthew’s expression when he looked at Elise, when she reached out to him.

  He was her Matthew.

  When I’d seen her with him at Viva Las Vegas, she wasn’t afraid of him-she was afraid of me finding her. It all made sense now.

  I went to the phone on the desk and dialed Tim’s number.

  “You have to come to my shop,” I said when he answered.

  “Why aren’t you at home?” he demanded.

  “Let’s just say I got sidetracked.” I paused, looking at Matthew, who was still clutching Chip’s shoulder. “Your murderer is here, if you want him.”

  “What?”

  “It’s Chip. Chip Manning. He killed Kelly Masters. He might have killed Matt Powell, too.”

  I told Tim the rest as quickly as I could, and he finally interrupted me to tell me he’d be right over with the cavalry. I hung up and looked at Matthew Masters.

  “Who killed Matt Powell?”

  “Kelly did,” he said quietly.

  Everyone stared at him. It was possible no one else had known this until just now, from their expressions.

  Matthew sighed. “He threatened to tell Chip about the baby. How it wasn’t Chip’s. Kelly couldn’t let him do that. Her plan was to tell Elise about her and Chip, the baby.”

  “And she thought Chip would marry her?” I looked at Elise.

  “She thought that if I knew, I would break it off. And then she would get Chip because she was pregnant.”

  Seemed like a simple plan, but what went wrong?

  “I wanted to meet her, see if she really was pregnant. Kel
ly was all for it; she even sent me her ID so I could get an airline ticket under her name, because I didn’t want anyone knowing where I was going. I figured I’d be back the next day. I went to D.C., because I didn’t want to run the risk of anyone seeing me in Philly at the airport. Matthew picked me up here at McCarran, and we got to talking. He told me everything Kelly said was true. By the time we got to the hotel and met up with Kelly, I was so done with Chip.”

  “What hotel?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “We’ve been staying off the Strip.” She gave Matthew a sidelong look that told us what they’d been doing when they weren’t following me around.

  Elise didn’t seem to have a problem jumping from one man to the next.

  “Kelly went to Matt Powell’s room to try to talk him out of telling Chip about the baby,” Matthew said, taking over. “She ended up killing him while they were fighting about it. She said it was self-defense.”

  “But she had a tattoo needle on her?” I asked.

  Matthew sighed. “She had a case with her. She was going to give Elise her tattoo after she met with Matt. But when she realized Matt was dead, she figured she could protect Elise and me, and she gave him that tat.”

  “How did he get to Chip’s suite, though? He wasn’t found there until the next day.”

  Matthew nodded. “I moved him. Made it look like I was helping a drunk friend to his room, so anyone watching the cameras wouldn’t catch on.”

  “And who had the brilliant idea of setting up Jeff Coleman?”

  Matthew actually looked embarrassed. “Never liked the guy,” he admitted.

  Well, who did? Except for Sylvia, of course. But that wasn’t a reason to frame a guy for murder. Two murders.

  “I knew about that client of his,” Matthew continued. “And I knew he’d been in town. Kelly told me. She’d inked him, too. It was easy to arrange.” He looked apologetically at Simon. “I used Simon’s phone.”

  “So you set Jeff up to be in that room, but instead of Jeff, I ended up there,” I mulled out loud before having another thought. I looked at Elise. “Why didn’t you just have Kelly do your devotion ink in the first place, instead of coming here?”

  Elise gave Matthew a small smile before answering. “I told you; I wanted to surprise him. If I had Kelly do it, he’d know. But someone had seen me here, and then the cops were all over the place, and I couldn’t come back.”

  Seemed reasonable. But one thing didn’t. “Why did you kidnap me today? Why didn’t you just tell me you were with Elise?” I asked Matthew.

  “I was going to try to scare you into telling me where the diamond was.”

  He’d scared me, all right, but he hadn’t had a chance for negotiations after I jumped out of the car.

  “Who left me that drawing on my car?”

  Elise and Matthew exchanged a look, both of them shrugging.

  “You were sticking your nose in where you shouldn’t.” Chip, the peanut gallery, had spoken.

  “Did Matt Powell show you that sketch I did for Elise?” I asked.

  Chip made a face. “He wanted to prove to me that he wasn’t her lover. He showed it to me-out of loyalty, he said. I didn’t believe him. I mean, it said Matthew. What did he expect?”

  Matt Powell had been playing all angles, it seemed. He knew about Kelly and her pregnancy, he knew about Elise and Matthew, he knew about Jeff Coleman. But what he’d known ended up being his own death sentence.

  Matthew was still holding on to Chip’s shoulder. Chip was slumped over now, sort of like a rag doll, his eyes glazed and unblinking. Without waiting for an answer, I went into the staff room and found a roll of paper towels and brought it out, wadding some up and pressing them to Chip’s wound. He blinked at me a couple times.

  “Don’t thank me or anything,” I said curtly, then looked at Matthew. “Take him to the couch and sit him down.”

  Simon was still holding Elise, and gently I took her arm, nodding at Simon, who released her. I brought her into my room, shutting the door and sitting her in my chair, reclining it.

  “What are you doing?” she asked through her tears.

  I had to do something about the tat. It wasn’t done right, and she’d have trouble with it if I didn’t take care of it. I pulled on a pair of latex gloves and took a baby wipe, moving it across the ink. The blood smeared over her skin.

  “I’m going to fix this up for you,” I said. “It’ll get infected if I don’t.”

  She nodded and closed her eyes. “I saw him kill her,” she said softly.

  My hand froze a second before I resumed wiping down the tat. “Is that why your driver’s license was found in the car? You were with her?” The tattoo was clean now, the outline a little rough. I slid a clean needle into my machine and dipped it in red ink.

  She tensed when she heard the machine start.

  “It’s okay, Elise. Trust me.”

  She relaxed a little. “I was with her. Kelly was taking me to the airport. I was going to go home, tell everyone I wasn’t going to marry Chip, and that would be the end of it. I would go back and meet Matthew after I took care of everything.” She paused and gave me a sad smile. “Kelly wasn’t a very nice person. She told Chip we were going to be there. He showed up, but she didn’t realize that he would choose me over her, even though she was pregnant.

  “When Chip told her he still wanted to marry me, she pulled a gun on him. He got it away from her, and I tried to stop him. I fell and cut myself. He threw me into the backseat, told me to stay there, but I didn’t. I heard the shot as I was running away. I called nine-one-one after I called Matthew to come get me.”

  I filled in the heart with the red ink and drew a black arrow through it, turning the start of the “C” into feathers.

  I heard a knock at the door, and Simon Chase stuck his head inside. For a second he didn’t say anything, just looked at my handiwork.

  “It looks good,” he said. “Your brother’s here.”

  That was fast.

  “We’ll be out in a few minutes,” I said, and he closed the door after himself.

  “Why didn’t you just come back for the diamond?” I asked Elise as I touched up the scraggly lines of the heart. “Why did Matthew have to break in?”

  “He looked in the orchid first, but it wasn’t there. He thought you’d found it and put it somewhere else.”

  It was the wrong orchid.

  “He felt bad about hitting your friend.”

  I wasn’t sure that was going to really comfort Ace, knowing Matthew “felt bad.”

  “Why didn’t you just ask me for it?”

  “We knew everyone thought Matt Powell was my lover. We didn’t want anyone to suspect about Matthew. We were going to just disappear.”

  “With a two-million-dollar diamond,” I said flatly, wiping the tat and assessing the work. It wasn’t the best I’d ever done, but it was a satisfactory cover-up. I took a hand mirror off the shelf and handed it to Elise, who studied the heart.

  She smiled shyly. “It’s nice,” she said, handing me back the mirror. “But I really did want Matthew’s name.”

  I could remind her that she’d been engaged to Simon Chase once. That she’d been engaged to Chip. That love sometimes doesn’t last, but the devotion ink would.

  I just nodded, wrapped the tat in Saran Wrap, and told her how to take care of it. She adjusted her bra and buttoned up the blouse as well as she could. The corner of the Saran Wrap peeked out from behind it.

  Tim hadn’t waited for me. A paramedic was dressing Chip’s wound as Tim read him his rights. Matthew saw Elise and drew her to him, his big arms surrounding her. Simon Chase raised his eyebrows at me, and I nodded to indicate everything was all right.

  But it wasn’t all right. Tim saw me, and looked up at Matthew.

  “This was the guy who kidnapped you today, right?”

  Description fit to a T. I thought about Jeff’s warning about Matthew, how he was “bad news.” So maybe he was trying to turn over
a new leaf or something with Elise, but he still had a long way to go in the social skills area. He obviously hadn’t had a Sister Mary Eucharista to keep him in line.

  “He also fits Ace’s description of the guy who broke in here,” Tim said, nodding at the uniformed cop, who now gripped Matthew’s arm, pulling it to his back, taking out his handcuffs.

  For a nanosecond, I felt a little bad, thinking about Elise. But he did trash my place; he did kidnap me. He’d been following me around, scaring me for the last few days.

  “You’re not arresting him, are you?” Elise’s eyes were wide as she confronted Tim. She swung around to me. “Tell him to stop. You know he didn’t mean it.”

  “It’s okay.” Matthew’s voice resonated through the room as he smiled sadly at Elise. He looked a little too comfortable in those cuffs. Obviously, he’d been here before. I had about as much confidence that this relationship would work as I did in that devotion tat. Sure, he looked at her with some softness in his eyes, but I couldn’t forget that the diamond was what he was after all along. Two million dollars was nothing to sneeze at.

  “Don’t worry. Simon’ll take care of you until I get out,” Matthew was saying.

  Oh, yeah, Simon. “Why were you helping them?” I asked him.

  “Because I still care about Elise and want her to be happy.” Simon cocked his head at Chip. “And because I couldn’t stand what he’d done to her. He was making dates with cocktail waitresses even while she was considered missing.”

  I thought about Robbin, the woman in the restroom at Versailles who’d fixed my makeup. So her date was with Chip, not with Simon. I’d jumped to the wrong conclusion.

  “And I found out that Chip was the one who lured you to my office with that text message. Your number was queued in. He’s also the one who locked you in. He wanted his father to find you there,” Simon said.

  I mulled that over for a second. It made me less sorry I’d skewered Chip’s shoulder. But I had another question for Simon Chase.

  “I overheard Manning asking you to take care of something, saying you could ‘let him come back’ after ‘it all died down.’ What was that all about?”

  Simon shrugged. “One of our employees is facing a deportation issue, despite our sponsorship. We agreed to continue to help him get his visa, but he has to go home for a short while. That’s all.”