The Missing Ink Read online

  The Missing Ink

  Karen E. Olson

  Murder leaves a mark

  Brett Kavanaugh is a tattoo artist and owner of an elite tattoo parlor in Las V egas. When a girl makes an appointment for a tattoo of the name of her fiancé embedded in a heart, Brett takes the job but the girl never shows. The next thing Brett knows, the police are looking for her client, and the name she wanted on the tattoo isn't her fiancé's…

  Karen E. Olson

  The Missing Ink

  The first book in the Tattoo Shop Mystery series, 2009

  To Ernest and Edith Hoffman

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author wishes to thank Alison Gaylin, Clair Lamb, Louise Ure, Jeff Shelby, Lori Armstrong, Eleanor Kohl saat, Cheryl Violante, and Carissa Violante for their help in the early stages of the manuscript; Mary Stella and Chris Hoffman for coming up with the title; Julio Rodriguez at Hope Gallery; Sharon and Joe at Cheesecake and Crime in Henderson, Nevada; Lee Lofland for his police expertise; Rita and Chris Kompst for myriad e-mails with information about Las Vegas; and Bonnie and Jonathan Rothburg and Robbin Seipold for their generosity. Agent Jack Scovil again offered his sage advice and humor. Editor Kristen Weber planted the idea, and her support and enthusiasm were, as usual, inspiring and validating. The book Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo by Margot Mifflin was invaluable. And finally, the author is indebted to Chris and Julia Hoffman for their patience and support during the writing process, and she didn’t even have to twist their arms when she said, “Hey, let’s go to Vegas.”

  Chapter 1

  I’ve made grown men cry.

  It’s not a crime.

  I wasn’t sure exactly what the cop was doing, hovering outside the shop. Was he expecting a robbery? Was he just giving us a little free security?

  I pulled the door open and stepped outside.

  “Can I help you, Officer?” I politely asked his profile. I knew how to talk to cops: Keep it cordial, no sudden moves.

  He was studying the frosted letters on the window, his hands on his hips. He didn’t look ready to grab the gun or the nightstick that flanked his stocky frame. He turned his head slowly, his mouth set in a grim line, eyes narrowed as they settled on my face.

  It unsettled me. Usually people stared at the ink on my left arm-a detailed replica of Monet’s water lily garden, complete with a weeping willow and footbridge-or the dragon that creeps up over my right breast under my tank top.

  “You work here?” he finally asked, his voice as deep as I’d expected.

  “I’m the owner. Brett Kavanaugh.”

  A twitch in his left cheek told me he didn’t expect that, even though the name of the shop is The Painted Lady and he’d obviously known that, since he’d been staring at the letters long enough. Or maybe he recognized my last name.

  “What can I do for you?” I asked again, when he didn’t say anything.

  “I’m looking for a girl.”

  I chuckled. “This is Vegas; a lot of guys are looking for girls. But this is a tattoo shop, not a brothel.”

  He didn’t even crack a smile.

  Okay, so the name of the shop might not have been a great idea, and occasionally we did get calls asking for girls. But this was the first time a cop had come around.

  I folded my arms across my chest. “You can’t stay outside my shop. We’ve got clients. It’s not exactly good for business.” I had another thought. “Unless, of course, you want to come in?”

  He ignored my question, reached over, and pulled a photograph out of his breast pocket. He held it up so I could see it.

  “Recognize her?”

  I stepped closer to see it better.

  “Why are you looking for her?” I asked.

  The cop, whose nameplate dubbed him Willis, shook his head. “Do you recognize her?”

  “Is she dead?”

  “No.”

  That narrowed it down.

  “What’s up with her, then?”

  Willis took a deep breath, obviously irritated. I didn’t much care. I was curious; I had a half hour until my next client, so I had some time to kill.

  “You haven’t seen her?” It was a new tack for him, and he made the transition smoothly.

  “Are you checking at every shop?”

  “Yes.”

  At least we weren’t being discriminated against. I wondered how long it took him to go into Shooz. Those stiletto heels could be even more intimidating than my tats.

  The Venetian Grand Canal Shoppes are what da Vinci would’ve designed if he were a capitalist. Besides Shooz-my favorite store-there was Ann Taylor, Ca’d’Oro, Kenneth Cole, Gandini, and Davidoff, among others.

  Then there’s The Painted Lady.

  At first, I figured some palms got greased for the shop to get this location. It’s sandwiched between Barneys New York and Jack Gallery. But I found out that Flip Armstrong, the guy I bought the business from, apparently had tattooed a prominent city politician’s name in a very private place on a local hooker. It’s amazing what a little blackmail will do for you.

  The only prerequisite was that we had to look respectable. No street-shop flash in the windows. No sign advertising tattoos. Anyone walking by would think we were an art gallery; through the glass windows, passersby could see the long mahogany table that served as our front desk, a spray of orchids perched on its edge. Paintings hung on the cream-colored walls on either side that hid the four private rooms behind them. The blond laminate flooring was sleek, sophisticated. What the public couldn’t see was the staff room behind the second room on the right, and the small waiting area with a long black leather sofa and glass coffee table covered with tat magazines behind the room on the left. A large, vertical, comic-book version of one of Degas’s ballerinas adorned the back wall.

  “Got a big job ahead of you. You working alone?” I wasn’t answering Willis’s questions, and his irritation was growing.

  “Just yes or no: Did you see her or not?”

  I shrugged. I may know how to talk to cops, but I also knew not to say anything that might incriminate me-or anyone else.

  He shoved the picture back in his pocket and brushed past me in long strides, his face flushed red. Another uniformed cop was coming out of Godiva across the way-maybe he needed a chocolate-covered strawberry to get him through the rest of his canvass-but I turned my attention back to Willis when I heard a shout. He’d collided with a family of four as he crossed the footbridge over the canal that ran past St. Mark’s Square. A gondola sailed under the bridge, the gondolier never missing a stroke.

  I could never be fooled into thinking this was really Venice, but the tourists liked to believe the illusion.

  Las Vegas is one big illusion.

  I went back into the shop, thinking about that picture. It hadn’t fooled me, either.

  There was no mistaking it: That girl had been in the shop two days ago. She had wanted a devotion tattoo.

  Chapter 2

  Bitsy was getting on my nerves. She was dragging her stool around the staff room as if it were a puppy on a leash, and the scraping against the floor echoed through the shop like fingernails on a blackboard.

  “Do you have to do that?” I asked, wishing the sound of my machine would drown it out, but it was merely a soft whine butting up against a cyclone.

  She poked her head into the room where I was trying to finish up the portrait of Jesus on a guy’s back, her face level with mine, even though I was sitting. Bitsy is a little person. The stool is her way of compensating. I was ready to compensate her just to get rid of the thing.

  “I will pretend that you did not ask me that,” she said, tossing her blond curls back over her shoulder.

  We were both a little on edge.
>
  The guy draped over the chair in front of me ignored us. He’d been here before, actually a couple of times. A portrait of his daughter was on his upper arm, and his mother, who’d died the year before, was on his chest. Jesus was new to the party. It was his version of the Holy Trinity, and I was enabling him by permanently embedding it in ink on his body.

  If Sister Mary Eucharista at Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy School could see me now, she’d rap my hands five times with a ruler.

  “Are you going to tell Tim?” Bitsy asked.

  “Tell him what?”

  “About the girl. What else?” Bitsy and Willis would tie in an irritation contest. I might come in a close second.

  “I’ll tell him when I get home.”

  “You could’ve told that cop about Tim.”

  Bitsy didn’t get it. If I’d told Willis that Detective Tim Kavanaugh was my brother, it would seem like I was going over his head. Which was what I planned to do. However, he didn’t have to know that. We’d already established a tense relationship.

  Anyway, he may have put two and two together when he’d heard my last name. How many Kavanaughs were there in Vegas anyway? That plus the fact that Tim and I were relative carbon copies of each other would’ve been even more of a clue. And clues were his business.

  Bitsy and I had been over and over the girl’s visit the other night. She’d seemed a little skittish, but we’d chalked that up to it being her first time. She didn’t even get the ink. She just made an appointment and then never showed.

  “You’re sure it was her in the picture?” Bitsy asked for the umpteenth time.

  “Yes.” I felt like a broken record. It was a recent picture-I could tell that even though it was a photocopy. She was in her late twenties, the long dark hair pulled into a fashionably tousled knot, a pair of big, black Jackie O sunglasses outlined in rhinestones on top of her head, her face white and narrow with brilliant blue eyes that indicated colored contact lenses. I couldn’t tell what she wore for the snapshot, but when she showed up here, she was wearing a thin white lace baby-doll top with spaghetti straps, a black bra peeking through, and skinny jeans with strappy red sandals. At first glance, she could have been one of those rich girls partying in Vegas for the weekend-or a working girl. It was hard to tell, since the wardrobes were similar these days.

  She said her name was Kelly Masters. She said the concierge at the Bellagio had recommended us.

  She said she wanted to surprise her fiancé on their wedding night. So much for the working-girl theory. The diamond on her hand could’ve been listed as one of the wonders of the world, the way it flashed like a strobe across the walls when the light hit it.

  From the small bag over her shoulder, Kelly took a rather rudimentary drawing of a heart with what I supposed were two hands clasped underneath it.

  “I want his name-Matthew-too,” she said.

  I’m not big on devotion tats. Relationships might start out great, but statistics were against most people. And relationships that had any foothold in Vegas were dubious, in my opinion. What happens in Vegas may stay here, but tattoos didn’t have that option. They went home with you.

  That said, a client is a client, and as David St. Hubbins of Spinal Tap noted, it’s a fine line between stupid and clever.

  I was used to straddling that line myself, so I cut her a break.

  We made an appointment for the next day. I told her I’d make a proper sketch, she could take a look, and I could make changes, if she wanted.

  Then she left.

  I carried out my part of the bargain-my sketch was much more elaborate than the simple one she’d handed me-but Bitsy doubted she’d come back. We’d even bet on it. My wallet was a hundred dollars lighter. They don’t say Vegas is for suckers for nothing.

  “Wonder where she is,” Bitsy said thoughtfully.

  “Maybe she and Matthew had a fight,” I suggested. I gave Jesus’ nose a little more shadow before lifting my foot off the pedal. The machine stopped whirring, and I assessed the Son of God before me.

  Not bad, if I did say so myself.

  “Cops don’t come looking for you unless something awful’s happened,” Bitsy said.

  “You’re done,” I told the young man, handing him a small mirror so he could take a look at himself in the full-length one on the staff room door. As he went to see my handiwork, I shook my head at Bitsy. “He said she wasn’t dead.”

  “He could’ve been lying.”

  I mulled that over for a second. Willis didn’t seem like the type to lie. Then again, I didn’t know him well.

  The young man came back and handed me the mirror. “It’s awesome,” he said.

  Sister Mary Eucharista felt the same way, although she had her own descriptive adjectives.

  I covered the ink with Saran Wrap, taping it down and going through the laundry list of how to take care of the tattoo. The skin was the color of bubble gum right now, but after it healed and peeled like sunburn, it would begin to look like his other tats. Not that he’d notice much, since it was on his back.

  He paid Bitsy at the front table, the cash and credit card machine discreetly hidden in a drawer, and I went into the staff room. Joel and Ace had gone home at ten o’clock. It was eleven now, and Bitsy and I were going to call it a day. I could hear Bitsy’s stool sliding across the floor in the room I’d just vacated. She’d already taken care of the books for the day-usually my job, as boss, but she was capable and knew I’d be toast after hours with Jesus-and she was trashing the disposable needles, leftover ink, ink cups, and gloves. The needle bar would be put in the autoclave for sterilization.

  I started sketching a design for the next day on the light table. Bitsy had turned off the sound system, and it was too quiet. I grabbed the remote for the small TV set in the corner.

  I should’ve called Tim to tell him about Kelly right away, after Willis left.

  Because her face was plastered across the screen on the local news.

  But the anchor didn’t call her Kelly Masters.

  Apparently, her real name was Elise Lyon.

  Chapter 3

  Tim waited until after he got off the phone with his people at the police department before interrogating me. “You didn’t think to call?”

  I knew Tim would be upset. We were standing in the kitchen; I still had my messenger bag over my shoulder, but Tim had been home for a while and was wearing a pair of sweats and a T-shirt touting the Mets.

  “I got busy. I spent four hours on this Jesus tat. There wasn’t time to call. I figured I’d tell you when I got home.”

  It was a lame excuse. I’d had twenty minutes before the kid showed, and I spent the time gossiping about Kelly Masters with everyone in the shop.

  “I didn’t know why the cops were looking for her,” I said when he didn’t say anything. The TV reporter hadn’t said much either, except that anyone who’d seen her should call the police. “That cop didn’t tell me anything. Just wanted to know if I recognized her. I’m not clairvoyant.”

  I was babbling over my guilt. I knew something was amiss the minute he showed me the picture. It didn’t matter how much I tried to talk myself out of it, with Bitsy or with Tim. Kelly, or Elise, was in trouble, and Bitsy and I had seen her. But being a tattooist is sort of like being a psychiatrist. Some people come to us discreetly, and they expect discretion in return. I had to tread that line carefully.

  Tim reached into the fridge, grabbed the milk, and poured himself a glass. He was drawing this out.

  “So what’s her story?” I tried to sound nonchalant, shrugging the bag over my head and slinging it on one of the chairs at the table.

  “Nothing you need to worry about, as long as you’re telling me everything.” He took a long drink, leaving a milk mustache. He didn’t wipe it away.

  “I am.”

  “We’ll need to talk to Bitsy, too.”

  “Of course.” Bitsy was already anticipating that. She’d come up with more possibilities as we locked up
the shop: rape, domestic violence, maybe Kelly was a terrorist. A little extreme, but I had to admit it might not be out of the realm of possibility. Especially since Tim was being just as closemouthed about it as Willis had been. I thought I’d have been a shoo-in to find out the whole story once I got home. Should’ve known better.

  Tim and I had been living together for two years now. He’d left our childhood home in northern New Jersey and moved to Vegas ten years ago, getting a job as a blackjack dealer. A year of that was enough, and he ended up at the police academy, training to be a cop like our father. It’s in the DNA.

  He bought the house in Henderson three years ago, when he and his ex-girlfriend, Shawna, had toyed with the idea of getting married. Well, he’d been toying with the idea, but she was dead serious. After a year, when she finally realized there was no diamond in her future, she moved out and he was stuck with the mortgage, so he got on the phone, trying to convince me that living in the desert would be heaven compared to scraping ice off my windshield in Jersey.

  No kidding.

  He also had a friend, Flip, who was selling his business. I had some money saved up, and Mickey said it was time for me to move on. I’d worked at the Ink Spot for eight years, starting as a trainee right out of college. Mickey taught me everything he could, and I was getting too comfortable. I needed a challenge. Buying Flip’s shop seemed like a plan.

  So here I was, a woman who owned her own business, and I was about to start whining like a kid on the playground because my brother wouldn’t share information with me.

  Contradictions are what make people interesting.

  “Can’t you give me a little hint? Did she do something? Is she hiding? Is she like that crazy runaway bride?” The moment I said it, I wondered if that was it. She’d been wearing that huge rock, she wanted devotion ink, but she never came back. Trouble in paradise.