Ink Flamingos

“You’ll thank me when you can finally eat your dinner,” he said.

We only waited a few minutes before the waiter came out carrying fancy to-go bags tied with ribbons. They looked like Christmas packages, not a five-star meal. I poured myself another quick glass of Malbec and downed it. Jeff grinned. “We could take that, too.”

Vegas, home of the open container.

We left the bottles on the table. Somehow showing up at police headquarters with open bottles of wine didn’t really seem like the right thing to do.

Once we reached Mandalay Bay’s entrance, we realized something. We didn’t have a car. Sure, we could take the monorail back to the Excalibur, walk the footbridge over Tropicana Boulevard to New York New York, walk the other footbridge to the MGM, then take the monorail from there up to Harrah’s and fetch Jeff’s car from the Venetian valet, but it would probably take us longer to do that than it would’ve to finish our dinner.

So we had the doorman get us a cab.

I was reminded a little of last night, when Harry and I had gotten that cab, and that flash going off. But there were no flashes tonight, I was with Jeff Coleman, we weren’t drunk on absinthe, and I was pretty sure he was going to keep his hands to himself.

He was looking at me with an amused smile. “Taking a trip down memory lane, Kavanaugh?”

I wished he couldn’t read my mind quite so well. The bags with the food were tucked at our feet, the smell wafting up. That piece of foie gras hadn’t been enough. My stomach growled, and Jeff reached over and pulled out a container, opening it to reveal perfectly cooked rack of lamb. He pulled one out by its bone and handed it to me.

“Bon appetit.”

We munched on the lamb.

“Your friend’s a great cook,” I said, my mouth half full.

“I know.”

The police station came up a lot faster than I expected. The cabdriver, to his credit, made no comment about our destination or the fact that we were having a gourmet meal in the back. We shoved the empty container back in the fancy bag and scrambled out; Jeff handed the cabbie some money. I tried to pay him for my half, but he waved me off.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“But I didn’t pay for dinner, either,” I said, realizing then that I hadn’t seen a check come to the table.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said again, pushing the door to the station open and letting me go through first.

Once we identified ourselves, we were led upstairs by a uniformed cop. He’d done a quick double take when he saw me-Tim and I were virtual carbon copies of each other-but then basically ignored me.

Tim was waiting in an interrogation room. His eyebrows rose high in his forehead when he saw the bags. Jeff put them on the stainless steel table and opened them, taking out one of the plastic containers.

“Steak?” he asked, lifting the top off.

The scent of charred meat drifted into the air, and my stomach growled again, despite the rack of lamb. Tim’s stomach didn’t growl, but he looked longingly at the steak.

“Maybe later,” he said, having much more self control than I did.

Jeff sat, pulled out a plastic fork and knife, and began to cut up the steak and eat it as though we weren’t in a police department interrogation room but back at that fancy restaurant. Tim looked at me, and I shrugged. I wasn’t Jeff Coleman’s keeper, regardless of what Tim thought.

“So what’s going on with that limo driver?” I asked. “Is he really pressing charges?”

“He says Jeff assaulted him.”

Jeff kept on eating.

“Only after the guy started coming after me,” I said, recounting the scene, explaining how the driver had said I was a murderer.

Something in Tim’s expression made me take pause.

“Have you been on a computer since I talked to you on the phone?”

I frowned. “What, are you kidding me? I was at the restaurant. Jeff and I caught a cab and came over here. Why would you think I was on a computer?”

Tim sighed. “Someone posted on that Ink Flamingos blog. The one that you’re supposedly writing.”

I caught my breath. This was not going to be good.

“It said you’re going to get away with murder, because you planted Sherman Potter’s fingerprints at the scene.”

Chapter 31

It was possible that whoever was impersonating me actually had planted those fingerprints. But it certainly wasn’t me. I said as much to Tim.

“I know that, but it throws a wrench into everything. Because now Potter’s lawyer is shouting about how he was framed, and this blogger is saying she did it, and now he’s demanding that Potter be released immediately because he’s falsely accused.”

“The fingerprints are his, though, right?”

Tim nodded. “But that doesn’t matter. There’s someone out there implying that he was framed.”

And that someone was me. Or someone posing as me.

I started to worry that I was going to end up arrested for all this. “Am I in trouble, Tim?” I asked, my voice so soft I could barely hear it myself.

Jeff’s head shot up, and he put down his fork. The steak was history.

“She was with me the whole time,” he told Tim. “She didn’t post anything on any blog.”

Tim nodded. “I know that. But it’s possible Potter will get released based on that.”

“So we’ll have the real murderer wandering around,” I muttered, “but everyone will still think it’s me.” I had another thought. “Do you think Potter has an accomplice? Someone who posted that blog while he was in here just so he could get out?”

Tim ran a hand through his hair, exasperated. “It’s possible. Or whoever’s writing that blog really is the murderer and is setting Potter up.”

“Can’t you trace that blog back to whoever is posting?” Jeff asked.

“I’m not a computer guy,” Tim said. “But we’ve got people on it.”

Which basically meant: I have no idea. That was not reassuring. At least, though, I didn’t seem to be a suspect, but I didn’t like that someone was out there, impersonating me.

Which reminded me…

“What about Ainsley Wainwright?” I asked.

“She’s dead, Brett,” Tim reminded me.

I made a face at him. “I know that, but this new lead singer for the Flamingos, well, the band told me her last name is Wainwright, too. And I’m almost positive I saw her at the arena. She’s a redhead, too. What if she’s the one posting on the blog? What if she picked up the slack for the dead Ainsley Wainwright?”

“You saw her?”

I closed my eyes and could see the red hair. “Yes,” I said, although I wasn’t a hundred percent sure.

“Potter said he hasn’t seen her since this morning. Said she never showed for the concert tonight.”

“That’s right. That’s what the girls said, too. But then when we were leaving, I’m pretty sure I saw her. And then that security guard led us outside and shut the door behind us.” The more I thought about it, the more I thought it had to have been Ainsley. And she was probably in on it with Potter. She’d been on intimate terms with him. Which made me think of something else. I quickly told him about what the girls in the band had told us, how Sherman Potter had threatened to take Daisy for all she was worth and how Daisy had come out here early because she was going to confront Sherman about that.

Tim was jotting it all down in a little notebook. Jeff was strangely quiet, just listening and watching. The food