arm and said, “We
I totally did not need this right now. I did not need Jeff Coleman to start getting all relationship-y on me. If that was what he was doing. I couldn’t quite tell. It was so like him to dance around this, to make me start thinking about it. I shrugged it off. I didn’t have time. I had a stalker, an impersonator, I’d just found a dead body, and I had to sort all that out first.
Jeff led the way to the front desk without saying anything else, which I was grateful for. I was also glad to see that the little blonde was nowhere in our vicinity. Maybe she’d gone off shift. One could only hope.
I wasn’t paying much attention to Jeff, until I saw him slide a key card across the desk to the young man in a Mao jacket. Immediately red lights started to go off in my head. Had he taken Sherman Potter’s room key? He turned slightly and caught my eye, winking. Of course he had. He took the key card. This was so not good.
The young man was now pointing around the corner. He handed Jeff back the key with a smile.
“I can’t believe you did that,” I said in a hushed tone as we approached the glassed-in business center.
“We needed a key to get in,” he said matter-of-factly. “We couldn’t have if we didn’t have a key.”
Just as he slipped the key card into the slot on the business center door, I heard a voice from behind us.
“What are you doing?”
We’d forgotten all about Sylvia. We’d left her with her pie and coffee and said we’d be right back. We’d lied.
Jeff shuffled her into the room with us. “Sorry,” he said, “but something came up.”
“I would hope so, otherwise why would you leave an old lady alone?” she said.
No one else was in the business center, and Jeff ignored Sylvia as he slipped into a chair in front of an old PC and clicked on the Internet icon.
“What are we doing in here?” Sylvia asked.
“Checking a blog,” Jeff said. I was glad he kept it simple; I wasn’t quite sure just how much to tell her.
“You can’t do that at home or at the shop?” she demanded.
Jeff waved his hand to shush her as the Skin Deep blog popped up on the screen. I peered over his shoulder, but no pictures had been posted since the ones of me and Harry. I looked away. I didn’t want to be reminded.
“What were you doing, kissing that boy?” Sylvia asked me.
I shrugged. “Momentary lapse.”
“Induced by absinthe,” Jeff added.
“You were drunk?” Sylvia frowned. “My dear, never kiss a boy when you’re drunk. He’ll get the wrong idea.”
No kidding.
Jeff was typing, and then another page came up on the screen. I cringed slightly, because it was “my” blog, Ink Flamingos.
And there it was: Sherman Potter’s flamingo tattoo.
I hate it when I’m right about the wrong things.
Jeff scrolled down to see if there was any text, but there wasn’t. It was like on Skin Deep, just a picture with no title. Just like the one of Daisy’s tattoo on Skin Deep.
“At least she didn’t have pictures of us up there,” Jeff mused.
“Maybe she doesn’t know he’s dead,” I suggested. “She could’ve taken it any time.”
Jeff pointed at the time on the screen. It had been uploaded fifteen minutes ago. “And what was it the text said? That you keep giving her good reasons to blog? Like the first dead body, and now this one?”
He didn’t have to rub it in.
“Let’s go back upstairs,” I said. “We have to meet Tim.” Somehow it seemed more urgent right now.
“If he doesn’t see us up there, he’ll probably call your cell,” Jeff said absently. He was back to Skin Deep, now looking at the picture of Daisy’s flamingo. He’d clicked on the picture and it came up in a separate window, much larger than it was on the blog.
I still couldn’t figure out why Daisy agreed to have color, although from what Flanigan said, it wasn’t this particular tattoo that killed her. It was that second time she was exposed to the allergen. But it still nagged at me that she’d gone somewhere else, to another tattooist, for this work, and not to me. Yeah, it was an ego thing.
“Are you looking for something in particular?” I asked.
“This is interesting,” he said softly.
“Interesting how?” I asked.
He turned to Sylvia. “What do you know about this?”
“What do you think?” she asked belligerently.
“I didn’t notice this before. Maybe because it was smaller, but I can see it now,” Jeff said. “And maybe you should explain.” He was still talking to Sylvia.
“What didn’t you notice? What needs explaining?” I asked.
Both sets of eyes turned to me.
“Do you want to tell her?” Jeff asked Sylvia.
“Someone better tell me, and fast,” I said.
Sylvia patted my arm and smiled as though I were a moron for not picking up on whatever it was they saw.
“I started a tradition a long time ago that in every tattoo I’d hide a little ‘mi’ for the name of the shop within the tattoo. You know, my signature,” Sylvia said. “No one knows,” she added with a little smirk, “but it’s the way we can keep track of our tattoos. When I turned the shop over to Jeff, he continued with it.”
Clever.
Sylvia’s finger moved on the screen, and suddenly I saw it. The initials were there. In the pink plumes of the flamingo.
“What?” I asked, turning to Jeff. “
Jeff shook his head. “Not me.” He looked at Sylvia, who’d puffed up her chest proudly.
“It was a nice tattoo,” she said, “but it needed that color.”
Sylvia did it. I took a deep breath and counted to ten.
“Didn’t she tell you she was allergic?” I finally asked.
Sylvia made a face at me. “Look at me, a hundred tattoos and I never keeled over, did I?”
It stung a little that Sylvia had been able to talk Daisy into the color, and I hadn’t even been successful in the discussion about organic inks. I turned to Jeff. “Didn’t you know about this?”
“Don’t go blaming him for any of this,” Sylvia admonished. “He went away for a weekend, remember that?” She turned to Jeff. “You and that nice girl, you said you needed a weekend away. So I opened the shop while you were gone. No big deal.”
I had never seen Jeff Coleman blush before. I should take note of the date and time, so I could tease him about it occasionally. In fact, it would be very nice ammunition for when he decided to pick on me.
And then I wondered who the “nice girl” was.
I shook the thought aside. Sylvia had done Daisy’s color. Without asking about her allergy. But she was right, at least about this one. Daisy didn’t keel over from it.
“She came to your shop?” I asked.
Sylvia nodded. “She said you’d done the flamingo, but she’d seen the koi that Jeff did on your arm and she loved the colors and the design. She was disappointed he wasn’t there, but I convinced her that an old lady could do just as good a job.”
Looking at the picture, I had to agree. The color was impeccable.
“So you didn’t know about this?” I asked Jeff.
“Not till right this moment,” he said. “Not till I saw the initials. I hadn’t looked that closely before.”
