“It’s here,” Shelley said, clicking onthe image of Callie’s tattoo when it was newly done. “Yes, the tattoo artist istagged… wait… Dead Eye Dave’s. It’s the same place.”
Zoe looked up and exchanged a meaningfulglance with her. “Looks like we know where we need to go next,” she said, thenpaused. “This is significant, is it not? The same artist? We should be thinkingabout finding a suspect right there at the parlor. Maybe we want to go in witha little more caution.”
“I don’t know,” Shelley mused. “It’s abit of a taboo subject, isn’t it? Holocaust tattoos. Maybe not every parlor intown is willing to do it. There are a lot of tattoo artists in LA. For both ofour victims to have gone there, there has to be a strong connection. Either thekiller works there, or they didn’t have another choice, which seems onlysemi-likely.”
“How can we be sure?” Zoe asked. Shefelt out of her depth on this subject. Taboo tattoos—what did that even mean?When a prison inmate could be tattooed with a list of the number of kills hehad made, or an image of a dead child, what was taboo?
“I can do a quick straw poll,” Shelleysaid. She was typing on her screen again, bringing up some details and thenlifting the cell to her ear. “Find me a few more parlors other than Dead EyeDave’s. I’ll see if they’ll allow me to make a booking for a Holocaust tattoo.”
Zoe nodded, starting her own search toprepare for when Shelley finished her first conversation.
Five parlors later, they had somethingof a consensus. It wasn’t a truly representative sample, given how many of themthere were in LA as a whole, but it was a good indicator of the trouble itmight possibly take to get a tattoo of the Holocaust prisoner number of arelative. Of the five Shelley had called, all but one of them had said theyflat-out refused to undertake the controversial design.
The last had said it was down to thediscretion of the artist, and let Shelley know they would call her back in theunlikely event that one of their artists was willing to take it on.
“So, that complicates things,” Shelleysaid, shifting toward Zoe on her seat. “It could be that they were picked outbecause of the tattoo parlor itself, or it could be because of their heritage.We still don’t really know. They might have both gone to Dead Eye Dave’sbecause it was the only option.”
“Well, there is one way to find out forsure,” Zoe said.
“What’s that?”
“We go there and ask them if theytattooed Naomi Karling.”
With a nod of agreement from Shelley,Zoe put the car into drive and pulled out into the street. They were gettingcloser now—she could feel it.
Maybe they were about to meet theirkiller face to face.
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
“What did they say?” Zoe asked, nottaking her eyes off the car in front of them.
Shelley put her cell back into herpocket, clearing her throat. “They said we might want backup, if we’re on theright track.”
Zoe shook her head. “Ignore that. We donot want to go in with great force right now. We just want to see if we canfind something out. Maybe the killer will get spooked and decide not to killsomeone tonight, and we can all win.”
“I agree with that,” Shelley said. “Butyou will want to hear the rest. I asked them to look up the specific tattooartist who worked on both Callie and John. He goes by the name OctopusArtisticaonline, but his real name is Jasper Franks. Apparently, he has a bit of arecord.”
“Oh?” Zoe quirked an eyebrow, swinging aleft and steering the car in the direction indicated by their GPS. “You have myattention.”
“He’s known to the local LAPD precinct,to say the least. They’ve had to bring him in a few times. He was causingtrouble by tattooing some pretty suspicious customers, and there were rumorsthat he was part of a white supremacist group. He was even arrested at asupposed meeting of this group, but they were never able to get any charges tostick. They covered their tracks well enough.”
Zoe nodded, mentally chewing this over. “Awhite supremacist happens to be one of the only tattoo artists in LA willing todo Holocaust tattoos, and the people who get them start turning up dead. Notjust dead, but burned. Obliterated. Sounds like a good match-up for a hatecrime to me.”
“Me, too,” Shelley agreed. “But if he ispart of a hate group, he’s not going to just admit it right up front. He put upwith a grilling from the LAPD without giving anything away. He won’t be an easyone to crack.”
Zoe eased the rental car into a spotthree stores down from the tattoo parlor, which boasted an all-black façadewith a 3D-effect skull—complete with staring eyes—spray-painted on thebrickwork above the door. It was two feet tall, a huge figure looming over theseven feet of the doorframe. “Are you asking me for permission?” she said,turning to Shelley with a glint in her eyes.
“Will I get it?”
Zoe grinned. “Do your worst, Agent Rose.Come on, we will nail this killer to the wall. Got your cuffs ready?”
Shelley only chuckled and got out of thecar, waiting for Zoe to join her before she moved forward.
“Let me take the lead on this,” shesaid. “You just do your usual job of looking angry and anti-social.”
Zoe realized she should probably beoffended by that, but coming from Shelley, she found she didn’t really mind atall.
***
Zoe watched with amusement concealedbehind a blank facial expression—not hard for her to achieve—as Shelley workedher magic.
Jasper Franks had been hard at workwhen they entered the parlor, set up at the last of six stations in the openspace, right at the back of the room. The bored eighteen-year-old on receptionpointed them in his direction with an emery file, telling them in dull tonesthat he was busy right now, but did not stop them from going over to him.
He was inking some kind of snakelikedesign onto the calf of a robust Latino man wearing knee-length baggy denimshorts and a baseball cap. Zoe could
