“Good.” Brooklynn slides an entire bowl full of candied cherries toward Georgie and my silver clad friend quickly gobbles them up. “More than anything I want Wyatt’s killer caught and behind bars. Nobody should have to see that, let alone have their life ended in such a brutal manner.”
I lift my glass as if I were toasting her. “I couldn’t agree more.”
A slew of women dressed with neon cosmetics and their hair fanned out above their head a foot tall swoop in and beg for Purple Rain.
Brooklynn excuses herself and quickly immerses herself in her work.
I mull over our conversation. Brooklynn all but implied that Wyatt and Thomas might have killed somebody. Thomas and Wyatt had tension according to her as well. And then there’s Dax. My surprise suspect. I bet he’s not even on Jasper’s radar.
If Dax turns out to be the killer, Jasper will practically thank me for coming here tonight and having this conversation.
All’s well that ends well.
And if it isn’t ending well, it isn’t the end.
But it didn’t end so well for Wyatt Sanders, now, did it?
And for Wyatt, it was most certainly the end.
Chapter 14
Georgie and Juni were out as far as heading over to Needlepoint Tattoos again and talking to Dax.
Georgie is still nursing a bum bum. Her words exactly. And Juni wasn’t all that interested in turning her hands into orange bruises. Her words exactly as well.
But I’m not looking to speak to Stormy this time. I want to speak to the head honcho of that place, Dax. In fact, I want to one-up it and crawl into his mind.
Jasper finally got back to his cottage today a little after five and promptly crashed on his sofa. Poor guy never even made it to the bedroom. So I took Sherlock Bones back to my cottage, along with Gatsby and Fish, and fed them all dinner, let them out to use the restroom, and left them with a pile of toys while I went out for the evening.
Lucky for me, I won’t have to head to Needlepoint Tattoos in Whaler’s Cove alone because I happen to have a sister who, not only is free on this, the holiest of date nights, but is itching to get a tattoo needle twitching over her flesh.
“Now we’re talking.” Macy gives a wistful shake of the head up at the neon signage in front of the tattoo parlor.
Her blonde hair is in a freshly shorn bob. She’s donned a hot pink velour sweat suit that reads yummy across her chest, and don’t think for a second it’s gone unnoticed. Macy scored at least three different catcalls as we made our way down the pier and one mostly coherent marriage proposal from a man clutching a bottle in a brown paper bag.
She sniffs my way. “I’ve always known getting a permanent etching on my body was a part of my destiny. And tonight”—she slings her arm over my shoulders—“you, my little sister, are about to witness the inevitable.”
“And you, my big sister, are about to witness an interrogation. Try to stay out of it. Maybe take a nap while he’s etching over your flesh, fulfilling your colorful destiny.”
We head on into the shop and the faint scent of Chinese food permeates the air once again, must be dinner. There’s no sign of Stormy, and I’m not too sad about it. Macy asks for Dax specifically and the snarky blonde working the reception counter tells her to fill out the proper release of liability paperwork, and soon enough we’re ushered to the back.
A thought comes to me. “Macy, what are you going to get? More importantly, where?”
She tips her head as she considers it. “I was going to finish the one on my back, but I think I’ll take a page out of Georgie’s tatted up playbook instead and go for a bug on the rump.”
“A blue butterfly,” I say. “And are you sure you want to sit there with your pants down while some strange man pokes and prods at your bottom for who knows how long?”
Her blue eyes slit my way. “Is there a better way to spend a Friday night?”
“I don’t know that I have an answer to that.”
The blonde secretary sets us up in a room and plants a bunch of books with pictures of various butterflies in front of Macy and my sister quickly points one out. The blonde asks Macy to lie on her stomach and pull down her pants to an appropriate level before she leaves the room.
“So it begins,” I say, trying hard not to stare at my sister’s glowing full moon.
“The interrogation?” Macy asks as she turns her face in my direction.
“The struggle to keep your hiney from etching itself permanently into my brain. There are only so many parts of you I want to commit to memory.”
Before Macy can shoot me a comeback, the door opens and Dax steps on in.
“Hello, ladies.” A grin expands on his face as he heads over to look at the paperwork on a small metal table, and suddenly this all feels very medical in nature, as if Macy had a bee sting her on the rear and now we were about to have a physician look at it. Although in this case he’s technically the bee, and he’s about to pull out his electronic stinger.
Dax is tall, muscular, and wide chested with dirty blond hair that touches down just below his neck. Pale skin, light eyes, and an overall bored expression finish off his look.
He takes a deep breath. “What are we doing today?” he asks as he scrubs up in the stainless sink in the corner. Honest to God, he’s lathering all the way to his elbows as if he were about to perform surgery and, come to think of it, he sort of is.
Macy looks his way. “Well hey, good-looking.” She quickly flips her
