Ink Flamingos (33 page)

“Your wife, excuse me, ex-wife, took the pictures of us,” I said. And then I remembered something else. How he’d taken me home in a cab. He knew where I lived. And I found a flamingo on my bed.

I shivered when I recalled the way Terri had given me the once-over when she came here to talk to Joel about the tattoo. She wasn’t here for anything except checking me out, seeing if she could impersonate me better, like I’d thought.

“So why do all that stuff?” I asked. “The blog posts, the impersonation, the flamingos?”

“Your brother, the police, needed a distraction,” he said. “You were the best way to do it.”

I’d suspected that, but hadn’t wanted it to be true.

I couldn’t hear banging anymore. Bitsy and Joel were going for help. I moved my hands under the chair and felt the cord give a little. I moved my hands a little more, and to my surprise, it gave even more. I started to work at it, hoping he wouldn’t notice my muscles flexing. If he did, then I’d just say my arms were falling asleep, a little white lie Sister Mary Eucharista would approve of, considering the circumstances. The needle was moving along my lower back, horizontally. It lifted a couple of times then settled back with little pinches of pain that had finally gotten my endorphins all worked up.

“So what are you going to do to me? Are you going to kill me, too?” I asked with a little more confidence now that the cord was giving way bit by bit.

“You screamed when we were at the Flamingo. In
public
,” he said angrily. “Now everyone’s after me.”

He hadn’t answered my question. Not that I really wanted an answer. Not that I needed one.

In what felt like hours but was probably only minutes, the cord fell away from my wrists. But what to do now? I couldn’t move my feet; he’d see me. And he had that machine. While he couldn’t go any deeper with the needle than he already was, he could use it as a weapon, hit me with it or something. But if I moved fast, maybe I could catch him off guard.

I had no choice.

In one swift move, I swung my arms up from under the table, twisted my body around to one side, and my fist connected with the side of his face as I pulled myself up to my knees.

T
he needle slid along my lower back, but I didn’t have time to think about it. I swung my arms again and slammed my hands against either side of his face. He was so startled, the machine fell to the floor and his head snapped back.

Right at that moment, I heard a crash, glass shattering, footsteps running, and Jeff burst into the room. He barely looked at me as he grabbed Harry, swung him around and threw his fist into his face.

Harry’s good looks were history.

He fell to the floor, Jeff’s boot on his chest to hold him down, as Jeff turned to me.

“You okay?”

I nodded, although it was a lie. My shirt had fallen back down, but my jeans were still down below my hips. I reached down and started to pull them up when I remembered.

“He tattooed something,” I whispered, indicating my back.

“I got it,” Joel said from behind me, and I felt a soft cloth against my skin.

A security guard was behind Bitsy, who had her phone in her hand. “Tim’s on his way.”

Joel finished wiping the tattoo, and I pulled my jeans up, looking down at Harry. Jeff still had his foot on him, but Harry wasn’t going anywhere. He was out like a light.

Joel untied my ankles, and as the cord fell away, I felt myself start to collapse. Jeff caught me, his arms around me as he whispered, “It’s okay.”

I indicated Harry. “He killed Daisy. And Ainsley. He told me.”

Jeff lifted me up and carried me out of the room while Joel stood sentry, watching Harry. Bitsy waited at the front desk for Tim.

Jeff gently put me down in a chair in the staff room, but I stood right up.

“Stay put,” he said.

I shook my head. I had to see what that tattoo was. I went out to the back of the shop, where we had a long mirror, then lifted up my shirt and lowered my jeans.

It was half an outline of a flamingo, with a long black line from the beak to the wing. That had probably happened when I leaped up so fast.

I choked back a sob as I stormed up to my room and shoved the door open. Joel had used the cord that Harry had used on me to tie Harry to the chair. Harry’s eyes were open but unfocused, and he licked his lips.

“How does that feel?” I shouted at him. “What was the point of this? Didn’t you realize you’d get caught?”

His head lolled to one side as he stared up at me. “I thought they were gone for the night.”

He’d seen Bitsy and Joel leave but didn’t know they were just across the canal. He’d seen me lock the door.

“So you were going to tattoo me and then what? Were you going to kill me?”

He shook his head, then winced with pain. “I wanted to leave you something to remember me by.”

He’d certainly done that.

Before I could ask anything else, I heard glass crunching, and I turned to see Tim come in with three uniformed cops and Flanigan. I pointed at Harry. “He killed Daisy. And Ainsley Wainwright.”

Tim nodded. “We found Ann Wainwright tonight in a bar across the street from her sister’s apartment, having a drink after she cleared out her sister’s stuff. Ann was the one who saw Harry and Terri leaving the hotel room. After they were gone, she went in to find Daisy dead. She didn’t know what Daisy was doing there, but we can probably figure it had something to do with the Flamingos. She panicked and took off because she didn’t want to be implicated in Daisy’s death, especially since she was taking her place in the band. She left the door open a little, though, which was how the room service guy found the body. Ann didn’t know Harry and Terri knew her sister; she hadn’t seen her sister in a long time. When she saw Harry with you in Potter’s hotel room, she realized who he was. And then she found out her sister was dead, put it together that they must have mistaken her for her sister, so she decided to lie low, hoping they wouldn’t go after her.”

So she’d recognized Harry, not Terri, as they’d suspected. And that was why she didn’t show up for the Flamingos’ concert. No one had seen her, until Jeff spotted her meeting up with Sherman Potter at the Golden Palace earlier. I wondered who the redhead was at the arena, but then realized I’d probably jumped to conclusions. I hadn’t seen her face. As I’d said to Tim at one point, there are a lot of redheads in Vegas. Unless it had been Terri, after all, like Jeff had suspected. And then I remembered the plastic flamingo with the tiara on my bed. It must have been Terri. She must have been there.

“Why didn’t Ann go to the police?” I asked.

Tim sighed. “That’s what Potter told her to do when she told him everything in that room at the Golden Palace after Potter was released. But then Potter was killed, and she ran.” He anticipated my next question. “She says she left Potter alive in that room, and I believe her. The red hair in the stairwell? It was from a wig.”

“Where is Terri?” I asked Harry.

“Out in the car. It was her idea, all this,” Harry said quickly, waving his arm around to indicate the shop.

Flanigan motioned to the uniforms that they were to go find Terri before asking Harry, “Why did you kill Potter?”

“That was her idea, too,” Harry said. Pretty convenient, blaming everything on his ex-wife. “We found out the sister was staying at the Golden Palace, and we were going to take care of her.” He flinched a little, but I wasn’t buying his story that it was all Terri’s idea. “Sherman was there instead. He had figured out what was what, and we had no choice.”

Tim was nodding. “Ann told us she’d gone to get ice, but the ice machine was broken so she had to go to another floor for it. When she came back, she saw Brett and Jeff going into the room. Sherman was dead.”

I remembered seeing Harry in the casino. We must have surprised him and Terri, and they had to wait until we went downstairs to the business center to move the body. My suspicion that the picture text of Sherman Potter’s flamingo had been a ruse to get us to leave was spot on.

“Why was she using her sister’s name?” I asked Tim.

He shrugged. “She said she thought it sounded more like a celebrity name than just plain Ann.”

Had to agree.

“If she was worried about Harry and Terri finding her, why did she go to her sister’s tonight?” I asked.

“She didn’t know about Terri, didn’t know Terri lived there, too. She wanted to make sure she got a couple of family heirlooms that her sister had and ended up cleaning out the whole place.”

I hadn’t seen anything that had seemed to be worth something, but what did I know?

I had another thought. “Why did Terri leave, knowing Ann was in there?” I left it unspoken that it was Terri’s chance to get to Ann; she didn’t know that we were watching.

Harry squirmed a little. I stared him down.

“She wanted me to take care of the sister, said she was a loose end,” he said. “I was over at the Flamingo. I was supposed to meet Ace, but she called me, said she was coming to get me. She didn’t want to do it herself.” Harry stared at me, his gaze unnerving. “Terri is jealous of you,” he said in a complete non sequitur.

I couldn’t hold back my surprise. “Why?”

His familiar smile flashed for a second. “She knows how I feel about you. You know I would never really hurt you, right?”

The guy was certifiable.

“She said we could leave and start over, that I didn’t have a choice. She said I should use the key first, though, take care of you, too, and no one would find you till morning.”

I started to shake, and Tim slipped his arm around me, steadying me.

“But I wouldn’t do it, you know that, don’t you?” Harry asked again. “I only wanted to tattoo you.”

Like that made it all better.

But it reminded me of something. “What about that stencil and flamingo at Murder Ink?” I asked.

Harry’s eyes skipped behind me. I turned slightly to see Jeff leaning against the wall, his arms crossed, his eyes dark with anger as he stared Harry down. Harry bit the corner of his lip, then said, “He fired me. And you’re in love with him.”

Seems he wasn’t the only one who was jealous. But still, I wouldn’t meet Jeff’s eyes as I felt the flush crawl up my neck.

Tim frowned as he went over to Harry and pulled him up, taking note of the bruises on his face before slapping a pair of handcuffs on him. Flanigan turned to me. “We need—”

“A statement,” I said. “I know the drill.”

J
eff’s fingers traced the outline of the unfinished and marred flamingo on my lower back, causing goose bumps to rise, but not in a bad way.

“I’ve got an idea, but you’ve got to trust me, Kavanaugh,” he said.

I couldn’t see his expression. I was facing away from him, holding up my shirt, my jeans back down around my hips.

Suddenly his fingers were dancing along the tiger lily on my side, and then the dragon tail that curled around my torso.

“This is good work,” he murmured.

Mickey, my old boss at the Ink Spot, had done them. They were beautiful. This was the first time Jeff had seen them.

“Do you have any others?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Just the sleeves and the one your mom did on my leg,” I said, referring to the Napoleon on horseback.

“You need more,” he said, still tracing the dragon.

“Let’s get this one fixed up first, okay?” I had asked him to do the repair work on the tattoo Harry had started. Ace had said he could do it, as a sort of peace offering. He was back at work here, just as Joel had said he would be, and was feeling pretty guilty about his friendship with Harry. I didn’t hold it against him, though. It wasn’t his fault.

Joel had offered to fix up the mess, too, but while I admired Joel’s work, it wasn’t as delicate as the koi that Jeff had done on my arm. Jeff’s style, when he wasn’t doing flash, was more my style.

I was acutely aware of his touch; now he was back to the lily, his fingers moving up along the stem toward the flower, which touched my breast. I shivered, and his breath whispered against the nape of my neck.

I arched back and felt his lips brush my skin; then he moved away.

“Let’s get started,” he said, all business.

I lay face down on the chair, which was a little too reminiscent of when Harry had tied me down. I thought about how Tim had told me Terri wanted to make me afraid, how she’d called the Venetian to be on the lookout for me and to detain me, how Harry had sneaked peeks at my schedule when Bitsy wasn’t looking, and Terri had called my clients to cancel appointments. This was all more than just making me a distraction for the police. Terri was obsessed with me—and with the way Harry felt about me. She’d impersonated me at the bar, and when Harry texted her that he’d gotten me drunk, she relished taking those pictures of me and posting them on Ainsley’s blog. Ainsley had all her passwords written on a notepad in her desk drawer, which was how Terri had been able to do it. She’d even tracked down Colin Bixby’s e-mail so she could break us up. She wanted to ruin my life.

It was too bad for her it didn’t work, and now she’d end up in jail.

Jeff put the stencil to my lower back. He hadn’t asked me if I wanted to see it, and I hadn’t said I did. I trusted him.

When the machine started, I closed my eyes and let myself become a part of the work.

 

It was magnificent. Pink and red and purple plumes stretching along either side of my lower back, the beak raised upward slightly, a little haughtily. The black rogue line blended in with the lines of the bird’s body. It didn’t look like a flamingo now, but a phoenix rising from orange and yellow flames. As much as I loved Joel, he couldn’t have done this. He couldn’t have turned something so ugly into something so beautiful.