Karen Olson - Ink Flamingos

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.”

Jeff’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.