“And the fake tattoo? Where were you when you were messing around with that last night?” Lucy asks. “And who saw?”

“Wow! Get out the rubber hoses! Or these days, the waterboard? In our living room. There was nobody else there. We were safe and sound in our own home. It’s too hot to go out and I’m not one for making scenes. Not that a fake tattoo and margaritas are a felony, last I heard.”

“What time was it?” Lucy asks.

“Let’s see. It was after dark obviously, and we’d eaten. I’m thinking around the same time it is now. Nine forty-five, ten o’clock. Maybe as late as ten thirty, which is about when I realized to my shock that the tattoo wasn’t temporary as advertised? It wasn’t going to come off easily, and I’m thinking of contacting the company about it and complaining.”

“So let’s talk about nicknames for a minute,” Lucy says.

“Well I’m sure I have a lot of them. And maybe I don’t want to hear what some of them are?”

“I’m actually talking about your chief,” Lucy says to him as she looks at me.

When she quizzes him about nicknames from my childhood that he might have overheard, he asks, “Like what?”

“You tell me.” Lucy isn’t going to give him certain unseemly details if he doesn’t already have them.

“She might have been called a know-it-all.” Bryce frowns the way he does when he’s thinking hard. “But that’s to be expected, I guess. No insult intended,” he adds for my benefit, I assume.

“Let me know if you think of anything else,” Lucy says to him. “Any comment, no matter how innocent. Any person you know who might have passed along something without realizing it.”

He promises he will, and with a click of the mouse he vanishes from the monitor.

“That narrows it down but doesn’t make me feel any better.” Lucy swivels her chair around, facing me as I recheck my phone for updates. “If this business with the fake tattoo had gone on in a bar, a restaurant or somewhere else in public?” she says as I read a text from Harold:

Tent up and ready for you.

“It might make more sense that someone could have been watching. But in the living room of his own home?” Lucy is saying.

The scene is waiting. I tell her I’ve got to go, and then I ask her to see what she can find out about Elisa Vandersteel. I tell her briefly about running into the woman who I fear is now dead, and if Lucy is surprised, she doesn’t show it. But I catch a flare in her green eyes like light touching an emerald.

“How did you get the name?” She goes into interrogation mode, and I tell her about the British driver’s license.