After that minute, Duckworth decided not to spend any more time waiting.

He definitely wanted to talk to Trevor about being at Knight’s. Was it possible he’d seen anything? He’d left the bar only a few seconds after Brian Gaffney. But in the meantime, there were other things he could do.

Phone still in hand, he looked up tattoo parlors in Promise Falls. There were three listed: Mike’s Tattoos, Kinky Inky, and Dreamy Tatts.

Kinky Inky was just up the street from Knight’s, so he walked it. But when he got there, he found a sign in the window that read: Out of Bizness. Thanx for your Patronage.

He made his hand into a visor and peered through the smudged window. The place had been cleared out. No chairs, no tables, nothing.

Hitting the other two parlors meant getting back into his car. Dreamy Tatts was seven blocks away, sharing a small plaza with a 7-Eleven and a wig shop. As he approached the door, he encountered another sign: CLOSED. He had missed Dreamy Tatts’ business hours by ten minutes. He made a mental note that the place would reopen at noon the next day.

That only left Mike’s, and Duckworth figured it might be closed too. But eight minutes later, when he rolled to a stop behind a black van out front of a shop sandwiched between a comic book shop and a lawnmower repair place, he got lucky. A neon OPEN sign lit up a window that was decorated with dozens of sample tattoos.

He went inside and immediately heard the high-pitched buzzing sounds of a tattoo gun. A blonde-haired woman in her mid-twenties, dressed in jeans and a red short-sleeved T-shirt, surprisingly free of any visible tattoos but with several studs in her ears, sat behind a simple desk with a computer on top of it. She was engaged in conversation with a man who was perched on the edge of the desk, pointing out something to her on the computer screen.

She eyed Duckworth with sleepy eyes and said, “Cop?”

Duckworth grinned. “Is it that obvious?”

The man turned and looked at him with sudden awareness. “Whoa, I’ve seen you on the news.”

“Yeah, that’s where I’ve seen you, too,” the woman said.

“Ah, well, that’s cheating,” Duckworth said. “It’s not like you’ve got some sort of sixth sense.” He flashed his ID. “Detective Duckworth, Promise Falls Police.”

The man slid his butt off the desk and grinned. “I think even if we hadn’t seen you on TV, we’d know what you do for a living.”

Duckworth gave him a quick look. Early thirties, two hundred pounds, short reddish hair and round cheeks. He peered at Duckworth through a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, and was dressed in tan khakis and a dark blue shirt with a button-down collar. No visible tattoos on him, either. He seemed out of place here, the detective thought. A little too clean-cut. He reminded Duckworth of Howdy Doody, that rosy-cheeked, red-haired cowboy puppet from the fifties TV show. Which was even before Duckworth’s time, but some American icons had staying power.