“It was my bad,” Dolly said. “I shoulda checked.”

“How hard would it be for someone to work out how to do what you do?”

“Well, if they got the stuff they needed, they could do it,” Mike said. “They just couldn’t do a very good job. I mean, I’m an artist, you know?” He nodded toward the waterfall on the man’s shoulder.

“Sure.”

“You wouldn’t figure a guy who stole some paint and a few brushes could turn out the Mona Lisa, would you?”

Duckworth took another look at the tattoo on the customer’s arm. “No, I wouldn’t.”

“What I don’t get,” Dolly said, “is how you could do something like that without the guy lettin’ ya.”

“’Cause it hurts like a son of a bitch,” offered the man in the chair.

“Did you call the police about the tattoo gun that was stolen?” Duckworth asked.

Mike made a snorting noise. “Honestly, how much effort would the Promise Falls Police have put into that?”

Duckworth nodded, taking his point. He thought about Knight’s and asked, “You got cameras?”

Mike shook his head. “Hell, no. I got a lot of clientele wouldn’t even come in here if they knew they were on video.”

“Like bikers?”

“Bikers? No, I’m talking upstanding leaders of the community, housewives, people like that. People who think they’re too respectable.” He grinned. “They get tatts in some pretty interesting places. Kind of a challenge gettin’ at some of those places, let me tell you.”

Dolly smirked.

“Thanks for your time,” Duckworth said.

As he was heading for the door, the guy in the chair asked, “Who’s the Sean that sick fuck killed?”

“Workin’ on that,” the detective said.

Getting into his car, he thought it interesting that he was the only one who’d thought to ask.

Once behind the wheel, he took out his phone again and called up the picture he’d taken of the van parked in the driveway of Mrs. Beecham’s house. He memorized the plate, then called in to the communications division at the station. A woman answered.

“Shirley?” Duckworth said.

“Yes, it is. That you, Barry?”

“Yeah. I need you to run a plate for me.”

“Barry, when you gonna get one of those computers for your car like the real police have?”

“Are you ready?”

“Fire away.”

He closed his eyes and read off the combination of letters and numbers.

“Hang on,” Shirley said. He could hear her typing in the background. “Okay, got it.”

“Who does it belong to?”

“Van’s registered to a Norma Howton.”

“Spell that last name?”

She did.

“So, not Norma Lastman,” Duckworth said.

“Nope,” Shirley said. “Anything else I can do for you today? Book you a cruise to Tahiti? Order you a pizza?”

“No, that’ll do,” Duckworth said.

TWELVE

CAL

“YOU’RE gonna have to buy me a new phone,” Jeremy Pilford told me from the passenger seat.

We were pulling out of the parking lot of the burger place. I glanced in my rear-view to see Jeremy’s girlfriend backing out of her spot in her red Miata, grinding the gears slightly as she did so.