“Did you run an ad in the newspaper?”
“No, but I ran his picture through our database a few dozen times.”
“Not one hit?”
“Not even a blip.”
“Do you have a report on him I could read? The night he washed up onshore, maybe?”
Boone folded his hands, leaning forward on his desk. She sensed the slightest thaw as one side of his mouth hinted at a smile. “I might.”
Uh-oh. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I think it’s going to cost you.” There appeared the old, familiar, dangerous twinkle in his blue eyes.
“Boone, do you want me to be a PI or not?”
“Is this an essay question?”
Perfect. And his smirk didn’t help because, yes, it made her smile.
Finally he opened his hands on the desk. “As far as the Kellogg police are concerned, it’s a cold case.”
“But if I find something, shouldn’t you reopen it?”
He narrowed his eyes at her just enough to suggest she might know more than she should. “You’d have to convince me.”
I could do that nearly made it out past her lips. But she held it in. Because, well, maybe she couldn’t, and even didn’t want to, anymore.
“Okay, what’s it going to cost me?”
“Dinner. With me.”
Dinner. Except dinner with Boone was never just dinner. It was a full-out sprint down memory lane, with her trying to shove her heels into the ground, only to be swept up by his lethal charm. There was no guaranteeing that they wouldn’t end the evening strolling the leaf-strewn beach under the full scrutiny of the moon, Boone reeling her back into his heart.
She sighed. But she needed her own PI license, her own life, if she ever wanted to sort out her feelings about any of the men in it. Including Boone. “When?”
“Tonight. After I get off my shift. I’ll pick you up.”
Oh, that would be swell. With any luck, Jeremy would be on-site to wish them happy trails.
“I’ll meet you. When and where?”
He seemed to be considering her words, and she could nearly see the Jeremy-Boone showdown playing in his eyes. She was wondering who would win, when he nodded. “Sunsets, 7 p.m.”
“Done.” She paused for a moment, turning over her next request in her mind. Maybe she shouldn’t have agreed so quickly. . . .
“What else do you want?”
Oh, shoot. She had to work on her PI poker face. Especially with Boone.
“Could you bring the cold case file on Joy Kellogg, too?”
He opened his mouth, then closed it in a grim line. “You’re not going to find anything.”
“Please, Boone. I don’t expect to solve the crime.” She gave a laugh, maybe a bit too high. “Really—I just want to read the file. Please?” She gave him a warm, let’s-be-friends smile.
He held up a hand. “Don’t do that.”
“Don’t do what?”
“Don’t. I’ll bring the file.”
“Two files. Don’t forget.”
“Trust me, I won’t forget.”
* * *
PJ usually loved a hardworking man. But this one was slimed in mud, from knee to work boots, grime flicked into his short brown hair, along his chin, even ground into his elbows. She wasn’t too keen on the smell emanating from said hardworking man, either—an algae pond odor mixed with a trace of sewer? “Please don’t tell me that’s my basement slathered all over you.”
Max peered over his shoulder at her from where he sat on the descending steps off the kitchen. Dog lay in the middle of the linoleum floor, finishing off a piece of driftwood he’d hauled in from the shore. Soggy wood chips soaked in puddles of drool around him. On her way in, PJ had given him a nudge with her foot and tried out Barney. Not a wink of recognition.
“I found the leak,” Max said.
“You did? Did you have to dive for it?” She laughed at her own joke.
He didn’t. She noticed he was wiping his hands on one of the new rags she’d purchased to dust with. Nice.
“Nope. Sorry.” He stood. “If you want, I’ll show you.”
“Does it involve descending to my creepy, rat-infested, slime-smelling, ghost-ridden basement?”
“Maybe.” He gave the word a singsong lilt and grinned. Oh, she’d forgotten about the dimples. She should have mentioned that in her advertisements—definite memory joggers.
“I’ll pass. You can describe it to me. Feel free to use adjectives and any other descriptions that will make you feel better.”
“How about if I start with a price?”
PJ made a face. “Let’s not. How about starting with . . . location? or a time frame?”
Max rolled his eyes and moved past her. She gave him plenty of berth.
He tracked through the kitchen, out along the main room, past the fireplace, and stopped at a place that she calculated fell right beneath the locked bedroom where Agatha Kellogg had breathed her last.
He tapped a wall. What should have been a sharp rap against a hard surface sounded more like a soft, forgiving thud.
“Please don’t tell me these walls are soggy.”
Max took her hand and placed it on the wall. “Like half-baked bread. Frankly I’m surprised it hasn’t come down on you yet.”
Now he sounded like Boone, Mr. Doom and Gloom. She ran her hand along the wall, found where the water had saturated it. It seemed like a good ten-foot-wide panel. “So the leak is here?”
“I think it’s upstairs in the bathroom. Must have flooded, or a pipe burst, and it flowed down this wall and then into the basement.”
“That’s a lot of water.”
“It wouldn’t take much to do this kind of damage. But the amount of leakage in the basement—yes, that’s quite a bit of runoff. Do you want my theory?”
“Please.”
“I think old lady Kellogg ran herself a bath one night and then snoozed off. The bath overflowed and killed the walls, turned the basement to mud.”
“What if that’s when she died? She went to take a bath . . . and ended up in heaven?”
He raised an eyebrow. “That’s deep and profoundly theological.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The idea of cleansing one’s soul before departing.”
The conversation felt too solemn suddenly. And Max’s expression had grown dark, even troubled, as the words settled around them.
PJ resisted the urge to reach out to him, touch his arm. Still, she put kindness in her voice. “We’ll figure out who you are, Max Smith. And I doubt you’ll have any soul-cleansing to do.”
He sighed. “Oh, I think we all have some soul-cleansing to do, but I have to admit, I don’t think I could take it if I turned out to be an arsonist or something.”
“Arsonist?”
He held up his hands.
She smiled. “I pegged you for a fireman.”
“I’ll take that.” Max met her eyes, gratitude in his. “Now—I hate to ask, but can I use your bathroom to clean up? I have a change of clothes in the car. I don’t want to leave a permanent smell in the old Cutlass.”
Again the urge to ask him where he lived tipped her lips, but she simply nodded, driven to silence by her own transient addresses.
Twenty minutes later, PJ was finishing off a slice of cold pizza, listening to Max sing “Bye Bye Love” in the shower. She could probably cross off lounge singer from the list of possible identities.
Meanwhile, she paged through a sheaf of papers from Jeremy while she checked her cell phone messages. Twice. Nothing from the boss.
This morning, when she’d stopped by the office, she found that he’d left her a sticky note on a folder, which contained a list of all the forms and continuing classes she’d have to complete before he’d submit her application to the licensing board. Including a first-aid and CPR-training class; Tactics: Baton, ASR, and Handcuffs; a continuing education class on the basics of civil process; and one tha
t she wasn’t sure how to understand: Sudden In-Custody Death Syndrome.
Just how sudden?
“What are you looking at?” Max came out of her bedroom, rubbing his wet head with a towel.
Without a shirt.
His clean jeans hung low on his waist, and she knew she shouldn’t be looking, but her gaze flitted over his torso and arrested on a mean-looking scar that curled the width of his muscled stomach.
Her gaze then moved to the red tattoo on his upper arm. She noticed it as he draped the towel around his neck, gripping both ends. “You have a tattoo,” she said dumbly.
He glanced at it. “Yep. No idea where that came from.”
She went over to him and studied it. “I’ve never seen anything like this. It looks like a phoenix holding two arrows.”
“Are you a tattoo specialist?”
“No, but I have a friend who knows her tats inside and out.” She looked at him. “You have no memory at all how you got this?”
“Nothing.”
She stepped away from him. “Put your shirt on, Max. We’re going on a little field trip.”
* * *
Stacey Dale, tattoo artist extraordinaire and proprietor of Happy Tats, worked out of a small shop in Uptown, banked on one side by a hair salon called the Scissor Shack. PJ stopped in at the salon and waved to her friend and former client Dally Morrison, who was elbow-deep in lather, her raven black hair now shorn close to her head, dressed in a short-sleeved black shirt and a pair of jeans with a row of horizontal rips held together with safety pins. She nodded toward PJ. “Hey, Me, you still solving crimes?”
PJ grinned. “Hey, Me—yep, I’m still on the job.”
Max caught her eye, frowning.
She explained, “I spent two long, hot weeks in August as Dally, while Jeremy kept her under wraps, in close protection.”
“Not too close,” Dally said. Her gaze lingered a second on Max, then back to PJ, a question in her eyes.
“He’s a client.”
Dally made a round O with her mouth, then wrapped her customer’s head in a towel and propped her up. She directed her attention to Max. “You’re in good hands. She’s why I’m alive today.”
Max glanced at her with a look that made PJ warm. “Okay—not entirely true. Is Stacey over at Happy Tats?”
“All true. And I think so.”
PJ stepped next door and found Stacey seated on a stool next to a padded chair that looked like something out of a dentist’s office. A client’s arm extended across a winged pad, and she bent over it with a tattoo iron, grinding a tribal symbol into his arm. He looked about eighteen, fresh out of school, with a pimply face and not much facial hair. Probably the tat acted as some sort of rite of passage.
Stacey wiped away a gathering of blood with her purple-gloved hand and looked at PJ. “Hey, Sherlock, what’s up?” Stacey had helped complete PJ’s transformation into Dally’s look-alike by painting on Dally’s various tattoos. In washable ink.
“I see you’re working on dreds,” PJ said, noting Stacey’s longer, red, now-tangled hair.
“No more softball. It’s time for my winter look.” Indeed, instead of the usual skull-and-crossbones tanks and low-cut jeans, Stacey wore a pair of paint-stained overalls and an orange tee. She’d gotten another piercing in her eyebrow, too. “But what happened to you? You move to the suburbs, turn into a soccer mom?”
PJ looked at her outfit—a pair of jeans, a plain brown T-shirt, a jean jacket. She was wearing her high-top patchwork Converse. “It’s easier to blend if I don’t look like I’m about to knife somebody.”
Stacey grinned. “Yeah, I s’pose. Who’s the hottie?”
Max shifted behind her. PJ turned and hooked him around the arm. “He’s my show-and-tell. I show—you tell.” She urged him toward Stacey. “Ever seen a tat like this before?” She turned Max, who took off his jacket and hiked up his sleeve.
Stacey removed her safety goggles. Peered at it. “It’s a phoenix.”
“Right.”
“Well, that means rebirth. And the arrows—I’ve seen those on soldiers who earn medals. They don’t wear them, so they get them tattooed.” She replaced her glasses. “I have a guy you should talk to. He’s sort of my mentor. Jinx Jenkins runs a shop near the U in Dinkytown. Tell him I sent you.” She gave PJ the address and turned back to her client. “You know, that offer of free ink—a real tat—is still open. Maybe make a little flower or something to cover up the one you already have?”
Out of the corner of her eye, PJ saw Max’s eyes flicker to her, and she suddenly wanted to put up her hand to cover—or protect?—Boone’s scripted name on her arm. Thankfully, she wore a jacket. But she dredged up a breezy smile. “Nah. I’m not ready for that yet.”
“Really,” Stacey said, knowledge in her voice. “You come back to me when you are.”
Max waited until they were out on the street before he spoke. “You have a tattoo?”
PJ unlocked the Vic lounging against the curb. “I have a memory.”
He muttered something about her being the lucky one as they climbed into the car and headed for Dinkytown.
Big Ten Tattoos looked like a place that catered to the college set, with many of their designs featuring local fraternities or sororities. Jinx—or Marlon Jenkins, whose name PJ read off the certificate by the front door—came from the back, looking like a man who knew his trade.
Every inch of him was marked. An epic medieval battle played out in his vibrant sleeves all the way down his wrists, and even the back of his hand bore a black-and-white emblem, something Celtic-looking. A maroon baseball hat bearing a Minnesota gopher capped what looked like a bald head, and she supposed he might even have a tat under there. He set down a tray of instruments—a gun, some ink, a package of black surgical gloves. “Are you my three o’clock?”
“Nope. Stacey over at Happy Tats sent us. My friend here has a tat that we’re trying to figure out the meaning of.”
He glanced at Max. “What—you don’t know what you got?”
“He doesn’t remember getting it.”
Jinx frowned. “Were you drunk? on shore leave?”
“Do I look like a soldier to you?”
Jinx sat down on the stool, crossing his colorful arms so the thick muscles bulged. “Yep.”
Max glanced at PJ and she nodded. “Will you take a look at it?”
Jinx gestured him over. Max again removed his coat, pulled up his shirtsleeve.
Jinx studied it a moment. “Do I know you?”
Max looked at him. “I don’t know—do you?”
Even from three feet away, PJ could sense Max’s quickening heartbeat, his intake of breath, the hope on his face.
“I’ve seen this tat before. I inked it on a guy a few years back.”
“Was it me?”
Jinx seemed to be searching Max’s face. “Nah, it wasn’t you. But I do have a picture of the tat.”
He reached under the counter and pulled out a three-ring binder, flipping through it until he found a Polaroid of a man’s shoulder, including a shot of his torso.
“Fine piece of artistry, if you ask me.”
“Is there a name with it?”
“Nope. I only keep records back for a year.”
Max stared at it. PJ leaned over his arm. “That’s not you, my friend. Sorry.”
“How do you know?”
She pointed to the picture. “It’s different from yours—it’s missing the fire yours has around the phoenix. This one is more plain.” She glanced at Jinx. “But still very artistic.”
Jinx studied Max’s arm for a moment. “You’re right. It looks like the work of a friend of mine. He had a shop down the street. I do remember quite a few soldiers coming by at the time.”
“Do you have his name?” Max asked.
“Yep. But it’s not going to help you.” He closed the book. “Guy was killed in a bar fight about a year ago.”
PJ could feel Max’s hope deflate beside her.
Jinx focused on Max’s face as if probing for guile. “You really don’t remember getting this?”
“I wish I did.”
“Well, soldier, maybe you shouldn’t. I’ve seen variations of this tat around on a few men. They all have one thing in common.”
“What’s that?” PJ didn’t know why, but her hand found its way to Max’s forearm as if to steady him.
Good thing, too, because as soon as the words left Jinx’s mouth, Max stiffened and inhaled hard.
“Guys that have these usually survived being prisoners of war.”
Chapter Nine
“He was a POW?”
Boone couldn’t erase the note of surprise—PJ would even label it admiration—from his voice as they sat overlooking the veranda at Sunsets Supper Club. The night hovered beyond the splash of setting sun on the waves, and a family of Canadian honkers had stopped and bedded down on the beach on their journey south.
“That’s what the tattoo guy said. And that probably accounts for the scar on his chest. And two more—one on his calf and the other under his jaw—that he showed me when we returned to the house.” PJ finally took a bite of cold steak. She chased it with her Diet Coke.
“Stop right there. That’s too much information for me, PJ. Even if we aren’t dating.”
Inside the supper club, she knew a few eyes had turned on them as they walked in—and what girl wouldn’t enjoy the prestige of dining out with Detective Boone Buckam, dressed to kill in a green button-down shirt and a pair of jeans. But she wasn’t Boone’s girl anymore, even if that left her feeling a little like Dog next to him, homeless and without a clear identity.
At least she didn’t look like a vagrant, thanks to Connie’s jacket and a white dress shirt. Connie had been stirring up a batch of brownies, Davy seated at the counter licking the wooden spoon, when PJ stopped by.
“Auntie PJ!” He flung himself into her arms, and she gave him an extra twirl, not caring that he smeared her jacket with brownie goo.
She wiped it off with a sponge and stayed to visit for a while, snagging a couple of late-afternoon brownies on her way out.
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