Tattooed

by Pamela Callow

  No. Finn wasn’t capable of that.

  Was he?

  No. He would not harm Kate. Ethan was sure of it.

  * * *

  Kenzie kept her eyes closed. Her muscles buzzed with suppressed excitement. She was dying to leap off her chair and dance around the room.

  She couldn’t believe McNally had been stupid enough to taunt Kate Lange with that sketch of her as a pinup girl.

  McNally had put the final nail in his coffin.

  After his body and Kate’s were found, the police would undoubtedly search his apartment. She was sure it was full of pinup sketches. And it would reinforce their theory that McNally was Kate’s murderous stalker.

  Well, she had to admit it. They were right.

  Just not one hundred percent.

  They had missed one killer.

  38

  It had happened too fast.

  McNally’s fingers trembled as he read the newspaper headline again: Celebrity Tattoo Artist Arrested for Murder of Heather Rigby.

  Kenzie was being held by the police. Since sometime last night.

  Would they let her go after twenty-four hours—or charge her?

  He ran his hand over the bristle on his scalp, pacing the small living room. He turned on the television. But the droning of the news anchor’s voice about events somewhere on the other side of the goddamned world irritated the hell out of him.

  He strode into the bathroom and stood in front of the sink. Stubble dotted his cheeks, blurring the clean edges of his goatee. Everything had been going so perfectly. And now the police had Kenzie.

  You are so stupid.

  Every time you saw Kenzie, you let her knock you down.

  You let her call the shots.

  And now look what happened.

  He laid out his grooming supplies. Razor. Shaver. Beard trimmer.

  He switched on his shaver and ran it down his cheek. Over and over again, until his skin stung, his mind racing with questions.

  Had Kate Lange told the police about Imogen’s tattoo?

  Had Kenzie ratted on him?

  Did she turn over the gun to the police?

  But his brain kept coming back to the question that scared him the most: Would the police let her go?

  She’d been snatched from under his gaze. Taken to the police station and held in detention. What if they didn’t release her? What if she never got out of prison?

  What if she’d panicked after the text I sent her and called the police?

  He had waited seventeen years to finish something they’d started together on a misty, warm Halloween night.

  Kenzie was his.

  Always had been.

  No matter what she did.

  And he’d just executed the perfect plan at Kate Lange’s house.

  He raised the shaver to his temple. He ran it across the back of his skull to the other ear. The web tattooed across the back of his head tingled.

  Then he shaved his skull, his scalp gleaming.

  He was ready.

  * * *

  The phone rang. Kate jolted up in bed.

  Her thoughts were jangled, fear tinged: Was it her alarm company? Had her house been broken into again?

  Kate blinked at the clock—6:55 a.m. She fumbled for the phone.

  “Kate?” asked Frances in her unmistakable voice.

  Kate flung back the covers. This could not be good. She cleared her throat. “Good morning, Frances. How are you?”

  “Have you seen this morning’s newspaper?”

  “No.”

  “The police have arrested Kenzie. For the murder of that girl.”

  Kate exhaled. “I see.”

  “She didn’t do it, Kate.”

  Kate closed her eyes. “The criminal justice system will give her the benefit of the doubt, Mrs. Sloane.”

  “Like they did Randall Barrett?”

  Touché.

  “Eddie Bent is representing her. Trust me, he’ll make sure that the presumption of innocence is alive and well in her case.”

  “Well, he can save his breath.”

  Kate blinked. “Pardon me?”

  “My daughter did not kill that young woman.”

  She spoke with absolute certainty. And not, Kate sensed, because she believed her daughter was not capable of such a crime.

  “Why do you say that?”

  There was a pause.

  “Because I killed her.”

  And then Frances Sloane began to laugh.

  39

  “I have an idea,” Ethan said. He drained his coffee, his taste buds so inured to the bitterness of the reheated brew that he barely tasted it.

  “We could use one about now,” Ferguson said. She looked as rumpled as he felt.

  They had left Kenzie in the interview room to “think.” It had been a long, frustrating night.

  She hadn’t said another word.

  Of the many suspects Ethan had interviewed over the years, he could count on one hand the number who hadn’t cracked at some point.

  Kenzie had added herself to that number.

  Those tattoos were a force field, he thought. She deflected every tactic to get her to talk. Either Eddie Bent had counseled her extremely well, or she was too scared to talk for fear of incurring the wrath of whomever had killed Rigby.

  Or…she had done the deed and was too smart to say anything.

  He would bet that the answer lay behind door number three—but he had also learned the hard way with Barrett’s case to not jump to conclusions.

  It was looking more and more as though they wouldn’t get a statement from her during her detention. But as Ethan sat in the interview room with her, studying her tattoos, he remembered that Frances Sloane had said Kenzie had had several tattoos. Had one of them been a raven?

  It certainly wasn’t in evidence now.

  Either it was under her clothes or…it had been covered up by another tattoo.

  He left the room and tracked down Liscomb. “I want you to use the infrared camera and photograph Sloane’s tattoos. Just stand behind the one-way glass and see what you can get.”

  If the tattoo had been covered up by another tattoo, the infrared camera should be able to detect it. And if it was identical to Heather Rigby’s, it was one more piece of evidence to use to break Kenzie Sloane’s silence.

  * * *

  “Mrs. Sloane, let’s start at the beginning.” Kate sat in an armchair that she had positioned to face her client. The May sun, a notoriously unreliable witness, decided to make an appearance.

  “I killed Heather Rigby.” Frances Sloane’s eyes were calm, resolute.

  Uh-huh. “Tell me what happened.” Kate opened a notepad.

  “I was out walking by the bunkers. It was late on Halloween night—”

  “How late?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Of course you don’t. “Why were you walking out at Chebucto Head? Especially on Halloween?”

  She swallowed. “I often walked there. It helped me think.”

  That could be true. “So what happened?”

  “A girl ran out of the bunker. She was crying.”

  “This girl was…?”

  “Heather Rigby. She asked me to help her. Said her friend had hurt herself and was lying inside the bunker.”

  Frances’ disease prevented the muscles in her face from giving away any involuntary cues of mendacity. But there was nothing wrong with Frances Sloane’s eyes. Right now, they gazed at Kate with determination. Not unease.

  Kate couldn’t tell if she spoke the truth. Or not. “What did you do?”

  “I followed the girl into the bunker. But she had lied to me. There was no friend. Instead—” Frances began to cough. After a minute, she had cleared her airway. “Instead, she jumped me.”

  “Why?”

  “She wanted money. But I didn’t have any. It made her angry. She had a gun… .”

  Kate lowered her pen. Given Canada’s strict gun laws, it was unusual for
a teenage girl to have a gun. Unless it was a hunting rifle. “You mean a shotgun?”

  “No, a handgun. She aimed it at me. But I hit her in the shoulder and she dropped the gun.”

  “And?”

  “I grabbed the gun off the ground. She rushed toward me. And I…I shot her.”

  Had the police recovered the murder weapon?

  “She wasn’t very big, Frances. Why did you need to shoot her?”

  Frances blinked. Swallowed. “She was strong. She was also very angry. I feared for my life.” The irony of her client’s current situation did not escape Kate.

  “What happened after you shot her?”

  “She collapsed. I realized I had killed her.”

  The next question was critical. If Frances could answer it correctly, she either had an inside line on the forensic holdback evidence, or had been a witness when Heather Rigby was killed—or had shot her as she said she did. “Where did the bullet hit her?”

  Was that the slightest hesitation? Hard to tell with Frances. “In the heart.”

  “The heart?”

  “The chest,” she said. “Somewhere in her upper body. I couldn’t tell. It was dark.”

  Nicely fudged, Frances. “So then what happened?”

  “She died.” She glanced away. “There was a rubber witch mask in the bunker—”

  “Someone left it there?”

  “I think it was Heather’s.” She paused. Fatigue already pulled at the flaccid muscles of her face.

  “…Wearing a witch costume.”

  “Heather wore a witch costume,” Kate repeated to ensure she understood her client. Frances’ speech had worsened over the past week.

  “Yes. I put the mask on her.”

  “Why?”

  “I was angry.” She studied her barely functioning hands as if remembering their past strength. “I dragged her to the bog.”

  “How did you bury her?”

  “I dug under it. Rolled her body in.” She blinked several times.

  “Mrs. Sloane, do you understand the consequences of what you’ve just told me?”

  “Yes. I will go to jail for the rest of my life. I deserve to be punished.”

  “Your bid to change the assisted suicide law is now dead in the water.” Kate’s voice was flat in her effort to not sound accusatory.

  Despite the details provided by Frances in her confession, it rang false to Kate. The evidence against Kenzie was compelling. And Frances’ sudden decision to confess when she learned Kenzie was under suspicion reeked of desperation.

  The classic mother-protecting-offspring act.

  But in this case, Frances was throwing away a chance to do something really good with the end of her life. And she was making that sacrifice to protect someone who had probably killed Heather Rigby—and who deserved to be punished.

  Kate gazed at her notes, her mind whirling. But no matter which avenue she explored, she came back to the inevitable conclusion: she had a legal duty to proceed with her client’s instructions. She had no evidence that her client had lied, or that someone else had committed the crime. Ethically, her path was clear. She raised her head and said, “What are your instructions, Mrs. Sloane?”

  “I want you to tell the police they have the wrong suspect. Just like Barrett’s case.”

  It was nothing like Randall Barrett’s case, Kate thought wearily. “Okay, we’ll do this by affidavit. I’ll draw one up, and then you need to sign it. After that, I’ll contact the investigating officer—” her stomach tightened at the knowledge that it was Ethan “—and inform him that you are confessing to the murder of Heather Rigby.”

  “Too bad they don’t have the death penalty anymore,” Frances slurred.

  The death penalty, in this case, would have killed two birds with one stone for Frances Sloane.

  If Frances had been the killer.

  “One more thing,” Frances said.

  Kate glanced up. This couldn’t be good.

  “As soon as you give my affidavit to the police, I want you to issue a public statement that I have confessed to the murder of Heather Rigby.”

  And thereby make the police’s job that much more difficult. Kate flipped her notepad closed.

  Nicely done, Frances.

  * * *

  It was not surprising, Frances supposed, that she thought of her disease in terms of right angles. ALS destroyed her body in discrete stages. One day she could still swallow, the next day it was an act of gargantuan effort. It was as if she had taken a step on an escalator. And the previous step of functionality was swallowed by the machine, never to return.

  She knew from the early days of her diagnosis, when she had participated in ALS support groups, that some patients viewed their illness as the final stage on a journey to a better place, an “up” escalator to paradise.

  She, however, had stepped onto a down escalator. Every time her disease progressed to a worse stage, she became more isolated, more trapped. Her son, Cameron, who had bought out her partnership in her architectural firm three years ago, made an effort to see her. But he and his wife, Karen, had their hands full with twin three-year-old boys and a nine-month-old daughter named Lily Frances. The children were too young to have patience with her slow speech, her inability to move—and, in fact, were frightened of the wheelchair, the tubes that connected her to oxygen, the coughing fits that gurgled and choked her breath. “Grandma is scary,” she heard young Joshua protest one afternoon when Karen and Cameron arrived, loaded with diaper bags, Cheerios for snacks, and toys to keep their children busy.

  The visits dwindled to the obligatory one-hour Sunday afternoon cup of tea.

  The remaining 167 hours of her week were consumed with the many hours it took to get bathed, dressed and fed. She had, once upon a time, taken those simple tasks for granted—in fact, had dealt with them impatiently—as she juggled raising two children and succeeded as a lone woman running a large architectural firm, with an academic husband who retreated to the comfortably undemanding and arcane world of seventeenth-century Asian history.

  Gus left her for a Ph.D. student ten years ago. But he had, in truth, left her seventeen years ago, when Kenzie had contacted them after she ran away, begging for money. They had a bitter fight. Frances wanted to send Kenzie an airplane ticket home; he wanted to send her money.