The building rose in front of them. It was late enough that the streetlights shone down on the plain-looking building.
“We’ll go in here.” Morgan led the way to an entrance at the side of the building.
“Are you sure we can be here?”
“Yes, absolutely.”
She didn’t really believe him, but it wasn’t worth wasting time and energy on it. The idea of what she was doing consumed her. Still, she’d said she would do this, so here she was. Morgan had been quiet since she’d agreed to come. Maybe a little before. She was the one who had chattered unnecessarily for the trip. Anything to keep her mind off the upcoming viewing.
Morgan knocked on the door, his cell phone in his hand. He sent a text. The door opened a few minutes later.
“Hey, Dave, we’re here.”
“Good. Come on in.” The older man smiled at Jazz and held the door for her to enter. “Thanks for coming.”
She nodded mutely as she followed the two men forward. He took her to a set of double doors. “Normally we don’t do it this way, but as the photos aren’t enough…”
As if understanding what the hell he was talking about, she gave him a small smile, hoping her face didn’t look as dead white as the poor man she was coming to see. She walked into a small empty room to see a body covered with two sheets in front of her. Her breath caught in the back of her throat.
“Are you okay?”
She nodded. “I’ll be fine.” But she said it mostly to reassure herself more than him. With a deep breath, she walked closer. The older man walked to the other side of the body before carefully folding back where the sheets joined. He turned on an overhead lamp.
Light shone on the tattoo.
And she understood something that blew her away. The tattoo was identical to the one she put on her lovers, but… in a mirror image. Instead of pointing to the hip, the tail of the dragon pivoted toward the crevasse between the rounded cheeks.
In every other way, it was a copy of her tat design.
Yet, it wasn’t her work. She used color differently, and the edges were not as crisp. Not bad. But it wasn’t hers. She leaned closer, pulled out the magnifying glass she’d thought to push into her purse before leaving her shop, and studied the scales in the tattoo. There was something there. Something different.
“What do you see?”
“A number,” she said quietly, her voice low, intense.
“What?” The older man leaned closer. “What kind of number?”
“This tattoo is older.” She straightened, her heart sick and her mind furious at the cruelty of others. “But the number is new.”
“What?”
She stepped back to let the others look, her mind wondering what to make of it. The tattoo had been done a while ago, the skin long healed, the color still bright.
The older man looked up at her. “You do this type of work?”
“I’m a tattoo artist,” she acknowledged. “In fact, a favorite design is the mirror image of this one. I have never done one with this layout, and I never would. This is not my work.”
He nodded. “I’ll take a few more images and blow it up so we can see it better. We’re running DNA, but if it turns out to not be Morgan’s brother… we’ll need everything we can get to identify him.”
She spun to look at Morgan. “I understood there was no blood connection.”
Morgan’s gaze hardened. “We have the same father.”
“Oh.” She frowned, not knowing how that worked. She thought it was the matriarch DNA that mattered. But what did she know? All she wanted at this point was to leave. Go home, pour a hefty drink, and take it into the bath. Soak for an hour or two to wash away the odor and sight of this poor man. Too bad she wouldn’t be able to get rid of the image from her mind.
She stepped back, well past ready to leave.
*
“Okay, if there’s nothing else we can do here,” Morgan said, “I’ll take her home. You have my cell phone number if I can help with anything else.”
“We’ll run with this and see if we can track down the artist.” The older man looked at Jazz. “You don’t recognize the artist?”
“No,” she said shortly, “And I do know a lot of artists. The thing is that it is my design, so they’ve seen it or taken a copy of it from somewhere.”
The man nodded. “Is this a design you’d have lying around somewhere? Easily accessible?”
“No.” She took a deep breath. “I don’t have a pattern or a paper version of this lying around.”
“So the only way they’d have seen this design?”
“From one of the people I have inked it on.” She sucked in her breath as if waiting.
In fact, Morgan said, “You’ve only ever used that design on a specific segment of the world, correct?” He wanted to laugh at her hooded gaze, but this wasn’t anything to laugh about. She wasn’t appreciating him volunteering information, but he knew the cops would get there on their own. He just wanted to get there faster so they could solve this. If this was his brother, he needed to know. And if it wasn’t, there was another family that needed to be informed.
“What?” Dave asked. “What am I missing?”
She closed her eyes. “This design is only on my previous lovers.”
Silence as both men studied her. Morgan wanted to laugh but the older man looked like he’d sucked on a lemon.
“Sounds like I need a list of the men…or women…who you have inked with this design then.”
Her face twisted with distaste. Morgan could relate.
“We need to track down what yours looks like so we can compare the two,” said the older man.
She nodded. “In that case, you don’t need me.”
She turned around and walked back outside.
Dave looked over at him. Morgan sighed. Damn, she’d turned the tables on him very effectively. “So do you have a camera?”
“Yeah, why?” Dave stared at him in puzzlement. He walked over to a door on the far side of the room.
“Get it, please.”
Dave shot him a puzzled look but disappeared for a moment. Morgan paced the room, hating the next step. Jazz was likely laughing her fool head off.
The sound of a door closing had him turning in Dave’s direction. The older man waved the camera. “Okay, so where are we going?”
Morgan snorted. “Right here.”
He reached for his belt buckle.