Cries in the Night (35 page)

“The whole crazy incident was all over the internet, so I doubt it’s a secret,” Dallas pointed out.

“That might be why he’s coming to see us. Maybe he’s going to tell us to move out,” Killeen suggested. “I’ve kind of gotten attached to my Beatles room.”

“Beatles?” Jenny looked confused.

“Yeah, every bedroom in the mansion is decorated with memorabilia about a famous musician or band,” Killeen explained. “It’s pretty cool.”

“Sounds like it.” Jenny agreed.

“We’ll make it if we can,” I promised. Jenny was being polite, but I saw her glancing surreptitiously at her phone, probably hoping for a message … or maybe just anxious to get on with the investigation. As much as I doubted we were going to find something, I wanted to give it my best shot. Jenny didn’t deserve to be put through this aggravation, especially by a clueless younger sister. “Dallas, can you follow us? I’ll ride with Jenny.”

“Sure.” Dallas pulled the keys for his black Range Rover out of his pocket and headed toward the warehouse’s side lot where the employees and customers who were trying not be seen parked behind a high wall with an electronic gate.

“Nice to meet you, Jenny.” Killeen gave her a friendly smile and Jenny nodded.

“You, too,” she said and headed toward the front door. I had to hurry to keep up. This was a woman with a mission.

There was only one car in the front lot, a silver ten-year-old Honda Accord that was obviously hers.

“They seem nice,” Jenny commented after we were settled in the front seat of her car.

“They are. Remind me to tell you how Killeen saved our lives last weekend.”

 

Angela’s tattoo studio was in an older area of downtown that hadn’t yet been transformed by urban renewal. Of course, there was a Starbucks on one corner and a neighborhood grocery store on the other. Crammed between the Starbucks and a trendy used furniture store was a narrow shop barely wide enough for a single door and a 3’ x 5’ plate-glass window that had been painted over so you couldn’t see inside.
Longhorn Tattoo
was neatly hand-painted on the outside, along with a phone number and
Open Saturday, Sunday and By Appointment
. A large padlock hung on the commercial grade zinc-plated latch.

“I’m not familiar with Austin,” I said as I watched her struggle to get the padlock off of the shiny new hasp, “but this doesn’t strike me as a particularly safe area.”

She frowned as she concentrated on getting the key to turn … without success. “It’s all she could afford. Being so close to the university, it has a lot of foot traffic.”

One of the first tricks I had learned as a child was how to pick locks, and I knew that in spite of its size and quality, I could open this one in less than fifteen seconds. However, I didn’t want to freak Jenny out by showing her how easy it would be to breech the front door, so I stood back and let her use her key.

Dallas added. “During the day, it’s okay. At night, it can be a little sketchy.”

Jenny didn’t seem surprised by that information. “She was only here during daylight hours. I insisted on that. Besides, I know how she loses herself in her art, and I wanted to make sure she had time to do her homework.”

“Did she stick to the schedule?” Dallas asked.

“Always. Oh, she might be five or ten minutes late, but she always came home before dark,” Jenny answered.

That didn’t sound like a girl with a boyfriend, I thought.

Jenny finished releasing the lock and then opened the door. “Hold on, I’ll get the lights.” She flipped a switch on the wall. All of the bare fluorescence light tubes came on at one time, flooding the room with bright light. That made sense for tattoos, but not so much for artwork.

“Was she really good with colors?” I knew all about lighting from the stage shows I’d been involved with in high school and Vegas.

“Colors? Of course … why?”

“Fluorescence lights don’t show true colors,” I explained. “I’m guessing she didn’t do any personal art here.”

Jenny frowned at the grid of new lights that hung from the ceiling. “That’s odd, because I remember thinking how dark this place was when she first rented it,
and she said she’d find some spotlights or take her easel outside to the park. I don’t know when she added all these … or how she paid for them.”

I circled the room slowly, studying the stack of half-finished canvases in one corner and the displays of tattoo art that were stuck so close together that it actually papered every wall. There were lots of sci-fi themed pictures, cartoon characters, Oriental symbols, flowers, butterflies and dozens of different variations of Bevo, the UT longhorn steer mascot and the university’s iconic initials. Nothing raised any questions. I glanced over at Dallas who was going through the paperwork at an old wooden desk, also without success.

“What exactly are you looking for?” Jenny asked as she wandered around the small space trying not to get in our way and yet anxious to help.

“Anything that seems out of place or gives us a lead on where she might have gone,” I answered. I studied the tray of tattoo equipment next to an old reconditioned barber’s chair and a rolling storage unit that had a drawer full of individually packaged sterile needles and several shelves of different colored inks. It was a small, but impressive set up.

“She only did tattoos?” Dallas asked.

Both Jenny and I turned to look at him.

“Yeah … why?”

Dallas held up an instruction manual. “She has a Picosecond pulse laser … it’s used to remove tattoos.”

Jenny studied the manual. “It looks expensive.”

“Yeah … according to this receipt, $2,695.35,” Dallas added. “We studied these in one of our labs … it has a pulse width about 100 times shorter than the older nanosecond technology, so tattoos can be more effectively removed with fewer treatments. She must have made a pretty good profit on the tats to afford this.”

Jenny breathed out a whoosh of air as she shook her head. “I didn’t know she made anywhere close to that. I thought she was struggling just to cover the rent on this place. Her car was from one of those buy here, pay here joints, and she was barely able to make payments on that.”

I pulled out my cell phone and speed-dialed Liberty. She was the youngest of my new siblings and had been sidelined by a broken leg, so she helped out with the research. “Hey … we’ll be back in about an hour or so. Can you pull together all the Texas laws needed for laser tattoo removal? Yeah … licensing, inspections, everything. We need to know what’s required … and pay special attention to any parts of the law that may be optional. Yeah, thanks.”

“I don’t understand any of this. Other than letting her practice on me when she was starting out,” Jenny said, holding out her wrist with its Lucky Charms tattoo that I had already noticed, “I’ve never really taken this seriously. And I know nothing about lasers. Definitely not a topic for my pre-school classes.”

“They use a lot of laser effects on the shows in Vegas. And as for tattoos, I have a few myself.” I held my right arm next to hers so she could see the tattoo of Houdini’s name with a red padlock, hanging open from the “O.” I tried to lighten the moment with a playful suggestion, “Maybe we can compare tattoos sometime.” I was surprised by how anxiously I was awaiting her answer.

Before she could respond, Dallas called out, “Hey, Reno.” His voice was muffled as he leaned into a partially-opened desk drawer. “Can you look under this desk and see what’s making this drawer stick? I think there’s something caught in the track …”

“Sure, old man,” I teased. Dallas was actually almost two years younger than me, but he acted like he was much older. I crossed the short distance to the desk and got down on my knees after checking out the floor. My leather pants were expensive … and a little too hot for an Austin summer. Note to self … go shopping for a more practical wardrobe since I wasn’t going to be near a stage any time soon.

The room was surprisingly clean for such an old building. You’d think that would be a requirement in a facility where tattoos and removals were being performed, but all the tattoo parlors I’d been in hadn’t been particularly sanitary. I leaned down and tried to look under the desk. “Is there a flashlight around here?”

Jenny shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen one.”

Dallas flipped to a screen on his iPhone, turned on the flashlight and held it under the desk. “Does that help?”

“Great. It looks like there’s something white, but I can’t tell what it is.” I twisted my arm until I could get my hand up under the drawer. I felt around on the rough wood until my fingers touched paper. I tried to wiggle it out, but it was firmly stuck. “Okay … pull the drawer open slowly until I say stop.”

Dallas started pulling the lower desk drawer out, moving it from side to side. “It needs some oil on the tracks or something.”

“Stop! Got it.” I felt the paper release and I was able to pull out what appeared to be an old mailing envelope. I opened it and looked inside. “Hmm, that laser machine isn’t the only thing you don’t know about.” I pulled out a stack of hundred dollar bills and handed them to Jenny.

“What the fudge?” Jenny’s shocked expression confirmed that she had been completely unaware of the hidden cash. “How much is there
Where would she get this much money
?”

Dallas fanned through it. “At least five grand.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” I mused. “If she was hiding the money from you and buying lights and equipment you didn’t know about, then it seems more likely that she was making some bold choices and probably left of her own free will. But then, why didn’t she take the money with her?”

“Maybe she didn’t have time,” Jenny commented thoughtfully. “That indicates to me that it wasn’t a planned trip. I think someone took her or at least caught her by surprise.”

“Let’s take this laptop back with us,” Dallas suggested.

“Agreed,” I said. “Anything else seem odd to you, Jenny?”

She went to a large bulletin board that was loaded with pictures of people displaying their tattoos and sketches of all kinds. She pointed to one of a pretty girl and an attractive young man with his arm around her. He wasn’t wearing a shirt which showed off his tanned, muscular torso and a large tattoo of a wolf on his right shoulder. It was a casual photo, but there was something intimate about the way they leaned into each other. Jenny ripped it off the board, ignoring the stick pin that popped out and fell on the floor. She handed it to me.

“Is that Angela?” I asked. The girl in the photo had shoulder-length black hair and big green eyes like her sister and was very pretty, but other than that the resemblance to Jenny was slight. While Jenny was shapely and petite, Angie was medium height and … well, to put it bluntly a little overweight.

“Yes … but I’ve never seen the guy before.”

“Any idea where it was taken or when?” I turned the photo over, hoping to find a name or a date, but there was nothing written on the back.

“Looks like the base of the clock tower on the UT campus,” Dallas commented. “Maybe he’s a student.”

“We’ll check it out in our system and shop the picture around campus. If there’s a name that goes with that face or body, we’ll find it,” I offered.

None of the other photos on the board included either Angie or the guy, so we gathered up the laptop, the envelope full of cash and the laser machine receipt and left. Jenny turned out the lights and carefully locked the door behind us. We had plenty of clues, but absolutely no additional information to lead us to the missing sister.

“We should give her bedroom a check, but we don’t have enough time today,” Dallas stated.

“Maybe we could make it after I get home from work tomorrow. I can’t afford to miss another day,” Jenny answered.

“That’ll work for us. Let’s stop in at the mini-mart next door before we head back to the office. Maybe someone has seen her or him … or them,” I suggested, trying to think what Christopher would do since he had almost ten years of experience compared to my piddling two weeks.

We walked to the corner and entered the door that was on a diagonal to the intersection. Several large cow bells jangled loudly as we entered the small store. The clerk barely glanced up as we approached the counter. His focus remained on marking passages with a yellow highlighter in a thick college textbook.