The Missing Ink

Chapter 25

I told my sister I would have to call her back. I hung up even as she was arguing with me about it.

I sat on the couch and took a drink of wine. I wished I liked something stronger, but the wine was going to have to do.

Simon Chase? What did that mean, they were questioning him? Did the police think he had something to do with Matt Powell’s murder? I thought about how he’d brought me up to the suite to see what I’d seen. If he’d already been there, he certainly hadn’t shown it.

He’d egged me on about inking Chip’s chest. Maybe he did know more about this than he was letting on.

I shivered, thinking about how he’d flirted with me.

My brain started going backward, like a video in rewind, through the events of the last couple of days, trying to get Simon Chase out of my head.

I thought again about Jeff Coleman. And Kelly Masters. I wanted to find the connection between Kelly and Elise. They seemed separate, but they weren’t. They couldn’t be.

I pulled my laptop out again and Googled Kelly Masters this time. I found a MySpace page, but it wasn’t her. It was a Kelly Masters at NYU who was advertising her Wiccan religion. An accomplished harpist named Kelly Masters had gone to Juilliard and now played with the Boston Symphony. And then there was the Scientologist named Kelly Masters who had a YouTube video, preaching L. Ron Hub-bard’s words much in the same way Tom Cruise did, but to her credit she didn’t jump on anyone’s sofa. I shuddered and hit the button to go back to the previous screen.

A small item in Entertainment Weekly from a year and a half ago caught my eye. A picture of a woman whose features were similar to the picture on my cell phone-without being dead, obviously-accompanied two paragraphs about a Kelly Masters from Los Angeles who’d won a modeling contract with a top agency after some reality program on an obscure channel no one watched. Alive, she was very pretty in that skinny-model sort of way.

I couldn’t see a tat on her neck.

I couldn’t be sure if it was the same Kelly Masters. Jeff had said she’d been living in L.A. the last he knew, so it was possible. But he also said he hadn’t seen her for a long time, so she could’ve been anywhere.

Except when I went to the next page, another small item popped out at me. Kelly Masters had been stripped of her modeling contract because she’d lied about her age during the competition. She was too old.

It was just a segue into the next hit. A tattoo shop site. Planet Tattoo. I clicked on it.

The shop was in Malibu; it advertised that all the hot celebrities had gotten tats there, prominently featuring the one I was supposed to ink earlier today.

And in the center of the screen was a photo of their star tattooist: K-C, who wore a wide, sexy smile, a black bustier, black leather pants, and eagle wings spread across her neck. A short bio said that K-C had trained in Las Vegas-but there was no credit for her ex-husband-and that she had won a modeling contest previously.

She should’ve been stripped of her title solely for choosing the moniker “K-C.” Those TV tattoo shows were creating monsters.

Did Jeff Coleman know his wife was the Tattooist to the Stars? He certainly hadn’t indicated that, and neither had Sylvia. Kelly Masters had truly moved on, but it didn’t answer my original question: What was she doing in Las Vegas with Elise Lyon?

I stared at the Google search bar for a few seconds.

I couldn’t put it off any longer.

Googling Simon Chase brought up a slew of hits. Lots of news stories about Versailles, how Chase had been working for Manning in his Atlantic City casino before coming to Vegas.

I read through as much as I could, piecing together Chase’s history.

He’d grown up outside London, but not too much information was available about his life until he came to the United States, where he got his master’s in business administration from Harvard, hooking up with Bruce Manning early in his professional career. Not a bad star to hitch a ride on if you were ambitious.

And he was as ambitious in his off hours as he was on the job. He was a playboy, always with a different beautiful woman on his arm. I clicked on “Images” and saw him with celebrities, actresses and musicians and pop artists.

I picked one at random, clicking on the picture to make it larger.

The picture was taken on a beach, with palm trees and white sand. Chase was wearing a pair of khaki Bermuda shorts and a flowing cotton button-down shirt that was unbuttoned, revealing the physique I’d suspected when I met him. He had his arm slung over the shoulder of a woman wearing the scantiest of bikinis, her long dark hair pulled up and off her face, her features stunning and pink with sunburn.

Her body was turned to his, her neck swiveled in such a way that I could see it.

Eagle wings spread across her neck.

It was Kelly Masters.

My breath caught in my throat and my fingers froze above the keyboard.

Did he know Kelly Masters was dead? She was in Vegas; so was he. Had they hooked up here? Jeff said he’d heard she was getting married. Could it have been to Simon Chase?

Now I was even more embarrassed that I’d been taken in by his English charm. That his good looks had clouded any objectivity I would normally have had. But he had been suave and sophisticated and smart and funny, and, well, I’d been totally attracted to him.

The police were questioning him in Matt Powell’s murder. What about Kelly’s? Did the police even know Chase had a history with Kelly?

I wanted to know more. I hadn’t found enough. I hit the arrow to go back and found myself again among links for Simon Chase. I hit the “next page” button three or four more times before a link caught my eye.

The New York Times. An engagement announcement. But it wasn’t Simon Chase and Kelly Masters.

It was Simon Chase and Elise Lyon.