Mark laughed. “Yeah, it sure is. She’s one weird chick.”
Hanson pondered that for a few minutes, as Mark got up to refill his coffee. Was it just him? Hanson hadn’t noticed anything weird about Tasmin at all. When Mark came back by Hanson’s desk with his coffee in hand, Hanson continued the conversation. “Weird in what way?”
“You saw her,” Mark explained. “I mean, she digs dead bodies and preserves chunks of flesh. That’s like beyond weird.”
“Right,” he said, “I guess it’s definitely different.”
“You guess?” Mark said, with a laugh. “But, hey, you seem to be pretty stone-cold yourself, so maybe she’s the kind of chick for you.”
He shrugged. “Not my style. I like them warm and willing.”
At that, Mark laughed and sat back down at his desk.
“Still doesn’t change the fact that we’ve got somebody out there who put that tattoo on display,” Hanson reminded Mark.
“Yeah, but it’s as if like he killed anybody,” Mark argued. “Whoever it came from was already dead. The thief just broke into this woman’s shop and stole it.”
Hanson nodded. “Yet her security was on, and there’s no sign of any break-in. And that particular piece is the only one missing.”
“Well, that’s kind of spooky, isn’t it?” Mark asked sarcastically, smirking at Hanson.
Hanson shrugged. Mark was a standard, nine-to-five, black-and-white kind of cop, and any of this spooky stuff just wouldn’t cut it with him. “So, in other words, she’s the one who did it, and she’s really crappy at hiding her tracks? I don’t know if that’s a good assessment either,” Hanson stated, looking around at his coworker. “If you think about it, it doesn’t do her any good to have her shop vandalized like that.”
“Well, you know what they say,” Mark added. “Any publicity is good publicity.”
“Yet now some people won’t trust her security on something like this because it was broken into.”
“And yet you also know that anybody’s business can get broken into. It’s just the luck of the draw,” Mark said. “You mark my words. It’ll be her. You might as well write up the file now.”
“And if she didn’t do it?”
Mark shrugged. “Can’t say I really care either way. Yet she’s looking awfully good for it to me. It’s not our job to be the judge and jury about what she did. It’s just our job to catch them.”
“Regardless of whether they actually did it or not?” Hanson asked, with a note of humor.
“Well, preferably we have evidence that proves they did it,” he said in exasperation, “but really I don’t give a shit either way. We have cases to close, and, if we don’t close them, we’re in trouble. I’d just as soon close them and not be in trouble. So get at it.”
“Right,” Hanson replied, then sat back and wondered again for the umpteenth time what he was doing in this field.
Chapter 2
Tasmin worked away in her shop for the morning, trying hard to keep her nervousness at bay. She’d talked to the family involved, explaining that there’d been a break-in at the store and that she was heading to the morgue in the morning and would let them know the condition of the tattoo and that she had been told that it wasn’t terribly damaged, but she didn’t know for certain what that would mean.
Of course the family wasn’t happy and had been less than pleased that her shop had been broken into, but even more so that it had been their daughter’s tattoo that had ended up being stolen. Tasmin had done everything she could to make them feel better, but, of course, not a whole lot anybody could do with this right now.
It just rubbed the family raw to know that somebody would violate a piece that they held special, and it was also something that the family did not want to be made public. And Tasmin agreed with that; the family had every right to privacy. As Tasmin got up and measured off the frame again, wondering how she could have gotten such a simple thing wrong, she took the frame back over to the piece she was working on, when the front door to her shop opened.
Her sister called out, “Hey, Tasmin, are you here?”
“I’m in the back,” she said.
Lorelei stepped through into the back workroom and sighed. “You could try lights, you know?” She flipped on the overhead lights.
Tasmin sat back and blinked several times at the change in light. “Yeah, thanks,” she muttered in disgust. “You know I do my best work in the dark.”
Her sister stared at her. “You’re just getting weirder, you know that?”
Exasperated, Tasmin stood and glared at sister, her hands on her hips. “It’s not really a great day. Did you have a reason for stopping by?”
Her sister glared right back. “Yeah, I need you to work again. Plus, you ordered supplies. Here are the invoices,” she stated, passing them over.
Tasmin looked down at them and sighed. “And I told you that I’d pay them as soon as the pieces were picked up.”
“That doesn’t cover my bills though,” Lorelei snapped in frustration. “We’re both trying to run businesses here, but, in order to make that happen, we both have to pay our bills.”
There was definitely some truth to the matter. “Sorry about that,” Tasmin replied. “How about we renegotiate my use of the facilities?”
“How about you come work for me part-time as your payment for using the facilities,” her sister suggested, for the umpteenth time. “You know I need help.”
“You do,” Tasmin agreed, “but it won’t do your business reputation any good if people know I’m back there again.”
“So, they don’t find out,” she muttered. “We’ll keep you in the background.”
“You mean, tucked away in the basement, doing all the lovely Dracula things, so nobody knows?”
“Hey, don’t put it that way,” Lorelei argued, again glaring at her sister. “Respect and all that.”
“Right, I got it. … Did you ever wonder where our lives might have been if we weren’t born into a family of morticians?”
“Yeah, all the time,” Lorelei declared in disgust. “Do you know how long it took to get a boyfriend who would go out with me because it was me and not on a dare to go out with the spooky chick whose parents dealt with all the dead bodies in town?”
“Since I had the same problem, yeah, I get it,” she said. Then the two of them smiled at each other.
“Still,” Lorelei grumbled, “it’s the life we have and apparently is what we’re supposed to do. It’s not as if we can turn around and change it now.”
“I know, but sometimes I wonder if we shouldn’t have though,” Tasmin noted, her tone serious.
Lorelei stared at her and nodded. “It’s not the first time you’ve mentioned that—though, in your case, things went a little sideways for a while.”
“Ya think?” Tasmin quipped. “A mental breakdown is how Mom put it, as I recall.”
“What did you expect her to say? That you’d started seeing and having conversations with dead people? You know that wouldn’t go over well.”