It was strange beyond measure, and she did not know if she could trust someone who would be willing to make a permanent statement out of something so meaningless.
“Suit yourself.” Javier shrugged, apparently not bothered by her disinterest. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with the design I made for Callie. I was thinking about putting it on myself, but that might be kinda weird.”
“Why so?” Zoe asked, latching onto his words. In her experience, if someone involved in a murder case thought that something seemed “weird,” it was usually worth checking out.
“Well, it was a memoriam piece in the first place. Look, I’ll show you.” Javier began rooting around on a desk littered with stray scraps of designs on tracing paper, and pulled out a more finished-looking design on an artist’s pad. It was inked with heavy black strokes, outlining the shape of a bird in flight.
“What is it?” Zoe asked, ignoring the dirty look that Javier shot her for not immediately getting his art.
“It’s a raven. Based on the myth of Muninn,” he began.
“From the Old Norse, memory,” Zoe cut him off. Here, at least, she could demonstrate that she knew something. “A bird who attended the god Odin. This is why you called it a memoriam piece.”
“That and the flowers.” Javier pointed to sprays of flowers behind the black bird, carefully colored in shades of lilac and violet. “They’re zinnias, representing the memory of a lost friend.”
“In whose memory?” Shelley asked softly, examining the design from over Zoe’s shoulder.
“An old friend.” Javier twisted his mouth, shrugged. “An old boyfriend, really. Back when Callie was, um…”
“On drugs?” Zoe supplied. She sensed Shelley physically wince slightly beside her, but did not react. What was the point in beating around the bush? They all knew what they were talking about. It was no secret to any of them.
“Yeah,” Javier said, one of his hands going up to rub the back of his neck. “I was going to say in with a bad crowd, but yeah.”
“What’s the story?” Shelley asked. Her tone was much more sympathetic than Zoe’s had been. Somehow, she had the knack of asking those same direct questions but making them sound so much… nicer.
“He was bad news. One of the group that got her into drugs in the first place. From what I understand, if they weren’t stoned, they were drunk. And if they weren’t stoned or drunk, they were snorting coke in the bathrooms and screwing each other.” Javier shook his head, taking a deep breath. “Sorry. I don’t like thinking of her like that. That’s not who she really is. Who she’s been, these past years that I’ve known her.”
“She got herself cleaned up after college, isn’t that right?” Shelley asked.
“Right. I helped. She couldn’t afford the rehab at first, so we did an art fair. Raised some money for her, me and some of the others from our class. We stayed in touch since then.”
“This ex-boyfriend,” Zoe pressed, trying to keep him on track.
“He was killed, I think. Or, I don’t know. Callie didn’t like to talk about him much back then. The past few years, she started to come to terms with it, move on. I think she’d finally accepted that he was bad for her, toxic. But that what they had also mattered. That’s why the flowers. Not lost love, but just a lost friend.”
Killed? That sparked Zoe’s attention in a very real way. “Do you know what the circumstances of his death were?”
“It wasn’t an overdose. The police were investigating, but I don’t know if they ever caught anyone. That’s it. That’s all I know.”
Zoe mused on the idea. It would be a very tempting thread, if first this mysterious boyfriend was murdered and then Callie. All they needed to do was find a connection to Dowling, and they’d have something. Maybe something to do with the drugs.
Shelley said it was all just popular culture, but the tattoos… Zoe had never been a fan. They represented a subsection of society that she more often saw behind bars than in respectable positions. You couldn’t get a good job with a tattoo. Certainly couldn’t be in law enforcement, not with prison teardrops on your face or your kid’s name all across your throat.
The tattoo that Javier had designed for Callie was big. Seven point three inches, top to bottom. It wasn’t something you would be able to hide away. It was designed to be seen. People with visible tattoos, like hers and like Dowling’s—they weren’t usually good people.
Things were beginning to stack up. Callie and her boyfriend were in the drugs underworld. Hanging about with the wrong type of people. Even though she was clean when she died, she had the kind of past that attracted murder. Just because Dowling had a clean lifestyle now, didn’t mean he hadn’t been involved in something before.
“Thank you, Javier,” Zoe said briskly. “That will help us a lot.”
“Wait,” Shelley interrupted. “I just have a couple more questions.”
Zoe motioned for her to go on, stepping back toward the door where she could wait out of the way. As far as she was concerned, they were done, and she wanted to be in a position to leave soon. She didn’t want to waste any more time looking at these pointless tattoo drawings and talking to Javier, who had already given them the most interesting thing they needed to know.
“Are you aware of anyone who would have wanted to harm Callie?”
Javier shook his head no. “I already told the cops earlier. She was a sweet girl. These days. I mean, she really changed. No one wanted any harm to come to her.”
Had she really changed, though? Zoe wondered. Could a leopard change its spots? Callie certainly couldn’t change hers—not the ones etched forever onto her body. Forever, that was, until her killer had burned them off.
Maybe all of this was connected. Maybe she had gang tattoos that needed to be burned off. Maybe someone saw her as the last link in a murderous game that had been running for a long time. The last bit of revenge for a drug-runner released from prison, or a biker gang looking to purge themselves of someone who had broken their rules.
“What about this morning, last night, yesterday? Have you noticed anyone unusual hanging around?” Shelley was asking.
“No, not at all,” Javier said. His weight left him and he collapsed onto a low bench slung against a table, burying his head in his hands. “I wish I knew more. I wish I could say something that would find whoever did this to her. She didn’t deserve this.”
But maybe someone thought she did. That was for Zoe and Shelley to work out, and they weren’t going to get anywhere closer to doing that here.
“We will leave you with your thoughts,” Zoe said, a phrase she had heard before that she thought sounded at least mildly sympathetic. “If you think of anything that might be useful, please do get in touch.”
Ignoring the reproachful look that Shelley was giving her for not being friendly enough, she walked out of Javier’s tattoo den, pleased to be breathing free air and no longer surrounded by all of the distraction of his garish designs.
CHAPTER EIGHT
He watched her from across the street.