She snorts. Reaching over, she pushes my head back to its resting place, where I can no longer stare at her. “He always had a soft spot for me. I’d come in here with my cousin when I was as young as six and watch him work on people. Sometimes I’d just sketch in a corner quietly. He never sent me away. I thought he was the coolest, most badass adult ever.”
I’m trying to picture a six-year-old version of this woman and I’m struggling. However she looked, I can’t imagine this place would have been suitable for her. “Your parents didn’t care?”
“Oh, they cared. They hated me being here, but there wasn’t much they could do. My aunt Jun would watch me after school while my parents worked. But she also had a part-time job, and when she was working, I had to go somewhere. My parents didn’t have enough money to send me and my brothers to day care. I was the oldest and therefore easiest to unload on someone else, so I came here. I pretty much fended for myself growing up.”
No wonder she’s so independent.
“By the time I turned fourteen and they realized that I actually wanted to come here, they packed us all up and moved us to Oregon.”
This is good. She’s opening up, and it seems to be comfortable for her. Oddly, talking to her is easy for me, too. Definitely more pleasant than my typical interrogations. “So they moved your entire family away just to get away from your uncle?”
“I guess that’s what it boils down to, yeah.” I can hear the displeasure over that in her tone.
The needle runs over a particularly sensitive spot and I inhale through the pain. “Sounds like they must have had reasons.”
“I don’t know about reasons. Fears, yeah. My dad was raised by quiet Chinese immigrants; my mom comes from an affluent family of accountants in Spain. They’ve always had strong opinions about Ned’s clientele.”
“Are any of those opinions warranted?”
“Well . . .” Ivy has shifted her body to focus on the midsection of the tattoo. I can just barely catch the way her lips twist with hesitation in the mirror.
“The guy yesterday, in the back. The biker who wanted his arm done. I’d say that your parents’ opinions of him might be warranted.” All this talk of parents makes me think of mine, something I never do when I’m on an assignment. They’re no more than a fifteen-minute drive from here.
She smirks. “So you knew who he was when you tried to provoke a fight.”
“Just like you knew who he was when you stepped between us.” Her tiny body, her delicate fingers, pressing into my stomach. The girl doesn’t back down, even when she’s afraid.
In the mirror’s reflection, I see her smile. “I guess it would make sense that you recognize those kind of people, given what you do for a living.”
“It would. And I wasn’t provoking anything.”
“Sure you weren’t.” She pauses to adjust something on her machine. “But I guess it’s all about who you associate with, right? My uncle Ned, he was just trying to run his business and didn’t really give a shit about what anyone did as long as they didn’t bring it into the shop. But he’s been painted with an ugly brush by my parents. And now the cops are only too eager to somehow pin the blame for what happened to him right back on him. Whoever did this is going to get away with killing two innocent men. Or at least one. I didn’t know the other guy.”
Her expression, her voice, the way her shoulders seem to sag with the weight of that reality—she really believes that her uncle was needlessly murdered, probably collateral damage in a burglary gone wrong. And if she believes that, then there’s no way she knows anything about the blackmail scheme.
“What’s wrong?”
I frown. “What do you mean?”
“Your whole body just . . . relaxed. Not that it wasn’t unusually relaxed before, but I felt it shift.”
Because now I know that I don’t have to kill you. I smile. “Yeah, I guess it did.”
FIFTEEN
IVY
HOUR THREE