Say Goodbye (Romantic Suspense #25) by Karen Rose

            The photo was of the tattoo itself, so only the person’s left pectoral was visible. It had the grainy quality of a photo taken with a cheap camera, then scanned.

            “When did you ink this tattoo?” Daisy asked.

            “Eighteen years ago.”

            Liza was surprised. “You keep your files that long?”

            “I do. I’ve kept them all, a file for every tattoo I’ve ever done, including signed documents stating that they are not intoxicated, and that they approve my design. It was the way I was taught by my mentor, almost twenty years ago.”

            “Why do you remember him specifically?” Daisy asked.

            “Partly because it was one of my first, and I was really proud of how it turned out. But mostly because I almost didn’t do this tattoo. He seemed really young and immature, which was funny, because we were about the same age. The day he came in was his eighteenth birthday and I’d had mine only a few weeks before. But he had ID and there wasn’t anything offensive about the design, so I did it.” He hesitated. “Why do you want to find him?”

            “The short answer is, we don’t know,” Daisy admitted. “We’re looking at every connection to the community from which our friends escaped. This person”—Daisy pointed at the photo—“wouldn’t have been from their community, because he would have already had a tattoo by his thirteenth birthday. But he has to have known someone who had one. The tattoo you inked is identical to the one my boyfriend had inked over when he was eighteen.”

            “We ultimately want to talk to whoever told this guy about the tattoo,” Liza said. “That person may give us information about the community and the people who are trying to hurt us.”

            Sergio inhaled sharply. “It was like a cult?”

            “Yes,” Daisy said. “My boyfriend still wakes with nightmares from that place, and he’s been gone for seventeen years.”

            “The young man who got this tattoo was very happy to be eighteen, to ‘finally be free.’ ”

            “Free from what?” Liza asked.

            “I asked him that. He said it was from his mother’s control. She was apparently quite overbearing and he was very unhappy at home. He said that the tattoo would ‘show her.’ I got a bad feeling while I was working on him. I might have stopped, but he was eighteen. I made a copy of his driver’s license. Just to cover myself, you know. He’s one of the reasons I keep all my files with signed releases. Just in case someone comes forward years later and complains.”

            “Oh wow!” Daisy exclaimed, excited. “Please say you still have it!”

            Sergio’s smile was faint, but genuine. “Yes, I have it. I scanned the files to my phone when you first contacted me.” He tapped his phone and turned it so that they could see the screen.

            “May I?” Liza asked, reaching for the phone.

            “Yes,” Sergio said warily, handing it over.

            The driver’s license photo showed a young man with a baby face, but his lips curled down, giving him a sullen appearance. His hair was blond, cut military short. Nearly black eyes stared defiantly through round-rimmed eyeglasses.

            “William Holly,” Daisy murmured, looking over Liza’s shoulder. “The name doesn’t mean anything to me, but it might to Gideon. Can you send us this file?”

            Sergio nodded. “Of course.”

            Liza tried to enlarge the photo, but it swiped left, revealing the original tattoo design with a scrawled signature beneath. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

            “It’s fine,” Sergio said. “That’s the design he approved.”

            “What’s this?” Daisy pointed to a second signature in the margin.

            Liza enlarged the sketch. The children kneeling in prayer had something written beneath them. “Are these names?” She peered harder. “Bo and Bernie.”

            “Yes,” Sergio confirmed. “For him and his sister, but when I got to that part, he decided he didn’t want the names after all, so I updated the release and had him sign off on the changes.”