I was roaring along the main street in the four-wheel-drive, hastening to get back to the hotel and find the vile Cassandra de Santiago, when a sign caught my eye: Eroria's Tattoos, it said. One of many huge gaps in my comprehension of what was going on here was the subject of tattoos. Moira hadn't said much about hers other than it hadn't hurt as much as she thought, and she couldn't go in the pool until it healed. How did these people get their tattoos? The trouble was, ever since I'd started dreaming about them, and since I'd seen dead people with them, I was terrified of the thought of having one. Get over it, I told myself. How bad could it be? After all, I'd seen Daniel and his wife Eroria at the police station while I waited to visit Moira, and she'd seemed a reasonable-looking person, not somebody who put snake venom in your tattoo. I parked and stood outside the place for a minute or two, summoning my courage. Get on with it, Lara, I told myself. Just walk in there. It took a couple of minutes, but at last my feet started to move.
"Hi," she said. "I'm Eroria. Are you here to book an appointment for a tattoo?"
"I guess so," I said, looking around.
"What did you have in mind?" she said.
"I'm not sure," I said. "Something discreet, small, somewhere nobody can see it."
"Nobody?" she said.
"Well, nobody who isn't really, really close," I said.
"Base of the spine? Something small on the bum?" she said.
"Did you do these?" I said, pointing to photographs on the walls.
"I did," she said.
"Some of them are beautiful," I said. "If you like tattoos, that is."
"Thank you, I think," she said.
"Does it hurt?" I said.
"A little," she said. "If you're worried about that, you're better to choose a part of your body that is, um, fleshy."
I didn't think in my case that narrowed it down much. "Okay," I said. "That doesn't sound too bad. Can I pick a design, or something?"
"Of course," she said. "I have stencils, or you can have a custom design."
"Will it take a long time?" I said. In other words, how long had it taken to tattoo Dave and Jasper and put a partial tattoo on Gabriela?
"Not for something very small and discreet," she said. "Maybe an hour. Are you sure you really want a tattoo?"
"Er, no. I mean yes," I said. "What I mean to say is that my friend Moira got one here, and she thinks it's terrific and that I should have one done, too. But it's not something I've ever considered, really. I suppose I had my ears pierced on a whim, and I haven't regretted that, but I don't know what my partner would think about this." Stop babbling. Lara. I thought. You are making a fool of yourself. It's just a tattoo.
"Moira, yes. She got a little hummingbird if I recall. Rory Carlyle brought her in."
"That's her," I said. "You can have them removed, right? Tattoos, I mean."
"Yes, you can," she said. "But it's more difficult and more expensive—a lot more expensive—than having it done in the first place."
"Oh," was all I managed to say.
"Would you like to come in and see the equipment?" she said. "I could explain the procedure to you better, and that might help you decide. I have someone coming in for a big job in about an hour, but I'll show you my setup, and you can think about it."
"That's good of you," I said. "That would be helpful." I didn't say helpful for what, but followed her into the back room. It was very nice and clean and professional-looking, for want of a better term—sort of like a dentist's office. It would have to be. It had, after all, passed the Meller Spa test.
"This is the tattoo machine I use," she said. "It's very carefully sterilized, and I'll open the package of needles right in front of you. I don't reuse the needles or anything, and the equipment is always sterilized before it's used again."
"A machine," I said.
"Yes," she agreed. "What did you think? A bone chisel or something? That hasn't been popular in a long time."
"You have to plug the machine in," I said.
"It's electric, right," she said. She was looking at me as if I was some nutbar, which maybe I was.
"I really didn't know that," I said. That certainly meant that Dave hadn't been tattooed on Tepano's Tomb, Jasper at Ahu Akivi, and Gabriela at the back of the hotel grounds.For Jasper in particular that would have required a longer extension cord than would normally be available.
"This machine has been around for more than a hundred years," she said, laughing. "An early version of it was invented in the late 1880s."
"But people got tattoos before that," I said.
"Oh, yes," she said. "There are Egyptian mummies with tattoos, and I've heard that people were tattooed in the Stone Age. In this part of the world, tattoos are very much a part of tradition. In the old days, both men and women here covered their bodies in tattoos. And people here still get them, only not quite as elaborate."
"I'll bet they didn't use this machine," I said.
"You've got that right," she said. She did not, however, volunteer what they did use.
"You look familiar to me," I said, feeling we were beginning to establish some rapport despite my babbling. "Did I see you at the police station with Daniel Striker, by any chance?"
"Yes," she said. "Daniel's my husband. The police asked me to come and help them with an investigation. I saw your friend Moira there, too, didn't I?"
"Yes," I said. "The police are questioning everybody at the hotel again, I guess. That's why I was there. Were they asking you about tattoos?"
"Yes," she said. "But how would you know that?"
"I found the body at the hotel," I said. "Dave Maddox. After that I was out at Ahu Akivi when the group found Jasper. I happened to notice they both had a similar tattoo."
"How awful for you," she said. "But those tattoos! That was the worst tattoo job I've seen in a long, long time."
"You saw them?"
"Photographs," she said. "The police showed them to me.
Looked as if they'd been done in a back alley somewhere."
"They didn't look anything like these," I said, gesturing again at the photos in the room.
"Most certainly not," she said. "To do a tattoo properly you need the right equipment, and if I may say so, a good deal of skill. This machine vibrates up to several hundred times a minute, moving the needle up and down, so you have to know what you're doing." This sounded unbelievably complicated to me and not a way to go about killing somebody.
"If I were giving you a tattoo," she said, "we'd decide on a design, I'd do an outline, either from a stencil, as I said, or freehand on your skin. Then I'd use the machine to redo the outline, permanently, I mean, with the needle. After that, we'd fill in the design, with color if that is what you wanted. The skill is in how well you use the machine. If the needles go too deep, there is excessive pain and bleeding, too shallow and the line will look kind of uneven when it's done. You have to get it just right. These tattoos on the dead bodies were done by a butcher, without a machine. Whoever did them simply used some sharp implement to scratch the skin surface, rather deep, too, I'm afraid. It would have hurt, but maybe they were dead at the time."
I knew, from the traces of blood on the tattoo, that they'd all been alive when it was done, but we could hope they were unconscious.
"Then the ink—and I'm not sure what was used for the color or whether or not it would be permanent—was just rubbed into the scratch." It was permanent, all right, for Jasper and Dave. I could only hope it wasn't for Gabriela.
"Horrible job, and really very, very unsanitary, I'm sure," she said. "This is the kind of tattoo procedure people in prisons use to give each other tattoos and kids try out on their friends. Very bad idea." Obviously the police had not bothered to mention the snake venom. That was about as unsanitary as it gets.