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hit a hardware place after he finishes the tattoo he’s working on. He’s going to drop me at my apartment on his way home so I don’t have to take the bus back up to Capitol Hill. In the meantime, however, I’m running to the grocery store for him. I guess Cheri’s got a yen for sauerkraut.”
    Isa grimaced. “I thought I’d gotten used to keeping rum raisin ice cream in the shop freezer while she was pregnant, but sauerkraut? Has anyone told her she had the baby?”
    “I guess nursing takes its toll,” Nathalie said. “’Cause I’m also buying a six-pack of porter.”
    “Sauerkraut and porter? Remind me to never reproduce.”
    “Amen, sister. I thought I’d take Gus out for his walk while I go. Want anything?”
    “I’m so grossed out by beer and pickled cabbage that any appetite I had is dead,” she groused. “No. Wait. Ibuprofen. Research is giving me a headache.” Not to mention Daniel and Agent Anne Macquarie.
    “How’s that going?”
    “Badly.”
    “I thought you could find anything on the Internet.”
    “Common misconception. Maybe this is what I get for not going to college.”
    “Yeah?” Nathalie frowned and came to glance at the screen. “What are you searching for?”
    “How to capture rogue Ink. The problem is that Live Ink is new enough we haven’t had to deal with hosts dying from old age. The Ink deaths I’m finding are all failures to assimilate.”
    “Both Ink and host die, then, right, unless you bind the tattoo?” she asked, leaning in to peer at the screen. “Whoa. Over two million hits? That sucks. But you’re searching the ‘history of Live Ink.’”
    “All of which is wild conjecture and bullshit,” Isa said. She typed in a new parameter. “Here. My original search on ‘capturing rogue Ink.’”
    “A mere half million hits?”
    “All about the early days of Live Ink going bad in public.”
    “Oh, yeah. Terrorists using it as a suicide bomb until their sacrificial teenagers turned out to have the magic cojones to handle the Ink,” Nathalie said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but don’t you already know all this stuff? You’re SPD’s Live Ink expert because you’re the best, right?”
    Isa sank lower in her chair. “Hardly. I’m the one they can afford.”
    Nathalie flushed. “Wow. Sorry.”
    She snagged Isa’s cell phone from the far side of the table and handed it to her. “Look. If you get stuck, call the research desk at the Seattle Public Library. If there’s anything to be found, the research librarians will know where to look. I’ve never stumped them. Come on, Gus. Let’s go for a walk in the snow.”
    The dog bounced between Isa’s chair and Nathalie going for his leash in the entryway, the nylon of her parka rustling.
    Isa frowned at Nathalie’s back. “What are you researching that you know this?”
    “Song lyrics, man!” she said, clipping Gus into his halter and leash. “Poetry is hard work.”
    Isa’s skinny, spiky-haired piercing artist led a not-so-secret rock ’n’ roll life on the side. She wrote songs and played lead guitar for her band, Rage of the Raptors.
    Nat and Gus jingled out the door. “Back with the keys and the mutt in a little while!”
    With nothing to lose, Isa called the library. It wasn’t as if she could be more mired in crappy search results.
    The research librarians taught her a few search parameter tricks, but they came up dry, too. After twenty minutes on the phone, the woman said she had other customers to assist. “From what I found,” she said in parting, “I see the first Living Tattoo was created in Japan about sixty years ago.”
    “That’s the theory.”
    “I’d recommend checking the Live Tattoo organizations in Japan. Sorry we couldn’t help. Good luck.”
    Japan. Why hadn’t that occurred to her? She hung up and did another search. Sure enough, three separate Live Ink organizations had their libraries online. In Japanese.
    On impulse, Isa dialed another number.
    “Okari