Cat In A Topaz Tango

Missing in Action

Carmen had left her car parked on the street instead of in the driveway or garaging it. Nobody would want to steal her aging Toyota wagon anyway.

She could afford a new family car, but who had time?

Confession was said to be good for the soul, but it just tired her out.

Matt was as easy as they come to confess to. Still, he’d been annoyingly sure that he’d been right all along and she was just now coming over to the side of truth, justice, and the Max American way.

Thinking of sides, her wounded ribs were throbbing. The stitches had dissolved finally, but they still left hot red marks at each insertion point, an irritating, long tattoo of discomfort. Infection loved to feed on shallow wounds.

She faced her own front door. A lot of lies and deception had transpired behind it since she’d been stabbed.

Morrie Alch coming and going like a loyal family friend, covering for her at the office and at home.

Mariah, God bless her heedless, egocentric teenybopper soul, had blithely accepted doing chores for a mother “sick” with a virus that gave the word virulent meaning. Even more convenient for her mother’s hidden wound from a concealed misadventure outside the law, Mariah had remained on the go, thanks to many nonworking married neighborhood mothers who could chauffeur an extra.

They probably gossiped about her. Not about her and men. Never about men. No cause. Or wait! Was Morrie’s attentive presence causing talk? He was sticking his neck out to save her job, not to covet her body, stitched up like a football as it was.

Shoot. Now, she not only had her stalker and Kinsella’s stalker and her own iffy actions to worry about, but what the neighbors might think. They’d been deprived of juicy details about her private life for far too long.

Now they had Dirty Larry, too, the undercover cop, who’d paid her a visit or two at home.

Carmen sighed and made herself march up to her front door and unlock it.

A skitter of ratlike nails over kitchen tile and then a pounding on the carpeting made her almost clutch for the paddle holster at her back waistband.

Nothing. Just the two cats going squirrelly from the upset domestic routine here lately.

She turned on the lights in the living room, then in the kitchen before confronting the magnetized message board on the fridge. Right. Thursday. Night. It had been free to meet Matt because her social butterfly daughter had a . . . study date at the Lopez house. Home by—Carmen checked her watch—8:30 P.M. By an hour ago.

She pulled out her cell phone instead of her holster and speed-dialed Cecilia Lopez.

“Hi. Mariah’s mom. Yeah. Fine. Say, wasn’t this supposed to break up over an hour ago?” There was a pause while Cecilia spoke. “She didn’t. I said! No. I didn’t. Yeah, I know kids this age. But if she didn’t go with your Ashlee after school—yes, please. Check with your daughter.”

Carmen started pacing around the end of the eating island, then into the living room. She was almost running by the time she got to Mariah’s bedroom and snapped on the overhead light.

Lord, what a mess. You couldn’t see a girl in here for the posters and pillows and scattered, rejected outfits. Mariah’s Our Lady of Guadalupe uniform was a castaway heap of white blouse and plaid skirt and navy jacket over the desk chair. The laptop computer was open, but off.

Carmen took a deep breath, wincing as her stitches stretched. When would she get over this damn knife wound!

A voice came back on the phone. Carmen repeated each tidbit of information to lock it in her memory.

“Check with Sedona Martinez? Right. And her mother is? Yolanda. Her number is, uh-huh.” She’d raced back to the kitchen to scrawl the phone number on a countertop note pad. A 270 exchange. Not this neighborhood. Sedona. Probably bused in from Henderson. Catholic schools were fashionable now. Sedona Martinez? What was next? Paris Solis? Madrid Rodriguez? Barcelona Banderas?

“Thanks,” she said. “If you hear anything—”

Cecilia promised to call if she heard where Mariah might be. It was probably just a misunderstanding, she added.

Carmen hung up, thinking about the recent days that Mariah had supervised her, under Morrie’s direction, more than she had kept tabs on her daughter.

Ordinarily, a missing person had to be gone twenty-four hours before the police became involved. With a child, if there was evidence of kidnapping, that rule was suspended. With her child, Carmen had to stop running wild scenarios through her head and get practical, fast.

She speed-dialed every family she or Mariah had been in touch with on her cell phone. No one knew anything, and all got those small catches of alarm in their voices. A child being even momentarily unaccounted for was everyone’s nightmare.

What about that new friend? she wondered. The transfer student Mariah had taken a sudden liking to? This age fostered intense friendships followed by melodramatic splits. What was that kid’s name? They had never done anything organized together, so there was no trail to follow.

She needed to know more before she alerted anybody. The house sounded ominously empty, the only noise the uneasy shift of ice in the refrigerator and any motions Carmen made herself. The cats had curled up to sleep in opposite corners of the living-room sofa, like bookends.

Carmen pushed maternal panic out of her mind and hit one last fast-dial number.

“Morrie? It’s Molina. No, the stitches are fine. It’s something else. Something worse, maybe. Yeah. Under wraps for the moment. Can you bear to come over here one more time and maybe save the day? Great. I, ah, didn’t ask what you were doing. Oh. This.” She tried to find a smile, but couldn’t. “Thanks.”

“Jesus, Carmen!”

She wouldn’t have called Morrie if she’d known he’d go postal.

He was pacing the small living room in the opposite direction she was. He was a Columbo sort of cop, middle-aged, rumpled, nice enough to underestimate. “You can’t keep a thing like this under wraps. You think this is the secret service or something?”

“You know no one official will act until tomorrow unless there’s evidence of a kidnapping or a runaway kid. And you know I’ve been down and out lately, with Mariah on her own more than usual.”

“So you last saw her—?”

“This morning before I went to work.”

“You’ve been coming home for lunch for a change. We know you were readjusting your Ace bandage. Doesn’t she come home from school for lunch?”

“Not as much anymore. We’re close to the school, but she has groups of girlfriends now. They’re always working on some project in their spare time.” She paused to look him in the eye. “And I skipped lunch because I had an appointment elsewhere earlier today. About Mariah.”

“She getting in trouble in school?”

“No. I saw her father.”

“Rafi Nadir?”

“There’s any other candidate?”

“About what?”

“About his wanting a role in Mariah’s life.”

“Oh, Lord, you laid down the law according to Molina and he went apeshit and took her anyway.”

“I’d love to put an APB out on my ex-boyfriend, Morrie, but I didn’t close him down. I told him we’d work something out, as soon as I got a little time.”

“And he took it how?”

“Like a lamb. We talked about old assumptions and discovered we’d had a terminal ‘failure to communicate,’ as the shrinks say.” She smiled. “I saw and talked to Matt Devine this evening too, about Kinsella. He’d bought Temple Barr’s party line that the magician was innocent of anything but protecting the innocent. After what happened in Kinsella’s house five weeks ago, the stalker, I’m beginning to wonder if the people after him aren’t worse than he is.”

Morrie grinned. “Including you? Sounds like you’ve been dining on crow, lately.”

“Yup. And what’s my reward? My kid goes AWOL. Anything about her strike you, Morrie? I’ve been pretty out of it these last five weeks or so.”

“She was a good kid. Did what I asked, right away. Ready to be tearing off back to school, of course.”

“‘Tearing off back to school?’ Morrie, that’s very abnormal behavior.”

“I thought kids that age had energy.”

“Not for going back to school. Her room’s the usual tsunami victim. It doesn’t look messed with by more than the resident’s usual habits. Yet I don’t want to go through things in there in case we need”—her voice got a bit wobbly—“evidence taken, but I think I should check the computer. I haven’t since I got ‘sick,’ and the Internet is the root of all evil these days when it comes to kids getting into trouble.”

Molina fetched two sets of latex crime scene gloves from the going-out-the-door supplies in a kitchen drawer.

“You can’t think—” Morrie began.

“Anything’s possible. One of the mothers I called tonight should have been able to pinpoint Mariah’s whereabouts. The kid wrote her destination on the fridge, as we agreed. It’s door-to-door pick up and drop off. Even if Mariah fudged things, someone should have a clue.”

By then they were stepping over books, and papers, and articles of clothing in Mariah’s bedroom.

“I’ve walked into a nightmare like this before,” Morrie said.

“Blair Witch Project?”

“My own teen daughter’s bedroom, years ago.”

The usual cop-shop black humor was rearing its macabre head. They’d both reverted to what gave them the distance that made efficiency possible instead of panic.

“Kids this age do tend to go a little AWOL,” he commented. “Testing the limits. They get crazy ideas.”

“And I haven’t been paying proper attention lately.” Molina brushed her thick hair back from her face, but it flopped forward again, thanks to its recent “disguise” as an actual hairdo. “You know teen girls better than I do, Morrie. Keep searching here and I’ll check with the next-door neighbors. Maybe they saw something.”

When she got outside, the sun was thinking about dropping completely behind the mountains. The streetlights were only faintly lit, also looking like they might change their minds any minute, looking like fancy entry hall lights in better neighborhoods.

The Vargas house on the right wasn’t lit inside for the evening yet. She was a nurse’s aide and he drove long haul.

Molina tried the doorbell, but heard no faint interior bing or buzz inside. These old fifties’ bungalows needed constant updating. So she knocked. Hard. The door cracked open on inner shadow. Slacker youngest son, the only one still at home, looked her over.

“If it ain’t the lady lieutenant, all got up to go boogying.”

She’d forgotten she wore her Carmen Miranda disguise. “I’ll go boogying down to the city jail with you someday, you don’t straighten up. Roberto, isn’t it?”

He leaned against the door jamb in his low-slung baggies and gang bandana. Almost twenty-one and had never held a job. “What can I do for you?” His smirk answered his question.

“I’m looking for Mariah.”

“The kid? She’s gettin’ kinda cute, lootenant. Still a little porky, though.”

Could an adult woman punch out a lippy twenty-year-old manboy? In her case, yes, but should she?

“You look like you’ve been hanging at home all day.” She sniffed. “Doing weed. You see anyone drive up to my place? Hear anyone, a car or van?”

“Nah. Your place is like a funeral home, usta be you had no traffic nohow. Lately been some dude coming and going at all hours, as they say on TV. Maybe the chickie baby made tracks because your new b-friends were going after her.”

He was hard against the doorjamb, her fist twisted in the sleazy fabric of his T-shirt and her knee cocked to ram him in the crotch. The searing pull on her healing cut only made her madder.

“Don’t mess with me, punk. I can have you up on all sorts of charges, but most of all I can have a lot more satisfaction leaving a lot of you on this door frame. Did you see or hear any vehicles coming and going at my address today, or not?”

“Not.”

She started to relax her grip.

“Bitch.”

Before she could ram and slam further, someone pulled her back.

“‘Buzz-E’ bad boy Vargas,” Dirty Larry said. “The lieutenant doesn’t know the half of what you could be put away for, including dustups in Aryan Brotherhood and Crips and Bloods land, but I do. Be a good niño and go suck on cannabis until you’re in a coma.”

“I ain’t queer!”

Larry’s chuckle was sinister, an older, wiser man’s threat. “You don’t wanna be, stay out of federal prison and shut up if you don’t have any news to offer.”

He pushed the punk back into the dark house and slammed the door shut on him.

Molina was fuming. “What are you doing here? I was handling it.”

Dirty Larry was chuckling again, this time admiringly. “A bit too much. You can practice your more aggressive moves on me sometime, if you want.”

He was called Dirty Larry because he worked undercover. He’d shoved his way into her life on his street cred and a certain sexy interest she didn’t trust and wasn’t even sure she was interested in.

“Why are you here?” she demanded.

“I was concerned about the LVMPD Iron Maiden being out sick and then sick on the job for so long. You don’t look ill, though. You look hot tonight. Now wonder you got scumbag sass.”

Walking back to her driveway, where Morrie’s hybrid Honda Civic sat uneasily next to Larry’s restored gas guzzler, a seventies Chevy Impala, he reached out to snap one of her big gold hoop earrings with his thumb and forefinger.

“You look like a Gypsy queen about to read tarot cards. Been on a date, Carmen?”

“Godammit, Larry! My daughter is missing. I don’t give a shit about your issues or inferences.”

His mocking attitude dropped like a john’s pants in north Las Vegas.

“Mariah gone? That’s bad stuff. Sorry. What can I do?”

She looked around, thinking. By then they were at her front door.

“Morrie’s going over her room for any clues. Go and hassle my neighbors. You seem to be good at it. Mariah was supposed to be picked up at four for a group study pizza dinner, but the mother-chauffeur says the pick up was called off.”

“By Mariah?”

“By her daughter, who said Mariah was going to another girl’s house instead. I called there. They had no idea on that end about anything, mother or daughter.”

“Hate to say it. Kid pulled a fastie.”

“I don’t care what she did, I want her found and back.”

“Hey.” His arm braced her shoulders. “It’s probably a stupid prank. I’ll pull fingernails all over the block to see if anybody saw anything.”

“They’re neighbors. Good people. With the occasional delinquent kid. Just ask.”

“Yeah. You go help Alch. He’s a thorough guy. I’ll cover the waterfront.”

She smiled weakly. “Thanks.”

“Working undercover, I see a lot of runaways. Your kid is not one of them. Trust me.”

She nodded.

No, she didn’t trust him. Couldn’t. Mariah was gone, and anybody fresh to their lives, Mariah’s or her own, was suspect. After all, a stalker had been loose in their house, several times. She’d been so sure who that was . . . .

Suddenly, what she thought or didn’t think about Max Kinsella and his disappearing act was irrelevant, immaterial, and a damned, delusive waste of time.