Cat In A Vegas Gold Vendetta

“Ready for the next stop, Miss Temple?”

Was it Matt or was it Max?

The story of her life.

No. The order had been dictated beforehand. Her aunt Kit was fiendishly efficient.

“Drive on, Rico,” Temple said, settling into the channeled ivory leather upholstery that flattered the hair colors of blonds, brunettes, and redheads alike. She fixed her gaze on the reflective green eyes blinking from the black carpet. “Louie, you’ve already chosen sides. Watch yourself, Blackie, and stay discreet, or you’ll be walking home from … wherever.”

*

“Temple,” Matt said in surprise as he bent to enter the low-rise living room of the Silver Cloud. “This limo is amazing. It sure has my new Jag beat.”

“The Silver Cloud is not entering a contest,” she said. “It’s acting as a rolling conference room.”

“Then there’s at least a third coming,” Matt said, eyeing the vast seating arrangement.

“I’m in the center-back spot,” Temple said. “You take the left bench. Max can sit on the right.”

“‘Sit down, sit down, you’re rockin’ the boat,’” Matt muttered as he bent to take the long bench seat. “Max, being the third pickup, won’t have to do the Marx Brothers walk across the limo.”

“He’s taller,” Temple said. “Also, more to the point, injured.”

“Mea culpa,” Matt said. “I forgot. He’s a handicapped person.”

“This is nothing new.” Temple leaned forward with a piercing look. “You guys talked just yesterday. Wasn’t a dry run useful?”

“Yeah, but having you here ups the ante. At least for me. Why couldn’t you board with me at the Circle Ritz?”

“I’m worried Max will assume we’re ganging up on him.”

“I’ll tell him we’re not, Temple. He’s already a bit paranoid, right now. Rightfully so.”

“Very thoughtful, Mister Midnight. Did I tell you that you look to-the-manor-born in a Rolls as well as a Jag? Is this a taste of the Chicago life, or what?” Her voice had sunken to a sexy rasp. She couldn’t help remembering their recent roll on the Vladimir Kagan. Next, a Rolls. Why not?

“A truly clever roaming conference room, Miss Barr,” he said, obviously recalling the same incident. “Did I tell you, as a late-night chitchat expert, that these ivory leather seats are just right for a rolling tête-à-tête? Let’s open that champagne bottle and ditch the last stop.”

Temple sighed. Deeply.

“I’m tempted, but it would be really mean to leave Max standing on a corner waiting for the Kitty the Cutter Club to come by.”

“Yeah. This way no one eavesdrops on us. What about the driver?” Matt jerked his head toward the capped silhouette beyond the tinted-glass interior window. “A Fontana brother, I presume. Won’t he tattle on us to the whole family?”

Temple shook her head. “His new sister-in-law would have his shorts in a sling.”

“Sister-in-law? Oh. Your aunt Kit is back from her honeymoon with Aldo.”

“Right. It’s nice to have my own blood kin as muscle inside of Fontana, Inc. Not a word will go beyond this limo. Here. Looks like Scotch is the, uh, car-bar favorite. Isn’t this mini-fridge with ice and mixers adorable? The decanters sparkling like a chandelier in the center make this rolling luxury vehicle a maxi-bar, though.”

Matt took the cut-crystal lowball glass she extended, giving Temple that intensely significant glare he’d recently mastered doing on the Paso Doble on Dancing with the Celebs.

“You don’t know what you just said, do you, Temple?”

Temple did an instant rerun of her admittedly distracted mental processes.

Oh. Maxi-bar.

“Honestly,” she said, “that’s like the faux fuss kicked up when the Apple iPad debuted and geek guys immediately associated the name with a feminine hygiene product. Talk about euphemistic phrases. Matt, you’ve got to quit personalizing this. If Kathleen O’Connor is still out there, she’s not going to care which one of you she has a chance to off first, although she’d probably prefer it be Max.”

Matt shook his head and sipped the Scotch. “You understand why I’m worried. Max is ahead even in the Most Wanted To Be Killed category.”

“See. If you can joke it takes the social awkwardness away.”

Matt stretched out his khaki-trousered legs. “Once Max gets in here, there won’t be a lot of leg room.”

Temple crossed her ankles. The limo seat kept her feet firmly on the carpet. Without the high heels, they wouldn’t touch and would be swinging like a kid’s.

“What the—?” Matt lifted his beige suede shoes as the carpet beneath them rippled like asphalt in an earthquake.

“It’s just Louie, the sneak!” Temple said, assuming the ramrod-spine posture of the disciplinarian. “I should drop you off wherever we are now,” she lectured the cat, squinting hard out the tinted glass windows. “Circus Circus neon. Crawling with kids who’d probably pull your tail. Serve you right.”

Matt was laughing as Louie hopped up beside her and began rubbing his chin on her tote bag.

“Hey,” Matt said. “A ride-along referee. I was afraid your tender heart would make you a sap for Max in his current condition, but Louie accepts no guff from anybody.”

“You think I have a tender heart?” Temple asked.

“Yeah, you do. It’s your biggest flaw and your greatest gift.”

“Aww.”

“Cut the sentimentality, babe,” Matt suggested in patented tough-guy-ese. “Our party is about to pick up the third man.”

“There are only two guys in our party.”

“You’d leave out the house cat?” Matt asked. “What does he drink? White Russians?”

“Oh. You’re right. There’s a nice carton of cream in this adorable mini-fridge.”

By then Louie’s uniquely white whiskers were deep within the small cavity and bent back, so he looked like a windblown cat.

“The only thing I could put Louie’s cream in,” Temple said, frowning, “is a champagne glass. And I’d have to hold it.”

And that’s the tableau they presented when the Silver Cloud eased to a smooth stop that lived up to its name and Rico stepped out and around to open the door to a waiting Max Kinsella.

A Fontana brother and Max standing side by side was pretty intimidating, Temple had to admit to herself, but it also emphasized how … diminished Max was.

There went her tender heart again. Matt, as usual, had been perceptive.

What’s a girl to do?

She concentrated on the only uninvolved alpha male present right now. Louie.

“There’s champagne on ice,” she told Max, “and ivory leather to lounge on, but the man of the hour has long white whiskers, not entirely due to cream.”

Max ducked into the low compartment and lowered himself into a corner so his legs could stretch past the central bar.

“Devine,” he said with a nod. “Temple. You can explain the cat, I hope.”

“Hitchhiker.”

“I admire his taste in rides.” Max smiled, managing to include Louie, Temple, and Matt. “I’ll have what he’s having.” He nodded at Matt.

“A grade of Scotch probably way better than I know,” Matt said.

“I’d trade what you know for what I know in a heartbeat.” Max flashed a rueful smile.

There was no answer to that.

The luxurious cabin—for the vehicle was sailing along again like an ocean liner, afloat in its uniquely powerful but tranquil way—moved into the anonymous dark, far from the Strip’s glitz and glitter.

“Where are we going?” Matt asked.

“Nowhere,” said Temple, “until we all exchange information and figure out what the Synth is or was; why Kitty the Cutter is involved with Las Vegas; what the tunnels under the Crystal Phoenix, Gangsters Hotel-Casino, and the Neon Nightmare club mean; and what the attempt on Max’s life has to do with it all.”

After another long silence, Max spoke. “Which attempt on my life?’

“You’ve had that many?” Matt asked. “I’ve only had one.”

“Kathleen’s introductory slash doesn’t count?”

Matt waved that minor assault away as Max leaned forward to dilute the melting ice in his drink with more Scotch.

“You must not be a very interesting fellow,” he told Matt. “One serious attempt. Minor league.”

“That one almost got Temple killed instead,” Matt said, leaning forward without refilling his drink.

Max glanced from him to Temple. “Obviously there’s been a very fresh attempt I didn’t remember, or know about. Sorry. I was trying to lighten the tone here.”

“Why?” Temple asked.

“I feel responsible for the general air of angst.”

“You’ve been a sick man on the run for your life for the past two months,” Matt pointed out. “Why should you be responsible for anything?”

“Because my troubles, my literal ‘Troubles,’ in Northern Ireland years ago have brought everyone I know pain and death, all right?”

Matt glanced at Temple. “Definitely a savior complex.”

She nodded. “He’d shown tendencies before he lost his mind.”

“Wait a minute,” Max said. “I am not here to be … psychoanalyzed by a pair of amateurs—an armchair shrink and a PR sleuth, not to mention limousine riders.”

“Just trying to lighten the tone,” Temple told him.

“Now that I’ve insulted you two,” Max said, “maybe we’re done with the preliminaries.”

“What makes you think,” Temple asked, rubbing her ankle absently against Louie’s solid, reclining bulk, “Kathleen O’Connor is still alive?”

“The alternate-IRA men in Belfast said she’d still been sending money from abroad to ‘the Cause.’”

“But the Irish ‘Troubles’ have been over for years, haven’t they?” Matt asked.

“Except for the usual diehards. And both sides believe any money previously raised for either side of the conflict is due to them only, for those wounded or widowed by the decades of civil strife. And most of that money during the active IRA years came from the Irish in America. Not that much from South America, where Kathleen had been rumored to be working even a few years ago.”

“Always money,” Temple noted, shaking her head.

“Maybe not.” Max eyed Louie. “What’s with the oversize furry ankle bracelet?”

“That’s Louie.” Temple was startled. “Midnight Louie, my … furry Valentine. Max. You don’t remember Midnight Louie?”

“He follows you everywhere like a dog?” Max asked, incredulous.

“Not just her,” Matt said. “He has a knack for being where the action is.”

“I don’t remember you having a cat,” Max said.

“I don’t, Max. Louie is ‘had’ by no one. He’s half alley cat and half bloodhound.”

“If you say so. I trust he won’t repeat what we say here.”

“Only in cat,” she assured him. “Why are you asking Matt about the time Kathleen O’Connor attacked him? She was really after you, wasn’t she? And you were so elusive. You weren’t even living at the Circle Ritz—”

“I lived at this ‘Circle Ritz’? Was it above a country-western bar or what?”

Matt remained silent, letting Temple talk her way out of this.

“We invested in a condo there,” she said, watching the high-heeled pump slip off her foot as her toes massaged Louie’s shoulder, “after you had whisked me away from my family and job in Minneapolis to accompany you to a big magic act at the Goliath.”

“What happened to our happy home?”

“Some bad guys from your counterterrorism past showed up, I guess. A man ended up dead in the Goliath gaming-area ceiling, and you ended your expiring contract by … vanishing without a word.”

“And you took up with an alley cat.”

“Not then. Not right away.”

“And,” Max said, “I assume Mister Midnight Two came into your life a lot later, too.”

“You were gone a year, Max,” she said, meeting his eyes. “I waited, but new people and a cat still came into my backyard.”

“All ancient history.” Max leaned forward to refill their ebbing glasses. He eyed Matt so sharply that Midnight Louie uttered a low growl.

“Quiet, kitty. You’re not the one we’re all worried about,” Max said. “Devine, I think Kathleen’s approaching you, what she did, is a key to her poisonous presence in all our lives. I need to know exactly what happened.”

“She accosted me leaving the radio station,” Matt recalled.

“Wait,” Temple said. “Did you know why? What did she look like?”

“She was a knockout, I bet,” Max said.

Temple was shocked. “You don’t remember her either?”

“Garry filled me in on her so vividly I almost feel I do, but no. Not this woman, this girl then, who ruined my life, destroyed my connection to my family, as I hear it.”

He stared hard at Temple. “She may have killed that man at the Goliath on my last performance night, forcing me to run and ruining our condo dreams, Temple. So why did she literally lash out at our mild-mannered ex-priest here?”

“Oh, come on,” Matt said. “You may not remember anything of your relationship with Temple, but you are not a man who lets go easily. Neither am I. I didn’t just duck out on the priesthood, I went through the whole ‘repatriation process,’ you could call it. I jumped through every hoop—”

“Climbed every mountain,” Temple put in.

“Honorable discharge.” Max nodded. “Not a piece of cake in that Church. I salute you. Seriously. I apparently tend to cut and run.”

“It’s funny,” Matt said, sipping soothing amber. “Kathleen O’Connor was not somebody you’d suspect came with claws. Not that tall, almost delicate. Attractive, seductive in a classy way, which I wasn’t buying. And then … she stung with her words first. The razor she used for a bloody underline was a complete surprise.”

“How, with words?”

“She knew about my past. She seemed to have something against me, my ex-vocation, the Church.”

“Oh, Mama,” Max said, his blue eyes glittering with comprehension. “Drink up, Master of Understatement. This is going to be a bumpy night.”

“I’ve gotten used to that,” Matt said. “Explaining why I am an ex-priest. Why I was a priest. Some of the older relatives in Chicago still don’t accept my leaving. I’m not going through that Inquisition again with you.”

“It’s not idle curiosity.” Max breathed out audibly. “We’ve all got a piece of the puzzle, only I’ve lost five-sixths of my pieces.”

“It’s not that bad, Max,” Temple said, leaning forward to put a hand on his arm. “The best one-sixth, your survival instincts, are still there.”

“Not enough to save Garry.”

She backed off. Reaching out made Matt edgy, and Max was beyond consolation.

But … he was on the track of some very tricky pieces that were almost a fit. Temple sensed that from how he questioned Matt.

“So,” Max told Matt, “Kathleen dissed you because she thought you were a wuss—”

Major testosterone surge from Matt’s side of the aisle. Temple’s fingernails creased her palms and held on tight. Louie was up on his haunches, although who he’d go for as out of line in her presence was anybody’s guess.

“—or because you’d been a priest.” Max finished.

Temple had seen Molina use that whiplash interrogation technique to startle an insight out of a witness. So had Matt, but he was not happy with this new triumvirate nor, unlike his usual temperament, feeling and not thinking first.

“She wasn’t real pro-priests, no,” Matt said, his expression fierce. “After the international scandals of child abuse by churchly authority figures, a lot of people aren’t, including me. The hierarchy was as bad or worse than any stonewalling government or corporate badass. ‘Mistakes have been made.’ Children abused. Lives ruined. Faith destroyed. ‘Mistakes have been made.’ In my own archdiocese.”

“Whoa, Father Matt,” Max said. “I apparently came up in the party line. I know my gut gets utter betrayal. What I’m here to tell you is, which may make your unlikely Fight Club night more understandable, so did Kathleen O’Connor. Which is why she razored an innocent bystander like you only a year ago, and slashed my teenaged heart into broken shards in Northern Ireland seventeen years ago, and maybe why she could be behind my head being broken into tiny shattered bits recently, too.”

Silence prevailed at the end of that speech. Shock and silence.

The Silver Cloud sailed into the dark distance like the Queen Mary, captained by a deaf and distant man in a chauffeur’s cap, while Temple and Matt breathed deeply and slowed their respiration until no one in the compartment could hear them.

Midnight Louie rose and went to rub on Max’s ankles. Unfortunately, he left a slash of black cat hairs like tar on Max’s pale linen pants legs.

Like the sticky, dark residue that old sins not forgotten forever leave on the psyche.

Chapter 32

The Key to Rebecca

Matt was the first to break the lengthening silence.

“I’ve seen many instances of galloping guilt in my church and in my counseling career, including my own,” he told Max, “but you probably have the world’s worst case. You always have to be a world-class contender, Kinsella, with memory chips or without.

“How do we find and get this ‘Typhoid Mary’ out of our lives before she hurts someone we really care about? Or at least I do.”

Max leaned forward, intent. “Here’s what I learned in Belfast, when I was in a condition to not forget a thing: Rebecca.”

“Rebecca,” Temple echoed. “You know I loved that novel when I was a kid.” She knew it was connected to the young Kathleen O’Connor, but she’d let Max bring Matt in on the mystery. It would help the two men bond. Listen to her! Did she want a happy ending to her own life story or to be a playground monitor? Or, maybe there was no separating the two elements.

“Rebecca,” Matt echoed. “I guess I should read it?”

Temple lifted an eyebrow. “It’s a dark, romantic novel but way less sloshy than Wuthering Heights.”

“It’s on my iPad,” Matt said. “Or will be in a heartbeat, if the great Max Kinsella says it’s relevant.”

“‘The great,’” Max mocked himself.

“Legendary, then,” Matt said. And grinned. “It’s quite a … kick to be more together than you are at the moment, even if that won’t last. I’m sure your memory loss will fade as you follow the leads you got in Ireland. You’re right. We should unite to exorcise this female demon whose venom has touched all our lives.”

“I applaud your gutsy imagery,” Temple said. “I don’t think female transgressors should be spared a thing just because they’re women.”

She noticed Max’s face looked both bitter and rueful.

“What if they’re transgressors because they’re women?” he asked.

So Max told them what he’d briefly mentioned to Temple, that Garry Randolph had tracked gorgeous-but-lethal IRA moll Kathleen O’Connor to her roots.

Temple couldn’t watch Matt’s face during Max’s terse recital, keeping her eyes on Louie, who looked back and forth between the two men as if watching a tennis game. He didn’t want to miss a nuance. Cats are always masters of subtlety, their own or their neighboring human’s.

“A Magdalen asylum?” Matt repeated, unbelieving.

He obviously knew about these Church-run industrial institutions that incarcerated supposed “fallen women,” including girls, for life. Many were put to hard labor in these places, named after Mary Magdalene, and there they lost their real names and became “lost” to society.

“Holy Mother of God,” Matt murmured. “Those places were hellholes of Old World ‘discipline,’ otherwise known as mental and physical and even sexual abuse. Ireland’s and Scotland’s were notorious and operated until late in the twentieth century. No wonder a young woman labeled ‘unholy,’ as Kathleen was, would come out twisted. The motives were cultural; they go back centuries and aeons and appear in all societies and religions. It’s why the human animal is so hard to defend. Hypocrisy. Bred in the bone and soaking the soul until it drowns.”

“Beautifully stated, prosecuting attorney,” Max said. “But no.”

“No?” Matt was on a righteous roll. “We shouldn’t pity Kathleen as victim as well as our personal villain? The young women were incarcerated for life—for life—and considered unholy creatures unworthy of the smallest kindness or sympathy, not even allowed their own names.… Why wouldn’t anyone strong enough to evade that fate be a monster?”

“You don’t understand,” Max said in a mild tone.

Matt’s fists were bunched, white-knuckled. “That’s my job, to understand.”

“You don’t have all the facts,” Max said.

Temple stayed out of it. This was where the rubber hit the road. For all her desire to negotiate a decent truce between the two men who were rivals for her in their own minds, they had to throw it all out there and learn this was about them, not her.

And about Kitty the Cutter, above all.

“Then tell me all the facts,” Matt said, demanded.

Max smiled slightly. He had played this to get Matt going in one indignant direction then another. He was testing the level of passion and commitment Matt would bring to the hunt for the real Kathleen O’Connor.

Temple knew he’d be surprised, but she was thinking of the old Max, not the maimed man before them. She eyed how he angled his stretched legs across the central space of the limo “living room.” He needed to take the pressure off his body so his mind was up to handling a tricky situation.

His eyes found her fascinating—as a missing piece of his past. They no longer held the look of love. So she breathed a sigh of relief even as the two men jostled in the closeness of the limo compartment for position, a place they each could stake out without losing face.

Not an easy “guy” thing.

“Listen,” Max said, talking only to Matt. “You’re a good guy, by intention. I hear I was a quasi-good guy, always trying to undo my past by hunting the future in the form of Kathleen O’Connor. Gandolph the Great. There’s where the word great really comes in. I was always just the ‘Mystifying.’ He was my mentor, my father in absentia, my ‘great’ friend. Garry Randolph. A second-class magician, maybe, but a first-class human being.”

“Don’t you blame Kathleen O’Connor for his death?”

“I blame myself. She’s been an easy out for my entire life, I’m thinking now. Yeah. She needs to be stopped, for her own sake, maybe. That much hate, even justified, is ultimately self-corrosive.”

“What do you mean by ‘that much’ hate?” Matt asked.

“You see, she wasn’t just put in a Magdalen institution as a teenager. Her mother was.”

“Her mother? Who was that?”

“Who knows?” Max said. “I saw the mass graveyard of unmarked, unnamed burial sites at one such place near Dublin. The point is that the woman who called herself Kathleen O’Connor and then Rebecca, our mutual enemy who won’t die, was born in a Magdalen asylum. Her mother had been consigned there. And there Kathleen grew up to have her own child.”

“Child?” Temple couldn’t contain herself. “Kitty the Cutter has a child?”

“She had one,” Max said, eyeing her for the first time in several minutes. “She ran away as an unwed mother, one of very few who had the will to escape.”

“To become the femme fatale who seduced you in Belfast?”

“I wasn’t her first, but she was mine, my aching bones tell me that much. And my instincts.”

“She must have been incredibly damaged.” Matt shook his head.

“She is,” Max said. “Beyond what any of us can imagine.”

“The rings,” Temple said.

Both men eyed her.

“Matt. She forced you to wear that big ugly snake ring for a while.”

“Not a snake. The worm, Ouroboros,” he said, looking unhappy to share the incident with Max. “It’s an ancient eternity symbol. A ‘worm’ or Medieval dragon eating its own tail.”

“Rather like Kathleen herself,” Max said. “What about such a ring, Temple? She forced it on Matt?”

“When she was stalking him.”

“After the razor attack?” Max wanted to know.

Matt spoke for himself. “Yes. She’d marked my skin. She wanted to mark my mind and soul. I had no option, but she finally stole the ring back, as if she’d tired of the game. She’d threatened Temple. Every woman I came in contact with.” Matt hesitated. “I was counseling a call girl who fell to her death. I never knew if Kitty the Cutter had done that or not.”

Max drew back to coddle his glass of Scotch. “She’s really put you through the ‘Guilt Gavotte,’ too, hasn’t she?” He looked at Temple. “You’re being quiet. Am I right to think that’s not typical?”

“The ring business is beyond … eerie. I found the Ouroboros ring in my scarf drawer not long ago, and I don’t know where it came from.”

“Your scarf drawer?” Max drawled. “Is this a place of pilgrimage? An inner sanctum? Who has a scarf drawer these days?”

“Temple collects vintage clothing,” Matt explained. “She stores shoes, gloves, hats. And scarves.”

“Any of my magician’s unending rainbow of linked chiffon scarves?” Max asked with a fluid gesture that almost made that hokey trick seem visible in his hands for a moment.

“You didn’t do the scarf trick,” Temple said. “Way too expected. No, the fact is I’m not good with scarves. Some women are. I’m not the drapery sort of woman. Too short.” She looked down. “So is Louie.”

“He’s not too short to impinge on my pants legs.” Max frowned at the horizontal bar of black hairs.

“Louie impinges on everything,” Matt said, not sounding regretful about Max’s impaired wardrobe.

“Including Temple’s scarf drawer.” Max was trying to brush off the hair, which stuck like barbed fishhooks to the textured linen weave.

“You need tape loops for that,” Temple told him, glad they had skirted the issue of Louie once upon a time impinging on their California-king-size bed. “No. There’s nothing in my scarf drawer that Louie would find worth the effort of opening it. It’s a lost and found for things I don’t feel I can throw out but don’t know what to do with.”

“Kinda like me.”

Matt groaned at Max’s quip. “It’s not all about you anymore.”

“It’s a stupid scarf drawer!” Temple said. “Can you guys keep on point? Which is … that Ouroboros ring turned up in it, I don’t know how.”

“Exactly when was that?” Matt asked her.

“It was after we think Kitty assaulted you with an aspergillum on the crowded down escalator during TitaniCon at the Hilton.”

Max shifted to restretch his legs. “I know my misfiring memory may be a bore, but can we speak about the same planet at least?”

“Yeah.” Matt frowned, trying to rerun his own memory track. “Mini-Molina was there. She was really kiddish then. They grow up fast.”

Temple nodded at Matt. “Mariah was chubby and half bummed out about being ‘watched’ by us … and half totally crushing on you. Now look at her, all teenybopper. No wonder Mama Bear has been getting unraveled lately.”

“Look.” Max said. “This cozy trip down memory lane isn’t helping my recall or my nauseous feeling. What was TitaniCon? What is an aspergillum, which sounds vaguely familiar, like a medication name … or some kind of flower? Why would Kathleen try to assault you on an escalator?” he asked Matt. “And why were you two wandering around the Hilton with a bratty kid in tow like The Simpsons?” he asked Temple.

Temple took on the task of answering. “TitaniCon was a huge science-fiction convention. Murder was afoot, but Matt got suckered into taking Molina’s kid, who wasn’t there when Matt was going down an escalator and felt something hard, like a gun barrel, pressed into his back.

“When he got to ground level, he heard a metallic roll and found this funky object on the hotel floor. The thing looked to me like a baby rattle with a wooden handle and a silver ball, the kind of fancy, nonfunctional nonsense people without kids give as baby gifts. Matt explained it was an aspergillum.”

“You’ve seen one,” Matt told Max. “Whether you remember or not. It’s a ceremonial holy-water dispenser, and the officiating priest does indeed shake it like a baby rattle at the most solemn rites.”

“I do remember that.” Max waved a hand in front of his eyes. “Just a vision. A pale cloud of incense and chanting and crowds … and me being short.” He made a hasty sign of the cross. “You’re saying Kathleen has collected these mystical or religious artifacts, an Ouroboros ring, an aspergillum? And used them to taunt you? That is really sick.”

“It may be sicker than you think,” Matt said. “She was after any woman I associated with, like the call girl I was counseling, whose death was never solved.”

“Interesting.” Max’s eyes narrowed. “Looks like Molina’s kid wasn’t the only one who had a crush on you.”

Matt was not taking on that role.

“I think, from what you just said,” he pointed out, “she just wanted to hound people the way she and her Magdalen-asylum mother had been hounded. Kathleen’s ‘haunting’ presence in my life did stop shortly after that aspergillum incident. She was able to get in and out of my unit. One day the ring was gone. What’s sick is that she somehow got it into Temple’s possession later. I never thought I’d say this about a human being, but it’s a pity she wasn’t dead, as you thought. As you said you saw.”

“Few people really want someone dead,” Temple said. “You may not be sorry they’re gone, though, like Kitty the Cutter.” She eyed Max. “How could you have made a mistake about something as definite as a dead body with all your counterterrorism experience abroad?”

“I swore she was dead, too, don’t forget,” Matt said. “I ID’d the body through a morgue window.”

“Everybody thought Gandolph the Great was dead when he wasn’t.” Max turned to Temple. “How could that have happened?”

“That wasn’t so hard to pull off,” Temple said. “He was disguised as this ditzy, turbaned, overripe female medium.”

“Looking dead isn’t the problem,” Max said. “It’s being carted away by the coroner’s office. In my case at the Neon Nightmare, I had the services of a fake ambulance and hired EMTs to whisk ‘the body’ away.”

“And a past-master at faking death in Gandolph, now that we know about that,” Temple said. “Besides, after impact, your condition was severe enough to fool Rafi Nadir, Molina’s ex-boyfriend, who was working security at the Neon Nightmare when you fell. He’d been a cop.”

Max hesitated before saying more. Temple supposed he might be reliving the last moments before he hit the wall.

“The crash was authentic,” he said, “and pretty spectacular to witness, I imagine. I was unconscious, in a coma for weeks. At the Swiss clinic they suspected me of being a drunk driver, because the impact ordinarily would have killed me,” he explained to Matt. “What saved me then was what saved me when I braked that car in Belfast so hard to avoid bullets. I wasn’t drunk, and I wasn’t wearing a seat belt, but I’ve trained myself to go limp at any oncoming impact. It minimizes the damage if you don’t tense up. And you said I’d used bungee cords before in my official act.”

Max reported all this to the limo carpeting and Midnight Louie’s unblinking, upcast eyes. Temple caught Matt’s somber glance. Time to move Max past dwelling on his latest case of survivor’s guilt.

“Gandolph must have stage-managed some sort of exchange, then,” she said, “after he got you off in the hired ambulance.”

“From what I saw of his impressive contacts in Ireland and Northern Ireland,” Max said, “he’d have plenty of Vegas help to call on. He was the wizard who helped me develop the Neon Nightmare act as the Phantom Mage, and he whisked my unconscious body out of the Neon Nightmare and Las Vegas all the way to a Swiss clinic.”

“Without any on-scene treatment?” Matt sounded incredulous. “That would be barbaric.”

“Not if Max had really fallen on a mountain,” Temple pointed out. “It can take hours, even days, to get to and carry out a victim. Gandolph didn’t dare leave any kind of trail here in the U.S. In fact, officially, the Neon Nightmare ‘accident’ was written off as unreliable reporting from the scene. It’s not like the onlookers were sober.”

“Except for Nadir,” Max put in wryly. “Little did he know his ex would have killed to get her hands on me for once.”

“Poor Rafi,” Temple mused. “So close to making points with Molina and getting access to his kid.”

“Poor Max!” Max put in. “I guess you and I really were exes by then or you’d be a teeny bit more solicitous about the almost-murder victim.”

“Oh! I’m sorry to be so insensitive. I was just caught up in the dramatic irony, and you don’t look like that much of a victim now, and…”

Temple caught the first momentary glimpse of a twinkle in Max’s eyes. He was just teasing her. And, ironically, you tended to forget about his gigantic memory loss, he was so good at looking like he was in complete control, of himself most of all. Poor Max indeed.

“Next you’ll get around to ‘Poor Louie,’” Matt said, “and maybe finally me.”

“It’s hard,” Temple said, “to feel sorry for a guy whose business associates just gifted him with a new Jaguar.”

“Really?” Max commented. “That ride was a gift? Good going.”

“That’s the trouble. It would mean ‘going.’ Leaving Vegas for Chicago.”

“Matt’s been offered his own TV talk gig,” Temple explained.

“Good show,” Max said in the Brit way, then laughed at how literal he’d been. “Brave man. I don’t remember hearing you on the radio except for a spin through the dial lately, but you seem adept at that.”

“Yeah. If you need any counseling on your memory loss…”

“I need someone who can bring it back.”

Matt said, “That would be someone you had a deep emotional connection with.”

Awkward silence.

“Midnight Louie,” Temple said with a pointed forefinger. “You two were always ‘soul brothers.’”

Max crossed his arms on his knees and bent down to fix Louie with a stare. “Those unsmiling Irish eyes of yours have hidden depths, do they, Louie, old boy?”

The cat’s expressionless face shook with a sudden sneeze, which broke the building tension as they all laughed.

“Maybe he’s developed an allergy to you while you were gone,” Matt twitted Max.

Louie pawed his muzzle like a dazed boxer while everyone sat back and sipped their drinks.

“Speaking of jogging memories,” Temple said, “I could use professional help on dredging up exactly how I might have gotten the worm ring. If it was near the aspergillum incident, I might be able to check my PR date book and get some ideas.”

She almost went on to say that Molina had returned the semi-engagement opal ring from Max, but … assessing both men’s politely guarded air, she decided the topic of her affections and any rings that resulted from them had gone on about as long as reasonably possessive and competitive-but-civilized men could stand.

“Okay,” she said. “Homework for Temple. Track down the when and how of Evil Kitty’s hate tokens.”

They’d dipped their heads for a silent sip to that resolve when the limo sped forward so fast they all had dripping chins.

The limo swung into a wide left that made it lurch like a swamped boat.

“Bottoms up,” Max shouted, downing the contents of his glass and reinstalling it in the rack.

Both he and Matt reached for the same button in the Starship Enterprise–complex panel installed in the upholstered ceiling.

Temple had ridden in limos for her job before but not the latest tricked-out models.

Matt won the button war. “What’s going on, driver?” he asked.

“Sorry!” came Rico’s angry voice over the intercom. “We’ve got a … wasp on our tail. I so much as blur the wax finish on this baby, it’s my ass on the line. Crazy biker kid!”

With that, the limo sped up and screeched around another corner.

“The windows are tinted so dark we can’t see out,” Matt complained, pushing more buttons until the side passenger windows descended, revealing a speeding panorama of off-Strip shops and importing a blast of warm, pollutant-laden streaming air.

Both Matt and Max had their heads out opposite windows.

Midnight Louie leaped up beside Temple. What a good guard kitty. She was about to pat him, but his shiny fur skimmed her palm as he jumped to the rear window ledge and stared into the dark as if he had laser eyes.

Temple got on her knees and joined him.

“It’s the Vampire,” Max and Matt shouted as one.

Really, Temple thought, that vampire fad was now at the point of overkill. If she never heard about another one …

Then the shrieking whine of an overtaking engine so shrill and loud that it inspired the name of a mechanical beast came through with the wind, and Temple saw through the black back window a blinding Cyclops blur that darted off to the side like a UFO.

Next she’d be seeing Elvis.

Or … she leaped to Matt’s side of the car, but the passing traffic and buildings were only a blur, even with the window down.

Temple glanced over at Max and his open window and saw a gun butt balanced on the door padding. Of course he’d be armed these days.

“Speed Queen,” Max muttered in determined fury.

Something was coming up alongside them, overtaking them. Someone in a space suit. There was that UFO imagery again. The speed, the road cinders flying into their eyes—Temple thought she was coursing through the Chunnel of Crime ride between Gangsters and the Crystal Phoenix again, only it had been put on crystal meth.

Max was aiming the gun at the rider.

“No!” Temple shouted.

She must have leaped across the limo’s conversation-pit middle, because even as she screamed, what looked like a dark arm brushed Max’s braced elbow. The firearm flew out the window.

“Holy freaking flying cat!” Max shouted, leaning far out the window, hair wind-slicked, eyes squinted almost shut.

The limo was finally slowing. Max slumped back in the cushy leather, wincing. He’d heaved himself up on his knees, folded and twisted his legs like he used to, and hadn’t felt a thing in the excitement.

Matt was hair-ruffled and bleary-eyed too as he pulled himself back into the seating.

“The Circle Ritz Hesketh Vampire motorcycle,” Temple said, dazed. “I don’t get it.”

“Using Electra Lark’s Speed Queen helmet,’ Matt said, eyeing Max.

“You or Electra been riding it lately?” Max asked Matt.

“No. Not lately. It was my only transportation for a time, a while back. I started getting shadowed by another rider. You know anything about that?”

Max’s laugh was weary. “If I did, I don’t now. Could have been Kathleen or a traffic cop. Seeing and hearing that bike brought a lot back. All of it just about the ride. I gave it to Electra as collateral, I think.”

Temple nodded confirmation when he glanced at her.

“Then I got irritated when I saw she’d gotten that corny helmet. And I seem to know … somehow … that you rode it, Devine. I’ve had visions or dreams of Kitty the Cutter crashing on another motorcycle, being dead. And that’s all I know, but it’s more than I knew a few hours ago. Maybe there’s hope for my memory.”

Matt nodded. “The motorcycle literally jolted your brain cells. Probably the intense high-pitched scream. And it was something you loved and wanted. That leaves an indelible mark, too.”

Another awkward silence.

“Where’s Louie?” Temple asked, searching the black carpeting.

Max turned to Temple. “I’m sorry. I hardly understood what was happening when it was happening, and you probably didn’t see it. My shrimp-breath ‘soul brother’ was determined to stop me from shooting at a moving target.

“The weight of his leap knocked my arm away. That forestalled my shot, but not his own momentum. He landed on those leather saddlebags behind the rider like he was on a bungee cord that worked.

“He’s tailing that Vampire in the riding pillion position at seventy miles an hour to God knows where.”

Chapter 33

In the Hot Sauce

WHEE! If I had a headdress I could be the Flying Nun.

Not that I’d sign up for the chastity part. Or the obedience part. Poverty I could handle, having been born in the streets.

Meanwhile, the Hesketh Vampire and I are flying down side streets lurching to the left and to the right, the metal foot-peg caps sparking on the pavement. I am at my claw-hanging, balancing-like-a-butterfly, screaming-cat-spat best, vocalizing in counterpoint to the engine.

I realize my Miss Temple must be a trifle worried by my absence and means of egress from the limo, but I did not want Mr. Max doing anything intemperate with a firearm. He is not quite himself, as you may have noticed.

I am sure that he believes the person in biker leather in front of me is Miss Kitty the Cutter. He may be right. Such a sneak attack would be up her alley. But does he really want her dead before he can have a nice long heart-to-heart with her about then and now and why and why, why, why?

In this way, Mr. Max is sort of a Hamlet person. I am a just a ham.

So I bask in the double-takes that pedestrians shoot my way as we zoom past.

By now we are down to street-legal speeds, say forty-five miles an hour. It is getting so a guy could almost jump off and just skin his shins and chinny-chin-chin. Not that I want any scars.

The Vampire slows to glide into the service area behind a row of one-story businesses. By now I am hanging by a single nail, preparing to drop off where I can shelter in the shade of the handy cat’s best friend, a dumpster.

The rider is dragging the soles of—what else?—motorcycle boots, which I judge to be a size 6 or 7. I am looking for a woman a bit taller than my Miss Temple. Five-three, I heard long ago.

My unintentional driver drops the kickstand and dismounts. This lean, slight build looks womanish, but then the figure doffs the silver helmet. I hold my breath and snick out my shivs.

No need.

This nefarious knight of the road is an Asian man, small, wiry, and black-haired. He has a cell phone to his ear before you can say “brain damage.”

“I am leaving the ride behind a Chinese restaurant,” he reports then snickers. By this I gather that he is Japanese. “Yeah, the dorky helmet, too. Glad none of my bros saw me in that thing; I might have had to defend my honor.” Another snicker. “I will walk a couple blocks away and call another biker for a ride. I really rattled that snazzy limo’s tailpipe. I am sure the contents were well shaken up.”

His motorcycle boot soles flash the overkill of steel cleats, so I hear his scraping steps fading away out front.

First, I check to see that I am alone, then I leap upward to the seat and start working out the saddlebag flap latches with my bare shivs. My improvised hitch on the saddlebags has more than somewhat marred the leather, but I know my Circle Ritz acquaintances would prefer to lose some anonymous cowhide accessories over my well-groomed turf of shiny black fur.

Alas, the stuffing inside the saddlebag is just a Red Hat Sisterhood sweatshirt decked out with sequins and rhinestones, most likely belonging to Miss Electra Lark.

I certainly have no use for it, since my breed does not sweat.

I look around from my solitary perch, planning my necessary next steps. First, I need to guard this valuable vintage motorcycle. Then I need to guide my handicapped humans to where it is.

The second step is the easiest. I spot a Wong Ho’s coupon on the littered asphalt behind the restaurant, which smells of fried noodles and … fish.

Now I have also settled problem number two.

Just as hobos left marks on places good for handouts during the Great Depression, so we survivors of the Great Recession have our own marking system. No, it is nothing so crass as inappropriate littering. Even our homeless members know enough to bury our eliminations if we can.

It is an auditory signal, aka a mew news line.

In no time, local alley cats come pouring in from all directions, left, right, and up.

I make the proper paw gestures and gang signals, adding a few choice audible calls. The moniker of my maternal parent, Ma Barker, is like a passkey on the mean streets of Vegas. Even bulldogs tremble at the mere mention of her name.

Soon I have the coupon in my fangs and twelve hardened street fighters at my back, three remaining behind to guard the “undead” bike.

I lead them from the back alley onto the nearest main street, retracing the way the Vampire and I have come. We all make quite a sight, though it takes some nerve for these retiring, dark-of-night slinkers to do a public cat-pride parade under the streetlights. Luckily, most establishments along here are closed and traffic is thin.

Soon I see the cruising Silver Cloud approaching at a stately crawl then veering wildly to our side of the street. I halt the clowder and wait. You do not often see thirteen of my discreet breed gathered in a docile pack with a solid black dude with white whiskers at their head.

The limo’s back door opens without the polite offices of Rico.

Miss Temple Barr comes barreling out, Mr. Matt right behind her, followed by a slightly gimpy Mr. Max.

It is a good thing I have my cat pack cowed. I have learned the Ma Barker theory of management from the old dame herself. Gruff voice, clear orders, and cocked shivs.

Before my Miss Temple can reach me and undermine my leadership position with an avalanche of sloppy human sentiments, another gang arrives—a silent-running confluence of the sleekest red, black, and red-and-black sports cars I have ever laid eyes on, and I have laid eyes on a lot of pricey cars in Vegas.

Seven or eight surround the Silver Cloud, and they arrived faster than special effects in Avatar. Even I am blinking with surprise, but then I do the math. It helps that lots of long, tall dudes in summer-pale Zegna suits unbend from the low, futuristic cars, talking on cell phones and doing things with GPS devices.

It is, of course, Fontana, Inc., in their new fleet of electric Tesla Roadsters.

The absence of vroom in their descent en masse unnerves me, but is most reassuring to my troops.

Miss Temple brings herself to an equally silent dead stop at my feet and looks down, rebukingly.

Yeah, it was a bold move, but all is well that ends well. I drop the Wong Ho coupon at her Gianmarco Lorenzi-clad feet, which she passes on to Emilio or Eduardo or Ralph.

Two of the brothers hop in an unnervingly silent idling Tesla Roadster and vanish. Another Tesla driver dismounts.

(These are really low, two-seater sports cars, with just room enough for a guy and his girl and a lot of high-end audio equipment that will be way louder than this cool green expensive electric car will ever be.)

Boys must have their thundering bass one way or another.

Pretty soon I hear the siren song of an engine that will not tiptoe. Eduardo and Emilio return, one driving the Tesla, one steering the recovered Hesketh Vampire. Sans helmet, which is tied on the back facedown. No Fontana brother will don a helmet that reads Speed Queen.

I notice that Giuseppe has collared Mr. Max and handed him something bulky in a plain brown-paper wrapper. Obviously, he has retrieved the lost handgun. I know Mr. Max meant merely to blow out a tire and catch the rider, but I cannot permit such a risky maneuver with my Miss Temple present.

After all, she is a jewel, and she immediately understood the import of the Wong Ho coupon I laid at her feet.

“I feel,” she says to all within hearing, “in need of a wonton special dinner at Wong Ho’s. I also spy a fish special that is too good to pass up.”

She thanks the gathered brothers and various vehicles, which scatter to deliver the Vampire back to the Circle Ritz.

The Silver Cloud shadows my three human companions at about five miles an hour as my feline escorts swagger back to Wong Ho’s.

By my observation, it is hot, crowded, and sweaty inside the humble eatery as my humans sit elbow to elbow at a tiny table filled with large platters of Asian delicacies.

Me and my new street gang enjoy the night air behind the place with a dozen orders of the fish special.

Koi it is not, but it is ambrosia to my homeless kin.

Chapter 34

Pooling Resources

Temple parked in the Circle Ritz lot under the recently installed row of carports, where Matt’s gorgeous new Jag sparkled like a “big rock candy mountain,” even in the shade.

It seemed to have the word Chicago superimposed on it, a perfect billboard for the glitzy musical.

Maybe it was time for them to be leaving Las Vegas.

The weather was almost always hot and hard on her skin type—pasty and prone to freckles. She was getting tired of bathing in sunscreen. And coming from the Midwest, Temple was no stranger to the cold: think of the new outfits that she would need.

She’d tried to reach Matt, but he wasn’t answering, so she went up to her condo, looked for Midnight Louie to be taking an afternoon nap in the air-conditioning, and found him AWOL again as well.

Temple swung her heavy tote bag to the kitchen counter and sighed. Two lovers in town—one ex, one not—and she’d spent the morning catching up on PR matters all over town when she was thinking she was alone, confounded, and not doing well with her first “case.”

She went searching for Louie, through the living room to the tiny triangular patio that made a corner to her unit in the round building. That’s when she spied a lone figure swimming midday laps in the usually deserted pool below.

The building was adults-only, simply because fifties apartment units had been under 1,600 square feet, and the Circle Ritz residents were older adults at that. Electra Lark had converted larger units into condos to keep the building full, but the wedding-chapel business on the side kept her solvent. The business was literally “on the side” of the building, because nowadays a drive-by wedding service was even more popular than the charming chapel inside.

Honestly, Temple thought, people can’t wait for anything in this Internet era.

What she couldn’t wait for was to get out of her lonely, catless condo and down by that pool to observe and interrupt those powerful clockwork laps.

*

Matt suddenly sensed a presence and surfaced, blinking chlorinated water from his eyes.

Swimming was his form of meditation, like martial arts was his form of exercise, although too many things in his life had been hopping in the last few months to get to class.

His first blurred glimpse of the silently watching female figure reminded him that Kathleen O’Connor had confronted him here, face-to-face, that he was the “beneficiary” of the only two true personal appearances she’d ever made in Vegas. Both times she’d cut him with words, and once with a razor.

But it was Temple squinting back at him in the hot sun, her vibrant peachy-red hair a waving, curlicued sunset out of a Alphonse Mucha print of Summer.

He turned in midlap and made the pool edge in one underwater bound.

“No splashing on my new leather sandals,” she warned, stepping back.

That forced him to regard the fretwork of leather and laces both baring and snaring her feet to well above the ankles. Fetish-wear made fashion, and he totally got why.

“I’ll splash more than your shoes,” Matt said, “if you don’t run up and slip into some sunscreen and a suit and come back down here.”

“You know I never use the pool.”

“Why not?”

“Natural red hair. White skin. Freckles. Burning. Melanoma, which sounds like something pretty, but isn’t.”

“The sun’s going over the building and you wear nothing but sixty SPF. You may wear nothing much as a bathing suit, but I wouldn’t know, would I? Something as strappy as your shoes?”

“That would be possible. I can’t remember. It’s been a long time since I’ve been swimming.”

She walked back and forth along the pool’s length while he paced her in the water.

“I miss your Dancing with The Celebs spray tan,” she noted.

“Pretty remarkable stuff. All the network anchors are wearing airbrush these days. I still have some. I could give you an all-over sample. Up in my rooms. After we swim.”

The high heels paused. “I don’t do well in bikinis, except for waxes,” she had to add, to be provocative back.

“Why not?” he asked.

She rolled her eyes. “I’m not a thirty-six C, as you well know.”

“I’m like a nonsnob art lover. I know what I like. I don’t need caliber.”

“Oh, Matt, I’ve had a bummer day. I’ve been hired for a real PI job and I’m totally flunking it. I don’t tan, I don’t swim, and I don’t fill out a bikini. I’m just a short shoe freak with a curiosity bone instead of a funny bone.”

“Come in,” he reassured her. Tempted her. “The water’s like aquamarine silk. I can hold you up, and so can the water. You will feel like a thirty-six C, as you always have to me. You can also explain to me what exactly a thirty-six C is later.”

“You’ve seen Victoria’s Secret ads on TV. You know it’s all about false packaging.”

“Nothing to do with you, then,” he said. “Just join me. I’d really like it.”

She sighed heavily and scampered back into the building.

Matt leaned his chin on his crossed elbows at the pool edge and smiled. All his cares and indecision were floating away. Temple needed a TLC break, and he was free, willing, and able to give it to her.

*

“This is really cool stuff,” Temple called from his bathroom two hours later. “And it really stays on in water?”

“Longer than I wanted it to,” Matt answered from the bed. “Of course, they used tanning spray booths at the dance show.”

She came out dressed and looking slightly toasty all over. “I prefer the personal touch. I’ll never coax you to put sunscreen on me, but a spray-on tan—that felt like a great massage.” She went over to strip back the sheets.

“Amazing!” She wasn’t eyeing him. “There’s hardly any rub-off on the sheets.”

“There is some only because you weren’t patient enough to lie still, like I told you.”

“And why should I be patient with you about that? You’ve been gone a week. You haven’t even asked if I missed you.”

“I was trying really hard right now not to be insecure.”

Temple perched on the edge of the bed while Matt got dressed. The sheets had long ago dried him indirectly.

“Will all these shoe straps rub off the tan when I walk?” she wondered, inspecting her feet.

“I don’t know, Temple. I don’t wear strappy shoes.”

That made her laugh. “You have nothing to be insecure about.”

Then she got serious, addressing something she’d left unsaid for the four days he’d been back.

“I hope you understand that my getting a call from Max as if I was his last lifeline was like you talking to a lost soul on the WCOO call line. All he knew at that point was what Garry Randolph had been able to tell him in their last, short time together. I couldn’t let him go blundering around without anchors of any sort in his past.”

“I know you couldn’t, “Matt said, sitting to pull on his shoes. “I couldn’t have either.”

She got to her knees on the mattress and plastered herself against his bare back. “We’re both fixers, aren’t we? And insecurity makes us human. I shouldn’t have felt so … superior … to Savannah Ashleigh that I thought I could fix her family feuds and banish a bunch of vultures.”

He turned to take her in his arms. “But you did and you can. You just aren’t used to sleuthing without a partner.”

“It’s true. Louie’s been annoying and seems to be up to something on his own these days.”

They didn’t mention that Max had been her invisible partner when he lived in town before.

“What’s really bugging you about Savannah’s case, Temple?”

“Other than that there’s this irresistible distraction back in town and I can hardly find the time to make progress on it?”

“That is me you’re referring to, right?”

“No one else,” she promised, and sealed it with a kiss.

“Maybe I’m too young for the job,” she said when they’d settled into a comfy embrace. “Her aunt Violet is an elderly lady. I don’t know if she’s getting senile or someone is messing up her mind to make her act that way. Expecting anyone to live in that oddball old house until all the resident cats die of natural causes is crazy.

“Once Violet dies, the people around her have no stake in honoring her wishes. She used to be shrewd in business, and I’m sure she has some money socked away in mutual funds and insurance, but she’s hardly a Rockefeller heir. I just don’t get why she has this cadre of suspicious people around her.”

“Let’s go find out.”

“Let us?”

Matt checked his wristwatch. Temple’s eyes saucered to see it was new, like his Jag, not only expensive but exquisite. Those producers were heavy seducers, but she doubted Matt even knew what the watch was. A Rolex would have tipped him off. Clever people. She needed to meet them. He was a babe in the woods, but he was her babe.

“Sure,” he said, the laugh lines around his brown eyes making rays like the kind kids draw around suns.

She watched him, soothed, satisfied, blissed out.

“You’ve got me, babe,” he said, “from eleven to eleven—Eleven A.M. to eleven P.M. That’s not counting any sack time you commandeer. So use me. We’ll go over to Violet’s house and figure out together what’s what.”

“I love you,” Temple said, following it up with a long, luxurious kiss. “Give me five to hop downstairs and get changed into kitty-litter-kicking shoes.”

“For a moment I thought you were going to say ‘Kitty the Cutter–kicking shoes.’”

Temple didn’t hesitate for a second. “That too.”

Chapter 35

Candle in the Wind

Temple got out of her Miata across the street from Violet’s house, resigned when she saw Savannah’s Sky parked right in front and the fishnet leggings and corset-attired actress returning from the house to the curb.

“You do remember Savannah Ashleigh?” she quietly asked Matt as he unpretzeled from the car’s passenger seat.

He wasn’t entirely naive. He’d been wearing his usual Timex when he’d come to collect her for this investigatory outing.

“She’s all revved up about something,” Temple told him. “The animal shelter people want Violet to give them a bequest.”

“Are you sure Savannah Ashleigh’s motives are pure?”

“Um, normally I’d say she’s too stupid to be crooked, but I’m beginning to think her eternal starlet act is crazy like a fox.”

Matt eyed the silicone-enhanced vision on six-inch platform heels heading toward them. “She is such a fox.”

“I didn’t know that you knew that expression.”

“I mean the ‘sly’ version of the word. You’re the only true fox on my horizon.”

“Purr,” Temple said. “Speaking of which, prepare yourself for cats.”

“And you’re not speaking of Savannah Ashleigh this time?”

“Why are women always compared to animals?”

“A man can be called a ‘wolf’ and a just plain ‘animal.’”

“True,” she said. “It might be interesting to see Savannah interact with Violet’s estate suitors.”

But first the Scarlet Starlet had to interact with Matt, whom she greeted with a snarky grin.

“Say, Mister Midnight. I saw you bossa nova–ing on Dancing with the Celebs. Lookin’ good. And bad.”

“No bossa novas,” Matt said. “They’re a dated dance.”

Temple watched Savannah’s seductive facade glaze over and crack. She wasn’t used to impervious.

“What’s the excitement about?” Temple asked.

“There’s some cat shelter hoping to get Violet to sign on the dotted line, at least for a bequest if not the whole schmear. Violet is so confused, the place reeks and—” Captain Jack’s masked face popped up from Savannah’s purse, shocking the heck out of Matt. “—and that big longhaired cat inside named Maverick showed an unnatural interest in eating Captain Jack,” Savannah went on in her usual sultry but aggrieved way.

“If,” said Matt, “‘Captain Jack’ is that marsupial in your purse, I can see why.”

“Jack is no … Mar-soopial. He is a fixed ferret, but still not about to take kindly to pushy other males. Not even,” she told Temple, “your fixed alpha cat.”

“Thanks to you,” Temple said. “If you recall, Louie is sterile, not impotent. And speaking of kitty-food commercial spokecats, how are Yvette and Solange these days?”

“You know darn well.” Savannah stamped her solid-steel spike heel in the heat-mushy asphalt, where it stuck. “I wanted to smuggle the poor things out in my purse, but they’re hiding somewhere inside that hellhole. I can’t find them.”

“Maybe they’re hiding from you,” Temple suggested, as Matt knelt like Prince Charming to free Savannah’s impaled heel. She simpered prettily and balanced a hand on his shoulder while cooing, “Ummm.”

“Are ferrets pursebroken?” Temple asked. “Captain Jack seems to be making too many happy wiggling motions for a fixed male.”

“He’s upset, and why not? Violet’s place is a circus.”

Meanwhile Matt had freed her heel and stood, leaving her without support.

Savannah staggered, trying to pull Captain Jack from her purse. As she extracted the wriggling form, it dribbled on the pavement.

“Eek!” Savannah struggled to hold Jack as far from her as possible and still keep standing on her fashionable stilts.

Matt took pity and stabilized her flailing elbow while Temple pulled Savannah’s expensive purse free of the ferret’s aiming range.

“When have you last given him a bathroom break?” Temple asked.

“He’s trained!”

Matt picked up Savannah’s wrist with its glitzy watch. “Six o’clock? Is that A.M. or P.M.? Your watch has stopped. It’s only one P.M. I don’t think the cats inside will appreciate ferret markings. You’d better get home for a makeover. Leave the lowly chores to us.”

“Oh! Oh! Oh!” Savannah stood still except for limp-wristed, taloned hands shaking off ferret pee as if she were a slasher-movie beauty queen ridding herself of drops of blood. “Captain Jack has been a bad, bad boy. We will have to wait for the sun to dry us before we go in Mommy’s pretty car.”

In the desert heat, that wouldn’t be long.

Matt and Temple headed up the cracked concrete walkway.

“This may be tricky without Savannah by our sides,” she told him. “I’ve only met Violet twice.”

“On the other hand,” he said, opening the rickety screen door that covered the heavy wooden door, “we might find out a lot more without Savannah there.”

A knock produced a harried-looking Rowdy Smith, running a nervous hand over his crew-cut head and focusing on Temple.

“You’re Savannah’s friend,” he identified her, frowning. “Where’d Savannah go?”

“She had to attend to a small animal crisis,” Matt explained.

“And who’s this guy?” Rowdy asked Temple, as if they were old friends.

“Matt Devine.” Matt captured his hand for a quick shake and also managed to get into the darkened house by taking Temple’s elbow in the other hand and ushering her inside. “I do counseling work. Maybe I can help with the insistent visitors.”

“I was just here cleaning cat boxes. Violet’s getting pretty confused. She thought Savannah was Alexandra today.”

“I imagine there’s a family resemblance,” Temple said.

Rowdy blinked hard. “Uh … maybe so. Maybe so. Alexandra was so young and pretty, though, nothing fake about her. Meanwhile, the crystal con man and some old friend of Violet’s are both here, selling themselves as the ones to move in and keep the house and cats going after she’s gone.”

*

The usual suspects were gathered around the island that was Violet these days.

“Mister Midnight!” the sick woman exclaimed when Temple introduced Matt Devine.

“You know my radio program?” he asked, taking her frail hand.

“Oh, I listen to you every night you’re on. Tell Ambrosia her voice and the music she plays just float the pain away.”

“That’ll mean a lot to her,” he told Violet.

“Oh, you’re wonderful, too. I can only think that if you’d been on the air when I’d had my little spat with Alexandra you might have talked me past my … selfishness and anger. She died so tragically and so young. Could Ambrosia—?”

“She’ll dedicate a song to you and Alexandra tonight,” Matt said.

Temple was glad she’d told Matt Violet’s family history.

Meanwhile, Freddie had pushed herself into place behind Matt, so when he turned to give Violet breathing room, he was flat up against her formidable form, and trapped.

“Mister Midnight, wonderful to meet you. I’m a dear friend of Violet’s. Freddie LaCosta.” She drew him away from the bed and Violet’s hearing. “If you could publicize the All Creatures Arc, it’s a very worthy cause. ‘No Needy Creature Turned Away’ is our motto. And, of course, Violet’s leaving her estate to a cause instead of a person would be so wonderful. You might mention that on your show.”

“It’s not ‘my’ show, Miz LaCosta. The producers have all the say on that. I’m sure I can talk to them about your idea, though. It’s a hot-button topic, animals suffering on the home front when people are spiraling out of financial control.”

“I’ve done some talk radio myself,” Jayden said, extricating Matt from Freddie’s clutches into his own expert hands.

Temple took advantage of Matt’s celebrity and people skills to occupy everybody in the house—except for the cats—while she explored deeper into the terrain.

Furry feline sides massaged her ankles all the way into the kitchen, but they were fewer than during her last visit. Gleams of reflective irises from hidden cats led her through the dim dining room, as she sought to get a firmer sense of Violet, her house, the many cats, and what anyone would really want here beyond the opportunity to become an instant heir.

Older Sunbelt homes tended to be dim interior mazes that beat back the heat. She was glad when she finally found a light to follow, a flickering flame.

The source was a huge, fat, decorative candle, maybe nine inches tall, on a black wrought-iron stand.

Hearing the steady murmur of voices from the main room, Temple found a round plastic control on the nearby wall and turned up the rheostat until there was light enough to see by without alerting the residents. She stood in an octagonal hall between the public rooms and bedroom wing, where one wall was a “shrine” to Alexandra.

The exquisite custom candle was diagonally striped in soft pastel shades, with white butterflies drifting upward against the watercolor hues.

Its strong flame illuminated the life-size stylized color portrait above it of a young woman’s face and shoulders. She seemed to breathe in the flickering light, making Temple jump a bit, as if she were meeting a ghost.

As she examined the photo, she saw that Alexandra’s face was perfectly made up, the thin eyebrows and lips both sharply arched, eyeliner and eye shadow and lip gloss impeccably applied. This must be what a twentyish Savannah had looked like.

The expensive candle sat on a carved Asian chest. Behind the doors elaborately inset with mother-of-pearl, she found several photo albums. A quick flip-through showed childhood photos of Alexandra, tapering off in young adulthood. In many photos, Alex was dressed in glitzy dance-recital costumes, always an ultrafeminine child, although in a more wholesome way compared to today’s tweens, who emulated the ultrasexy Pussycat Dolls.

This “little doll” of a child and young woman reminded Temple of Savannah’s doted-upon “accessory” pets.

Oddly enough, there were no cats in any of young Alexandra’s photos, no pets of any kind.

If Violet and her daughter had become estranged, as the boyfriend, Rowdy, had said, Alex’s sudden death would have been doubly devastating. Hadn’t Savannah mentioned that Violet’s cat “collection” started when she took Alexandra’s cats after her death, that Violet even thought Alex could “come back as a cat,” and started taking in strays? Probably that conviction was the first sign of mental failing.

So now, facing her own death, Violet wanted the cats she believed might “forever” harbor her daughter’s spirit to be kept in this house for as long as they were alive, to the last one. She must hope something of the love mother and daughter had once shared would survive through them.

Temple shook her head at the futility of family feuds, between Violet and her siblings first, and then with her daughter. Now, the bereaved mother had made herself an easy target for the takers of the world.

Temple replaced the albums and lifted out a box, the kind of pretentious packaging that expensive stationery comes in. When she opened it, she saw newspaper clippings and two slim leather-bound diaries, items she needed to read, not skim.

Still crouching below Violet’s shrine to Alexandra, she followed an instinctive investigative urge. She stuffed the box into her tote bag to examine later, when she had time, and stood.

Violet’s mind had begun unraveling with Alexandra’s death. Someone had wanted Violet alone and isolated in her house and had likely pushed Pedro that night, intending at least to injure him and get him out of the way.

That could have been any man or woman. Maybe among these souvenirs Temple could find a motive more personal than grabbing a confused old woman’s estate.

Because she knew one thing: regardless of whoever among the current candidates Violet was persuaded to make her heir and executor, once Violet died, the cats would be the first to go.

Chapter 36

The French Resistance

Since some unknown person or persons has been making it easy for the inside cats to slip out, I am happy to find that it is just as easy for an outside cat to slip in.

So I am already the inside dude when my Miss Temple and Mr. Matt pay a visit to Miss Violet. I also witness my sweet and straightforward roommate making a surreptitious survey of the house’s nooks and crannies, specifically the hall leading to the closed doors of the bedroom wing.

I must say that I am shocked—shocked!—when I see her prying inside a chest of Asian design under the icon of some saint with a candle burning in front of her. You would think that an intimate associate of a former priest would not tamper with religious artifacts, but then she is an intimate associate of a former priest, and I am not sure if that is kosher. Great Bast never expressed herself on rules of personal conduct. She is a Rules of Prey sort of gal.

However, the search and abstraction of evidence is smoothly done, thanks to the fact that humans can tote objects by other means than their mouths. That gives them great versatility.

So, once she and Mr. Matt have made their adieus to the folks in the front room and are gone, I resume my mission.

First off, I look up my inside guy, Maverick.

Being shades of brown, he comes and goes in the dimly lit interior like a shadow.

“Psst!”

I nearly jump out of my best satin-lapelled suit down to my skin when he ambushes me in the kitchen.

“How goes it,” he asks, “with our exterior brethren?”

“And sisters,” I add. Or is that “sisthren”? One never knows when Miss Midnight Louise is listening, although I have her stationed outside.

Maverick shakes his head impatiently at the fine points. He would not be so rude were my own fine points at his throat.

“What do you want in here?” he demands. “There are no resident black cats. You will stick out like a sore dewclaw.”

“I need to get the Ashleigh sisters out now. It will be a delicate extraction. I have scouted a work-crew outbuilding near the flood channel where our homemade clowder can shelter until the evil afoot here is rooted out.”

Maverick eyes the heaped bowls of Free-to-Be-Feline that now outnumber the cats around the place.

“What can they all eat and drink in the wilderness?” he asks.

“We have scouted a leaking water pipe near the flood channel, and Miss Midnight Louise is a very vigorous, ah, cook. If you like desert sushi.”

Maverick nods sagaciously. “Sushi is good. Miss Savannah has brought us boxes of it lately.”

“Where are the sisters?”

“With the greater number of people coming and going, they have hidden.”

Oh, Great Bast’s earring! I will not only have to convince them to accompany me into the great outdoors, I will have to find them first.

In minutes, Maverick and I have searched the house, floorboard to furniture, to no avail. Even the occupied main room, which he covered because he’s a known resident, is not hiding the Persian sisters. We are stumped.

Then I recall rule number ten of feline behavior. If a door is opened, you are through it, and the less you are noticed, the better. That is how all Miss Violet’s cats are wandering out of the house, through deliberately ajar exits. The Ashleigh girls would never venture outside alone, though. I rush to the hall and employ my street-sharp shivs as a crowbar under the Asian cabinet doors.

Presto, pussycats! Four fluorescent green eyes blink back at me. They slipped in when Miss Temple turned her back to slip the purloined goods into her tote bag. I was so busy watching her, they even evaded my keen private eye.

“Bonjour, chéries,” I say. “I have come to escort you out of this unhappy domicile to a fine new nightclub down the street. It serves sushi.”

“Oh, Louie,” says Yvette, forgetting her snarled hairdo. “You look very handsome in your freshly washed tuxedo.”

“And,” says Solange, “Miss Savannah often brought us sushi when we were with her.”

“Well, you are with me now, mademoiselles, and we have only to slip outside and be on our way.”

Solange’s pretty face looks worried. “Oh, Louie. I do not know if we can, without permission.”

“Of course you can,” I say, nudging each along by the shoulder. “You are French. And so am I.”

Chapter 37

Prime-Time Tail

Max sat in the rented winter-gray Prius almost as dark as the night itself and wondered if he’d ever had this thought before: Molina had been right.

Grabbing Dirty Larry and marching him into her house had had its satisfactions, but following the undercover narc now that he knew Molina had him under surveillance made the job much harder.

Nobody ever expected a tail to be driving a Prius, though, making an ecological statement. Max also wore a funky little tweed cap, one that a guy who played golf or listened to folk music might wear.

“Layers,” Gandolph had always said. “The best disguises have layers.”

If Podesta was in danger of noticing the guy in the Prius, Max could doff the cap, circle back from a different direction, and still get in some useful tailing time.

One thing he knew: Dirty Larry was indeed dirty. He’d lied to Molina three nights ago at her house. Not all the time, about everything, but about a lot. Max could hear a lie the way musicians hear a single sour note.

Cynical C. R. had taken everything either of them had said with a grain of salt. Max wondered what the R stood for. He could see how someone with a first name like Carmen could have been kicked off the law-enforcement career ladder. He thought of the opera. Opera? Did he like opera? Most men would think of some hot Latina chick.

Larry had been visiting the scenes of the Barbie Doll Killer’s two Vegas crimes. Max saw the pattern early and kept the Prius on the farthest circling shopping-mall roads. Larry’s big, bruising seventies Impala made him easy to be seen despite the deep-bronze-brown body color. D. L. expected to be predator, not prey. Visiting crime scenes was an uncool thing to do, especially now that he knew he’d been watched. Serial killers did that sort of thing. They couldn’t keep away from the stage of their secret triumphs. They drove around at night.

So did cops.

And ex-magicians.

Max noticed the Impala disappearing between rows of parked cars and toddled the Prius—not his speed—along the access roads toward an exit.

He caught the car’s taillights accelerating onto the freeway and had to goose the Prius’s gas pedal, cheered by the swift, if quiet, response. Dirty Larry was either trying to lose any tail or was feeling a need, an intense need.

Holy St. Mackerel! Was he following a killer to a new crime site?

*

Ten minutes later he was playing catch-up, as Larry left the freeway on an exit he’d never taken before. Max’s heart wanted to race in time with his car engine, but the damn thing was too quiet. He was on the trail of something dark, something secret in Dirty Larry’s life, he knew it.

The scene at Molina’s house had made Larry less cautious, not more. Max sensed an emotional ebb and flow in the man’s driving that said he was losing control. Max was Irish; he understood how charm and fury could coexist. Podesta. Dirty Larry’s father had to have had Italian or Sicilian blood, but something stubbornly Celtic was in there, too. Maybe Scots.

They were driving through a gently aged neighborhood, passing the occasional corner church or convenience store at the bigger intersections. Max doffed the hat, sat it like a memorial on the Prius’s passenger seat, and felt a moment of grief too dark to bear.

Not too close, a voice in his head cautioned. Not now.

He forced his hands to relax their strangling grip on the steering wheel, even as Dirty Larry’s wallowing Impala took a wide, sloppy left into a small parking lot.

Max and the Prius cruised on by, eyes and headlights front. Max glimpsed a long, mostly one-story building, institutional yet in a residential neighborhood. New, but pre–Great Recession. Blond brick, lots of outside security lights, damn it.

Max checked his watch: 9:30 P.M. Even late suppers are over and TVs are on prime time. He spied the flickering, cozy halos in almost every window. An apartment building? One-story?

He parked the Prius on a side street and shut down everything, silent-running motor, headlights. No radio. And waited. A half hour later the bad-neighborhood rumble of Dirty Larry’s Impala notified him his subject was leaving the property.

Max knew he was now trailing a “subject.” He waited ten minutes then guided the Prius around to the front portico and the central two-story core of the building, where matte steel letters over the entry doors read ST. ROSE’S NURSING HOME.

Max frowned and parked the Prius right out front, where it looked very at home. He paused in leveraging his legs out of the driver’s seat, still a slightly hard physical—and a very emotional—move for him, when he paused to lean back to reclaim the tweed hat.

A wee dorky look would do for him here, he thought.

If things had worked out differently in Belfast, he might have been visiting Gandolph here, or vice versa. Garry, I hardly knew ye.…

The large lit circular lobby echoed his footsteps, magnifying the minor hesitation in his gait.

The woman at the desk looked up with compassion on her face.

Every little bit helps, Max told himself. “Dashing” was not his high card at the moment.

She had soft, pretty features and was in her late fifties. Her name tag read BARBARA. Max checked the clock above Barbara’s head: 9:40 P.M.

“Yes? Visiting hours are almost over,” she told him, “but you have a few minutes.”

“Sorry I’m late,” Max said a bit breathlessly with the shade of a brogue. “I’m from out of town … the country, really. My international flight was late and I missed meeting my cousin Larry at his condo to drive here together.”

“What a time you’ve had of it, Mister—?”

“Randolph. Larry’s last name is Podesta. I don’t know the room number—”

“You just missed Larry. He’s such a regular. Most people would give up after a couple years. Not Larry. The room is in the left wing. Follow the green stripe in the tiles. She’s in room six.”

“Thank you,” Max said. “I’ll, uh, catch up with Larry later.”

He began hustling down the hall, his mind going faster than his legs. She? A couple years? An ailing mother with Alzheimer’s? He did not want to feel sorry for the man or feel like a creep for faking his way in here.

“Mister Randolph,” the receptionist called sharply.

What the hell? He turned. Had Podesta come back for some reason?

She was still alone at the desk and smiling at him. “Do you need a cane? We have plenty.”

“Ah, no. Thank you. You’re very kind and perceptive, but I need to learn to do without.”

She nodded. “You don’t need very long with Teresa, just to feel better that you’ve seen her and can tell your cousin so.”

Max moved on toward room six.

Creep, he berated himself. He was glad he couldn’t recall what ruses he’d used in his previous life of counterterrorism. Sleeping with the enemy had probably been one; Molina had been right. Certainly he’d done just that accidentally his first time out, with Kathleen O’Connor. And maybe again, with his partner in escape, Revienne.

This was a top facility. Spotless. No usual urine smell—and he had empathy for that now. Only Febreze, as in a modern morgue. Cheery decor and colors, an air of attendants near but not hovering. Just the kind of place he’d put Garry in rehabilitation if … he’d survived.

Max slowed to approach the door numbered six. It was always hard to seem normal around the gravely ill, but he guessed this lady’s comprehension was pretty nil, and his visit wouldn’t alarm her. Old people can be as trusting as children if their minds have decamped.

In fact, he almost jumped a little when he spotted some stuffed animals inside—a pink tiger and a blue whale. Could this be a child?

He paused in the open doorway, aware that a nurse would be doing a bed check soon. Any minute. He’d have to do some fact-checking himself, on the patient’s relationship to Dirty Larry Podesta, for instance. The sly nickname seemed obscene in this pleasant place, with its very serious reason for being.

He let his eyes pan up from the foot of the bed to the frail patient in it, her thin hair still showing the morning’s brush marks, her face funeral-parlor composed, only her arms visible under the flowered hospital gown, as thin and angular as a high-fashion model’s.

He recalled Revienne’s anorexic sister, the suicide.

For this girl was not a child, but she was wrenchingly young, maybe in her late teens.

And cradled in her left scarecrow arm, wearing something sassy, shiny, purple, and Lady Gaga, lay a late-edition Barbie doll.

*

Max Kinsella could have used that cane now. He sank onto the visitor’s chair. And just looked.

“I tried to prepare you, Mister Randolph,” a voice said behind him.

He turned to find the receptionist in the doorway. Those rubber-soled white nurses’ shoes had come up behind him as silently as an assassin’s. Did she suspect something?

“Aren’t you supposed to be at the desk?” he asked.

“I had someone watch it. Not everyone who visits can deal with patients in a coma. Did you know her?”

“Not since she was a child.” Liar.

“I was worried,” she said, “the shock might impact your injuries.”

“Now I see,” Max said, realizing she considered him a sort of patient, too. “The cane.”

She eyed his legs. “Was it an accident?”

“Ye-es.” Not quite true either, but “murder attempt” was not a useful conversational gambit.

“Both legs?”

“Yes.” What a relief to be honest with this damn saintly woman. “A couple months ago. I was, ah, in a coma for several weeks. In … in Europe.”

“You came out all right?”

“Memory issues.” Another honest answer. Wait! He could use that to pump her.

“I don’t even remember Teresa’s full name. Just saw her as child. Playing. Running.” Scum.

“Oh, such a shame. Teresa Paddock. She only has a disabled grandmother and her stepbrother left. Horrible case.”

“Accident?”

The nurse’s eyes avoided his.

Max knew just what to say. “Larry’s not aware of the extent of my injuries. Coma. The memory loss. I don’t want to ask too many questions, make it worse for him. I’ve been overseas on a job, for, oh, before Teresa was struck down. What is it now, how long?”

“More than five years. She’s been here two years.”

He joined her in regarding the girl, shaking his head. “Somebody … did this, didn’t they?”

“It was in all the papers. Horrible. In the west shopping-mall parking lot. Attempted strangulation. Someone came by. She lived. Just.”

Max’s recent memory dominated mind trolled for his former deductive processes. Eureka! He visualized puzzle pieces dropping like manna from the heavens above, assembling visually above his head. Dirty Larry. His stepsister. Attack. Mall parking lot. Barbie doll.

Dirty thoughts assembling. Beautiful young starstruck stepsister. Hanky-panky. She had to be shut up. Had to hide a motivated murder inside a storm flurry of mystifying ones. D. L. went into undercover police work, could go anywhere, unwatched … unlike an ordinary partnered cop. Oh, my God. Looking at this … broken doll of a young woman in her pink-and-blue nursing-home bed and thinking these things brought a fog of pollution into the room.

“Mister Randolph? Maybe the facts are too much for your own condition.”

“No.” He shook his head, violently. “The facts are never too much. Has the attempted killer not been caught?”

“Never,” she said, sighing deeply. “And there’ve been more deaths. The papers call them the Barbie Doll Killer’s work.” She nodded at the doll in Teresa’s arms. “She had a big Barbie collection. Dreamed of stardom the way kids do these days. American Idol. Anybody can be rich and famous in an instant. It’s so innocent and tragic. Young girls today have no notion of the dangers in the world. They go from Barbie dolls to Pussycat Dolls.”

“So her parents were absent?”

“I don’t know the particulars.”

I will, Max thought. He checked his watch.

“I need to go,” he told her.

“I give you a lot of credit for having the will to see her when your own strength has been so compromised.”

He stood, stumbling a little. His limbs liked to “fall asleep” on him still.

She offered a shoulder.

What a woman!

“If I felt twenty years younger, I’d ask you for a date,” he said.

She chuckled, being the one with twenty years on him. “I don’t date younger men.”

They walked out together, the clock above the reception desk showing the big hand on twelve and the small one on ten.

Max pulled out the Prius Smart key with the car-rental logo on it.

He had a feeling this was an occasion when his old self would amp up the charm, leave the lady with a false sense of almost flirtation. Charm was a tawdry bauble compared to compassion.

“Thank you, Nurse Barbara,” he said. “My friend … in my accident … died. On the spot. Head trauma. If he’d lived to recuperate, this is the kind of place I’d have hoped he could have come to.”

“What a lovely vote of confidence, Mister Randolph. I do hope I’ve been of help to you tonight.”

“More than you’ll ever know,” Max said.

*

And than I deserve …

Max sat outside in the car, brooding. Gandolph had teased him during their journeys about Irish dark nights of the soul.

That veteran nurse had been right the moment she set eyes on him. The recent trauma marked him and had affected him far more than he’d been willing to believe or admit.

Apparently, he’d developed quite a conscience while in his coma. He’d recognized a certain automatic, ruthless survival instinct in himself while on the run in Switzerland. Now, supposedly “safe,” he recognized another restless, driving need … for honesty. And … connection.

Not gonna happen in Las Vegas as the odd man out, he told himself. Too little too late. All you can do is work for the “man,” who in this case is a woman, keep out of Temple Barr and Matt Devine’s way, get the guy who put that girl into permanent Barbie dolldom, and save the only people in town he did know from the walking, emotional kill zone that was Kathleen O’Connor.

He pulled out his cell phone and checked the last photo, luckily taken before he’d sat down by the bedside and the receptionist had come in. The camera had captured a head shot perfect for ID purposes, a sleeping Teresa who looked almost normal.

Imagine being tucked away for eternity with only a Barbie doll for company.

Chapter 38

Rafi, with Fries, to Go

“McDonald’s?” Molina frowned up through her sunglasses at the familiar golden arches over the outside eating area where they sat.

“At least,” she went on, between sips of the chain’s Starbucks-busting McCafé Latte, “Matt Devine would meet me someplace atmospheric, like the Blue Dahlia, when he’s asking me to give him special information. Temple Barr even shows up at headquarters politely asking for an audience.”

“The Blue Dahlia, huh?”

Max Kinsella’s secretive smile was meant to rattle her, and it did. Who the heck had been talking to him about that place?

“I picked someplace cheap because you’re paying.” Kinsella kept his own sunglasses cast down to his paper cup, his eyes, like hers, slipping sideways to check out the other customers.

“And what’s with the Hawaiian shirt?” she asked in a retaliatory attempt to annoy. “The midday sun forcing you to abandon your signature black?”

“‘Loud’ is always the best disguise. Besides, I lost my wardrobe in a hunting accident.”

“Most amusingly put.”

“I’m glad you and the home closet confirm black as my signature in my previous life. I’ve been instinctively avoiding it since I got my second lease on a memory.”

“So ‘Las Vegas clown,’ aka rainbow vomit, is your new look?”

“I’m making sure not to have a ‘look,’ especially now that Larry Podesta will require my constant attention.”

“Since when? What about watching Rafi?”

“I suggest you put him on Dirty Larry, too.”

“Oh, he’d like that.”

“That’s why he’d be good at the job.” Max made a face at his strong black coffee and set it aside.

“Since when are you directing my surveillance needs?” Molina asked.

“I’ve, ah, found out something pretty damning about our mutual object of suspicion. Until this, I’d thought it could be some misdirected mini-obsession with you personally.”

“I’m so flattered.”

“Well, you had me pegged for that role, and I don’t find myself so inclined now, so I must not have been then.”

“Not necessarily. Anyone with a police-work history would not confuse sexual stalking with romance, Kinsella. I always knew those home invasions were threats.”

“You weren’t too plain about the incidents. Better come clean now.”

“Why?”

“Then I’ll shock you to your menswear socks and tell you the truly horror-movie discovery I made about Dirty Larry. First the incidents.

“So,” he said, enjoying the topic, “you sing somewhere in vintage velvet. The singing detective. Not new.”

“I’m not doing that anymore.”

“But your first sign of home invasion was when an extra vintage velvet gown showed up in your bedroom closet.”

“Right.”

“Too bad my memory’s on the fritz. I have a feeling I’d know where to get more of those velvet gowns for you, wholesale. I don’t suppose you have any photos of you got up as Carmen. That would be worth a thousand words.”

“Sorry, no souvenir pics. Carmen was a live, private gig. I didn’t even allow them to use one of those cheesy chanteuse portraits behind glass outside the place.”

Max framed her face with his thumbs and forefingers like a director. “Taken at a noir angle, red lipstick, and a black Dahlia kissing your … left cheek, like an exotic jungle spider.”

“You don’t need a memory. Your imagination is off the chart to begin with. I sang, all right? The band was cool and the jazz was hot and I had an unused talent.”

“I bet you have many.”

She ignored the smoldering look. Kinsella had always challenged her dignity and need to be utterly professional at all times, only now he didn’t remember that. She did know he’d been relentlessly stubborn then and was now.

“Okay.” She was eager to finish this humiliating confession. “The next ‘invasion’ was a lot more personal. The bedside radio playing when I came home, a box on my bed containing lingerie, Victoria’s Secret or Frederick’s of Hollywood. Then—”

“Which lingerie hustler? There’s a big difference, even Mister Memoryless knows that.”

“What? Red and black and filmy has degrees?”

“Oh, yes, cher lieutenant. You’ve never worked prostitution?”

She held off a retort. They’d put her on hooker duty in L.A., stings to humiliate the rookie who towered over some of the johns, tall enough to be mistaken for a transsexual. Some of that fury at those sexist games rose to choke her for a moment. Her hands resisted strangling the crushable, smooth-coated paper coffee cup.

“Sorry,” Kinsella said. “I honestly don’t think enough. Provoking reactions gets my own brain going full speed again. That was tacky.”

“Agreed. Provocative was always your modus operandi.” She decided to proceed because she really, really needed his info on Podesta. “There was a note inside.”

“That read…?”

“‘You dress like a nun.’”

“Hmm. Why wouldn’t you? Smart, and you are that.”

He started a psychoanalytical riff on her right then. “You wear Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department street-cop khaki in the heat of the summer. I bet it’s navy and other dark neutrals in what passes for winter here. Pantsuits, like our shrewd secretary of state. Both khaki and navy are military colors, subtly authority-enforcing, desexualizing on the job. Also, you wear the men’s socks with your low-heeled boots that keep you from towering too unduly over inferior and superior male officers. Women’s knee-highs are hot and cut off circulation at the … er, knees. Guys always dress for comfort. You adapt to be as neutral as humanly possible. That’s why you needed to let Carmen out to play.”

“How did this become about me and my working wardrobe?”

“Because it is.” Kinsella leaned across the cheesy plastic table. “It was always about you. At least the home stalking incidents were, even the Barbie doll planting job. I wish I could assure you that your daughter’s okay, but it could escalate to involve her. We’ve got one, maybe two, very sick minds loose in Vegas.”

“Dirty Larry?”

“I’m not ruling him out. Give me Rafi. He’s a good man.”

“That I don’t need to hear from you, Kinsella! I’ll be damned. Memory or not, I’ve never trusted you. I’ve always believed you capable of anything.”

“Thanks. Then you know I’m the man for the job.”

“What freaking job?”

“Finding and stopping the Barbie Doll Killer, and saving your butt.”

Chapter 39

Living Doll

“Max?”

“You sound surprised enough to be hearing a voice from the grave,” he told Temple over the phone. “Didn’t I used to call you all the time?”

“Not lately. That’s why I’m surprised.” Temple blinked at her computer screen. “I’m just lost in a multimedia world. Let me save some stuff.”

In truth, Temple had been more than surprised. She’d been almost shocked off her ergonomic office-chair seat. Until this call, Max had stayed away from her, solo, as if operating on another planet since his return.

“What stuff?” he asked.

“Podcasts, Tweets. Web site updates. The public-relations world is getting to be less paper and more screen every second.”

“I’m impressed—and depressed—to hear that, if that makes sense.”

“I get that reaction,” Temple said. “I’m updating constantly.”

“Kind of like me.”

“Yes.” She kept quiet, waiting to hear what Max wanted. He must have called for a reason.

Her silence did the trick.

“Look, Temple, I’ve resolved to stay off your radar, out of your hair, whatever. But I gather your career path has made you good at ferreting out information, and I need some fast.”

“About the shootout in Belfast?”

“Nothing about me or any of my works. I can manage that on my own. Listen, in my quest to er, look up my own past around town, I’ve encountered some earthshaking possibilities involving the Barbie Doll Killer.”

“I see. Why call me? Molina’s really mellowed toward you now that you’ve got your own one-man soap-opera plot going. You should be talking to her.”

“Maybe so. But I need to have a credible case by then. It’s something I’ve stumbled over. I don’t want to accuse an innocent man.”

“Really? You think you have a lead on the killer?”

“Yes, really. What I’m asking isn’t dangerous, Temple. I need information about a nursing-home patient who may have been victim one. Teresa Paddock. The anniversary of her attack is coming up, so the media would likely do an update.”

“Depressingly, probably not, Max. Media has to be so ‘now’ now.”

“And if you could arrange a visit with a nurse-receptionist named Barbara, you’d have it made.”

“I’m supposed to fake an interview with a woman, a girl, the Barbie Doll Killer may have put in a nursing home?”

“No interview needed. She’s in a coma.”

“Max!”

“I know it’s a tough thing to see. I’ve already been there, but I figure you can find out more on the case way faster than I could.”

“Why not use Molina? She has access to police files, not just news trails. Or even Alch? I might be able to persuade him.”

“No. Nothing official. Yet. I can’t tell you why. I was thinking of the time you spent playing girlfriend with Molina’s daughter. Mariah could be in danger. She fits the victim profile. You know that’s been a constant worry.”

Temple tapped a fingernail on the glass-covered desktop. Louie liked to lounge by her computer when she was working, and his nails were death on wood grain. She was tempted to tell Max the new suspicions about who had planted the Barbie doll at the Molina house. She couldn’t. She had no idea what angle he was working, or how much it might conflict with Molina’s concerns.

“Temple?”

Max sounding uncertain was just not right.

“If this girl’s condition made the news,” she conceded, “I can find the basic facts pretty fast. No need for me to visit the nursing home.”

“I want your opinion on the setup there.”

“You’ve seen it, you’ve said.”

“Not from a girly point of view.”

“No wonder you can’t go to Molina.”

“You had a Barbie doll once yourself, didn’t you?”

Temple hesitated. “Yes and no. One. Once. One day.”

“What do you mean?”

“My older brothers commandeered her the day after Christmas for target practice.”

“You have older brothers?”

“Four.”

“No other siblings?”

“Nope.”

“It’s a wonder you’re not following a career in the World Wrestling Entertainment franchise.”

“Or maybe obvious why I didn’t.” Temple brightened. This was her second serious investigative assignment in a few days, this time from an all-pro. “I’ll get back to you as soon as I have all the info.”

She clicked Max off after he gave her the nursing-home address.

By then Louie had appeared from somewhere and leaped atop her desk with enough “English” to spin some of her papers askew.

“Nothing you can supervise, big fellah,” she told him. “Just boring research and a sad visit to a bedridden girl. Must be my week to comfort the sick.”

His huge forepaw batted at her hand, perhaps to offer consolation, but more likely inviting play.

Temple sniffed, now that he had her attention.

“Oooh, boy. You smell like you’ve been laid up in mothballs or something. I hope you haven’t been getting into trouble with that feral colony at the police substation.”

He was not about to answer her, so Temple cleared her screen and started her search engines.

*

She subscribed to the Las Vegas daily papers, so she easily accessed the online archives. The actual search was frustrating and time-consuming. Newspapers had such vast archives, going back to off-line years. She kept calling up long lists of loser leads. And local crime reporting was not the front-page star it once had been.

Temple decided she had time to accede to Max’s strong request that she see the victim, and might as well make it a cheery evening by stopping in at Violet’s, with all the litter and cat kibble the Miata could hold.

She laced up her working tennies and toted a couple grocery store visits’ worth of ten-pound Free-to-Be-Feline bags down to the parking lot.

Midnight Louie seemed to sense she was on a mercy mission to his kind, because he seemed very excited to see the Free-to-Be-Feline bags going out and started supervising the operation. He watched her load up three tote bags at a time, used his private entrance via the guest bathroom window and leaning palm tree to beat her down to the lot, where he sat and watched her unload the totes and load the Miata, with an air of superior satisfaction. Or an overseer.

By the time she got up to the condo for a new load, he was already present there to play major domo.

“These are your people, Louie,” she told him through gritted teeth. “Surely you could do more than show up, show off, and lift a majestic white whisker or two.”

In the end, Temple decided to shower and change before starting her rounds of mercy.

Louie had disappeared by the third time she got down to the Miata, so she pictured him lolling by his personal Free-to-Be-Feline bowl in the air-conditioned condo while she relied on convertible wind power to keep her cool en route in the waning rush-hour traffic.

It was again a gorgeous Las Vegas twilight, caught between sunset and moonrise behind the valley’s western mountains, with the blossoming neon and Vegas Gold lights bursting into being like hot-lava fountains. This was when Nevada nature and Strip showmen collaborated to prove why they belonged together.

Temple sighed as she drove the Strip, letting the wind style her freshly washed curls, thinking about a really relaxing dinner out with Matt after her investigative errands were done.

Best of all, the first errand was a hands-off Max operation, so she didn’t need to feel guilty about doing him this secret little favor. After all, he’d wanted her to do this, not Molina. Hah! Take that, copper!

Temple’s peep-toe pumps with modest platforms and a skinny skirt and silk-blend cardigan set looked business-casual for Vegas, so she’d pass as a reporter. She soon pulled into a tight space near the nursing-home portico. Tight for some, not for Temple’s small car.

She’d brought a separate envelope purse that would hold a reporter’s narrow notebook and papers, and with it tucked under her arm, she entered the fluorescent-lit atrium surrounded by leafy plants.

The late middle-aged woman at the reception desk was indeed the Florence Nightingale of St. Rose’s Nursing Home, Barbara by name tag.

“I called earlier,” Temple said, introducing herself. “I’m with the Review-Journal.” Which was perfectly true; she had a folded copy in her handbag.

The woman shook her slightly silvered head. “I suppose it’s good that someone remembers the anniversary of the attack that as good as ended this girl’s life.”

“Her parents don’t visit?” Temple got out her old notebook and pencil, jotting down details.

Barbara ran through the short, sad details.

“Her mother ran off when she was eight. Her father remarried, but the family was hardscrabble, poor and uneducated. Lived in motels, worked the temporary jobs at the low-end of the Strip, handing out flyers for ‘private dancers.’ Let the kids fend for themselves.”

“Kids?”

“The father had a son from a previous marriage. He went into the military later, was quite a bit older than Teresa. Lord knows what chances this girl ever had in life. She’s a ward of the state now. No wonder she was living in an area where such a brutal fate overtook her. I suppose there’s a kind of peace in her current state. You’ll want to see her, I suppose.”

She started to lead Temple down the hall, then paused to stare hard at her. “Have you ever seen anyone in a coma?”

“No, but someone I know was in one recently for a few weeks.”

“And recovered and became functional?”

Temple nodded, carefully. “Memory loss about almost everything before the accident, though.”

“Not uncommon, but the rest … a miracle. Cheer up. Those memory issues can be temporary.”

Somehow Temple was not cheered. Things were complicated enough as it was.

They’d paused beside one of those superwide hospital doors needed to accommodate gurneys, a big blond-wood slab with brushed steel hardware.

“You never saw your friend during the coma?” Barbara asked in a hushed voice.

“No. It happened out of the country.”

Barbara frowned. “Your friend doesn’t happen to be tall, dark, and gauntly handsome?”

“No. No way. No such luck.” Darn that Max! He could make a lasting impression on a Tempur-Pedic mattress.

“His story is oddly familiar to a recent visitor’s case. Well, dear. Sometimes long-term coma patients can look pitiful, but this one’s a regular Sleeping Beauty, a little Kewpie doll, sixteen forever. Pale and peaceful. Is that a comfort or a greater tragedy? I don’t know.”

On that ambiguously encouraging note, Temple stepped into the room.

And stopped.

That damn Max could have warned her. But he wanted her immediate, unvarnished reaction.

“Teresa does look peaceful,” Temple softly told the nurse-receptionist. “Very cared for.” She approached the bed, silencing her heels by tiptoeing. She felt like she was attending a wake. Max could have ended up looking like this, forever.

“She only has one regular visitor, the stepbrother,” Barbara said. “I don’t know if he left the doll for her, or if her parents did before they disappeared. She’s always had it, it seems like. No one has the heart to remove it. We undress and bathe it now and again, just as we do her, daily. They’re a team.”

Temple nodded, hoping her pounding heart wasn’t audible or visible.

“Victim one,” Max had said.

Teresa looked younger than her sixteen years. Had she somehow set off a serial killer? Or had she just happened into someone’s path when he’d gone psycho for some reason?

“Very sad,” the nurse said, the cliché really the only comment possible. “I imagine a reporter must see a lot, that is.”

Temple nodded and backed away, noticing the vase of fresh flowers on the bedside table. She smelled the small tea roses nestled among bigger scentless blossoms, daisies, and carnations.

She didn’t take an easy breath until she was back outside and under the well-lit portico, trying to recall which slot in the dark parking lot beyond held the Miata.

Parking lot. Parking lots, plural.

They were the favored killing ground of the Barbie Doll Killer. The news reports said Teresa had been attacked in a shopping-mall lot, and that was five years ago, before the current fad of auditions for reality TV were everywhere.

Temple skittered fast to the spot where the Miata was barely visible between two oversize pickup trucks. It would be murder backing out past those behemoths without getting her taillights dusted by some passing speed demon.

Parking lots were unsafe in so many ways.

Temple was glad she always put up the car’s top when she parked. She was happy to be back in her small automotive cave, safe, awake, too old to attract the Barbie Doll Killer. Of course, everybody took her for younger. At least her hair wasn’t the blond it had been dyed during the teen reality-TV show, speak of the devil.

She backed the Miata out of its slot, cautiously, slowly.

And a good thing.

A big ole car from the gas-guzzling decades rumbled past with its self-advertising engine. She didn’t know if guys who drove giant trucks or road-hogging rust buckets irritated her more.

She braked to watch the arriving car cruise by in her rearview mirror. The portico lights made the driver’s profile into a sharp silhouette, a familiar one. There was nothing wrong with her memory. What was he doing here? Following her? Creepy.

And then Temple knew. It was the anniversary of Teresa’s attack and the faithful stepbrother would be visiting, for sure.

Dirty Larry Podesta had a very close connection to the disabled girl.

That was why Max couldn’t use Molina or Alch to research her background and the case. He needed to know more before he brought the police in on it. So he had used ever-eager-to-crime-solve Temple Barr.

Dirty Max!

Chapter 40

Boxing Day

Dirty Larry and his truly disturbing connection to what might be the first Barbie Doll Killer victim was best left to pros like Molina and Max, Temple decided.

She had her own case to solve.

When she returned to her place she left a long phone message for Max, with the particulars of Teresa’s background and attack and a sarcastic “Thanks” for sending her in blind.

Teresa’s history, though, had uneasy echoes in Alexandra’s life and death. Temple was starting to get a vague vision of a possible nightmare: two young women, one dead and one as good as, both within the geographic operational area and time frame of the Barbie Doll Killer. Vegas and Tucson. And maybe Jayden’s Sedona, Arizona, too.

Alexandra, though, had died from a fluke and had been much older than the BDK’s teen victims. Somehow, though, Alexandra still felt like a victim to Temple, of her mother’s ambitions and control, if nothing else. Could Alex have had a secret advocate who was bringing grief to her mother in revenge?

Temple decided to reexamine the “treasure box” of Alexandra’s life that she had “borrowed” from the hall shrine. Taking it had been a dumb move. Who did she think she was, Nancy Drew?

Well, yeah.

Violet’s health was so fragile. Temple should return these keepsakes fast if she couldn’t find anything productive here. Once the will was signed, everything in the house would belong to whomever would inherit on Violet’s death.

Temple settled on the living room sofa, Louie by her side. She frowned sternly at him. He never did her the courtesy of lowering the Free-to-Be-Feline bowl a few healthy nuggets while scarfing up the tasty seafood toppings, even though she changed the Free-to-Be-Feline twice weekly. Not one nugget.

She certainly hoped to find a missing nugget of a clue in the box she’d left on the coffee table.

Temple picked it up with a forbidden thrill, knowing she was acting on her nosy reporter’s “need to know” instincts. That was why she loved vintage clothes and objects. They all had a history and told a story and sometimes hid enchanting echoes of their pasts and their owners’ lives.

This box was the size of a ream of paper, but much lighter. The heavy cardboard was covered in a cream-colored textured paper, so the box was tailor-made for holding heavy cream stationery … and then mementos after the letters and notes had been used and forgotten. Temple let her fingertips caress the surface.

Nobody bought items like this except when stumped for a present for someone you didn’t know. Temple remembered being fascinated as a kid by the decorative boxes that notepaper and envelopes came in. She’d claimed them for holding her own treasures when they were empty.

Nowadays, greeting cards talked, sang, and showed minimovies, and people sent e-cards or “gifts” via online social-network sites.

Still, there was nothing like opening a sensual-feeling box, wondering why it had been kept for so long and what was inside. Poor Teresa was almost a human treasure box, hiding the last thing she’d ever seen, the image of a murderer.

Temple had already leafed through the loose photos of people she didn’t know, but now she carefully opened the two leather-bound diaries with gilt-edged pages and weighted satin ribbons for bookmarks. The first entries dated from Alexandra’s death, or, more accurately, her funeral, but they tapered off in both books after twenty pages to sporadic notations, mostly when Violet found a new stray cat.

Again and again the hard-to-read handwriting—in actual ink, probably from an expensive fountain pen bought just for these diaries—expressed love and loss and regret. Violet begged forgiveness for that “disastrous trip to Tucson,” for being “wrong.”

Temple sensed a terrible break between mother and daughter just before Alexandra’s sudden and tragic death. No event or other person was mentioned, just how, after her daughter’s sudden death, Violet had taken Alexandra’s Whisper and tuxedo cat, Rebecca, and Buttercup and her four yellow kittens back to Las Vegas, where Violet pledged to keep them together and cherished in her house until her death and beyond, so they all—cats and mother and daughter—could be together until the last one left “to go to the place you are and where I hope you are happy and getting along well.”

Later entries, Temple found, were all about adding cats to the retinue.

“I know you sent this poor homeless tabby to me.” “I love them so, as I love and miss you so.” And finally, the latest entries: “Did you come back to me as Pancake? Let me know. She is a lovely taupe stripe and so sweet and came home a day after her surgery. Sadly, she had four kittens coming, but she needed to be fixed. I hope—oh, I didn’t think! Were you one of her kittens? Oh, my darling daughter, I never dreamed you would leave me.”

Temple had to set the volume aside to avoid blotting the ink. Now that she’d read how much the cats meant to Violet, she understood why the old woman was trying such far-out ways to fend off death. That someone was already letting the cats out showed no one could be trusted to follow Violet’s wishes and keep the cats together in that house until their natural deaths, will or no will. It was an unrealistic hope.

It also showed Temple that Violet was not only surrounded by indifferent strangers or greedy hangers-on, but by someone truly mean.

Someone vindictive. Someone who wanted Violet’s last moments to be ones of repeated losses as, cat by cat, her beloved charges vanished. And she could do nothing about it. The dirty tricks were like tormenting a paralyzed person.

In pushing the diary away to save it from her tears, Temple saw something slide askew from the endpapers.

Opening the book again, this time from the back, Temple discovered three four-by-six-inch photos, printed the old-fashioned way. Two were of a beautiful blond young woman, slender and smiling, her face and hair and fingernails perfectly done, playing with a yellow-striped cat and its four tiny kittens.

The third photo was of a Barbie doll in the original box, the familiar features smiling through the cellophane window, hair blond, face perfectly made up under a cotton-candy cloud of shiny, wavy, Vegas-gold blond hair. That was the only photo with identifying writing on the back: “For My Beautiful One and Only Angel Barbie.”

Temple shuffled the photos back to the two showing Alexandra. Long neck and blond hair, blue eyes. Violet had not only started confusing her daughter with stray cats, she had always equated her to Barbie. Her own collectible precious baby doll.

Temple grabbed her netbook and did a search for “angel Barbie doll” that led her in seconds to the exact image in the third photo, the 1988 Happy Holiday Barbie. That explained the huge eighties silver bow in Barbie’s hair with its dab of red-and-green decoration. Mistletoe.

According to the Web site, this model had the “typical 1966 superstar face” and was considered the first “collectible” Barbie, setting off a buying frenzy among adult collectors, which would raise prices to incredible heights that later declined. Still, Temple saw that a 1988 Happy Holiday Barbie without the all-important Antiques Roadshow “original box” was worth two hundred dollars.

Had Violet begun collecting Barbie dolls for her baby daughter and kept collecting them, like the cats, even after her adult daughter’s death, as somehow embodiments of Alexandra, as she thought the cats were?

How crazy-sad.

That didn’t mean that someone crazy and not-so-sad didn’t have it in for Violet.

Temple rounded up possible suspects in her head.

Violet had made her money selling real estate and could have made enemies there. Someone burned in an old real-estate deal, say. Maybe the person had overpaid for the house Violet sold them, and that’s why they were haunting hers during her last days.

Or one of Violet’s spurned family members could resent not being her heir and had come secretly to Vegas to take revenge on Violet’s helpless rescue cats. Even a school rival of the impossibly pretty and perfect Alexandra, done up like a little doll from her earliest years, could harbor a hatred of the doting mother. Those folks would be hard to track … unless they had left clues.

If it was murder, the death of Pedro Gomez also seemed mean, almost childishly so, like a hard school-yard push. He was the last long-term employee loyal to Violet and her cats. So he was both a barrier for getting at Violet and another great loss during her last days. Where were the cats going?

What would be the object of killing Violet? She was already dying.

The motive had to be tormenting Violet, taking everything she had, with her knowing and hating it even in her foggy state. It had to be a personal vendetta.

That scheme would involve the moment she agreed to name an heir-executor and signed the will, which could be happening right now. And then that homicidally mean someone would lean close and tell Violet that no cat would be saved, that her house was history, an on-the-market property. That any assets would be given not to the family members she felt had betrayed her, but to the chosen person she had selected to carry on her hopes and dreams, who had been betraying her far more.

Who would that someone be, and why so vindictive? Freddie, the former great friend who’d known Violet long enough to build up a grudge? Jayden, the New Age con man who had spent several years operating in Arizona before coming to Vegas a year before, and who could have some hidden personal connection to Alexandra? Violet had come to depend on him most, so knowing he’d most manipulated her would hurt the worst.

Temple grabbed her car keys from the coffee table and headed to the parking lot and the Miata. She had to get the “treasure box” back and check on the situation.

Whatever evil under the sun and the moon was going on, it was happening now in the house on Aloe Vera Drive.

Chapter 41

Convoy: Beware of Bears

Max spotted Temple flying out the side door of the Circle Ritz, short skirt swirling, low-heeled mules practically skidding off her feet as she headed for the Miata wisely parked near one of the lot’s three security light poles.

Her headlong commitment and those lithe bare legs made him smile.

Miss Mini-Tornado.

He was driving his previously owned black Volkswagen Beetle, now that Garry’s laptop computer had coughed up the names of his banks and numbers of his accounts. The humble Beetle offered surprising legroom for a tall guy. Max had read on an airline magazine that Tommy Tune, the six-foot-six (and a half, supposedly, sans cowboy boots) Texas tap dancer and Broadway star, drove one.

That had given him the idea, now that legroom was an issue. Also, the Beetle provided a literal low profile for tailing work. Max figured he’d be spending a lot of time getting up to date on his history in Sin City. But he wasn’t here for testing the Beetle’s legroom. Or legs.

Idling throatily along the side street was a much more serious car than either he or Miss Whirling Dervish Barr drove. A deep-bronze vintage Impala.

Max had always figured Dirty Larry Podesta for a man with an agenda that went far beyond police work. He’d followed the guy here on his own instincts, not Molina’s instructions. And he found this destination as sinister as that possible personal link through Podesta’s stepsister to the Barbie Doll Killer.

He especially didn’t like that Impala waiting in the dark to pounce on the Miata. He might not remember his ex, but, by God, nobody was going to mess with her. Including him.

And, he was thinking, she hardly fit the profile for the Barbie Doll Killer victims. She’d left him a message saying that she’d seen Larry, not vice versa, at the nursing home. Still, he couldn’t help worrying now that sending Temple to the nursing home Dirty Larry had visited had somehow drawn the undercover narc’s attention to her.

Maybe something the receptionist had said on Larry’s next visit had tipped him off to who the “visiting reporter” might have been. Had he “made” Temple as a likely possibility for uncovering his real aims? Or as a likely victim? Was Larry an avenger or a serial killer? His job description well suited him for both roles.

No more deaths on Max’s conscience, that was his obsession now, besides finding Kathleen O’Connor.

The Beetle swooped out of the lot after the Impala got into line behind the Miata. Max loved being invisible and underestimated, not doing the magician act out front, but pulling the strings from behind the curtain.

He hoped the sainted Gandolph had been right, as usual. Miss Temple Barr was too easy to underestimate. He hoped so with all his heart and soul, if he had any left, because his instincts told him this unintentional auto convoy was headed on a straight line to Showdown City.

He’d observed, at least, that Temple had her seat belt on. Good girl! It was going to be a bumpy ride. He had his on, too. You couldn’t save someone else if you didn’t care enough to save yourself.

Bitter lesson learned.

Chapter 42

Little Girl Lost

“Do you know where your girlfriend is?”

Matt blinked at the cell phone. He was already getting into that Zen place for the Mr. Midnight Hour tonight and didn’t recognize the incoming number—or believe the voice he recognized.

“Carmen?”

“Molina. ‘Where is your favorite fiancée?’ I should have said. I’m in a squad car on my cell phone. Well?”

“Temple? Where is she? Uh. We’re not a Siamese-twin act.”

“Yet. Are you at the Circle Ritz?”

“Copy that, lieutenant.”

“Don’t bother trying to be cop show–ish. I need you to check her condo and then her parking space. Don’t hang up.”

By then he was shouldering through his door and racing down the exit stairs one floor and along the curved hall to Temple’s door, which was locked. And then clawing out his key and using it, and shouting as he raced straight through to the balcony with its view of the pool and parking lot.

“She’s not here. Nor the Miata either. What’s wrong?”

“It’s what might be wrong. I’ll be swinging by in two minutes. Be down in the lot, and meanwhile be thinking of where she might have gone.”

By the time he got to the street exit from the Circle Ritz parking lot, a black-and-white had pulled up parallel, blocking it.

“Hop in back,” Molina ordered through the slightly opened passenger-door window.

Matt did, disconcerted by the hard plastic bench seat and the thick aluminum and Plexiglas barrier separating him from the front seats. He was starting to feel like he’d put on a mobile RoboCop suit.

Molina’s face came close as she opened a small sliding glass window in the barrier. Now Matt was feeling like he was in a high-tech confessional.

“Two damn CIs I’ve got on shadow detail,” she told him, “and they both go off the grid. Not answering contact. Kinsella at least left me a cryptic message to check with you on Temple’s whereabouts. Tell the officer at the wheel where to go.”

Matt took in the back view of a uniformed cop with white-knuckled hands on the steering wheel. Kinsella was acting as a confidential informant for Molina? Who was the other one?

Molina prodded him. “Where did she go? I’ll bet Temple’s little lambs will be right behind. And one could be a big bad wolf, not to mention what’s likely waiting dead ahead.”

“She’s been visiting a sick old lady lately.”

“Specifics, please. Where?”

“It’s 1405 Aloe Vera Drive,” he yelled out, glad Temple had taken him there once. The driver wheeled away, punching buttons on her computer for the best route. Matt could see the computer better than the cop, but Temple’s advertised “bumpy ride” had finally materialized.

Molina’s fingers curled around the side of the open Plexiglas window between them. “Sorry for the lousy accommodations. A yardman was found dead a week ago at that address. Which precious ‘friend’ asked PR woman Temple Barr to get involved in a murder case?”

“Savannah Ashleigh.”

“Get serious.”

“I am. Savannah Ashleigh hired Temple to find out why her dying aunt’s yardman ended up dead.”

“Pedro Gomez.”

“I don’t know his name. He was found dead at the bottom of a concrete flood channel backing onto Savannah’s Aunt Violet’s property.”

“Coroner says that could have been accidental,” Molina said. “Or maybe murder. And you let your future bride run off and get herself involved in such things?”

“She’s her own woman. And … I was out of town.”

“At least you will stay out of this when we get there.”

“No. I’ve a right—” Matt pushed against the back car door. It was locked, from the front seat.

“You have a right to remain silent, after I’m through with you,” Molina told him. “So. What did Miss Barr think she was investigating? She surely didn’t think she could solve a man’s death?”

“Weird things were going on at Savannah’s aunt’s house besides the old guy’s death. Violet is terminally ill and she rescued a lot of stray cats. She hates her relatives and plans to leave her house, her assets, all her worldly belongings, to whoever will swear to keep the house and its animal residents going after her death.”

“Until the last dog is hanged.”

“Cats. They’re all cats. Until the last cat has gone to its reward.”

“Which could be years, during which any tangible assets of the estate would be burned off.”

“It’s an addled old woman’s dying fantasy.”

“It’s a con artist’s dream. They don’t usually murder, though. Anything more than cats, that is.”

“Temple says some of Violet’s cats have been let loose, but none found killed. Nearby or visibly. That Temple knows of.”

“What Temple knows of would fit in a thimble on this case. Like I said, Devine, you’re confined to quarters when we arrive. You wouldn’t even be here if you hadn’t had clues to what your loopy fiancée thought she was up to.”

“It’s more than money and cats and old ladies?”

“Could be.”

Matt had been watching the route. He kept his mouth shut because he’d been there once and couldn’t think of a faster way to go.

The car lurched through the night streets far from the Strip. He couldn’t help thinking of Max Kinsella’s recent, last desperate race through the streets of Belfast that left him bereaved. Oh, God. Was it his turn?

“Pray,” Molina urged in an undertone. “That may be the best break we get tonight.”

Chapter 43

Goldilocks Boxed

Temple parked the Miata three houses short of Violet’s.

A housebreaker doesn’t pull into the driveway in the light of day, and it was nicely dark here. She’d never noticed before that the streetlights ended long before Violet’s house at the end of the block, the end of the line. Maybe someone with a softball aim had knocked out the nearest lights.

Temple needed more sensible shoes in this desert-dusted area, and was glad she had been wearing kitten-heeled mules when she decided she had to make a house call. Easier to tiptoe in.

Supposedly, a night home-health-care aide was on duty. Temple spotted a faint glow through the deeply shadowed windows as she approached. Of course she wouldn’t disturb Violet at this late hour, 9:00 P.M.

She couldn’t see into the dark around the side of the house or if any vehicles were parked near the abandoned garage.

Temple wasn’t sure how she’d enter without disturbing the residents. If she had to, she could come up with some song and dance for visiting so late, but she really wanted to slink in. She needed to revisit the Alexandra shrine now that she knew more about the strained relationship between Violet and her daughter, and to return what she’d taken.

She grabbed the tote containing Alexandra’s memory box and soft-shoed her way up the street. She imagined she resembled someone visiting the sick with gifts of cologne and hand lotion maybe or, in this case, cat treats.

While Temple paused on the stoop in the dark, weighing options, the front door swung soundlessly open.

A pale feline muzzle peeked out and then a calico cat eased out, more white than red, black, and orange in the interior light.

That was how some of the cats vanished! The front door was left unlocked and just a teensy bit ajar.

Temple knew from Louie’s window and door-massaging ways that a cat’s hopeful rub back and forth could sometimes edge them both open wide enough for an escape. She ached to corral the elusive calico, but a protesting cat in her arms windmilling all four clawed limbs would not aid her mission.

Reluctantly, she moved the surprisingly well-balanced door open with her forefinger, wide enough to slip through sideways. She turned to pull it almost shut, just to the point of making a telltale noise, then eased off.

A television cast a flickering rainbow of light in the main room, turned on for a sleepless Violet or the night attendant’s diversion.

Temple was able to tiptoe through the few slumbering cats into the dining room and then through to the hall, led by the flickering light of the eternal candle lit in Alexandra’s memory.

She bent to open the chest doors so she could replace the box. Nothing looked disturbed since she’d last seen it. Violet, unlike the sleeping cats, had not been ambulatory for some time.

Temple straightened to regard the three closed doors that led off the back hall. A bedroom for Violet. A guest bedroom. And …

She felt so Goldilocks for a natural redhead.

The door to the left opened as easily as the heavy-looking front door. They made houses true when this one was built. Level. Doors and windows opened easily, were not off-square and prone to stick or to make unseemly noises.

A huge Spanish bedstead declared this the master bedroom. The mattress was far too high for an invalid, hence the hospital bed in the living room.

This was Papa Bear’s room.

She tried the far right door next.

Mama Bear’s lair, the guest room, not crowding the residents’ area. The candlelight, amazingly helpful, showed a queen-size bed without a headboard, with a crocheted comforter and two piled pillows per side.

That left the middle bedroom. In this case, Baby Bear’s?

Temple turned the doorknob and pushed. She wasn’t surprised to find it locked.

Satin place ribbons had bookmarked the two diaries she’d spirited away. One had a key tied on to weigh it down between the pages filled with Violet’s lines of love, regret, and despair.

Temple had a hunch and had appropriated that key.

It fit exactly in the middle locked door.

Temple turned it after much jiggling, as if it hadn’t been unlocked in a long time.

The door edged open and she walked through, feeling she might be violating a sacred place. Even without any interior light, the candle flicker from the hall reflected from all three visible walls surrounding the white wicker “crown” of a single bed headboard fit for a princess.

Temple’s vision was confused by a surfeit of pink and white, and walls that were an eye-dazzling surface of myriad miniature windows.

And through each tiny cellophane window shone the face of a differently coifed and appareled Barbie doll. All exquisitely tiny and beautiful. All frozen faces of Alexandra, the perfectly imagined daughter who’d fled her controlling mother to lead an imperfectly imagined life and death. Far away.

Barbie doll boxes towered alongside and over the girly wicker headboard; they covered every wall, floor to ceiling, row upon row.

Temple stepped into the weird reflected aura of shining blue eyes and glossy red lips and Vegas Gold locks to turn and examine the door wall, also paved in Barbie doll boxes.

Mint condition.

In the box.

Temple recognized several of these blond babes from her Web perusal, spotting a few brunettes and redheads and bronze-haired later models among them. Even redhaired Deirdre of Ulster, from the Legends of Ireland sequence. When Violet had called her that, she took it for raving until she checked the Barbie sites. This was a complete collection, lavished on Alexandra as tributes and role models—and every last one of them never opened.

Not by Violet and certainly not by Alexandra. Temple guessed Violet had surrounded her daughter with temptation and forbidden her to open it. This entire room was a tribute and a tomb to a princess in a tower of her mother’s making.

And … this was the prize of Violet’s “estate.” A collection worth a couple hundred thousand dollars or more in its pristine completeness. These tiny boxed showgirls were Vegas Gold, but they’d never been anything a real girl could play with or live up to.

While Temple stared up, turning around and around, the bedroom door had opened wide without a sound.

She turned to face full into it.

And the human figure it now framed.

Chapter 44

Away All Cats!

Of course I am stuck eight feet up in the air in the faithful mesquite tree outside Miss Violet Weiner’s house.

In the dark of night.

I pass the time by counting the varieties of predatory desert nightlife that come out when the sun goes down. Coyotes. Bark scorpions. Tarantulas, now in their mating season, and giant desert centipedes, both about six inches wide or long, however you want to reckon it. I reckon it as too big to tango with. Then there are rattlesnakes and my big brothers, mountain lions and bobcats, not to mention an endless variety of lizards.

Some of these my kin can eat. Some are poisonous and we would not want to. Most of them can eat us.

I am uneasy about leaving our makeshift cat clowder alone on the retention-basin land, but at least human predators do not usually go there. In fact, more of that lethal ilk is inside the former safety of Miss Violet’s house, now that someone has been leaving doors and windows ajar so that the feline population has been steadily declining, much to her somewhat foggy dismay.

At least so my inside dude, Maverick, reports.

Hark! What light at yonder kitchen window breaks?

“Psst! Daydreamer. Here’s a youngling for you.”

Maverick’s longhaired face has side whiskers like a Victorian gentleman does, or Brother Bobcat. Under it peeks out a smaller, striped version.

“Succotash,” Maverick reports, “is afraid to climb down the tree. This is the first time I have gotten him to the window.”

Even the most dim-witted human knows that getting a cat or kitten down a tree is a trying task, but this is the most concealed exit route from the house and we do not want the ill-intentioned human inside, or Miss Violet, to know we are removing the feline residents for their own safety.

If they make it down the mesquite tree.

By now the youngster is crouching on the broad adobe sill, claws out.

Succotash. What kind of moniker is that? You do not want to be named after something that is eaten when you are going out into the untamed desert.

“Come on, Pops,” Miss Midnight Louise harries me from the ground below. “If you cannot coax a kitten down a tree, make way for someone who can.”

The astute observer will see that I am caught in the middle here. Maverick is the trail boss. Miss Midnight Louise is the cowcatcher, so to speak. And I am the cattle prod.

I lean over the unnerved tiger-stripe. “Hello, Suckie, my lad. I know the ground looks far, but I use a tall old palm tree to enter and exit my exclusive condominium near the Vegas Strip every day. Do you not want to grow up to be a big dude about town someday? So take one little pounce to the tree trunk like it was an unwary mouse, and Uncle Louie will have you on your way to rejoin all your pals in no time.”

“No!” the little bugger yowls. Its small claws curl tighter, seeking purchase on the hard adobe.

I see the next customer already in line, a sleek shorthair dame wearing skintight solid gray velvet and winking at me with one emerald-green eye.

“Come on, Junior. No time for cold feet and fingernails.”

“Uncle Louie lies,” he squeaks. “I have never seen such a scary, dark, and horrible place—”

“Survival of the fittest,” I decree, ducking my head to pick up the impudent kit by the nape of the neck, like his mama had, and flinging him onto a fork of the tree just below me, hind feet first.

“Now, just pretend it is a giant scratching post and skedaddle down.”

By then I am looming over him. His eyes become as round as SpaghettiOs, but all four feet start “swimming” in concert. His tiny claws sound like a very loud zipper opening lickety-split all the way to the bottom of the tree and into the indignant embrace of Miss Midnight Louise.

“He is just a baby,” she hisses up at me, her eyes gleaming as lurid green as a demon’s in the dark.

“He is down, is he not?” I turn to the next customer.

“Now, young lady,” I purr. “Obviously, you will need to put your mitt in mine to bridge the gap from sill to trunk, but I can see that you are no stranger to performing alluring acrobatics on a pole.”

She coyly marks the side of the window niche with her sleek cheeks.

“And what is your name?” I inquire.

“Sirena.”

“And so appropriate. Here you go, Sirena. Just take the elevator to the main desert floor. I will join you later when all my rescue work is done.”

I watch her undulate down like a very furry snake.

When I look back up to the window, Maverick is shaking his head and long spidery vibrissae.

“What?” I ask. “You know the house is no longer safe for this crew.”

“I just hope you know what you and your semiferal partner are doing. My associates are confused and upset at the condition of one caretaker and the sudden absence of another, not to mention the strangers trooping in and out of the premises. Taking all these hothouse homebodies into the wilds is risky.”

“I am experienced in the perfidy of the human animal, and I tell you again, this house is raising all the hair on my haunches. Letting domestic slaves out one by one to drift off and get hurt or killed is not simple mischief. It is malice designed to hurt your beloved caretaker. The other caretaker has died already over that. These sorts of benign humans are hard to come by, trust me.”

“I know things are turned upside down, and our dear lady is unable to pet and feed us, and it is very bad,” Maverick admits, furrowing the faint stripes on his brow.

“At least I have an inside woman.”

“Miss Violet’s niece?”

“No. My faithful red-cream. She is not a partner in Midnight Investigations, Inc., but I have trained her well. She can handle anything, trust me.”

Chapter 45

Showdown at the Shrine

Jayden, his pale clothes looking luminous in the bedroom’s odd, rippling-underwater light, stepped inside.

“You?” He sounded truly amazed. “Savannah’s ‘friend.’ How did you get in?”

“The doors … opened for me. I think it was the cats. They seem to be jumping ship.”

“Maybe, but you’re trespassing. You shouldn’t be here. This is a storeroom. Violet keeps it locked. She’s very sick. She could go at any time.”

“Then shouldn’t you be there, for the signing of the will?”

“That was done this afternoon.”

“So I guess you’ve got nothing to lose now.”

Temple tried to figure out how to push past him. He ignored her accusation and seemed disinclined to move. He, too, was mesmerized by the walls of Barbie dolls in their store packaging.

“What are these things?” he asked. “Astounding. It’s very Kachina-doll, in a totally Vegas sort of way.”

“You’ve never seen this room?”

“Violet had her boundaries. I respected them.”

“As long as they included you, in the will.”

“I witnessed it,” he said, frowning. “You’re a terribly cynical young woman. That attitude will impede your path through life.”

“At least I’ve got a life.”

She regretted pointing that out as his odd-colored eyes fixated on her.

“You’ll be sorry…” he started to say.

And she couldn’t disagree.

Then Jayden bounded forward.

And tripped.

He fell facedown on the hard wooden floor, a ghostly Kachina doll with a dark arrow impaled in his back.

A paler shadow-figure behind him began to weave martial-arts motions Temple recognized from a zillion movies and TV shows and Matt’s shadowboxing by the Circle Ritz pool.

In the faint, flickering candlelight, the arrow in the back she thought had felled Jayden was starting to look a lot more like a … kitchen knife.

“Oh,” Temple said, backing up in the room of Barbie dolls, the cul-de-sac of Barbie dolls, the dead end of Barbie dolls, and probably her.

“Aren’t you pretty?” The man in martial-arts pajamas stepped around Jayden’s bleeding body to follow her retreat step-by-step, advance-by-advance.

“You’re almost as pretty as Miss Angel Alexandra,” he crooned in a phony, scary-soothing way. “Her momma’s joy and puppet. You all just belong in a box, don’t you, girly? All fluffed and frozen perfect, freeze-dried, like Mama’s Alexandra. In a box so they can put you in the ground where you all can rot.”

Oh, my God, Temple thought, who would ever connect the Barbie Doll Killer with Violet and her estranged daughter and her massive and valuable and hateful doll collection?

The man glanced up at the tiny Barbie faces wallpapering the room in 3-D.

And came closer.

“So here you are, too. Up against the wall, like these untouchable dolls. Who said it’s better to have loved and lost? Lost is better.”

“That would be Alfred, Lord Tennyson,” Temple said, her mind flying in three different directions.

One: this man was a killer, the killer. Two: Jayden might still be alive and needed emergency attention. Three: she might not be alive long enough herself to be in a position to help anyone.

“Huh?” the guy said. Lord Tennyson and his poetry had always been quite a mouthful.

“Just saying who said it,” Temple said, retreating. Babbling. “A dead English aristocrat. You might be related. You have a fancy first name. Sylvan. Very … dead English aristocrat.”

Her left leg had stopped against the wicker headboard, beside the piled small pillows in lacy, embroidered shams. For show.

“So.” Temple’s wandering gaze tried to fasten on a better defensive option than a heart-shaped crocheted pillow. “When did you get hooked on Barbie dolls? Aren’t you a bit old for them?”

“Never,” he said. “I play with them. I muss them up, all their pretty perfect looks. You all need mussing up.”

“No thanks.” Temple grabbed a couple pillows, clutched them to her chest like they were a Kevlar vest. “You play rough, Rowdy. When did it start? When Violet told Alexandra she was too good for you? And she left you?”

“Alexandra. No.”

The name seemed to put him off track.

“Oh, wait.” Temple began to see when the anger and madness set in. “Alexandra didn’t leave you. She was taken from you. She died from poisoned drugstore painkillers.”

“We would have been fine,” he said, ignoring the tragedy that had probably set him off, “if the old bitch hadn’t had her claws into her.”

“Like, you were better for her?”

He lunged, as she had hoped.

Temple dropped the pillows to grab the bedside lamp, a ruffle-shaded, Barbie-like accessory, and smashed it into his momentarily parallel back.

“That cut!” Rowdy complained, brushing off the shattered lightbulb shards and pushing himself upright, looking around, not sure which doll had claws.

“It ‘cut’ when Alexandra rejected you after Violet warned her about you.”

Temple grabbed a couple more pillows. There was nothing behind her but walls of insubstantial dolls in cheap packaging.

Rowdy was unarmed now, but she remembered he’d always worked in the construction trade. His short, stocky body must be all muscle, as his mind was all vengeance and spite, nursed for years and acted out in the meantime on all the pretty Alexandra dolls who also dreamed of auditioning for fame.

Temple was betting that Alexandra bought her own Barbies after leaving home and moving to Tucson, ones she could take out of the box and handle and costume. And she also had acquired a cat and kittens she could play with. And somehow she’d acquired a very loco local admirer whose seemingly simple, earthy ways had intrigued her for a time but who wanted, needed, her complete attention, sans dolls, sans cats.

Or … Rowdy may have never been her serious boyfriend, just someone she saw that she could flaunt at her mother, to reject Violet’s quest for perfection in her daughter’s life.

Temple had to wonder if Violet breathed yet in the main room.

She had to do something.

So she scrambled across the pile of pillows on the bed, pushing them into a white dotted-swiss avalanche behind her. She made the floor on the other side of the bed and ran for the bedroom door, leaping over Jayden’s red-streaked form and out into the hall.

She was halfway through it when the stomping sound of Rowdy’s weird white Oxfords, like forties hepcats and male dancers wore, caught up to her. Her ankles were clutched in two hard, tight, grasping hands. She went down, all at once, facedown, Jayden-fashion.

Temple kept her legs churning like a cartoon character’s, but her hands and wrists had taken the brunt of her weight and burned with sharp, scraping pain.

She kicked loose and scrambled up onto her skinned knees and crawled toward the table where Alexandra’s photo was enshrined. Maybe seeing his “lost love” would slow Rowdy down.

Maybe she could shove the table in front of him and escape to the front hall and through the big, heavy front door and into the dark and lonely street that stretched into desert beyond where Violet has lived and Pedro and maybe Jayden had died and maybe where Temple Barr would be found as another Barbie-accompanied serial-killer victim.

Not while she could stand and shove. Violet was alone now for real, in the main room, with only Temple between her and this madman.

She pushed one side of the chest into Rowdy’s path, slamming it into his hip bones hard enough to jar the contents and knock the breath out of the guy.

With all the cats in Violet’s house, you’d think a few of them could have congregated to get in the man’s way, but Temple was spoiled by having Louie always around as her guardian feline.

Apparently he was out to lunch, and she was on her own.

She spun to rush out of the hall when a flare of … flame caught her eye.

The tall, thick candle flickering in front of Alexandra’s eternally youthful features had fallen to the floor, rolled and … caught the bottom edge of Rowdy’s flared martial-arts pants on fire.

Liar, liar, pants on fire.

The fabric was simple cotton. The flame climbed his pants leg, but Rowdy was fixated on claiming Alexandra’s Barbie doll face. He lurched up to grab the photo off the wall, clasped it, then turned to the Barbie doll–lined bedroom, running back into it, reaching for and knocking down any Barbie doll boxes he could, a figure amazingly fast and furious … and quickly being consumed by fire.

Temple stood there panting, torn between where to go, what to do. Violet in the main room? Jayden on the floor, forgotten by his assailant? Rowdy only had eyes for Barbie. For so many Barbies, to be hated, mutilated, destroyed. Even with himself. He was screaming, with pain or triumph, or maybe they were the same thing. The entire room was a bright, crackling backdrop to Sylvan Smith.

Temple dropped to duck as much heat as possible and knee-crawled to Jayden’s feet, half out of the bedroom door. She grabbed his ankles and pulled. Backward, backward. Out of the burning Barbie doll room. She really didn’t have the strength for this, and he might be literally dead weight, except that she’d misjudged him and she could only budge his body a couple inches at a time.

When she looked up for Rowdy, she could see the cardboard and cellophane and plastic and tiny bits of satin and velvet and nylon hair erupting in a final blaze of glory. She could hear the dying Barbies screaming. High-pitched, tiny voices that rose in a silent smiling chorus as they shrunk into floating bits of ember in Alexandra’s girlhood bedroom.

Rowdy’s howling white figure turned black, dancing with transformation and death, and then it was all ashes, like the old nursery rhyme, and all fell down.

The screams continued for a long time, until someone lifted Temple up by the elbows and dragged her out of there with her heels trailing—ouch!—while big moonwalking spacemen smelling of smoke blocked the view of the bedroom and poured out a flash flood of epic Las Vegas proportions into the flames and on the room and all its contents.

Chapter 46

Burned Out

The spinning red lights of three ambulances and two fire trucks, along with the carousel of red, white, and blue flashing lights from two cop-car headache bars made an insane wonderland of the street outside Violet’s house.

Temple had somehow been taken outside, a shivering, bloody, drowned rat. She wasn’t too out of it to spot the coroner’s van among the confusion of vehicles.

Emergency technicians had her sitting on the back edge of one ambulance while they sprayed her with stinging antiseptic and applied gauze pads to all her visible joints.

“Oh, my God. Temple. I couldn’t come over to you sooner. They had me in custody.”

Matt was suddenly beside her, all reaching concern that couldn’t touch any part of her. Only his eyes, which were as burned-out as Rowdy’s last-glimpsed figure.

“Who?” she asked. “Where?”

Then appeared the looming figure of Molina, no Barbie doll she, with news.

“Violet is alive, smoke-inhalation-free, and en route to a hospital. The man in the pale clothes is also alive.”

“Jayden? Or Rowdy?”

“I don’t have a cast-of-characters list, Miss Barr. That will have to wait until tomorrow. The one you were found clutching by the ankles is en route to the hospital. The stab wound in his back missed the heart and vital arteries. The firemen were too late for the other man. Grizzly Bahr has a new Crispy Critter.”

Temple winced. She knew what medical examiners and staff called dead burn victims. It helped them disassociate from the inhumanity of seared muscle and skin.

“She’s hurting.” Matt’s voice challenged Molina. “And she’s the hero of this scene. Get off your high horse and act a little human.”

Temple could have hugged him, except it would hurt too much. Instead, she pushed her lips into a grin and was amazed to find them obeying. Man, she needed moisturizer!

“After all,” Temple told Molina, “I did help ID D. L. and C. B. as possible BD planters at your … um, place of residence.”

“ID? D. L.? C. B.? BD? Are you babbling or just mad?”

Temple realized Molina must have dismissed all thought of that joint attempt to come up with a Barbie Doll Killer suspect now that the actual killer had convicted and executed himself, even that Dirty Larry and Crawford Buchanan had been hot candidates then for planting the Barbie doll in Mariah’s bedroom.

And Molina had much more to worry about now, too.

“That guy … what’s left of the guy in the burned-up room—” Temple choked up from smoke and trauma. “He’s the Barbie Doll Killer.… It’s a long and … winding story, but Dirty Larry … wanted you to smoke the BDK out, and here … I … finally did … accidentally, and—”

The more Temple talked, the more she coughed. She had so much more to say, but tears ran down her face and anything she tried to say was foiled by hiccups.

“So … Violet still alive? And Jayden?” Temple needed to be sure.

Molina gave an impatient nod. “What did Dirty Larry do? To who?”

“Enough,” Matt told Molina. “You can get her statement in the morning.

“If you say so,” Molina answered.

She suddenly crouched down, eye to eye with Temple. “You were ahead of me on all aspects of this case. I don’t know who’s who or what’s what. When you feel better tomorrow, I’d much appreciate being brought up to date.”

Molina stood and glared at Matt. “That okay?”

The glare kind of ruined it, but Temple just blinked, glad to hear the ambulances had so many customers. Her?

She eyed the woman who was efficiently tending her wounds.

“No burns, just scrapes.” The EMT smiled to make such a mild diagnosis in this one case, on this terrible scene. “You can take her home and keep up the OTC treatments?” she asked Matt.

“Absolutely,” he said.

“OTC, is that serious?” Temple asked. She still felt a little … muzzy.

“Over the counter,” he translated. “Drugstore preparations for you, baby, that’s all.”

Temple sighed. She hurt way too much for Walgreens, but she just wanted to go home to the Circle Ritz and rest and sleep and … oh!

“Where’s Midnight Louie?”

“Nowhere on the scene to be found, for once,” Molina declared from on high, now that she was standing again and looming over them.

Temple frowned. “And all the cats inside?”

“Also missing, every damn one. Highly suspicious,” Molina said, “but that just clears up the crime scene.”

“Wait? Violet’s will?”

“No idea what you’re talking about.” Molina grinned evilly, like Cruella De Vil. Or maybe Temple was hallucinating.

“The elderly home owner—” Molina said, “apparently this Violet—was raving about ‘Father Hell’ when she was wheeled away. She couldn’t have been referring to your fiancé. One hopes. You have a lot to nail down after you get your beauty rest and become coherent. Let me know. It might be interesting. Meanwhile, if you’re well enough, the pair of you can join my little private postmortem at the flood-control channel up the street.”

She left.

“Thanks for bailing me out of an interrogation right now,” she told Matt. She sipped the water the EMT had handed her. “There’s a lot more going on here than meets the eye,” Temple whispered to Matt in a dramatic rasp. “Don’t let them shuffle me off to Buffalo.”

“You’re pretty beat up, way more than I can live with.”

“You have not seen ‘beat up’ until I’m left out of learning the real story.”

“I don’t have wheels. Molina hijacked me in the backseat of a squad car. No exit.”

“Really? That was drastic of her.”

“She somehow knew that things were going to turn bad at Violet’s place.”

“I gotta get to the end of the block and find out what’s really happening.”

“I doubt one of these emergency vehicles is going to give us a lift.”

“Oh, no! My Miata keys were in the tote bag I dropped near Alexandra’s shrine, which I’m sure is burned out, too.”

The EMT dredged up a dripping-wet object from the ground. “The fire guys said you grabbed this as they were dragging you out.”

Temple nodded. “I never go anywhere without my tote bag. Maybe the car keys stayed in it.”

Matt felt inside it until he pulled out the keys.

Temple regarded him with pleading big baby-blue-grays.

“Okay. You stay here. I’ll get the Miata.” He picked up her tote bag and headed outside the claustrophobic circle of huge, pulsing, squawking, flashing emergency vehicles.

“Here are three NSAIDs,” the EMT said, handing them over with a paper cup of water. “It’ll dull the pain.” She looked over her shoulder to where Matt had vanished. “So will that.”

Temple felt grateful to have no more injuries than, say, a fall off a skateboard in a flood channel. The kids were always sneaking off to them for practice. Superficial wounds was the term.

The Miata’s low red nose soon threaded through the maze of heavy-duty trucks.

Matt got out to come around and lift her into the passenger seat. Temple had to remember to keep her gauze-covered palms from contacting anything. And her knees would burn like heck when she tried to walk, but she just had to get in and out of the car twice more.

“You’re crazy to take Molina up on that odd invitation. We should go straight home,” Matt told her.

Temple leaned over to inspect his watch face. “Oh. Ten thirty. You have to leave for work soon.”

Matt shut his eyes. Then he opened them and got out his cell phone. “I’ll alert Electra to be there to help you out when we get home. I can make the radio station in fifteen minutes from the Circle Ritz. You deserve to see Molina eat more crow. And I’m curious too.”

*

An oddly unofficial group of vehicles formed a second circle at the small paved maintenance parking lot for flood-control workers at the end of Aloe Vera Drive, directly behind Violet Weiner’s property.

The pale slash of empty concrete riverbed through the desert and the unlit empty acres that constituted one of Las Vegas’s hundred or so retention basins made civilization seem far, far away.

Matt pulled the Miata to a stop next to Detective Alch’s Crown Vic, obviously Molina’s ride home, because she leaned against its side.

Dirty Larry’s Impala looked low-down and dirty compared to the contemporary vehicles. He sat on the front hood, feet dangling and head down, like a juvenile delinquent.

Rafi Nadir’s black SUV was parked opposite the white Crown Vic. Interesting position and effect, Temple thought.

It wasn’t until Matt off-loaded her and sat her on the Miata’s hood that Temple noticed Max standing on the fringe of the group, sans vehicle. They had converged on this site from all directions for an oddly unofficial, but appropriate, conference.

And it turned out that it all began and ended with … Dirty Larry.

“You planted that Barbie doll in my house,” Molina told Dirty Larry. “Was whatever reason you did it worth your career in law enforcement?” Molina moved into close-confrontation distance.

“We burned the Barbie Doll Killer, didn’t we?” Dirty Larry’s words were a mumble, and his cynical, defiant eyes were downcast for once and stayed there.

Temple couldn’t help thinking that Podesta was a latter-day Rebel with a Cause. But what cause, what point?

“You risked more lives,” Molina said. “Miss Barr’s tonight, for one. And you literally toyed with mine by making it look like my daughter was in danger.”

“And my daughter,” Rafi said, moving toward him, fists balled.

Molina put a hand on his arm. Rafi was off the force, too, and had been for a long time.

“You are through on this police force and any other,” she told Larry.

He shrugged. “For what cause? Flirting with a homicide lieutenant with intent to catch a killer?”

This time Molina took an infuriated step toward the guy, and Rafi put a cautioning hand on her arm.

Alch just pulled out his cuffs. “Lieutenant?”

“Obstruction,” she said between set teeth. “Dereliction of duty. Endangerment of a minor. Public endangerment. Give me a minute. How can I count the ways?”

“Everybody might want to cool down,” Max said from his position aloof from the group. “You all could do each other a lot of career damage, and the loose canon is right: the main objective—identifying and stopping the Barbie Doll Killer—is a done deal.”

“And you’re an expert on not doing oneself a lot of damage,” Molina argued bitterly.

“Yeah. I’m an expert.” Max looked over at Matt, holding Temple protectively tight. “You’re scaring the civilians, officers. Hell, you’re scaring me. You better get your stories straight for the paperwork. Petty vengeance is not going to see any of you through.”

They quieted as his words reminded them no one official had acted entirely “professionally” for the past few months.

Matt eyed him curiously. “You’re not furious this guy got Temple going head-to-head and hand-to-hand with a serial killer?”

“You forget ‘heart-to-heart.’” Max smiled at Temple. “Gandolph chided me for underestimating you. I didn’t even remember you at the time. Sorry about that. Look, Devine. You’re an advisor, a mediator. There’s too much fear and fury bubbling under the surface here. Help us out.”

Meanwhile, Temple couldn’t keep her eyes off the case’s odd man out.

It was rewarding to see all the crime-solving pros with their feathers ruffled over little her stumbling across the Barbie Doll Killer, but it was Dirty Larry who’d bullied the others into pressing forward on the case, no matter what.

“Did you know,” Temple asked Larry, “that you messing with the lead detective’s head and maternal instincts to get her personally involved risked making you a suspect yourself?”

“Sure.” He quirked her a smile that could easily pass as a smirk. “Whatever it took.” His glance ricocheted fast off of Molina’s and Rafi’s. “All I ever wanted was the guy who did that to my stepsister—strangled her almost to death and put her in a living nowhere—stopped. I don’t care what happens to me now.”

Another uneasy silence was turning into wakelike solemnity.

“Sure you do,” a voice said.

Molina’s. And she had more to say.

“And you have a lot more to enlighten us on, but Kinsella is right. We all went off the reservation, either on this case or … related issues. I don’t know all the whys and wherefores of what you did, Larry, and we will go over every bit of it, but I still can’t stomach letting you stay on the force.”

Dirty Larry shrugged again.

Temple realized, hey, gosh, he’d probably grown up in the same nurture-starved environment as his stepsister and suffered from the same lack of—ta-dah—that psychobabble favorite: self-esteem. Actually, that terrible crime had motivated him to get into law enforcement and make sure the elusive killer was caught. So he was as obsessive in his way as the Barbie Doll Killer.…

Max was right. Temple was a bleeding heart. She looked over to find him winking at her.

Meanwhile, Matt was giving her an encouraging hug. Ooh, she was going to ache all over tomorrow from doing the Fireman Drag tonight.

“I’ll mediate for you police persons,” Matt said. “Someplace way more comfortable and conducive to compromise than this wilderness.”

Rafi made a considering face and turned to D. L. “There’s always private security work in Vegas.”

“Not Vegas,” Dirty Larry muttered.

Lieutenant C. R. Molina looked so relieved she actually quirked a smile at Rafi Nadir. He did a Dirty Larry and lowered his glance.

Temple smiled at Matt. He took that for an OK to kiss her hard back into the land of the living.… Danger was an aphrodisiac.

“Devine,” Molina said, not commenting on the kiss. But she could have been, Temple thought. “I’ll pick a neutral location and e-mail you. We’ll … put all the pieces together before breakfast tomorrow.”

Matt gave Temple a look. The last thing he needed tonight was an early morning call, but it sure wasn’t going to put a kink in anything. When he turned to lift her off the hood and into the Miata, she saw Max had vanished. Where had he parked, anyway? Had to be mysterious about everything.

Alch caught up with them before Matt could start the car to leave. “You kids. Get outta here. I’ll calm Carmen and Rafi down,” he told Matt, leaning in the driver’s side open window. “You’ll have sane people to deal with in the morning.”

“I don’t know if I’ll be one of them,” Matt answered.

Alch patted his shoulder. “Sure you will. Mister Midnight knows Elvis.”

“You listen to my show?”

“Hey. I work late hours and live alone. There are worse things to do.”

Alch moved back to the trio of boss and her two onetime suitors.

“I’d hate to be in Larry’s shoes,” Matt said, thinking the same thing Temple was. “For someone as buttoned-down as Molina is, she sure has stirred up a lot of sticky man trouble.”

“And then there’s Max,” Temple said as they drove away.

“Max and Molina? Oil and water,” he pronounced.

“Aren’t those both ‘holy’ elements in your religion?”

“Yes, but holy hell in the romance department.”

Chapter 47

Four-Posters and Postmortems

Temple had spent the night in her bedroom with piled feather pillows personally placed by Matt Devine under her knees, back, extended arms, and neck and head.

It was not the setup for a kinky sex scene she’d have preferred.

Electra was sleeping on the sofa bed in the living room, a cell phone call or a hoarse yell away. And Matt was doing his midnight–2:00 A.M. radio show.

She heard him come in about three, whisper with the landlady, and fade away.

She slept what they called “fitfully.” She didn’t know if that meant fit to be tied to a four-poster bed, which she certainly was, or fit to be consigned to a hospital bed, like Violet had been, which she almost was.

She lay there and felt the scabs on her hands and knees forming over the burning skinned portions. She would be her lively, fast-moving self sometime next week. First, came the morning and the Big Reveal.

Temple understood her knowledge and theories were crucial to wrapping up the Barbie Doll Killer case since the murderer was dead. It was just that she had pictured herself, the triumphant but lowly PI, giving testimony in a killer noir-black, witness-stand suit and huge black picture hat. She hadn’t expected to present her case while as scabby as one of her big brothers fresh from the football field with gauze and tapes swathing all joints.

Electra came in at about 6:00 A.M.

“Awake, are we?” She looked from Temple to Midnight Louie, who had commandeered half of her ankle pillow sometime in the night.

“I feel like Mister Bill, the Play-Doh patsy on Saturday Night Live,” Temple said. “He was always being dropped from a skyscraper and cheerfully answering from the sidewalk in a pip-squeak voice. That was a sadistic routine.”

“Of course you feel a bit down,” Electra said, plumping the pillows. “I’ll help you to the bathroom, and Louie and I will look through your wardrobe for something comfy and gentling to your joints.”

“My most flattering clothes are neither of those,” Temple snarled.

Yes, “snarled,” as she limped to the adorably tiny and tiny-tiled fifties bathroom, which seemed bent today on knocking her hard in all her scraped places.

*

Matt picked her up at the front door in his smooth and creamy Jaguar, into which Electra helped her, as if they were about the same age. Actually, Electra was a lot sprier.

“Poor baby,” Matt said, kissing her on the lips, which were probably her only unbruised portion. “Really.”

By the time they got to Aloe Vera Drive, the swath of concrete at the side garage was occupied by a Crown Vic and that’s all. Matt pulled the Jag beside it.

“I’ve got to say the ride is worthy of Saint Peter,” Temple said, leaning her head against the fresh-smelling leather rest, “but the working cops in the Crown Vic are going to Tweet you on it when they leave.”

“I can take it. Or leave it.” Matt shook his head. “The note from the producers made it clear the car was mine whether I ever inked a deal with them or not. I thought consumer confidence was kaput.”

“Not in the big-time media biz, apparently.”

“Frankly,” he said, “your crime-solving exploits are turning too rough for me. I might take that job just to get you and Louie out of Vegas and onto the genteel streets of Chicago.”

She snorted at that characterization of Chi-Town, which she was meant to. “I blundered into this last mess,” Temple said. “The temptation of one-upping Savannah was too sweet.”

“Yeah, that’s what I mean. There are too many temptations in Vegas to keep you safe, and maybe me, too.”

“Nothing I can’t handle,” Temple said firmly. “I do think we need to make a quick trip to genteel Chicago, and maybe Minneapolis, before you make a decision on your career.”

Matt frowned, but before he could say anything, Temple went on.

“Hey! Maybe we can drive. Road trip. Impress the elders with your new wheels.”

He laughed. “I don’t want to impress anyone besides you. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to meet the future in-laws on either side. I’m just a part of the talk-show package. It’ll take a while to put it together.”

“Chicago, here I come. For a while. Now, let’s get this not-genteel business over.”

Matt came around the car to help her out.

“I’d rather have taken a bullet,” Temple complained, walking gingerly up the walk to the house with her knees bent to prevent scab-pulling.

“Don’t joke about it,” Matt warned her, “or I’ll be booking the first flight to O’Hare so you can meet my family. They may be a little screwed up, but at least they’re not deadly.”

She shrugged, working on a basketball guard’s shuffle that should see her through the next few days. “I’d love to meet them anyway, and dysfunction can be as deadly as dedicated criminals. Let’s put Chicago to rest until this is tidied up.”

“I’m amazed Molina called a meeting in Violet’s house, after the fire.” Matt opened the screen door and guided Temple through the ajar front door into a campfire aroma of embers and ashes.

She kept her eyes off the area leading to the rear of the house, then blinked after a few steps inside. The shutters on the main room had been folded open, admitting a flood of light. The empty hospital bed and its attachments still occupied the room’s center, but now she could see sofas and chairs, mahogany ones with brocade upholstery under the various covers that had been turned back.

Molina and Alch were waiting on a camelback sofa like an old married couple. Matt saw Temple established on a Queen Anne chair and sat in its mate.

“This is it?” Temple asked. “Just us?”

“Consider it a visit to Headquarters West.” Molina eyed her critically. “You look a mess, like Mariah after a nasty skateboard accident when she was ten. She really strutted those scabs in the school yard.”

“Unfortunately, lieutenant,” Temple said as stiffly as she walked, “I don’t have a school yard to impress.”

“Well, you impressed the hell out of me,” Molina answered. “I don’t know how you did it, but the firefighters said you saved Mister Jayden some nasty facial and hand burns by dragging him out of the most intense part of the blaze.”

Alch was nodding soberly behind her.

“Where’s poor Violet?” Temple wondered, eager to get their attention off of her.

“Nursing home,” Molina said. “Her friend, Freddie LaCosta, arranged it. After the fire and Jayden’s injury, Violet seemed to give up the ghost. And … all the cats are gone, spirited away, I guess.”

“Freddie? I considered her a suspect, or at least a hopeful heir.” Then Temple remembered. “Jayden said he witnessed the will yesterday, before the fire. I guess he wasn’t a greedy would-be heir, after all.”

“You seem to have thought everybody was a greedy would-be heir,” Matt said.

“I was … investigating. I was supposed to be suspicious.”

“Exactly right, Miss Barr.” Alch nodded firmly as he came to her defense.

“So exactly where is Violet now?” Temple asked.

Alch gave a shrug. “St. Rose’s Nursing Home. Once the fire forced her out of the house, she didn’t want to cling to whatever was in it.”

Temple inhaled too much secondary smoke as she sighed. “How ironic. Violet is under the same roof as a Barbie Doll Killer victim, Larry’s stepsister, Teresa Paddock, and she doesn’t even know it. Nor does poor Teresa. Lord! I’m tired of calling people ‘poor.’”

“You can call me ‘poor,’” Molina said, “because I haven’t a clue to what you’re talking about.”

“Wait a minute,” Alch said. “Now I remember. When Dirty Larry first showed up off the narc beat, he was using the last name of Paddock. Don’t you remember, Carmen?”

“I go by ‘lieutenant’ in front of civilians. And Paddock is his stepsister’s surname.”

Alch grinned with gusto. “Exactly. He either took on his stepfather’s name or he’d been using Paddock as a tribute to his stepsister, in a way. He switched his narc pseudo to Podesta later when he got the idea of riling you up to get on the Barbie Doll Killer’s trail, so the connection wasn’t evident. Names were close enough we wouldn’t notice. Those guys have identities all over the place.”

Molina nodded, looking shell-shocked.

“We can trace that through later,” she said. “Now I need to know who was the man who died in the fire? What was his connection to Violet and her daughter? Who the flying sweet potato was named in the will that this Jayden witnessed, and where is it?

“And, by the way, why have two cats entered the house in the past two minutes?”

Temple looked down, expecting black and black. She got the white cat who was probably named Whisper and a yellow-striped one, both sniffing cautiously as they prowled the room’s perimeter.

“Maybe they sense their enemies are gone.” Temple thought for a moment and then asked Molina, “Is there anything left of the Chinese chest in the hall outside the bedroom wing?”

Molina passed the question on to Alch with a quizzical look.

“The fire commander said the house’s adobe walls made it into a little Alamo,” he said. “The structure resisted burning, but not the contents, including the perp.”

Temple winced at the memory of the burning man. She’d seen the first flames snatch at his heel and pants leg, and then … he’d run right into the flammable temple of Barbie dolls.

“Can someone check if there are any photo albums or a box in that Chinese cabinet?” she asked.

“I will.” Matt jumped up, treading to avoid circling cats, now four.

“I had a lot of time to think about this last night,” Temple said.

“We’re not interested in your nocturnal adventures, or the lack of them, Miss Barr.” Molina gave a sardonic lift of one eyebrow.

“Yes, I can imagine pillow talk with a hard-muscled, black-haired, alpha male wouldn’t hold much appeal for you.”

Alch’s chuckles made Molina shut up. “That Midnight Louie is an all-round lie-down guy, all right,” he said. “Seriously, Miss Barr, superficial injuries usually hurt more than deeper ones.”

“Over the short term,” Molina added, inadvertently reminding them of her own knifing. She ought to know.

“Where’s, uh, Larry?” Temple asked. Calling him “Dirty Larry” wouldn’t help his case right now, and she sympathized with his misguided crusade after having seen his stepsister’s condition at St. Rose’s.

“He’s not in on this,” Molina said. “It’s us and you. Your required chauffeur, Mister Devine, is here to be seen and not heard, like a good boy.”

“An errand boy,” Matt added just as sardonically, returning to the main room carrying the photo albums and box.

Temple gestured for him to give them to the couple on the sofa.

Her gauze-swathed hands still weren’t good at keyboards or paging through ephemera, as papers and photographs were called, meaning they were dust in the wind of most lives, precious only to those they involved for only as long as they lived.

“Wasn’t there a large portrait photo of a young woman above the chest?” Temple asked.

“It was fire-singed and water-soaked.” Alch shook his head. “Pretty much just disintegrating cardboard with a fading image on it.”

“The candle that started the fire was right in front of it,” Temple told him. “It was big and long-lasting, but it burned night and day and had no one to drain off the pooling melted wax since Violet became bedridden.”

“Candle. Like a church shrine,” Molina said. “Missus Weiner was asking about ‘Alexandra’s portrait,’ and her cats, as she was transferred to a gurney.”

“Those photo albums have lots more photos of her daughter. Violet will want them. And her diaries, in which she fretted about needing to arrange for her cats to live on in the house after Alexandra’s death six years ago.”

“Won’t happen,” Molina said. “No will was found in the house, just a business card from a downtown law firm. I reached the guy earlier this morning. Although he prepared the will and mailed it to Violet a couple weeks ago, unless it’s signed and witnessed, his copy means nothing.”

“Jayden told me last night the will was witnessed,” Temple said. “He acted as one of the two needed witnesses, so Violet must have signed it just before this all blew up.”

“Jayden isn’t able to be interviewed in the hospital yet,” Molina said. “That’s why we’re all here. Just what is ‘this all,’ and how did it ‘blow up’ into a stabbing, a fire, and a death? With you in the middle of it?”

Matt sat forward in his chair to accept the photo albums Alch handed him. More people were looking at and thinking about Alexandra than since she had died.

Temple sat back in her chair. As a TV reporter, she’d been used to doing “stand-ups” for the camera. This would be a “sit-down,” but she wanted to make the report as clear and factual as she could.

“Here’s the story. The young woman in the photos is Violet’s daughter, Alexandra. Something led to an estrangement, and Alex lived in Tucson, where she met a guy named Sylvan Smith.”

“Sounds like another con man like Jayden,” Molina commented. “They always have fancy names. Looks like, estranged or not, the daughter was into the same shaky New Age trends and hucksters her mother was.”

“Maybe they both were susceptible to smooth talkers,” Temple said, “but Sylvan Smith was a construction worker they nicknamed Rowdy on the job, an all-American blue-collar type, a hard worker but not overeducated. More beer than wine. Violet disapproved of him. Probably wanted Alexandra hooked up with a professional guy.”

“This is our dead guy?” Alch wanted to establish that first.

“This is your Barbie Doll Killer.”

“No way,” Alch said. “Of course, roofers are itinerant workers. It might explain the geographical range.”

Temple shrugged. “That’s what I suspect. I also think that Alexandra was his first victim.”

Molina had been shuffling through the Tucson newspaper clippings in the box and lifted them out. “These news stories make her the victim of a drugstore remedy tampering.”

“Rowdy was smarter than he looked.” Temple resumed her emphatic but deadpan on-camera delivery style, and it did seem to command attention from a difficult audience. “What a way to conceal a murder. Rowdy could slip potassium cyanide into an easy-to-open capsule, probably something herbal. Alexandra would be into that, like her mother. Over-the-counter remedies are all caplets nowadays to prevent tampering, after the first headache-remedy tampering murders back in the eighties.”

“Aren’t you a bundle of information?” Molina was not impressed. Probably found on the Internet and highly suspect. “Why would he kill his girlfriend?”

“For the same reasons he picked his victims and repeated the pattern. Alexandra was Violet’s Barbie doll. You can see it in the hyper-girly way she was dressed all through childhood and in the three photos at the back of one of the two diaries.”

Molina quickly checked both leather-bound volumes and found the adult Alexandra photos. “Definitely aspiring-model material. And this wigged-out Barbie doll model?” She held up the photo of the 1988 Happy Holiday Barbie.

“The first two photos of Alexandra playing with her cats came to Violet from Tucson. I think the Barbie doll photo was sent to Violet’s daughter in Tucson and she reclaimed it on Alexandra’s death, along with her daughter’s cats. Alexandra was probably collecting Barbie dolls as an adult, but Rowdy took them before Violet arrived, and kept them to … experiment on, and leave at his death scenes later.”

Matt couldn’t contain himself any longer. “That guy would be sick beyond belief. He must have hated the mother and possibly tried to kill her through her daughter. And the dolls.”

“Voodoo Barbie dolls,” Molina said. “I like it. I’d most like to see you try to sell that theory to a prosecuting attorney, Miss Barr, but that’s not possible now.”

“It makes sense if you realize that one of the three rooms beyond the hallway shrine to Alexandra was kept locked. That wrinkled satin-ribbon bookmark in diary number two is kinked because a key was tied to its bottom. I thought at first it was a weight or a commercial decorative touch, but it unlocked the door to Alexandra’s bedroom.”

“The fire room.” Alch’s seamed forehead grew more rumpled. “A bedroom is a psychological battleground in some murders.”

“Enough already, Morrie.” Molina was growing impatient. She was the one used to holding forth on sequences of events.

Temple decided she needed to present the heart of her case, what she had discovered here last night in Violet’s house, besides heartbreak and delusion and missing cats.

“I opened the bedroom door and walked in. The walls were covered from floor to ceiling in stacked Barbie doll boxes, maybe two layers deep. I recognized some of the most collectible models from the Web.”

“Obsessive,” Matt said, “but a motive for murder or attempted murder?”

“They’d be worth plenty, the whole collection, maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars, but that’s not the point. Nobody knew about them but Alexandra and Violet. Ironically, any greedy hangers-on would have had a jackpot, but the collection is only ashes now.”

“Not even a shapely Barbie gam left to ID,” Molina put in. “All the melted goo in the room puzzled the fire investigators.”

“What are little girls made of nowadays?” Temple mused. “Not sugar and spice, but skin-soft vinyl bodies and synthetic hair. Not even the rare porcelain-bodied ones survived?”

Molina shook her head. “Must have shattered on impact from falling to the floor. All that cardboard and cellophane packaging was highly flammable tinder. Those hundreds of glamorous dolls melted like the Wicked Witch of the West. So why was the collection secret? What is the point, Barr?”

Things were getting tight when Molina dropped the “Miss” from Temple’s surname.

“The point is that Violet never let Alexandra open a doll box. Can you imagine how frustrating that would be to a kid? No wonder she grew up into a Barbie kind of girl and woman and auditioned to become a star in her own right as a model. Alexandra probably began listening to her mother’s put-downs of Rowdy Smith and dumped him.

“He found her shallow, and superior, so his infatuation turned into fury, such fury that he needed more than the clever, undetectable murder to end it. He needed to destroy all the Barbie doll women out there who in his mind would reject him again and again if they lived to be able to do it. He started to practice defacing the Barbie dolls and then targeted Alexandra/Barbie look-alikes auditioning for fame on the reality shows. The first he attempted to strangle was Teresa Paddock, Larry’s stepsister.”

Matt and Molina had both been nodding agreement during Temple’s recital.

“Meanwhile, he moved to Las Vegas on the pretext of being near the bereaved Violet, who still had no time for him. But he clung on, playing the good guy and waiting for Violet to weaken so he could undo her fondest hopes. He’s the one who was letting the cats out, leaving Violet bereft as he had been and blaming her dislike of him for Alexandra’s death.”

Molina stirred on the sofa. “What would you call that, Mister Devine?”

“Turning the victim into the villain. Someone else is always responsible for the person’s destructive actions.”

“Rather like,” Molina pointed out, “the nut-job abuser who blamed you for convincing his wife to leave him through your radio counseling show. Your job seems almost as perilous as being a public-relations expert.”

She pointedly returned her high-intensity blue gaze to Temple.

Golly, that laser-light stare would convince Temple to confess to something, even to acting as a private investigator for Savannah Ashleigh. She dearly hoped that little detail never had to become public knowledge beyond this small circle.

“Tell us,” Alch urged, “how you ended up an action hero and saved Jayden’s skin while the Barbie Doll Killer went up in smoke.”

“I’ll need an official statement taken at the office,” Molina said. “Meanwhile, the jury of two is out on Larry Podesta, so we need to know all the facts you think you know.”

“I think Rowdy Smith killed Pedro. He wasn’t just letting cats out. He was trying to kill them so their bodies would be found and word would get back to further torment Violet. Pedro probably caught him attempting that by the flood channel.”

“Speaking of cats,” Molina interrupted, frowning at her khaki denim pants legs, against which a pair of tortoiseshell cats was rubbing … in between long, connoisseur sniffs of same, “where are all of these coming from?”

“They’re all Violet’s. They’re coming back from wherever they went when they were let out. They smell your own housecats on your clothes. It’s nothing personal.”

“It’s damn annoying.” Molina bent to brush the red and black hairs from her khaki denim pants leg, but they clung like burrs.

“It’s a great sign that some of Violet’s cats survived Rowdy and the fire,” Temple said. “To answer your question, Detective Alch, I was probably becoming too visible a snoop when I returned the box and albums I’d ‘borrowed’ to take home and study. Rowdy had probably arrived before me to find Jayden announcing the will had finally been signed, the last thing he wanted, a prospective heir-cum-executor taking over the care of Violet and the house.

“I’d, um, discreetly entered the locked bedroom and was standing there bedazzled by those walls of Barbie dolls, realizing the three cases were linked.”

“Pardon, Miss Barr.” Molina’s voice was steel silk. “Just what ‘three cases’ are you referring to?”

“The Barbie Doll Killer case and death of Violet’s handyman…”

Temple knew better than to say in front of Detective Alch “my case” investigating Pedro’s death. It was bad enough that Molina knew she’d signed on as a PI for Savannah Ashleigh. “And the attack on Larry’s stepsister. I’m betting Teresa was found with that Barbie doll and it was taken for a talisman of hers personally, not a sign of a freshman killer’s contempt, dropped before he could violate it, as well as before he’d actually strangled Teresa quite to death.”

Matt’s hand reached the unbandaged top of her left hand, ringless until she healed enough to ditch the dressings and the messy ointments. “And I think I handle some dark subject matter on my radio show,” he said.

“The successful investigator,” Molina answered him, “has to face the blackest depths of human nature and speculate from there.”

Alch jumped up to dislodge a longhaired brown tabby cat that had come up on the sofa to settle in his lap and listen attentively to the proceedings.

“I heard that one called Maverick,” Temple said. “All the cats are coming back. Isn’t that interesting?”

Alch sneezed. “Not really. Tell me about the showdown at the shrine.”

So she did, and had them all on the edges of their seats, even Lieutenant C. R. Molina.

Who, of course, had more questions.

“Why did Rowdy go off on Jayden? He followed the man and stabbed him with a”—Molina paused—“a kitchen knife.”

“With the will signed, Jayden probably ordered Rowdy out of the house, and he snapped. Rowdy probably went for Jayden with a kitchen knife, and he fled. Then they both became mesmerized when they discovered Alexandra’s bedroom door was finally open and glimpsed the Barbie doll–box walls.

“Jayden considered himself Violet’s guru. But if he was a witness to the will, he couldn’t be the executor-heir. I suppose he’ll tell us who was when he can talk.”