Cat in a White Tie and Tails

Chapter 33

Temple’s Table of Crime Elements

“Nice place,” Max said, prowling around behind Matt’s red suede sofa. “Should I recognize it?”

“Not at all,” Temple said.

They’d “convened” at Matt’s apartment. Her suggestion. It held no unsettling memories for Max to unpackage. Matt would be on his own territory. She was the most adaptable person present.

Max finally settled his long frame on one of the upholstered side chairs, leaving Temple and Matt the sofa.

“How’d you end up at the Oasis pirate ship attraction?” Matt asked.

“Gandolph—” Max paused to eye Matt. “You know better than I remember that he was my former stage partner in Europe and mentor at counterterrorism work for half my life. I suppose he was my spiritual father.”

Max’s blue eyes had become soft-focus as he looked inward, a new habit for the Max Temple had known. “He’s the only person I still feel … felt a real personal link with.”

Temple couldn’t stop her eyes from flashing to meet Matt’s at the same moment. Max’s insight and declaration, if accurate, cleared away a ton of emotional sand traps looming between Temple’s former and current fiancées.

Max was still figuring out his reactions. “He’d been born Garry Randolph. I keep calling him by his stage name as a magician and his civilian name interchangeably. Maybe it’s because I’ve lost part of my mind.” He made a humorous grimace. “Or maybe it’s because I can’t separate what he meant to me.”

“He needs no further introduction here,” Matt said. “I get spiritual fathers. I also get very unspiritual faux fathers, like Cliff Effinger. You know, if that Oasis drowning case ceases being ‘cold,’ this new death there could make me a suspect again in Effinger’s death.”

Max shook his head. “Don’t worry. I’ve managed to bollix things up so much that right now Rafi Nadir is a likeliest suspect for the latest death at the Oasis. And Molina might be eager to buy that because it takes him out of the running for joint custody for her daughter. Fortunately, the probable victim vanished.”

“Why is Rafi involved?” Temple asked. “You’ve said he was a good guy. So any personal bones Molina had to pick with him are not relevant?”

“I say that because Gandolph secretly hired Nadir as our Vegas backup. Even I didn’t know about that. When I crashed, Rafi was on-site at the Neon Nightmare as a security man. He was really there to keep an eye on me. When I went down, he was in instant touch so Gandolph could have me spirited away by fake EMTs, which covered up the murder attempt and made my apparent death convincing.”

“Gandolph has been way more central to all this than we suspected,” Temple told Matt. “The Synth has been looking like some lame woo-woo group of delusional magicians pretending to be powerful occultists lately, but Gandolph’s ‘retirement’ years were spent unmasking fraudulent mediums. Apparently, he still took the Synth seriously.”

Max bestirred himself on the upholstered chair, a sign that his battered frame was revitalizing. “Parts of it. The Synth is not a united front.”

“How do you know?” Temple asked.

“I have Gandolph’s laptop computer from our last recent dash across the Continent and the British Isles. And now I have access to some ambiguous files on his home computer. He wasn’t one to commit the obvious, or the devious, to any lasting form, but he had to pay Rafi and those records are intact.”

“Why are you and Rafi the new Starsky and Hutch?” Temple wanted to know.

“I told you. I inherited Rafi Nadir from Gandolph. He owed Garry a lot, including the recommendation for the Oasis security position. That was a prime job for an ex-cop who’d flunked out after Las Vegas’s current finest homicide lieutenant left him without notice when she got with child. Anybody know why she ran? Was he abusive?”

“Suspicious mind,” Temple said promptly. “She believed Rafi had sabotaged her birth control to get her off a career track at LAPD. They were both ‘minorities’ at the time and competition for the few token slots was harsh.”

“So they both ended up losing out in L.A.” Max smiled at the irony.

Matt entered the exchange. “Classic case of ‘a failure to communicate.’ Forgive the cliché.”

“So why were you and Rafi snooping around the Oasis pirate ship in the wee hours?” Temple asked Max. “That’s the kind of stunt I’d pull.”

“Molina is out of unofficial legmen,” Max said. “She hired me to investigate the crime she fingered me for as likely suspect. She has a sense of irony, I’ll say that for her.”

“But that was the dead guy in the eye-in-the-sky service area above the Goliath casino area.”

“Right. Rafi followed me there in his role of posthumous Max guardian on Garry’s payroll, and I encountered a fly on the wall of the service ducts, armed and dangerous only to himself.”

“So,” Matt said, leaning forward, “you team up with Rafi and on your next stop at the Oasis, you both get waylaid and some anonymous attacker ends up drowned. Why were you nosing around the scene where my stepfather died months ago?”

Max produced a quizzical look. “And you swore you weren’t the possessive sort.”

“You don’t know me well enough to know what ‘sort’ I am, Kinsella. So why?”

Max shrugged. “Gandolph had stored a lot of references to Las Vegas crimes in his computers. Don’t forget that he faked his own death at the Halloween séance to bring back the ghost of Harry Houdini. You can get a lot done when people think you’re dead.”

Temple produced an unladylike snort. “So that’s your excuse for your AWOL episodes. What about this? Maybe Effinger isn’t dead.”

She’d been exaggerating to make a point, but both men stared at her, the shocking suggestion shaking their separate assumptions.

Matt spoke first. “Temple, we need to tell him about Chicago and Louie and Effinger and Ophiucus.”

She kept silent. Did they really want to let Max in on all of Matt’s family issues. Did she?

“Chicago my long-term memory has down cold,” Max told them, sensing they needed reassurance. “Midnight Louie I’ve met and concede is a formidable cat. Garry’s computer notes make Effinger’s relationship and character clear as the battery acid he was spawned in. But … Ophiuchus? I probably knew what it was just a couple months ago, but it’s not downloading from the backup drive. Is it an ancient Greek curse?”

“Not a bad guess.” Matt smiled to recall his genteel mother’s similar reaction to the word. “It means ‘serpent-bearer.’”

“It’s the ‘lost’ thirteenth sign of the zodiac,” Temple added. “Astrologers are trying to resurrect it right now because they say the sky or whatever has shifted since the traditional signs of the zodiac were designated centuries ago and all the autumn babies are not the same scales, scorpions, and archers they thought they were.”

“Whoa.” Max put his hand to his forehead. “I don’t remember much, but I can sense that science was never your strong suit, Temple.”

“So maybe the sky didn’t shift. Exactly,” she said. “What is making our specific spot of earth move is that Ophiuchus is the chosen symbol for the cabal of disgruntled traditional magicians that have been operating in Vegas, and out of the Neon Nightmare nightclub for years.

“And,” she added, “the Synth may have had ties to guns and money for the Irish Republican Army both before and since the peace was made. That’s why you were there posing as the Phantom Mage, to investigate it.”

“That I buy,” Max said. “Gandolph briefed me on the Synth during our European travels and it’s been in his computer for ages. He liked them as a serious set of miscreants, but they strike me as rather pathetically mumbo jumbo. Or as a toothless front group.”

“Maybe,” Temple said, “but at least two of the unsolved deaths floating around this town in recent years involved magic or magicians and a corpse displayed in the form of the major stars in Ophiucus, which form what a kindergarten child would draw as the shape of a house.”

“The houses of the zodiac,” Max said.

“Nobody’s put it quite that way,” Matt admitted. “Anything zodiac seems too out there to take seriously.”

“Says you!” Temple was indignant. “I read mine in the newspaper every day and sometimes it’s eerily accurate.”

Max smiled at her. Tolerantly. “Accidental affinities are the long-mined territory of mediums, mind-readers, and scam artists.”

“Is it an accident,” Temple asked, “that Midnight Louie was just catnapped in Chicago to force Matt’s mother to turn over items left behind in a fireproof box by the late Effinger? An accident that the only possible thing relevant we found is what may be a biker tattoo in the form of a drawing of Ophiucus?”

“Ophiucus?” Max was no longer complacent. “Connected to Effinger?”

“And then,” Matt said, lighting fire, “there were the ‘she left’ murders, one at the Blue Dahlia where Molina sings sometimes and one … Temple, you wrote all this down in a table, didn’t you?”

She regarded Max with super-sleuth intensity. “Call me unscientific, will you? I’ve compiled all those eerie details into a Table of … Crime Elements, Ophiuchus and all.”

“Then show me, by all means.” He leaned back and spread his empty hands. “Dazzle me with your superior organizational logic.”

Temple left the sofa to dredge her tote bag from behind it. It sported a leopard pattern bought to match the late, lamented Midnight Louie travel carrier.

First she flourished the drawing of Ophiuchus at Max. “Zodiac signs may be junk science and superstition, but this ‘lost’ one is leaving star tracks all over Las Vegas.”

Max took the drawing to study. “It would make a terrific tattoo.”

Temple shuddered delicately. “It’s called the serpent-bearer, but the muscle man looks more like he’s fighting for his life than giving the snake a lift.”

“Effinger had some tattoos,” Matt said, “crude homemade ones, so this design may only have been a tattoo dream for him.”

“I’m not enamored of making skin into maps,” Temple said, pulling out her netbook.

Its hot pink cover clashed with the red sofa when she sat back down to bring up a file.

She handed the computer to Matt while Max sprang up to lean down over the sofa back between them to see. He was indeed moving like the Max of old.

They all stared at the screen.

“That is worthy of Dame Agatha Christie,” Max said, giving a long, low whistle after studying it.

Temple shrugged modestly. “I have read a Poirot and Marple or two.”

Max’s forefinger speared the table. “I’m right there as a suspect for Murder Number One at the Goliath. And, Devine, you’re down as a suspect for the murder of a call girl named Vassar at the same hotel. My, my. No wonder the closemouthed and manipulative Molina is on all of our cases.” Max eyed Temple. “You’re amazingly unbiased in your suspect list, but I don’t see you on it anywhere.”

“I’m innocent of everything,” Temple said blithely. “This table lists suspects the police would find likely for taking the rap. I’m an objective reporter and recorder. I just find some of the suspects likely, period.”

Her impish grin had both men backing away like nervous tomcats. Max left his casual post at the sofa back that had made them a threesome as Matt frowned at the image on the screen.

“You’ve added the Cosimo Sparks death,” he noted.

“If the Synth is a paper tiger,” Temple said, “why was Sparks killed and his scarlet-lined cloak left in the distinctive ‘Ophiuchus house’ shape?”

“Maybe to misdirect the blame.” Max sat back in the upholstered chair and tented his hands to support his chin. “Most of the cast of characters on your chart, Temple, are mentioned in Gandolph’s computer files. What stands out for me is the murdered professor, Jefferson Mangel That killing was off the Strip and there were no overt links to magic.”

“There was one,” Temple said.

“What?”

“You.”

“How would Gandolph miss that?”

“Jeff Mangel was a professor of philosophy, but a magic fan. He was found dead, in that telling Ophiuchus-Synth position, among a classroom exhibition of magic show advertisement posters. People collect that kind of ephemera. And one of your Mystifying Max posters was on display.”

Max suddenly pounded his temples with his fists. “Damn this MIA memory of mine! I’m useless.”

Temple’s dismayed look consulted Matt.

“Not useless enough for someone’s taste,” Matt said with a bit of Max’s own sardonic drawl. “There’ve been two attempts on your life in the time it took us to make a whirlwind trip to Chicago.”

Max lifted his head, the fury dispersing as fast as it had come. “And on Midnight Louie’s life. Apparently me and the cat have too many of those pesky lives for someone’s security. You’re right, Devine. The more I investigate, the more I’ll flush out the rats. Rat bait is an honorable role.”

“We all need to investigate.” Temple said, “Why are these cold cases that involve one or more of us suddenly hot again? The trouble is, when you look at my, ahem, brilliant Table of Crime Elements, there are so darn many ways we could go and way too much ground to cover.”

“Can you get the Fontana brothers as backup?” Matt asked Temple. “We don’t seem to have a choice on staying out of what’s going on, but Rafi’s going to be plenty busy with Kinsella, or Carmen Molina.”

“I don’t want Nicky getting all über-protective about me,” Temple said.

“Do all those big boys tell their little brother everything, even though he’s the hotelier?” Matt prodded.

“Probably not.”

Max held one hand fanned over his eyes and braced an elbow on a chair arm listening to them, as if the light were too bright.

Before Temple could make an alarmed murmur in his direction, he spoke. “The Fontana brothers. Is that a juggling act at the Sahara or something?”

She and Matt exchanged a totally blitzed look. Where to kick-start Max’s memories when he had such serious blanks as already-demolished Strip hotels and Las Vegas legends like the Fontana brothers, high-profile owners of Gangsters custom limo service, not to mention the boutique hotel of the same name?

Temple should change topics to touch on Max’s more immediate experiences. This would also be an apt time to admit her risky Neon Nightmare adventure and the showdown she’d stumbled onto in the Synth’s secret clubrooms there.

“I can’t say I’m much impressed by the local Synth crew as capable of murder,” Temple said, “although its symbol flashes itself around murder scenes.”

“Why not?” Max asked. “I’ve had ‘flashes’ of being at the Neon Nightmare in my Phantom Mage persona and they were certainly planning something. I’m recovering memories in a grid like a Mondrian painting, or pixels when a HDTV picture breaks up … islands of clear images in a sea of nothingness.”

“Uh,” Temple said, “before we leave the topic of my incisive mental powers, I have to mention that I’ve had a close encounter recently at the Neon Nightmare’s secret Synth clubrooms.”

“And you didn’t mention it to me?” Matt was shocked.

Temple grimaced. Time to confess her sins to Matt. “When I went to Neon Nightmare—which every guy I know wants to lecture me for doing, including Nicky Fontana, my boss at the Crystal Phoenix, where I do PR—”

“I know this,” Max said.

“Uh. Okay. It was a very tacky and woo-woo experience, lacking only Rod Serling as narrator intoning, ‘Welcome to the Twilight Zone.’”

“Extreme stage effects,” Max said, “often are used to divert an audience from what’s really going on. Cirque du Soleil is masterful at that.”

“Also the Mystifying Max,” Temple said with a smile.

“So,” Matt challenged. “You were an audience of one subjected to delusional magic tricks, Temple?”

“Maybe,” she told Matt. “It involves ninja cats and double Darth Vaders.”

“Oh.” Matt sat back.

“Oh.” Temple shrugged. “I had been exposed previously to inferior cocktails, would-be wild and sexy single guys, and the screamingly loud, shrill, and robotic noise that passes for dance music these days, not to mention circling neon laser lights that cast the spinning zodiac signs, including Ophiucus, on the black glass dance floor and walls.”

“Takes me right back to my near-death experience,” Max murmured.

“I figured out, though, that all those lightworks hide entrances to the interior pyramid-shape of the nightclub. I found a narrow upward ramp that has spring-loaded doors into the walls.”

“Temple!” Matt was horrified. “Why would you go there? That sounds like a drug trip.”

“Just think of the doors on fancy home theater equipment storage units. They’re always black lacquered and you just touch a corner and they spring open. That’s how I got into a maze of rooms behind the walls, and the Synth clubrooms, which overlook the dance floor with a one-way wall of black glass.”

“Sounds like a private high roller club,” Max said, “at some of the upscale hotel-casinos where a lot goes on that isn’t legal. So? If a group of fantasizing fakes want to pretend they’re magicians with an agenda…”

“We know from the empty safe built between the underground tunnels where the Crystal Phoenix and Gangsters hotels meet with one from the Neon Nightmare that your old IRA enemies had been amassing money and guns in Vegas for a couple decades.”

“What kind of safe?” Max asked.

“A giant walk-in one. That’s where Synth member Cosimo Sparks’s body was found, wearing white gloves, top hat, and tails.… Well, the top hat didn’t stay on when he was stabbed to death. A couple silver dollars were found on the floor, along with a bearer bond for twenty thousand dollars a rat dug up from the adjacent hidden tunnel to … the Neon Nightmare.”

“Rightly named,” Matt said. “You never told me you’d broken into the Synth’s lair at that nightclub.”

“Well, that’s because what I saw there wasn’t exactly believable.”

“In what way?” Max wanted to know.

“It wouldn’t pass the C. R. Molina test.”

“In what way?” Matt now wanted to know.

Temple kept jerking her head from one interrogator to another. “It does sound a bit too much Mad Tea Party.”

Into the continued silence she had to commit truth. “The club room held a middle-aged woman who looked like a medium, or Gandolph in the guise of a female medium at that Halloween séance. The other woman looked like Morticia, the slinky Goth wife from The Addams Family. And there was a pretty ordinary guy there. They were upset about Cosimo Sparks’s death, and then another spring-loaded door opened and these two … figures … showed up.”

“Figures?” Matt questioned.

Temple decided then and there to leave out the pack of black cats that closed down the private party minutes later, but she was now committed to describing the figures.

“They were disguised. In black. Head to toe.”

“Head to toe?” Max snorted. “Were they wearing blackface?”

“Gloves and long cloaks with hoods.”

“Old magicians’ tricks to blend in with the background,” Max said. “Houdini used it.”

“That’s not all. Full head masks. I thought of them as the Darth Vaders.”

“Now, that’s an elaborate getup,” Matt said. “Hokey, though. Are you sure that’s what you saw, Temple?”

“It was dark, but I’d entered through a sheltered niche between bookcases and it was like being an audience at a peepshow.” She took measure of the two men’s dubious expressions. “Not that kind of peepshow. Let’s just say it was a gathering of dramatic personalities. The Darth Vaders were clearly the stars. They had guns and they wanted money.”

“Temple!” Matt was shocked. “You put yourself at risk in the middle of some kind of heist? People who rip off casinos go for the extreme disguises, don’t they, Kinsella?”

Max looked quizzical. “You’re relying on my memory? Fortunately, it’s the personal history that’s mostly gone missing. Yeah. Because of the intense visual security and scrutiny in casinos, people who knock over cash transfers at money cages wear masks at least. They’re safe physically.”

Temple wasn’t so sure. “They always get caught.”

“But they are never interfered with as long as they’re armed and dangerous and out on the casino floor among hundreds of clients and players,” Max said. “Hotel security and police want zero collateral damage.”

“So,” Temple said, “you can get out with the money, but your chances of keeping it are—”

“Zero,” Max said.

“What about the plans I overheard, for the Synth magicians to create a multi-Strip free-for-all distraction of illusions to cover a major heist?”

“Again,” Max said. “Great idea. Would work for getting the money. As in every robbery from a modest ATM stick-up to a major planned assault on a Strip casino or Fort Knox, for that matter, the real trick is the disappearing act afterwards.”

Temple nodded. “That’s why the Glory Hole Gang hid out for decades when Jersey Joe Jackson absconded with the train robbery money.”

“Jersey Joe,” Matt reminded her, “got away with the money and cheating his buddies, but he had to hide the ill-gotten goods for so long, he died bankrupt and alone.”

“So this IRA money raised over a couple decades could simply be left hidden forever?” Temple asked.

Max sighed. “The Synth members are pawns. From what you said, they were in it for the revenge and the prestige, in the sense of the payoff in a magical illusionary statement, when jaws drop. So how did you and they escape being mowed down by two Darth Vaders?”

“Jesus,” Matt said prayerfully.

Temple shrugged. “I … just bowed out. They sorta noticed me finally—”

“‘Sorta’?” Matt sounded pre-cardiac.

“And I just said I was looking for a ladies’ room and they were really hard to find here and I wouldn’t be back. Stephanie Plum always gets out of pickles with girly candor.”

“Stephanie who?” Matt demanded, exasperated.

“The book series,” Temple said. “Chick lit mystery.”

Max chuckled. “She must mean Nancy Drew rebooted. You do know who that was?”

Matt shook his head, mystified.

“How do you know about Nancy Drew?” Temple asked Max.

“I don’t know.” He blinked. “I had a younger girl cousin, I guess, in Wisconsin.” His contribution ended in one of his memory-exploring silences.

“I know all about ‘younger girl cousins,’” Temple said, eyeing Matt.

He opted for silence too.

It was all just too nicey-nicey, Temple thought. Everybody was so busy not stomping on everybody’s else’s toes—or previous and current relationships—that any honest analysis was impossible.

If they couldn’t work together, they darn well might hang separately.

“You can see why I’d never mention this Neon Nightmare stuff to Molina,” Temple said into the extending silences. “I’m even sorry I discussed it with you guys. We need to divvy up the cold cases and investigate on our own.”

“How do we ‘divvy up’ this imposing table of multiple murders and possible perps?” Max asked.

“Mathmatically,” Temple said, then quipped, “MaxiMattically.”

Both guys shot more bolt upright at the idea being equated in her investigative formula. Good. Their competitive natures were kicking in after this very refined and very boring Likefest.

“And some say girls can’t do left brain,” Temple finished up.

She consulted her Table of Crime Elements like an efficiency expert, rubbing her hands together.

“Max. Your assignment. Assignments, plural.”

He pulled his long, lounging frame to attention. Temple was happy to see his core muscles and core spirit were, uh, she couldn’t think of a description that didn’t involve “hardening” or “stiffening,” so, like Scarlett O’Hara, she didn’t think about it anymore.

“You understand magicians,” she told Max, “whether you remember that or not, so your assignment will be the Cloaked Conjuror, the role model for the Darth Vaders, and the death of Professor Jefferson Mangel, a lover of magic and your magic act in particular. He was the first victim found dead in the Ophiuchus position and that’s an off-Strip site on the university campus.”

“What about the Goliath and Oasis murders I’ve already looked into?” Max wasn’t so much objecting as reminding her he’d done the groundwork.

“You’ve proved assassins are still out to get you, so you need to keep a low off-Strip profile. One involves Cliff Effinger, so Matt can deal with the Oasis now on that.”

Matt raised his eyebrows, pale as they were. “Uh, free will come into any of this assignment-making?”

“No.” Temple raked her Table of Crime Elements with another rigorous glance. “You’re already neck-deep in Cliff Effinger and his death, so you get the Phoenix ceiling death that looked to be Effinger but wasn’t and the Goliath, courtesy of Max defaulting, but also the scene of the death of the call girl you encountered called Vassar.”

“Wait a minute,” Matt said. “You’ve got me or Kitty the Cutter listed as the possible instigator of that ‘fatal fall.’ Granted I feel horrible about Vassar’s death and I did visit her at the Oasis, but I’m hardly a suspect on the Kathleen O’Connor level.”

“Just being thorough,” Temple sang out, aware that an unspoken rivalry was galvanizing the guys to feel possessive about their assignments, if not specifically about her.

Her best option as queen of the board and the Table of Crime Elements was to be bossy, move them to their best positions of personal safety, and herself take on the untidy murders that didn’t seem directly linked to current kidnapping and death attempts.

“I’ll look into Gloria Fuentes, if Max will e-mail me Gandolph’s notes on her, and see if I can track down the Synth members who knew Cosimo Sparks. His death had to have rattled them.”

“Hasn’t that South American entrepreneur been arrested for that?” Matt asked.

“The evidence against him is circumstantial,” Temple answered. “So far. And, of course, need it be said we’ll all keep a leery eye out for any traces of Kathleen O’Connor?”

“What would be her motives,” Matt asked, “after all these years?”

“Follow the money,” Max said. “She raised money for the Cause and doesn’t want it to line any private party’s pocket now that the Irish Republican movement is dead.”

“What about the news reports of resurfacing violence in Northern Ireland?” Matt asked.

Max waved a dismissive hand. “That’s the corpse having postmortem involuntary muscle tics.”

“You didn’t have money for the IRA as an idealistic teenager,” Matt pointed out.

“I had ideals. Look. What drove Kathleen, especially given her state of pariahdom from birth, was tricking or seducing people—men—into feeling the same self-loathing she herself did.”

“Luring them into genuine states of sin?”

“You could—and would—put it that way, ex-Father Matt. She just wanted her victims to feel as low-down and guilty as she could. I don’t think she toted up Sean and I competing for her affections as a duel of pride, lust, and betrayal. We didn’t think that way. If either one of us had scored with a girl after our sheltered upbringing, we would have been shocked to our jockey shorts and more about bragging to our mates back home than running to confession. The better ‘man’ would win.”

“And you were it, as usual,” Matt said.

“No, I was the one who … fell in love with her,” Max said in a tone of dumbstruck self-revelation, shocking Temple to her Daisy Fuentes undies, speaking of undergarment shock.

Matt looked pretty astounded too.

“Sorry.” Max shook his head as if finding the “reset” for his memory. “Some of my bits of recovered memory hit like sledgehammer strokes. And it’s all the distant, teen-drama ones, God help me. At that age, guys try to pretend they’re heartless to other guys and sincere to girls in such alternating impulses, they get whiplash. My gut knows I loved my cousin like a brother. I guess I didn’t have a brother. I don’t remember. At that age, you don’t have the maturity to admit family feeling, you’re trying so hard to break away. So. I encountered first love and first loss in a stunning double-bill.”

“Do you think,” Temple asked, “Kathleen had real feelings for you too? That your fury at your cousin dying in that IRA pub bombing wiped out her chance of any further relationship with you, and that really put her over the edge?”

“I don’t remember.” Max shook his head. “I don’t even remember the details of our assignation. I suppose that says something. Yes, I could think of nothing else but revenge on the IRA bombers, because I thought it was my fault I wasn’t there to save Sean, or to lose my own life too.”

“As much as it’d be fascinating to psychoanalyze Kathleen O’Connor in light of her roots,” Matt said, “you run a close second, Kinsella.”

“You’re not exactly Mr. Average yourself.”

Temple was not willing to probe into dueling guy adolescences. “So you’re both saying to know our greatest enemy is to outwit her. Why did she become a slut—?”

“That’s harsh,” Matt said.

“That’s written in her history,” Max said. “She was living up to what her mother was reviled for supposedly being, and she was herself labeled as from birth.”

“Let me finish,” Temple said. “Why did she whore for a noble cause? For religious and ethnic freedom, for equality and tolerance? Did she have a sinner-saint complex? Excuse me for asking. We UUs don’t much go in for extreme moral judgments.”

“UUs?” Max asked Matt.

Matt laughed. “You may have never known, or forgot. When pushed for her religious upbringing, Temple will be amusing and claim to be a ‘fallen-away’ UU. Universalist Unitarians reject age-old intolerances, like warring religious identities and condemning classes of sinners outright. No burning at the stake. With charity for all and malice toward none.”

“It sounds a bit wishy-washy,” Max said wickedly.

“You and I came up in moral boot camp,” Matt agreed.

Max nodded at him. “Like Kathleen. No wonder she’s targeted us both.”

“No wonder we’ve both survived her.” Matt waited for Max’s reaction.

He grinned. “So far, my lad. So far.”

Temple huffed out a loud, theatrical sigh. “I’m so happy seeing the two of you make common cause, but this woman is a walking war zone and you both bear her scars, visible or not. I may be ex-UU, but I’m not feeling at all tolerant about Kitty the Cutter. She’s obviously been lurking on the fringes of lives, shifting personas, pulling strings on her patsy associates, taunting us with her mysterious ‘gifts’ and ‘thefts.’ Was she Shangri-La? How can she have apparently died twice and still be around to haunt us? What’s the bottom line on her messing with us here in Las Vegas as if it’s the last stand before the end of the world?”

Matt was the first to answer. “She may be unconsciously searching for someone incorruptible, but she isn’t equipped to recognize such a person even if she found him. Or her. And doing that would so shake her negative world-view—”

“She’d implode,” Max finished. “And the fallout would be lethal.”

Temple tapped her Table of Crime Elements. “When I look at this, I’m struck by how many of these unsolved deaths involve falling. I’m a press release writer, not a logician, but it’s got to mean something. Maybe it’s an unconscious metaphor.”

“Falling from grace,” Matt intoned slowly. “Falling from a ‘state of grace,’ as the Church calls it. Kathleen’s mother was a ‘fallen’ woman. She was expected to live down to that. So she did.”

“Satan,” Max said, “tried to tempt Jesus to step from the top of the temple.”

Matt spun the crime table to face him and scanned the rows. “That could mean Kathleen O’Connor is responsible for almost all these deaths.”

“That would make her a serial killer.” Max said. “And that may not be her only method. Someone tipped the warring IRA remnants off to Garry and my movements in Belfast.”

Temple grabbed back her death list to study it again. “Then we’d better organize and ‘out’ her before she can do us all in.”