Cat In An Indigo Mood

Chapter 24

Dead of Night

When the phone rang, Molina's bedroom was in that inky state of darkness that owns the hours of three to six A.M. The Twitching Hours was how she thought of it.

She had been tossing and turning since two-something, second-guessing her gutsy decision to let Max Kinsella play blood-hound for her. She risked his learning more about her past than she liked, but she couldn't risk not knowing where Nadir was. Not with "she left" spray-painted on the side of her personal vehicle.

So she let the phone ring twice before lifting the receiver, not to wake up, but to quiet the jitterbug a sudden ring would have on her already antsy system.

"Molina." Spoken like a wee-hours bureaucrat.

"We got another one, Lieutenant."

"That you, Su?"

"Yeah. Alch was against calling you, but l said you'd want to see the crime scene in flagrante delicto."

"Female victim!"

"Check."

"Strangled?"

"Right."

"Stab wound!"

"Yup."

"Graffiti?"

"No . . . that's why Alch thought it could wait."

Molina sighed.

"It's close, though, Lieutenant. Too close for comfort. That's why Reisdorf and Munez, who were up for the case, gave us a call."

Molina scrawled the address on the bedside notepad that lit up when you lifted the pen from its support. Notes in -the dark were a routine of police work.

"Keep the corpse on site, then?" Su asked.

"Twenty-five minutes," Molina said, already jamming her feet into moccasins.

Her finger was poised to hit the programmed number for Delores as soon as Su hung up.

Ten minutes later she was rushing through the kitchen door into the garage. Delores's husband worked the graveyard shift at a package delivery service, so she stayed up until he went to work. She didn't mind coming over nights to sit the house and Mariah and she really didn't mind making the extra money. Her own kids were old enough to be left at home alone.

Knowing what she did about crime in this town, Molina couldn't imagine Mariah ever getting old enough to be left alone at night.

The night air balanced on the cutting edge of forty degrees, chilly but not icy. The crime scene was far from the Blue Dahlia, probably one reason Alch didn't think she should be alerted.

He'd worked for her longer, knew her better, but Su was keen and new and had an unconventional instinct for the odd detail.

"She who delegates is lost," Molina told her softly glowing dashboard.

Maybe she hadn't been in a supervisory position long enough to give her investigators their head as much as she should. If those words hadn't been sprayed on her car--her car--she'd be home in bed right now, sleeping, and Max Kinsella would have heard nary a word about Raf Nadir.

This scene was the parking lot of a church, one of those cheap cinder-block churches with a chintzy wooden steeple giving the feeble finger to heaven. The name of the church would not reflect a Major Congregation.

Alch was chewing on his mustache, hands digging deep into his trench coat pocket, a sure sign of malcontent.

Su paced, her tiny figure jerky and doll-like in the artificial twilight of a single streetlight.

Why did petite people have so much energy, like those wired three-pound toy dogs? Maybe they had to make more of themselves to get attention.

Now that the watershed age of forty was loitering with intent to ring her doorbell, Molina was beginning to envy energy.

Asphyxiation was one of murder's more brutal forms, leaving the victim's face twisted with an expression of struggle at the least, or horror at the worst, depending on how much you wanted to read into the still-life that death made of a human body.

This victim looked no younger but more polished than the Strawberry Lady. Grooming details glossed her face and hands.

She looked like she belonged in Las Vegas, as the Strawberry Lady had not.

"No writing," Molina threw to the two detectives, to the technicians tagging and bagging evidence, to the distant streetlight.

It was not a question, but it wasn't a statement either. It was a hope. Because writing would be a pattern and a pattern had a prayer of being deciphered.

"Nothing in the immediate area."

"There's no surface but the asphalt here, but the church must have a lot of wall. A Dumpster nearby?"

"The uniforms are conducting a search."

"No purse again, no ID?"

"Right." Su stopped pacing to nibble daintily on one of her dragon-lady nails. No matter the length or intensity of the nibbling, Merry Su never shortened a claw. Must have fiberglass in her nail polish.

Molina donned a pair of the latex gloves jammed in the pocket of every jacket for just such sudden occasions. She squatted beside the body, her knees cracking, and drew hack the lacquered hair so bleached you couldn't tell whether the hairdresser had been going for blond or white.

"Strangled with something knotted, but the marks are farther apart and softer than the previous victim's."

"As if the weapon had stretched since its last use," Su suggested.

"Or it could be a different ligature," said Alch.

"Different offender," Molina finished his thought. She stood, joints snap-crackle-and-popping. "We need to be sure we're not missing a message, even on the fringes. But at least this one looks like she's been around town for a while. We should have better luck identifying her.

These two deaths; they're strangely inappropriate."

"What do you mean?" Su sounded eager to jump on any supposition.

"Well, the woman at the Blue Dahlia hardly seemed the type to go there, especially alone. And this woman hardly seems the type to be visiting some dinky church at the midnight hour."

"At least we should get some labels off these clothes," Su agreed.

That's the indignity of sudden death, Molina thought; in an instant you're judged on your wearing apparel. What would someone think who found her dead in her unimaginative pantsuits, the pockets jammed with latex gloves as if they were condoms for octopuses?

"Over here!"

The uniform's voice wasn't loud, but sharp and urgent.

They swarmed to the edge of the parking lot thirty feet away, where an oleander bush spread its spiky, poisonous leaves and a flashlight pooled like saffron oil on the ground.

Molina saw something sparkling in the dry soil and squatted again without mercy for her knees.

"Jeez." The officer was impressed with his own find, but let Molina's still-gloved hand scoop it up on the barrel of her ball-point pen. "That thing's worth something."

"Indeed it is." She stared at the circle of gold and diamonds and inlaid opal.

Su was beside her like a Doberman. "Looks too small for that woman's fingers."

Molina nodded. She thought she knew just whose pinky this little piece of plunder would fit.

No need to scour the whole kingdom for a candidate; no way, Cinderella.

This ring had someone's name written all over it. Two someones.

"Was it lost here, or left here? And for how long?" Su was like a Pekingese rolling in possibilities.

"Awfully good condition," the uniform noted. "You'd think someone would spot it fairly soon."

"They don't have your keen eyes and methodical ways, Cartright," Molina said, smiling as she glanced away from his ID.

"Good hunting."

She let the ring slide into the plastic Baggie Su held out and open for it.

The last time anyone had seen this ring, it had vanished on-stage during a magic act downtown. The last person seen wearing this ring had been Temple Barr. The undeniable donor of the ring was Max Kinsella.

She caught the ring in its plastic shroud tight into the palm of her hand, until its sharp contours stamped her flesh like a cold brand.

She would not be the pawn of any man, not again. Her daughter would not be a trading card between the past and the present, not ever.

Enlisting Max Kinsella to track Raf Nadir had been a bold, unpredictable move. Like any move in the game of chess that a life or a career was, it was also dangerous, and somewhat desperate.

Molina didn't like feeling desperate, and especially detested acting on that feeling. But the two men, her two opponents, were also unpredictable, dangerous and desperate, each in his own way.

To catch a thief . . . hire a thief. To destroy an enemy, destroy another enemy, it wasn't nice, but it was . . . efficient.

No matter what Mr. Mystifying Max dug up on Raf Nadir's and her past together--and the risky position that put her in--she now had evidence of something a lot more incriminating from his own present.

To imprison a magician, capture a magic talisman.

She released the ring, eyed its exotic splendor. Thirty pieces of silver must have looked that good to Judas Iscariot once.