Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In An Alien X-Ray

“Would I be here at your beck and call if I did?”

She sat up, leaning her hands on the bed and swinging her feet in their decidedly sinister cuffed and buckled black leather platform shoes. Every position she’d taken on that bed, stripped of the seductive clothing, was that of flirty teenage girl.

“You can tell me, Father Ex,” she wheedled, whispered. “Was it earnest little tweens in the parish choir? Their plump unhappy mamas in the rectory? Maybe crushing teens in the confessional. You can’t fool me. I know what you are and I know what you did.”

Sexually abused children always believed their lot had to be the secretive norm of everyone around them, who just weren’t telling. Kathleen was too old for that fairy tale.

“Sorry. Nada. I was even more abnormal than you. I was a virgin until way too recently. You said it. Rules follower. If I hadn’t been, I probably would have killed my stepfather, Cliff Effinger, and murder for sure is a sin.”

“You kill someone? Priests aren’t good, they’re just cowards.” She leaned closer.

“I almost did.” He met her eyes with all the darkness in his mind when he’d held a limp, wife-beating Effinger, himself the devil this time, who had his boyhood demon by the sharp lapels of checkered past and coat. Like the song said, Matt was here to rock the boat. “Maybe,” he suggested, “you had something to do with his nasty death later.”

She reared away from his words, or the truth in his eyes. You couldn’t hide the hate that almost ate you alive. She didn’t expect that of him, only of herself.

“Maybe you’re more of a man than I thought.”

“You don’t know me, even if you think you know my kind. I’m not a country you can explore, a book you can turn into another kind of story. We each have our own dark fairy tale, Kathleen. So what are we going to talk about? Truth or dare.”

“You’ll sleep with me before I’m done with you. All men do.”

It wasn’t wise to end this game and unloose her elsewhere.

“I’ll make you work for it. Tell me about the first sexual experience you remember.”

Her eyes flared wide. This was territory she knew how to manipulate: sex and priests.

She rolled over onto her back and crossed her legs in the air, posed like the cover of a cheesy airport novel.

He sat behind her in the classic Freudian position of alienist and patient, only nowadays everyone knew a lot more about psychological kinks than Freud had.

Matt hoped what he knew was enough.

Chapter 15

Slugfest

Lieutenant C. R. Molina stood in the hot sun, staring down at the corpse planted under a bit of rubble in a deserted lot. It wasn’t concrete that had killed him, but a .38 slug that had missed being an earring by two inches.

“Hey, Lieutenant,” a voice said behind her. “What you got?”

“A bad feeling.” She slid her eyes behind the sunglasses to Morrie Alch’s tanned and seamed face. “You’re old enough to remember mob hits in this town.”

“As a kid, yeah.”

“This guy’s no kid.”

“Pushing seventy before he stumbled, I’d say. He’s sporting the mob-approved execution-style ventilation, all right. But, uh, dumping a body in public like this? It’s just bad taste nowadays. Looks amateur. The mob is finally being recognized as the down-and-dirty influence on the making of Vegas with the official museum, the competing attraction, the Ocean’s whatever-number ‘son of Frank Sinatra’ Vegas heist movies a few years back.”

“Nothing ever dies here but people,” Molina commented. “Certainly not the notion of mob activity.”

“A cheesy body-dump like this looks small-time. Any remaining hoods would rather fling it than flaunt it.”

“So that dead face doesn’t populate a Ten Most Wanted list? There’s something familiar about it to me.”

Alch braced his hands on his knees and semi-squatted for a better gander at one dead goose. “Older guys all start to look alike.”

“Not you, Morrie. It’s that Justin Bieber hair of yours.”

Alch snorted as he rose. He did have a handsome mop of hair, but it was the iron gray of an aging Scottie dog. “I know some CIs who are pretty senior. I’ll ask around.”

Molina nodded. “Actually, some leftover mob hit would be a nice change of pace on cases.”

“Yeah?”

She produced her most sardonic face and voice. “This is nothing involving crazy public relations events or … critters. Old dead guy shot execution-style. Plain as dirt.”

“Oops. Not quite, Lieutenant.”

Alch pointed at a shadow near the large building construction.

Something was moving in it and vanishing.

A rat.

Molina raised an eyebrow over the upper sunglass rim. “Grizzly Bahr at the morgue will be glad our vic avoided being lunchmeat for the rat pack and losing any body parts that might be evidence.”

Alch nodded. “That was a piece of luck. These empty lots attract a lot of vermin. Maybe this guy was a literal rat.”

“A snitch, you mean?” Molina reflected. “Either that or a drug dealer or even a gambler who welched on a bet. Empty lots attract a large clientele of human vermin.”

They backtracked in their crime-scene booties to let the tech team have its way with the body.

Chapter 16

Dead on Paradise

“Guess what?” the cheery voice cackled in Temple’s ear way too early in the morning. She’d been inhaling coffee mug steam to clear her sinuses.

“Who is this?” Brain cell number 100,030 kicked in. “Silas T., is that you?”

“What’d you call me, chickadee? ‘Silas T.’? I like it.”

“I don’t like ‘chickadee.’ Don’t call me that again.”

“If you say so, Miss Barr, but whatever I call you, you are a tip-top publicity genius. You’ve done it again.”

“Done what?”

“Once again, a body has been found on the scene of your client’s new attraction. Hip, hip, hooray!”

“I have found myself in a crazy phone conversation. What are you saying?”

“Better click, click, click those fancy high heels over here to Paradise. I came by to check the site, and the authorities and their yellow ticker tape were all over the place. TV vans are lining the curb.”

“Oh my lost ruby red slippers! I’m still in Oz. Your construction project has unearthed a corpse?”

“Even better, the scene looks rather mobbish. Ties right in with the latest trends in Vegas hot spots. I couldn’t be happier if you had killed him yourself to make the buzz happen.”

“Silas T. This is bad publicity. You are a bad, bad, bad client. Keep your mouth shut from now on or I’ll … I’ll do something drastic. I’ll be there ASAP.”

Temple wished she could “click, click, click” her red-shimmer slipper heels—ballet flats for around the condo—and get back home to a day earlier, in a past where she had declined to take a ride on Farnum’s “stunt publicity” hurricane.

Before she left the condo, she looked around for Louie, but she hadn’t seen him since he plopped on the bed a few hours earlier for an out-of-character purr-fest. He’d slipped away to some favorite condo haunt after that. Not to worry. He often knew what she was doing better than she did.

* * *

In record time, she and the Miata slipped into a just-right-size sloppy space left by two askew parked media vans. This was a “hot” scene, all right.

She’d worn her sturdiest shoes, black patent leather closed-toe pumps, and crunched across the rough bare ground toward a clot of what looked like the monsters from the Alien films, but were only media men and women bearing videotape cameras high on their shoulders to focus on the victim in their midst.