Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Topaz Tango

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Jesus, Carmen!”

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

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

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

“So you last saw her—?”

“This morning before I went to work.”

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

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

“She getting in trouble in school?”

“No. I saw her father.”

“Rafi Nadir?”

“There’s any other candidate?”

“About what?”

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

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

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

“And he took it how?”

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

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

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

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

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

“I thought kids that age had energy.”

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

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

“You can’t think—” Morrie began.

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