Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

“Except Kinsella didn’t beat cancer. He is cancer.”

Matt pulled back, surprised. “I can’t believe how much you really hate him. Personally, I mean. Why? I’m the one you think is entitled to despise him.”

“See this house you’re sitting in? See my teenage daughter run outside, fancy free? That man has been in here. When we haven’t been. Prowling. Playing games with my wardrobe. My mind. The last time was really sick, but he got too cocky. His taunting little note mentioned something only he and I could know about.”

“Carmen?” Matt had tabled the beer. The slice of lime lay on its pottery dish like a sick green grin. “You’re being stalked? For how long?”

“A few weeks.”

“And you’re sure it’s . . . Max?”

“Absolutely.”

“What’s the point?”

“Sickness. It’s sexually . . . taunting. Items left in my closet, on my bed. Now a trail of rose petals to my bedroom, and Mariah’s! Radios playing. The last ‘gift’ was a sleazy teddy.”

While Matt looked blank, Carmen found herself laughing, giddy at leavening her tension with some unexpected comic relief.

“God, I sure know it’s not you! Not a stuffed bear, like you’re thinking! A teddy is a sex-shop staple, a see-through . . . uh, bathing suit. Red, black, lace.”

Matt frowned. “Sounds like a sort of valentine.”

“A sick, threatening valentine only a stalker would slink into a woman’s house to leave.”

“Thanks for the tip.” Matt was trying to lighten the mood, but his warm brown eyes were deeply concerned now.

She relaxed a little.

“So,” Matt said, “you’ve been dealing with this on your own for how long now?”

“A few weeks.”

“Can’t you of all people sic the law on this?”

“No.”

“You won’t lose face by admitting to your peers that you have a stalker. I’ve seen those two, Alch and Su. They’d go to the wall for you.”

She blinked back unlieutenant-like tears. So good to hear an outsider confirm her unit’s loyalty. But police work was not like anything else. Loyalty would never overlook irregularity. And Carmen had done some damn irregular things lately while trying to keep her daughter safe and the creep at bay.

“ I couldn’t go to the wall for me in their places, Matt,” she admitted.

He blew out a breath that indicated he understood the extent of what she was confessing. He was a hell of a counselor, quick to get it, slow to judge. Why hadn’t she confided in him before? Too close to the woman in the case, Temple Barr. Just how close these days, anyway? He radiated a certain secret serenity she hadn’t noticed before. She was pretty quick to understand too.

Had the scales in the eternal triangle tipped Matt’s way in, say, the last few weeks? Had that made Kinsella go over the edge, and for Molina instead?

“You’ve always had your suspicions about Max,” Matt said.

Suddenly, he was referring to a man he’d always called by his last name by his first. What was this?

“Surely,” Matt went on, “your staff knows that, could make discreet inquiries.”

“There is nothing discreet to be done when it comes to Max Kinsella,” she said, her voice as tough as Kevlar. She sighed, grabbed her beer and took a long, long swallow to rinse the recent words out of her mouth.

He raised sun-bleached eyebrows but said nothing.

“I can’t call on anyone in the department because the note that nails him as my stalker refers to an . . . incident I’m not crazy to open up to anyone official. In fact, I must be crazy trusting you. You swear on the seal of the confessional—?”

“I’m not really a priest anymore, Carmen.”

“But you’d hate yourself if you betrayed a confidence. Maybe there is still a little corner of Hell for someone like that, someone who’d betray a serious confidence?”

“A large corner. Unless someone else’s life was at stake, or something.”

“I suppose you think I’m just a neurotic woman, after all—”

“No. I think you’re a rock, too much so. But I’ve noticed that something has been seriously bothering you. I thought it might be, you know, your ex.”

“Him! Rafi. Some secret. Even you’ve met him. Sure, he’d be a likely suspect, but now his reappearance on the scene looks like child’s play compared to someone stalking me and Mariah. And that someone can only be Max Kinsella.”

“Why?”

“Because at the time that your adored Temple, crazy mixed-up kid that she is, went undercover to trail the Stripper Killer, I had Max Kinsella in my sights at Secrets’s strip-joint parking lot. He was all hot to trot, saying that Temple’s life was in danger at Baby Doll’s. He wasn’t going to assume the position and cuffs, no way. Much as I wanted him to give me a reason to shoot, he wasn’t doing that either. He was unarmed.”

“A stand-off.”

“Right. What to do? I had to subdue him or lose Mr. Slippery again. And all I had was ‘suspicion’ of being the Stripper killer. But it was good enough to take him in for, with him right there on the site of a previous crime, and having been seen there earlier.”

“So you radioed for backup.”

“He was going to walk, daring me to shoot him.”

“So—?” Matt was really curious now, sitting forward on the sofa, a terrific audience for her defining, and dumbest, moment.

“So, I slapped my weapon down on the nearest pickup hood and we went hand-to-hand.”

“Carmen!”

“I’ve been trained. The sexist watch commanders in L.A. set little old rookie me taking down three-hundred-pound brothers and drug dealers with Uzis in Watts. Loved that Latino-black rivalry. Adding a woman to the mix was even more amusing.”

“Yeah, but . . . Max is a world-class strong man.”

“He’s not that tough. I did cuff him.”

“Maybe he let you. So that’s the problem? You cuffed him and what? Um, I know. He uncuffed himself.”

“And me to the steering wheel of my car! Never arrest a magician. By then, the radio was announcing the takedown of the Stripper Killer, thanks to your pal Temple’s meddling. I would have had to let him go anyway.”

“But he would have escaped before then. What’s so irregular about that scenario? You found and captured a reasonable suspect then freed him when fast-moving events proved him innocent.”

“Don’t ever apply the word ‘innocent’ to that man. Yes, he got away. Yes, no one knows about our parking-lot round but he and I. And that’s how I know—I know now!—that he’s my stalker.”

“How?”

She took a deep breath. “When we were fighting, he thought he had the upper hand at one point. He came on to me. Seriously. Your lovely little Miss Temple was off the radar. He had turned my pursuit of justice into some sick psycho-sexual game between us. It was real, believe me. If she had seen it, she would have dumped him like that. I’m protecting her, in a way, from having her illusions sent to Sing-Sing for life.”

“What did he do, say?”

“I’m too embarrassed to tell an ex-priest.”

“Try me.”

“Just that our cat-and-mouse game was substitute for what I really wanted and needed, a good screwing.”

Matt winced. As much as he was adjusting to secular society and its rough edges, crudity still impacted his priestly sensibility. Suddenly, he looked at Carmen from under those baby-blond eyebrows, his penetrating brown eyes so unusual in one of his Polish coloring.

“Intense feelings can flip either way, love or hate.”

“Don’t say love.”

“Passion or hate, okay?”

“You ever feel either one?”

“More than you can imagine, Carmen.”

For a few fixed instants, she believed him. “Right. You hated your stepfather. I assume that’s resolved now that he’s dead.”