Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Leopard Spot

“For the love of God, no! What has that to do with anything?”

“Only that we shouldn’t be handling these artifacts. Pieces of physical evidence, in fact. In case we need the police to take fingerprints.”

“I don’t have any pincerlike devices. You saw the place.”

“Then get on the phone, call Temple, and ask her to bring up some tweezers.”

“Do we have to involve Temple?”

“You called her in the first place.”

“I don’t want her to know about this.”

“All right. Go down, come up with whatever story it takes to get them, and borrow some tweezers.”

Matt rose, left the apartment door open, took the stairs beside the elevator a floor down, then headed for the small private hallway to Temple’s apartment.

Before he rang the bell, he put his palm on the door, like a medium reading the scene of a haunting. This was the scene of a haunting, all right, his own haunting.

He rang the bell, waiting on pins and needles for her to answer.

“I need a pair of tweezers,” he blurted out on sight.

Temple blinked, signifying polite mystification that he should be eager to dispel. She knew something was up. He didn’t dispel anything. She was more suspicious than ever.

“Tweezers? Has Max—?

“I’ve got a…domestic emergency. Have you got some tweezers or not? Quick!”

Still blinking, Temple disappeared. She reappeared a moment later with tweezers rampant in a raised, closed right hand. A fist, as it were.

“Will these work?”

“Thanks.” Matt snatched them before he had to look into her soft steel blue eyes too long. He was bound to start saying more than he should. “I’ll bring ’em back…tomorrow or sometime.”

He raced down the little hall, around the big circular hall, and up the stairs again.

In his apartment, Kinsella was bending over the cube table staring at the Post-it note.

He looked up to say, “Plastic baggie?”

“That I’ve got.” Matt went to the kitchen to fetch a big one.

Taking Temple’s tweezers, Kinsella placed the manila envelop and the Post-it note in the baggie. “A present for Molina. She’ll do anything for you, right? It would be best not to mention the suspected source. Tell her a demented female fan is stalking you.”

“It’s the truth.”

Kinsella cocked his head. “Sit down and tell me about it.”

Matt sat, but he couldn’t bring himself to speak for a moment. He still felt like a body double for the real actor in this instance.

“I don’t get it,” he exploded finally to Kinsella. “She’s a demon from your past. What’s she doing in my present?”

“Bad luck, I guess. What does this phrase mean, ‘Wear me’?”

“I think the snake is a ring. She’s approached me a couple of times again recently.”

“To maim again?”

“No. She knows I’d never let her get that close again.” Matt felt his hand go to his scarred side, despite himself. “This TitaniCon I took Mariah Molina to—”

“And how did that happen, I wonder?”

“That has nothing to do with this. Temple showed up there, and a woman I used to work with at the volunteer hotline, ConTact. And all three…females were somehow attacked during the convention, including Mariah.”

Kinsella became very intent. “I didn’t know that.”

“You don’t know everything, after all, I guess.”

He smiled. “No, I just act like I do. Part of the magician’s code of behavior. I know you hate coming to me with this, but it’s better than Temple, isn’t it? Why?”

“Because this Kathleen threatened Temple. And Sheila, the ConTact employee, and Mariah, and even poor Janice.”

“Janice?”

“You don’t know her. I hope. She’s an artist, does sketches for the police sometimes.”

“ Hmmm . The talented portraitist of Miss Kitty. I did see that piece of work.”

“The fact is, this woman has threatened everybody. And now she sends me this…token. Like she’s daring me to not do as she says, or she’ll take it out on the people around me.”

“Why you?”

“Because you’re not available, right? You’re Mr. Invisible. You’re her real target, you have to be. But you’re holing up somewhere no one can find you, except Temple probably, so the rest of us have been turned into targets. She is your old girlfriend, after all.”

“Besides my professional services, what do you want?”

“I want you to tell me everything about her and your relationship with her.”

“Sorry, Father, I’m not about to confess my youthful sins to you.”

“I’m not a priest anymore, and you’re not a kid anymore. Whatever happened in Northern Ireland twenty years ago triggered what’s happening here and now. I’ve got to figure out what’s driving her. Don’t you understand? Temple is in danger. We’re all in danger. Except you.”

Kinsella smiled and turned the Ouroboros ring in his fingers.

“No, I’m in danger too. It’s just not obvious yet.” He glanced at Matt. “I suppose she’s targeting you because you’re the equivalent of the seventeen-year-old boy I was all those years ago. You’re a virgin, right? Don’t bother denying or claiming it. I don’t care about your sex life, or lack of it, as long as Temple isn’t involved. You’re me seventeen years ago. An overeager innocent trying to right global wrongs in a single summer. You don’t come across greenhorns like that every day, or at least Miss Kitty doesn’t, not with the role she’s played for the IRA all these years, seducing rich old men for gun money. Guns and roses, that’s been her specialty. Fortunately, she’s spent most of her time in Central and South America. Until now.

“But I doubt the rich old guys have done anything for her ego. It’s poor young men she really likes to prey on. I don’t doubt that she’s been trying to track me down, and she wouldn’t have if I hadn’t settled with Temple here in Vegas for a few months. So you’re right; it’s my fault she found us all.

“That’s all I can tell you. She seems to want to replay that deadly summer in Londonderry, when my cousin Sean was blown up in a pub bombing by the IRA. I lived to tell the tale only because I was losing my innocence to Kathleen O’Connor at the very moment he died.”

“You realize,” Matt said, “that if she’s repeating a pattern, and if I’m right in suspecting that she sent your cousin into that pub bombing deliberately, that she’ll need to kill one of us…again?”

“Will she? What does she want now? Right now? From you. Best guess.”

“To torment me.” Matt thought that was obvious. “To force me to do what she says by threatening the people around me.”

“But not me.”

“She’s never mentioned you to me.”

“Hmmm.”

Matt hesitated. He couldn’t tell Kinsella Kitty’s stated price: Matt’s body and soul, i.e., his body would do because the soul went with it. Kinsella would probably laugh, and say, “Screw her, then, and save us all.” Kinsella would probably just laugh.

He wouldn’t understand the price Matt had paid, that his soul did ride on his priestly purity, even now that he was no longer a priest.

Especially, he couldn’t tell Kinsella that emotionally, spiritually, he was utterly married to Temple. That she was the only woman he could see sharing his first sexual moments with, that in his heart, reality aside, he was still saving himself for Temple.

He remembered teaching virginity to preteens, using Saint Maria Goretti, the forgiving rape victim, as a model. That was going too far; that was woman as eternal victim. But the violation of rape or molestation was real, for a child, and for an adult. For a woman, and for a man.