Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In An Aqua Storm

Temple turned the key and opened her mahogany door. Dead ahead on the slice of kitchen floor visible stood the banana split dish overflowing with brown-green pellets.

She marched over, picked it up and dumped the contents down the garbage disposal. They made a quite satisfactory racket getting ground up, she observed.

She next did what Matt had suggested. The library’s reference-desk personnel sounded harried, but easily found the needed calendar. Temple read the woman on the other end of the phone the dates: March 4, 1963, and April 22, 1958.

One was a Monday, and one was a Tuesday. In the right order.

Temple screamed and jumped up before the phone was fully hung up. No doubt the library staff was used to bettors calling from bars and other unstable inquirers.

She sat down again, sobered. Since when did women-hating, brutal serial killers of strippers docilely follow nursery rhymes?

She went to the bedroom to change, still mulling it over. Clothes lay everywhere—on the closet floor, near the bed.

Temple stiffened on the threshold. She had been so obsessed with the Goliath murders that she had almost forgotten her own peril. Had those two men come back and trashed her bedroom? Why hadn’t she learned how to lay grown men flat with one well-placed kick? Maybe those thugs weren’t just after Max. Maybe they had something to do with the Goliath murders...

She was already too deep into the condo to retreat from intruders who might be lurking at her back, and the phone was across the room. But why hadn’t they attacked her when she was calling the library from the living room? An abiding respect for public institutions?

Ridiculous.

And her clothes. Most of them had slipped off the hangers. She went over to inspect the damage, and picked up a red knit dress. The zipper was undone. What kind of room-tossing hoodlum stops to neatly undo the zippers? She looked around some more.

Oh, no! Her Hanae Mori green silk, crumpled again, on the floor! She whipped it aloft, unable to help admiring the fall of emerald silk folds. Another gaping zipper. Were these guys metal freaks, or what? Something had wafted to the floor when she lifted the dress.

She looked. A powder puff. The fluffy dressing-table kind. Pink. Ugh. She bent and picked it up. A diagonal white satin ribbon on the back bore the brand name in flowing script. Yvette. The puff part glimmered with opalescent flakes. A subtle whiff of Emeraude assaulted her nostrils.

Temple now knew what had inspired the name of the actress’s cat, but how had Savannah Ashleigh’s powder puff arrived at the Circle Ritz? On the wings of a dove?

29

Born to Be Child

“W hat are youdoing here?” Lieutenant C. R. Molina asked a trifle bitterly Friday morning. “There hasn’t been another murder.”

Molina’s world-class blue eyes—Temple could give credit where credit was due—lay stranded in maroon circles. Her hair was more lusterless than usual, and she was unconsciously twisting the loose class ring on her right hand. At eleven o’clock, both women were already frazzled.

“1 don’t know,” Temple answered, aware of a mirroring bitterness in her own voice. “WHOOPE apparently doesn’t need PR advice since the murders have made it world-famous. I guess I’m about as effective as you are, Lieutenant.”

“PR is window dressing. Murder is people’s lives.”

“I know. And I still think—”

“I don’t care what you think.”

“I know. But you do care what I know.”

“What do you know?”

The ballroom was bustling in preparation for afternoon and evening preliminaries. Seminaked men and women fussed with costumes, props, lights, music. Technicians lent state-of-the-art finesse to the process. Media people buzzed around, thrilled by the crude energy, the obvious glitz, the titillating lure of sex and death.

No one police lieutenant, no one PR woman could do a damn thing to stop it.

“I knew,” said Temple, “that Kitty Cardozo was abused, and was fighting it. I suspect that she was calling a local hot line with the same message she gave me: she was breaking free, she was going to live her own life.”

“Matt Devine?” Molina asked tersely. “She was calling him?

“Like clockwork. Until Tuesday night.”

“What happened Tuesday night?”

“I was attacked. Matt skipped work to stay at the Circle Ritz with me. Kitty was killed.”

“Devine stayed with you?”

“Yes. Strictly defensive, Lieutenant.”

Molina moved her nervous hand from her ring to her forehead, where she brushed back her thick hair. “I checked him out.”

“Matt?”

“No college record, no degrees. No driver’s license in this state. The hot line director stonewalls on his background. You seem to have found another mystery man.”

“With all this going on, you had time to play peek-a-boo in Matt’s life? My life? Again?”

“Maybe you have a pattern: mysterious men and murder. By the way, we haven’t found anything out on your attackers.”

“ Attackers-schmackers, so what! You probably think I hallucinated that, too. Listen. You didn’t like my nursery-rhyme pattern. Well, it works! I did my own checking out, with the public library. Both of the first victims were born on the right days.”

“And murdered on the wrong ones? Is there a right day for it, Barr?”

“How about today?”

Molina visibly stiffened. Temple was impressed with herself. Height didn’t matter here, or position. Only results. She had a feeling she was beginning to think like a hard-nosed homicide lieutenant.

“So.” Molina deliberately modulated her voice to noncommittal silk. “Tell me what the library said.”

Temple did.

Molina nodded. “It does fit. Perfectly. Do you realize what a... twisted mind it would take to follow your plan?”

“No more twisted than a random stalker.”

“It doesn’t figure. Whoever’s killing them is taking a tremendous risk. Some of these killers have massive egos. They enjoy the game of taunting the police. The murderer has got to be someone close to the competition. Now you say it’s someone who had access to their birth dates.”

Temple shrugged. “Look at a driver’s license in an unguarded purse. Call the library and find the right date.”

“And bypass victim B, C and D because they were born on the wrong day of the year?”

“Why not, if you’ve got a cornucopia of victims?” Molina was silent again, thinking. “There must be... three hundred entrants in this competition.”

“Three hundred and four,” Temple said with PR person precision.

“Almost as many as days in the year.”

Temple nodded.

“Your whole approach is crazy,” Molina said.

“Maybe we’ve got a crazy killer.”

“Hmm. What do you want?”

“The birth date of the latest victims. I don’t even know their last name.”

“Standish.”

“As in 'Miles’?”

“So the records say.”

“And the date?”

“June first, nineteen sixty-seven.”

“That young?” Temple was surprised.

“That young. You’re pretty young yourself.”

“Sixty-five. Hey! I guess I am.”

“Where are you off to? What are you going to do?”

“Call the library again,” Temple answered, sprinting away. The phone that Temple had requested the day before still sat on a chair by the wall. She had to call information to get the Clark County Library number. The librarian consulted a perpetual calendar and was quite certain. June 1, 1967, had been a Thursday.

“Thursday’s child has far to go,” Temple repeated speculatively. But what about Wednesday’s? Why had Wednesday’s child (“is full of woe”) been left out?