Carole douglas - Cat on a Hyacinth Hunt

I've got a Very Important Person to find."

"Got your evidence?" Molina shouted into the trailer's long metal cavern. "Get 'em into the van. We've got missing persons to find."

"Missing persons?" Matt asked.

She shrugged. "Kinsella did hear a mewing sound."

The men, carrying garbage bags full of gently clicking capsules bounded off the trailer end in formation, the vehicle shaking as each man leaped to the ground.

The moment the drug-hounds had deserted the trailer, Max began moving his fingers over the nearest cabinet as if searching for Braille.

Matt's alarm grew as he watched the magician's swift and serious search.

Before this, everyone had seemed so laid-back, as if there were no hurry. Now, it was all hurry.

"I've been hearing a faint cry," Kinsella said, finding a hidden spring and clicking open a sword-swallowing taboret.

The cinnabar-red painted interior was empty.

Matt moved among the magical furniture, listening for clues.

A banshee's cry came from far within the trailer.

"Eeeeeeroooooooow. "

Kinsella bounded in that direction, still using the flashlight Molina had commandeered.

"That doesn't sound like anything human," Molina pointed out.

"You wouldn't sound very human if you'd been locked in a virtual coffin decorated by mandarin-fingernail painting," Matt said, as Kinsella wrestled another tall case away from the side wall. His long fingers made spider-light tracks across the front surface.

When Matt joined him, he tilted the unit forward just in time for Matt to catch the brunt of its weight, then did the same thorough finger-walking over its lowered top and revealed bottom.

At last a secret lower drawer clicked out and jammed into the trailer floor.

Kinsella rooted through a tangle of rainbow-colored scarves, then rose and pushed the cabinet upright.

Some pieces were covered in tarps. Kinsella began ripping them off. His early handling technique had been cautious, even respect-fill. Now he was indifferent to the magical cabinet-maker's art.

Matt heard a squeak, or a cry. "There!" He pointed to a low shrouded oblong.

The elasticized ropes binding the piece snapped like suspenders in Kinsella's eager fingers.

He knelt before the revealed object.

It reminded Matt of an altar from a Black Mass. Chains and locks crisscrossed its sinister battered leather surface, which was scribed with arcane signs scrawled in the deep burgundy-brown color of old blood.

Kinsella rubbed his hands together, as if stimulating circulation. He tapped on the trunk in various places, tested the chain links, rattled the locks.

"If Temple were confined in something like that," Matt demanded, exasperated, "wouldn't she have run out of air by now?"

Kinsella shook his head. "These props are all made of wood. Wood breathes. It never joins as tightly as it should. These may be built to look as solid as a steel safe, but in magic everything is the opposite of what it appears to be."

"In life, too, I'm beginning to think."

The man grinned up at him in the harsh glare of the flashlight. "Sounds like you're learning."

"If we don't have keys, we need .. . picks, hatchets."

"Violent, aren't we?"

Kinsella's hands roamed the heavy metal keys like a pianists. He unthreaded a length of chain then jerked. Two loops fell free.

"I suppose," he told Matt in a confidential us-guys tone, "that if I asked Molina for a nail file, and she did have one, she would stab me with it."

Matt dug in his pockets. "I've got a nail clipper, one of those deals with a short pull-out file.

"Good work, Scout Devine! I'll take it."

Kinsella fanned out his bare hand like a surgeon anticipating the slap of a scalpel on his palm.

Matt complied, a little harder than he had to.

"Male nurses can be so violent," Kinsella said, chuckling and handing Matt the flashlight.

Kinsella flipped out the two-inch ribbed-metal file--utterly useless for smoothing off hangnails, Matt had always found--and began probing the keyholes as if they were open wounds in need of cleaning out.

Matt aimed the light at whatever lock Kinsella explored.

Sometimes he gave up and moved on. At other times, a lock conceded with a click that sounded like applause to Matt's blood-pulsing ears. Then Kinsella would draw another long length of chain free and into a puddle on the floor.

Ten minutes became fifteen by the watch Matt's mother had given him, that he wore only on occasions "out."

"You believe she can breathe, if she's here somewhere?" he asked at last.

"These devices aren't made for smothering someone, merely containing them, concealing them, letting them escape. It's too bad I never taught Temple some tricks of the trade. . .. ah!"

Another lock sprung open. More chain pulled through Kinsella's agile hands to coil on the metal floor.

An almost unheard whine hailed the fall of the last length of chain.

Kinsella shook his hands, spread his arms, fanned his fingers over the trunk's front corners, and lifted.

The metal-banded maw cracked, then split, then elevated upward.

Matt felt his blood slow in his veins. The trunk was big enough to hold Temple, especially if her body were curled up. And why would it be curled up? Because someone had forced her into that position to fit into the trunk? Because she had assumed it herself? The ever-comforting fetal position? Or because she had curled up and died. That expression didn't exist for nothing.

The flashlight he held glared like a nova sun into the darkness inside the trunk. Anyone alive in there would have reacted to the bright light, would have stirred or protested.

But all Matt saw were the trunk's dark corners outside the overheated circle of the flashlight beam. No one was inside.

Relief felt like the flu, his arms and legs aching as if all the blood in his body was draining.

The next thought was: if not this casket, what about the next? And the next. And the next.

This was like playing hide-and-seek in a funeral-parlor coffin-display room and he had very recent reason to be familiar with that grimly hushed arena.

And then the darkness moved, leaped up at him and the flashlight, struck the portable lamp from his hand.

"What the devil--?" Kinsella was caught off guard too.

Matt jumped back to retrieve the light where it lay rocking on the floor.

Something brushed his leg as he did so, and he couldn't restrain a shudder.

He swept the light across the floor, until its beam nailed the perpetrator. Matt saw flattened ears, frown-ruffled forehead blinking eyes with the pupils narrowed to a vertical slit the width of a straight pin. A tail lashed the trunk's outside corner.

"Louie?"

"Oh, no," came Molina's groan from outside the truck. "Keep searching."

Kinsella bent to pick up the cat.

Louie's feet flailed against the magician's chest, and from the expression on his face, a few claws connected.

"Who wants this fireball?"

"Put him down," Matt suggested. "Maybe he knows where Temple is."

"This is a wild goose chase," Molina said from her distance. "We should go back to the theater and conduct a more thorough search there."

Kinsella was quick to answer. "We haven't conducted a thorough search here yet."

Matt heard the mockery as Kinsella repeated her official phrase: conduct a thorough search.

He could afford to mock the routine, the methodical means of the law. He was an outlaw.

Before Matt could decide which side to join--stay with Kinsella until every box had been broken down or rush back with Molina to strip-search the theater topside and below--Kinsella spun violently forward and tore the tarp from a concealed shape.

What he revealed made even Matt catch his breath.

"It's the cabinet Temple disappeared from! But how can that be? Did they break down the stage props that fast?"