Unknown - 23_Cat_In_A_Vegas_Gold_Vendetta

“Don’t pussyfoot,” she told the veteran detective; “come into my parlor.”

“You must be feeling better.”

“Shut the door.”

He did. Molina had no qualms that office gossip would buzz about her and Morrie, and nowadays she wouldn’t have cared anyway.

“I am feeling better,” she said. “The stitches are finally not pulling and itching with every movement, although my torso looks like an overlaced football. Mariah’s home and behaving, so I don’t have to lie by omission at work anymore. Other than the troubling, unsolved business of the former stalker in my home and the planted trademark of the Barbie Doll Killer inside my teen daughter’s bedroom, all’s right with the world.”

Alch settled himself onto one of her wooden visitor’s chairs. “Feels good to get a weight off my … feet.”

She nodded, puzzled. Morrie had settled into his fifties like a slightly graying Scottish terrier, comfortable but with plenty of chase and growl left in him. He didn’t, uh, “pussyfoot” around like this, even when invited.

“You know those folks you were having me keep a casual eye on?” he said, casually.

She nodded. Two men, one woman.

“My free time for casual eyeing is hit or miss, Lieutenant, you also know that.”

“What I know is I’m lucky to have one last man I can trust on call, Morrie. Whatever you come up with is appreciated.”

“So get this: I was driving up the Strip last night and spotted Our Miss Barr’s red Miata leaving Planet Hollywood.”

“Not her usual venue, like the Crystal Phoenix, but nothing suspicious in that. Girls just want to have fun.”

“Not this one. She drove out to an old address that used to be in the boonies and now, with the years of housing booms, is alarmingly close in, when you think of it.”

“What address?”

“It was already dark. I still kept my distance. She’d already tried to dodge a tail en route. Private house on Mojave Way.”

Molina sighed, audibly.

“Yeah. Guy pried himself from the Miata’s passenger seat.”

“Pried?”

“He was a big guy and that’s a small car.”

Molina shut her eyes.

“I should say he was big by being taller, not so much wide.”

She nodded. “Barr go in?”

“After he apparently jimmied the front door open.”

Molina’s dark eyelashes flicked wide.

“Yeah.” Alch knew he had reached the core of the apple and it was a Golden Delicious. He grinned. “Dude jimmied the lock. He went in. She went in. She stayed … um, barely twenty minutes. I’d have mistaken her for a real estate agent if I didn’t know better. No farewell smooching.”

“Duty, not desire,” Molina pronounced. The missing Max Kinsella was now accounted for.

She had to give Temple Barr credit for character, for not staying to give her returning ex-lover the ugly modern courtesy of a pity screw, but then, if Kinsella had masqueraded as the Phantom Mage, who vanished from the Neon Nightmare after sudden impact with a wall, he must be a shadow of the lady-killer he had been. Whatever the story behind Temple Barr’s stepping out on Matt Devine with her ex, it would be juicy.

“Good girl. Bad boy,” she told Alch. “Interesting from a gossip-mag point of view, but what about our other … serious persons of interest?”

“Good boys both. In the routine groove, work and home, no carousing, no bad habits. Mind you, I’m not on either one enough to swear they’re not busy plotting to knock off the Wynn Casino tomorrow.”

“Okay.” Molina produced a rare smile for their work environment. “Your personnel file is bloated with recent commendations, detective. Better get back to cracking your caseload so that doesn’t look suspicious.”

Alch rose, wincing as his knees creaked. “I don’t suppose you want to know about the black stray cat I spotted in the Mojave Way house vicinity?”

“No, Morrie, no more cat tales around here, if you can contain yourself.”

“And no more shadowing these persons of interest?”

“No. Don’t bother your handsome head about them anymore.”

“But … this new development is a killer.”

“Yet … not illegal. You might still keep that … casual eye on Miss Barr. I worry about that girl as if she was a daughter.”

Alch blinked. “Since when?”

“Oh, Morrie, you’re so behind the times. Since it was we three girls against a berserk but well-hidden killer at the celebrity dance contest—me, Mariah, and Miss Barr’s ever-so-trendy Zoe Chloe Ozone persona. If your name was Charlie, you could call us your angels.”

“Yeah, right. Not a halo in that bunch.” Alch went to crack the door open but turned. “You need anything else, let me know.”

“Always.”

Molina shut down her wide smile the minute the crack in the door went to six inches. The Iron Maiden of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Force had a reputation to keep up. And places to go and people to see.

Person. Singular.

One formerly missing person.

Apparently fate had dropped a shiny new pawn on her board.

Chapter 13

She Spat, He Spat

“This site is dead,” Miss Midnight Louise declares when I come to inspect her work. “All the juice has been squeezed out of it. We should be back on Aloe Vera Drive where the cat action is.”

“I am thinking that it is always good to keep an eye on Mister Max. Were you not hot to do that from the moment the Phantom Mage hit the wall at the Neon Nightmare? I am giving you your dream assignment.”

“That is what will be going on here tonight. Mister Max’s dreams. Now that I know he is all right—or at least alive and back where he belongs—I can concentrate on Miss Temple’s first case along with you.”

Phtchooey, I say.

“Dudes always give dames the ‘scat’ work.”

“What is ‘scat’ work?” I ask, much amazed by the term.

“Where we are forced to hang around and twiddle our dewclaws and are finally shooed away by irritable humans yelling ‘Scat!’”

“I trust you to keep a very low profile, Louise, and the reputation of Midnight Investigations, Inc., discreet.”

“Besides,” she says with a sly sideways look, “you would think the senior citizen of the firm would want the snooze detail.”

Actually, I have been losing some sleep lately over Miss Temple’s suddenly overpopulated private life.

To be honest, I do not have much expectation of anything worth a squib in the Las Vegas Review-Journal happening here, but I am keeping my personal private eye on Miss Violet’s house with all those residents of the female feline sort and do not want a chaperone on my tail.

So I leave Miss Midnight Louise there, on discontented duty, feeling a bit smug in the knowledge that the lovely ladies on Aloe Vera Drive will certainly not be growling “Scat!” at their devoted protector.

What could happen here in one night?

Really.

Chapter 14

She Said, He Said

The last time Molina had stood outside this address in the dark of night, she’d been wearing camouflage black, slinking around to the back of the premises to break in.

The last time she’d been inside the place, an unidentified intruder had paid a simultaneous visit, resulting in an eighty-six-stitch wannabe scar across her left rib cage and hip.

Now she stood at the front door, under the subtle entry light, ringing the doorbell.

*

Max pressed his eye against the peephole, cursing the long Black Irish lashes obscuring his vision, trying to ID the shadowy figure outside, a suited six feet with no other identifying features he could make out in the dim light.

Door-to-door salesmen hardly showed up at 9:00 P.M.