Unknown - 23_Cat_In_A_Vegas_Gold_Vendetta

Aha! Max hadn’t been here when that Barbie doll incident had gone down. For once, he had an unbreakable alibi—two broken legs and a coma—which might not even stop the Max who Temple knew, but the nearly six thousand miles to Switzerland would.

Max had been a convenient suspect physically and emotionally for the “old” Molina. Now the woman had to know if it hadn’t been Max, it very likely had been someone even more supernaturally elusive.

Usually, Temple felt she had to help Molina for Max’s sake. Now, she mused, she had to help her for everybody’s sake.

*

Alch opened the door when she knocked.

Off a crime scene, he was a fifty-something silver fox with kind eyes. Even he was looking frazzled and weary. Temple recognized the survivor of a too-long boxing match with worry.

“Hi, Detective Alch,” she said. “You look wilted off the crime scene.”

“Wilted? Oh. You mean instead of looking ‘fresh off.’ You’re always fresh, Miss Barr, and not always in a good way.”

“I know I can be painfully perky at times, but I’m here to help. Or so I was told.”

“Me too.” Alch stood holding the front door open, or maybe it was holding him up.

“Hey, may I come in? I was invited.”

“Sorry.” He swept the door fully open with a slight bow. “I’ve been pulling a lot of overtime lately.”

“I’ll bet,” Temple said, stepping in curiously.

Why wasn’t Molina here to greet her? She did an open survey, craning her neck up and down and around. Being short, she always risked missing something. No Molina or Mariah in sight. Not even the two rescue cats. Just a lot of slouchy kid-friendly furniture.

Alch was chuckling.

“What?” Temple asked, turning his way.

“Miss Pussyfooter. You look just like a cat stepping over a threshold, anticipating turning around and running at any second. The soles of your sandals won’t burn, and Molina won’t bite.”

“Hmph. Maybe not for now.”

Alch was shutting the door, forcing her to take a step forward and commit. “You know something you’re not supposed to?” he asked.

“Probably.” While Alch frowned, visibly torn between saying something more and not, Temple added, “I can guess how much you did for her these last couple months. Merit badge time.”

“Yeah, maybe, but she’s well now.”

“I guess. What’s the rush here? Why do we need to relive the night Mariah disappeared, especially me? I was peripheral to all that.”

“Nasty new development.” Alch studied the carpeting. “It’s under wraps, but there was another parking-lot Barbie doll murder last night.”

“Oh, my gosh. Here? In Vegas?”

“Yeah. Again. And, given the weird incident of the Barbie doll left in Mariah’s bedroom…”

“Molina needs to solve that freaky fact fast for her own peace of mind,” Temple finished for him, “and maybe to unlock the whole case. So here we are—lieutenant’s little helpers.”

Alch nodded and waved a hand toward the couch.

Temple still felt leery about sitting down when Molina was not there to OK the hospitality. The last time she’d been ordered into this room she’d had that weasel, Crawford Buchanan, in tow, on Molina’s orders, and Mariah had just gone missing.

A wild, scrabbling sound erupted from around the kitchen eating bar. Two brown-striped streaks bounded over the sofa back and seat, and then to the floor and down the hall.

Alch shook his head at their vanishing tails. “I’ll never understand why adult cats will suddenly act as if a black widow had bitten them in the ass and take off like kittens,” he said.

“We’ll never understand feline behavior.” Temple felt free to sit on the couch now that the cats had run roughshod over it. “What’s up? Where are the human inhabitants? Are we for dinner, literally?”

“Mariah’s doing an overnight at a friend’s house,” Molina’s contralto voice said from the unlit hall down which the cats had vanished. “For real this time. This time I wanted her out of the way. I was printing some things out in the home office.”

Temple had leaped to her feet like a guilty schoolkid at the sound of Molina’s voice, and Alch corrected his tired slouch.

Maybe Molina was what had bitten the tiger-cat girls in their fluffy rears, but she was coming from the wrong direction.

“Sit,” Molina said. “This is not boot camp.”

Alch and Temple exchanged a sympathetic look. If either had heard a more contradictory statement, it would be a long shot.

They sat.

“I’d offer you some refreshment,” Molina said absently, shuffling her papers, “but this is an exercise in a game of Clue.” She looked up. “Maybe afterward, if you’ve been good.”

Again Temple and Morrie Alch exchanged glances.

Molina was moving slowly, probably more from mental abstraction than recent physical problems. She was dressed casually, but Temple noticed that the khaki denim slacks had tight, fashionably wrinkled legs at the calf and that Molina’s buckskin flats were fringed around the ankle strap. Her loose leopard-print linen top was astoundingly fashion-assertive for the laid-back lieutenant, and her functional brunette bob was caught back on one side with a tortoiseshell barrette—a small tortoiseshell barrette, but the first jewelry Temple had ever spotted on C. R. Molina.

Maybe not so astounding, Temple decided on second thought. The policewoman’s alter ego, the torch singer Carmen, who’d been in retrograde for months, had worn a very forties silk flower in her hair.

Alch was still frowning, detecting a change but way too male to read the small-print signs. Obviously, however you looked at it, Molina was finally feeling better … and back!

Temple wondered why. Time and healing … or something else.

Molina sat in a chair opposite the device-cluttered coffee table—Mariah’s trail—and spread the letter-size pages over its length.

Temple blinked to see her Web site head shot blown up. Alch was next, with a ten-year-old ID shot that looked focused and jaunty.

“No comments?” Molina asked.

“Wish I didn’t need Just for Men now,” Alch said.

“As if you’d use any subterfuge for anything,” Molina chided. “Distinguished gray works. Trust me.”

Molina eyed Temple.

“I need to update my Web site photo,” Temple volunteered.

“Why? You wouldn’t look any older or wiser.”

Temple made a disrespectful Zoe Chloe Ozone face.

“You’ve got that teen persona down,” Molina conceded.

She laid out another glossy sheet.

“The tiger girls aren’t banishing rats from the house?” Temple asked as she recoiled from the gleaming visage of Crawford Buchanan.

“Nice shot.” Molina leaned back to study him. “You’ve known him for as long as you’ve been in Vegas?”

“It seems like aeons longer than three years.”

The photo was truly as oily as Buchanan was, taken at that old “Hollywood slant” so his stringy neck was hidden and his jaw looked stronger, his smile pasted-on phony, and his hair a monument to trendy-until-two-hours-ago male vanity.

“I believe you call him ‘Awful Crawford,’” Molina said. “You’re not very subtle in your dislikes and likes, are you?”

“No, I’m up front and honest,” Temple said. “What’s it to you?”

“It may be a very lot.”

Temple felt her flippant, defensive gaze caught in the searchlight of Molina’s electric-blue concentrated stare and found herself saying …

“He’s sexist and sleazy, and everywhere I’ve gone there’s always been one guy like him trying to do me dirt.”

Molina nodded, her lips taut but smiling satisfaction.

“Snitch,” Alch said, dismissing the photo and Buchanan. “That’s what this guy strikes me as—sneaky, lying snitch.”