Unknown - 23_Cat_In_A_Vegas_Gold_Vendetta

“I have been way off base for a long time, on everything. All right?” Molina’s cheeks flushed a dusky burgundy. She truly did look beautiful when she was mad. “I’ve been a bad cop, and I’ve been a bad mother.”

Alch shook his head. “Not for lack of trying to be great in every venue.”

“The point is,” Molina said very slowly, “the last … sign of the stalker was the most deviant. Rose petals through the house and down the hall. A radio playing. Not in my bedroom. Mariah’s.”

“And that’s,” Temple said, “when you first thought your suspicions of Max might be wrong.”

“On the stalking charge. Not on the Goliath murder, and not on deceiving you.”

Temple rolled her eyes and swallowed the B word. “At least you don’t have his photo on your suspects table.”

“He has a cast-clad alibi. What I want to know, and you two are here to help with, is who doesn’t?”

Temple and Alch sighed in tandem, exchanged glances, and began again. They would almost make a vaudeville act, Alch and Barr. No. Barr and Alch.

“Why don’t you move the photos around for where the people were?” Alch said. “So Buchanan is outta here, but maybe not off the exterior premises. Dirty Larry is still on the couch. Does that guy ever sit up straight?”

“Drug dealers don’t,” Molina said. “You have to realize D. L.’s undercover persona has become second nature. He’s not such a bad guy, just a good cop with too many years on a rugged beat.”

“He showed up out of nowhere, to hear Detective Alch tell it,” Temple pointed out. “Could he have been your stalker? He did act kind of boyfriend-y during Mariah’s reality-TV stint.”

“I let him act ‘kind of boyfriend-y.’” Molina looked at Alch, not Temple. “Frankly, I was using him to check up on my ex, and on your ex.” This time she eyed Temple. “Just an all-around handyman.”

“Kinda cold, Carmen,” Alch said.

“He’s a kinda cold guy, Morrie. Cold nerve is what keeps you alive in undercover. I don’t know what he wanted from me. I’m not as naive or”—she eyed Temple—“as self-deluded as you two think. He wanted something I don’t think he got.”

“Yet…” Alch pronounced, slumping Dirty-Larry-deep in the upholstery.

Ooh, Temple thought, ye olde faithful guard dog is ready to bite someone.

“So,” Temple said, being the good PR woman and discharging the edgy emotions around her, “the lovely and enterprising Crawford Buchanan is off the scene, perhaps to do dirt outside, perhaps not. He was in his Hummer H2 and on the cell phone when I came outside to leave.”

“A Hummer H2?” Alch questioned with disgust.

“Orange,” Temple added.

For a moment they all mused on whether the driver of an orange Hummer H2 could be a stalking slayer of young women.

Much too recognizable a vehicle.

A glum silence prevailed.

“Wait a minute!” Temple said.

Blue eyes and brown eyes regarded her with equal resignation.

“Dirty Larry left the main room.” Temple took a deep breath. “He’s always so low-key you automatically ‘erase’ his presence. That’s his day and night undercover job. Not to be noticed.”

She had their attention and went on.

“During all the sound and fury of Crawford Buchanan being given the bum’s rush out, I think Dirty Larry got up and faded … down the hall to Mariah’s room.”

“Can you swear to that?” Alch asked.

“Can you swear you saw a ghost? You were sitting on the couch,” Temple told Alch, “and Molina joined you after Buchanan was escorted out. So. Where was Dirty Larry?”

Alch jumped up. “That’s true. I try not to see the jerk, he’s so annoying. He’s got that act down good.”

“Why would Larry do it?” Molina asked.

“Mine is not to reason why,” Temple quoted an old nineteenth-century military poem. “Mine is to say there’s something rotten in the cast of characters on your coffee table, lieutenant.”

In the ensuing silence, the tiger-stripe girls came running through again. Barreling out from the kitchen, they touched down on the sofa back and seats, then took off for points unseen.

Midnight Louie followed in semihot pursuit, slip-sliding across the coffee table and pushing off the photo of … Dirty Larry Podesta. Louie skidded to a stop on the slick surface, claws out as four feet stapled it into the carpet.

Dirty Larry’s photographed face slip-slid away, shredded like a horror movie monster’s victim.

“Where did that cat come from?” Alch asked.

“Apparently,” Temple said, “he hitched a ride with me and snuck into the house, maybe through an old, insecure sash window?

“Clearly,” she added, “Midnight Louie ‘likes’ Dirty Larry for the dirty deed. Or deeds. Any objections?”

Molina had one. Or two.

“I told you to put your thinking cap on,” she told Temple. “Not your ‘thinking cat.’”

“We go together, like Mickey and Minnie, like oregano and olive oil, like spunky and funky.”

“Okay, Zoe Chloe. We’re done. Get the hell out, with your tiny red shoes and your big cat, too.”

Chapter 28

Home Invasion

Lieutenant C. R. Molina sat on her homely couch after everyone but her housecats had gone.

She’d cleared the decks, had Mariah safely away for the night, had rerun the night in question, and had ended up in an unpleasant place.

She wished she smoked. She wished she’d cultivated some vice besides generating an impressionable daughter for whom she felt she had to supply an impeccable model. Which Mariah’s father certainly wasn’t. Or was he?

She got up to fetch a beer from the fridge, listening to the two visiting vehicles depart outside as she leaned on the breakfast bar. Was the person who’d planted the Barbie doll on her premises Dirty Larry or Crawford Buchanan?

The next, almost laughable question? Was either one of them a serious Barbie Doll Killer candidate? Molina pressed the beer bottle’s cold glass against her forehead.

Larry made the more believable serial killer, yet she’d never gotten that vibe off of him. Lots of minor warning blips, but no serious suspicion. Was she slipping? Not a subject for debate. She had slipped.

A deep but easy breath told her the long and winding slash scar had finally settled in. Her own damn fault. All she’d learned from that insane B and E at the house on Mojave was that she and Max Kinsella might share the same enemy. Who?

Or … had Kinsella wanted someone to think that? Had his mentor, Gandolph, arranged for a watchdog as a diversion? Anything was possible.

A sharp pounding on her door made her heart jump. She put the beer down and got up to grab the Glock in her kitchen drawer. With Mariah out for the night, she hadn’t needed to use the gun safe that was in her closet and was suddenly glad.

The police-invasion-level pounding resumed.

Molina stuck the firearm down the back of her beige denims and pushed her face against the door’s peephole. Too dark.

“ID yourself,” she shouted loud and hard.

“Carmen, it’s me,” came a male voice.

Not many would say that. Alch or Rafi. And this wasn’t either voice.

She opened the door and stepped back.

Dirty Larry, looking particularly sullen, burst in …

… in the firm custody of Max Kinsella, the evident pounder.

“Who the hell are you?” Larry snarled at Kinsella.

“I don’t know. If you put it existentially. Or aren’t you feeling too existential now?”

What a bizarre nightmare! Mr. Light and Mr. Dark making a home-invasion duo with two faces.

“What’s going on here?” she demanded as she swept all the coffee table photos into a pile, which she moved to a hall-table drawer.