Unknown - 19_Cat_In_A_Red_Hot_Rage

Max had found the profession of magician to be the perfect cover for his activities. Why wouldn’t Kathleen O’Connor come to the same conclusion, especially since she knew all about him and would have relished using his own methods to track him and bring him down. Maybe ShangriLa wasn’t always the same person. Hai Ling was illegally in this country. Maybe Kitty the Cutter forced her into stepping aside at times when it suited Kitty to masquerade as ShangriLa. For criminal activities! Like that designer drug smuggling operation at the Opium Den!

Everything was amazing … and fit … and, Temple mused, utterly useless. Because Kathleen was dead and buried. Temple’s brilliant insight had come too late. It didn’t matter, except that it proved that Matt was eternally free of Kitty the Cutter’s sick, violent stalking, as was Max.

If she could only find Max to tell him so! He’d be so proud of her reasoning, her revelation. Except he was noncommunicado, as he’d so often been lately. Too absent to even keep her chronic attraction to Matt from finally exploding into consummation. Not that she regretted a moment of that, but Max could have at least tried to prevent it, instead of pushing her into Matt’s bed like some heroic doomed lover passing her onto a new romance and a better life.

So her elated mood at having solved the biggest mystery afflicting them all dropped like a stone. She was still sipping her way through that one expensive glass when she got up to answer the knock on her door, hoping that it wasn’t someone wearing purple and red.

She’d had enough of P and R PR to last a lifetime.

She lucked out in that respect. She faced a wall of plain khaki-colored cotton pantsuit.

Lieutenant C. R. Molina was poised with a fist still raised. That vision shook Temple out of her fog and into combat alert.

“Should I cringe now or later?” she asked.

“I’m greedy:’ Molina said. “I want both.”

“And you still expect me to invite you in?”

“Oh, that would be nice.” Said sarcastically. “Actually, I have some questions that you might really want to know the answers to.”

Temple stepped back from the door, resigned. Molina followed her into the living room, but neither woman sat. Their relationship, always at odds over Max, was too thorny for simple actions like that.

“Have you seen Kinsella lately?” Molina asked, eyeing Temple’s glass of scotch.

Still the same old tune. Only this time, with Max vanishing again, it really stung. Molina was the last personTemple wanted to know that Max had left Las Vegas, maybe. Had left her, certainly.

“Seen Max? Not recently,” Temple said casually. “We’ve never lived in each other’s hip pockets.”

“Heard from him?”

“Not recently.”

Molina nodded. “Were you aware of a magician working at Neon Nightmare?”

“I know the nightclub, but no.”

“He wore a cape and a mask and performed as the Phantom Mage. He bounced around the dark interior walls on bungee cords and did magic effects in literal thin air. I understand he was quite popular.”

“Sounds like a comic book superhero act.”

“Sounded like Max Kinsella to me.”

“He hasn’t performed in almost two years.”

“Exactly why he might want to polish his skills anonymously. What do you think? Even better, what do you know?”

“Nothing about this Phantom Mage. Why ask me? Why not trot over to Neon Nightmare and interview the magician in question? Surely you and your shield can sweet-talk only a mask off a man.”

“I would, except I didn’t learn about him until he stopped performing.”

Temple rolled her eyes. “This is such a non-issue, then. Guess we’ll never know who the Phantom Mage was.”

But she was wondering now if it had been Max. He’d talked about rehearsing again, about putting a new act together. It had been his excuse for remaining distant lately. Maybe that’s why he’d left. To train in Europe or someplace safe. Right, and not tell her he was going?

“Maybe we’ll all soon know who he was,” Molina said, watching her. “Have you seen or spoken to Max Kinsella since last week? Telling me won’t betray him. I know you’ve been in close contact for months.”

Temple had to take a few moments to mentally backtrack. Her mind had been pretty occupied by Matt and his dinner date and engagement ring recently …

“No,” she said finally.

“That’s interesting. You might want to sit down.”

Temple remained standing. Molina sat on the sofa’s broad arm, a position that put their faces on a level.

“The Phantom Mage left a huge puzzle behind him.”

“He’s gone, then? He left?”

Molina shrugged. “Hard to say. Witnesses are divided about whether he died on the scene or not.”

“Died?” Temple spoke quickly to keep from focusing on her stomach doing a swan dive. Died? “What scene? I haven’t read anything in the newspaper about the Neon Nightmare.”

“There was a small notice, but no follow-up. That’s the mysterious part. Witnesses saw him fall. He hit the wall, hard, when his bungee cord failed. An onlooker gave him CPR. Nine-eleven was called, then a pair of EMTs took him away in an ambulance, siren screaming. About four hundred shocked people witnessed it.”

Temple felt her knees turn to Jell-O. Molina must think thiswas Max. And she’d come here, to Temple’s home, to taunt her with the horrifying, gory details to make her give something away.

“You know,” Temple said, her voice shaking, “you’re a heartless bitch.”

“I did suggest you sit down.”

“I won’t suggest what I think you should do.”

“I still think you should sit down.”

“There’s more?”

“The onlookers were pretty shaken up. They started calling the police to inquire about the man’s fate or condition. Of course we had to look into it then.”

“And of course you couldn’t let a magician disappear on you again.”

“Or on you. Again.”

Temple swallowed, hard. That’s just what had happened.

“When we started investigating it,” Molina said, “we found out the magician had really, actually disappeared into thin air. No ambulance had reached any medical facility with an injured or dead man wearing a mask and a cloak. No ambulance service had made a hospital run that night at that time.

“The man who performed CPR never came forward, and never could be found. The only description was medium everything—height, weight, and age—in dark clothes.

“That’s when I became interested in the incident. I sent some detectives to the scene. The fatal bungee cord couldn’t be found. All the bungee cords hanging from the apex of the interior pyramid at the Neon Nightmare club were fine. Whole. Unbroken, and uncut. Everything was normal.

“It must have been an act, my detectives concluded. It must have been the magician’s spectacular exit from a job he’d tired of.

“No unclaimed bodies lie in the morgue. Sometimes, when illegal Mexican workers die, their friends and family stuff the body in a truck or a car trunk and race back into Mexico to bury him. Nobody official in the U.S. knows a thing about it. That could have happened here, except Mexicans are a shortstatured people and everybody at Neon Nightmare agrees that the Phantom Mage was tall and imposing, a thrilling acrobat and illusionist. Really too good for a nightclub act at the Neon Nightmare. The crowd misses him. Maybe you do too.”

That was such a low blow that Temple wanted to shriek at the woman, but she wasn’t giving Molina a shred of information about Max, good, bad, or just damn scary. This might be the last chance she had to shield him from Molina’s obsessive desire to find him guilty of something.