Unknown - 15_Cat_In_A_Neon_Nightmare

He shook his head and shut his eyes in denial even as he said, “Yes,” as if confessing a failing.

“Oh.” Temple sat back. She thought for a minute. “I’m flattered. And I’m too smart and tough and nervy to let Kitty the Cutter win. So we are in this together, with whoever we can get on our side, sans Molina. Okay? Okay. This means Max and Midnight Louie, too. Louie saved my hide just last night, so that’s no measly ally.”

Temple had deliberately omitted from her list of admirable attributes the one that had thrilled her the most: beautiful. Really? He thought she was beautiful? Strange how something so shallow could resonate so deep.

Of course she immediately felt guilty for feeling that way.

Max was the one she’d fallen madly, manically, magically in love with, the one she had followed from Minneapolis to Las Vegas, the one she’d lived with at the Circle Ritz. When he had vanished without a word after finishing his magician’s gig at the Goliath Hotel, her world stopped. Then Molina had shown up, pushing Temple for information she didn’t have on Max’s whereabouts, accusing him of a murder discovered at the Goliath the same night he vanished. Temple feared Max was dead too. Molina was sure Max was alive and well somewhere, and a murderer.

Max had come back months later as suddenly as he’d disappeared. It was no one’s fault that Matt had come to live at the Ritz in the meantime. That Temple had begun to learn the secrets of Matt’s past, begun to be a part of his present… .

Max was back, and his reason for vanishing was … her safety. Sheer gallantry. He did indeed know about the Goliath’s dead man and was afraid the killers had been after him. He had fled to keep Temple safe. Turns out even Max had secrets in his past.

Max was back. He had been her only live-in lover, her only partner on the tracks of true love leading to Matrimony Junction. You didn’t throw away a mutually monogamous commitment in the Age of AIDS. You hung with the one who brung you. Who stuck with you. Who didn’t deserve to be cut out while he wasn’t looking, only because he cared enough about you to leave you for your own good.

Still, it seemed she had been wrong somehow in becoming Matt’s friend as he was trying to return to a secular, freshly sexual world from the Catholic priesthood. She had somehow been unfaithful to Max and unfair to Matt, without meaning to, without knowing it.

She clutched the one truth in the whole sordid mess that touched her to the quick. Matt had hoped she could be his salvation. Maybe she hadn’t been in a position to help him disarm Miss Kitty before the fact—and she understood that they could never have been intimate without betraying who they were and the very reasons they were tempted to be intimate—but she could sure kick stalker ass now that all had been said and done.

Chapter 6

Body Bag

People who don’t work in a medical examiner’s facility wonder how the staff can do it. How can they take fingerprints from the fire-eaten tips of charred hands? How can they stare headless bodies in the missing face?

Molina inhaled shallowly in the cool corridor, absorbing the sickly scent of decay with its inescapable overlay of orange, the counter-scent deemed most effective. She was reminded not of orange blossoms, the beginning, but the bitter, curled rind. The end.

As a visiting police officer, she had quickly discovered the paradox that perfectly intact bodies are far harder to cope with than the ones bloated or burned beyond recognition.

Vassar’s was one of those disturbingly intact bodies. She lay naked on the stainless steel examining table in the autopsy room. As if she could wait for anything anymore.

Despite the trauma of her fatal fall, her skin was simply bruised, as if she’d been in a minor automobile accident. The color was not as pallid as Shangri-La’s white stage makeup, but almost normal. She was as fresh as they ever came here. Worse, stripped of her high-fashion clothing and jewelry, she resembled an old-fashioned department-store mannequin underneath. Motionless, naked, as angular as an anvil to which exaggerated female secondary characteristics had been added: full lips abutting a cadaverous cheekbone; full breasts, a ripple of ribs.

She looked as if she could rise and leave any minute, as if her vacant, haughty model’s features would animate in an instant. She would yawn or smile. Sit up. Leave. Get on with her life.

Not, Molina thought, once Grizzly Bahr had finished eviscerating her like an Egyptian mummy in the name of forensics.

“This the downed bird?” the ME’s voice boomed from Molina’s rear. As burly as his nickname, he couldn’t avoid brushing against her as he barreled by. He stopped, arrested. “Say, there’s almost an expression on her face. Makes you wonder what her last thoughts were.”

Molina had noticed it too: a not-quite-expression of surprise and even perhaps a hint of distress. Only extreme trauma left post-mortem expressions on the dead, a death resisted. She’d seen that once, in a victim who had choked on a latex glove, an autistic adult. They’d never determined whether the death was accident … or suicide.

“You in for the duration?” Grizzly asked, his virtuoso eyebrows arched to their highest. Either he couldn’t believe she really wanted to do this, or he was relishing another opportunity to gross out the civilians, which in his opinion included police officers.

“She’s a real mystery,” Molina said as she accepted the mouth mask and clear safety goggles he extended. “I want to be the first to know.”

“Hmmm, may not know much even afterward.” He stepped to the corpse’s side as if about to ask her to join him in a macabre dance. “Pretty woman. Too skinny for my taste, but at my age I’m not the target audience anymore. The bruises all look impact-induced. Nothing-in the thigh and genital area. She wasn’t raped.”

“She was a call girl.”

“They can be raped.”

“Not a veteran. Not often.”

“This one irritate a client, you think?”

“I have no idea. Maybe a client irritated her.”

“And it was such a shock she dove to her death?”

“You know what the multiple choice is: accident, suicide, or homicide.”

“Which one would you like it to be?” Bahr’s eyes were slightly blurred through the goggles, but Molina found his expression especially avid.

Grizzly Bahr could smell when a cop really burned to make a case.

“In this instance … accident would be nice.”

Her choice startled him. Homicide lieutenants seldom rooted for an innocent death. Then he shrugged. He was a scientist. Only the evidence would count and that needed to be exhumed from the body before him.

Molina was having an unwished-for epiphany. She had stood through more than a few autopsies, and was used to the ME’s droning voice as he or she confided the long, Latinate medical terminology to the confessional of a tape recorder. She was aware of Bahr’s spare but invasive motions … the long Y incision of the trunk, the grueling revelation of the brain by sawing a literal skullcap off the top of the head.

These actions, this sequence, this ritual and its accompanying inventory of comment were familiar.

Except that now, today, for the first time it reminded her of another ceremony over another table. Altar. The mass. This is my body. This is my blood.

In a way this body and blood were communal property now, and literally community property. Their sacrifice upon the altar of science would free them from the eternal damnation of a known resting place reached by an unknown cause.

Unless of course, the autopsy was completely inconclusive.

Instruments clanged into stainless steel trays. Molina finally heard the inimitable squeaky, sucking sound of latex gloves being stretched and drawn off like alien skin.