Unknown - 15_Cat_In_A_Neon_Nightmare

Vassar now lay disassembled like the department store mannequin she had evoked earlier.

“No bruises or other marks consistent with the application of force from an outside source,” Grizzly Bahr summed up for her ears only, the tape recorder already turned off. “The presence of semen, but no indication of force. A contraceptive implant was the only anomaly in the body. Nothing remarkable.”

“Semen?” Molina was startled. “Hookers don’t hook without condoms nowadays.” Her second thought was chilling. That might be evidence to hang Matt Devine. Was he dumb enough to forego a condom? And even if he was, which she doubted, Vassar certainly wasn’t. “How are you going to rule it?”

“Death by misadventure?” He pulled off his mask and grinned, widely. “No, that’s only in the murder mysteries, isn’t it? Guess your people will have to work on the definition, Lieutenant.”

“Guess we will.” She didn’t have to add that nobody usually cared much about a call girl but her cell phone service.

Wait a minute! Where was her cell phone?

“Her things are upstairs?” she asked.

“Bagged and tagged. Just like the remains will soon be.”

Molina glanced in passing at the table and its contents as she removed her mask and goggles. Not even a discarded mannequin anymore. Just remains.

“Any next of kin?” Grizzly had paperwork as well as bodies to process.

“Not that we know of. Yet. Maybe the clothes will be more talkative than her body parts.”

“In this case, then, clothes would ‘make’ the woman.”

Molina quirked a weary smile at his joke. She didn’t expect the expensive labels from any of a dozen casino shopping malls to reveal much more than the extent of Vassar’s clothing habit. But a cell phone might be a lot more “talkative.”

7

Beasts of Eden

There was no cell phone.

“Now this doesn’t make sense,” Molina commented aloud.

The technician in charge was a multi-earringed twenty-something whose eyes were still glued with envy on the slinky, shiny clothes Vassar had worn.

“This stuff is to die for.”

Molina avoided the obvious comeback. Most coroner facility mid-level techs were high school grads so ecstatic about the rewarding pay scale that they overcame any nicety about peeling fingerprints off the dead and other unpleasant tasks.

And they lived in a world where black humor was the best defense against depression.

“If any relatives step forward to arrange a funeral,” Molina said, “they’ll have to find something else to bury her in, that’s for sure.”

“Oh, these are too cool to bury.” The gloved technician pushed the soft silken folds back into their paper bags. Paper was more preservative than plastic when it came to fabrics.

Molina frowned at the iridescent snakeskin purse as it disappeared. One of those glitzy toy purses that cost a bundle but were only big enough to hold credit cards, tight curls of cash, and a decorative lipstick case.

No cell phone.

Vassar had to have carried a cell phone, or a pager. Where was it?

Max Kinsella stared at his own words on the computer screen with a sense of disappointment.

Temple made writing, and talking, look so easy. With her it was a flow, a part of her personality. He could sling a bit of patter himself. A professional magician had to be a silver-tongued devil to some extent. But when it came to setting word after word down on a computer screen, he found something lacking.

It wasn’t as if he hadn’t had a head start. Gandolph the Great’s memoirs were packed with fascinating stories about debunking phony mediums. Max had taken them up after Gandolph’s death last Halloween to finish what his mentor had started.

He was living in the man’s house, after all, and one bedroom was crammed with the machines of his stage illusions. The ghost of Orson Welles, former owner of the manse, an amateur magician of note and a film genius, hovered over the place as well.

Why couldn’t Max make something of what Gandolph had started?

Maybe he wasn’t a writer.

He was probably too tired to worry about this project now, but he was also too wired to sleep. His face and body ached, not a lot, but enough that three ibuprofens didn’t totally kill the pain.

Last night had been taxing, to say the least. After weeks of undercover work on both their parts, he and Molina had missed out on capturing the Stripper Killer. While they’d been duking it out mano-a-mana in a strip-club parking lot, Temple had been fighting for her life with the killer in another strip-club parking lot.

He’d finally allowed Molina to capture him, knowing no handcuffs would hold him, but the fact left an ugly taste at the back of his throat, like bile.

He’d never gotten into this kind of a macho contest with a woman before and his mid-thirties’ mind was old enough that a touch of chivalry cramped his style with the combative lieutenant.

Then to know that she’d made him too late to save Temple anyway, that it had been her hated ex-lover, Rafi Nadir, who had been there to do it … the only consolation to Max’s ego was that the pepper spray he’d given Temple had helped her hold off the killer until Nadir could come along and deck him.

He was an ex-cop, Nadir, and must still relish a bust, even if his shady present didn’t permit him to hang around to get the credit.

Max grinned at the annoying words on the screen. His words, that wouldn’t obey and look gracious. Molina would split her spleen to know that her loathed ex had chivalrously come to Temple’s rescue.

The Iron Lieutenant had looked pretty spleen-split when he’d left her handcuffed to her own steering wheel. Max chuckled. Never mess with a magician.

Then he frowned. Someone had messed with Gandolph the Great. No one had been charged with his mid-séance murder at the Halloween haunted house attraction. Garry Randolph had been Max’s mentor in magic and the counterterrorism life, his only family for years. Max had done nothing to avenge or solve his death except try to finish his book, and to do a mediocre job at that. Temple could help him fix the book, and she might even help him clear up Garry’s death.

Max tapped his fingers on the keyboard so lightly that no letters appeared on the screen.

Several psychics and mediums had been present for Garry’s death. He had been there in disguise to expose the frauds among them. Garry would say all of them. Someone more open minded, or imaginative, like Temple, would say most of them. She had been impressed by a couple of the psychics.

But Garry, he hadn’t performed for years. His mission the last years of his life had been revealing the tricks behind the illusions. Unlike the Cloaked Conjuror, he hadn’t built a mega-million Las Vegas headlining act out of it. Now the Cloaked Conjuror was facing death threats, and Max had to wonder if Garry’s death had been the first act of a plot to kill renegade magicians who gave away trade secrets.

Which brought up the mysterious Synth, supposedly a band of magicians who punished magicians who told. Even Garry’s former assistant, Gloria Fuentes, had been found dead a couple months ago in a church parking lot, one of a series of strangled women whose deaths might, or might not, be related.

And now CC had partnered with the strange female magician Shangri-La.

Max ran last night through his head again, but it didn’t come out any less cluttered. First there was the realization that Temple was a target for the Stripper Killer, then his own compelling need to reach and protect her. Yes, he was protective of Temple, call it what you would. He was bigger, sadder, wiser. She was the last, best hope the limited life his work as a counterterrorism agent had allowed since his late teens. While he had roamed the world working onstage illusions, he had foiled offstage attempts to kill innocent civilians. It was a career choice he hadn’t chosen and no one retired from.