Unknown - 15_Cat_In_A_Neon_Nightmare

A man who had walked out of the camera’s view back-stepped reluctantly into focus again.

“Stop there.” Molina leaned inward, studied the figure from the same bird’s-eye view as the camera. His face was foreshortened, his shoulders exaggerated. She caught her lower lip in her teeth. Rafi Nadir? She’d only seen him close-up once in recent years, and a lot of Middle-Eastern men came to Las Vegas, enough that the security lines at McCarran Airport snaked through half the terminal nowadays. Was it him, or just your average possible terrorist?

“Want a close-up?”

“Yeah. Lower left-hand quadrant.”

Magically, the screen expanded to a larger blur of bodies.

Rafi? Rafi had been at the Goliath that night? It was possible. He was quite the man about Las Vegas, from what she had gleaned.

“That enough, Lieutenant?”

“Quite enough. Go back to the overview and run the tape forward.”

“Nobody good, huh?”

“Nobody good, right.”

No good, period. Molina brooded. He had gone downhill since L.A. Downhill and edged into quasi-legal territory, at the least. Not all cops stay the course, but they don’t have their futures written on their foreheads either. She had the uneasy feeling that Rafi’s downward slide, if graphed, would exactly parallel her upward climb, in rank at least. It had not started out that way.

All the while her eyes were scanning the images flowing past the registration desk. The time read 6:10, the seconds fleeing like suspects.

Ten minutes, then she sat forward again.

Chet read her body language and immediately stopped the tape, reversed it, froze it.

Molina checked the time, then noted it down in the small notebook she carried in her jacket pocket: 6:23. And Matt Devine waiting at the brass stands that kept people from rushing the desk clerk.

What had nailed him was that he was looking around, constantly. Hunting Kitty the Cutter. If you knew to look for a hunted man, and Barrett and Su had not, it was easy to spot that bobbing head amid the sea of bored, nodding heads.

She nodded at Chet herself, okaying him to continue the tape, and watched Matt approach a desk clerk, chat, flash a roll, wait, study the page her computer spit out, hesitate, chat some more. The woman smiled. He was changing his room number and the woman smiled. What an operator! Mr. Charm. Irritate an overworked functionary and have her eating out of your hand anyway.

He did everything she had suggested.

“Stop.”

Again the taped world obliged thanks to Chet’s quick trigger finger. Molina studied every single soul in the frame, maybe seventy people. Nobody recognizable. No Vassar. No Kitty. No Rafi.

Nobody to see Matt Devine check into the Goliath Hotel for a date with death.

Nobody but the eternal Eye in the Sky and anybody with access to studying the tapes.

“Forward,” Molina finally ordered.

Docilely, everyone on-screen sprang to life again, shuffling forward in line, slapping credit cards to marble, jostling each other, hanging back behind the registration line watching. .

Son of a biretta!

Molina’s hands tightened on the hard plastic arms to keep herself from leaping out of her chair, but the control geek at the monitors sensed her excitement.

“Got it!” Chet caroled.

Even in black and white, there was no mistaking that head. Black as night, towering over the common crowd.

Max Kinsella had been at the Goliath Hotel the evening that Vassar had died, long before she and he had tangled in the Secrets parking lot and before Temple Barr had met the Stripper Killer face-to-face in another parking lot.

The ultramodern letters on the frozen tape read 6:26.

Molina was doing some fast mental math.

Was there any way Kinsella could have escaped her custody and gotten back to the Goliath in time to interfere with Vassar in a fatal way?

Yes. And the bastard would even have had time to visit his heroic ladylove on the way.

If Kinsella could fly as a suspect, Matt was off the hook, and so was she.

But no. She and Matt would still have to reveal their roles in the whole charade, and who would believe the tale of Kitty the Cutter, woman of mystery?

Still. Kinsella had been there. She knew it. She had evidence. It would be worth something. Sometime.

Chapter 24

… Gone for Good

Matt awoke, so early that the light wasn’t sluicing through his bedroom miniblinds, and panicked.

Yesterday had been Sunday and he had missed mass. The instant overpowering, guilty surge was an old altar-boy reflex.

Matt knew it had been Sunday. He knew he had missed mass. He had deliberately missed mass.

After the Saturday night he planned had turned out, he hadn’t figured out how to go back to church. Was he a lamb of God or a leper? Did he need confession, and if so, exactly what sins should he confess? For the first time, Matt understood the constant internal agonies of overscrupulous Catholics caught up in an obsessive-compulsive round of self-doubt.

Father, forgive me, for I may have done something wrong sometime, like maybe now by debating just what is confessable and what is not.

Often Matt had been secretly impatient with their endless, tiny, tedious venial sins, then had joined their self-abasement and assigned himself penance afterward. Now that his mind was splitting hairs, too, he began to see the torturous thumbtacks of self-incrimination that pinned these overanxious souls to a rack of worry and insecurity.

Okay. Yesterday had been Sunday. Today was Monday. A new week. Vassar was two days dead instead of one. Molina was digging into a new week’s worth of investigative work. He was, what, eight hours into being promised release—paroled but not pardoned, if you will—by the call-in lips of Kathleen O’Connor? Could you believe a psychopath? Wasn’t the impulse to want to believe them just another way they wrapped you up tighter in their own sick scenarios?

Nothing was sicker than his feelings about Vassar’s death.

Matt sat up, his bare feet on the wood floor, which felt slick and cool.

Somebody must miss Vassar. She hadn’t lived, or worked, in a vacuum. Maybe he could find out who. Tell them, him or her, about her last hours, which hadn’t been too bad really … or was that hubris?

Matt shook his head, trying to make sense of the crowded hours: Vassar, and then Molina breaking in on him at home with such awful news, and next Temple, asking questions he didn’t want to answer. Then Leticia baby-sitting him through the lonely hours live on radio, and Kathleen calling to say he was free, and finally Jerome, Jerry Johnson from seminary, showing up in the parking lot with fifteen years of baggage invisibly dragging behind him, expecting Matt to help lift the load.

Punishment, he supposed, for trying to turn against years of conditioning.

He got up and trudged to the shower, sloughing his gipajamas. Martial arts-wear as sleepwear. Was there some underlying statement in his habits? Did he need to be on guard even as he slept? Especially as he slept? Yes.

Hot water, then cold may have cleared his head, but not his heart.

Dressed, Matt went into the main room, not surprised that the hour was too early for anything except extra z’s.

Maybe he would drive somewhere, to an all-night fast-food place. Eat breakfast as the sun rose over the mountains at the valley’s eastern edge.

His wallet and keys lay on one of the small cube tables that formed an impromptu coffee table in front of the sofa.

He swept the items up, designated for opposite pants pockets, then stopped to study the key ring.

Something was different. Wrong. Missing.

His heart leaped to the top of the Mount Charleston, seeking the first rays of sun.