Unknown - Cat_In_A_Midnight_Choir-spaces_ru

“This is Molina and all my days are unusual, so don’t flatter yourself. I need to talk to you.”

“You are.”

“In person, where I can see you and you don’t sound half-looped.”

“I am not looped. I am happy. It is a natural human state in parts of Las Vegas you seldom see, Lieutenant.”

“That’s good to know. Can you come see my side of town?”

“Yeah. Now?”

“As good a time as any.”

“For you, maybe.” Then Temple pictured zipping up to the police department building in this jaunty set of wheels. What’d Molina drive, an ancient Volvo? “Okay, I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“Thanks,” Molina’s brusque voice said before the connection died.

Temple stared at her cell phone as if it had grown Dumbo ears. Molina gave thanks? To her?

Must be a trap.

Temple resolved to be on her guard despite a New Car High and welcomed piloting her new baby on a mission to Homicide Central. Might as well break it in early.

C. R. Molina’s office was depressingly functional, but Temple had been here before. She sat on the molded plastic visitor’s chair, her feet barely grazing the floor despite platform wedgies that added four inches to her five-feet-zero.

Across from her, Molina was the same stark, brunette figure that sometimes stalked Temple’s nightmares: Mother Superior incarnate, a female authority figure who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Instead of feeling chirpy about her flashy new car, Temple suddenly felt like a kid with a new red fire engine that all the adults were too busy with Real Life to look at.

This insight reminded Temple that she had often been too busy lately to look at Real Life, which was the only kind of life — and death — Molina dealt with daily.

Molina was shunting some paperwork aside. The statistics of death in Las Vegas. She reminded Temple of a school principal calling a student to her office. Except school principals were seldom nervous, and today the Rock of Gibraltar of the LVMPD was. Slightly.

She sat back, a nunlike figure in her dark navy blazer and denim shirt. “This is off the record.”

“Which way? I’m not supposed to tell anyone, or you won’t tell anyone?”

“You’ve never listened to me before, but I wish you’d prick up one tiny Toto ear and listen now.”

Temple flushed at being compared to a dog. A small dog. A small cute film dog. “Which Wicked Witch are you warning me about now?”

“It’s Wicked Wizard.”

“Max? Don’t you know by now that I don’t listen to propaganda?”

“I do. Which is why I’m pretty stupid for even trying to open your eyes about him. You should know that he is suspected of some pretty serious stuff. That there’s good reason to think he’s committed a felony.”

Temple’s sun-warmed skin felt the sudden frost of an inner chill. “Felony.”

“Grand theft, burglary, robbery, kidnapping,” Molina noted tone lessly. “And murder.”

“You’re not back on that old sweet song again? Max is not a murderer. If he’d done anything even remotely wrong since he came back last fall, you’d have had him arrested by now.”

“Easier said than done with the Mystifying Max. Magicians have a criminal edge second to none.”

“Ex-magician.”

“Too bad he’s not an ex-boyfriend.”

“Maybe he is. You don’t know anything about us, really.”

“I know more than you do about Max Kinsella.”

“Now, really, that’d be going some.”

“You’re blinded by your relationship to the man. You so resented the implication when you were assaulted in the parking garage that the emergency room staff assumed you were a battered woman. But what does sleeping with the stripper strangler make you?”

“Max? Killed that poor girl? Cher Smith?”

“For starters.”

“You think I wouldn’t know if he were capable of that?”

Molina nodded. “Most of the worst serial rapists had nice little wives at home who were totally ignorant of their real natures. And some didn’t. Some had willing partners in their crimes; women who preferred to see it done to other women than to suffer it themselves. Abused to the point of becoming accomplices.”

“You have no idea of who Max is,” Temple said, stunned at the darkness of the crimes under discussion, but unshaken. “I wish I could tell you, but you wouldn’t believe me.”

“Who’s more liable to be deceived here: the girlfriend, or the police professional?”

Temple just shook her head.

“Remember that I warned you. He could go down for something seriously criminal, and then you really will be an accomplice, as well as a witness for the prosecution.”

“Why do you need to prove Max guilty of something so badly?”

“Because it’s my job to find and arrest the guilty. He may be guilty of more than you can imagine.”

Temple had a Cecil B. DeMille imagination, so this was a real threat. If Molina was even more convinced now than a year ago that Max was guilty of something heinous, the situation was as serious as she said.

Temple answered seriously. “I know it looked suspicious when Max disappeared right after that dead man was found in the spy network cubbyhole over the Goliath Casino, but he had just finished his performance contract there. If — and I say if — he knew about the death, he might have gone underground because he was afraid of whoever did it, or of being arrested for it. Maybe he was set up —”

“You’re telling me you lived with the man and he never explained his vanishing act to you?”

“Max keeps his own counsel. He said it was for my own protection.”

“He’s not doing a very good job of protecting you, or what’s yours.”

Molina finally lowered her laser blue eyes — so like that beautiful blue light of the glaucoma test machine at the eye doctor’s that you’re supposed to hold absolutely still for while staring right into it without blinking as it pushes closer and closer…and even though you can’t feel it you know that gas-blue flame is drilling right into your cornea — ick! Temple blinked from just thinking about the eye test.

Maybe it had made her nervous (that epic imagination at work again), because she jumped when Molina tossed something across the desk that hit the papers with a thunk.

This was the usual police evidence baggie that you thought should be holding somebody’s leftover tuna-fish sandwich, which usually turned to be something sad, like one earring, or grisly, like somebody’s leftover bloodstained wallet….

The object inside the bag was small and lumpy with a glint of gold.

Temple’s ghoulish imagination conjured a flashy molar pulled out by the roots….

“Oh.”

She reflexively reached for the object. It was hers, after all.

It weighed heavily in her palm as her memory assayed it. She’d forgotten how utterly beautiful it was, the opals, the diamonds, the gold setting.

It had been hers for only a few days.

“Where? When?”

Molina was happy to dispatch the dispassionate facts. “In a parking lot. A church parking lot. Several weeks ago. Near another parking lot body. It was identified, but the perp remains at large. A female victim, of course.”

“My ring was by the body?”

“By the edge of the parking lot, actually. A bright young uniform found it. The body was thirty yards away.”

“I don’t understand.” This time Temple could meet the laser eyes: she stood on firm ground. “You know this ring was on my hand the night we all attended the Opium Den to see that woman magician’s act. Shangri-La called me onstage as the willing audience schmoo, took my ring, and then vanished with her whole retinue.”

“You vanished too, and that black alley cat of yours, who gets around like a case of the clap.”