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Given how deeply Molina loathed and distrusted Max, it gave Temple chilling pause to wonder what else threatening Molina saw looming in Temple’s own present and future.

The Sign of the Serpent

If Lieutenant C. R. Molina had meant to destroy Temple’s zip-a-deedoo-dah mood, she couldn’t have done better had she gone to graduate school in Killjoy 101.

Temple put the Miata’s top down again, fussing aloud about the process and herself.

“There’s no sense in taking anything that woman says seriously. She’s prejudiced against Max and probably thinks Miatas are the Devil’s workshop, too. What a puritan! She probably has the sex life of a cantaloupe. She certainly has the hide of one.

“I’d hate to be her daughter! Poor Mariah! It would take more than a Xena the Warrior Princess outfit to make that woman halfway human.”

Still, Temple stopped and grinned to picture the towering, no-nonsense detective done up as a credible Xena in leather bustier, studded boots, and kilt. And she already had the Lucy Lawless Olympus-blue eyes down cold. The masquerade had been a ruse to catch a killer at a science fiction convention where Xena clones were about as unique as Bozos at a clown convention. Temple was surprised the buttoned-down Molina would go undercover in such an over-the-top feminine guise, but her daughter had been in danger and mother love is a desperate motive. Actually, Molina’d looked pretty hot for a homicide lieutenant in that get-up. Temple’s grin faded.

Then she broke a fingernail on the convertible-top latch.

“Holy Aeolus! It’s the curse of the Chakram Chick.”

She got in the car and drove away, worrying more about what Molina might know about Max (that Temple didn’t) than was good for her sanity.

She hardly noticed where she was driving, she was so upset. Seeing the ring Max had given her treated like a Cracker Jack token made her stomach churn. Contemplating how Molina might use it to tie Max into yet another murder made the churn start whipping out butterflies. She was hardly Max’s keeper, she told herself. He’d been taking care of himself since high school and then some. Taking care of her, too. Loyalty and faith were hard emotions to defend; they were so totally in the mind and heart of the holder.

Had her supply of both run out on Max? He was mysterious, yes, but that had been a professional qualification for a magician, a charming quirk at first. Later…

She was driving east of town on Charleston. On her left the Blue Mermaid suddenly surfaced from a tangle of junky roofs and signs, her slowly turning serene plaster image a kind of Virgin Mary for the down-at-the-heels set.

And of course the Virgin Mary (which she was decidedly not) reminded her of Matt (which he decidedly was). Virgin, that is. Holy mackeral! What had she been thinking? How could she, a fallen away Universalist Unitarian, deal with an earnest ex-Catholic priest determined to re-enter the single lifestyle with eyes wide shut; to play by the religious rules even some Catholics had found unworkable? Talk about sexual responsibility. Before Max had reappeared, she might have and he couldn’t. After Max had returned, he might have and she wouldn’t. A tragicomedy of timing. Something to film for a joint HBO and Pax TV project: Sex in the Psyche.

The white-painted motel named in the mermaid’s honor bore a huge new sign of its own, a temporary banner stretched over the portico:

PSYCHIC FAIR

Temple’s foot hesitated over the brake for a heartbeat. She’d attended a psychic fair once. Even knew a few psychics. Maybe one of them would have a clue about the strange five-sided figure that had scribed professor Jefferson Mangel into a circle of death only a couple weeks before.

She was sure that the figure meant something arcane. Who better to ask than a psychic? It was doubly a pity that poor Jeff was dead. He was the one objective expert on the mantic arts she’d trust to have a scholar’s dispassion on the subject. But she couldn’t consult him anymore….

Or could she? What had Max said? He’d borrowed some Ph.D. theses that mentioned the mysterious entity known in some magic circles as the Synth.

She twisted the small steering wheel right to shoot down a side street, rather dingy in this near-downtown neighborhood. Max would have wanted her convertible top up, pronto, if he were along. But he wasn’t, and she quickly turned around in a deserted gas station lot and got back on Charleston heading west.

She hoped Max was at home and feeling like company. Maybe she could also find out what he had done lately to put Molina in her rabid-rottweiler mood.

The house was a picture of housing development serenity, like its neighbors. In the nearby houses, though, people were really away at work and school. Behind this house’s hooded windows, Max probably spun plots like a spider in a suburban web.

Temple parked the Miata three houses down and hefted a businesslike folder from her tote bag. Maybe she’d be mistaken for an Avon lady if anyone was watching.

If anyone was watching. At the very least Max was. Like a spider, he was supersensitive to any stirrings on the fringes of his gossamer empire.

Why was she creating such unattractive metaphors for Max’s perpetual state of siege today? Had Molina really gotten to her this time?

Temple paused in the sheltered entryway. Ringing the doorbell was a last resort. If Max was inside, he would materialize at the heavy wooden door and draw her within before anybody on the street noticed her.

When she came here Temple always felt like a magician’s assistant being shuttled quickly into the next disappearing lady trick, as if the whole house were only an illusion, one big revolving door into a maze fashioned of hidden compartments and deceptive mirrors and sliding false walls.

Temple stood in the shade of the portico, designed as shelter against the daily Las Vegas Heat and Light Show. The door did not so much open as dissolve into deeper darkness.

A hand, pale as a formal glove, reached out to draw her inside.

Her eyes blinked, unable to adjust to the interior shadow.

Max’s hand, conversely as warm as it looked pallid and cold, pulled her through the entry hall and into the well-lit rooms beyond.

Her eyes, still blinded, rebelled at the rapid-fire change in light.

“What brought you here without phoning first?” he asked.

“An interview with the vampire.”

“Vampire? Before lunch? Let’s go into the kitchen for a little healthy fluorescent light.”

Temple laughed. Max always managed to banish his own most powerful illusions. It was just a darkened house, after all, kept shuttered against the heat, but mostly so he could see out without anyone seeing in. That’s what a man on the run for eighteen years needed.

The kitchen was its usual gleaming, efficient self, the stainless steel appliance fronts reflecting and distorting their entering figures into gray alien forms.

“You didn’t say why you dropped by.” Max never forgot an unanswered question.

“I…I was happy.”

“Was?” He never missed an implication either.

She studied him as he leaned against the walk-in refrigerator front like an extremely suave corpse propped against his coffin. Or a space vampire against a high-tech crypt door.

His trademark black clothing underlined the image, but Molina had carefully planted the sinister side of Max in Temple’s brain. The policewoman had been working on that for a year, always questioning Max’s whereabouts, his history, his sudden disappearance and reappearance in Temple’s life. Maybe it was beginning to work.

Max turned away to pull open the stainless steel door, and spun back to face her, something in his hand. “Dreamsicle?” he asked