Cat In A Neon Nightmare Part 18

Something familiar flashed past her eyes. "Stop!" Chet froze the screen instantly.

"Can you go back in slow motion?"

"I can make this thing do everything but cook, Lieutenant."

"Slow motion is good enough, Flyboy."

Chet grinned. The images began running backward in a staccato fashion, as jerky as if a strobe light were flashing somewhere above them.

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."

"n.o.body good, huh?"

"n.o.body 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 bra.s.s 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. n.o.body recognizable. No Va.s.sar. No Kitty. No Rafi.

n.o.body to see Matt Devine check into the Goliath Hotel for a date with death.

n.o.body 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 Va.s.sar 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 ultra-modern 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 Va.s.sar in a fatal way?

Yes. And the b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 ma.s.s. The instant overpowering, guilty surge was an old altar-boy reflex.

Matt knew it had been Sunday. He knew he had missed ma.s.s. He had deliberately missed ma.s.s.

After the Sat.u.r.day night he planned had turned out, he hadn't figured out how to go back to church. Was he a lamb of G.o.d 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-abas.e.m.e.nt and a.s.signed 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. Va.s.sar 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 Va.s.sar's death.

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

Somebody must miss Va.s.sar. 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: Va.s.sar, 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.

It was Monday morning, and Kathleen O'Connor's worm Ouroboros ring was gone. The bad news was that sometime in the recent past she had been in his rooms, had moved among .his things, perhaps even while he slept, to accomplish the sleight of hand of the missing ring. The good news was that, for the first time, he truly believed that she had given up on him.

Liberation felt uplifting, like a good confession. Like saying the Apostle's Creed and starting a whole new day, a whole new life.

But one man's liberation was often another's loss. The snake had left Eden.

Where was it slithering next?

Chapter 25.

. . . Jailhouse Hard Rock "Okay," Molina said, shaking the multivitamin energy drink-to-go on her desk.

Breakfast.

Everyone in the room was eating on the run, or on the meeting break: Alfonso, Barrett, Su, and Alch.

Alfonso had a McDonald's cholesterol special on his lap, sausage and cheese predominating. Barrett munched a sports nutrition bar. Su had coffee from the Office Urn of All Sediment and an Almond Joy candy bar. Alch, he went for a Weight Watchers bar, munching in time with Barrett.

Molina eyed her troops, aware how their very differences, physical and psychological, made them good partners. Too good for this case that cut so close to her own bones. Yet she had to do her job. Or seem to.

"I saw Rothenberg," Molina announced. "Va.s.sar was her girl, and Rothenberg believes that her girls are too mentally, physically, and socially healthy to off themselves, or to get offed. She won't be yelling police incompetence if we just bury this investigation. Case closed?"

"No way," Su mumbled through three hundred luscious calories that would not put an ounce on her tensile little frame, Molina reflected. "A call girl dies. Chances are ninety-to-one it's murder."

"No evidence," Alfonso countered.

Molina took a deep breath. It was now or never. Do her job or save her rear.

"I don't like that bellman with Alzheimer's," she said. "The kind of tips they get for playing matchmaker, I don't believe he never noticed a thing."

"Lots of that sort of traffic at a big place like the Goliath," Su said. "I doubt those women even remember the faces they saw the night before, and they get paid plenty."

"What do you suggest?" Alch asked Molina. Morrie always recognized when she was leading a horse to water.

"Bring the bellman in. Sweat him. Let me know when you're ready."

Alch nodded.

Barrett spoke up. "Whatever the bellman says, there's not a mark on her that wasn't caused by hitting neon at eighty miles an hour. Some bruises, a lot of internal damage. She could have dived. But Rothenberg has a political stake in representing hooking as safe and sane."

Molina nodded, waiting for their respective partners to bow in.

"It's not good PR," Alch offered, trying not to look l.u.s.tily at Su's half-eaten candy bar. "A dead call girl when you're a national spokeswoman for hookers' rights to choose? Rothenberg might know more. Maybe somebody was moving in on her operation. It's pretty pa.s.skey. The girls are gung-ho about wanting to do what they do. An old-school pimp would be a wolf among sheep."

"Interesting," Molina agreed. "Rothenberg's bled the local media for all the feature stories she can get. She might be ripe for plucking, and her girls too. Va.s.sar might have been approached first to change handlers."

"What if she went for the idea?" Su asked, sitting forward on a chair she already perched on like a sparrow."What if she'd been recruited by someone else, and Rothenberg saw her libertarian utopia looking shaky? Would she kill to defend it?"

"Even more interesting," Molina granted. "And then there's the string of deaths of near-apparent women of the night. You know which ones I mean?"

"Yeah." Alch burped. That Weight Watchers bar must have been heavy consumption for him. He shrugged apology, but was too jived on his idea to blush for his social sins. "First there was that woman's body dumped at the Blue Dahlia parking lot. 'She left,' was painted on the neighboring car. Yours, as I recall, Lieutenant."

"You don't have to remind me, Morrie."

"Right. Anyway, Su and I solved that one. Some weirdo had killed her for not being a shady lady, can you believe it?" he asked Alfonso and Barrett.

"And there was that young stripper, Cher Smith," Su put in. She was compet.i.tive with her elder, Alch, even though, or especially because, they were partners. "We lucked out when her killer tried to attack a strip-club costume-seller who was armed with pepper spray."

"Right," Molina said too quickly.

The less anyone dwelled on that recent episode the better she'd feel personally. The fact was that a mere civilian had lured and trapped the killer, pathetic as the murderer had turned out to be.

"We've still got one outstanding," Su noted unhappily, folding her candy bar wrapper into very tight, neat origami.