Lieutenant C. R. Molina sat on her homely couch after everyone but her housecats had gone.
She’d cleared the decks, had Mariah safely away for the night, had rerun the night in question, and had ended up in an unpleasant place.
She wished she smoked. She wished she’d cultivated some vice besides generating an impressionable daughter for whom she felt she had to supply an impeccable model. Which Mariah’s father certainly wasn’t. Or was he?
She got up to fetch a beer from the fridge, listening to the two visiting vehicles depart outside as she leaned on the breakfast bar. Was the person who’d planted the Barbie doll on her premises Dirty Larry or Crawford Buchanan?
The next, almost laughable question? Was either one of them a serious Barbie Doll Killer candidate? Molina pressed the beer bottle’s cold glass against her forehead.
Larry made the more believable serial killer, yet she’d never gotten that vibe off of him. Lots of minor warning blips, but no serious suspicion. Was she slipping? Not a subject for debate. She had slipped.
A deep but easy breath told her the long and winding slash scar had finally settled in. Her own damn fault. All she’d learned from that insane B and E at the house on Mojave was that she and Max Kinsella might share the same enemy. Who?
Or … had Kinsella wanted someone to think that? Had his mentor, Gandolph, arranged for a watchdog as a diversion? Anything was possible.
A sharp pounding on her door made her heart jump. She put the beer down and got up to grab the Glock in her kitchen drawer. With Mariah out for the night, she hadn’t needed to use the gun safe that was in her closet and was suddenly glad.
The police-invasion-level pounding resumed.
Molina stuck the firearm down the back of her beige denims and pushed her face against the door’s peephole. Too dark.
“ID yourself,” she shouted loud and hard.
“Carmen, it’s me,” came a male voice.
Not many would say that. Alch or Rafi. And this wasn’t either voice.
She opened the door and stepped back.
Dirty Larry, looking particularly sullen, burst in …
… in the firm custody of Max Kinsella, the evident pounder.
“Who the hell are you?” Larry snarled at Kinsella.
“I don’t know. If you put it existentially. Or aren’t you feeling too existential now?”
What a bizarre nightmare! Mr. Light and Mr. Dark making a home-invasion duo with two faces.
“What’s going on here?” she demanded as she swept all the coffee table photos into a pile, which she moved to a hall-table drawer.
Kinsella propelled D. L. to the sofa like she’d propelled Crawford Buchanan to the door a few nights before. She had to admire his total control, despite a forced, stiff-legged gait. It still served for a perp walk. She understood now why his pounding had been so urgent. He hadn’t expected to maintain control of a pro like Dirty Larry for long.
“You have any idea,” Kinsella asked, breathing hard after dumping D. L. on the couch, “how much time this bozo spends tailing you?” He paused for more breath and to smooth his hair with his fingers.
Dirty Larry wouldn’t have been an easy takedown.
“That’s what you’re paid the big bucks to find out,” she told him while regarding Larry, who was massaging his right shoulder and keeping his eyes down.
“What was Temple doing here?” Kinsella asked.
“Okay.” She returned her weapon to the drawer, a gesture Kinsella saw, but not Larry. Molina shook her head. “Even without a memory, you’re her self-appointed guardian angel. Now we know why you broke your cover and muscled Dirty Larry inside. Did I want this degree of disclosure? No.”
“Look.” Kinsella eyed her beer. “How about one of those? I’ve been getting as buggy and sweaty as Podesta eavesdropping on your big confab. You know this old house’s windows are doors … and listening devices.”
“Just another thing I was going to fix someday,” she said. “Okay, I’m going to let you two duke it out in my living room to do what I seem to do best tonight—fetch beer.”
She got two bottles from the fridge, put them on the breakfast bar, and returned to the living room to sit in a chair opposite the couch.
Then she eyed the two men. Kinsella had collected the beers and was handing Dirty Larry Podesta one. Had she ever dreamed of such a day…?
“There’s no one here but us and the cats,” she told them, “so … spill. Guts would be nice, but explanations will do for a start.”
Dirty Larry cracked his shoulders and accepted the cold brew from Kinsella. Even Temple Barr could handle twist-off tops, so the opening ceremony offered no macho one-upmanship.
“I was just protecting you,” Larry said, after his first long pull on the beer.
“From what?” she wondered.
“Yourself, maybe.”
Molina eyed his angular face with the faint glint of gold beard growth and the slitted, defiant eyes. She remembered Temple Barr’s comment: grew up as a military brat or a plain street punk.
“You had no reason to be lurking outside now, Larry.”
“I came over, saw you had company. Figured you didn’t want your underling and that Sally Field on K-9, er, Kat-9 patrol to know too much about me.”
“And what would be ‘too much’ to know about you, Larry?” Molina braced an elbow on one knee and her face on her hand. “That you transferred to traffic from undercover at your request, not your superiors’? That you weren’t ‘burned out’ on drug casework? That even a distracted, concerned mother like me figured out you had some hidden reason for worming your way into my office, my confidence, my life?”
“You’d listen to a freaking cat? These old walls are Swiss cheese. I heard that black devil’s owner saying that he ‘liked’ me.”
Larry’s burning blue gaze fixed on Kinsella’s deceptively casual figure upholding the low wall between the kitchen and the living room. “You’d listen to this questionable guy even you pegged as a killer?”
“I agree he’s questionable, Larry,” she said, “but so are you.”
She eyed Kinsella, not fooled. He’d braced his back to the wall, legs straight out. That’s about all they’d do after the exterior tussle. He looked like he’d taken a stance far from the fray, but his injuries had forced it.
Molina sighed. She had a gimp and a cop with a lot of gray areas on her hands. Both were probably armed.
She resumed her interrogation of Dirty Larry. Kinsella had faced her with that prematurely, the bastard, and had forced her to conduct it in his presence. On the other hand, he wouldn’t have been able to do that if she hadn’t hired him to tail the man and if Larry hadn’t been lurking.
Just like on the night Mariah had disappeared?
Tabitha and Caterina came tearing through the room again, rushing past Larry’s back and making him duck.
“Merely the thunder of little cat feet, Larry,” she told him. “Nothing to be nervous about here but me. So. Did you plant that messed-up Barbie doll in my house?”
“God, no, Carmen. Sure, I sniffed around the place. I was trying to help. I’ve had a lot of experience with runaways. The drug beat is filled with them.”
“That night you told me that Mariah wasn’t a runaway. Not the type, you said. And you were wrong.”
“Not really. She wasn’t running away from home, or from you. She was running to something—that constant media and Internet hype that kids can be stars. Look at Justin Bieber, the pre-boy-band phenom, and the preteen wannabe Pussycat Dolls freaking out on alcohol and drugs and S-and-M fashion. I don’t blame you for being a hard-ass about your kid. You’re right.”
Molina eyed Kinsella, drinking beer standing up.
He shrugged. “You want me to leave, since you two are so in tune on the horrible state of teendom nowadays? Not my field.”
“I want you to shut up and sit down.” Molina saw his eyes flare with defiance. Max Kinsella didn’t need to sit down, not him. “Sit,” she spat out.
She jerked her head at the breakfast bar with its high, hard stools. He could manage that better than a mushy upholstered chair, and she sure didn’t want him on the sofa with Podesta. This smelled of her first, horrific days of seniority on the force, when every guy “under” her needed to prove a point. To prove his superior force and masculinity.
“Larry,” she said. “I don’t see any reason why you’d want to hurt my child or my career.”
“Swear to God, Carmen.” His voice was hoarse with emotion. “Never. I have the greatest respect for you as an officer and a detective. You have always laid it on the line for the job. Never a gender thing with me. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think you had the drive and the stones to catch the Barbie Doll Killer. Me, I just put away scum who kill people slowly with drugs. You take down murderers.”
The sound of two hands clapping, slowly, ended the Law & Order moment.
Max Kinsella, of course, ever the cynic, even without a functional memory.
“I believe you, Larry. Every word,” she said.
And she did.
“Get along now. It’s been a long, nasty night. I’ll set Kinsella straight.”
Behind Podesta’s back, Kinsella toasted with his beer bottle and a crooked grin. No one could have “straighter” legs than he did.
Dirty Larry fidgeted on the couch, rubbing his neck and alternating with slugs of beer to finish the bottle. Molina understood his reluctance to leave the scene to this iffy newcomer at the breakfast bar. She had to swallow a grin. Setting up these guys against each other was the smartest move she’d made lately.
Dirty Larry finally stood and heel-dragged out of the house as if his dingy Reebok sneakers sported steel cleats. He’d been so sure he’d had her confused, wounded, and alone, like a stray dog, so he could play the hero.
Only after the front door had slammed shut did Kinsella move.
First he held the beer bottle to his forehead. She could get that.
Then he finally rested his rear on the stool she’d sent him to. The only thing missing was the corner and the fool’s cap.
“He’s a low-life wrangler and a midnight tangler,” Kinsella said. “You choose your stalking horses well.”
She lifted an eyebrow with her Dos Equis bottle. “What’s the difference between a ‘stalking horse’ and a ‘cat’s-paw’?”
“A horse has steel hooves. A cat has a steel ego, assuming you’re referring to Miss Temple’s Midnight Louie.”
“Why’d you force the issue with Dirty Larry? Bring him in?”
“Because my legs were getting damned tired of following him around shadowing you. You knew when you asked me to watch him he was up to something.”
“I asked you to watch Rafi Nadir, too.”
“Not to knock your taste in men then and now, but Nadir is truly not as interesting as Dirty Larry. In a criminal sense.”
“You think Podesta is criminal?”
“No more so than this Crawford Buchanan character I heard you talking about.”
“And you’re going on … what? With legs that threaten to capsize you and a memory made of cheesecloth?”
“Instinct. That’s why I’m still here, and why you still want me.” He made a deprecatory gesture before she could jump on his phrasing. “Alch won’t cut it anymore. You need someone more ruthless, without a life and a career to ruin. Your conscience wouldn’t allow that. Enter moi, just in time. We didn’t get along, did we?”
Molina couldn’t stop a low, confirming chuckle. “An understatement.”
“You made a mistake about me, yes? So now you need me to vet and uncover your current mistakes.”
“Simple job. I wanted a discreet report on a couple guys normally not objects of professional police interest. I may have a personnel problem, but you’ve got personal problems, too.”
“There’s nothing personal in my life, or my memory. Except … Garry Randolph.”
“Are you sure? I bet you’re finding that you like Temple Barr a lot more than you thought you would.”
“That’s odd about what I remember. I do recall my druthers.”
“And?”
“Not my type.”
“What is?”
His smile was reminiscent. “I’ll know it when I see it.”
“You already did,” Molina surmised. “Men. God, you’re like Stephen Hawking, committing infidelity from a wheelchair.”
“As I understand it from the lady in question, and her very-present fiancé, I was and am free to commit whatsoever I choose with anyone of my choice.”
“I’m sure women the world over rejoice. Back on topic, why the hell did you out Dirty Larry? I just wanted him followed, not confronted. You put him on notice.”
“When a guy is Johnny-on-the-spot for a murder scene one night and skulking outside the investigating officer’s the next, he should be put on notice. That’s when mistakes get made. Also, I overheard the byplay about your underage daughter. I get why you went supernova when she disappeared. You want me to investigate that Crawford creep, too? If Temple loathes him, he must be scummy.”
“You’re doing too much as it is.” She rose to collect the empty bottle from his hand and weighed it to match her mental processes.
Max Kinsella waited.
“Anything else you want me to tell you?” she asked finally.
“Anything and everything about Larry Podesta, from the moment he showed up, and your stalker, and the Barbie doll killings.”
“That’s very restricted personal and professional territory.” She dropped her hand with the beer bottle, moving from hostess to challenger.
“That’s the beauty of it. I have no restrictions. I’ve got a totally fresh outlook on the facts. I’m not emotionally attached to anyone involved, and I find the whole sequence of events I’ve heard so far seriously troublesome.”
Molina considered. “I suppose you’d take another beer. I can’t interest you in a cushy chair?”
“Beer is fine, but I need to stay as close to vertical as I can be these days.”
“Most pricks do,” she tossed behind her back as she went for the fridge, walking straight into and out through the probably unintended implication.
She slammed two fresh beer bottles on the breakfast countertop and took an opposing stool.
“What did I ever do,” he asked, “to make you an enemy?”
“Left town before I could interrogate you.”
“Interrogate me.” He opened his hands to prove he had nothing to hide.
“Too late. I guess I’ll have to let you interrogate me.”
“Okay. Dirty Larry. I already know you never trusted him. As you don’t trust me now that I’m playing the same role for you—undercover investigator. The only man you really trust is Detective Alch.”
“True enough. As you only trusted Garry Randolph.”
“After what he did for me through the years, just the past two months of this year…”
Molina turned the now-damp beer bottle in her hands. Her palms had already gone sweaty with career memories. Losses. Cops would die for each other, but civilians weren’t obliged to. She wished she’d met “Gandolph the Great.” Her sympathy for Kinsella’s unfading grief at losing him made her respect both men.
Temple Barr had believed to that terrier-tough core of hers that Max Kinsella was a “good guy.” Still to be proven to Molina. And now she was about to do what she’d never done with Dirty Larry. Tell Kinsella her secrets. Admit that she’d been so obsessed with him as a cop she’d believed he could be obsessed with her as a woman. As Mariah would moan in her melodramatic teen way, “Tres embarrassing, mo-ther!”
“All the chalk has been wiped away,” Kinsella said to get her started. “It’s that old cliché, a fresh slate. Maybe now I am the murderer you always thought I was, by default.”
“Quit whining. That was never in your jacket. Randolph’s shooting was the universe’s fault. We’ve all screwed up. Whatever was wrong about my assumptions these past two years, about you or Temple Barr or Dirty Larry or my stalker or my daughter—or my ex—is my fault. My watch.”
“Okay.” She saw her hands—large, strong, plain—clutching the thick bottom of the beer bottle. “I decided to ‘use’ Dirty Larry as an off-the-books investigator because I couldn’t find you. I knew Temple was seeing you regularly, that you were out there. When Larry did it, when he tracked you to your hidey-hole, your house on Mojave, it happened to be just after your Phantom Mage persona had crashed and burned at the Neon Nightmare club. Randolph must have been an even better magician than you.”
Kinsella just nodded. She had to credit him with being a good listener.
“Getting you out of the Neon Nightmare wall-banging scene as a DOA, and then, presto, you never got to a hospital on the other end—I didn’t believe it. But I didn’t know about that incident when Podesta followed you home from a rendezvous with Barr and got an actual, genuine street address for you.”
“What did you do with it?”
“I didn’t trust anybody. I went over myself.”
“The house is equipped with embassy-level security,” he said. “It almost managed to spit me out when I returned.”
“I had to do a B and E.”
“Illegal.”
“Naturally.”
Kinsella lifted his beer bottle. “I like your style. Hard on a police career, though.”
“Even harder on me was the stalker inside.”
“Already there?”
“Maybe. The biggest butcher knife was missing from the kitchen block when I went through the back. One of those now-you-see-it, later you-really-“see”-it, bite-you-back situations.”
Kinsella gave a rueful grimace. “I hate it when your instincts are ahead of your brain.”
“I heard someone else there not much later and ducked into the hall closet.”
“Not the greatest cover. Shallow. Louvered wooden doors like toothpicks. Not much in there, but not much protection either.”
“I didn’t know the house. Then I … heard what I later knew to be the sound of a knife shredding someone’s wardrobe. Yours. It sounded like a big cat on a rampage.”
“Very Psycho.”
“Exactly. That’s when I knew I had to get out of that closet. I heard someone coming, tried to surprise the intruder by banging through the flimsy louvered folding doors.”
“You had a weapon.”
“Glock. Of course. But I didn’t want to use it randomly. I fended off the perp with my right forearm, but the knife was already sweeping down in the darkness.”
“Ouch,” he said. “If it was a Norman Bates–type attack…”
“No. Slashing, not stabbing. And I was a moving target. The cutting edge did a bouncing glissando on my ribs, left a blood trail, but didn’t damage any critical organs.”
“All pain and no glory.”
“You got that right.”
“So there you are, in the dark, bleeding, hurting, armed, and alone.”
“Don’t I wish.”
“You saw the attacker?’
“You tell me. I figured my attacker was gone, got myself to the living room, and discovered someone was still in the house with me.”
“Not the attacker?”
“So he claimed when he explained himself.”
“At the barrel of a GLOCK?”
“And in the light of a lamp.”
“First lamp in the main room off the hall?”
She nodded.
“Dirty Larry.” He said the name thoughtfully.
She nodded.
Max Kinsella whistled softly, but waited.
“Larry said he’d been watching the house and came in after me.”
“So might the attacker have done.”
“Right.”
“Or the attacker might have been lying in wait, quietly, until you were fully committed to … housebreaking. In a vulnerable position.”
“Right.”
“Anybody admit to seeing the attacker leave?”
“Larry, you mean? No. I was bleeding a lot. He had to get me out of there.”
“How’d he explain being there?”
“He thought I’d stood him up.”
“You were on dating terms?” The slightly disbelieving tone in Kinsella’s voice was either flattering or insulting.
“I’d used Dirty Larry to find your address and then didn’t invite him to the B and E party. He figured something was up and followed me. Ironic, huh?
“Oh, better than that, lieutenant.” Kinsella actually grinned as he considered the Vegas police version of “Spy vs. Spy.” “Maybe that’s how my wardrobe ended up shredded on the closet floor. It looked expensive.”
“It certainly looked like someone hated your guts, and your Guccis.”
“I must have made a lot of money on the Strip. I notice I have expensive tastes.”
She shook her head. “So you’re rich. Big sin. Can you access any of that wealth?”
“Haven’t tried yet. Don’t remember where, actually. Wanna help?”
“Your tough luck.”
“You wouldn’t have to pay me anymore. Have you done any digging into Podesta’s background?”
“His record’s with us. He worked in Flagstaff earlier.”
“I mean, where he and his people came from, family, and school—all that jazz?”
“No. I suspected he had some self-serving scheme going, but nothing truly shady. His file jacket here as a narc is impeccable.”
“His recent behavior sure isn’t. Cops aren’t immune from overcontrolling women. Maybe he wanted you freaked about danger to your kid and depending on him.”
“But I didn’t.”
“Who did you depend on during that challenging time when your daughter was missing? What? You look like I’d handed you a pickle for a Havana cigar.”
“Ugh. What a distasteful figure of speech either way.”
“So who?”
Molina made another pickle-smoking face. “My ex, Rafi. And … a crazy teen alter ego of your Miss Temple Barr called Zoe Chloe Ozone.”
“She’s nobody’s Miss Temple Barr but her own. ‘Zoe Chloe Ozone’? That sounds rather … disturbing.”
“It is. Check the Web. I guess ZCO caught some buzz. Anyway, we caught up with Mariah and her little dancing friend. There’d already been another Barbie doll killing at a mall audition out of state. The captain wanted all of us undercover at the dancing competition, which was being sabotaged. Larry was among the security and police forces there.”
“And the Barbie Doll Killer wasn’t behind anything, or caught?”
“No. Actually, the saboteur was after Matt Devine.”
“Why would anybody be after an ex-priest radio counselor?” When he saw she wasn’t talking about the case, he added, “I suppose no public personality is safe these days. Mister Midnight or Zoe Chloe Ozone. Well.”
Kinsella put his finished beer bottle on the countertop as if planting a flagpole. Firm and targeted. “It’ll be harder to shadow Podesta now, but I’ll manage. I’ll also look into the deepest and darkest corners of his past. You?”
“Larry’s games are just a distraction. I’m going over all the Barbie Doll Killer incidents, lethal and just creepy, until I squeeze a viable suspect out of those files. There’s got to be a loose end somewhere.”
Kinsella stood, wincing. “You’re surrounded by loose ends, including me.”
She watched his stride stretch out after the long time sitting, as he moved to the front door. He was walking pretty damn well for two months off two broken legs. She needed to keep in mind that magicians were often athletes.
Once he’d left, she allowed herself to remember their one set-to, when she’d tried to subdue and cuff him. He’d been frantic to get to Temple, rightfully worried, it turned out.
But while Temple was waltzing with the Stripper Killer and a can of pepper spray in another local strip-club parking lot, she and Kinsella had been tangoing in closest quarters with matched skill and strength at Baby Doll’s.
Recently, forced to watch Dancing With the Celebs with Mariah and Temple/Zoe, seeing the five competing couples do the tango, including Matt Devine with unsuspected macho fire, she’d felt her face heating with memory.
To break her hold and concentration, Kinsella had begun taunting her about her Iron Maiden nickname. She’d recognized a ruse to distract and anger her, but for just a furious moment, she’d thought, I could show you a thing or two, you bastard, just like I showed all the sexists on the force. I could heat you up and then shut you down so fast your brain cells would go nova, if I wanted to.
Luckily, his desperation to get away had ultimately ended that old Argentinean tango she/he impasse. He’d folded, let her take him down, hard, cuff him, and haul him into her Crown Vic while they headed for the other strip club. Only he’d slipped the cuffs off like Houdini and left her cuffed to the steering wheel. He got to the other club first, but Temple was already safe.
Loose ends, Molina thought, smiling as she locked the door after him.
Max Kinsella was completely up for grabs now, and he didn’t remember how he’d tried to seduce her in the heat of battle. She still might like to show him something, after this case and its other loose ends were dead and buried. She had the mental advantage now, although they both had been through the wars. She had a memory.
With Mariah out for the night, she had the bathroom to herself for once. She headed down the hall, now glad that Dirty Larry had been outed. Progress on the case.
She needed, and could get in blessed peace, a muscle-relaxing, pulsing shower. Umm, too Psycho. Why not a long, luxurious soak, courtesy of Mariah’s perfumed Hello Kitty bubble-bath set?
Even Iron Maidens had the occasional day, or night, off. And Mama had a lot of eligible men worrying her mind, some of them even deliciously dangerous.