Matt was the first to break the lengthening silence.
“I’ve seen many instances of galloping guilt in my church and in my counseling career, including my own,” he told Max, “but you probably have the world’s worst case. You always have to be a world-class contender, Kinsella, with memory chips or without.
“How do we find and get this ‘Typhoid Mary’ out of our lives before she hurts someone we really care about? Or at least I do.”
Max leaned forward, intent. “Here’s what I learned in Belfast, when I was in a condition to not forget a thing: Rebecca.”
“Rebecca,” Temple echoed. “You know I loved that novel when I was a kid.” She knew it was connected to the young Kathleen O’Connor, but she’d let Max bring Matt in on the mystery. It would help the two men bond. Listen to her! Did she want a happy ending to her own life story or to be a playground monitor? Or, maybe there was no separating the two elements.
“Rebecca,” Matt echoed. “I guess I should read it?”
Temple lifted an eyebrow. “It’s a dark, romantic novel but way less sloshy than Wuthering Heights.”
“It’s on my iPad,” Matt said. “Or will be in a heartbeat, if the great Max Kinsella says it’s relevant.”
“‘The great,’” Max mocked himself.
“Legendary, then,” Matt said. And grinned. “It’s quite a … kick to be more together than you are at the moment, even if that won’t last. I’m sure your memory loss will fade as you follow the leads you got in Ireland. You’re right. We should unite to exorcise this female demon whose venom has touched all our lives.”
“I applaud your gutsy imagery,” Temple said. “I don’t think female transgressors should be spared a thing just because they’re women.”
She noticed Max’s face looked both bitter and rueful.
“What if they’re transgressors because they’re women?” he asked.
So Max told them what he’d briefly mentioned to Temple, that Garry Randolph had tracked gorgeous-but-lethal IRA moll Kathleen O’Connor to her roots.
Temple couldn’t watch Matt’s face during Max’s terse recital, keeping her eyes on Louie, who looked back and forth between the two men as if watching a tennis game. He didn’t want to miss a nuance. Cats are always masters of subtlety, their own or their neighboring human’s.
“A Magdalen asylum?” Matt repeated, unbelieving.
He obviously knew about these Church-run industrial institutions that incarcerated supposed “fallen women,” including girls, for life. Many were put to hard labor in these places, named after Mary Magdalene, and there they lost their real names and became “lost” to society.
“Holy Mother of God,” Matt murmured. “Those places were hellholes of Old World ‘discipline,’ otherwise known as mental and physical and even sexual abuse. Ireland’s and Scotland’s were notorious and operated until late in the twentieth century. No wonder a young woman labeled ‘unholy,’ as Kathleen was, would come out twisted. The motives were cultural; they go back centuries and aeons and appear in all societies and religions. It’s why the human animal is so hard to defend. Hypocrisy. Bred in the bone and soaking the soul until it drowns.”
“Beautifully stated, prosecuting attorney,” Max said. “But no.”
“No?” Matt was on a righteous roll. “We shouldn’t pity Kathleen as victim as well as our personal villain? The young women were incarcerated for life—for life—and considered unholy creatures unworthy of the smallest kindness or sympathy, not even allowed their own names.… Why wouldn’t anyone strong enough to evade that fate be a monster?”
“You don’t understand,” Max said in a mild tone.
Matt’s fists were bunched, white-knuckled. “That’s my job, to understand.”
“You don’t have all the facts,” Max said.
Temple stayed out of it. This was where the rubber hit the road. For all her desire to negotiate a decent truce between the two men who were rivals for her in their own minds, they had to throw it all out there and learn this was about them, not her.
And about Kitty the Cutter, above all.
“Then tell me all the facts,” Matt said, demanded.
Max smiled slightly. He had played this to get Matt going in one indignant direction then another. He was testing the level of passion and commitment Matt would bring to the hunt for the real Kathleen O’Connor.
Temple knew he’d be surprised, but she was thinking of the old Max, not the maimed man before them. She eyed how he angled his stretched legs across the central space of the limo “living room.” He needed to take the pressure off his body so his mind was up to handling a tricky situation.
His eyes found her fascinating—as a missing piece of his past. They no longer held the look of love. So she breathed a sigh of relief even as the two men jostled in the closeness of the limo compartment for position, a place they each could stake out without losing face.
Not an easy “guy” thing.
“Listen,” Max said, talking only to Matt. “You’re a good guy, by intention. I hear I was a quasi-good guy, always trying to undo my past by hunting the future in the form of Kathleen O’Connor. Gandolph the Great. There’s where the word great really comes in. I was always just the ‘Mystifying.’ He was my mentor, my father in absentia, my ‘great’ friend. Garry Randolph. A second-class magician, maybe, but a first-class human being.”
“Don’t you blame Kathleen O’Connor for his death?”
“I blame myself. She’s been an easy out for my entire life, I’m thinking now. Yeah. She needs to be stopped, for her own sake, maybe. That much hate, even justified, is ultimately self-corrosive.”
“What do you mean by ‘that much’ hate?” Matt asked.
“You see, she wasn’t just put in a Magdalen institution as a teenager. Her mother was.”
“Her mother? Who was that?”
“Who knows?” Max said. “I saw the mass graveyard of unmarked, unnamed burial sites at one such place near Dublin. The point is that the woman who called herself Kathleen O’Connor and then Rebecca, our mutual enemy who won’t die, was born in a Magdalen asylum. Her mother had been consigned there. And there Kathleen grew up to have her own child.”
“Child?” Temple couldn’t contain herself. “Kitty the Cutter has a child?”
“She had one,” Max said, eyeing her for the first time in several minutes. “She ran away as an unwed mother, one of very few who had the will to escape.”
“To become the femme fatale who seduced you in Belfast?”
“I wasn’t her first, but she was mine, my aching bones tell me that much. And my instincts.”
“She must have been incredibly damaged.” Matt shook his head.
“She is,” Max said. “Beyond what any of us can imagine.”
“The rings,” Temple said.
Both men eyed her.
“Matt. She forced you to wear that big ugly snake ring for a while.”
“Not a snake. The worm, Ouroboros,” he said, looking unhappy to share the incident with Max. “It’s an ancient eternity symbol. A ‘worm’ or Medieval dragon eating its own tail.”
“Rather like Kathleen herself,” Max said. “What about such a ring, Temple? She forced it on Matt?”
“When she was stalking him.”
“After the razor attack?” Max wanted to know.
Matt spoke for himself. “Yes. She’d marked my skin. She wanted to mark my mind and soul. I had no option, but she finally stole the ring back, as if she’d tired of the game. She’d threatened Temple. Every woman I came in contact with.” Matt hesitated. “I was counseling a call girl who fell to her death. I never knew if Kitty the Cutter had done that or not.”
Max drew back to coddle his glass of Scotch. “She’s really put you through the ‘Guilt Gavotte,’ too, hasn’t she?” He looked at Temple. “You’re being quiet. Am I right to think that’s not typical?”
“The ring business is beyond … eerie. I found the Ouroboros ring in my scarf drawer not long ago, and I don’t know where it came from.”
“Your scarf drawer?” Max drawled. “Is this a place of pilgrimage? An inner sanctum? Who has a scarf drawer these days?”
“Temple collects vintage clothing,” Matt explained. “She stores shoes, gloves, hats. And scarves.”
“Any of my magician’s unending rainbow of linked chiffon scarves?” Max asked with a fluid gesture that almost made that hokey trick seem visible in his hands for a moment.
“You didn’t do the scarf trick,” Temple said. “Way too expected. No, the fact is I’m not good with scarves. Some women are. I’m not the drapery sort of woman. Too short.” She looked down. “So is Louie.”
“He’s not too short to impinge on my pants legs.” Max frowned at the horizontal bar of black hairs.
“Louie impinges on everything,” Matt said, not sounding regretful about Max’s impaired wardrobe.
“Including Temple’s scarf drawer.” Max was trying to brush off the hair, which stuck like barbed fishhooks to the textured linen weave.
“You need tape loops for that,” Temple told him, glad they had skirted the issue of Louie once upon a time impinging on their California-king-size bed. “No. There’s nothing in my scarf drawer that Louie would find worth the effort of opening it. It’s a lost and found for things I don’t feel I can throw out but don’t know what to do with.”
“Kinda like me.”
Matt groaned at Max’s quip. “It’s not all about you anymore.”
“It’s a stupid scarf drawer!” Temple said. “Can you guys keep on point? Which is … that Ouroboros ring turned up in it, I don’t know how.”
“Exactly when was that?” Matt asked her.
“It was after we think Kitty assaulted you with an aspergillum on the crowded down escalator during TitaniCon at the Hilton.”
Max shifted to restretch his legs. “I know my misfiring memory may be a bore, but can we speak about the same planet at least?”
“Yeah.” Matt frowned, trying to rerun his own memory track. “Mini-Molina was there. She was really kiddish then. They grow up fast.”
Temple nodded at Matt. “Mariah was chubby and half bummed out about being ‘watched’ by us … and half totally crushing on you. Now look at her, all teenybopper. No wonder Mama Bear has been getting unraveled lately.”
“Look.” Max said. “This cozy trip down memory lane isn’t helping my recall or my nauseous feeling. What was TitaniCon? What is an aspergillum, which sounds vaguely familiar, like a medication name … or some kind of flower? Why would Kathleen try to assault you on an escalator?” he asked Matt. “And why were you two wandering around the Hilton with a bratty kid in tow like The Simpsons?” he asked Temple.
Temple took on the task of answering. “TitaniCon was a huge science-fiction convention. Murder was afoot, but Matt got suckered into taking Molina’s kid, who wasn’t there when Matt was going down an escalator and felt something hard, like a gun barrel, pressed into his back.
“When he got to ground level, he heard a metallic roll and found this funky object on the hotel floor. The thing looked to me like a baby rattle with a wooden handle and a silver ball, the kind of fancy, nonfunctional nonsense people without kids give as baby gifts. Matt explained it was an aspergillum.”
“You’ve seen one,” Matt told Max. “Whether you remember or not. It’s a ceremonial holy-water dispenser, and the officiating priest does indeed shake it like a baby rattle at the most solemn rites.”
“I do remember that.” Max waved a hand in front of his eyes. “Just a vision. A pale cloud of incense and chanting and crowds … and me being short.” He made a hasty sign of the cross. “You’re saying Kathleen has collected these mystical or religious artifacts, an Ouroboros ring, an aspergillum? And used them to taunt you? That is really sick.”
“It may be sicker than you think,” Matt said. “She was after any woman I associated with, like the call girl I was counseling, whose death was never solved.”
“Interesting.” Max’s eyes narrowed. “Looks like Molina’s kid wasn’t the only one who had a crush on you.”
Matt was not taking on that role.
“I think, from what you just said,” he pointed out, “she just wanted to hound people the way she and her Magdalen-asylum mother had been hounded. Kathleen’s ‘haunting’ presence in my life did stop shortly after that aspergillum incident. She was able to get in and out of my unit. One day the ring was gone. What’s sick is that she somehow got it into Temple’s possession later. I never thought I’d say this about a human being, but it’s a pity she wasn’t dead, as you thought. As you said you saw.”
“Few people really want someone dead,” Temple said. “You may not be sorry they’re gone, though, like Kitty the Cutter.” She eyed Max. “How could you have made a mistake about something as definite as a dead body with all your counterterrorism experience abroad?”
“I swore she was dead, too, don’t forget,” Matt said. “I ID’d the body through a morgue window.”
“Everybody thought Gandolph the Great was dead when he wasn’t.” Max turned to Temple. “How could that have happened?”
“That wasn’t so hard to pull off,” Temple said. “He was disguised as this ditzy, turbaned, overripe female medium.”
“Looking dead isn’t the problem,” Max said. “It’s being carted away by the coroner’s office. In my case at the Neon Nightmare, I had the services of a fake ambulance and hired EMTs to whisk ‘the body’ away.”
“And a past-master at faking death in Gandolph, now that we know about that,” Temple said. “Besides, after impact, your condition was severe enough to fool Rafi Nadir, Molina’s ex-boyfriend, who was working security at the Neon Nightmare when you fell. He’d been a cop.”
Max hesitated before saying more. Temple supposed he might be reliving the last moments before he hit the wall.
“The crash was authentic,” he said, “and pretty spectacular to witness, I imagine. I was unconscious, in a coma for weeks. At the Swiss clinic they suspected me of being a drunk driver, because the impact ordinarily would have killed me,” he explained to Matt. “What saved me then was what saved me when I braked that car in Belfast so hard to avoid bullets. I wasn’t drunk, and I wasn’t wearing a seat belt, but I’ve trained myself to go limp at any oncoming impact. It minimizes the damage if you don’t tense up. And you said I’d used bungee cords before in my official act.”
Max reported all this to the limo carpeting and Midnight Louie’s unblinking, upcast eyes. Temple caught Matt’s somber glance. Time to move Max past dwelling on his latest case of survivor’s guilt.
“Gandolph must have stage-managed some sort of exchange, then,” she said, “after he got you off in the hired ambulance.”
“From what I saw of his impressive contacts in Ireland and Northern Ireland,” Max said, “he’d have plenty of Vegas help to call on. He was the wizard who helped me develop the Neon Nightmare act as the Phantom Mage, and he whisked my unconscious body out of the Neon Nightmare and Las Vegas all the way to a Swiss clinic.”
“Without any on-scene treatment?” Matt sounded incredulous. “That would be barbaric.”
“Not if Max had really fallen on a mountain,” Temple pointed out. “It can take hours, even days, to get to and carry out a victim. Gandolph didn’t dare leave any kind of trail here in the U.S. In fact, officially, the Neon Nightmare ‘accident’ was written off as unreliable reporting from the scene. It’s not like the onlookers were sober.”
“Except for Nadir,” Max put in wryly. “Little did he know his ex would have killed to get her hands on me for once.”
“Poor Rafi,” Temple mused. “So close to making points with Molina and getting access to his kid.”
“Poor Max!” Max put in. “I guess you and I really were exes by then or you’d be a teeny bit more solicitous about the almost-murder victim.”
“Oh! I’m sorry to be so insensitive. I was just caught up in the dramatic irony, and you don’t look like that much of a victim now, and…”
Temple caught the first momentary glimpse of a twinkle in Max’s eyes. He was just teasing her. And, ironically, you tended to forget about his gigantic memory loss, he was so good at looking like he was in complete control, of himself most of all. Poor Max indeed.
“Next you’ll get around to ‘Poor Louie,’” Matt said, “and maybe finally me.”
“It’s hard,” Temple said, “to feel sorry for a guy whose business associates just gifted him with a new Jaguar.”
“Really?” Max commented. “That ride was a gift? Good going.”
“That’s the trouble. It would mean ‘going.’ Leaving Vegas for Chicago.”
“Matt’s been offered his own TV talk gig,” Temple explained.
“Good show,” Max said in the Brit way, then laughed at how literal he’d been. “Brave man. I don’t remember hearing you on the radio except for a spin through the dial lately, but you seem adept at that.”
“Yeah. If you need any counseling on your memory loss…”
“I need someone who can bring it back.”
Matt said, “That would be someone you had a deep emotional connection with.”
Awkward silence.
“Midnight Louie,” Temple said with a pointed forefinger. “You two were always ‘soul brothers.’”
Max crossed his arms on his knees and bent down to fix Louie with a stare. “Those unsmiling Irish eyes of yours have hidden depths, do they, Louie, old boy?”
The cat’s expressionless face shook with a sudden sneeze, which broke the building tension as they all laughed.
“Maybe he’s developed an allergy to you while you were gone,” Matt twitted Max.
Louie pawed his muzzle like a dazed boxer while everyone sat back and sipped their drinks.
“Speaking of jogging memories,” Temple said, “I could use professional help on dredging up exactly how I might have gotten the worm ring. If it was near the aspergillum incident, I might be able to check my PR date book and get some ideas.”
She almost went on to say that Molina had returned the semi-engagement opal ring from Max, but … assessing both men’s politely guarded air, she decided the topic of her affections and any rings that resulted from them had gone on about as long as reasonably possessive and competitive-but-civilized men could stand.
“Okay,” she said. “Homework for Temple. Track down the when and how of Evil Kitty’s hate tokens.”
They’d dipped their heads for a silent sip to that resolve when the limo sped forward so fast they all had dripping chins.
The limo swung into a wide left that made it lurch like a swamped boat.
“Bottoms up,” Max shouted, downing the contents of his glass and reinstalling it in the rack.
Both he and Matt reached for the same button in the Starship Enterprise–complex panel installed in the upholstered ceiling.
Temple had ridden in limos for her job before but not the latest tricked-out models.
Matt won the button war. “What’s going on, driver?” he asked.
“Sorry!” came Rico’s angry voice over the intercom. “We’ve got a … wasp on our tail. I so much as blur the wax finish on this baby, it’s my ass on the line. Crazy biker kid!”
With that, the limo sped up and screeched around another corner.
“The windows are tinted so dark we can’t see out,” Matt complained, pushing more buttons until the side passenger windows descended, revealing a speeding panorama of off-Strip shops and importing a blast of warm, pollutant-laden streaming air.
Both Matt and Max had their heads out opposite windows.
Midnight Louie leaped up beside Temple. What a good guard kitty. She was about to pat him, but his shiny fur skimmed her palm as he jumped to the rear window ledge and stared into the dark as if he had laser eyes.
Temple got on her knees and joined him.
“It’s the Vampire,” Max and Matt shouted as one.
Really, Temple thought, that vampire fad was now at the point of overkill. If she never heard about another one …
Then the shrieking whine of an overtaking engine so shrill and loud that it inspired the name of a mechanical beast came through with the wind, and Temple saw through the black back window a blinding Cyclops blur that darted off to the side like a UFO.
Next she’d be seeing Elvis.
Or … she leaped to Matt’s side of the car, but the passing traffic and buildings were only a blur, even with the window down.
Temple glanced over at Max and his open window and saw a gun butt balanced on the door padding. Of course he’d be armed these days.
“Speed Queen,” Max muttered in determined fury.
Something was coming up alongside them, overtaking them. Someone in a space suit. There was that UFO imagery again. The speed, the road cinders flying into their eyes—Temple thought she was coursing through the Chunnel of Crime ride between Gangsters and the Crystal Phoenix again, only it had been put on crystal meth.
Max was aiming the gun at the rider.
“No!” Temple shouted.
She must have leaped across the limo’s conversation-pit middle, because even as she screamed, what looked like a dark arm brushed Max’s braced elbow. The firearm flew out the window.
“Holy freaking flying cat!” Max shouted, leaning far out the window, hair wind-slicked, eyes squinted almost shut.
The limo was finally slowing. Max slumped back in the cushy leather, wincing. He’d heaved himself up on his knees, folded and twisted his legs like he used to, and hadn’t felt a thing in the excitement.
Matt was hair-ruffled and bleary-eyed too as he pulled himself back into the seating.
“The Circle Ritz Hesketh Vampire motorcycle,” Temple said, dazed. “I don’t get it.”
“Using Electra Lark’s Speed Queen helmet,’ Matt said, eyeing Max.
“You or Electra been riding it lately?” Max asked Matt.
“No. Not lately. It was my only transportation for a time, a while back. I started getting shadowed by another rider. You know anything about that?”
Max’s laugh was weary. “If I did, I don’t now. Could have been Kathleen or a traffic cop. Seeing and hearing that bike brought a lot back. All of it just about the ride. I gave it to Electra as collateral, I think.”
Temple nodded confirmation when he glanced at her.
“Then I got irritated when I saw she’d gotten that corny helmet. And I seem to know … somehow … that you rode it, Devine. I’ve had visions or dreams of Kitty the Cutter crashing on another motorcycle, being dead. And that’s all I know, but it’s more than I knew a few hours ago. Maybe there’s hope for my memory.”
Matt nodded. “The motorcycle literally jolted your brain cells. Probably the intense high-pitched scream. And it was something you loved and wanted. That leaves an indelible mark, too.”
Another awkward silence.
“Where’s Louie?” Temple asked, searching the black carpeting.
Max turned to Temple. “I’m sorry. I hardly understood what was happening when it was happening, and you probably didn’t see it. My shrimp-breath ‘soul brother’ was determined to stop me from shooting at a moving target.
“The weight of his leap knocked my arm away. That forestalled my shot, but not his own momentum. He landed on those leather saddlebags behind the rider like he was on a bungee cord that worked.
“He’s tailing that Vampire in the riding pillion position at seventy miles an hour to God knows where.”