Max sat in the rented winter-gray Prius almost as dark as the night itself and wondered if he’d ever had this thought before: Molina had been right.
Grabbing Dirty Larry and marching him into her house had had its satisfactions, but following the undercover narc now that he knew Molina had him under surveillance made the job much harder.
Nobody ever expected a tail to be driving a Prius, though, making an ecological statement. Max also wore a funky little tweed cap, one that a guy who played golf or listened to folk music might wear.
“Layers,” Gandolph had always said. “The best disguises have layers.”
If Podesta was in danger of noticing the guy in the Prius, Max could doff the cap, circle back from a different direction, and still get in some useful tailing time.
One thing he knew: Dirty Larry was indeed dirty. He’d lied to Molina three nights ago at her house. Not all the time, about everything, but about a lot. Max could hear a lie the way musicians hear a single sour note.
Cynical C. R. had taken everything either of them had said with a grain of salt. Max wondered what the R stood for. He could see how someone with a first name like Carmen could have been kicked off the law-enforcement career ladder. He thought of the opera. Opera? Did he like opera? Most men would think of some hot Latina chick.
Larry had been visiting the scenes of the Barbie Doll Killer’s two Vegas crimes. Max saw the pattern early and kept the Prius on the farthest circling shopping-mall roads. Larry’s big, bruising seventies Impala made him easy to be seen despite the deep-bronze-brown body color. D. L. expected to be predator, not prey. Visiting crime scenes was an uncool thing to do, especially now that he knew he’d been watched. Serial killers did that sort of thing. They couldn’t keep away from the stage of their secret triumphs. They drove around at night.
So did cops.
And ex-magicians.
Max noticed the Impala disappearing between rows of parked cars and toddled the Prius—not his speed—along the access roads toward an exit.
He caught the car’s taillights accelerating onto the freeway and had to goose the Prius’s gas pedal, cheered by the swift, if quiet, response. Dirty Larry was either trying to lose any tail or was feeling a need, an intense need.
Holy St. Mackerel! Was he following a killer to a new crime site?
* * *
Ten minutes later he was playing catch-up, as Larry left the freeway on an exit he’d never taken before. Max’s heart wanted to race in time with his car engine, but the damn thing was too quiet. He was on the trail of something dark, something secret in Dirty Larry’s life, he knew it.
The scene at Molina’s house had made Larry less cautious, not more. Max sensed an emotional ebb and flow in the man’s driving that said he was losing control. Max was Irish; he understood how charm and fury could coexist. Podesta. Dirty Larry’s father had to have had Italian or Sicilian blood, but something stubbornly Celtic was in there, too. Maybe Scots.
They were driving through a gently aged neighborhood, passing the occasional corner church or convenience store at the bigger intersections. Max doffed the hat, sat it like a memorial on the Prius’s passenger seat, and felt a moment of grief too dark to bear.
Not too close, a voice in his head cautioned. Not now.
He forced his hands to relax their strangling grip on the steering wheel, even as Dirty Larry’s wallowing Impala took a wide, sloppy left into a small parking lot.
Max and the Prius cruised on by, eyes and headlights front. Max glimpsed a long, mostly one-story building, institutional yet in a residential neighborhood. New, but pre–Great Recession. Blond brick, lots of outside security lights, damn it.
Max checked his watch: 9:30 P.M. Even late suppers are over and TVs are on prime time. He spied the flickering, cozy halos in almost every window. An apartment building? One-story?
He parked the Prius on a side street and shut down everything, silent-running motor, headlights. No radio. And waited. A half hour later the bad-neighborhood rumble of Dirty Larry’s Impala notified him his subject was leaving the property.
Max knew he was now trailing a “subject.” He waited ten minutes then guided the Prius around to the front portico and the central two-story core of the building, where matte steel letters over the entry doors read ST. ROSE’S NURSING HOME.
Max frowned and parked the Prius right out front, where it looked very at home. He paused in leveraging his legs out of the driver’s seat, still a slightly hard physical—and a very emotional—move for him, when he paused to lean back to reclaim the tweed hat.
A wee dorky look would do for him here, he thought.
If things had worked out differently in Belfast, he might have been visiting Gandolph here, or vice versa. Garry, I hardly knew ye.…
The large lit circular lobby echoed his footsteps, magnifying the minor hesitation in his gait.
The woman at the desk looked up with compassion on her face.
Every little bit helps, Max told himself. “Dashing” was not his high card at the moment.
She had soft, pretty features and was in her late fifties. Her name tag read BARBARA. Max checked the clock above Barbara’s head: 9:40 P.M.
“Yes? Visiting hours are almost over,” she told him, “but you have a few minutes.”
“Sorry I’m late,” Max said a bit breathlessly with the shade of a brogue. “I’m from out of town … the country, really. My international flight was late and I missed meeting my cousin Larry at his condo to drive here together.”
“What a time you’ve had of it, Mister—?”
“Randolph. Larry’s last name is Podesta. I don’t know the room number—”
“You just missed Larry. He’s such a regular. Most people would give up after a couple years. Not Larry. The room is in the left wing. Follow the green stripe in the tiles. She’s in room six.”
“Thank you,” Max said. “I’ll, uh, catch up with Larry later.”
He began hustling down the hall, his mind going faster than his legs. She? A couple years? An ailing mother with Alzheimer’s? He did not want to feel sorry for the man or feel like a creep for faking his way in here.
“Mister Randolph,” the receptionist called sharply.
What the hell? He turned. Had Podesta come back for some reason?
She was still alone at the desk and smiling at him. “Do you need a cane? We have plenty.”
“Ah, no. Thank you. You’re very kind and perceptive, but I need to learn to do without.”
She nodded. “You don’t need very long with Teresa, just to feel better that you’ve seen her and can tell your cousin so.”
Max moved on toward room six.
Creep, he berated himself. He was glad he couldn’t recall what ruses he’d used in his previous life of counterterrorism. Sleeping with the enemy had probably been one; Molina had been right. Certainly he’d done just that accidentally his first time out, with Kathleen O’Connor. And maybe again, with his partner in escape, Revienne.
This was a top facility. Spotless. No usual urine smell—and he had empathy for that now. Only Febreze, as in a modern morgue. Cheery decor and colors, an air of attendants near but not hovering. Just the kind of place he’d put Garry in rehabilitation if … he’d survived.
Max slowed to approach the door numbered six. It was always hard to seem normal around the gravely ill, but he guessed this lady’s comprehension was pretty nil, and his visit wouldn’t alarm her. Old people can be as trusting as children if their minds have decamped.
In fact, he almost jumped a little when he spotted some stuffed animals inside—a pink tiger and a blue whale. Could this be a child?
He paused in the open doorway, aware that a nurse would be doing a bed check soon. Any minute. He’d have to do some fact-checking himself, on the patient’s relationship to Dirty Larry Podesta, for instance. The sly nickname seemed obscene in this pleasant place, with its very serious reason for being.
He let his eyes pan up from the foot of the bed to the frail patient in it, her thin hair still showing the morning’s brush marks, her face funeral-parlor composed, only her arms visible under the flowered hospital gown, as thin and angular as a high-fashion model’s.
He recalled Revienne’s anorexic sister, the suicide.
For this girl was not a child, but she was wrenchingly young, maybe in her late teens.
And cradled in her left scarecrow arm, wearing something sassy, shiny, purple, and Lady Gaga, lay a late-edition Barbie doll.
* * *
Max Kinsella could have used that cane now. He sank onto the visitor’s chair. And just looked.
“I tried to prepare you, Mister Randolph,” a voice said behind him.
He turned to find the receptionist in the doorway. Those rubber-soled white nurses’ shoes had come up behind him as silently as an assassin’s. Did she suspect something?
“Aren’t you supposed to be at the desk?” he asked.
“I had someone watch it. Not everyone who visits can deal with patients in a coma. Did you know her?”
“Not since she was a child.” Liar.
“I was worried,” she said, “the shock might impact your injuries.”
“Now I see,” Max said, realizing she considered him a sort of patient, too. “The cane.”
She eyed his legs. “Was it an accident?”
“Ye-es.” Not quite true either, but “murder attempt” was not a useful conversational gambit.
“Both legs?”
“Yes.” What a relief to be honest with this damn saintly woman. “A couple months ago. I was, ah, in a coma for several weeks. In … in Europe.”
“You came out all right?”
“Memory issues.” Another honest answer. Wait! He could use that to pump her.
“I don’t even remember Teresa’s full name. Just saw her as child. Playing. Running.” Scum.
“Oh, such a shame. Teresa Paddock. She only has a disabled grandmother and her stepbrother left. Horrible case.”
“Accident?”
The nurse’s eyes avoided his.
Max knew just what to say. “Larry’s not aware of the extent of my injuries. Coma. The memory loss. I don’t want to ask too many questions, make it worse for him. I’ve been overseas on a job, for, oh, before Teresa was struck down. What is it now, how long?”
“More than five years. She’s been here two years.”
He joined her in regarding the girl, shaking his head. “Somebody … did this, didn’t they?”
“It was in all the papers. Horrible. In the west shopping-mall parking lot. Attempted strangulation. Someone came by. She lived. Just.”
Max’s recent memory dominated mind trolled for his former deductive processes. Eureka! He visualized puzzle pieces dropping like manna from the heavens above, assembling visually above his head. Dirty Larry. His stepsister. Attack. Mall parking lot. Barbie doll.
Dirty thoughts assembling. Beautiful young starstruck stepsister. Hanky-panky. She had to be shut up. Had to hide a motivated murder inside a storm flurry of mystifying ones. D. L. went into undercover police work, could go anywhere, unwatched … unlike an ordinary partnered cop. Oh, my God. Looking at this … broken doll of a young woman in her pink-and-blue nursing-home bed and thinking these things brought a fog of pollution into the room.
“Mister Randolph? Maybe the facts are too much for your own condition.”
“No.” He shook his head, violently. “The facts are never too much. Has the attempted killer not been caught?”
“Never,” she said, sighing deeply. “And there’ve been more deaths. The papers call them the Barbie Doll Killer’s work.” She nodded at the doll in Teresa’s arms. “She had a big Barbie collection. Dreamed of stardom the way kids do these days. American Idol. Anybody can be rich and famous in an instant. It’s so innocent and tragic. Young girls today have no notion of the dangers in the world. They go from Barbie dolls to Pussycat Dolls.”
“So her parents were absent?”
“I don’t know the particulars.”
I will, Max thought. He checked his watch.
“I need to go,” he told her.
“I give you a lot of credit for having the will to see her when your own strength has been so compromised.”
He stood, stumbling a little. His limbs liked to “fall asleep” on him still.
She offered a shoulder.
What a woman!
“If I felt twenty years younger, I’d ask you for a date,” he said.
She chuckled, being the one with twenty years on him. “I don’t date younger men.”
They walked out together, the clock above the reception desk showing the big hand on twelve and the small one on ten.
Max pulled out the Prius Smart key with the car-rental logo on it.
He had a feeling this was an occasion when his old self would amp up the charm, leave the lady with a false sense of almost flirtation. Charm was a tawdry bauble compared to compassion.
“Thank you, Nurse Barbara,” he said. “My friend … in my accident … died. On the spot. Head trauma. If he’d lived to recuperate, this is the kind of place I’d have hoped he could have come to.”
“What a lovely vote of confidence, Mister Randolph. I do hope I’ve been of help to you tonight.”
“More than you’ll ever know,” Max said.
* * *
And than I deserve …
Max sat outside in the car, brooding. Gandolph had teased him during their journeys about Irish dark nights of the soul.
That veteran nurse had been right the moment she set eyes on him. The recent trauma marked him and had affected him far more than he’d been willing to believe or admit.
Apparently, he’d developed quite a conscience while in his coma. He’d recognized a certain automatic, ruthless survival instinct in himself while on the run in Switzerland. Now, supposedly “safe,” he recognized another restless, driving need … for honesty. And … connection.
Not gonna happen in Las Vegas as the odd man out, he told himself. Too little too late. All you can do is work for the “man,” who in this case is a woman, keep out of Temple Barr and Matt Devine’s way, get the guy who put that girl into permanent Barbie dolldom, and save the only people in town he did know from the walking, emotional kill zone that was Kathleen O’Connor.
He pulled out his cell phone and checked the last photo, luckily taken before he’d sat down by the bedside and the receptionist had come in. The camera had captured a head shot perfect for ID purposes, a sleeping Teresa who looked almost normal.
Imagine being tucked away for eternity with only a Barbie doll for company.