Cat in an Alien X_Ray

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Yes! Yes, of course. But, dear, it’ll have to be a church wedding, and I don’t know that Las Vegas is quite the venue for that.”

  “Are you kidding? There are more churches in Vegas than in most U.S. cities. Anyway, I’m not coming up to church-hunt, just to give you all a chance to meet my fiancé.”

  “It’s great news, honey. We love you and can’t wait to see you.”

  “Same here, Mom.”

  Mumbled good-byes ended the call.

  Temple slumped in her ergonomic chair.

  Midnight Louie lifted a lazy forepaw to bat at the wires as she returned her headphone to its usual position on her desk, curling the wires into a less tempting mass.

  She took a deep breath of her own, then released it slowly. “Well, that’s done,” she told Louie. “You’re lucky cats don’t have families and civil and religious ceremonies. Mom’s right. We’ll have to come up with a geographical site and an ecumenical ceremony. No matter what, I am going to get one gorgeous over-the-top white bridal gown to do it in.”

  Temple dried her damp palms on her knit shorts and pushed herself to her feet.

  Her spirits lifted with her first step back into the living area. She detoured to the kitchen to make herself a peanut butter sandwich, Louie at her heels and then up on the countertop. Louie was the Royal Sniffer, and the Royal Taster if he liked the sniff. He always smelled her food, but usually turned his nose and whiskers away in distaste.

  Temple then went to cast herself down on the living room sofa. She pulled the Review-Journal sections across the coffee table to browse. Now that the May weather was growing hotter for the summer, Louie turned himself around by her side, twice, and cuddled up close.

  His big furry body was going to get too hot to cuddle with soon, and she’d already had her sweat shop experience for the day.

  A small headline below the newspaper’s first section fold caught her eye:

  UFOS AHOY ON THE STRIP

  “As if my call to Minnesota wasn’t totally ‘phone home, E.T.,’” she mumbled to Louie, munching crunchy peanut butter. He perked a gentlemanly ear. Thank goodness cats didn’t object to talking with one’s mouth full. “Now Vegas is getting all spooked.”

  The article made much of a few tourists freaked out by low-flying UFOs they claimed to have spotted hovering over the Strip. Temple shook her head as she read of the darting round “ships” with a broad row of lights beaming a glow around the middle. Probably two Frisbees glued together. People will hallucinate anything, she thought. With all the exotic outdoor lighting in Sin City, a fleet of genuine flying saucers could land and probably be taken for a new restaurant’s advertising gimmick. How would she engineer the effect?

  With those silver flattened helium balloons, Temple thought, and a pulsing LED readout like the famous Times Square electronic billboard around the middle. That would work. Hey, the marketers behind this rumor had already scored newspaper ink and even a link to a site where people were mounting camcorder footage and cell phone photos of the phenomena.

  And here Temple thought she’d been wandering through her own personal Twilight Zone already this afternoon. Still, inquiring minds wanted to know. Temple picked up her iPad and checked the sighting Web site just to laugh at what people will believe.

  The usual jerky videos were fuzzy like all phony UFO footage, but she saw enough to get a sit-up-and-drop-your-jaw moment.

  Anyone with a long memory or a thorough grounding in Las Vegas history would recognize this particular model of levitating saucer. The design was crude, the look was hokey, but this shape was not alien to Las Vegas at all.

  In that case, maybe the UFOs weren’t an alien visitation but more on the order of a haunting.

  Someone should look into this.

  She was sure someone would.

  Temple tossed the newspaper section on the coffee table and went to relieve anticipated family stress by making another peanut butter sandwich, this one with bacon.

  Imitating Elvis’s eating habits was as weird as she wanted to get just now.

  She had a forthcoming meeting that would make a call home to Mom look like a grammar school cakewalk.

  Chapter 3

  Ménage à Murder

  An hour later, Temple was clinging to one concept: creative tension.

  A public relations specialist could handle conventions hosting up to twenty thousand or more people, and Temple was well aware that major events weren’t orchestrated in environments of tranquillity, concord, and camaraderie.

  No, it often took chaos on the scale of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony—the one with the booming cannon—to move all the players and pieces around the board to reach a successful conclusion.

  She was an expert at that.

  Creative tension.

  So.

  One might think a mere party of three sitting at a round card-slash-dining table in her vintage condo could accomplish wonders with a minimum of fuss.

  Temple shook her head mentally.

  Two guys and a gal made a symmetrical but always awkward trio, especially if one guy had occupied the California king in the adjoining bedroom … and the girl was now a semi-permanent fixture in the other’s guy’s bedroom right above this very second-floor unit.

  Would her mother ever be shocked! She’d think the Circle Ritz was some sort of swinging singles place when most of the residents were long-term and middle-aged-plus. Maybe what would shock her mother the most was that the triangle was still locked into place in mutual support because of criminal matters. How could Temple explain, if she ever had to, that each relationship was seriously monogamous? True at the time. Temple had never intended to be a serial monogamist. How had it happened?

  Temple took the chance to study Mr. Now and Mr. Then from a distance as she hovered unnoticed in the kitchen archway.

  A warm brown-eyed blond was as irresistible as a golden retriever, and Matt Devine had the inner warmth of empathy to light up her life and the room. A rotten childhood followed by years of dedication as a celibate priest had made him into someone who’d seen past his own hurts to tend to other people’s pain. That included healing the unwed mother he’d defended since a boy.

  On the other hand, and side of the table, Max’s looks were compelling rather than handsome. His angular face, black hair, and pale blue eyes could make him seem mischievous … or dangerous. His great, all-American happy childhood had been followed by a hellish young adulthood that put his life on the line forever and had estranged him from his family and, ultimately, even her, despite his oodles of mercurial charm. She’d never before thought of the two men’s histories as being in exact reverse.

  She’d truly loved them both and they knew it.

  Max Kinsella himself had “disengaged” from her, bowing to the inevitable draw of Matt Devine. She was Matt’s first love, and nothing could stop their union … except themselves.

  So now the three were joined into an uneasy alliance, forced to work together to declaw a psychopathic chameleon from Max’s past, a possible serial murderess with as many lives as a cat.

  That last thought made Temple smile. Midnight Louie, her alley cat roommate, was sitting as unnoticed as a furry black statue of Buddha on the narrow buffet, his glossy black velvet paws tucked in and his slitty eyes indicating either napping or a disgusted meditation on human follies. Such as romantic triangles.

  Temple sighed. Aloud. Not meaning to attract either guy’s attention.

  Both men looked up from the centerpiece on the table and said, “What?” On that they were united.

  “I’m in mourning,” she said, matching her tone to the sentiment.

  Both men frowned in concern.

  She pointed to the piece of paper they were all staring at. “My wonderful, logical Table of Crime Elements is ‘Mangeled,’ rubbed out, and Xed-out to bits, thanks to recent deductions.”

  She followed her dramatic announcement by delivering bottles of sangria wine cooler to the guys. Max was Black Irish
and favored whiskey. Matt wouldn’t care what he drank.

  Temple set down a tall glass of her favorite mixer, even when it was solo: Crystal Light. She sat down at the third place and tapped the center of the table. “That single sheet of typing paper before you holds the most left-brained creation of my career. I feel ready to audition for CSI: Las Vegas.”

  A mutual chuckle broke the tension.

  Matt spoke first. “It’s brilliant. It’s methodical. It’s wonderful.”

  “What’s wonderful,” Max Kinsella said after a swallow of wine, “is that you’ve managed to rule out several unsolved deaths in one swoop.”

  “Yeah.” Matt Devine sipped his drink. “How did that happen? One day this flaky group of disgruntled magicians who call themselves ‘the Synth,’ are secretly running the Neon Nightmare club and hunting a hidden stockpile of Irish terrorism money and guns. The next day they’ve disbanded and the nightclub has gone dark overnight. Kaput. Closed. And you say—” He looked at Temple. “—they’re no longer a danger and their recently murdered member, this Cosimo Sparks, is probably a serial killer.”

  “A multiple murderer,” Temple corrected. “All his victims could have revealed his plans. He was the mastermind for the Synth’s mounting the most astounding magical illusion ever staged in Vegas as cover for a huge heist and making off with the hidden IRA funds too.”

  “So the theory,” Max said, “is that the Synth was on a recruiting jag for their illusion of a lifetime, treasure hunt, and heist in the making?”

  “Yes,” Temple said, for Matt’s benefit. He was new to this scenario. “And the three surviving founders of the Synth and Neon Nightmare realized that Cosimo Sparks had the motive to recruit other professional magic workers. What if he panicked when they turned him down and thought they’d, er, squeal on him and the plan? The Synth founders even believed Sparks tried to recruit Gandolph, Max’s mentor in magic.”

  “Ridiculous,” Max said. “Once ‘Gandolph the Great’ retired, Garry Randolph was on his own crusade against phony mediums.”

  “He even faked his own death,” Temple told Matt, “so he’d be available to help Max when the angry IRA guys from the past came after him.”

  “So.” Matt pinned his finger on a row of the table in turn. “You think Gandolph’s former onstage assistant, Gloria Fuentes, was also approached to be recruited, along with the Cloaked Conjuror’s assistant, Barry, and Prof. Mangel at the state university. When they all backed off, Sparks killed them one by one to shut them up. Sounds like that board game, Clue.”

  Temple nodded.

  “It’s important we remember,” Max said, “that the Synth members considered themselves the high priests and priestesses of magic, which had lost out on the Vegas Strip to artsy acrobatic productions by Cirque du Soleil and actual magic trick revealers, like the Cloaked Conjuror.”

  “And,” Temple said, “they weren’t primarily after the hidden stockpile IRA loot and guns Kathleen O’Connor and her allies had amassed, now up for grabs. They wanted to provide the massive illusion that would astound the Strip and distract from the hoard being claimed. Maybe they were being used by the mob, and maybe by O’Connor. And who was using whom more, Kathleen O’Connor or the mob, I don’t know.”

  “That’s impressive,” Matt said.

  “My theory?” she asked.

  “No, I don’t know where the heck that’s coming from. But you did use the proper usage of ‘who’ and ‘whom’ in your last sentence.”

  She had to laugh. “Comic relief. Always welcome.”

  “Especially,” Max said, “when you’re unraveling a cosmic tangle.”

  “Cosimo Sparks,” Matt said, “is now a murder victim himself, any murders he might have committed are just speculation.”

  “So,” Max noted, “is the Table of Crime Elements before us, but Temple’s adjustment makes sense. There was a mini-attempt by the remaining Synth members and their followers to heist the million-dollar treasure chest at the Oasis last week.”

  Max glanced ruefully at Temple from under quizzical brows. “Now that you’ve cleared away the underbrush, we stand a better chance of finding out where—and why—Kathleen O’Connor was lurking during the past two years of unsolved Las Vegas crime scenes.”

  “Kathleen O’Connor.” Matt picked up the sheet of paper, then tossed it back down as if wanting to wash his hands of it. And her. “She’s become a myth, an invincible antagonist at the edges of all our everyday lives. If you believe,” he told Temple, “that the Synth guy, Cosimo Sparks, accounts for several deaths, that doesn’t leave much to blame on this … implacable banshee from Kinsella’s Northern Ireland past. How and why did you get so cozy with the Synth that they told you all about these murders and then just faded away?”

  “They may not have completely faded,” Max said. “The IRA didn’t either.” His pause left a silence Temple had to fill.

  “Surely, Temple, you didn’t go back alone to that hellish nightclub?” That’s what Matt really wanted to know. “It was bad enough you were snooping around it enough to crash one of the Synth’s meetings a bit back.”

  This was awkward. She indeed had gone back there, and Max had been on scene as well. She didn’t want to lie to Matt.…

  “I wasn’t alone,” she said.

  She could feel the rising tension in Matt from two feet away. Max and she had not only once been live-in lovers heading toward marriage, but he’d also been the professional backup on her amateur investigations from the very beginning. Before Matt moved into the Circle Ritz.

  “Midnight Louie and some of his feral cronies were there,” she said, quite truthfully.

  The cat took a bow by rising and thumping down to the tabletop. He cocked a head at the paper under discussion, then yawned and thumped down to the floor. And Midnight Louie, all twenty pounds of him, did thump. Yet not a thing on the table had moved during his ponderous passage.

  He lofted up to the couch arm right behind Temple, a bodyguard settling into position.

  “That cat follows you like Mary’s little lamb in a Big Bad Wolf suit!” Matt sounded exasperated. That unlikely fact was true and they all knew it. Midnight Louie got around Vegas like a tumbleweed—fast, erratic, and often ignored. “After I saw his performance on our trip to Chicago, I have to admit he’s pretty formidable.”

  Temple beamed with pride as she turned to view his latest perch. Louie had assumed a Cheshire cat position, his eyes narrowing, basking in the sunshine of full credit for his übercatness. He almost seemed to be smiling, but maybe that was because some of his snazzy white whiskers turned up at the ends. Any moment, she expected his lazily watchful form to vanish … everything but those whiskers.

  “Plus,” she said fondly, “Louie makes a darn good ring bearer at weddings.”

  “All hail the cat,” Max said impatiently. He’d been out of the country during the recent weddings of Temple’s Aunt Kit and Matt’s mother, both mature brides. He’d never seen a dapper Midnight Louie wearing a white formal tie with a ring box tied to it. “We’re not here to discuss weddings.”

  Temple and Matt exchanged a glance. She was struck by how much of her life Max had missed during only a couple months of absence.

  Max was still talking. “Tell Devine how you managed to solve several murders with one fell swoop of inspiration.”

  Matt’s eyebrows remained arched inquiringly.

  “First,” Temple said, “we need to consult the Table of Crime Elements, because my new version shows the theoretical crimes committed by Cosimo Sparks before his own recent death.”

  Matt tapped the paper. “I see you’ve still got me down for Vassar’s death at the Goliath. Don’t I get a free pass for being your fiancé?”

  Max snorted. “You just don’t like being paired with your slasher, Kitty the Cutter.”

  Temple had expected Matt to challenge that one, but instead he just glared for a second and looked away.

  Awkward, awkward, awkward. She and Max had never b
een formally engaged, but Matt probably hadn’t realized that. If she wanted to practice crisis-managing PR, doctoral level, she had the chance here and now.

  “Sorry, guys. I am an equal opportunity speculative sleuth. I still have Max down for the Goliath murder that seems to have started this sequence.”

  “I have to admit I’m cloudy on the latest happenings on the Las Vegas crime scene,” Matt said, “what with my career and family matters going full throttle in Chicago lately.”

  “Come to think of it,” Max said, leaning back in his chair and then leaning back the chair to balance on its rear legs, “the Chicago mob was involved in founding Vegas. What?” he added, as Temple and Matt exchanged significant glances.

  “What don’t I know?” Max asked.

  Temple and Matt spoke at once, the sounds gibberish because they were saying different things.

  “Okay,” Max said, “what I’m hearing is that Matt’s evil stepfather, Effinger, was kidnapped by the mob.”

  “True, the unfortunate Effinger was bagged, gagged, and sent to a watery grave here in Vegas months ago,” Temple went on solo, “but in Chicago, last week, Louie was kidnapped from Matt’s mom’s apartment by a couple of lame mobsters who wanted something from a locked file box Effinger had left behind long ago in Chicago.”

  Max leaned forward to stab the pertinent line in the table with his forefinger. “If any death on this list reeks of mob involvement, it’s Effinger’s. I happen to know that certain parties do not want folks snooping around at the Oasis and especially near that sinking-ship attraction. Or around that casino ceiling at the Goliath where the first guy on your unsolved list died and I was suspected of being the perp.”

  Matt folded his fists atop each other on the table and leaned his chin on them as he studied the paper again. “The other mob death could be Sparks’s. Back in the day, they liked to leave their victim’s bodies messy and where they could be found.”

  “True,” Temple said. “The suspect in the Sparks death is a way-out Chilean architect who goes by one name like a rock star. Santiago. There’s some blood evidence, but not enough to indict.”