But this was now, and that was then, and it was disturbing news.
“All? You were all talking about me? I didn’t talk about you.”
“Maybe that’s why—You didn’t know what was going on. Did you?”
“I like to think I’m fairly observant.”
“But then.”
“But then…we were kids. We were engaged in a very serious course of self-examination and study.”
“I used to admire you.”
“Used to?”
“I mean, back then, when I was just a kid. I was two years behind. You don’t remember me, do you?”
Matt tried to, and then he tried to think of a way of lying and saying he did without actually lying, but Jerome cut through all that.
“I not only had hair then, but I had glasses.” He looked up from his burger. He had pale blue eyes, rather soulful. “I wear contact lenses now. I don’t much want to be what I was back then.”
“It’s understandable.”
“Is it? How can you say that when you don’t understand?”
Matt felt irritation scratching like his long-lost clerical collar. He’d finished a draining night shift at work; he was at worst a suspect in a murder and at best responsible for a woman’s suicide. And now he was expected to make small talk with someone he didn’t even remember from a time he wanted to forget.
And who expected him to do this? He asked himself. He did. He smiled wryly, at himself.
“I’ve got a lot on my mind, and, no, the brain is not turning back the album pages very efficiently right now. Doing a live radio show is terribly draining. I’m told by those who know that there’s a natural ‘let-down’ afterward. It’s not my best time.”
Jerome swallowed, not any food or drink, just his own very visible Adam’s apple. “Mine neither. I’m not an after-midnight kind of guy.”
“What’s your job?”
“Day shift, obviously. I’m a picture framer.” He shrugged. “Guess it’s an outgrowth of all those Sacred Heart paintings the old folks at home had framed on the walls everywhere. You can’t outrun your own history.”
“No. You can’t.” The words cut Matt like a razor.
His own history was getting pretty lurid. He wondered what Jerome would think if he knew his old seminary schoolmate had been with a high-priced call girl just last night. Matt checked his wristwatch with a spasm of guilt. This time last night he had been talking to Vassar. She had been alive.
“I don’t mean to keep you up.”
“It’s not you,” Matt said hastily. This guy looked like people were always ducking out on him, and Matt didn’t want to add that guilt to the load he already carried. “I was thinking of a…friend.”
“There’s someone—?”
“Someone? Oh. No. I’m single.”
Jerome nodded, looking a little uneasy.
“Something wrong about that?”
“No. Only it’s obvious—”
“What?”
“That you’re committed to marriage, since you equate being single with having no significant other.”
“Yeah, I guess. Listen. We haven’t seen each other in years and we weren’t even in the same class. I don’t get—”
Jerome took a deep breath. “You never knew, did you? I kinda hoped it was that way, that one of us got out unscathed.”
“Knew what?”
“What was really going on in seminary.”
Matt felt the burger bites in his gut congeal with cold, as if slapped with an ice pack. Oh, my God, was this about the nightly news?
“If I was so ignorant, why are you looking me up?” he asked.
“I was hoping to find someone who escaped. Who got clear. If one did, it makes the rest of it, the worst of it, better.”
“One! Are you saying it was that prevalent?”
Jerome shrugged, sucked on his straw even though only a few drops of melted ice water migrated up his straw. “Maybe not. It just felt like it. To us.”
“Was it peers, or instructors?”
“Both. Kind of like those British public schools used to be, maybe still are. Bullying and boys on boys. I think now it was all about authority, not sex. Sex was just the excuse.”
“I don’t want to hear this.”
“Why, when telling is the only redemption?”
“Why tell me?”
“I—I always admired you. I hoped you’d escaped what I couldn’t. It’s important to me to know that you did.”
“Yes, I did. At St. Vincent’s. I could swear that on a Bible in a court of law, but, Jerome, I didn’t escape it elsewhere. I was at St. Vincent’s because I was running away from the abuse at home. Not sexual, thank God, but abuse.”
“You were abused?”
“What kid hasn’t been, to some extent, by someone at some time?”
“You believe that?”
“I’ve seen that. No family is perfect. Every generation has its own axe to grind. We all get sandpapered with someone else’s issues. And we go on.”
Jerome nodded, and neatly wrapped most of his burger in the tissue for disposal.
Matt hadn’t managed to eat much either. Not so much because of Jerome Johnson, but because of Ashley Andersen, both Upper Midwest babies in a world far colder than a North Dakota blizzard.
“Maybe that’s why no one messed with you,” Jerome said meditatively. “I remember you working out those marital arts moves, alone. You were like…oh, Luke Skywalker in the first Star Wars movie, remember? Looking for the Force in yourself. I never thought it might be because…you looked invulnerable. Like nobody should mess with you.”
“They didn’t. So maybe my past made me less likely to be abused. It didn’t feel like it then.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m strong in some ways, and weak in others. Hey, we’re human, yes?”
“I always…”
Jerome no longer seemed capable of finishing a sentence, and Matt, the stressed-out Matt who’d seen a bitter enemy make mincemeat of his life and more importantly of his conscience, was growing impatient with this stumbling loser who had nothing better to do than to look him up. The blind leading the blind was not Matt’s current goal.
“I always…liked you, especially,” Jerome said, finally raising his limpid blue eyes to Matt’s again, brimming with something unfortunately quite readable.
Holy Mother of God. Help me now and at the hour of my death, amen.
Chapter 23
The Morning After: Fast Backward
“In bright and early, Lieutenant?”
“Always, Chet. So are you.”
“Yeah, but I got a great job. This is better than Eye in the Sky at any Strip hotel. This is Eye in the Sky central for all of Las Vegas.”
“This” was Chet Farmer’s wall-to-wall wired domain, stacks of audio and video equipment, a gray/black wallpaper of knobs and switches and dials.
The high-tech surround would have creeped Molina out, but Chet thrived in it like a spider in an electronic/digital/computerized web. There was a bit of the arachnid about him anyway: long bony limbs and such poor eyesight that he had to wear half-inch-thick lenses in heavy-framed plastic glasses despite living in the age of thin high-power optical lenses that gave everyone else a cosmetic edge.
There was no way to avoid describing Chet as a nerd, but he was a happy nerd. That was the blessing given to nerds along with extreme myopia and a socially-challenged existence.
“I need to see the Goliath tapes.”
“Sure thing.” He spun in his mesh-seated chair to pull some labeled tapes out. “Must be a sensitive case.”
“Just hard to call. Why do you say ‘sensitive’?”
“Su and Barrett both checked these out. Separately. And now you’re here.”
“Glad to hear they’re on the job. Either one come up with anything?”
“Nope. Just a lot of faces and bodies milling through the casino and lobby area.”
“I’ll take another
look. New eye, new ideas. Say from six to eight P.M. You make that look so easy,” Molina said, envying the ease with which Chet played his electronic game board. “I had to let my twelve-year-old daughter take over the VCR at home. She’s teethed on computers since third grade.”
“That’s cool. We can’t afford any more computer-phobic generations. Do you know my folks don’t e-mail?”
Chet was on the cusp of forty, Molina figured, so his parents must be senior citizens baffled by debit cards at the grocery store.
“At least I have a job where I have to keep up on some modern improvements,” Molina said. “Try the hotel registration area first.”
“Okay. There’s the time in the lower right-hand corner.”
Molina watched the broken LED numerals flick through their predictable round.
If Su and Barrett had seen nothing, maybe nothing was to be seen. Certainly Vassar hadn’t checked in at the front desk. But Matt Devine had, and she wanted to know if he had been caught on tape. It was possible he hadn’t. The tapes were pervasive but general. It would be easy to miss one person in the constant flood of bodies through a major hotel during the evening hours.
And, of course, Su and Barrett only knew to look for Vassar and anything “unusual.”
She forced herself to focus on the front desk clerks. Matt would have had to pass through the lines leading to one of them.
That was the one given she knew, that no one else did. Who the man was that Vassar had met.
The tape was black and white; no point wasting color on pure surveillance. It made finding Matt’s very blond head harder. A lot of silver-tops came to Vegas and in black and white blond was white.
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 backstepped 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.”
“Nobody good, huh?”
“Nobody 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 brass 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. Nobody recognizable. No Vassar. No Kitty. No Rafi.
Nobody to see Matt Devine check into the Goliath Hotel for a date with death.
Nobody 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 Vassar 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 Vassar in a fatal way?
Yes. And the bastard 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, panicked.
Yesterday had been Sunday and he had missed mass.
The instant overpowering, guilty surge was an old altar-boy reflex.
Matt knew it had been Sunday. He knew he had missed mass. He had deliberately missed mass.
After the Saturday night he planned had turned out, he hadn’t figured out how to go back to church. Was he a lamb of God 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-abasement and assigned 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. Vassar 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 how he felt about Vassar’s death.
Matt sat up, his bare feet on the wood floor, which felt slick and cool.
Somebody must miss Vassar. 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: Vassar, 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 gi-pajamas. 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.
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