“Plastic surgery.” Molina nodded. “How’d you find out?”
“Used the phone records. A lot to a local doctor. Some were out of the area code. The L.A. and Manhattan ones were fancy-shmancy plastic surgeons. These guys do movie stars. Their minions weren’t about to say much to a homicide detective, except to confirm that the way she looks is the way she wanted to look.”
“How long have the surgeries been going on?”
“Three years.”
“Interesting. She was married to Van Burkleo for six.”
“So,” said Su. “The lady aimed to please. Maybe she was being coerced into this freaky remodeling job and decided to kill him. Involving the leopard was a way to make a statement at the same time: he made her into a cat-faced woman, a cat would bring him down.”
“Perhaps.” Molina sipped her coffee and made her usual face on first tasting it. “I don’t see this woman as the type to alter herself to anyone’s specifications, though. If anything, she’s the control freak.”
“Affirmative,” said Su. “I like my Leopard Lady theory, but it’s pretty out there. The plastic surgery is probably just an extreme expression of that tendency to control nature. The word I got nosing around the ranch was that she was the one who really ran things, and with an iron fist. Van Burkleo was the client back-slapper.”
“He got his back more than slapped by that antelope horn,” Alch observed.
“The scenario we’re being asked to buy,” Molina said, “is that the leopard got loose in the house, scared Van Burkleo, and he ran himself through trying to get away from it.” Molina leaned back in her chair. “The introduction of the leopard brings our attention out of the house and onto the grounds. At the least it implies an outside accomplice to handle the leopard and let it indoors.”
“The place is crawling with keepers,” Su said, “and private security types.”
“Any of them recent hires?” Alch asked.
Su consulted her own narrow notebook. “Three. Two animal guys and one security guy.”
“I’m sure you ran all the names through records.” Molina looked at Alch.
He nodded. “Nothing major. One had a hobby of collecting traffic tickets. One had a couple altercations at a club, but he was a bouncer, you’d expect that. Cost of doing business. The other was as clean as a dinosaur’s tooth.”
“Dinosaur’s tooth,” Su jeered in retaliation for the eyebrow crack. “Your age is showing, Morey.”
“Let’s see the list.” Molina held out a palm.
“My notes are kinda scrawled.”
“I know your notes. If anything happened to you we’d need an Egyptologist to translate them….”
“See something, Lieutenant?” Alch asked hopefully.
Molina didn’t answer right away.
Because even in Morey’s scrambled handwriting she could translate the recognizable letters, Rfff Ndr. The letters “alt” followed the name. Short for altercations. This was the strip club bouncer.
Talk about turning-point moments. How far did she go to protect Nadir from official inquiry while she ran her own half-assed unofficial inquiry? If he was more than suspect, even a real live perp, at what point did her personal interest add up to endangering the public while protecting her daughter and herself? Now? Sic ’em on Rafi? Alch and Su to the manhunt? Kinsella hadn’t panned out, that was for sure. Molina cleared her throat, swallowed duty one more time. She simply didn’t believe Nadir had done it, not for personal reasons, but in her professional judgment. Now Alch wanted to know what had given her pause, something plausible, besides conscience.
“Just your execrable penmanship,” she told him affectionately. “You need to have these things translated, Morey.”
“I can read ’em better than I can type. You should see my typing, you want hieroglyphs.”
“It could cause trouble in court,” she said. “You can have the captain’s secretary type them up.”
“Captain wouldn’t like that.”
“You mean you can’t sweet-talk Arietta into doing you a favor? Just show her these pathetic notes. Her sense of order will put her at your disposal.”
“You overestimate his charms, Lieutenant,” Su told her. “Morey’s bashful act doesn’t go over with uptown women like Arletta.”
“Then you type ’em up for him, Su. You are partners,” Molina told her with a frigid smile that meant business. “You’re supposed to compensate for each other’s weaknesses. But do it after this case is over. We have a lot of folks already involved at Rancho Exotica. And we haven’t even looked into the upscale clientele.”
“You mean the sick weekend hunters,” Su said.
“You think the animal-rights people have a cause?”
“Darn right they do. Saw a feature on one of those TV news magazines. Had some kind of wild ram pinned against a fence. Shot so many arrows into his body he looked like a pincushion. Poor thing was panting and heaving, just lying there, waiting for the macho incompetent to kill him inch by inch in order to spare the head and chest for mounting. I’m a homicide cop and it made my stomach turn. I was ready to off the hunter myself.”
No one wanted to break the silence. Then Alch shifted to look at the scowling Su. “That cute little fuzzy jacket you wear when the temp dips below sixty, what’s that made of?”
“The magenta one? I guess, well, maybe, fur. Something they raise on farms. It’s not the same thing.”
“They don’t waste time with arrows, I bet, but I also bet that Peter Cottontail didn’t want to die for your fashion sense, either.”
Molina raised her hands to head off a serious spat in the detective team. Morey was right, a lot of things were easy to swallow if you didn’t know, or think, or see too much about them.
“That part of the case is not our jurisdiction,” she reminded them both. “We’re here to get people-killers. We don’t even have proof that Van Burkleo’s place was a hunting ranch, and we’re not about to waste man, or woman, power on that. It’s only relevant as a motivation for the animal-rights protesters, and I have a hard time buying a group kill. That only happens in Agatha Christie mysteries.”
“Maybe not a group kill,” Alch said. “Maybe one did it and the others are protecting him, or her. Or just don’t know. Somebody let that leopard into the house.”
“How about Van Burkleo himself?” Su asked, engaged again. “Maybe he liked to live dangerously. According to his wife, he was alone in the house that night because she stayed over in town.”
“Accidental death?”
Su shrugged. “We’ve seen some pretty incriminating death scenes that turned out to be accidents. Remember the alcoholic woman who went into a fit and tore up her living room? The place looked like an interrupted break-in, with attempted rape and successful murder.”
Molina nodded. Anything was possible. The medical examiner had reported head and body blows and bruises, but those could have happened while V. B. was running from the leopard.
“And then, for another theory—” said Su. And stopped.
“Yes?”
“There was the usual black cat on the premises.”
“What ’usual black cat’?”
“The usual black house cat we keep running into on crime scenes lately.”
“If it’s showing up at crime scenes, it can’t be a house cat,” Molina said.
“Big, shorthaired male?” Alch asked Su with interest, ignoring the boss.
Molina kept a dangerous silence.
Su made a point of consulting her notebook, just for show. “Not so big. Not so shorthaired. Maybe not so male. The description sounds female.”
“Oh,” said Alch. “The other one, then.”
“Sorry.” Molina slapped her palms on the desktop for attention. “I refuse to believe that Las Vegas domestic cats could get out into the desert like that. Must be a stray attracted by the big-cat food.”
Su shrugged. “Some of the attendants spotted it, earlier the same day that Van Burkleo
was killed. Said it was hanging around the leopard’s cage. A little too coincidental, Lieutenant?”
“It’ll be a little too coincidental if I catch you wearing a jacket that looks suspiciously like cat fur, that’s when I’ll concede coincidence. Forget the house cat. What could a house cat have to do with a murder? We have enough big cats mixed into this case to make even Siegfried and Roy suddenly allergic to the species.”
After they left, Molina finished her too-strong, too-cold coffee, then headed for the women’s rest room, brooding.
The ethical line she was walking was fishing-line thin. If Raf was at the scene of another murder…he should be brought in and questioned. She could let Team Su-Alch do it. He didn’t have to see her at all. She could warn them not to mention her name…no, that would be out of character.
The door whooshed shut behind her the way rest room doors always do. She was alone in here, which wasn’t odd. Not that many women in a police facility even now.
Normally she didn’t check herself out in mirrors, but she glanced up while washing her hands. Granted even the brutal overhead fluorescent lighting, she looked haggard. Not good. Looking frazzled would generate questions, and questions would generate evasions, and then she was down the slippery slope and heading face-first into a tree….
A sound from one of the three cubicles interrupted her self-reflection. She hadn’t felt another presence. Sounded suspiciously like a sniffle. Someone with a cold, or one of the secretaries with a bum personal life.
While she considered how to graciously retreat, she realized that she had been frozen in silence for some time, first while studying her unlovely face, then while thinking…
A cubicle door swung open and Su emerged, stopping when she saw Molina.
Her eyes looked red.
“Merry?” Molina asked.
“Nothing.” Su stomped to the other sink and ran both taps full force, washing her hands with the furious energy of Lady Macbeth.
“Merry—”
“Never mind, I said!”
“It’s not, not Alch’s crack about the coat, the jacket, is it?”
“I just spotted it and tried it on.” Su lifted her hands and shook them, spraying Molina with ice-cold drops. She jerked a fistful of tan paper towels from the wall dispenser. “I didn’t even look at anything besides the price tag. I didn’t think.”
“That was Morey’s point, I guess.”
“Damn!” Su jerked another unneeded wad of paper towels from the wall. “I loved that jacket. Now what’ll I do with it?”
“Donate it to the homeless? They’ll wear it out using it for the right reasons, to keep warm, like the cave people, right?”
Su suddenly laughed. “Yeah, it’d look great on Crazy Clementine, wouldn’t it? She’s sure no size two on the streets!”
Molina smiled at the mention of one of the chief characters along the Strip. “It’s done. Move on.”
“Right. No one is going to wear a bunny in my presence scot-free from now on. Unless it’s Bugs.”
Su headed for the door, then stopped. She didn’t look at Molina.
“I hope it isn’t one of the animal people.”
It was almost seven by the time Carmen Molina slogged from the attached garage into the kitchen.
Something about the silence in the house alerted her.
She charged into the living room, alarmed, to find Mariah making like a hammock on the comfortable old couch, a book propped on her awkwardly swelling chest. A Buffy the Vampire Slayer book. Oh, well, it could be worse.
“Where’s Dolores?” Carmen asked, carefully.
“I told her to go home. She’s got dinner to fix for her family.”
“Dinner.” Carmen sat on the nearest chair.
They had none.
Mariah’s head lifted from the sofa pillow. “You’ve been out all the time lately, even nights.”
“The workload—”
“Okay.” She shut the paperback book and sat up. “I’ll make dinner.”
“You’ll make dinner?”
“You don’t think I can?”
“S-sure, but—”
“It’s okay. You’ve been up late a lot.”
Carmen sat there, stunned. Her twelve-year-old daughter taking on a domestic chore? It would probably be Hamburger Helper and frozen pizza, but at this point…
She kicked off her low-heeled shoes. How did Temple Barr wear those spikes of hers? Carmen’s feet were killing her and she’d spent most of her day on her behind. Maybe it was all psychological. She flinched as she heard banging and rattling in the kitchen. Let the kid do her thing. Don’t be a control freak, you might end up looking like the MGM lion.
Leo.
That was the name of the MGM lion.
Mrs. Van Burkleo’s given name was Leo-nora. Or an assumed name? To match the face. Stop! Stop thinking about the case. Stop thinking about Rafi Nadir. Carmen only calmed down after mentally urging herself to do just that for a few seconds.
She was at home now. Time to restore the frayed synapses. Relax. Spend some quality time with her kid, who was starting to act like a responsive adult, hallelujah. Not like a responsible adult, mind you, just a responsive one. That was something. Dinner was something.
She sighed, pushed her hair off her face, which she didn’t need to do because she wore it in a functional blunt out.
Mariah had even fetched in the mail. Amazing!
A small padded manila envelop lay on the cluttered coffee table facing the sofa.
A surprise. She hated surprises. Not healthy. Okay, we are all kids at heart. I love a parade….
Carmen froze to hear a kitchen appliance whirring. It’s okay. Give the kid space. You can fix anything that can go wrong except chopped-off fingers…She’d been in homicide too long.
She looked at her name on the typed—computer-generated, these days—label. C. R. Molina. Odd. These promo packages usually came addressed to “Resident.”
Still, maybe the day, and the nights before it, had been too wearing, but she felt the slightly giddy curiosity of a child with a surprise present. She didn’t get many of those nowadays. Certainly not at home.
She ripped open the adhesive flap at one end. Who had the energy to stagger into the kitchen—Mariah’s domain of the evening now—to look up a steak knife?
A small boxy item was inside. She practically had to squeeze it out, like a newborn.
Then she stared at what lay in the palm of her hand. A pair of white minibinoculars, something alien with two round sides. It didn’t look like an America Online CD, much too small, but who knew what innovation lurks in the heart of today’s technology?…
She groped in the empty package and pulled out a plum: a piece of memo paper folded in half.
“Not for correction,” the typed capital letters read, “except in color.”
Weirder and weirder. Carmen twisted one plastic screwtop. Too small to be plastic explosive…would she quit thinking like a cop for one single minute—? No.
Floating in a viscous fluid was a bit of colored Saran Wrap. Huh?
“Mom, I need some advice,” a voice piped over her shoulder. It dropped a register. “Mom! What are you doing with a contact lens?”
So that’s what this was. A set of contact lenses. Not for correction, except in color.
The abrupt, one-word signature below the cryptic phrase suddenly registered.
Chameleon.
“Oh, my God…”
“I haven’t even made anything yet,” Mariah complained defensively.
“Oh, not you!” Carmen turned and smiled encouragingly, like all mothers everywhere. “Go to it, niña. If you make it, I’ll eat it.” She would regret this promise.
The manila envelope was still pregnant with possibility, another lump. She midwifed out another sibling: some solution in a bottle.
A whole kit and kabottle. Soft contact lenses. A change of eye color. Boring brown, she noted.
Somewhere, sometime in her nig
htly undercover rambles she had crossed paths with him. He was sending her a message: if you play at undercover work, dress the part. Do as I do, do as I did, and hide your lying eyes.
She pushed the hair she didn’t need to brush aside back from her face anyway, remembering her image in the mirror, the mirror she so seldom consulted. Vanity was not a vice.
She had worried that a haggard face might betray her to a friend.
She had been on the right side of the law for too long to think like a perp. Moving onto dangerous ground, she had counted on her altered getup and her cop’s instincts to see her enemies first, before her vivid eyes gave her away like a blue-light special at Kmart. Gave her away…
To Max Kinsella.
And to Rafi Nadir, should she be caught off guard and meet him face-to-face. According to this packet of joy and admonition from Kinsella, she had come too damn close to meeting Rafi for any of their goods.
Would she heed the warning?
Of course.
Did she appreciate it?
Hell, no.
“Dinner’s ready,” Mariah caroled from the kitchen.
It was much too soon for anything edible.
Carmen put on a happy face, if not contact lenses, and went into the kitchen.
She smelled burning cardboard.
Chapter 33
Track of the Cat
The desert sky looks like one of those Strip hotel dioramas: big bowl of dark sky, twinkling lights for stars, a nice crescent moon tilted artistically low on a horizon tinted a smoky indigo color from the distant aurora borealis of Las Vegas.
Except that this sky is real, and dark, and deep.
The dark in the building behind us is even more impenetrable.
“I smell something bad, Mr. Midnight,” Groucho pipes up.
And I do mean “pipes.” The pipsqueak sounds like a soprano cricket.
“So do I,” is my response. “And do you know what it is? I smell a rat.”
“We are not afraid of rats,” Golda puts in.
“I mean the human kind,” I start to respond, just working up a really withering retort, when someone else decides to do it for me. A roar rends the night like it is a silk curtain.
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