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  “I can get it,” she says. “We can take it to the shelter.”

  You can try, lady.

  “That ground is awful rough,” he says. “You can’t go there barefoot.”

  “Then I’ll put my shoes back on.” She grabs hold of his shoulder and stands on one foot to don the spike-heel sandals one by one.

  The dude has to hold her up or she would fall on her face, but he is not looking very happy about my interrupting their canoodling time. Tough. Tonight is your turn to play the good citizen.

  “This is crazy,” he tells her. “You will never catch it.”

  Right on, brother.

  “It is just an old alley cat,” he goes on, sealing his doom.

  I sit up and pant laboriously. “Just an old alley cat” indeed, and a lot smarter than a six-mai-tais-to-the-wind young dude. Those rum cocktails will stir-fry your brain.

  “Oh, honey.” She teeters onto the sandy soil. “He really needs help.”

  I let her get close enough to bend down with hand outstretched; then I hop away on three legs, with a pitiful look over my shoulder.

  She plants those thin-soled shoes and trots after me like my own Miss Temple on a rescue mission.

  “God,” the guy mutters from the sidewalk, but he has to commit to her quest and rushes after her.

  It is like having a fish on the line. You must give them enough play and yet reel them in closer and closer. I am an old koi-catcher from my Crystal Phoenix house-detective days.

  I give the silent meow and hobble away. I let her get near enough to almost grab me with one pounce … and spring away. Next time I limp even more.

  “Oh, he is hurting himself,” she announces. She has now decided I am a boy. Dames always go for me; Mr. “Old Alley Cat” should never underestimate the competition.

  “We are never going to catch that cat,” he grumbles.

  You got it, bub.

  “He must be at the end of his strength. Look. He is heading for those tumbled cement blocks. He will probably hunker down there for the night.”

  Uh … no, but you will.

  I settle on my haunches in front of the John Doe and look up at my gracious rescuer with a happy little cry, almost kittenish, although it is hard to make my voice small and wee.

  She gives a happy little cry in answer.

  “Holy jalapeños, baby. That is a dead guy he is cozying up to.”

  “Oh. Do you think he killed him?”

  Okay, not so much in the brains area, but her heart is pure.

  They are much occupied in operating cell phones and calling 911 and fussing about if the police might question their condition.

  “Don’t worry, baby,” is the last thing I hear the guy say. “I hate to say it, but we have been shocked sober.”

  “I hope the poor kitty is all right.…”

  Poor Kitty is hot-footing his tender pads off this wasteland and getting back to his devoted roommate and their condominium at the Circle Ritz.

  I pause before vanishing into the foliage and grounds of the major Strip hotels to see the squad car’s headache rack casting bright colors over the arid scene. Ma Barker was right. This is our town. If something is wrong, we must do what we can to make it right.

  But I can tell you one thing. I should get an Oscar nomination for my “poor kitty” act tonight.

  * * *

  I am all the way home and preparing to shiv the bark off my living staircase into the Circle Ritz—the old leaning palm tree trunk—when someone hisses, “Mission accomplished?” in my ear.

  I turn, spitting mad, but I am only facing my almost spitting image and certainly my almost double when it comes to names.

  “Midnight Louise, why are you not getting your beauty sleep at the Crystal Phoenix?”

  “Ma Barker wanted me to report on your body-revealing efforts.”

  “So you were there! And watching. And did not lift a claw sheath to help.”

  “That was unnecessary,” she says.

  “Quite right. I had the situation firmly in foot.”

  “That limping act was … a tad predictable.”

  “You try to get people to walk onto a rubble-strewn lot. When they finally came, Louise, I thought the fuzz was going to plant themselves on the site and grow there. And there will never be any credit to Ma Barker’s clowder and me for taking the graveyard shift to keep their precious body preserved in place.”

  “If you expect gratitude from the human race at your venerable stage in life, Daddy Dumbest, I have a cat condo in Atlantis to sell you.”

  Miss Midnight Louise cranks her head around to regard her fluffy train, which is covered in desert dust and who knows how many sand fleas, and gives it a mighty waft.

  I cough in the downdraft, but cannot help bragging a bit. “Does Midnight Investigations, Inc., know how to preserve and reveal a crime scene, or what?”

  “With you it is always ‘or what.’ What are you thinking of? Why are we here?”

  “Not to answer eternal philosophical questions, for sure, Louise. Why do you think we are here?”

  “Me? I am here to go back to Ma and report. You can rejoin your roommate and rest on your laurels, which you assure me you still have.”

  Chapter 14

  The Thin White Line

  Kitty the Cutter stepped back, her bare arm making a sweeping welcome gesture with the straight razor. “Enter, stranger.”

  Matt glimpsed himself, and her, in the floor-to-ceiling windows opposite the door. They looked like ghosts against the dark mirror of nighttime Las Vegas.

  Kathleen O’Connor, Max Kinsella’s adolescent Irish love turned IRA fanatic and eternal enemy, was a petite woman, not so small as Temple, and shared Max Kinsella’s Black Irish looks. She was clearly obsessed with haunting Kinsella and anyone linked to him.

  The first such person she crossed paths with, Max’s cousin Sean Kelly, had died at the age of seventeen years ago. Only months ago, Kathleen O’Connor had assaulted Matt on the street with a slash to the side—just for associating with Max’s significant other. With Temple now his fiancée, she had Matt at the razor’s edge again, threatening Temple if he didn’t play her sick head games. So he agreed to these creepy secret meetings at a place she may have murdered another victim, desperately trying to find some mental cutting edge that would disarm this severely damaged and damaging woman.

  Primed to dodge any sudden move on her part, Matt was careful to amble inside as coolly as James Bond.

  He moved into the opulent bedroom with burgundy carpet the color of welling blood, with its marble-topped furnishings. The immense brocaded bed was draped in insanely costly linens and various sized pillows so elaborately embroidered, they seemed to be wearing suits of metallic fabric armor.

  He passed the hall’s choke point opposite the entrance to the bathroom, which was lined with marble and mirror, and approached the precipitous view of incandescent Las Vegas Strip laid out below.

  “See any ghosts in the glass?” she asked.

  One.

  This was the same room where he’d come to lose the virginity Kathleen coveted, and ended up counseling the troubled call girl, Vassar, instead. He’d been in deep but unconfessed love with Temple by then and immune to other women. He knew he’d had nothing to do with Vassar’s fatal plunge off the balcony outside the room later that night, after he’d left. Except for being a suspect. He couldn’t say the same for Kathleen O’Connor.

  “Ghosts,” he repeated. “No. You know I only believe in one spirit.”

  “The Holy Ghost,” she mocked. “What a ludicrous concept. And he isn’t here.”

  “The Holy Spirit is the spirit of truth. He is everywhere. Especially here.”

  “Truth.” He heard a slashing sound and turned. Her razor had ripped open the seat of the upholstered desk chair.

  Matt shrugged. “You rented the room. I didn’t.”

  “I put your name on the reservation.” Her tone was childishly spiteful.

  He eye
d the destroyed property. “It can be repaired.”

  “And you’ll pay for it.”

  The glare in her blue green eyes was laser-intensive. Matt was reminded of the wicked queen in Snow White. Jealousy. Was that Kitty the Cutter’s prime motive? He’d smiled at Temple’s apt and quick-witted characterization of the demon haunting them all. Kitty the Cutter.

  His calm angered her more. “I can cut you again as easily.”

  “Surface wounds. For show. Your own run deeper.”

  “So that’s what you’re here for? Comparing scars? Show me yours. Show me mine on you.”

  “It’s shrunk to a thin white line, Kathleen, bloodless. Not interesting at all. You are interesting, though.”

  “Oh.” She threw herself onto the pillow-mounded bed, her tight mesh skirt riding up to show white thigh and iceberg-sharp knees, seductive, the straight razor stropping back and forth on the encrusted comforter fabric, as if being wiped free of blood. “Mr. Midnight, counselor of the idiot wind, the Dysfunction Nation airwaves. You want to psychoanalyze me?”

  Matt sat on the defaced chair, bracing his arms on its carved gilt arms. “I think ‘psycho’ is the operative word.”

  She laughed, mocking him. “You’re trapped. You’re trapped because you worry about other people when you should be worrying about yourself. You’re trapped because you think you can still do good and be good. You’re trapped because you know I can do anything.”

  “No, I don’t know that, Kathleen.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Rebecca, then?” he asked deliberately.

  She sat up. “Where’d you get that name?”

  “Or Shangri-La?”

  She relaxed back against the pillows. “Just how many people do you think I can be?”

  “As many as you need to be, but that’s an interesting question. You could have multiple personality disorder. Or just be an extreme drama queen.”

  “You’re one to call me names. An ex-priest in an unsanctioned relationship. You’d do anything to keep your little redhead safe, wouldn’t you?”

  She rose, set the razor on the marble nightstand with a sharp click, and oozed across the bed toward him. Taffeta crinkled like dead leaves under a boa constrictor.

  Matt couldn’t help thinking his “drama queen” diagnosis was right on. A slinking femme fatale was pretty predictable, except he knew this one was no TV cliché, but a woman who had liked to play with her prey since her teens.

  That meant she at least needed her victims alive to squirm.

  Kathleen was fixated on tormenting men and he knew the reasons why. The question was, did she? On the surface, maybe she did, but deep down everyone has a “story,” some deep personal blind spot. And around it they construct a distorted world view to justify what they need to believe of that world.

  He stood and spelled out his terms. “You set the time and place for this session. I set the parameters. Temple is off the table. You mention her or her name and I walk.”

  “Oh, going all terse and manly. You knew when you came here that I can put you up against the wall with one slash of my razor on someone else’s throat.”

  “No. You can get me to come out and play shrink with you, but one more threat and it’s your neck that’s in jeopardy.”

  “You’d kill me, Father Be Good?”

  “Ex-father, and even if that weren’t so, there’s no vow against justifiable homicide.”

  “And since when did priests keep vows of poverty, obedience, and, particularly, chastity? Look at you, Mr. Ex. You’ve become wealthy listening to whiners on the radio.”

  “Poverty is not a vow made by parish priests, only within certain orders, such as Jesuits and Franciscans.”

  “So it’s all right to rake it in on the miseries of others.”

  “I donate ten percent.”

  “Paltry.”

  Matt sat down, taking a negotiating tone again. “You’re right. I set up that percentage when I wasn’t making much money or anticipated doing that. I’ll up it. Twenty-five percent strike you as fair?”

  “You’d, you’d do that because I challenged you? Wishy-washy, aren’t you?”

  Of course, anything you’d say to a psychopath became a lose–lose for you.

  “Not at all,” Matt answered. “You’ve put your money where your mouth is. From all accounts, you’ve spent a good part of your life raising money for a cause. It was a just cause of human rights violations even if the IRA resorted to terrorism before the al-Qaeda terrorist extremism so appalled them that both sides in Northern Ireland saw the light and struck a peace.”

  Kathleen cast herself on her elbows at the foot of the bed, displaying deep cleavage three feet from his chair. “I put my mouth where the money was. Is that not a sin even in the service of a just cause? Can you absolve me of sin?”

  Matt mentally kicked himself for using a careless expression that she could sexualize, this woman who’d used sex as a lethal weapon since adolescence.

  “I can’t absolve anyone now, not even myself,” he pointed out. “Besides, chastity was a vow for me at one time. You took no vows.”

  “And you honored none. No priests do. Chastity is a joke to that tribe of kiddie-diddlers, and obedience is only for their victims.”

  She was deep into the twisted truths of her “story” now, the lifelong narrative formed at dark moments of childhood that justified her hatred and anger and envy.

  “That’s not true of the majority of priests, Kathleen.”

  “Of course you’re in that saintly number that goes marching in to heaven.”

  “I was.”

  “But you ran away from your position as God Almighty’s favorite son.”

  “I became laicized. I didn’t just walk. I went through the full process of officially leaving.”

  “Mr. Ex, the rules follower.”

  Matt smiled. “Exactly your opposite.”

  Her precisely plucked raven black brows swooped into a frown. “You think you know all about me.”

  “I know nothing about you but your history.”

  “My history? Am I some kind of ‘country’ to you? A book you can read and figure out by this place or that event? You’re making a huge mistake to underestimate me.”

  “Would I be here at your beck and call if I did?”

  She sat up, leaning her hands on the bed and swinging her feet in their decidedly sinister cuffed and buckled black leather platform shoes. Every position she’d taken on that bed, stripped of the seductive clothing, was that of flirty teenage girl.

  “You can tell me, Father Ex,” she wheedled, whispered. “Was it earnest little tweens in the parish choir? Their plump unhappy mamas in the rectory? Maybe crushing teens in the confessional. You can’t fool me. I know what you are and I know what you did.”

  Sexually abused children always believed their lot had to be the secretive norm of everyone around them, who just weren’t telling. Kathleen was too old for that fairy tale.

  “Sorry. Nada. I was even more abnormal than you. I was a virgin until way too recently. You said it. Rules follower. If I hadn’t been, I probably would have killed my stepfather, Cliff Effinger, and murder for sure is a sin.”

  “You kill someone? Priests aren’t good, they’re just cowards.” She leaned closer.

  “I almost did.” He met her eyes with all the darkness in his mind when he’d held a limp, wife-beating Effinger, himself the devil this time, who had his boyhood demon by the sharp lapels of checkered past and coat. Like the song said, Matt was here to rock the boat. “Maybe,” he suggested, “you had something to do with his nasty death later.”

  She reared away from his words, or the truth in his eyes. You couldn’t hide the hate that almost ate you alive. She didn’t expect that of him, only of herself.

  “Maybe you’re more of a man than I thought.”

  “You don’t know me, even if you think you know my kind. I’m not a country you can explore, a book you can turn into anot
her kind of story. We each have our own dark fairy tale, Kathleen. So what are we going to talk about? Truth or dare.”

  “You’ll sleep with me before I’m done with you. All men do.”

  It wasn’t wise to end this game and unloose her elsewhere.

  “I’ll make you work for it. Tell me about the first sexual experience you remember.”

  Her eyes flared wide. This was territory she knew how to manipulate: sex and priests.

  She rolled over onto her back and crossed her legs in the air, posed like the cover of a cheesy airport novel.

  He sat behind her in the classic Freudian position of alienist and patient, only nowadays everyone knew a lot more about psychological kinks than Freud had.

  Matt hoped what he knew was enough.

  Chapter 15

  Slugfest

  Lieutenant C. R. Molina stood in the hot sun, staring down at the corpse planted under a bit of rubble in a deserted lot. It wasn’t concrete that had killed him, but a .38 slug that had missed being an earring by two inches.

  “Hey, Lieutenant,” a voice said behind her. “What you got?”

  “A bad feeling.” She slid her eyes behind the sunglasses to Morrie Alch’s tanned and seamed face. “You’re old enough to remember mob hits in this town.”

  “As a kid, yeah.”

  “This guy’s no kid.”

  “Pushing seventy before he stumbled, I’d say. He’s sporting the mob-approved execution-style ventilation, all right. But, uh, dumping a body in public like this? It’s just bad taste nowadays. Looks amateur. The mob is finally being recognized as the down-and-dirty influence on the making of Vegas with the official museum, the competing attraction, the Ocean’s whatever-number ‘son of Frank Sinatra’ Vegas heist movies a few years back.”

  “Nothing ever dies here but people,” Molina commented. “Certainly not the notion of mob activity.”

  “A cheesy body-dump like this looks small-time. Any remaining hoods would rather fling it than flaunt it.”

  “So that dead face doesn’t populate a Ten Most Wanted list? There’s something familiar about it to me.”

  Alch braced his hands on his knees and semi-squatted for a better gander at one dead goose. “Older guys all start to look alike.”