Cat In A White Tie And Tails

She consulted her Table of Crime Elements like an efficiency expert, rubbing her hands together.

“Max. Your assignment. Assignments, plural.”

He pulled his long, lounging frame to attention. Temple was happy to see his core muscles and core spirit were, uh, she couldn’t think of a description that didn’t involve “hardening” or “stiffening,” so, like Scarlett O’Hara, she didn’t think about it anymore.

“You understand magicians,” she told Max, “whether you remember that or not, so your assignment will be the Cloaked Conjuror, the role model for the Darth Vaders, and the death of Professor Jefferson Mangel, a lover of magic and your magic act in particular. He was the first victim found dead in the Ophiuchus position and that’s an off-Strip site on the university campus.”

“What about the Goliath and Oasis murders I’ve already looked into?” Max wasn’t so much objecting as reminding her he’d done the groundwork.

“You’ve proved assassins are still out to get you, so you need to keep a low off-Strip profile. One involves Cliff Effinger, so Matt can deal with the Oasis now on that.”

Matt raised his eyebrows, pale as they were. “Uh, free will come into any of this assignment-making?”

“No.” Temple raked her Table of Crime Elements with another rigorous glance. “You’re already neck-deep in Cliff Effinger and his death, so you get the Phoenix ceiling death that looked to be Effinger but wasn’t and the Goliath, courtesy of Max defaulting, but also the scene of the death of the call girl you encountered called Vassar.”

“Wait a minute,” Matt said. “You’ve got me or Kitty the Cutter listed as the possible instigator of that ‘fatal fall.’ Granted I feel horrible about Vassar’s death and I did visit her at the Oasis, but I’m hardly a suspect on the Kathleen O’Connor level.”

“Just being thorough,” Temple sang out, aware that an unspoken rivalry was galvanizing the guys to feel possessive about their assignments, if not specifically about her.

Her best option as queen of the board and the Table of Crime Elements was to be bossy, move them to their best positions of personal safety, and herself take on the untidy murders that didn’t seem directly linked to current kidnapping and death attempts.

“I’ll look into Gloria Fuentes, if Max will e-mail me Gandolph’s notes on her, and see if I can track down the Synth members who knew Cosimo Sparks. His death had to have rattled them.”

“Hasn’t that South American entrepreneur been arrested for that?” Matt asked.

“The evidence against him is circumstantial,” Temple answered. “So far. And, of course, need it be said we’ll all keep a leery eye out for any traces of Kathleen O’Connor?”

“What would be her motives,” Matt asked, “after all these years?”

“Follow the money,” Max said. “She raised money for the Cause and doesn’t want it to line any private party’s pocket now that the Irish Republican movement is dead.”

“What about the news reports of resurfacing violence in Northern Ireland?” Matt asked.

Max waved a dismissive hand. “That’s the corpse having postmortem involuntary muscle tics.”

“You didn’t have money for the IRA as an idealistic teenager,” Matt pointed out.

“I had ideals. Look. What drove Kathleen, especially given her state of pariahdom from birth, was tricking or seducing people—men—into feeling the same self-loathing she herself did.”

“Luring them into genuine states of sin?”

“You could—and would—put it that way, ex-Father Matt. She just wanted her victims to feel as low-down and guilty as she could. I don’t think she toted up Sean and I competing for her affections as a duel of pride, lust, and betrayal. We didn’t think that way. If either one of us had scored with a girl after our sheltered upbringing, we would have been shocked to our jockey shorts and more about bragging to our mates back home than running to confession. The better ‘man’ would win.”

“And you were it, as usual,” Matt said.

“No, I was the one who … fell in love with her,” Max said in a tone of dumbstruck self-revelation, shocking Temple to her Daisy Fuentes undies, speaking of undergarment shock.

Matt looked pretty astounded too.

“Sorry.” Max shook his head as if finding the “reset” for his memory. “Some of my bits of recovered memory hit like sledgehammer strokes. And it’s all the distant, teen-drama ones, God help me. At that age, guys try to pretend they’re heartless to other guys and sincere to girls in such alternating impulses, they get whiplash. My gut knows I loved my cousin like a brother. I guess I didn’t have a brother. I don’t remember. At that age, you don’t have the maturity to admit family feeling, you’re trying so hard to break away. So. I encountered first love and first loss in a stunning double-bill.”

“Do you think,” Temple asked, “Kathleen had real feelings for you too? That your fury at your cousin dying in that IRA pub bombing wiped out her chance of any further relationship with you, and that really put her over the edge?”