Cat In An Alien X-Ray

This time Max lifted her down. Temple noticed he’d left Matt to do the heavy lifting, probably because he still didn’t have full leg strength.

“Before we all get bent out of shape,” Matt said, “including Ophiuchus, what exactly would explain my no-good late stepfather having custody of any kind of key related to a fringe group of magicians in Las Vegas? The same Synth being apparently abetted by some vague mobster connections and Irish political extremists of either stripe?”

Temple sat at the table again, chin on elbows atop the table. “Looking at my Table of Crime Elements—”

Both guys groaned, realized their mutual agreement, and shut up.

“Effinger died,” Temple went on, “before Gloria Fuentes was found dead and Professor Mangel was, well, as good as slaughtered a month later.” She shut up before she choked up.

She’d had a couple talks with Jeff Mangel, the way a reporter or an investigator would. He was a model of the idealistic, always enthusiastic teacher. She’d liked him instantly. And he’d loved Max’s onstage work. She sensed the guys looking at each other over her head, at a loss.

Because of her emotional upsurge, it was way too awkward for either of them to make a move, like the impasse between the china images of the gingham dog and calico cat on the mantel in an old poem. Because of her, they were frozen into incompatible roles.

Then she’d just have to unfreeze the moment with her incisive logic. Easier said than done.

“Look, guys. It’s pretty clear that Effinger knew or had something that got him killed, likely without talking. We’ve always speculated that the mob and the Synth were after the same prize, and now we know that Cosimo Sparks was the Synth headman.”

“‘Major recruiter’ is probably what you’d call him,” Max put in. “And he wasn’t too persuasive if he left a killing trail of would-be recruits that turned him down.”

“Effinger talked to somebody with mob connections,” Matt said. “The events in Chicago proved that.”

Temple was starting to see the light. “Santiago probably got something out of Sparks. The body had what the coroner calls ‘hesitation marks.’”

“What was the weapon?” Matt wanted to know.

“Ice pick.”

“Cold,” Matt said. “And he hasn’t been indicted?”

“He confessed, but without a lawyer present, so he retracted it.”

“He confessed?” Now Max was incredulous.

Temple grinned. “The Fontana boys took him for a ride from hell, and he wasn’t too rational after that.”

“So now he is in hell,” Matt said, nodding. “According to Dante, there’s a whole circle of hell with murderers being harried in a river of blood.”

“Gosh,” Temple said, “we encountered a few of those killers.”

“Think Kathleen O’Connor will go directly there?” Max asked Matt with gusto.

Matt looked troubled. “I think that’s not up to us. There still may be the soul of a lost child within her.”

Temple hadn’t been following the interchange. She was busy writing Santiago in as the last corpse on her Table of Crime Elements.

“Why was Santiago killed? By whom? And why there?”

Both men opened their mouths to speculate, but Temple suddenly jumped up. “Hold the fort and the mayo. I’ve got an idea.”

She grabbed Professor Mangel’s map and the Ophiuchus map and ran for her office, to rev up the copier. There was some murmured conversation between the guys but the noise from the rackety copier kept Temple from hearing what they were saying.

“I’m back!” she announced breathlessly from the doorway to the main room. “I reduced and enlarged until I went through fifty pages, but I finally herded these two images into cowering submission and they are one. Now I know why Santiago was murdered and why it happened where it did.”

“And who did it?” Matt and Max asked together, in concert for the second time in the history of their sessions.

“Well, no. On that, I haven’t got a clue. Specifically.”

“Specifically is kind of important,” Matt said.

Max nodded.

“So are maps,” Temple said, slapping two pieces of paper to the tabletop. One was copied at a very dark setting.

Both men leaned close to view the usual guidebook map of Las Vegas Boulevard from Downtown to McCarran Airport on the south end, the footprints of all the major hotels and landmarks drawn in and named.

Temple lifted a faint reproduction of the Ophiuchus figure from Effinger’s file box, only a few dark spots inked in: the major stars that formed the crude shape of a kindergartner’s askew house outline.

Matt reared back so abruptly, he almost butted skulls with Max. “It’s the Vegas Strip. The star sites are places that could be hiding the IRA hoard. Why so many, though?”

Max’s forefinger pinioned a dark spot. “The Synth was the keeper of the hoard for outside interests. It’s like Cosimo Sparks kept the map to himself, but some map site points may have been phony to confuse other seekers, perhaps even the intended keepers of the hoard. Or the ‘star spots’ may indicate an order in which the hoard could be moved if in danger.”