Cat In An Alien X-Ray

“If I can stand. I was used to doing ‘stand-up’ on-scene reporting when I was at the Minnesota TV station.” Temple did as requested and “reported” her overhearing the morose Synth survivors commiserating until she realized what the truth could be and stepped out of the dimness to say it.

“I don’t think the Synth members were killers, and Sparks was probably pretty unhinged by grandiosity and paranoia. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was bipolar.”

“And you think the lady magician Shangri-La also was approached to join the renegade magicians?” Matt shook his head. “She was already suspected of being a drug smuggler, and now we think she was really Kathleen O’Connor in disguise under all that full-face Asian makeup.”

“We do know she brought Temple onstage and made her ring disappear and then Temple herself,” Max said. “Louie fast behind Temple, of course, into the understage escape area. The entire sequence was designed to kidnap Temple.”

“For a ring?” Matt asked, surprised.

Temple glanced at Max. Kitty had claimed his “promise” ring to Temple.

“Yes,” Temple told Matt. “A trophy of her power, I suppose.”

“What happened to it?” Matt asked. He obviously sensed their unspoken thoughts.

“Molina kept it as evidence,” Temple said.

“Molina doesn’t strike me as having a leg to stand on in doing that, and she sure isn’t into bling.”

“It doesn’t matter, Matt. We were having a girly showdown over that, and she finally gave the ring back to me.”

Max was now staring at Temple with the same puzzlement and a new tinge of shock. “Where is it now?”

“In my scarf drawer, I guess. It was just something I bought at the women’s exposition when I was handling that.” She said the lie as casually as an amateur college actress could manage.

“Oh, that fatal bottomless pit,” Max said, “your scarf drawer.”

Temple laughed. “I know I’m impossible at managing scarves, but they’re too pretty to throw away. Look. I don’t know where Shangri-La fits in all this,” Temple admitted. “She was sabotaged during her act with the Cloaked Conjuror at the New Millennium and fell to her death. The body was definitely that of an Asian woman. Unless,” she told Max, “the corpse was switched on the way to the morgue and the tender mercies of Grizzly Bahr and his staff. Gandolph managed that for himself and a semi-switch for you when he spirited your unconscious body from the Neon Nightmare to Europe. Why couldn’t the all-powerful Miss Kitty pull off the same kind of illusions?”

“She could,” said Max. “Although I swore the woman who died pursuing me on a motorcycle was her, from information I got in Ireland, she’s very much alive. Magicians use body doubles. Houdini did. Gandolph and I didn’t. I suppose an international terrorism money-raiser like Kathleen could have insisted the doubles have facial plastic surgery to seem identical to her.”

“And then she let them die in her place whenever anybody got too close.” Now Temple shook her head. “What a totally irredeemable human being.”

“Maybe not,” Matt said, staring at the Table of Crime Elements. “The only person Jesus specifically invited to His Father’s kingdom in heaven was the thief being crucified beside him who went from reviling to believing in Him.”

“Deathbed confessions,” Max said, “are notoriously insincere.”

“Still.” Matt sat back. “I have to believe every human soul is redeemable.”

“You don’t have to believe it,” Max said. “You just do. And I guess that’s admirable.”

He leaned forward, stabbing the Table of Crime Elements with a forefinger. “Here, here, and here. Somewhere in these unsolved crimes are clues that will implicate and lead us to Kitty the Cutter.

“We’re getting closer than we know. I sense it. This time she won’t die on me to run away and die another day in another guise, and another after that. This time it’ll be a permanent demise. Even knowing what I know now about Kathleen’s beyond-brutal childhood, I won’t find peace until I know that she is off this planet for good, and unable to harm Temple, you, and me.”

Temple felt a chill run up the back of her neck, sheer anger. What a rabble-rouser Max would have made.

She eyed Matt, sitting back, his expression both troubled and intense, his arms folded across his chest as if holding something in.

She wondered what thoughts or emotions held him captive. Something she didn’t know, she sensed, kept him quiet.

And that couldn’t be good.

Chapter 4

Home Alone

“I thought he’d never leave.”

Matt shut the door on Max and turned to Temple.

“Me too,” she said, moving into his arms. “Ever since we came back from Chicago, which was an all-business and too-much-funny-business trip, we’ve been caught up in your mom’s wonderful-but-quickie wedding. You and I haven’t had any real time together, night or day.”

“I know.” He pulled her into one of those first-time love-declaring, almost desperate embraces with a long kiss that migrated into a breathless series.

The new-old intensity of it made her knees and pulses quiver like a teenager’s. “What was that for?”