Cat In An Alien X-Ray

“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.”