Cat In An Alien X-Ray

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 another 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.”