Cat in an Alien X_Ray

by Carole Nelson Douglas

“You do! What would make you take on such a flaky client? A supposedly invisible building with a spaceship restaurant on the top?”

  “I didn’t really take it on. Officially. I had just started talks with Deja View Associates when the first corpse on the site was found.”

  “What?” Van was livid with shock, almost as livid as … a corpse.

  “The death didn’t happen there,” Temple assured her. “The police are pretty sure. The site was just used as a body dump.”

  “‘Pretty sure’? ‘Just used as a body dump’? And now a second body has been dumped, one associated with the Phoenix. I’m not at all happy about that, Temple.”

  Van was amping up her Ice Queen act. She ran a Strip hotel-casino and could take the heat … and dish it out in that icy Devil Wears Prada fashion Meryl Streep had mastered for the film.

  “I understand, Van. That’s why I have Plan B.”

  “What was Plan A? That whizzed past me.”

  “The press release. Believe me, the Area Fifty-four concept and site are so wacky that they’ll get all the ink and pixels and mass digital recordings. What I need to know is how much background research you did on Santiago after Nicky hired him.”

  “Temple, you think I’d second-guess my devoted husband and the hotel owner like that?”

  “Absolutely. I would. Nicky is a doll and sharp as a nail gun, but he can get overenthusiastic about over-the-top schemes. He thinks that Fontana charm will smooth all roads to Rome.”

  Van leaned forward to consult her sleek computer screen. She was Apple all the way. “What do you want to know?”

  “Santiago wasn’t born an international phenom. Where’d he come from?”

  “This was tough to find out. My father was a European hotel manager, so I met many hotel owners as a child. They form a network through the major cities of the world. Luckily, Santiago had consulted for the Ritz-Carlton in his home city before he became internationally known.”

  “His doing Vegas projects isn’t that far-fetched,” Temple said, “though I don’t understand why he was still hanging around the Strip after being tainted by the Cosimo Sparks murder.”

  “A crime uncovered on our premises,” Van reminded her. “Was that another ‘body dump’ I shouldn’t worry about?”

  “We’re lucky that the Crystal Phoenix is too classy to hold public attention. Silas T. Farnum with his invisible hotel and revolving spaceship restaurant makes much better copy. Ordinarily, Santiago’s working for Farnum wouldn’t be that strange. Santiago did have a strong reputation in immersive entertainment and cutting-edge technology and special effects. It was his specialty.”

  “Not in the beginning.” Van looked up from her screen. “He actually had a last, middle, and first name, although he hadn’t used it in decades. Carlos MacCarthy. M-a-c, not M-c. That last name’s unusual spelling made it easier to track.”

  “His father was Irish? Maybe…”

  “Maybe what? There are many mixed Latino-Irish names in South America. Ireland’s always been so poor, her citizens emigrated to survive or thrive.”

  “Maybe Santiago took a ‘city’ name because he wanted to hide his origins.”

  “I’m sure it was a career decision,” Van said. “Look at John Denver and Rick Springfield. They needed something more memorable.”

  “And those two had real last names that were a mouthful. Although ‘MacCarthy’ would be an awkward surname, given Santiago’s strong Central and South American looks.” Particularly, Temple thought to herself, if the father had been devoted to the IRA and Irish liberty. “Thanks for the info, Van, and stay cool,” Temple told her. “I have the inside track with the police on this. In fact, I’ll probably be seeing Lieutenant Molina later.”

  Van sighed and kicked off her cream patent leather Cole Hans under her glass-topped desk. “Molina? That’s impressive. Go to it, then.”

  Temple left, considering what had always seemed likely: Santiago may have been one of Kathleen O’Connor’s South American sources of funds for the IRA back in the day. Maybe, though, he hadn’t been the usual rich seducee. Maybe he’d been a bankroller who knew about the hidden Las Vegas stash because he’d been a political partner.

  There were still people in Ireland who deserved reparations for lives lost in the Troubles. An IRA fanatic might want that money to go to them.

  So … had Kitty the Cutter been the other Darth Vader at the Neon Nightmare during Temple’s inadvertent but memorable visit?

  Chapter 38

  Body Double

  “I’ve never thought of the coroner’s office as open twenty-four/seven, like the casinos,” Temple said when she met Lieutenant Molina at the rear entrance where the bodies came in.

  “Death doesn’t take a holiday,” Molina answered, looking down disapprovingly at Temple’s Jessica Simpson high heels. “Those will echo in there.”

  “As if the dead would complain. We all don’t need to sneak around on moccasins and rubber soles.”

  “You manage to sneak around plenty.” Molina eyed the area. The coroner’s van was parked outside the garage area. “It’s the late afternoon shift change. Let’s get inside before some paparazzo decides our visit is worth covering.”

  Molina punched in a security code at a high-enough position that her body concealed the entry number from Temple … and any lurking paparazzi bearing infrared cameras equipped with long lenses.

  Once the women were inside, fluorescent lights turned both their skins slightly green. Temple assumed she had the more ghoulish pallor. Molina’s olive complexion was harder to tint.

  Molina was wearing one of her summer khaki pantsuits. Temple wondered why beige colors looked so dull and institutional on Molina and so casual and dreamy on Matt. This was an odd comparison to make in a morgue. It had definitively been too long between assignations, Temple thought, if engaged people could accomplish anything that sounded so naughty.

  Or maybe her mind was already trying to go anywhere else than here. It was the casual gore of the place that got to her. A white-coated worker slicing a brain into cold-cut thinness on a lab table that would have looked at home in a high school biology lab. A naked body parked on a seemingly abandoned gurney in a hall.

  She was sure that the alien astronaut guy would not be in open sight.

  “Here you are,” the coroner greeted them, as if they’d gotten lost already. “Lieutenant. Miss Barr. You’ll have to excuse my appearance. I’ve just returned from dinner at the Monte Carlo. What a savory rack of lamb.”

  The appearance he apologized for was a navy linen sports coat and old school tie glimpsed under his wrinkled white lab coat. Dr. Graham Bahr had a curling head of whitened black hair with werewolf eyebrows to match, but it was his robust weight, imposing height, and sometimes his temperament that gave him the “Grizzly” nickname.

  “I imagine you two have no time to waste in viewing our current ‘savory rack of lamb,’ eh? An unlikely pair,” he added.

  Molina was gathering herself to take offense when Temple realized where his focus was: on her feet. She hurried to answer his comment.

  “Thanks. Your orange and burgundy snakeskin boots really rock that navy coat and tie.”

  Molina frowned. “Down is the last place I’d look in medical examiners’ facility,” she said. “How long have you worn cowboy boots?”

  “Forever, Lieutenant. I guess my dazzling pearly whites distract visitors from my footwear.”

  His teeth, and Molina’s, were probably the only unwhitened choppers in Las Vegas. Everybody Temple’s age used a whitening toothpaste at least, even Matt.

  That thought spurred another one. “What color are the teeth of the ancient astronaut?” she asked.

  “Not ancient,” Grizzly said with a grin, “but they are naturally whiter than most. I suppose you girls are champing at the bit to see my hunky mystery man.”

  “I’d appreciate you using the honorific, Doctor.” Molina was not smiling.

  “Now, are our titles really
‘honorifics,’ Lieutenant? I’m not too sure. More like horrorifics in my field. Anyway, come with me; we keep our alien visitor in a special room, the celebrity suite, if you will.”

  Temple was counting on Febreze to cover any scent of decay, but also wished she’d put some Mentholatum near her nostrils. She tried to walk on her soles to mute any high-heel clatter, but Bahr’s boot heels made enough noise for both of them.

  Molina strode beside him, leaving Temple trailing two tall people like a child.

  Huh! She was the one who might be able to fill in the blanks on their many official forms.

  The facility was eerily quiet, apparently running on a skeleton crew. One siren or phone call could stir up staff like a stick energizes an anthill, she was sure.

  “Here’s the bunker.” Bahr pushed through an unmarked steel door and hit the inside light switch. The warming fluorescent tubes spotlighted a man wearing only the incision marks around his forehead and skull and the Y-incision on his torso.

  You couldn’t help but think of Frankenstein’s monster as depicted in a slew of films. At least Temple couldn’t. She was glad she was here to look at a face, not a fig leaf.

  And maybe she didn’t want to look it in the eyes either.

  It. Already she’d objectified the victim in her mind, and emotions. If truly alien, maybe it was an “it.” If not, it was a “him.” A him she thought she could recognize. What had she been thinking? The people she knew were animated, and that made recognition a whole different task.

  “Five-ten,” Molina said, bringing the tension down to the facts on a driver’s license, which this guy certainly had not been carrying. “Maybe one-eighty or -ninety. Brown/brown. Skin tone natural?”

  “Sort of, Lieutenant. The skin is naturally dark, with added self-tanner. What about this individual does Miss Barr think she might recognize?”

  “Dr. Bahr!” Temple was taking offense now. “Just the face, of course.”

  “Of course,” he said, chuckling.

  Temple walked around the top of the stainless steel gurney, unable to avoid seeing the back-of-the-head incision that had exposed the now-missing brain.

  The Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz film crooned, If I only had a brain…, in her head. In her brain.

  She stepped away from the table. Dr. Bahr’s and Lieutenant Molina’s faces looked serious and seriously scary in the harsh light. Did hers?

  She tried to think like a computer image, tilted her head to imagine the man vertical. To see the slicked-back black hair clinging to the skull over the incision. It would fall all the way to his collar-top if he wore a shirt and suit coat.

  If he were tilted up a bit at an ancient astronaut angle, he would have the strong brow bone and nose of the carved temple warrior. Those genes had not died out in Central and South America, despite the best efforts of the conquering Spanish explorers many centuries before. Empire had always been about genocide.

  Temple walked the length of body, looked back up to the face with its staring dark eyes that reflected fluorescent tubes.

  Can you see a face, and not recognize it again? Yes, if you have prosopagnosia. But if you have mental prosopagnosia? She eyed the hands and nails, the hair, the neck; she tilted the whole man upright and clothed him in a great suit to wear for his funeral. Wait. One borrowed from a Fontana brother.

  Because that was the vibe her subconscious associated with this man, not some ancient warrior culture. Something primitive, predatory even, but clothed in complete modernity, down to his buffed fingernails and that razor-cut nape-line of his hair. Smooth, slick. Smart, glib.

  “He’s from an ancient South American line, all right,” Temple told the doctor and police lieutenant. “This is the world-renowned conceptual architect who came to Las Vegas to dream up special projects around the Strip. He was even a consultant on Silas T. Farnum’s decidedly third-class construction site.”

  “You’re saying he was somebody important?” Molina asked.

  “He thought so. He goes by one name, like Cher or Madonna. He’s Santiago.” Temple was as stunned she was right as they were.

  Chapter 39

  Murder Ménage II: Naked Came the Clue

  Temple called a meeting of the Murder Ménage that evening.

  Max purposely arrived late for the meeting.

  He wanted the lovebirds to have a chance to establish their couplehood before he intruded on it. He wanted to be clearly the “outsider.” Creative consultant, say. This was purely professional.

  When Temple opened the condo door to his knock—ringing the doorbell was too akin to the unwanted solicitor—Midnight Louie uttered the first word of welcome as he weaved protectively around Temple’s calves.

  Correction: The couple was already a triumvirate. He was the fourth corner of a quadrangle. Temporarily.

  “This is starting to feel like a three-person poker game,” Temple said when she’d seated Max across from Matt Devine at the round dining table on one side of the main living room.

  “What’s up?” Max asked as he sat. Unwanted snapshots of memory from the time he’d lived here with Temple clashed in his mind, and he could hear majestic strains of Vangelis echoing from the unique barreled ceiling.

  He kept his head down and his expression blank. Only Max’s amnesia made it tolerable for them to gather in such a cozy, private way at all.

  “I thought you two should know what I and Molina know,” Temple began.

  The men exchanged glances, Matt looking edgy and a tad guilty, which was the way Max felt. Guilt? What was that about with Devine? Max would have to figure it out later.

  “Look, guys,” Temple said, “I’ve got the most shocking information. It’s like being hit by a … death ray from Jupiter. I’ve ID’d the ‘ancient astronaut’ body from the construction site on Paradise for the police,” she announced, sitting back to receive accolades.

  Matt leaned forward with a frown. “Temple, I thought you were distancing yourself from that crackpot developer guy with the invisible building.”

  “So the dead guy is a crackpot developer?” Max asked.

  “No,” Temple said, sighing. “That’s Silas T. Farnum, who wanted to hire me to PR the project. The ancient alien abductee who fell back to Earth in a flash of UFO fire is…”

  “Don’t milk it too long,” Max warned.

  “… Santiago.”

  She waited for applause, but got silence.

  “This is big, guys. Santiago is the South American architect-cum-showman who redid the ‘immersive’ Chunnel of Crime attraction connecting Gangsters and the Crystal Phoenix Hotels.”

  “So you provided the police with the right name for the most notorious corpse in Vegas?” Max wondered. “Didn’t this Santiago have links to the bizarre murder victim in formal dress found in the underground safe?”

  “Yes, and yes, that is a bizarre scenario,” Temple said. “Cosimo Sparks, that dead man in the safe, was also the head magician who was running the Synth,” she added for Matt’s benefit.

  Max already knew that. She and Max had paid a midnight visit to the disbanding Synth at the Neon Nightmare only days before. And there Temple had discerned from the forlorn magicians’ conversation that several unsolved murders on her Table of Crime Elements could have been committed by the now-dead Sparks to keep their failed conspiracy secret.

  Matt mustn’t know that, at least not right now, when Max’s return to Vegas made him uneasy.

  “South American architect,” Max repeated to change the subject. He’d been on the run in Europe when Santiago debuted in Vegas. “That’s Kathleen O’Connor IRA-donor territory. How could this apparent technocrat be mistaken for an ‘ancient alien’?”

  “Being found naked. In this case, clothes made the man,” Temple explained, “and his living look was all Fontana brothers gone Latino.”

  Max nodded. “That Italian greyhound pack of ‘instant sleek’ wears the ‘cool clothes in a hot climate’ look that sells designer suits.”

&nb
sp; “As if,” Matt said, “you didn’t ever work that look.”

  Max raised an objecting forefinger. “Not the same. That tropical look requires an off-white or pastel palette. I’m all about midnight black.”

  As though called, Midnight Louie gave a yodeling greeting and lofted atop the table, managing to avoid any elbows or glasses. He settled into an alert lying position, his huge black paws elegantly crossed.

  “Hi, Louie,” Temple said. “You are the epitome of elegant black.”

  Louie blinked as if accepting tribute and slitted his eyes almost shut.

  “Enough Gentlemen’s Quarterly chat, boys,” Temple decreed. “Santiago was pumped enough under those high-end suits to look like an ancient Central American civilization warrior and, without the product inflating his black hair, had the classic Mayan profile. At least when dead. That’s what tipped me off, visualizing the face upright on a modern, clothed man.”

  “Lying horizontal on a stainless steel autopsy table will indeed give the profile a new emphasis,” Max noted dryly.

  “Agreed,” Matt said. “I had to ID Effinger and wasn’t sure at first. When the living expression falls away … they look different enough to confuse people who knew them, the coroner told me. So, Temple. You figured this out, how?” Matt was looking skeptical, and suspicious.

  “Well, I never did regard the guy as anything more than a pricey con man, but I’d seen some photos of the body online. Combining that with the rumored ‘alien surgery scars,’ it suddenly clicked that he might have been one of the Darth Vaders at Neon Nightmare and been cat-mauled. So I called Molina and demanded to see the body. And I did. And it was just as I’d thought.”

  Max eyed Matt. “She and Molina are becoming quite a crime-solving duo. Are we being cut out of the action?”

  Matt didn’t bother to answer, instead asking Temple, “Someone wanted Santiago to be mistaken for a figure from the UFO-ancient alien cult?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not,” she said.

  “Ancient astronauts.” Max shook his head. “People are so gullible, but I shouldn’t complain, given my profession. That ‘Chariots of the Gods’ stuff trades on some temple carvings looking amazingly like a space-suited astronaut. One of the most famous figures happens to be a long-lived Mayan king, Pakal, tilted forward as he died and fell into the afterworld. A happy ending and place in that mythology, by the way.”