Cat in an Alien X_Ray

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Twisted?” Bucek leaned closer to Matt and dropped his voice. “Matt, you sound like you’re taking on a job for a psychiatrist. I’d advise you to leave any abuse survivor who’s turned to violence alone. That person is a ticking time bomb. That person could turn to mass violence.”

  “No. This one is acting out against the one decent person in her life.”

  “You?”

  “Not me. Not directly.”

  “Indirectly? Good God, Matt. You’re on the brink of an insanely great career and marrying a woman you’ve been lucky enough to find and love later in your life than most men. Don’t mess it up with some crusade to save a nut job.”

  Matt recoiled as Frank went on.

  “‘Love the little children,’ but a psychotic abuse survivor is no one for an amateur to deal with. We have FBI profilers who’ve plumbed the depths of human misbehavior, and even they don’t personally interact with the damned.”

  Matt nodded as Frank sat back, relieved, taking the nod for a concession.

  Matt had been nodding to himself. Yes, he’d have to continue going this alone. Bucek wouldn’t be any help.

  Matt just had to be something more than Kathleen O’Connor was. Something smarter. Something more determined. Something more stable. And fast.

  Chapter 41

  Northern Exposure

  “Hmm.” Kathleen cooed at Matt, trying to circle him in the narrow hotel room entry hall. “I smell expensive booze and steak sauce and cigar smoke on you.”

  Had she been tailing him?

  “What a high-end nose you have.”

  He moved to keep her face-to-face while he checked out her clothes. The filmy skirt was short in front and long in back, the way women (other than Temple) were wearing them today. And she wore some hip-length floaty top.

  Maybe he could see through the back of it if he positioned her correctly against the bedside lampshades, which were about at back level.

  “Oh, you want to tango tonight,” she said.

  He gently avoided her clinging ways. “I guess you did a lot of that in Rio and Buenos Aires, Lima and Santiago when you were courting South American money for the IRA.”

  He watched for a reaction on the word “Santiago.”

  She backed away. “And what have you done to support a cause besides simper from a pulpit?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “What made you fall in with the IRA at such a young age?”

  “I escaped the Magdalene ‘school.’ None did, you know.”

  “I do know. I’ve looked all that up.”

  “So you can divine my entire life story from the Internet?”

  He took his customary chair without turning his back on her, yet making the movement look natural, not defensive. He’d studied marital arts, but was finding the philosophy more helpful than the fighting part.

  She tossed herself on the bed, reminding him that she’d made her political point on her back the world over and that she still struck him in some ways as a rebellious teenager. “How do you know how young I was?” she asked with a bit of a preen in her voice.

  If Max was at his mid-thirties, his teenage “older woman” must be pushing forty, like Molina. Vamping it up might not get the instant results it once had. Besides, peace had made her cause moot.

  “Max thought of you as an older woman.”

  That had her sitting up, indignant. “Only six years!”

  “Double that in the emotional age between you. And then there’s your vast sexual experience edge, no matter how wrongfully you came by it.”

  “Max was an infant. A baby. He knew nothing of the world but being a privileged American and underage drinking and having fun and wanting to go far from home to seduce and screw his first girl.”

  “That sure didn’t work out for him, thanks to you. He thinks the only reason you went off to the park with him was to have his cousin Sean killed in that IRA bombing. Divide and destroy.”

  She shook her long black hair and wriggled to expose more leg in the front high-rise of the bipolar skirt. Nearing forty or not, she was a world-class beauty, born of abuse and compelled to think sexual power ran the world. “I thought we were here to talk about me. About how you’re Father Pureheart and want to save me.”

  Her mockery held some pulse of hope she’d deny, Matt thought. Unfortunately, at the moment, Father Pureheart was not only no longer a “father,” but he had to figure out a nonsexual way to check out her back for cat-scar marks, as well.

  “Tell me about it all,” Matt said.

  “How much ‘all’ do you want?” She crossed her legs high up, legs in sheer black nylons visibly supported by a black garter belt. Matt was not susceptible, but he allowed her to see him glancing at her thighs, looking for marks. Nothing to see at this distance. The back would be the telling section.

  “Tell me,” Matt said, hoping to overwhelm her, “about your mother and father, about your daughter. Then tell me about you and Max.”

  “You don’t want much, do you?” She picked up the razor from the marble-topped bedside table. “One strike across the eyelid, and you’re blind.”

  He couldn’t deter the chill of fear.

  “My mother was a whore. Sounds Victorian music hall, doesn’t it?” She’d veered off the threat. Maybe she’d always craved an audience for her wrongs.

  “So far,” Matt said, “I’m getting that she was unmarried and pregnant, like mine.”

  “Don’t try to ‘identify’ with me.”

  “How do you know she was a sex worker?”

  “Because in the orphanage they called me a bastard child of a whore. Are you too holy to say the word ‘whore’?”

  “No, but it’s a word meant to hurt, label, denigrate. And most often, it isn’t true.” Matt wanted to strip the shock value from her words, to depersonalize the dialogue.

  He realized he was being as manipulative as she was, but maybe that was what it took to cut through thirty-some years of abuse, fury, and hatred.

  He went on, “If your mother was put into a Magdalene school, she was an unpaid laundry worker, a virtual domestic slave. Those are labels I’ll accept.”

  “With nuns and priests as the warders.”

  Matt appeared to mull her words. “Yes. Warders is a good way to put it.”

  His agreement aggravated her more than any diatribe would.

  She grabbed the razor again and leaped to the floor. She flew at him, flying hair almost blinding her. Matt stood even faster, intercepted her right wrist, and pulled it down toward the floor. It was easy to push a foot out from under her, so she tumbled over onto her side.

  She curled into a ball, the reflexive position revealing more about her early life than a hundred hours of “therapy” talk. He could hardly hear the low keening, but saw a trio of ruby red blots on the marble floor.

  He bent over her. “Have you hurt yourself!”

  “No! You did!”

  The razor had fallen a few inches away. He grabbed it before she could. Her hand must have hit the floor with the open blade clutched in her palm. He shut it and closed the blood-dewed cutting edge out of her sight and put it in his pants pocket.

  “Come on. We’ll clean that up.”

  He was careful not to use her name. Anything that put her back into the dreadful past might push her into hysteria again.

  Funny. Everyone took her for a stone-cold killer, including himself. That was only a pose. What she really was might be even more dangerous.

  She let him lead her into the bathroom, to the marble sink with its 24-karat gold-clad faucets.

  She hung over it, panting, as he ran cold water on her bloody hand and jerked tissues from a golden box to wrap her palm. King Midas must have had a frenzy in this bathroom.

  Kathleen let herself sag against the sink stand, ironically accomplishing his dangerous and touchy mission for him. His supporting arm had pushed up the filmy top, exposing her spine and a lot of back.

  White. Clear of scars. He almost let her sli
p in shock, and had to clamp her ebbing body close, her heavy hair against his chin and chest.

  He realized this was supposed to be seductive, but his now ruefully regarded years of wrought-iron celibacy had made him seduce-proof.

  “Here, a towel.” He grabbed an ornately embroidered finger towel and wrapped it around the cut hand. “Let’s get you back into the bedroom.” She’d take that move as a sign of victory.

  He steered her out onto the bed, then peeled open the towel. It had absorbed some blood from the short cut, but the flow was already slowing.

  He plumped the scratchy brocade pillows behind her and settled her back like an invalid.

  Then he sat again in his usual chair against the wall.

  It was hard to be seductive with a huge towel wrapped around one hand.

  “You’re good at first aid,” she said, unaware of delivering her first compliment. “Did your stepfather hit you?”

  Matt shrugged.

  “Did he, did he? He must have!”

  “Then why ask me?”

  “I want to make you tell the truth.”

  “You don’t have to make me. Yes, he yelled at me, cursed at me, and he hit me when I stood between him and my mother.”

  “When was that.”

  “Every time.”

  She fell silent. No one had stood in front of her.

  “Look,” Matt said. “I know Cliff Effinger was a piker in everything he ever said or did. He was even a failure at being abusive. I know now what I went through was minor compared to some.”

  “And I’m that ‘some.’”

  “No. You are the one. A one. The only one I’m talking to at this moment.”

  “But you don’t want to be.”

  “True.”

  “You don’t want me to exist.”

  Matt didn’t have to think before he spoke. “I don’t want anyone who’s been through what you have to exist, but the world won’t let that happen.”

  “You are the world.” She spun away on the bed. Again revealed the back he’d needed to see. He was glad no signs of further abuse showed, even from the cat pack. “We are the world.”

  She quoted the happy, sappy soft drink song of eighteen million TV commercials ago. He remembered crouching on the floor in front of the TV set in an unhappy house and seeing all those happy people singing that they’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.

  Yeah, he had felt that he could do that at one time. Still did.

  It occurred to him that Kathleen’s dedication to the IRA might have been genuine.

  I’d like to buy the world … a soft drink and then what? Call man’s inhumanity to man, woman, and child done?

  He approached the bed. He pulled the shut razor from his pocket. He opened it. He laid it on the bedside table.

  She didn’t move. She left her vulnerable back—that he’d so needed to see to convict her of another wrong—exposed.

  Mission accomplished.

  He left, without her moving or speaking for once. Just bleeding a little.

  And breathed a deep sigh of relief outside the door.

  He walked to the edge of the hallway and the railing that overlooked all the tropical greenery and flitting, chatting birds of the atrium.

  He said good night to Vassar, who’d plunged from this height eighteen stories to her death.

  Perhaps her murderer rested inside.

  Chapter 42

  Track of the Cat

  It had taken Max a few nights to determine which floor Matt Devine was visiting.

  It took another day to target the exact room of the many that circled the Hyatt-style atrium of the Goliath Hotel.

  First, he’d called the front desk on his cell phone—thank God for smaller, brilliant portable devices—and asked for Devine’s room over and over. That service was automated, so no human would notice the repetitions.

  Then it was a matter of prowling the halls of the twentieth floor until he heard a phone ringing at the same time. That was not an easy task. The central atrium was a thirty-story aviary, thronging with whistling, chattering, calling exotic birds. As pleasant as the effect was, it made it hell to determine where normal human sounds, like ringing room phones, had originated.

  Max couldn’t say why he was doing this. Was it to protect his ex–significant other from news of a philandering fiancé? Or to protect—or nail—Devine, who was clearly uncomfortable with whatever was going on in room 2032? Was it a matter of prurient curiosity? Or life and death?

  His new secret mission certainly wasn’t uncovering the possible mob activity Temple was obsessed by. That was the task assigned him and Devine by their lead detective.

  Max chuckled. Temple certainly put the “dom” in “indomitable.”

  Tonight he’d gotten here ahead of Devine, ducking into the entry niche of a lavish suite.

  He’d seen his expected prey arrive, looking unhappy, and depart about ninety minutes later, looking unhappier.

  About ten minutes after that, he heard the room’s door open and close. His back was to the hall as someone from the room passed a man bent over to open the room to his suite. Max had worn the gangsta fedora so popular in music videos, and had pushed his blazer sleeves up to his elbows to complete the look.

  When he thought it safe to come out, he passed only bleary-eyed gamblers, all male, as he headed for the elevator area, arriving just as the middle one of five closed its doors on nothing visible.

  He called for another, pacing. At this hour, past 4 A.M., it came quickly. Gamblers either gave up the ghost of a chance around 3 A.M. or stuck it through until breakfast at six.

  Once on, Max hit LOBBY and pressed the CLOSE DOORS buttons. This trick happened to work at the Goliath. He’d used it when performing his magic act here to get around the hotel without delays and in privacy.

  One elevator essentially out of service would force the other four elevators to stop more frequently.

  When the elevator car lifted almost imperceptibly before stopping, Max released the LOBBY button and hit OPEN ELEVATOR DOORS at once.

  He burst out of his silent womb into the bright, bustling lobby of milling people.

  He stepped aside. Waiting people pushed past him into the elevator car. Max studied the master board that showed each car and the floor it was on. The first and last were too high to have touched bottom during his own trip down. Number two was about to come in for a landing, and number four had just disgorged a clot of passengers.

  Max joined those debarkers, quickly studying them for any possible clue to being Matt Devine’s secret contact. This was hard, with his memory bereft of 90 percent of what Matt Devine was about besides the bare facts of his history, ex-priest and now disc jockey to the depressed. Actually, he’d listened to the evening programming at WCOO-AM radio.

  It was Devine’s predecessor on the air, Ambrosia, who played the songs. Devine just talked the talk afterwards. He had a good voice, and an obvious gift for teasing reason out of troubled people. No surprise he was on the brink of a national career.

  Could that have anything to do with these nightly assignations? Not unless the wooing network brass had given him a free room at the Goliath with call girls on tap as a contract perk. Highly unlikely, given the guy’s mind-blowing celibate history. He’d known how to resist temptation for years. Devine had “straight shooter” written all over him.

  The Bermuda shorts–clad tourists of both sexes who’d left the elevator were also highly unlikely to be Devine buddies, and most of them high on alcohol too, at this late hour.

  Whatever was happening in room 2032, it wasn’t a party. He’d listened at the door, but all that marble and mirror wall sheathing deadened sound.

  Max whirled to see the spate of passengers from elevator number two fanning out like electrons deserting a nucleus.

  He had half a second to make a decision. His eye focused on the only blur of black, and he swung into step behind it, knowing people crisscrossed in all directions and th
ey both were caught in a basketweave pattern that made a simple attempt to follow almost impossible.

  Woman, though. Not that tall, even allowing for stiletto heels.

  Max shrugged and shouldered his way closer, keeping his knees bent and his face down, looking past the hat brim.

  She was leaving the hotel. That conviction sent a shock wave of jubilation through him.

  Outside it would be much easier to follow her, even if she used a cab.

  But she didn’t. She was walking down the long, curving pavement toward the Strip, on heels but walking fast.

  Max slouched after her, taking in the shiny black-patent trench coat so much more costly than the hooker heels. She wore real hooker heels, extreme and cheap enough to glitter and be easy to follow. She too wore a hat, black with a floppy brim. Made it hard to see what was hair and what was hat.

  Max ran the stats through his mind. Around five-feet-three. Black hair. Max got a sudden vision of aqua eyes, probably contact lens enhanced. No doubt about it. She must be Kathleen O’Connor, his implacable enemy.

  How the bloody hell had she ended up in nightly collusion with Matt Devine?

  For a moment, he savored outing ex–Father Perfect, but that was petty.

  Even as he paused in shock to absorb his conclusion, the crowds were thinning enough for him to realize another shocking fact.

  He was the second in line.

  Someone else was tailing Kitty the Cutter—and from the way she kept her right hand buried in the coat pocket, she might well be carrying a switchblade—another guy, not so tall as he but as unremarkably dressed. In a hat. A baseball cap.

  Not law enforcement.

  Some new player in the game.

  Max stuck his hands in his black denim jeans and fell into step where he belonged … behind everybody.

  * * *

  Max Kinsella watched the dawn come up on the desert. He’d driven east after his long night of surveillance. It wasn’t hard to leave Las Vegas if you drove east or west.

  Kathleen had lost them in the Treasure Island’s tropical greenery. Not Max, but by then he’d been more curious about who was following her than where she went. There was always tomorrow night to track down Kitty the Cutter.