Cat in a Topaz Tango

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  He was on the run from the posh Swiss private clinic just up the Alps where he was registered as Michael Randolph, although he didn’t have a scrap of that identity on him. He was secretly known as Max to the older gent who’d paid to have his mangled body and mind admitted and treated there some six weeks ago.

  None of this mattered because he didn’t remember a thing about himself since he’d awakened in said posh clinic. Just three days ago, he’d fled an attempted assassination with the help of his psychiatrist, his tall, blond, attractive psychiatrist, an intriguing blend of French and German genes called Revienne Schneider.

  While she’d delved for his missing memory, he’d found he liked her mind and various French folderols. Too bad something in him didn’t trust the luck of the draw. They’d shared a rough road trip for three days, but he still wasn’t sure she wasn’t a planted assassin. Waking up to find her gone was maybe the gift of the morning. Too bad he didn’t buy sudden disappearances, not even his own. He would find her and then find out if she was an enemy, or just a really attractive diversion.

  Right now he was pretending she was his missing wife.

  “She was wearing a pink suit and boots. The boots aren’t pink,” he added. “Just black. I missed the bus and she’s probably looking for me too.”

  The quaint upland Swiss town hosted scads of tourists, especially during the spring and summer when the Alps were passable, so the shopkeepers spoke excellent English. This shop had the best view of the plaza. Revienne was handsome enough that she would not escape notice unless she wanted to.

  He took a deep breath as the man turned to question his staff in the slightly different German the Swiss people had developed. Scents of chocolate and pipe tobacco soothed his senses, but they weren’t succumbing to any of it.

  Revienne could have dumped him, been kidnapped, or even be lurking nearby to assassinate him. Maybe he should let her disappearance this morning go, get the hell down off the mountain. The clinic security personnel, as in goons, were bound to be searching for him, for good or bad reasons.

  They wouldn’t expect a fugitive with casts on his legs to be plaster-free and this mobile already. He owed that to Revienne begging a saw to hack off the casts, and his own preinjury muscle strength. Six weeks in painkiller and sedative limbo made a lot fuzzy, but he’d lost no muscle tone in his arms, thanks to shower-rod chin-ups on steel fixtures robust enough to hold up a bull.

  Why, one had to wonder, was the clinic so industrially tricked out? Simple efficiency, or something more sinister? Torture?

  “Sorry, sir.” The pleasantly pudgy shopkeeper offered a sheepish smile beneath a down-turned moustache. “None of the staff has seen such a woman this morning.”

  “She’s probably waiting for me at the next bus stop down the mountain.” He returned the smile with a rueful grin and was already examining the square for other options before he was quite out the door.

  The charming breakfast places with exterior tables under second-story window boxes spilling blossoming flowers had not seen hide nor hair of her. He spotted a huge German bus pulsing in the square, waiting to leave, and started concocting a tale that would get him on the tour without a ticket.

  On a whim he stopped at a flower seller’s cart that had just set up by the central fountain. The water splashed as vivid gold, purple, and pink flowers scented the clean mountain air. He bought a bunch of fragrant yellow freesias, thinking even as he did that they’d suit a brunette or a redhead more than a blonde. He wondered if he was buying for a woman he’d forgotten, like everything else he’d forgotten since the accident that had brought him here so far so fast from the United States.

  Garry, the stranger who called himself his old friend, had said that was the place they called home. The United States. Too bad the guy hadn’t left any information on where to reach him in Switzerland.

  “For your sweetheart?” the woman asked.

  She was an old-country grandmother in an embroidered vest she’d probably stitched herself, dirndl skirt, and peasant blouse. “Sweetheart” was a word out of an operetta, as she was.

  He smiled, and poured on the charm he suspected he’d lived off for years. “You might have seen her. You have clever, bright eyes. How could you miss her? Tall, blond, in a chic suit. French.”

  “Ach, yes. The Frenchwoman never sheds her style. She was with you?” She eyed his new-bought jeans and hiking boots.

  His heart had almost stopped to stumble across a lead.

  “Can’t get her away from the big-time banking position long enough to relax, not even in the mountains,” he complained amiably.

  She nodded, handing over the simple bouquet in exchange for some coins. He felt awkward as a schoolboy standing there, just holding it. Must not be a hearts and flowers kind of guy.

  She smiled at him. “A bank job? No wonder I saw her in the back of that big black Mercedes. I’m sorry, lad, but these flowers come too late. Her driver took her down the mountain when I was coming into the square.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Ten on your watch.”

  He eyed the cheap tourist model. “How big a Mercedes?”

  “A Mercedes 280 SEL.”

  His surprise at her knowing the model, more than he dared hope for, must have showed.

  She smiled and nodded again. “I know that because it was the car Princess Diana was killed in, God rest her soul.”

  Max frowned, trying to remember Princess Diana as dead. Trying to remember a Princess Diana for a few moments.

  The crisp mountain morning air he inhaled froze in his chest. He remembered now.

  The chase in Paris, the crash in the underpass. The car. Big, powerful, engineered and customized from the factory, the kind of car driven to ferry the rich, the important, the nefarious. A Mercedes 280 SEL.

  This stuff he knew without hesitation.

  Not just a Mercedes.

  Not just a big black Mercedes.

  An armored model built for security purposes, for whisking blond young women away from it all, perhaps to their deaths.

  Was Revienne a prisoner, or a lovely lure drawing him farther afield into another booby trap like the one that had broken his legs and clouded his memory?

  Only way to know that was to find her.

  And Garry, the old man who’d mentored Max and now looked after his semi-self, Garry must know he’d gone missing by now and be worried.

  “You didn’t glimpse the license plate?” Max asked.

  Her crepe-shuttered eyelids fluttered with surprise.

  He said quickly, “I don’t know if she’s been sent for by the Swiss or the Italian branch of her bank.”

  “ZH, Zurich, of course. Six, twelve, five-six. My eldest son was born November 6 in 1956.”

  Confused, he thought: 6/12/56 was June. Wait. No. Europeans put the month before the day: 12/6/56. Her son had been born on that date and year, but in the previous month.

  “The Milan branch, then,” he said. “The Italians are always unreliable when it comes to money and train schedules, unlike the Swiss.”

  She nodded, smiling at the compliment.

  Max checked his cheap watch again, made not in Switzerland, but—where else?—China. He actually used his wooden cane to propel him faster toward the big bus throbbing in idle before leaving.

  The doors whooshed open. He looked up the narrow steep stairs into the cornflower blue eyes of the young brunet driver.

  And held out the deceptively purchased bouquet. “Gruezi, fräulein. For you.”

  She took in the flowers, his cane, his face. A tourist bus driver would know English.

  “I have a bit of an embarrassing problem—”

  She smiled and reached for the bouquet.

  Not anymore he didn’t.

  Missing in Action

  Carmen had left her car parked on the street instead of in the driveway or garaging it. Nobody would want to steal her aging Toyota wagon anyway.

  She could afford a new family car
, but who had time?

  Confession was said to be good for the soul, but it just tired her out.

  Matt was as easy as they come to confess to. Still, he’d been annoyingly sure that he’d been right all along and she was just now coming over to the side of truth, justice, and the Max American way.

  Thinking of sides, her wounded ribs were throbbing. The stitches had dissolved finally, but they still left hot red marks at each insertion point, an irritating, long tattoo of discomfort. Infection loved to feed on shallow wounds.

  She faced her own front door. A lot of lies and deception had transpired behind it since she’d been stabbed.

  Morrie Alch coming and going like a loyal family friend, covering for her at the office and at home.

  Mariah, God bless her heedless, egocentric teenybopper soul, had blithely accepted doing chores for a mother “sick” with a virus that gave the word virulent meaning. Even more convenient for her mother’s hidden wound from a concealed misadventure outside the law, Mariah had remained on the go, thanks to many nonworking married neighborhood mothers who could chauffeur an extra.

  They probably gossiped about her. Not about her and men. Never about men. No cause. Or wait! Was Morrie’s attentive presence causing talk? He was sticking his neck out to save her job, not to covet her body, stitched up like a football as it was.

  Shoot. Now, she not only had her stalker and Kinsella’s stalker and her own iffy actions to worry about, but what the neighbors might think. They’d been deprived of juicy details about her private life for far too long.

  Now they had Dirty Larry, too, the undercover cop, who’d paid her a visit or two at home.

  Carmen sighed and made herself march up to her front door and unlock it.

  A skitter of ratlike nails over kitchen tile and then a pounding on the carpeting made her almost clutch for the paddle holster at her back waistband.

  Nothing. Just the two cats going squirrelly from the upset domestic routine here lately.

  She turned on the lights in the living room, then in the kitchen before confronting the magnetized message board on the fridge. Right. Thursday. Night. It had been free to meet Matt because her social butterfly daughter had a . . . study date at the Lopez house. Home by—Carmen checked her watch—8:30 P.M. By an hour ago.

  She pulled out her cell phone instead of her holster and speed-dialed Cecilia Lopez.

  “Hi. Mariah’s mom. Yeah. Fine. Say, wasn’t this supposed to break up over an hour ago?” There was a pause while Cecilia spoke. “She didn’t. I said! No. I didn’t. Yeah, I know kids this age. But if she didn’t go with your Ashlee after school—yes, please. Check with your daughter.”

  Carmen started pacing around the end of the eating island, then into the living room. She was almost running by the time she got to Mariah’s bedroom and snapped on the overhead light.

  Lord, what a mess. You couldn’t see a girl in here for the posters and pillows and scattered, rejected outfits. Mariah’s Our Lady of Guadalupe uniform was a castaway heap of white blouse and plaid skirt and navy jacket over the desk chair. The laptop computer was open, but off.

  Carmen took a deep breath, wincing as her stitches stretched. When would she get over this damn knife wound!

  A voice came back on the phone. Carmen repeated each tidbit of information to lock it in her memory.

  “Check with Sedona Martinez? Right. And her mother is? Yolanda. Her number is, uh-huh.” She’d raced back to the kitchen to scrawl the phone number on a countertop note pad. A 270 exchange. Not this neighborhood. Sedona. Probably bused in from Henderson. Catholic schools were fashionable now. Sedona Martinez? What was next? Paris Solis? Madrid Rodriguez? Barcelona Banderas?

  “Thanks,” she said. “If you hear anything—”

  Cecilia promised to call if she heard where Mariah might be. It was probably just a misunderstanding, she added.

  Carmen hung up, thinking about the recent days that Mariah had supervised her, under Morrie’s direction, more than she had kept tabs on her daughter.

  Ordinarily, a missing person had to be gone twenty-four hours before the police became involved. With a child, if there was evidence of kidnapping, that rule was suspended. With her child, Carmen had to stop running wild scenarios through her head and get practical, fast.

  She speed-dialed every family she or Mariah had been in touch with on her cell phone. No one knew anything, and all got those small catches of alarm in their voices. A child being even momentarily unaccounted for was everyone’s nightmare.

  What about that new friend? she wondered. The transfer student Mariah had taken a sudden liking to? This age fostered intense friendships followed by melodramatic splits. What was that kid’s name? They had never done anything organized together, so there was no trail to follow.

  She needed to know more before she alerted anybody. The house sounded ominously empty, the only noise the uneasy shift of ice in the refrigerator and any motions Carmen made herself. The cats had curled up to sleep in opposite corners of the living-room sofa, like bookends.

  Carmen pushed maternal panic out of her mind and hit one last fast-dial number.

  “Morrie? It’s Molina. No, the stitches are fine. It’s something else. Something worse, maybe. Yeah. Under wraps for the moment. Can you bear to come over here one more time and maybe save the day? Great. I, ah, didn’t ask what you were doing. Oh. This.” She tried to find a smile, but couldn’t. “Thanks.”

  “Jesus, Carmen!”

  She wouldn’t have called Morrie if she’d known he’d go postal.

  He was pacing the small living room in the opposite direction she was. He was a Columbo sort of cop, middle-aged, rumpled, nice enough to underestimate. “You can’t keep a thing like this under wraps. You think this is the secret service or something?”

  “You know no one official will act until tomorrow unless there’s evidence of a kidnapping or a runaway kid. And you know I’ve been down and out lately, with Mariah on her own more than usual.”

  “So you last saw her—?”

  “This morning before I went to work.”

  “You’ve been coming home for lunch for a change. We know you were readjusting your Ace bandage. Doesn’t she come home from school for lunch?”

  “Not as much anymore. We’re close to the school, but she has groups of girlfriends now. They’re always working on some project in their spare time.” She paused to look him in the eye. “And I skipped lunch because I had an appointment elsewhere earlier today. About Mariah.”

  “She getting in trouble in school?”

  “No. I saw her father.”

  “Rafi Nadir?”

  “There’s any other candidate?”

  “About what?”

  “About his wanting a role in Mariah’s life.”

  “Oh, Lord, you laid down the law according to Molina and he went apeshit and took her anyway.”

  “I’d love to put an APB out on my ex-boyfriend, Morrie, but I didn’t close him down. I told him we’d work something out, as soon as I got a little time.”

  “And he took it how?”

  “Like a lamb. We talked about old assumptions and discovered we’d had a terminal ‘failure to communicate,’ as the shrinks say.” She smiled. “I saw and talked to Matt Devine this evening too, about Kinsella. He’d bought Temple Barr’s party line that the magician was innocent of anything but protecting the innocent. After what happened in Kinsella’s house five weeks ago, the stalker, I’m beginning to wonder if the people after him aren’t worse than he is.”

  Morrie grinned. “Including you? Sounds like you’ve been dining on crow, lately.”

  “Yup. And what’s my reward? My kid goes AWOL. Anything about her strike you, Morrie? I’ve been pretty out of it these last five weeks or so.”

  “She was a good kid. Did what I asked, right away. Ready to be tearing off back to school, of course.”

  “‘Tearing off back to school?’ Morrie, that’s very abnormal behavior.”

 
“I thought kids that age had energy.”

  “Not for going back to school. Her room’s the usual tsunami victim. It doesn’t look messed with by more than the resident’s usual habits. Yet I don’t want to go through things in there in case we need”—her voice got a bit wobbly—“evidence taken, but I think I should check the computer. I haven’t since I got ‘sick,’ and the Internet is the root of all evil these days when it comes to kids getting into trouble.”

  Molina fetched two sets of latex crime scene gloves from the going-out-the-door supplies in a kitchen drawer.

  “You can’t think—” Morrie began.

  “Anything’s possible. One of the mothers I called tonight should have been able to pinpoint Mariah’s whereabouts. The kid wrote her destination on the fridge, as we agreed. It’s door-to-door pick up and drop off. Even if Mariah fudged things, someone should have a clue.”

  By then they were stepping over books, and papers, and articles of clothing in Mariah’s bedroom.

  “I’ve walked into a nightmare like this before,” Morrie said.

  “Blair Witch Project?”

  “My own teen daughter’s bedroom, years ago.”

  The usual cop-shop black humor was rearing its macabre head. They’d both reverted to what gave them the distance that made efficiency possible instead of panic.

  “Kids this age do tend to go a little AWOL,” he commented. “Testing the limits. They get crazy ideas.”

  “And I haven’t been paying proper attention lately.” Molina brushed her thick hair back from her face, but it flopped forward again, thanks to its recent “disguise” as an actual hairdo. “You know teen girls better than I do, Morrie. Keep searching here and I’ll check with the next-door neighbors. Maybe they saw something.”

  When she got outside, the sun was thinking about dropping completely behind the mountains. The streetlights were only faintly lit, also looking like they might change their minds any minute, looking like fancy entry hall lights in better neighborhoods.

  The Vargas house on the right wasn’t lit inside for the evening yet. She was a nurse’s aide and he drove long haul.