MIDNIGHT LOUIE MYSTERIES

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Copyright © 2009 by Carole Nelson Douglas

clever, creative, and supportive,

There are a lot of fat cats in Las Vegas.

These glitzy media-blitzed streets host almost forty million tourists each year and a ton of camera crews. If cameras are not recording background shots for CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, they are capturing thousands of personal videos. People think they know this town—from film if not firsthand experience—know it from the flashy hotels to the seamy side of the Strip.

And a good number of them know one particular Las Vegas institution.

That would be me.

Oh, I keep a low profile. You do not hear about me on the nightly news. That is the way I like it. That is the way any primo PI would like it. The name is Louie, Midnight Louie. I am a noir kind of guy, inside and out. I like my nightlife shaken, not stirred.

I am not your usual gumshoe, in that my feet do not wear shoes of any stripe, but shivs. Being short, dark, and handsome . . . really short . . . gets me overlooked and underestimated, which is what the savvy operative wants anyway. I am your perfect undercover guy. I also like to hunker down under the covers with my little doll.

Miss Temple Barr and I are perfect roomies. She tolerates my wandering ways. I look after her without letting her know about it. Call me Muscle in Midnight Black. We share a well-honed sense of justice and long, sharp fingernails and have cracked some cases too tough for the local fuzz. She is, after all, a freelance public relations specialist, and Las Vegas is full of public relations of all stripes and legalities.

None can deny that the Las Vegas crime scene is big time, and I have been treading these mean neon streets for twenty-one books now. When I call myself an “alphacat,” some think I am merely asserting my natural male and feline dominance, but no. I simply reference the fact that since I debuted in Catnap and Pussyfoot, I then commenced to a title sequence that is as sweet and simple as B to Z.

That is where I began my alphabet, with the B in Cat on a Blue Monday. From then on, the color word in the title is in alphabetical order up to the current volume, Cat in a Topaz Tango.

Since Las Vegas is littered with guidebooks as well as bodies, I wish to provide a rundown of the local landmarks on my particular map of the world. A cast of characters, so to speak:

To wit, my lovely roommate and high-heel devotee, Miss Nancy Drew on killer spikes, freelance PR ace Miss Temple Barr, who had reunited with her elusive love . . .

. . . the once again missing-in-action magician Mr. Max Kinsella, who has good reason for invisibility. After his cousin Sean died in a bomb attack during a post-high-school jaunt to Ireland, he went into undercover counterterrorism work with his mentor, Gandolph the Great.

Meanwhile, Mr. Max is sought by another dame, Las Vegas homicide detective Lieutenant C. R. Molina, mother of teenage Mariah . . .

. . . and the good friend of Miss Temple’s recent fiancé, Mr. Matt Devine, a radio talk-show shrink and former Roman Catholic priest who came to Vegas to track down his abusive stepfather, Cliff Effinger.

Speaking of unhappy pasts, Miss Lieutenant Carmen Regina Molina is not thrilled that her former flame, Mr. Rafi Nadir, the unsuspecting father of Mariah, is in Las Vegas after blowing his career at the LAPD. . . .

Meanwhile, Mr. Matt drew a stalker, the local lass that young Max and his cousin Sean boyishly competed for in that long-ago Ireland . . .

. . . one Miss Kathleen O’Connor, deservedly christened Kitty the Cutter by Miss Temple. Finding Mr. Max impossible to trace, Kitty the C settled for harassing with tooth and claw the nearest innocent bystander, Mr. Matt Devine . . .

. . . who tried to recover from the crush he developed on Miss Temple, his neighbor at the Circle Ritz condominiums. He did that by not very boldly seeking new women, all of whom were in danger from said Kitty the Cutter.

Now that Miss Kathleen O’Connor has self-destructed and is dead and buried, things are shaking up at the Circle Ritz. Mr. Max Kinsella is again apparently lost in action. In fact, I saw him hit the wall of the Neon Nightmare club while in the guise of bungee-jumping magician, the Phantom Mage, and neither I nor Las Vegas has seen him since.

That this possible tragedy coincides with my ever-lovin’ roommate going over to the Light Side (our handsome blond neighbor and former priest, Mr. Matt Devine) in her romantic life only adds to the confusion.

However, things are not always what they seem. A magician can have as many lives as a cat, in my humble estimation, and events would seem to bear me out. Meanwhile, I am spending more time tracking the doings of Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina these days, whose various domestic issues past and present are on a collision course. Since she has always considered the Mystifying Max a murder suspect and my beloved roomie his too-loyal accomplice, she may have to eat some humble pie as well as deal with two circling men of her own, Rafi Nadir and Dirty Larry Podesta, an undercover narc who is mysteriously interested in her personal and professional crusades. . . .

I am not surprised by these surprising developments. Everything is always up for grabs in Las Vegas 24/7: guilt, innocence, money, power, love, loss, death, and significant others.

All this human sex and violence makes me glad that I have a simpler social life, such as just trying to get along with my unacknowledged daughter . . .

. . . Miss Midnight Louise, who insinuated herself into my cases until I was forced to set up shop with her as Midnight Inc. Investigations and who, along with her many admirers, will be as mad as hell at her not making an appearance in this adventure, Girrrls always stick together . . .

. . . and still needing to unearth more about the Synth, an ancient cabal of magicians that may be responsible for a lot of cold cases in town and which is of international interest now.

Well, there you have it, the usual human stew, all mixed-up and at odds with one another and within themselves. Obviously, it is up to me to solve all their mysteries and nail a few crooks along the way. Like Las Vegas, the City That Never Sleeps, Midnight Louie, private eye, also has a sobriquet: the Kitty That Never Sleeps.

With this crew, who could?

“You’re the ex-priest,” Temple pointed out. “You must know how we can avoid the wedding from Hell?”

“All weddings, or the preparations at least, are from Hell,” Matt said.

He went on, chapter and verse. “I’ve officiated at enough of them to know that by now. The wedding ‘party’ always bristles with conflicting, intergenerational agendas. I doubt they’re all as highly dramatic as Aldo Fontana’s and your aunt Kit’s, though.”

Temple sighed and stirred on her living-room sofa in the Circle Ritz condominiums and apartment building, where she and Matt had units atop each other on the second and third floors. As, in fact, they were even more closely on top of each other now.

The five-story, round fifties-era building was a whimsical little place even for the city of Las Vegas, which only did whimsical large and on the Strip, but theirs was a whimsical little engagement.

Their lives were Euphemism Central these days. Being “engaged” made “sleeping together” expected, but they were still “living in sin” in the eyes of Matt’s Catholic church. In the eyes of Temple’s church, Universal Unitarian, she was just a modern woman ready for marital commitment and smart enough to want to know what she was getting into.

At least now that they were “engaged,” Temple didn’t have to “keep her feet on the floor” when she and Matt shared a sofa. Her feet were on his lap, and he was playing with the ankle ties on the resale-shop designer spike heels she’d worn previously as Kit’s maid of honor at the elegant hotel wedding ceremony a couple of days earlier.

Aldo, the groom, had nine brothers, one of whom owned the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino. Hotelier Nicky had been the best man, which left eight brothers to escort Kit’s eight bridesmaids. (How a Manhattan resident came up with eight Las Vegas bridesmaids is another story.)

“Only a best man and matron or maid of honor for our wedding, I think,” Temple said. “How can we get into trouble with that?”

“You still want the small civil ceremony here at Electra’s wedding chapel first?”

“I don’t know. We did meet here. Electra’s our landlady and would love to marry us in the Circle Ritz’s attached chapel. We’d be legal but we’d still be sinful in the eyes of your church. Would legal make you feel any better?”

“The only thing that makes me feel any better is you,” he said, his golden-brown eyes darkening.

Temple hiked a shapely but short leg onto his shoulder. “Untie my shoe straps and then we can discuss more important things.”

“I don’t know how you walk in these things,” Matt said, complying.

“Years of being a shrimp and suffering.”

He smiled and moved her other foot from his lap to his shoulder. “For a shrimp you have some provocative moves.”

“For an ex-priest, you catch on fast.”

They grinned at each other. Then yawned.

“That was a rough twenty-four hours in the desert,” Matt commented, “then the big wedding ceremony came right after it.”

“You were the kidnapping victim,” she pointed out. “I was only a member of the rescue party.”

“I wasn’t the target. I was just along for the ride.”

“And what a ride! Murder in a Nevada cathouse. It may not have been in Vegas proper, but it would sure make a great movie. Eight vengeful women, eight captive groomsmen, assorted associates, almost all of the last identifiable mob “family” in Clark County. Uzis, limos, hookers.”

“Not likely for my bachelor party,” Matt said, laughing. “I hardly know anybody here.”

“You’d be surprised, buddy. I think the Fontana boys plan on doing just that when we finally do get hitched.”

“No, a fate worse than a Vegas wedding with Elvis,” Matt said, still laughing, and then tickling the bare soles of Temple’s feet to make her join in.

She was easy and giggled away on cue. “Stop that! I’m really ticklish!”

He was no fun. He stopped, then frowned. “I really don’t know about committing to that charity fund-raiser for all of next week.”

“You wouldn’t bow out?”

“Ballroom dancing isn’t exactly in my résumé.”

“Just why you need to brush up before we do the wedding waltz at our reception. Not to mention you’re committed to taking Mariah Molina to her freshman father-daughter dance in high school this fall.”

Matt groaned at the reminder. “I have a lot of sympathy for single working moms rearing a teenage daughter, but who named me proxy daddy of the week? And Mariah’s in that embarrassing hero worship of older guys stage.”

“Who’s more embarrassed, you or her?”

“Me. Teen girls don’t get embarrassed, they embarrass everybody else. I’m already freaked. This Dancing With the Stars wanna-be show isn’t all wedding waltzes and dad-daughter shuffles. Those ballroom routines can be pretty risqué.”

“You’re out of the priesthood, Matt. You can do risqué. And kids today want dads who can rock out in the school auditorium like cool dudes. Doesn’t Ambrosia think it’d be good for your radio career?”

“Ambrosia’s in favor of anything that makes me a visual. She believes the world wants a Web presence, a Facebook profile, a YouTube persona, rather than just a voice in the night.”

“Let’s face it. Ambrosia knows how to market radio today. You make a socko visual. Remember that billboard of you on the red suede couch? I sure do! Blond, handsome, and horizontal.”

“Yeah, and all those screaming fan girls.” He made a face. It didn’t hurt his looks a bit.

“Ambrosia’s your producer. Your ‘Midnight Hour’ is syndicated in a lot of major markets, but there are more to be won over. You can go farther than the usual radio shrink, maybe become the next Dr. Phil.”

“Spare me.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“That’s what I get with an ace PR woman as a fiancée. P.T. Barr-num. Dr. Phil’s avuncular act is not only bullying, but superficial. I hope my ‘Midnight Hour’ digs a bit deeper.”

“It does.” Temple’s voice lowered to a dramatic whisper. “You are the most insightful, sincere, and sexy guy on the airwaves. Dr. Phil should be quaking in his Big and Tall Man suits.”

“Dr. Phil isn’t a dancing bear.”

“You won’t be a dancing bear.”

“I’ve been rehearsing already, so don’t bet on that.”

“Ooh. Who’s your teacher?”

Matt hesitated. “No six-feet-tall Strip chorus girls to steer around the floor, thank goodness. Most female proballet and ballroom dancers are petite. She’s a brunette.”

“Should look dramatic with your fair coloring.”

“She’s the dramatic type, all right, but she’s just the instructor. I’ll actually perform with the other celebrities.”

“Don’t glower. Men are so afraid of a little social dancing. Look at all those macho athletes who aced Dancing With the Stars. Football players, Olympic skaters.”

“Temple, my only ‘sport’ is swimming. Not exactly a couple’s pursuit. Besides. You overlook the sleaze factor. The winning ballroom dancers are all sexy.”

“And you’re not?” she asked indignantly.

“Not for a mass media audience.”

“Nonsense! This will be good for you,” she decreed, “and good exposure for your show.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“You can practice your new steps with me. That’ll give you an edge. Extra rehearsal time.”

“Sorry. All my free time must be devoted to rehearsal eight to ten hours a day with La Tatyana. Given my night-owl working sched, I’ll have no time or energy for fiancées.”

“Tatyana?”

“You can talk Dancing With the Stars, but you obviously don’t watch the show closely enough.”

“Guilty,” Temple admitted. “I’m too busy to catch a weekly TV show, but I’ve seen clips.”

“Most of the pro dancers are Russian. I guess the baton has passed and the great Russian dancers of today have gone from ballet to samba.”

“So what’s Tat-yan-ah like?” Temple asked, deciding it was time to flex her possessiveness.

Matt winced. “A Gestapo officer in rehearsal and a Lolita on stage.”

“Heavily bipolar. Sounds more like a blue movie than a dance contest. I’ll have to come to the broadcast every night of the competition to act as bodyguard.”

“I’m more worried about missing a step than any domineering sexpot.”

“‘Domineering sexpot.’ Now there’s a role I could aspire to.”

“Don’t even try.” Matt tousled her luxuriant red-gold curls. “Sexy sprite is my speed.”

Temple laughed and snuggled into his arms, glad to have Matt in her life and a subdued version of her natural fiery red hair color back after having a blond bleach job foisted on her for an assignment.

Into this premarital merriment a large black shadow descended.

Midnight Louie lofted over the sofa back onto their semitwined laps, earning protests.

“Louie! You weigh a ton,” Temple said. “Off!”

Matt hefted the big cat with one hand under his belly and set him on a sofa arm. “He must be protesting being left out of the wedding plans.”

“Oh,” Temple cooed, “Louie was so cute as the ring bearer wearing that black bow tie collar with the ring box attached.”

“You could see he hated the bow tie as much as I would, but he did relish center stage, as usual.”

“You’ll have to do ring bearer act again for our wedding, Louie,” Temple threatened her feline roommate.

He showed his fangs but stifled a hiss of contempt and jumped down to the parquet floor.

“I sometimes think he’s trying to come between us,” Matt said with a frown Temple found adorable.

Matt must have driven women and girls crazy when he was in the priesthood, Temple thought, enjoying watching her beloved interact with her panther-personality alpha tomcat. He’d kill ’em on Dancing With the Celebs. He was classically good-looking in a blond, matinee-idol way. That he never used it made his charm even more devastating.

But looks were deceiving, as usual. Matt’s unhappy childhood, first with a beaten-down unwed mother and then with an abusive stepfather, had driven him to become the perfect “Father Matt” he’d never had. He liked the anonymity of radio. She was hoping the dance competition would bring out his extroverted side.

She wriggled her bare toes against his stomach, making him seize her feet to stop the teasing and eye her with unsanctioned intentions. He’d worked hard to overcome his sad early history and was more than ready to start making some promising fresh history with her, except for the occasional qualm about fornication without benefit of matrimony.

She was a lucky girl. Temple sighed again, this time with an odd combination of contentment and excitement. She sure hoped trouble would stay out of their way until they could do something official to end these prenuptial nerves.

Ring bearer.

Who do they think I am?

Frodo?

I am short and I do have hairy feet, but do I look like I eat seven meals a day?

Well, maybe a wee bit.

Anyway, it was bad enough I was shanghaied into my Miss Temple’s maternal aunt’s wedding party recently. After all, the event was over the top to begin with, just in having eight legendary Fontana brothers for groomsmen, not counting the eight good-looking bridesmaids they squired.

And, granted, I got a little local publicity for being Johnny-on-the-spot, but I got no credit for outsmarting the murderous individual who almost ruined the wedding beforehand by taking out the maid of honor, my very own Miss Temple Barr.

All this wedding talk and reminiscence is making me gloomy. My Miss Temple was “this far” from being the matron of honor. The way a maid gets to be a matron is by marrying someone, as she and Mr. Matt Devine are discussing so often these days.

I do so miss my previous rival for turf on the royal bedspread here at the Circle Ritz.

Mr. Max Kinsella was the perfect boyfriend for my Miss Temple.

He lived and slept somewhere secret off the premises.

He customarily arrived discreetly by the patio doors, which is my usual modus operandi.

Although he gave lip service to a future of marital bliss, he led two to three lives and his past career as a magician and undercover counterterrorist kept him on the run and single.

He was so studly he could satisfy with a riveting personal appearance and then stay gone for whole days at a time. There were no nightly assignations to muss the bedspread and my territorial imperatives.

He remained totally protective but at a discreet distance, leaving me to do the daily bodyguard work and also lie guard on said bedspread.

In other words, for a significant other, he did not significantly get in my way. He exemplified the highest ideals of the Alley Cat Code: friendly, fierce when necessary, and fancy-free.

Mr. Matt Devine, however, is a much more domestically inclined breed of cat. Having no secret missions of an international nature, he lays about the place, especially in my spots!

He discusses “their” possible move to his apartment right above us on the third floor, no doubt hoping to erase all bedroom memories of Mr. Max Kinsella. I am not as young as I used to be. A three-story climb is much more demanding than a two-story climb. Show a little consideration for the aging frame.

So move. Fine! I will continue to occupy Miss Temple’s rooms all on my lonesome then. I am happy to entertain guests of my ilk in complete privacy. I could use a bachelor pad as much as the next guy. Just because Mr. Matt Devine is from a churchy background and actually considers matrimony holy does not mean those of other denominations, such as myself—I am a devout follower of the Egyptian female cat deity, Bast—must live by his rules.

But this is an empty threat. I have come to appreciate a feminine touch about the place, and also frequent ear stroking. The thought of being edged out of my Miss Temple’s bed if not her affections is most distressing.

I fling myself through the flimsy patio doors that Mr. Max was always urging her to fortify, and scramble down the single old leaning palm tree that is my land bridge to the ground-floor parking lot.

The asphalt is hot on my pads as I skitter across it to the hedge of oleander bushes. They are poisonous eating to critter kind, which is why Ma Barker, my long-lost mama, and her feral gang shelter in here for the time being. No wise street dog will disturb them here. I could use a friendly ear.

Instead, one of my own ears is boxed as soon as I am in the safe shadows within.

“Disappointing boy!” my venerable dam spits in that very now-ringing ear. “This is what you call a safe haven? With gourmet food and distilled water? We have seen nothing but aluminum pie tins full of those awful dried green rabbit droppings.”

“I have been busy, Ma. I have not had time to train the human waitstaff on what to serve in which manner. They constantly involve me in the criminal community. And Free-to-Be-Feline is a prime New Age health food.”

“Food! It is already in a condition to be eliminated before one can touch fang to its odious smell and texture. When can we expect something juicy and tasty that does not run away on four legs?”

“Soon, Ma! The only crimes transpiring around the Circle Ritz these days are crimes of passion,” I add sourly. “As soon as I can interrupt these proceedings for a few minutes, I will get your needs tended to.”

“You had better, son. We might just have to rumble nights in protest if you do not push these people into line. Free-to-Be Feline! If we were really free to be feline, we would run this town.”

You would think I had led them into forty days and forty nights in the desert. Or was it years?

I slink away, caught between the conflicting needs of my kind and my kind of girl.

A Moses of my people I am not.

When Matt got back to his empty but beautifully redone apartment—no thanks to himself, who’d lived contentedly for years with rectory furniture donations—his answering machine winked its low-tech red eyelash at him. Message waiting.

Most of the few people he knew in Las Vegas reached him by cell phone. He sat down on his scarlet suede fifties couch, courtesy of Temple’s secondhand store expertise, to listen to it.

A good thing he did.

The call from homicide Lieutenant C. R. Molina was a shock. Her rich contralto voice was soft and low and secretive. The formidable policewoman wanted a clandestine rendezvous with him. Pronto.

He was an almost married man, he wanted to protest to the recorded message. Still, romance was the last thing anyone would suspect was on the no-nonsense officer’s mind.

And she didn’t want him to call her anywhere on any phone. She would meet him at her house at 7:15 P.M. Her house was in Our Lady of Guadalupe parish, near the iffy north Las Vegas neighborhoods. He would stay in the car. She’d come out.

Hey, she didn’t want even her thirteen-year-old daughter and the two shelter cats to spot him? What was he, a pariah? Or did she want to avoid “talk” now that he and Temple were engaged?

Oh, and erase her message from the answering machine.

Matt did, wondering like crazy what was up.

He looked up the address of the modest Mexican restaurant where she’d wanted to eat in the shiny new Vegas street guide he’d bought after coming to town eighteen months before. The place was in a north-of-downtown area even a Vegas newcomer like him knew was high crime.

So he wasn’t about to take his silver Crossfire tonight. Expensive new automotive eye candy was susceptible to theft in that neighborhood. The Hesketh Vampire motorcycle in Electra’s back shed was built for fast getaways, but, again, was a vintage collectible with “steal me” written all over it.

Matt had a feeling that the Vampire would have been appropriate for this sudden outing. It had originally belonged to Max Kinsella, as Temple had. Not that she’d ever belong to anyone, including him. Still, she and Max had been serious lovers, with marriage in the wings, even though Max had been absent for almost a year when Matt had first hit the Circle Ritz and met Temple.

Matt, fresh out of the priesthood, had instantly fallen in love with Temple. Like many petite women, she made up for size with energy, spirit, and an Imelda Marcos– size high heel collection. Temple was smart, savvy, funny, and kind. As a freelance public relations person, she had to get along with all types of people to keep major events with casts of thousands running smoothly.

Sometimes that included fending off bad publicity; sometimes that had come to include solving crimes, even murder, if they threatened the event. Temple always put her heart and soul and exotic soles into her work.

Matt was smiling. He always did when he thought of Temple, even when he saw her at a distance, being Temple as only she could. His first flush of infatuation had nearly burned a hole in his soul and newly liberated libido, but he’d had to take cold showers and wait. Max came back.

Max Kinsella.

Molina despised this man without ever having met him. She’d pegged him as a murderer who had gotten away unscathed, thanks to a dead man at the Goliath Hotel and Casino. Temple loved Max with a fortitude Matt had thought would never flag. She knew he was innocent. After all, she’d finally learned he’d been an undercover counterterrorist since his teens as well as the world-class magician she’d met in her native Minneapolis and followed to Vegas.

Max was a good guy, but Molina didn’t know that and wouldn’t believe it, even when Matt told her so. And Max would never deign to defend himself from her false impression. It was Pride and Prejudice all over again.

Now Max was gone. Again. Disappeared without warning. Again. For good?

Matt felt guilty about hoping so in his secret soul. He also knew that Temple would be better off knowing how, and why, the ex-magician had vanished, and if Max was alive or dead.

Matt picked up his cell phone and speed-dialed the pent house number of their landlady, Electra Lark.

“Hi, Electra, are you recovering okay from being a murder suspect? Who knew attending the big Red Hat Sisterhood convention in town would entangle you with ex-husbands and murdered bodies? All okay now? Good. Say, can I borrow my old Probe back tonight? No, I don’t want to be anonymous. I just don’t want my Crossfire ripped off. Yeah, it’s a pain owning a sexy car. Had I but known, I’d have bought a Prius, which is now an even hotter car. Can’t win. I’ll be right up for the keys.”

“Tall, blonde?”

He nodded anxiously. His name was James McKlosky for the moment, according to the stolen credit card in his back jeans’ pocket.

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.

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.”

Seeing Morris Alch’s iron-gray head bent over a laptop computer on a kiddie-size desk while his hands two-fingered their way across the keyboard was an oddly reassuring sight.

He looked up as Molina entered the bedroom, his face craggy in the unflattering light of a small desk lamp.

“Nothing in the room, though your daughter has the drugstore makeup concession knocked.”

“I only allow her some lip gloss.”

“Yeah, well, that’s not hip with the tween set these days. Who knows where those allowances are going, huh? Anything missing from the room besides Mariah?”

“Who could tell in this mess? There’s her school backpack, but she wouldn’t take that. Cell phone! It’d be on the bed table . . . no. Otherwise, on the desk.”

“Pretty soon folks will have their cell phones implanted. Nope. Not here. Her absence is voluntary, then. You know how to navigate this Web world? Good thing we all have to use computers on the job these days. Keeps our kids from shutting us out as much as they’d like.”

“What’ve you found?”

“Sometimes it’s a good thing the Internet is as intrusive as it is. Kids think they know it all but they’re no match for Internet crooks and don’t know beans about how to erase an Ethernet trail. I’m in the history segment on recent URLs, and your daughter has visited some veeery interesssting sites.”

She stared at him.

“Sorry. I’m old enough to have seen that Laugh-In catchphrase on TV as a kid. I think if Mariah’s gone, it’s on her own recognizance, Carmen. That’s good. Not great, but good.”

“What do you mean?” She dropped on her knees beside his chair, eyeballing the computer screen.

“Britney. Miley. She’s bookmarked every pop tart teen singer site there is. And American Idol, and the site for the Teen Queen reality TV show she competed on. They have mini-movies you can play. Shows her along with all the other contestants. The finals. Her singing that Broadway song. She’s good. Better than the winner. She’s a mini-star on this thing.”

Molina grabbed the keyboard. “I monitor this devil’s workshop. I have the V-chip, for God’s sake.”

“You’ve been sick, remember?” Morrie said. “Give yourself a break. The sites she went to are just pop culture, entertainment news. The kid’s a wanna-be, a groupie. She’s probably skipped out to attend some idol’s concert.”

Molina frowned at the screen. “It’s his fault.”

“Whose?

“My ex’s. Rafi Nadir. He encouraged me in a singing career, but I was an adult. She’s just a kid.”

“Wait. You had a singing career?”

She shook her head. Her usually subdued hair whipped her cheeks. Annoying.

“Amateur night only. I, ah, still sit in at a local club from time to time. Nobody knows my day job. It’s a hobby. And it wasn’t meant to be a role model thing for my ditsy teen daughter.”

Morrie frowned at her. At her hoop earrings and dark forties lipstick, borrowed from her torch singer persona, Carmen. “Is that what the way you look tonight is about?

She echoed his words, “the way you look tonight” in a velvet croon. “Yeah. I moonlight as a chanteuse, but not looking exactly like this. This is a disguise I used to meet with a . . . source.”

“A snitch?”

Calling Matt Devine a snitch was hilarious.

“No, Morrie, something more, uh, personal. My life is way more complicated than you think.”

“I always thought you were complicated.”

“That bad?”

“Bad in a good way. So you think this Nadir guy was going behind your back, encouraging Mariah in her American Idol fantasy?”

“He was ‘coincidentally’ on site at the Teen Queen reality TV show. Yeah, he ran into her. Call it karma. He saw me there with Dirty Larry. That would warn off any guy.”

Morrie made a face. “I saw you there with Dirty Larry too. What’s that all about?”

“Can’t a woman have a social life?”

“Dirty Larry isn’t a social life; he’s a lowlife. You don’t need someone like him.”

“Maybe not. Maybe he’s a suspect too.”

Morrie looked at her hard.

“He initiated the contact,” she said, “and I needed someone to do some undercover, off-the-meter work for me.”

“Chasing poor Miss Temple Barr’s magician boyfriend?”

“Kinsella was a prime suspect for the Goliath Hotel murder a couple of years ago.”

“Not for the department.”

She shrugged. “Larry’s canvassing the neighbors, so he might be back any minute.”

“Right.” Morrie turned back to the screen. “Mariah’s got herself posted online too.”

“MySpace?”

“Naw, nothing notable. Just this one site you and I never heard of, teenqueendreamscream.com.”

It came up, featuring primped and posed young girls, made up like movie stars.

“That’s Mariah?”

Molina stared at the image of a baby-faced young girl in glitter eye shadow and lip gloss.

“The kids post their photos and bios themselves. The site owner is a local DJ. Visitors vote on who’s most likely to make it big time.”

“Oh, my God. You see what that bastard Nadir encouraged my kid to do.”

“His kid too.”

“My kid all along. He was there at the Teen Queen show as security. He didn’t know who the hell she was, but he seduced her anyway with the idea of using her voice, like a talent was something the world would welcome. It doesn’t. And the path there is ugly. You know that, Morrie.”

“I don’t think whatever way they connected at the Teen Queen house was enough to send Mariah over the fence. I really don’t. Carmen, you don’t need villains here. You need to understand that Mariah sees a world where kids her age can live a dream. She has a dream. And talent.”

“I know that, Morrie. I fear that. I just hope her dream isn’t a nightmare.’

Morrie looked around to see if Dirty Larry had come back yet.

“One more thing, Carmen. Here’s the most popular outtake on that Teen Queen Reality TV show site. Six hundred and sixty thousand-some visitors. It’s not your daughter who’s the pop tart hit of the site. It’s this little number.”

He’d brought up a small podcast screen and hit the play button.

An animated figure with punk blond hair and a wild outfit was dancing and rapping in the TV show’s final competition. She hadn’t even placed in the finals, but Molina could place that particular piece of tiny trouble in a Las Vegas minute.

It was Zoe Chloe Ozone, the phony teen persona Temple Barr had created when a certain homicide lieutenant had pressured her to go undercover to protect her contestant daughter, Mariah, from a possible stalker.

The thirty-year-old PR woman, current Matt Devine fiancée, and ex–Max Kinsella squeeze was an Internet pop tart sensation and didn’t even know it.

Thanks to modern conveniences, a ringing cell phone had interrupted opera audiences, churchgoers, classrooms, and bedroom intimacies.

“Damn, I should have turned that thing off,” Temple complained. At least she had never programmed some dopey ringtone, like the “William Tell Overture,” theme song of the Lone Ranger.

“It’s the turnoff,” Matt pointed out as he watched his half-dressed fiancée scramble barefoot across her wooden parquet bedroom floor to the dresser. Coming home to Temple after being in the noisy restaurant with Molina was a nice contrast. He’d promised to keep Molina’s problem quiet, even though the restored condition of Max’s house was troubling.

Still, Matt could lie back virtuously, knowing he’d thought to turn off his cell phone. Of course, almost nobody called him. Temple’s PR job required her being eternally reachable, like a doctor, in case things went wrong. Matt checked his watch: 10:30 P.M. He had to leave for work in an hour, tops.

“Yes?” Temple was saying, looking puzzled. “Gone? Surely you can’t think Crawford—Doing? Uh—” She rolled her eyes at Matt. “Nothing. Now. Yeah. Right away. I hope it turns out to be a false alarm.”

She snapped the tiny slave driver shut. “Molina’s kid is missing.”

Matt sat up, collecting clothes. “Mariah? No! How long?”

“This evening sometime. Wasn’t at the other kid’s house where she was supposed to be.”

“What have you got to do with this? You and Molina get along like cobra and mongoose.”

“Molina wants to talk to Crawford Buchanan ASAP and needs someone who can find the vermin.”

“Awful Crawford, the DJ-publicist guy?”

“Yeah, your so-not-serious competition for Las Vegas listeners.” Temple was pulling on her knit jogging outfit. “I need to check his show times, and maybe check in with his much-abused insignificant other. Molina said something about the Internet and Mariah and the Crawf’s juvenile delinquent stepdaughter, Quincey, being online together. She didn’t make a lot of sense for Molina, so I’m guessing the kid is in trouble. I sorta bonded with Mariah at the Teen Queen reality TV house. I’d hop to it for Mariah before I’d toss her mother a stale fortune cookie.”

“I know that, next to Molina, he’s one of your least favorite people, so what does Crawford Buchanan have to do with Mariah?”

“He was pretending to cover that Teen Queen reality TV show she was competing on.”

“Molina roped you into going undercover on that to protect Mariah and you did a great job. Why does she need you so urgently now? That show is old news.”

“Maybe not,” Temple said. “She said Zoe Chloe Ozone had damn well get her ass in gear and over to her place. You know where it is, Oh Swami of the Desert Nighttime Airwaves? I’ve never seen her house and she didn’t give me a clue.”

“Yeah. It’s near Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. You’ve been at the church, at least. To mass. With me.” He flashed her a remembering grin. “Whoever thought then we’d be thinking of getting married someday?” Actually, he had. “May I add OLG to the possible site list?”

Temple paused in jamming her bare feet into a pair of low platform slides. He could tell she really wanted to stay and finish what they’d started.

“Yeah. Good idea. I guess we should thank Molina for that one.” She took a breath. “I know how I’d feel if Louie was missing, so I imagine a kid must be triple that. “

“At least. There are so many predators nowadays.”

“Why the Crawf?” she fussed. “Oh, well, mine not to question why. Mine to round up the miserable skunk and bring him to—” She snatched the address Matt had just written on a note pad on one bedside table. “Chez Molina, of all places.”

“Molina’s opening her home to creeps like Buchanan now? I hope it’s not serious,” he said, sounding exactly that.

“Molina’s not usually the panicky type.”

“Molina hasn’t been too usual lately,” Matt noted.

“Aha! You get that feeling too? I can see I’ll have to interrogate you further after we do our respective jobs tonight. Wanna bet I’ll be ringing your doorbell upstairs around 3:00 A.M. demanding answers?”

“I’ll be breathlessly awaiting any and all of your demands,” Matt promised with a warm glance.

“Darn right,” she said. “Lock my door when you leave.”

You do not call a roommate of Midnight Louie out in the dark of night without a bodyguard of the feline persuasion walking right in her high-heeled footsteps.

Dirty Larry may take pride in invisibly fitting in with the lowlifes he spies upon, but I can slip invisibly into the dark backseat floors of almost any automotive model made in America and Europe and Asia these days.

Still, I am glad not to be on the move for now.

I am familiar with the environs of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church and School. There is a nearby convent occupied by several elderly nuns and a pair of stray cats named Peter and Paul. They were involved in a very early case of ours, my Miss Temple and me.

I was even present when I saw the striped Molina house cats adopted at the church animal blessing ceremony. That rite must have worked because I have been a blessing to crime-solving ever since.

So I have insinuated myself into the assembly, first outside Miss Mariah Molina’s bedroom window, under which I scent enough smells to confuse a bloodhound. Secondly, I slink through the front door when Detective Alch had returned from getting something from his parked car. Nobody much bothers to look from faces to footwear, especially when all and sundry are under stress, so I am usually able to toe-dance inside unnoticed alongside trouser legs and Mr. Morrie is an aficionado of dark suits despite the climate. It helps that there are already cats in the house.

You would think a big, handsome guy like myself would not be so easy to overlook, but everyone’s emotions are ratcheted tighter than a tourniquet and we poor domestic slaves are too low on the literal household totem pole to be much noticed at such times.

That is how I am able to pin the tiger-stripe females, Tabitha and Catarina, behind the sofa and wring them out like furry sponges of all the info they have.

It is a good thing I can speak to the animal kingdom. Homo sapiens habitually knows not much to speak of in these cases involving their headstrong young.

With a few well-chosen chirps, hisses, and paw signs, the tiger girls fill me in. This, of course, takes sharp questions on my part to prod a picture of recent events out of them, but I will not bore you with every little chit and chat and physical pantomime.

Here is their story, and I find it as fascinating as Mr. Scott finds a misbehaving Enterprise warp drive:

Mama Molina has been laid out with a midnight scrap injury, but this is being kept secret for some reason. Mr. Morrie Alch, one of the visiting toms, has been tending her. The sole surviving kit, Miss Mariah Molina, has been acting strange lately. She has ignored her delightful feline companions to hole up in her hideaway and smear strange-smelling potions on her face. She is also hypnotized by the one-eyed monster screen in her bedroom and spends most of her time in front of the litter-making shiny silver wall on her bedroom closet door . . .

It takes me a while to realize the tiger girls have never heard the word mirror and do not understand that their double reflection in same is not a glimpse of lost littermates living in the walls.

These domestic slaves are kept frightfully ignorant of things the lowliest alley cat has figured out by the age of three months. You learn fast to avoid being startled by your own reflection and save the panic and paranoia for encountering a real threat.

The resident Miss has also been cuddling up to her smooth shiny tiny kitten that she coos to and tickles endlessly on the tummy, instead of doing same to her loyal and loving resident felines.

Okay. The tiger girls have never tumbled to the names of such modern inventions and curses as the iPod and cell phone. I enlighten them.

Further, they say, there have been strange comings and goings in the house for several weeks when the occupants are away. They wonder if the lady of the house has hired a cleaning service and know to stay curled up, noses in tails, when these individuals come in.

I do not like this one tiny bit, but what can I do when the resident cats are so naïve and keep their eyes and ears to themselves? There is something to be said for the School of Hard Knocks, of which I am a magna cum laude graduate.

Osama bin Laden could hide out at Chez Molina and go unheralded and unmolested if it were up to these striped feline couch spuds.

Little Star

“Lieutenant,” Buchanan whined, “I’m just a local media personality. Ask anyone around town. I’m a pussycat.”

Molina studied the man sitting in Mariah’s desk chair. He resembled a pretentiously hip wolverine. He was just this side of greasy, one of those small, dandyish men blessed with huge egos and an old-time radio actor’s deep voice.

“Aren’t pussycats predators?” she asked.

“Me?” For an instant he became a mouse. “No, sir! I mean, ma’am. I’m an impresario. I give these kids a chance to sing on my radio show. Do a two-minute routine: ‘Vegas Voices of Tomorrow.’ It’s going to lure American Idol out here next season. Paula, Simon, Kara, the black guy. Our local talent will be presold.”

“You have more than a radio show. You have a Web site.” Molina hadn’t sat. She liked to loom. She bent to activate the mouse roller ball. Mariah’s computer flat-screen flashed open on Buchanan’s Teen Queen Dream ’n’ Scream site. “Looks a lot like you’re selling teen girl pinup photos.”

Molina was clicking through photo after photo of kids who’d gotten themselves up to look like Miley Cyrus or Britney Spears before she became Britney Bombed-out. She paused the cursor on one eager young chipmunk face highlighted with glitter makeup.

“This one is my daughter. My way, way underage daughter. How’d she get her photo on your site?”

“Uploaded it. And . . . and lied about her age.” He swallowed hard.

“You’re saying my daughter is a liar?”

“I’m saying she knows how to spin a résumé. They all do it, add a few years. If you wait until you’re eighteen on a singing or acting career nowadays, you’re Methuselah.”

“Why are you running this site?” Molina asked.

“That’s the site motto. See? Teen Queen Candy-dates. Tomorrow’s Stars Today. “

“You do this for free?”

“No, the site costs something. The girls pay a small fee to be featured.”

“How small?”

“Uh, just one-fifty.”

“One hundred and fifty dollars? Where’d these kids get that kind of money?”

“Usually their parents. Every mom’s a stage mother these days.”

“Not this mother.”

That shut him up for a few precious seconds.

“I’m a DJ,” he said. “I also cover Las Vegas attractions, pop culture. I can’t help running across new talent. There are reputable agents in L. A., Phoenix, Seattle, Denver, the whole Left Coast, who check with me on fresh talent here in Vegas. In the old days, a young talent had nowhere to go but nowhere.”

Molina straightened. Her back ached, as well as her side. Nowadays, at her age, it numbed her rear to perch on a stool at the Blue Dahlia to sing the oldies. She was a never-was who fiddled around sometimes. The creep had a point about ultra-early starts. That didn’t mean wanna-be performers weren’t targeted by predators.

“The Web is cheap, accessible,” Crawford was saying. “These auditions are legitimate. All the major media want fresh talent. Network talent shows, cable TV, the networks, movies. An ordinary person could be king, or queen. The wanna-bes may have more of a chance than ever before but they still need a platform and a facilitator. That’s what I do.”

“You’re the next Dick Clark.”

Crawford Buchanan ran a neat manicured hand through the froth of silver curls at his nape. Even wolverines preened. She supposed someone found them cuddly and cute.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m a matchmaker between the average kid with superior talent and the big, bad world out there.”

“Then where is my kid?”

His narrow shoulders sagged as he realized that one of his online protégés who was following her star was a police person’s missing daughter. “She’s a good little trouper with a nice big voice, if I remember rightly.”

“You’d better remember damn rightly, Buchanan, because you are going to be my guide into the girls-gone-glitzy world. Where would she have gone to further her so-called career?”

He grimaced. “L. A., maybe? There’s an all-talent, mega-audition next weekend. Singing, dance, acting, the whole ball of media stardom. Winners of other regional auditions can pile up points competing with another area’s pool of wanna-bes.”

“Next weekend? What’s she going to live on? Who’s she going to depend on?”

“They’re, uh, real go-getters, these kids. Great at improv. Hang out with each other, get tips.”

“So do street kids. Do you have any idea how many parents would like a piece of your smarmy, sorry ass? That’s not including the jail-house rodeo riders you’ll be meeting in stir.”

His face went as white as the silly froth of curls at his nape. “Oh, Lieutenant, sir, I will do anything I can to cooperate. I have, uh, local references.”

“Like, uh, what? Who?’

“Uh. Temple Barr, right here in your house.” He nodded to the hall. “Yeah. Lead PR lady around town. She can vouch for me. Knows I’ve been getting sweet personal appearances for my stepdaughter—well, it’s not official with her mother, but kinda stepdaughter—Quincey. She played Priscilla at the Elvis tribute impersonator event at the Kingdome not too long ago. Quincey is a boxing ring girl at Caesar’s and getting some real good leads out of that.”

“And the original Priscilla was not a rock star’s underage child plaything?”

“No, sir. No, ma’am! It was olden days, but the King did it right. Besides, he was from a rural culture, like Jerry Lee Lewis, and they married young girls young then. Not your daughter, of course! She is purely a commercial property at this stage. I mean, too valuable to mess with. These girls get on Excess Hollywood, for God’s sake. Quincey would give her scheduled boob job for a chance like Mariah’s getting. Ouch! What the hell was that for?”

Molina had slapped the back of his head in farewell, NCIS TV show style, which she hated but which seemed the only appropriate reaction to a cad who would pimp out his teen “sorta” stepdaughter as a boxing ring girl.

She plucked him up by the scruff of his sport coat collar and steered him out of Mariah’s room, pleased she hadn’t plastered him against one wall and cut off the air to his sleazy wolverine windpipe. But no doubt she was being unfair to wolverines.

Molina walked Buchanan into the hall, slammed him against the wall, and told him to “Stay.”

In the living room, Morrie Alch was waiting with Temple Barr, who’d been disappointed not to sit in on the interrogation. Did that woman have any boundaries? Probably not, which was why she was just the girl for this undercover job.

Molina spoke first. “I’m getting the germ of an idea to go undercover and track Mariah down, but nobody is going to like it, including me.

“Alch, I want your mouth shut on everything for now. Tell command I’ve had a relapse. Pneumonia, but I refuse to go to a hospital. The Iron Maiden strikes again. Infectious. Home nursing care.”

“Can’t I help besides a cover story?”

“You’ve done enough. Keep it shut and I’ll be forever grateful, if maybe not useful to your career.”

“Barr.” She eyed Temple as sternly as an underling, and sighed. “You’ll be doing your Zoe Floozy Ozone routine. Get your gear and act together. I’ll be at your Circle Ritz place in about four hours and I won’t be in a good mood. We may have to drive all over that audition map on the weasel’s Web site, L.A., Albuquerque, Flagstaff, so take a week’s worth of stuff along, including your cell phone, laptop, and Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, black wig. And the usual chutzpah.”

“That’s it? That’s all I know?”

“You’ll be briefed plenty en route.”

“What about him?” Alch nodded down the hall to the self-absorbed Buchanan, who was repeatedly roughening his gelled hair so it stood up in porcupine spikes. He looked like a spiny sea urchin rather than a cool dude.

“Let him go,” she told Alch, “with the notion that he’s under twenty-four-hour observation and needs to be available on an instant’s notice, which he will be and does.”

“All right, but Lieutenant.” Alch eyed Temple uneasily. “What about . . . DL?”

For a moment Molina managed to look utterly blank. As if Temple Barr wouldn’t guess Alch was referring to Dirty Larry. Then she got decisive.

“For now, tell DL I’m on compassionate leave and I’ll be in touch.”

“But, Carmen!”

She stared him down.

“Right, boss. And someone’s been holding on the landline for you. Wouldn’t hang up.

“I don’t need ‘someone’ distracting me right now.”

Alch shrugged. “You never know. He sounded pretty intense. Might have seen Mariah.”

Molina sighed theatrically, winced at what such a deep breath did to her pain threshold, and stomped into the kitchen, Alch trailing her.

She paused to turn that basilisk gaze on Temple.

“Better get going fast. I’ll come by the Circle Ritz sooner than you’d like. You don’t want to forget a false fingernail that Ms. Ozone requires, so you can mentally pack on the drive home. And tell them at the Ritz, including your light of love, Matt Devine, you’re visiting relatives for a few days. We’re going on the road.”

Carmen Molina was definitely starting to believe in karma.

The “intense” voice Alch had heard on the kitchen phone was indeed known to her.

“What’s this about Mariah?” it asked.

Rafi’s voice was loud and clear so it would carry over the clink, clang, and conversation of a hotel casino.

“How’d you hear about it at the Oasis?” Molina asked.

“Private cops monitor police radio bands. I heard ‘kid.’ Alch radioing he was on the way. I heard ‘missing.’ And I got a chill up my spine.”

There was no point in dodging this very unpleasant bullet.

“Your spine is right. Mariah’s gone off on some stupid kid quest for ‘stardom.’ All her own idea from the evidence, but we don’t want her preyed upon.”

“Preyed upon? She’s already missing! Jesus, Carmen, how’d you screw up this badly? I thought at least you were a good mother, that you of all people would know the score when it came to responsibly supervising a teenager.”

That “at least” stung more than she should have let it, but she was still hurting from the long slash wound, not to mention her own internal accusing voice.

“What do you mean, a quest for stardom?” he went on.

“You’d better come to my house. It’s easier to see than talk about.

We’ve got an informal task force assembled. It’s a fine line right now between putting out a wide-enough net for her, and one not so huge it’ll spook her to run farther, faster.”

“Where is your house?”

“What? You didn’t check that out the moment you realized I lived and worked in Vegas?”

“I’m not a stalker, just a damn surprised father despite myself.”

She didn’t comment, only gave him the street address and directions from his apartment as efficiently as some receptionist.

She shut her eyes momentarily after hanging up the phone.

Morrie Alch was leaning on her breakfast bar, watching her like a loyal Scottish terrier. “That Daddy Dearest?”

“Yup. Private cop at the Oasis. Heard some buzz on the police radio and thought of us.”

“He’s coming here? That’ll be interesting.”

“Yeah. Let me put a final scare into this Buchanan creep and get his every contact method before I kick him out.”

He eyed Dirty Larry slouched on the living-room sofa. “Mr. Undercover Guy fetched a snitch list from his car and is now calling informants who hang out at the bus station. Good idea.”

“His idea. He didn’t get any info from the neighbors?” she asked.

“Nada. He know about Nadir?”

She shook her head.

“You want me to clue him in?”

“Thanks, but it’s my responsibility.”

“You must be beat by now,” Alch said.

“Beat up, more like it. By myself. How could I have missed that Mariah was being way too sweet and helpful to her down-for-the-count mama, all the while scheming to make her break for fame and fortune? I should never have let her compete in that goofy reality TV show. Still, she’d showed some initiative in picking a goal and going for it. I thought that would be the end of it. Where do they get these ideas?”

“It’s in the air nowadays. Next thing my married daughter will be racing off to that runway supermodel hunt show, although she doesn’t make the age, height, and weight requirement.”

Molina managed a weak smile. “I can handle Rafi. He’s actually showing paternal inclinations. More than I’d like, especially now.”

“You gave him a raw deal.” Alch’s dark, dog-loyal eyes had gone paternally stern. “Not telling the guy, just running off. Kinda like Mariah here.”

“Shut up, Morrie. I’ m not in the mood.”

“I’m just saying, Lieutenant.” He ambled off to give her room and time to stew in her own juices.

She hustled Buchanan to the door, where she pumped all his phone numbers into her cell before shoving him out, while Larry ambled down the hall for another check of Mariah’s room.

He returned to join Alch sitting on the couch. The place looked cramped with three adults around, and empty beyond belief with Mariah not about to race down the hall screaming for a missing hair scrunchie or a fresh uniform blouse.

Carmen found her deadliest enemy, emotion on the job, almost strangling her.

She was a cop. A homicide lieutenant, for God’s sake! She had to tackle this like any other case or she’d be no good to anyone, most of all Mariah.

She checked her watch: 11:30 P.M. Three hours since she’d discovered Mariah was gone, three hours until Matt Devine was off work and probably on the phone with his fiancée. She’d bet Temple Barr would tell him what she was doing.

Great! Another person to add to the jury of her peers so ready to condemn her.

She checked her watch again. Under the pain of stitches pulled by her tensed stomach muscles and severe stomach acid, she was dreading Rafi coming here, into her life with both feet and a right to be angry.

The knock on her front door made her start. One knock. The minimum.

“I’ll get it.” Alch was nearest the door and opened it while Rafi still had his back turned to the house, checking out the neighborhood, the parked cars.

He spun around like a wary prizefighter to take in Alch, Larry Podesta, even the two cats weaving around all the alien legs, sniffing. With his swarthy Lebanese-American looks and wearing the plain dark suit of a hotel security supervisor he looked like a sinister FBI man. He spotted her last.

“Carmen.” Said with a curt nod. Everyone’s eyes snapped to him. Most had never heard anyone call her Carmen.

Now came the ugliest moment. All hers. She turned to the two men in the room.

“This is Mariah’s father, Rafi Nadir. He works security at the Oasis Hotel. Alch, take him to Mariah’s room and cover the bases.”

Dirty Larry had stood, a junkyard dog uneasy about the unexpected stray on his watch.

Rafi sensed the possessiveness immediately. “I know him”—he nodded at Alch—“from the reality TV house.” Then he eyed Dirty Larry. “And this is?”

Molina would not have believed she’d ever see two guys getting territorial over her, or, rather, over her house and daughter. She segued into the needed introductions.

“Dirty Larry’s usually undercover. That’s the name he goes by.”

“Wait. You were at the reality TV show finals too,” Nadir said. “With Molina” was left unspoken.

Larry nodded. “I saw you there too. You weren’t a guest or family member. What for?”

“Freelance security.”

“You been a cop?”

“Yeah. L.A.”

Larry’s head snapped back, impressed. L.A. cops took no guff, though they had a rep for cutting too many corners.

“Cool,” he said. “No wonder Mariah’s got gumption, however misplaced. Cop kid, one hundred percent.” He turned cool gray eyes on Molina and squinted like Clint Eastwood.

Alch and Nadir headed for the bedroom, leaving the two of them alone with the cats.

“You kept this guy tightly under wraps, Carmen,” Larry said softly.

“I keep everyone tightly under wraps.”

“Including yourself.” He grinned. “Don’t worry. You got a good team going here. We’ll find Mariah. And then you get to decide how long you want to ground her.”

“I’d just be happy to have a kid to keep home, Larry.”

“I see runaways all the time when I’m undercover. They’re nothing like Mariah. She’s a runaway to, not from. Her goal may sound dopey to adults but it all makes sense to her. I bet it’s sinking in now, what’s she’s done. How silly and scary it is. She may even come running back home, or call home.

“I don’t think so.” Molina shook her head. “She’s as stubborn as her mother, and that’s a very big, bad overdose.”

“You won’t be comforted, will you?”

“Not until we have her back.”

Dirty Larry produced a crumpled pack of cigarettes and lifted his eyebrows. She nodded. The others were in Mariah’s bedroom.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” she commented.

“Only undercover. It hides any nervousness.”

“You’re nervous here and now?”

“Yeah. This isn’t my scene. Usually the pressure is only on me, all on me. Here, I can’t do much but ask questions and wait.”

“Me too,” Molina snapped impatiently.

Footsteps, two sets, sped down the hallway, sounding like elephants in her small house.

Rafi first, looking sick, Alch second, looking sicker.

Rafi held out something glittery and stiff. It reminded Molina of the reality TV show that sought supermodels, Runway, which Alch had just joked about to ease her tension.

“I found this under all the clutter, on the floor near the computer table and the window,” Rafi said, hoarse and angry. “Didn’t the ‘unofficial task force’ do a halfway decent search, for Christ’s sake?”

She beat Larry to a closer inspection of the stiff, fourteen-inch-long item Rafi clutched like a weapon. She noticed he wore a pair of Alch’s latex gloves. Damn, she couldn’t fault him on anything.

What he held was . . . a Barbie doll, all done up in an evening dress and . . . all undone, the long plastic hair snarled, red nail polish slashed across the plastic mouth and eyes and throat, an arm and leg dislocated.

“The Barbie Doll Stalker,” Larry said like a curse under his breath. “That girl who auditioned for the reality TV show at the local mall, killed and left in the parking lot. You’ve never solved that case.”

“We never found the creep,” Molina said in a dead calm voice. “The case is still open. We thought the mutilated dolls looked like a sick, unrelated joke. When did this get here, goddammit! Yes, we searched the room as soon as we knew Mariah was missing, Morrie and I. We wouldn’t have missed this.”

The silence on Rafi’s part implied they obviously had.

“No,” Alch said, “it’s worse than the notion we missed something.”

He eyed her hard, unblinking, so she’d take every word seriously.

“I went over everything near the window, first thing, Lieutenant. That doll wasn’t there a few hours ago, but it sure is now. Somebody’s shadowing our moves. Unless there’s an accomplice, at least it means that Mariah isn’t being stalked yet.”

“Naw.” Larry was talking now. “It means that somebody knows the kid’s gone, and is daring us to follow and find her. The creep is probably as much in the dark as we are. I don’t get why he’d want to tip us off with a voodoo doll.”

Molina took such a deep breath that her hand went to her side as if to hold her stitches shut. To everyone but Alch, it just looked like a frustrated gesture.

“I know why,” she said. “I’ve had a stalker. There’ve been other tokens left in this house while we were gone, and the last invasion centered on Mariah’s room. I thought it all looked intended to shake me up, but maybe it was directed at Mariah more than I realized.”

She eyed the three men in the living room.

“Anybody here want to ’fess up?” She was only one-quarter kidding.

“You suspected me of such a stupid, pathetic M.O.?” Rafi asked.

She said nothing.

Larry pulled out another cigarette and rolled it through his fingers. Nervous? But saying nothing.

“You’re still the prime target,” Alch said decisively. “Mariah being gone and now threatened is just another way to get at you.”

Sometimes choosing the right ride is the most crucial decision the private operative will make.

When there is a sudden abandonment of Chez Molina this evening by two parties driving two vehicles, I am confronted by a basic choice: staying at the scene with an unsupervised Rafi Nadir and Dirty Larry, who bear watching, in my humble opinion, or heading out with one of the dear departing; my lovely roomie or the unlovely jerk we both know and loathe.

I have always been a backseat driver and my personal “four on the floor” have massaged dark, discreet interior carpeting from economy cars to limousines. Miss Temple would seem the logical one to stick with, but she will drive alone and this time I will not be entertained by her spiritedly hostile cell phone banter with the Crawfish.

I toy with the notion of riding with Awful Crawford himself. That orange Hummer tickles my fancy, reminding me of my Halloween birthday. I would enjoy being a surprise passenger in an automotive pumpkin. Has a nursery rhyme and reason to it, like blackbirds baked in a pie.

Besides, just who Crawford will whine to on his cell phone after his interrogation might be very informative.

I do not have long to weigh options as I lurk in the scant exterior shrubbery this clime provides.

A Miata has no backseat at all. Luckily, my Miss Temple, being short, obligingly keeps both seats set forward; the empty passenger seat holds her essential tote bag at the ready. This leaves a dude a smidge of wiggle room to hide behind either seat without being noticed. She is on the cell phone anyway; probably trying to rouse . . . I mean, roust Mr. Matt.

So I decide to indulge my craving for a novel experience and honor Mr. Crawford Buchanan with my guardian angelship for a time. Not that I would lift a split shiv to save him from even a case of dandruff. I hunker under his wheels.

As I suspected, he is on the cell too. Apparently he is alerting his radio station.

“I have an interview with a homicide lieutenant,” he boasts, turning an interrogation into a journalistic coup in his own beady little eyes. “Might have a whole new angle on the teen pop tart phenom. Lots of human interest. I am on the trail of the story now. Might be a spectacular linkup to my surprise new gig at the Oasis.”

I notice that he does not mention the possibility of needing bail money.

That would be a happy ending, I decide.

Interestingly, the Crawf did put out an All Points Bulletin of his own about the Molina kid to contacts in the teen talent industry at points west, all the way to L.A.

Meanwhile, my Miss Temple has paused to put the Miata’s top down for a breezy drive home. So I shelter under the low car. Once the top is down and she’s busy starting it up, I loft over the low side into the very mini “rumble seat” behind the front seats. Oofda! Squeezes the interior organs like a Swedish masseuse.

What a convoy of two we make. The smooth, small, sassy red Barr Miata, and, bringing up the rear, the hulking, boxy, orange Buchanan Hummer H3 with its shiny chrome grin of a front grille that so sums up the Crawf’s sleazy personality.

Miss Temple is in such a grim hurry that I almost lose a tail tip shadowing her into our car. I could just dispense with the secret agent routine, but she seems to have enough on her mind that I do not care to add to it.

Also, once we are a decent distance from Molina’s place, she exceeds the legal limit as if we were a squad car in pursuit. Maybe we are. Buchanan’s vehicle is soon a gaudy memory in the rearview mirror. We squeal into the Circle Ritz parking lot on a sharp turn, the headlights flashing across the gleaming eyes of a whole startled row of Ma Barker’s gang in the bordering bushes.

She runs into the building so fast the big outside door slams shut before I can get through, an unheard of occurrence. No problem. I can take the palm tree trunk up to the secondary bathroom window she keeps open for me.

I know then that something big is up and resolve to be something little but essential in helping her out.

Temple dashed out of the Circle Ritz into the parking lot, hoping not to be spotted by any residents. Leaving in the wee morning hours when it was still dark felt like eloping.

She also felt like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sarah Michelle Gellar, in a scene from a summer teen slasher movie. She couldn’t believe the sinister, big black SUV, a Tahoe, throbbing in idle near the back door security light was waiting for her. Nor could she believe who sat in the driver’s seat.

Rafi Nadir.

What a wild scenario. She felt like the rebellious little Goth girl being picked up by disapproving Mommy and Daddy. At least Molina had phoned to warn her they had a third wheel, a very volatile “third wheel”!

A pregnant Molina had run out on Nadir fourteen years ago, never telling him about Mariah, but he had ended up here finding out anyway. Temple didn’t know why they were so bitter toward each other but she suspected Matt might. If Molina confided in anyone, it was Temple’s ex-priest sweetie.

Short form, they’d been rookie cops/romantic roommates in L.A. Now Molina was a woman homicide lieutenant in a major city and Nadir was making a comeback as assistant security chief at a midtier Vegas hotel-casino. Rafi had met Temple briefly before, but he’d totally bought into her as Zoe Chloe Ozone at the Teen Queen reality TV show house, where she’d been babysitting contestant Mariah for her worried mom. He’d—ironically—taken them both under his wing, realizing something dangerous was up. So Temple didn’t feel the hate Molina did for her ex. More important, neither did Mariah.

Big Daddy got out of the driver’s side to inspect the huge suitcase and three duffle bags Matt had helped Temple wrestle downstairs.

“You need all this stuff?” Rafi asked, easily slinging the luggage into the cavernous storage space. He was wearing black denim jeans and a muscle T-shirt, looking like the laid-back manager of a Goth girl, who would also be counterculture.

“No, but Zoe Chloe Ozone does. You’re driving?”

“My vehicle. Yeah, it’s amazing she’d let me take the wheel. Must be because of whatever she’s got.”

“Flu.”

“If you all say so.”

“What else would it be?”

“I don’t know. You ride in the backseat, kiddo. Don’t I wish I could.”

He escorted Temple around the SUV and opened the side door. She made a major effort to haul her five-foot frame onto the high step up. Rafi turned it into a giant leap for womankind by boosting her inside with a hand under the elbow.

“They don’t make these monsters for shrimps,” Temple complained. “Getting in this is like climbing an Alp for me.”

“At least you don’t have Molina riding shotgun.” His quiet tone was glum.

Temple placed herself in the center of the middle bench seat, thinking she was going to be in the middle figuratively for this whole road trip. At least here she could see both of her traveling companions. She’d noticed a couple of backpacks and duffle bags in the rear storage area. Molina and Rafi had a lot less to get together and pack. They weren’t the star of this expedition. But they had a lot more “baggage,” nevertheless.

Los Angeles was only three hundred miles away but it seemed as distant as the Emerald City in Oz.

Facing the endless highway in the morning, when you needed mouthwash and had left a trail of gas station rest rooms behind you, the mirage of a huge, phantom city seemed to loom white and gray and glassy green under a haze of predawn heat.

Midnight Louie was sleeping alongside Temple’s hip, just as he’d done at the Circle Ritz.

Midnight Louie was sleeping alongside Temple’s hip, just as he’d done at the Circle Ritz.

Temple screeched, waking Molina in the front seat. She turned her head to glare around the headrest. Nadir frowned as he looked over his shoulder. “What’s the matter?”

Talk about waking up to a pair of grumps!

Temple sighed. “Uh . . . nothing. Zoe Chloe Ozone has just acquired a purse pussycat.”

Molina’s gel-roughened bob loomed over the front passenger seat’s back. She looked as happy as Godzilla on No-Doz. Eek!

“Balls!” she said, getting into character.

“He does still have them,” Temple admitted, “but they’re shooting blanks.”

“God!” Molina was violating all of her bad language rules at once. “Can’t you go anywhere without that big old alley cat traipsing along? What’s your new bridegroom going to say in the honeymoon suite?”

“I don’t expect him to be much into conversation,” Temple said as Zoe Chloe. “Chill, Cop Chick. This ole boy is a fab undercover op. Paris Hilton and her scrawny Chihuahuas are so over. Louie’s got claws and he knows how to use ’em.”

Rafi Nadir chose that moment to chuckle.

Molina turned on him like a whipsnake. “Our daughter is truant, missing, in danger . . . and you find a hitch-hiking cat a laughing matter?”

Rafi cocked an eyebrow at Temple. He hadn’t missed the “our daughter” either. He wisely didn’t draw attention to the phrase. Instead, he went for sweet reason.

“The cat’s great cover, Carmen. That Teen Queen Web site had a big mock Pink Panther podcast featuring the thing slinking around the competition house.”

“The name is Louie, Midnight Louie,” Zoe added, pouting. “He is not a ‘thing.’ I can improvise his travel supplies at the next gas station store. It will only take a few minutes.”

Molina glowered at her.

“Come on, us people will have to make comfort stops.”

“Just keep him riding shotgun in that big, zebra-striped tote bag of yours,” Nadir advised. “Now, where are we shacking up en route?”

“Nowhere,” Molina said. “We drive straight through, find and grab the kid, and retreat. The story is she’s another of our stars.”

“And we’re the entourage.” Rafi shook his head. “Our IDs?”

Molina tossed him a packet while rolling her eyes. “Phony baloney time.”

Rafi riffled through his new ID. “Raphael d’Arc, garage band impresario? Whoever cooked this up must have had archangels on the brain.”

Molina frowned, then got the reference. “I called Buchanan and had him dream up these “hip” fake IDs so I could keep this expedition unofficial.”

“And you are?” he asked.

“Carmina Regina,” she read reluctantly, as if making a confession. “Ex-singer with the Paper Hangers and PR rep.”

“Sure mangled your given and middle names, but we’ll respond more readily to identities that sound like our real ones. Smart. Cheer up, Carmina.”

“You’re betting everything that Mariah will end up down the road at an audition.”

“We can’t be everywhere.”

“I sent out her school photo, but God knows what she looks like after all those ‘makeup’ parties she claimed to be going to.”

“L.A., Phoenix, Denver, ’Frisco,” he said. “Those major urban centers have been savvy on runaway kids since the sixties. The cops there will see through any extreme makeup and clothes. They’re pros, like us.”

Molina didn’t have the energy to challenge that “us” any more than she had “our daughter” a few minutes earlier. Instead, she bit her lip.

Temple noticed that she’d been through a makeup session, too, probably from rookie cop days when she’d decoyed johns. The frosted lip gloss she wore made a lot more of her mouth than those dark forties lipsticks “Carmen” wore on the Blue Dahlia club stage. The make over meant she was pouting almost as much as Zoe Chloe. And Rafi Nadir was noticing.

Interesting.

Temple stroked Louie as she held him close in the big tote bag. She doubted he’d make an easy rider, but he needed to appear docile for the crowds and the cameras.

Their triumphal road show journey to the City of the Angels to find the delinquent little angel from the Molina residence was interrupted in the dawn’s early light by the unimaginative ring tone of Molina’s cell, which sounded just like an ordinary phone. Yawn.

Molina stared at her cell phone screen.

“It’s Mariah, thank God!” Jubilation and relief quickly became irritation. “But what is this, Aztec?”

Temple held out a hand. “Let me see.”

“You think you can read teen text messaging? I hate that! She knows it. Why couldn’t she have left a voice mail?”

“Probably didn’t want you to hear the fear.” Temple frowned at the abbreviated words on the small screen. And here she’d never taken shorthand in high school because she’d thought it was career-limiting.

“Basically, she’s saying that something became an ‘overniter’ and they had to stay in line or lose their place. She’s so ‘SorE’ but will ‘xpln’ later.”

“No hint of where she is?” Molina demanded.

“‘OK n LOFln.’”

“Laughlin?” Rafi repeated. “That’s just ninety miles down the highway from Vegas. If we backtrack we can cut off forty-five miles of highway 95. Laughlin’s a time capsule of how Vegas used to be in the eighties. What’s Mariah doing there?”

“‘AWdishn,’” Temple said. “Who knew phonetic spelling would ever become so hip?”

“It’s a way for kids to avoid learning grammar and spelling and parts of speech,” Molina said. “Hip-hop rhymes are now ‘high’ literacy, emphasis on the street meaning of ‘high.’ ”

“Lunacy,” Rafi added.

Molina looked up sharply to check if his agreement was sincere.

Temple wondered: if she and Matt had children, what strange symbols would they have to learn to communicate? Aliens R Us. And usually our kids.

Rafi took the phone and, while Temple hung over his shoulder and Molina leaned in to watch, texted: “U sing? Whr R U?” He hesitated and added, “Rafi.”

He shrugged at Molina. “I don’t know if she remembers me but I might come across less threatening than Ms. Policeman.”

New letters appeared on the screen. “Kool, R. Not sing. Dance. Aquarius.”

“As in ‘the age of’?” Molina asked, mystified.

“Not cool, Mombot,” Temple said. “Lyrics from Hair date you back to the Stone Age.”

“You mean the ‘stoned’ age.”

Temple shrugged. “Well, it was the sixties. If I didn’t like vintage and theater, even I wouldn’t have gotten your reference. I wasn’t born yet! It’s High School Musical today, and maybe a revival of Grease, not Hair.”

“U momma dont dance,” Rafi had texted back. “Me n Zoe meetya ther.”

“KOOOL! LOUEE 2?”

“LOUEE 2. Main dsk. 4 hrs OK?”

“OK.”

Molina glared at the cell phone screen, but breathed audible relief, then caught her breath and put a hand to her side. “At least she’s still a runaway, not a hostage.”

“Temple and I will be first contact when we get to the Aquarius,” Rafi said. “It’s a major Laughlin hotel-casino. You hang back.”

“You hang back! I’m her mother.”

“That’s the problem. We don’t want her rabbiting. I’m just the security guy from the last place she was a talent contestant, and Temple’s an ex-roomie, a pal. We’ll find what’s going on, and why. Then you can sweep in and put her in cuffs.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It takes discipline to rear a kid these days.”

“And being in top condition. Come on, Carmen, you’ve got a major pulled muscle, or worse. This race to the rescue hasn’t done you any good physically or mentally. Take some Aleve and make a late entrance as a reasonable woman. We’ll clue you in first.”

“You are a bastard.”

“Yeah, and I’m right.”

Temple added, “Why finally find Mariah just to scare her off? You are the police. We’re not.”

Molina’s hands scrubbed the expression of uncertainty off her face. “Fine. I agree that you two established a more peer-style rapport with Mariah at the reality TV house.” She eyed Rafi. “Keep it that way. You don’t tell her who you are unless I say so.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

Silence rode shotgun with them all the way to Laughlin. They retraced their path on Highway 15, then took 164 east to pick up the last forty-five miles on 95 to Laughlin. The highway paralleled the snaking Colorado River as it flowed out of Hoover Dam. They drove until midmorning, when they finally hit a mini-strip of Vegas-style high-rise hotels. The buildings fronted the river, a distinctively non-Vegas look.

This was a movie model Vegas, miniatures so far. Hotel towers loomed only sixteen or so stories high. The skyline looked less pretentious, less expensive, and more fun, like the old style Vegas, as Rafi had said.

Louie had disdained the tote bag to recline on the seat next to Temple for the drive, but now he had his front paws braced beneath the side window, surveying Laughlin with them. He seemed pretty unimpressed.

“Looks like the kid’s performing ambitions have gone down-scale,” Rafi noted.

“Good!” Molina let her anger off the leash. “Upscale is more dangerous.”

Twenty minutes later they were all standing in front of a long table with an adamantly bored middle-aged grump behind it.

“But I’m assigned to dance with the cute one of the Los Hermanos brothers,” the lanky thirteen-year-old girl known as EK protested, tears in her eyes and voice. “I won.”

“I need the signature of a parent or guardian,” the guy said. “You’re a minor.”

“Grandmother Dzhabrailova is in Las Vegas.”

“We’re signing up the winning girls here and now for tomorrow night’s show. Sorry, kid. The cast has gotta be locked in before we shut down the operation and we gotta leave this ballroom in an hour.”

Hotel staff were already slamming folding chairs shut and stacking them on dollies. A couple guys had their eyes on the last folding table left standing. This one.

“You can’t produce a guardian now, I’ll sign up the runner-up.” He nodded at a blond girl wearing an expensive highlighted hair-cut and a bored look that failed to cover hope so intense it seemed to sizzle off her.

Ekaterina’s dark brown hair was pulled back in a simple ponytail in a dollar store band. She was a thin, gangly girl, doe-eyed and desperate.

“Mom,” Mariah pleaded.

“Mom” stood resolute. “I’m not a relative. I can’t sign for her. Besides, I don’t know what this is about, who she is, who’s responsible for her—”

The blond girl pushed forward into EK. “Can we hurry up? My dad’s standing by the door. He can sign right now.”

“But I won!” EK wailed.

The blonde couldn’t quite disguise a smirk as a sympathetic smile.

“I’ll sign.”

Temple and Molina, and even Midnight Louie, stared at Rafi Nadir after he spoke.

The man behind the desk frowned. “You’re not a relative—”

“Temporary guardian.”

“You can’t do this,” Molina whispered impatiently.

“The girl’s grandmother will okay it.” Rafi was already pulling the form on bright yellow paper forward and bending over it, ballpoint pen in hand. Mariah grabbed EK’s hand and swung it up and down in childish, energetic joy.

“I’ll need employment info as well as personal,” the guy was saying, still frowning. “If the grandmother takes exception, it’s your responsibility.” He looked at the sheet Rafi spun to show him the filled out sections. “Oh. Assistant security chief at the Oasis Hotel. I guess that makes you a ‘responsible adult.’”

Molina snorted.

“And you’re with the exact right hotel, so that’s even better. Be at the Oasis in Vegas at 8:00 A.M. tomorrow,” he instructed EK, handing her a sheaf of papers.

The infuriated blond girl was about to knock hard into EK’s back as she turned away to leave, but Temple jerked the girl’s arm and pulled her out of contact.

“Bitch,” the girl mouthed, mistaking Temple as Zoe for a peer.

Temple lifted Louie’s big black paw and waved goodbye while he added a parting hiss, perhaps resenting his paw being appropriated, but more likely responding to one catty word with another, in actual feline.

They walked away as the sign-up table was turned sideways, folded, and toted away.

EK and Mariah brought up the rear, huddling and giggling like ten-year-olds. Temple had nothing to do but lug Louie and trail the wordless Molina and Rafi to the hotel entrance. Before they left the lobby, Rafi stopped and turned to the girls.

“You two have been sitting in line overnight?”

They nodded. “Everybody did,” Mariah said.

“What’d you eat?”

She shrugged. “There are snack dispensers on all the hotel floors. We didn’t have a lot of change after bus money, but got a couple candy bars.”

Molina sighed heavily.

“EK needed energy for dancing,” Mariah said, justifying necessity.

“We want to get something to eat before we leave, or en route?” Rafi asked Molina.

“‘We’ want to get the . . . heck back to Vegas and get these children settled at their respective homes.”

“EK’s grandma doesn’t have a car,” Mariah said, “and EK has to be at the Oasis by eight tomorrow morning. She’ll have roommates there but can stay overnight with me.”

“Mariah.” Molina’s voice was low, logical, and furious. “You ran away from home without leaving word on where you were going and why. You are grounded. You are not entertaining partners in crime overnight.”

“But EK has to be—”

“I’m sorry, but EK has to be no such thing. She has to answer to her poor worried grandmother.”

“My grandmother knows what I am doing,” EK answered, panic rising in her voice. “And I have won—”

“This is a stupid dance contest. That permission this . . . stupid man you don’t even know signed is worthless. You can’t compete. You two are children, and acted like very irresponsible children, and you’ll be treated like children. And that includes not getting what you wanted, or expected. Or even won.”

The silence was, well, Temple thought, impressive.

Then EK’s thin shoulders started shaking with swallowed sobs.

Molina rolled her eyes and looked around the lobby at the spreading silence as people nearby stopped to watch them. Mariah comforted her friend but still managed to glare at her mother.

“You’re such a . . . policeman,” Mariah accused.

“Quite a compliment,” Rafi said to Molina with a quiet smile.

To the two girls and the gathering crowd he added, “Let’s adjourn to a roadside restaurant down the highway. You girls must be starving. And your mother, Mariah, has been seriously ill while you were busing on down the road without permission or notice. We could all use some peace and quiet and food.”

He turned the two girls to the door and guided them out, leaving Temple to deal with Molina. Who was shaking ever so slightly.

“The dude is right, dammit,” Zoe Chloe said cheerily. “I hate it when they do that. Men, I mean. We can dis ’em all good on the way back to Vegas, and he’ll have to hear every word.”

“Can we dis magicians?” Molina’s voice was still shaky.

“No,” Zoe said seriously. “Never did, never will.” Temple met Molina’s ice-blue eyes. “Us undercover girls are loyal.”

Molina bit her bloodless-looking lip. She had been sick.

“Good for you,” she said brusquely, surprising the heck out of both of Temple’s current personas. “Let’s eat.”

“Jeez,” Zoe Chloe confided to Louie’s left ear, which twitched either from her soft caress or her breath. “Nobody’s acting in character on this cheesy road trip but us.”

Boogie Blues

Matt walked into the greenroom for the competition, nodding to his new peers. Someone he’d already met was there, the Cloaked Conjuror, the Goliath Hotel’s oversize masked magician.

Glory B. was a straw-thin, twitchy teen diva with a bee-stung pout courtesy of collagen injections.

Matt found shaking hands with the handsome José Juarez, an Olympic fencer as lean and limber as a fencing foil, a knuckle-crushing experience.

Keith Salter, a celebrity chef, was as expected—charming, egocentric, and chubby.

The ladies he met were Olivia Phillips, a postmenopausal soap opera star who reminded him of Temple’s aunt Kit; Motha Jonz, a hefty black hip-hop diva; and last, but decidedly not least, Wandawoman, a World Wrestling Wrangle Amazon got up like Wonder Woman on steroids.

Matt couldn’t help thinking he’d joined some X-manish federation of talented freaks as the token ordinary guy.

Their pro dancing instructors were present, the guys a muscled mystery meat mélange of straight and gay and bi—you figure it out—the women young and sleek and as ambitious as spawning silver salmon leaping upstream.

Matt grinned to think that Temple had pushed him into the heart of this gender-ambiguous, openly sexual world. She must think he was pretty secure. Which he was. Nothing like publicly advising other people about their deepest desires and identity crises to make one blasé.

Matt sat beside the Cloaked Conjuror. He was a Klingon-imposing figure on high platform boots, wearing a completely concealing tiger-striped full head mask.

“I, ah, met you at the costume contest you were judging at the TitaniCon science fiction-fantasy convention,” Matt said, not sure the man behind the mask would remember him.

“That’s right.” He stretched his long legs ending in the Frankenstein boots. “The Mystifying Max’s pretty little redheaded girlfriend helped engineer catching a murderer that night. You were there too.”

“I’m always surprised when anyone remembers me at such a huge event.”

“Not my problem.” CC chuckled. His mask contained a voice-altering device, so he sounded unnervingly like Darth Vader giggling. “They mentioned you used to be a priest. I bet that and sitting behind an advice-line mike doesn’t make you a natural at tiptoeing through the triple-time foxtrot.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Matt conceded, “but you don’t seem geared for that either.” He nodded at the industrial-strength shoes in size fourteen.

“I’ll ditch these for the dances.”

“Temple said something . . . don’t you get death threats from disgruntled magicians because your act is built on exposing the tricks behind their most famous illusions?”

“Temple! That was her name! Max’s squeeze.”

“Not anymore.”

“No? Max dump her?”

“He’s missing. And . . . we’re engaged.”

“Humph. So my old compadre bugged out and left you with the girl.”

“It didn’t exactly happen that way.”

“No, I guess not. You look like a nice guy. You’d wait your turn.”

Matt held his temper, figuring he’d have to do it a lot in the next week. This greenroom looked like a theatrical variety show and he didn’t fit in.

“Aren’t you taking a risk?” Matt pushed. “Exposing yourself at a hotel that isn’t set up to protect you 24/7?”

“All Vegas hotels are set up for 24/7 surveillance, and I brought my own guys.” The massive feline head nodded at a two men in wife-beater T-shirts holding up the far wall. Matt had taken them for idle workmen or technicians. Which was the idea.

“Why are you doing this?” Matt asked.

“The charity. I lead a pretty isolated life because of the disguise and the death threats. That makes people even more eager to see me outside of my secure home hotel. Everyone who votes for me during the six days of this competition pledges twenty bucks to cancer research. I figure it’s worth the risk. Isn’t that why you’re here?”

“Yeah. The kids’ leukemia fund. And my girlfriend made me.”

CC’s weird, wheezy, basso laughter somehow conveyed warmth. “I’d do almost anything for a smart girl like her myself. You’re a lucky man. I can’t afford a romantic life.”

Matt just nodded. He gazed around the room at the assortment of strangers who’d become friendly rivals very soon. They were sizing one another up as the team of male and female hairstylists, makeup artists, costumers, and pro dancer-choreographers made the round of contestants with the show’s director.

“Good,” said the head guy when he reached Matt and CC. “You guys are getting acquainted already. Dave Hopper, director. You’ll discover a real camaraderie developing between you eight. You’ll work harder mentally and physically than you ever have, and cross barriers you never faced before. It takes guts to try something you’ve never done much of right before live TV cameras.”

He sat on an empty folding table as his production team gathered around.

“The Cloaked Conjuror here will be a challenge from start to finish.”

“The Penn Jillette of Penn and Teller of our show,” a costumer said. “A huge guy, larger than life. I’ll have to work around the mask.” The tall, blue-jeaned bottle redhead glanced at the lithe blond dancer beside her. “Vivi, you’ll need to dream up Beauty and Beast type routines. The masked man is a romantic image; we’ll have to play on it with the costumes and the choreography.”

She turned to Matt. “Stand up.”

He hesitated. He hadn’t been ordered to move since grade school.

“Stand up, cutie. I need to see your build.”

He hadn’t been called “cutie” ever. But he stood.

“Fit, if not awesome. All-American boy.” She sighed and eyed the sinewy brunette who was evidently Matt’s choreographer-coach. “Blond and smooth as butterscotch syrup, Tatyana, but that’s a handicap in the Latin dances. And those are the audience-pleasers.”

“We could cover the hair,” the hairstylist suggested. “Zorro scarf and hat. Or go brunet.”

Hopper nodded. “Worked for Elvis.”

“Could use an Elvis tune,” Tatyana suggested.

“Uh, black dye—” Matt began, appalled.

“Just a rinse,” the hairdresser said. “Could even spray it in. Look around you. How many of the pro guys and the male contestants are blond? Isn’t dramatic enough for guys.”

“There’s Derek on Dancing With the Stars,” the costumer noted. “Does work that darling boy thing.”

“Not in Latin,” Hopper decided. He was middle everything: in age, build, temperament. “We’ll go both ways on him. It’ll be a real shockeroo when the teen angel boy comes out all dark and devilish for the pasodoble. Audiences adore transformations.”

“Plays well against the priest thing,” Tatyana suggested. “I can have fun with that: devil or angel.”

Matt had a feeling her idea of “fun” wasn’t heavy on personal dignity, at least as he knew it.

They moved on, as did CC, linking up with his bodyguards.

And Glory B. moved in on him, taking the adjoining folding chair, then tapping her high and strappy spike heels on the floor so nervously they sounded like castanets. “How’d a priest get talked into doing this?” she asked.

He regarded the notorious oversexed teen idol and decided not to emphasize the “ex” part of his status. “The charity donation.”

“Yeah, me too.” Her ankles turned out like a kid’s wearing white patent leather mary janes for first Communion, skewing the hooker heels to the side. “I want do something for the kids.”

“You were one yourself not too long ago.”

“You think so?”

Matt wondered what she wanted from him. Flirting? Nah, she’d mastered that years ago, even though she was probably sixteen, tops. Glory B. He’d seen her name in the newspaper gossip columns, on TV. She’d been in trouble? Drink or drugs? Both, probably.

“I hit someone,” she blurted.

With kids her age, it was usually another kid. He frowned, confused. What was so newsy about that? Tantrums must be her middle name.

“With my Beamer,” she confessed. “Can’t drive it for a while anymore.”

“You must have people around who can.”

“Yeah.” Her nails were painted midnight-blue, but very short. Probably bitten that way. “It hit a kid. You know, a little kid. Broke both legs. So I’m dancing for charity to work off part of my probation.”

Matt couldn’t help glancing down at her broken-looking ankles. Where does a teenage superstar put guilt? In a tiny purse like the one Glory B. kept beside her on a chain, clearly capable of carrying nothing more than a credit card, and maybe some happy pills.

“Funny,” she said. “The kid’s in double casts and I gotta dance my ass off for doing it.”

“How old is the kid? Girl? Boy?”

“Girl.” She stood, wobbling on the four-inch heels. “These shoes cost more than the medical stuff. I was gonna give her a pair when she got better, but they say she might not be able to ever wear pretty shoes. Dancing shoes.”

“It’s called penance,” Matt said.

“Huh?”

“When you do something wrong, you have to pay for it. It’s not the probation or what the law says you have to do. It’s what you feel inside. It hurts. It’s supposed to. You’ll remember that the next time you don’t think about what you’re doing that might hurt someone else. But you can’t hurt yourself to make up for it either. That way nobody learns.”

She stood there clutching the ridiculous tiny purse, slathered in rhinestones like the cell phone probably inside it, and worth hundreds of dollars. She still looked like a lost seven-year-old and was probably worth millions.

“It’s okay,” he told her. “Everybody gets a second chance. Maybe this show is yours.”

The eyes rimmed in black liner blinked once as she nodded and tottered back to her seat with the soap and wrestling queens. Men, Matt mused, usually got famous for what they did. Women often got famous for being caricatures.

The two girls were asleep, tangled like gangly kittens next to Temple in the Tahoe’s second bench seating row.

Las Vegas’s dazzling megawatt halo had been dancing like the aurora borealis on the dark desert horizon when they’d left Vegas many hours before but now both city and surrounding desert were bright and bland.

When Molina’s cell phone rang, she sighed heavily and answered it.

“Yeah? Got her in Laughlin. Figured it was too late to call earlier, and then it was too early. Besides, this was a personal crisis.” She listened. Neither Temple nor Rafi could figure out who had called. They were trying their mightiest to eavesdrop without looking like it.

“Not her this time. Helping a girlfriend I’ve never heard of in some crazy scheme to get on a dancing show. Dancing With the Celebs, yeah? How’d you hear about it?” Silence.

Temple eyed Molina pushing herself up straighter in the front passenger captain’s chair to listen. Molina swallowed a groan of discomfort. “I’ll hold on.”

A pause while someone else got on the phone’s other end. Molina’s tone was crisp, emotionless. “Yes, Captain, I’m glad Alch could reach me. What’s up? He told you about my daughter?” Thunder threatened. “That’s personal busi—because? At Dancing With the Celebs? You’re kidding.”

Rafi’s eyes met Temple’s in the rearview mirror.

“Yes, I know you don’t kid. The other girl is a babe in the woods but she won . . . and will be on the show.

“Sure, we’re set up for undercover, but there’s no point now. Mariah’s fine. She’s sleeping right behind me—

“The same show? That can’t be? Yes, I suppose it’s ‘fortuitous,’ but I’ve got two civilians here—yes, yes he was.” Molina glared at Rafi. “Yes, she’s along.” She twisted her head over her shoulder to glare at Temple. “I know you’ve seen those Teen Queen house tapes. Yes, it is stupid to argue with success and an easy entrée. Right.”

Molina punched off the cell phone.

“Great,” she whispered under her breath, eyeing the sleeping girls. “I hate it when Mariah comes out smelling like tea roses when she should be grounded for ten weeks.”

She eyed Temple. “God, I’m going to hate seeing that black wig of yours.”

“And me?” Rafi asked.

“And your new, improved annoying persona. Forget any home runs today. We’re going straight to the Oasis to operate our sting at the Dancing With the Celebs show that starts a weeklong TV run tomorrow.”

“But Matt’s on that,” Temple objected.

“On it? He’s on this case too? Another flaming civilian?”

“I meant, he’s on the show. One of the celebs. Well, he is one. Sort of.”

“Perfect,” Molina spat, meaning the opposite. She seemed to remember something, looked briefly sheepish, then sighed. “I guess you might want Zoe Chloe to be on site, then. The show’s getting death threats, the hotel and sponsors are going ballistic, they’re worried the junior performers will attract the Barbie Doll Killer, and the captain is just as happy as heck I can lead my ready-made amateur undercover team right into the killing field. And it will be one, because I’m going to kill Alch for squealing to the captain about who is who and where we were and what we were doing.”

“I suppose,” Rafi said, “those hokey false identities that Buchanan created for us will work here. What were they again?”

Molina’s teeth seemed to be grinding. “You know only too well. It’s all set up. We’ve got access to a high-roller suite at the Oasis. Or, rather, Miss Zoe Chloe Ozone has. Matt Devine’s personal appearance agent, Tony Fortunato, did a number on the competition organizers. Apparently even that weasel Crawford Buchanan has some pull. Fortunato negotiated a rock-star package for Our Little Miss Smartmouth. He said if she didn’t do the entourage routine she’d look phony.”

There was a silence. The backseat girls slept through the verbal fireworks, as fast-growing, sleep-deprived drama queen teens will.

“Death threats, they said?” Temple asked, worried about Matt.

“To the Cloaked Conjuror, mainly, now that he’s more accessible,” Molina answered, “but that’s a given. There’s also that national concern that the Barbie Doll Killer has been haunting teen reality TV auditions again. This dance show does have a junior contestant level.” She nodded at EK in the backseat.

Rafi frowned as he watched the traffic ahead. “The captain know about the mutilated Barbie doll outside Mariah’s window?”

Temple’s eyes and ears widened as Molina nodded. “Alch told him. The place will be crawling with undercover and uniformed cops.

“That’s awful,” Temple said. “Matt really, really didn’t want to be one of the adult contestants,” she said, “but I encouraged him to do it. I’m the PR expert, after all. I said it would be great exposure for him.”

But not to a murderous crackpot after a famous magician or a teenage girl or a dancing celeb.

Nobody had an answer to that . . . or to the stricken tone in her voice, not even Midnight Louie.

Cat’s Pajamas

After lunch break that day at the huge buffet table the hotel provided in the backstage area, Matt returned to his assigned rehearsal room.

It was empty, but Tatyana had been there. Matt winced at seeing his namesake on the rehearsal-room floor, a padded mat.

The rehearsal mat made an oblong pool of bright blue vinyl on the polished maple boards. This afternoon was “lift” practice. The mat reminded him of high school gym classes. Nobody wanted to be reminded of those days of infamy.

He eyed his reflection in the mirrored wall: army-green T-shirt, khaki pants, black lace-up shoes made from leather soft enough to flex like cloth. Jazz shoes, they’d told him. His hair was still spiky from “product” the show’s hairstylists insisted on. It looked a lot blonder because of the portable spray-on-tan booth the contestants had to use religiously every morning.

Its small dark space reminded him of an old-fashioned confessional, if one ever had to take all one’s clothes off to go to confession. It gave the stripped-naked soul a whole new look, not to mention the rhythmic sweep of cold dye as one assumed the position and turned.

If the object was to be reborn looking like a Beach Boy, it had worked.

Matt knew he’d hate this celebrity dancing show and all its works, but everyone, including Temple and his boss at WCOO-FM, hadn’t wanted him to miss this “opportunity.” An opportunity to look like an idiot in front of a local audience. If only the exposure was just local.

Since this was Las Vegas and nothing in Vegas was really “local,” the half-hour Hollywood gossip shows were all over the rehearsals. He never knew who would burst through that closed door besides his drill sergeant, ballet master, and dancing partner, Tatyana Tereshchenko, aka Tatyana the Terrible, five-foot-three inches of wiry and wily Russian tsunami.

She burst in now as if summoned by his thought, wearing a wispy tease of skirt over her lime-green leotard and tights, toting a bag for towel and bottled water.

“Matt-eeeu, Matt-eeeu, Matt-eeeu,” she mispronounced his name in her heavy Russian accent. “Are you ready to lift Tatyana up to the heavens today?”

“It’s just Matt,” he said. No point in correcting her. The long form of his given name was Mathias. “And I’m game for lifts if you are.”

“Of course you are,” she said. Her teaching technique was the whiplash application of carrot-and-stick in rapid alteration. She came close, suddenly kittenish. “Such lovely strong shoulders. Svimming is the most vonderful sport for dancer. Makes long, lovely muscle, all over.”

She accompanied this inciting conclusion with strokes and purrs, her position being that his ex-priest status had made him shy.

With her, a Tasmanian devil would be shy.

“But,” she added, drawing back and pulling herself up like a ballerina on pointe. “You have rhythm and we must pull that out of you before the competition begins, or Tatyana will not vin and one thing is sure: Tatyana will vin. Ca-peach? As they say on, on . . . These Three Sopranos!”

“Capeach,” Matt repeated dutifully, amused by her slaughtering the language and the TV show name, which he took as a deliberate ploy.

In a week of lessons, he’d learned Tatyana was a force of ego. She was the Yorkshire terrier that lived to boss around Great Danes. And she truly had a passion for dance, and for making him into a dancer.

“Good. You learn. With Tatyana you learn to be dancer and love it. So. Today. Surprise.”

He wasn’t surprised when the door opened again and a cameraman backed in, filming the incoming newcomers. Oh, my God! Surprise was right.

In came Ambrosia, his nightly on-air predecessor host at WCOO and his “Midnight Hour” producer, wearing a leopard-print caftan and singing “Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man” while banging a jangling circle of wood and metal overhead.

The cameraman kept backing up so far he almost tripped on the floor mat, just before Matt himself leaped forward to steer him around the barrier like a balky dance partner. He’d picked up a move or twelve from the driven diva who was his coach.

The cameraman had backed up so far because Ambrosia was three-hundred-pounds-plus of quivering leopard-skin-pattern caftan, and she was followed by a chorus line of women equally larger than life and as exotically clothed as she, or more so.

They were not shy, that was for sure.

Tatyana was grinning like a demon brat.

“So, Matt-euw. You say as priest you like to visit these gospel music churches. Miz Ambrosiana has brought whole gospel group to rehearsal. You will no longer hide rhythm from those long, hot shoulder muscles and hips, right, Miz Ambrosiana?”

“Right, girlfriend! We all gonna hip-hop today!”

Ambrosia began by bumping hips with him, but not before he could perform an evasive maneuver that kept him on his feet.

“Show us what you learned at dance school today, Beach Boy,” Ambrosia urged.

Matt had heard her selecting songs that soothed and inspired her radio call-in listeners for months now. She was a wonder at massaging sad hearts and sore feelings back into some hope of functioning again. He knew her repertoire, and she knew he’d played the organ a little and liked Bob Dylan.

So they could do a little act for the cameras, which was always what cameras demanded.

“Shall we, Sister Ambrosia?” he said.

“Shall we, Brother Matt?”

“A little Dylan?” he suggested.

“And a lotta rhythm.”

After he led on the first line, she joined in singing the rollicking, feel-good anthem of “When the Ship Comes In” as if rehearsed, while the other women clapped their hands and tambourines and shook their booties and joined in.

They formed a line to march around the room New Orleans funeral style, Matt turning to waltz Ambrosia in a circle, then do-si-do among a few women of the church choir, borrow a tambourine and do a little arms-raised hip-banging with a three-hundred-pound dynamo, then perform a dip with a tall, skinny woman playing the kazoo.

By then the song had segued into “This Little Light of Mine, I’m Gonna Let It Shine” and Matt had circled into the center of the room to sweep Tatyana up into the alternating over-the-hip lifts of the swing dance they’d practiced.

When he let her feet hit floor, she grinned into the camera coming in for a close-up and crowed, “We are gonna be ready to rock with the angels on tonight’s show.”

Wrap and roll.

The cameraman left, happy not to have been steamrolled under, grinning at the great sound and motion he’d recorded.

The churchwomen filed out laughing and gossiping, Ambrosia last.

“Were you surprised to see me?” she asked Matt after he hugged her goodbye at the door.

“I was floored.”

“Did we help?”

He considered. “Sistah, if the church choir can shake it like that, so can I.”

“Right on! Don’t hold back. That’s what you tell our people out there in radioland almost every night, and that’s what we do to show ’em the way.”

“Amen.”

“Now we vork,” came a tight, light voice behind him.

Matt turned around to study his tiny but fierce taskmaster. No one who had heard Ambrosia’s hypnotically soothing voice for years over the airwaves knew she was a woman of size. Now the world would.

If she was willing to “bare all” on TV for him, he guessed he should be willing to reveal a little “rock and roll and rhythm” for her. Besides, he couldn’t let Temple down by looking like a dork.

“Now we work,” he agreed.

A clot of hovering dancers and support staff blocked the door to rehearsal room three.

Whispers rustled the grave, nodding faces like a wisp of wind in a flower bed.

Danny, Matt figured, had seen a lot of rehearsal accidents, but Matt knew about ministering to the distressed.

So he pushed inside behind the choreographer, while Tatyana peeled off to gossip with her fellow and sister pros, who might know exactly what had happened.

The room mirrored his and Tatyana’s rehearsal area: portable wood floor laid over impact-absorbing material, wall mirrors, any spare chairs pushed to the perimeter.

But this room also hosted the metal-pipe jigsaw structure of a jungle gym.

That’s where Danny joined several people hunching over something on the floor.

The sight had Matt’s heart pounding as if he’d just done a six-spin airplane lift with Ambrosia to hold up.

He rushed over, calming only when he saw a small figure half sitting, answering questions.

“It was scary,” she murmured in a daze. “I don’t even know how I feel. The fall. Everything’s tingling, but I can move stuff. My toes. My fingers.”

“Stay still,” a man in a dark suit carrying a walkie-talkie ordered. “We have a hotel doctor and EMTs on the way. You don’t move until someone with medical expertise is here.”

Glory B. looked up, wide-eyed. Her left hand was holding her right wrist, but she didn’t seem aware of what that might mean.

“It just . . . gave,” she said. “When I was on the top rung. Jesse said I needed to work on my agility and balance.”

“I’m sorry, B.,” said the young male dancer still crouched next to her. “I tested the bars myself after it was erected. Did spins and flips all over them. They were solid. At least for me. I’m sorry. I just don’t get it.”

Danny knelt to gently test her limbs and rose.

Matt nudged Danny’s arm. As he stood again, Matt whispered. “You and I need to take a fresh look at the jungle gym once Glory is taken away.”

Danny mouthed, “Why?”

“Temple Barr disease,” Matt whispered back.

Danny got it and nodded, his forehead a broad ladder of worry lines.

Temple Barr disease: never settle for benign equipment failure as an explanation when malign interference might be a cause. And this was a highly public, highly charged competition, with a lot at stake for the producers and performers.

If a muscular male dancer bounding all over the device didn’t find the weakness, why would a wisp of a girl who was practicing with uncertainty do it?

For now, Glory B., hot up-and-coming teen pop tart with attitude, was just a scared, possibly hurt kid. Matt thought about Temple out there somewhere, on the trail of another lost kid.

Everyone except Danny and Matt followed the ambulance gurney with Glory B. on it out the door. Camera flashes danced like heat lightning in the hall outside. Matt cringed for Glory. No wonder she was a self-involved media brat, with that kind of center-of-the-universe attention 24/7.

Meanwhile, Danny was doing awesome acrobatics on the jungle gym. Matt watched his taut form spin around the high bars and leap down to the balance board. He switched to the high bars again, then suddenly twisted and vaulted to the floor.

“That’s it. The right side of the high bar. It’s ready to break away.”

“Why didn’t it come down with Glory B.?”

“She’s a lightweight amateur. She stressed and bent the bar, but didn’t break it. Her grip broke instead when the horizontal support wavered. You could be right and that bar was rigged to collapse. Luckily for Glory B., she triggered the collapse but didn’t fully cause it.”

Danny was straddling the bottom horizontal bar—ouch!—jiggling the joint where the top bar met the upright supports, using Glory B.’s fallen warm-up jacket as a latex glove.

“Yup. Here it is. Wiggles. Probably sound until the unit was used. I don’t know who’s going to investigate this equipment, but I bet if you pull the pipes apart, one of them has been cracked mostly through. These things are houses of cards.”

Danny thumped down to the floor, eyeing Matt. “I’ll have hotel security witness me taking it apart.”

“Photograph and save the pieces,” Matt suggested. “Are you sure we shouldn’t call the police?” he asked doubtfully.

“Overkill. There’s no concrete evidence here. It could be metal fatigue. Setting up equipment in non-normal dance venues makes for shoddy assembly. Accidents happen in rehearsal. And . . . these amateur dance contests get heated. Might be some overeager fans around. I’m thinking I need to keep an eye out for sabotage as much as good form and talent. So, just in case . . . watch yourself.”

Matt nodded. Who would have thought ballroom dancing could be so dangerous?

An Oasis hotel flunky met our party at the double doors opening onto the “Mata Hari Suite,” aka the Zoe Chloe Ozone suite for the duration. All right. A high-roller suite, free! Obviously, Midnight Louie has finally arrived! Sweet.

As soon as our party enters, I am decanted like a fine bottle of French wine from Miss Temple’s tote bag onto the plush carpet of the suite that will be our joint base of operations.

Both my Miss Temple and Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina immediately massage their ears with cell phones, checking with their outside connections.

I rub on Mr. Rafi Nadir’s black denim calves just to let him know who has more hair to lose and who is boss in other departments too.

He is watching Miss LCRM with a frown I recognize. He does not like being outside the loop, or the phone link, in this case. His hands are pushed into his jean pockets as if he is keeping them from grabbing the cell phone away from his former lady friend.

She takes the cell phone from her ear and clicks it off. “Mariah says Ekaterina has connected with her cocontestants. Mariah will be allowed to bunk with the whole crew, contestants and moms, since EK has no adult chaperone. I think—”

Then Miss Temple shrieks from the adjoining room.

Rafi and Carmen dig in heels to wheel like paired Dobermans, charging across the expansive living room and past its six-foot plasma TV screen.

My Miss Temple is standing in the center of a huge bedroom looking ultra Zoe Chloe and teensy teen, her hands splayed out. “I cannot believe it! All the M&Ms have my name on them! How cool is that?”

I leap atop the console table to inspect the huge Easter basket of goodies. I know that it is past Easter, but the bunny appears to have passed through here on its way out of town and laid a whole lotta sweets and treats down in farewell.

“Look!” she is crooning, holding up one colored candy shell after another. “Zoe. Chloe. Ozone. Is not that sweet?”

Only I notice that both Rafi and Carmen are pushing discreet semiautomatics into paddle holsters concealed by their denim jackets. One wears black and one wears blue. Naturally, Miss Carmen’s is law-enforcement blue. Naturally, when one thinks of this long-estranged couple, it is in terms of black and blue, not that I am saying anyone whomped on anyone other than emotionally.

“Get a grip,” Carmen spits at my roommate.

I am forced to growl, low and long like a dog. I hate resorting to shallow canine tricks, but sometimes humans only heed the overobvious.

“And you shut up, you mobile dust bunny!” Molina rants on. “I am about to call off this whole silly charade. I am out of here if nothing breaks in the next couple of hours.”

Nobody says anything, including me. Without the lieutenant’s cooperation, we are all off duty faster than a dropped and smashed M&M.

Where would the Miss Lieutenant go? we are all thinking. Mariah will not forsake her little friend who is in the finals of this contest. EK is her new “cause.” And the contest itself helps seriously ill kids. Even a hard-nosed police lieutenant cannot bow out of that, despite having to play a personally repugnant undercover role with her ex-boyfriend, least favorite female amateur detective, and her own kid, who has gone star-mad.

I count myself blessed to have evaded this horrible, hormone-hyped state called teenagery. My kind goes from litter to littering in a heartbeat, with no awkward in-between stages but hunting homes or eking out sheer survival.

Maybe human kits would be better off if they did not believe that life offers more than constant struggle, danger, deception, and death, as those of my ilk have long known.

Quick!

The ballroom where the show would be held seemed football field huge, with electricians and stagehands running around it like fire ants.

Temple eased her candy-apple red patent leather platform shoes over the snakes’ nests of black cables crisscrossing the carpeted floor.

“Watch your step, little lady.” Rafi took her elbow and almost hoisted her above the entangling cables.

On her other side, Molina frowned. “You two are on cozy terms.”

Rafi gave Temple a Cheshire cat smirk. “It’s all about working together on that reality TV show. Bonds form fast.”

“You and a bunch of teenage girls. I may heave.”

“Not on the cables. That could be dangerous.”

She looked mad enough to spit on both of them, but shrugged and stalked ahead, her tailored loafers missing every sheaf of cable.

“Man, she is wired,” Rafi said.

When Temple laughed, he caught her eye.

“Appropriate choice of words, right here,” he said. “I don’t know whether her problem is concealed pain or . . . concealed something else.”

Temple was not an ex–marital counselor, like Matt, so she let that lie. “How do we go about investigating in this massive place? A determined killer could be running around in one of these work-man’s overalls.”

“I’m sure that’s where Carmen’s gone. She’s got undercover cops here. They’ll have checked lists of workmen, program personnel, waitstaff, anyone with business in the area. And they’ll continue checking. You think you could find an outfit more likely to scream, ‘Here I am, mob me or kill me’?”

Temple looked down at her black-lace leggings, racy red shoes, and short, full skirt. She waggled her fingers in the long spiderweb-pattern Goth gloves and hefted the orange patent leather tote bag holding Louie and little else higher on her shoulder.

“I have to be fashion-forward. The world expects that of Zoe Chloe. Golly, Rafi, how long do I have to lug Louie around as a purse pussycat? He weighs a ton!”

Louie’s large, cheeky tomcat face looked very Halloweenish peering over the pumpkin-colored tote bag.

“Cats aren’t supposed to like being carried around,” Temple complained further.

“He’s a good prop,” Rafi said, lifting the double tote straps off her right shoulder.

Before Temple could sigh her relief, Louie hissed at his new custodian and wriggled out of the bag onto the floor. In a few smooth darts, he threaded the workmen’s legs before they even noticed his presence and, like Molina before him, disappeared.

“That cat has a nose for trouble,” Rafi commented. “If Carmen wouldn’t have my head for leaving you, I’d follow him.”

“Let’s both do it. Louie thinks best on his feet.”

So they tripped the cables fantastic until they arrived at the backstage area where floor directors, the producer, the music director, and press agents were milling around.

“Miss Ozone!” exclaimed a jovial man shaped like a bottom-heavy wine bottle that comes in a basket wrap. He waddled over, operating a cell phone camera. “Fab to have you here. You look fab. The show will be fab with you emceeing our junior division and bringing all your online fans along for the ride, not to mention making new fans through your appearances here. And this gentlemen is?”

“Mr. Raphael d’Arc, my manager and occasional personal security agent.”

“Hmm.” The officious fellow looked Rafi over and decided he looked both secure and personable. “Not the usual mindless muscle in hip-hop bling. Quite refreshing, Miss Ozone.”

“I aim to refresh,” Temple said. “So tell me what’s all happenin’ so I can jive with the jukebox in perfect one-and-ah-two-and-ah-three-and-ah-bam git-down, tank-up, thank you, ladies and gentlemen time.”

“She is a pistol, isn’t she, man?” the guy asked Rafi as if they were secret frat brothers, with a wink and a would-be jab in the ribs.

Rafi easily evaded any contact and drew his black denim jacket back to reveal a tan leather holster. “This is a pistol, man. Who are you and why are you accosting Miss Ozone?”

“Hey, chill, dude! I’m the DJ for breaks on this show. Gotta keep the live audience mellow yellow between segments. I’m just a fan of Miss Ozone. She is one scintillating little mama.”

“You’re on the set the day before the actual broadcasts?”

“Yes, sir!” The DJ was getting very Private Gomer Pyle after seeing the iron Rafi was pumping. “I need to watch the rehearsals, get the rhythm and the routines down. Just like Miss Ozone here. That’s why you’re here early, isn’t it? A real hip little pro. Always a 110 percent for the gig. These teen pop tarts are all energy and nerve and flash edges, even if they burn out fast.”

Temple thought that was pretty true, but coming from this oil-slick guy it made her sick to the stomach.

Rafi had the same reaction and he had a wanna-be pop tart daughter who was still as naïve as cornflakes. “Maybe. But Miss Ozone is only paid to perform on stage. You keep your distance and do your job, and your lame little soul patch will not be torn right off your chinny-chin-chin.”

Temple shivered as the guy shimmied away like a bowlful of lard. “That was mean.”

“He’s a creep. This is what Mariah wants to run deadhead into. Today’s entertainment industry is run by gangsters and creeps on the make and slimy celebrity ‘judges’ who make dough from ridiculing people, some of them pathetically hungry for approval, on live TV.”

“Wasn’t it always that way?”

“No. Talent used to matter and bullying wasn’t entertainment.”

Temple blinked.

Rafi shrugged. “You discover you have a kid you never knew about, you start to worry about the world. It’s nuts, I know.”

“I think it’s kinda sweet.”

Rafi’s fist took a mock swing at her upper arm. “Cut out that kinda talk. You don’t mess with my rep as the Big Bad Wolf That Ate L. A., Red.”

“I’m closer to a lively strawberry blond these days.”

“And a tasty little fruit tart you’re playing. But don’t underestimate the fruit flies.”

Temple nodded. She was liking Rafi Nadir more and more.

Would that frost Molina.

Maybe she did have a guardian angel, Mr. Raphael d’Arc, even though Max was gone. Temple wondered where his wings were in residence now, and hoped it wasn’t heaven.

Fiery leg aches sent shooting pains through his entire frame, but for the first time since his escape, sitting in the elegant Hummerbar drinking an aquavit, he felt he lived up to his real name, “Max.”

Maximilian Fleming was registered at the Hotel St. Gotthard on Zurich’s main shopping, eating, banking street—the Bahnhofstrasse.

Five new stolen credit cards reposed in the eel skin vertical wallet in the breast pocket of his new leather blazer. His magician’s fingers were still matchless at the Misdemeanor Waltz. The five cards had been extracted from obvious American tourists, all the better to remain undiscovered for longer. Tourists moved on fast these days, and, in patchwork Europe, could scoot two countries over in a day.

His slacks and silk turtleneck were Ralph Lauren, his shoes Bruno Magli. He’d also bought an electric razor that would beat back his black beard (with a slight gray sheen—when had that happened? Or was it new? Just how old was he?) to a disguising, yet film-star-hip smudge of three days’ growth. The way the bristles had annoyed him on the road, he figured he’d been smooth-shaven previously. His hair had been expensively barbered into the miserable spiky male coxcomb in vogue nowadays that made guys look like the village idiot, or worse, Clay Aiken. Everything elegant and costly was available within walking distance on the Bahnhofstrasse, despite the current economic swoon, a key advantage. Conspicuous consumption never died.

He figured bold was the best disguise. A rich Irishman would not be out of place here. The once-impoverished island nation where his forebears had starved for want of potatoes was having an Irish Spring of high-tech industrialization.

Yes, he’d donned a faint mist of brogue. It came as easy to him as German, even the Swiss variation. As had the facts of recent Irish economic upswing before the recent global recession. That he knew these geopolitical facts and other languages made Garry Randolph’s story about their being partners in counterterrorism for years ring ominously true.

The only things he didn’t know about was his childhood, boyhood, and personal, educational, professional, and romantic history. Details.

He’d shopped before he approached the Gotthard’s front desk, where he’d muttered in broken German about a skiing accident in the Alps having delayed his getting to a banking appointment in Zurich. He was rather embarrassingly marooned at the moment but had a crucial appointment at Adler and Company, Privatbank, in the morning. Was any sort of suite or even a single room available?

His illness-drawn face and the hokey carved cane, which he regarded with rueful disdain and reluctant dependence, had convinced the hotel manager. That and his Gucci bag. Snooty service staff assessed women first by their handbags, then their shoes, and finally their jewelry. For men, the order was watch, luggage, wallet, shoes.

That’s why a shiny new Patek Philippe high-dollar watch weighed down Max’s bony wrist, courtesy of an oil company executive from Texas. Max didn’t like the piece’s looks and overhyped luxury, but wore it proudly in the name of Enron ripped-off ex-employees everywhere. Corporate greed deserved a comeuppance.

See? It was all coming back. The nightly news. The exhausted American economy, the Irish renaissance. Brand names. Foreign words. But . . . nothing Personal. He felt like a data-gorged robot.

Maybe that was why he was chasing Revienne and her Mercedes chariot when he ought to let her go her own way, villain or victim, true purpose unknown.

But he couldn’t. She’d laughed over dinner in the mountain village, and wolfed down her meal like a real girl. She’d scavenged for him in the mountain meadow farmholds, finding a saw to cut through his imprisoning casts, begging food and clothing. She’d massaged his mending legs until he’d fallen asleep, as trusting as an infant.

If she’d been kidnapped because of him . . .

If she’d been leading him on . . .

Who was Max? Hero or killer? Or just Garry Randolph’s protégé, long past the age of needing mentors?

After this drink, and a dinner of the restaurant’s famed seafood, Max would be whisked five stories high in this 1889-vintage building to an arty suite with an Internet connection.

Did he even know how to connect to the Internet, much less real people, including Revienne? Had to. If the languages had come back to him, so would the technology. Just . . . nothing Personal.

His mind did another of its disconcerting flashbacks: to bright alpine wildflowers, a bouquet of fragrant yellow freesias, a pretty brunet bus driver who wrangled a major German bus and had granted him passage, and . . . a redheaded woman with gray-blue eyes. Revienne was blond.

Max lurched up. The “lurch” was partly his legs and partly his aquavit. Time for dinner and then a tour of the world by Internet. He’d punch in the words “Garry Randolph,” “Revienne,” “Schneider,” and “Max.”

As Edward R. Murrow, the pioneer TV broadcaster, used to say in closing his TV news program, “Good night and good luck.”

See! He remembered vintage catchphrases from before he was born.

Why not his own damned history?

While my human posse is introducing itself to our new venue, concentrating on the Dancing With the Celebs set and environs, I figure I better get my black velvet pads pussyfooting over the Oasis Hotel’s entire layout.

One never knows when the big picture will come in handy.

The Oasis is one of those midlevel Las Vegas people palaces, like the Luxor, and the remaining grand old dames of the Strip like the Riviera.

This does not mean that the Oasis is not the usual wild and crazy theme park of an attraction. Where the Luxor exploits the archeological fascination of ancient Egypt, the Oasis concentrates on eastern mysticism in general. Which is a nice way of saying that architecturally and thematically it is a hash of pop culture: ancient hidden treasure, camel trains of stolen jewels, Marco Polo, a little Sinbad and the 1001 Nights, harems, gypsy fortune-tellers, belly dancers, you get the Kodak. It has grabbed the lost Aladdin Hotel’s marketing spot with a more multicultural air.

An undercover operative like myself often ends up spending the most time on the shady and elite sides of the Strip. Crime tends to erupt at the extremes of the social scale. The happy middle is where passion and money tend to be on the mild and cheap scale. It is not surprising that Mr. Rafi Nadir could quickly rise to a second-in-command security position here, not to take anything away from his admirable reformation.

Apparently, discovering an unknown out-of-wedlock child can stabilize a man.

I cannot say that the discovery of my reputed offspring, Miss Midnight Louise, provided me with any impetus other than to run the other way. My impulse was intense, I will give the situation that. Miss Midnight Louise would be cranky that I am operating solo now, but purse pussies do not come in pairs, unlike shoes, or even gumshoes.

So I prowl the busy-patterned carpet underfoot, a mere shadow in the corner of everyone’s eye, busy educating myself to the scene of any crimes to come. For there will be at least one, with so much ill will already expressed in terms of death threats and the repeat appearance of the Barbie Doll Killer’s calling cards.

A Vegas hotel floor plan is like a small city to a guy my size. My walking tour would be hard on my pins were it not that I have discovered that this place houses something of deep personal interest, namely a dame.

She first appears to me on the back of a playing card that has fallen to the carpet. Now, this is a mortal sin, or at least a killing offense in Vegas, where every card being accounted for is a matter of life and death.

Loose cards imply dirty tricks, fixing, or worse.

So I nudge my find farther under the blackjack table, braving overexcited and milling human feet. The light is not so good here but I can still make out the lithe photographic form: sleek, asphalt-dark curves fast enough to derail a Porsche, legs that never end in black silk stockings, a flexible rear appendage long enough to derail a train, and the most unearthly, twenty-four-karat golden eyes I have ever seen.

These orbs—and, yes, that expression is okay, folks, because they are as round and brilliant as harvest moons—would hypnotize a Svengali.

Phew. I can hardly tear my gaze away already. I am so smitten I risk exposure to scale the table and eye the dealer’s shoe, which is not footwear, but a device for holding several decks of cards. Oh, my yes. Bingo! Every card slipped out of the shoe is a graphic tribute to this most sublime feline form.

“Hey!” some twenty-one happy gambler carps at my sudden presence. “I was just about to double down.”

I spit out the card I found on the floor so it falls to the green felt.

“Uh,” the loudmouth grunts. I found the card under his chair.

The dealer is frowning. “Stay right there, sir.”

“Damn cat!” the guy spits at me.

I snatch up the card and jump down. “Damn cat!” the dealer yells in parting. I can hear the crooked player chuckling to see the evidence vanishing with me.

I am not about to give up my card until I can find the model and have her personalize it.

There are two things I now need to locate: a pedigree pin-up book to pin down what breed of cat she is, and info around the hotel to find out who and where she is.

First I stash the card under a roulette table.

I cannot go wandering around a casino with a loose playing card clenched in my hot little black lips and sharp white teeth. Being an ace investigator, I know it is no coincidence that this hot, hairy little honey is backing every last darn Oasis playing card.

Pretty soon I am seeing those opulent gold eyes gazing soulfully down at me from posters and signs all over the hotel.

There she is, Miss American Beauty, curling into the Big O of Oasis over the show ticket booth, atop the registration desk on giveaway cards in Lucite boxes, six-feet-long lounging over the word “Theater” in the marquee to the nightly show.

Oh, no. I hope she is not literally a Big Cat. (There are some limits to even one of Midnight Louie’s romantic prowess.)

By now I am frantic.

I cannot believe that a dude of my discrimination and wide-ranging territory and nose for news all over Las Vegas has failed to notice the hot new girl in town! I must lay eyes on her, if nothing else.

It is while crossing the casino carpet, ignoring the hustle and bustle and jostle, that I at last catch her scent. It is sweet, earthy, musky, like expensive perfume. I immediately think of rare amber-gris. It may or may not be based in that treasured effusion of the sperm whale that the ancient Egyptians burned as incense—they worshiped cats, if you recall, so they were the smart sort—but it is music to my nose. It means that she is not “fixed,” that abomination of birth control perpetrated on my kind for its own good, but also for a major reduction in fun for me.

Now that I have a scent to follow, it is nose to the nap around the casino. In fact, I am so much the bloodhound on a trail that I bump into a table leg, face-to-face.

No! Not a table leg, but the leggy object of my search.

She is sitting there like a statue of regal Bast, the Egyptian cat goddess, only she is not eight feet tall, or even three feet tall like a Big Cat, but only a foot or so high and warm and satin-furred and I am lost.

I can see why I mistook her for Bast. She wears a collar and from it dangle glittering amber crystal teardrops. She looks like a billion bucks and I am just a two dollar bill. I am always falling for dames beyond my station.

“My apologies, miss. I was so hot on the trail I missed your presence.”

“What trail are you on, sir?”

Well, I cannot come right out and say it. That would be crass.

“Allow me to introduce myself,” I say, bowing so my luxurious black vibrissae blend tips with hers. (Vibrissae are known as whiskers to the commoner sort, such as humans.) “I am working undercover in this hotel. You may have heard of the Dancing With the Celebs event.”

“Then you are masquerading as a dancer?”

“No, I am masquerading as a celebrity mascot.”

“Oh! I am a mascot too!”

“What a coincidence. What are you a mascot of, or for?”

“This whole hotel. And your mascotery is—”

I am not about to identify myself as a “purse pussy.”

“I am a private detective by profession, Midnight Inc. Investigations, assigned to one of those currently popular teen pop tarts in the dance show, one Miss Zoe Chloe Ozone, as a personal pet. Only for appearances, I assure you. I am no one’s personal pet, although there are occasions when I would make an exception for the right little doll who could wrap me around her long supple tail.”

“You look like you have quite a long supple . . . tail yourself, Mr. Midnight.”

I am about ready to belie my words and do the happy dance.

“And how did you become a hotel mascot, may I ask?” I go on. “Other than sublime good looks, of course.”

She tilts her head adorably to the side and runs her little red tongue over her vibrissae, making them tremble, and me too.

“My mistress is a public events coordinator for this hotel.”

“What a coincidence! Miss Temple Barr, my current roommate, is a freelance version of same. She is a clever and comely and petite little doll to whom I am devoted.”

“How amazing. My Miss Tuesday Weldon answers to the same description and is devoted to me. I inspired her theme for the entire hotel.”

“What a coup for catkind. You are truly a pioneer.”

“I only assist my mistress. You are the first feline PI I have heard of. You must have carved a trail too.”

“This is top secret. I assist my roommate too. We are both undercover.”

“This is my hotel, Mr. Midnight. I deserve to know what danger assaults it.”

“The usual death threats so far.”

“Yes, that is quite usual these days. Well, Mr. Midnight—”

“I do not stand on formalities. Call me Louie.”

“Very well, Louie. I am working right now and must be on my appointed rounds.”

“‘Appointed rounds’? Surely you are not delivering mail?”

Her laugh is an entrancing burst of soft purrs. “No, no. Nothing so mundane. I am to cover the floor and show myself.”

“You are not being put on parade like a showgirl!”

“I am a showgirl, Louie,” she responds, patting my cheek with velvet paw. “I appear nightly at the Sandbox Lounge in the hotel, with the house magician.”

I stiffen. (Not that way!) The evil Hyacinth, the late Shangri-La’s feline assistant, had hitched her star to the only Asian female magician in Vegas.

“My main job,” she goes on, “is to stroll around with my necklace of amber-colored jewels. I am a walking special offer. The hotel’s guests can earn free chips, a dinner, a lodgings discount or other prizes by spotting me on my rounds and unfastening a pendant jewel from my collar.”

I would like to unfasten her collar! “So your work is promotional?”

“Purely.”

“I see your mistress is clever indeed and that I must not detain you longer, no matter how much I might wish to, as your job is to be mobile.”

“You are so . . . intuitive, Louie. I do like a sensitive male. I hope our paths cross again.”

“I am sure they will. And if a feline chap were to snag one of your valuable dangles—?”

“He would return it. For, alas, only humans can redeem the pendants for rewards.”

“Oh, I think there would rewards aplenty for an enterprising feline PI.”

“Just between you and I—”

I lean inward, not about to correct the grammar wafting from that honeyed breath.

“One of the faux pendants they place on my collar each morning is not just crystal, but a precious jewel. And the reward for finding that is major.”

I think for a moment, which is a considerable challenge, under the circumstances, as you may imagine.

“‘A precious jewel.’ Perhaps a jewel as precious as your name?”

“And what would that be, Louie?”

I am about to display my precious deductive gift.

“It is a gemstone,” I say, watching the flash of an appreciative gleam in her glorious golden eyes, “often having others substituted for itself: plain citrine, even lowly smoky quartz. But the true stone is worth a thousand times the lesser stones’ value, and ranges through a divine rainbow of warm gilt colors, from faintest dawn gold to the warm, ruddy sherry of sunset, and it is called ‘precious topaz,’ as are you.

“It has been a pleasure to meet you, Miss Topaz. I trust it will not be the last occasion.”

I am rewarded by the sight of her almost invisible airy black eyebrow vibrissae lilting high in shock and pleasure at my correct prediction of her name. I bow and back away.

Midnight Louie knows when to leave them laughing, and, more important, when to leave them swooning.

Art Thou?

Just like on Dancing With the Stars, Temple discovered, the local Celebs stars got only one dress rehearsal, two hours before the live show.

Four couples doing a minute-and-a-half routine didn’t seem like it would be a big production, but they had to rehearse the opening intro, coordinating with the live band and backup singers, and wrestling the buttons, bows, and spangles on the elaborate costuming that had been cooked up literally overnight.

(This was Vegas, baby! Costumes were the equivalent of street clothes here on the Strip.)

Zoe Chloe settled down in the front center row of audience seats, her bodyguards-cum-posse at her side. Louie prowled the area, his favorite perch being the empty judges’ table, where he sprawled finally to yawn, scratch, and lick his privates throughout all the rehearsed numbers, greatly amusing the crew.

“Two hours wasted,” Rafi groaned, “to watch amateur twinkletoes. Private cop work is worse than public cop work.”

“Anything might happen,” Molina snapped. “A life may be at stake, given the threats, and it’s on your turf and your watch.”

“I get it, Carmen. Too bad Mariah’s whole life wasn’t on my watch.”

“And what would you have had to offer? Child support? Please.”

Zoe Chloe leaned forward between them, effectively becoming a Goth girl wall.

“Peeps! You’re forgetting you work for me now. Cut the personal crap. I need to watch this to learn how Crawford Buchanan emcees the big boys and girls so I have a role model for my star turn with the little girls and boys.”

“Yeah.” Rafi snorted. “You learning from Buchanan. That’d be like the lieutenant here learning from Deputy Barney Fife. Call this what it is, babysitting.”

He nodded at Mariah and the junior dancers huddling in the front row of the side section, looking rapt and a little scared by the bored Los Hermanos Brothers sitting on their spines behind them.

“It’s not natural,” Rafi rumbled. “Real guys don’t dance.”

Molina kept silent on the subject.

“That is sooo a middle-aged ’tude, dude,” Zoe Chloe said after a three-beat pause. “If anyone here says Matt is not a real man, I will hit them with my designer tote bag, with Louie in it!”

“Present company’s fiancé excluded,” Molina said quickly. She eyed Rafi. “Some men have out-of-date macho issues.

“Max danced,” Temple said suddenly, in her own persona. “Like a dream.”

Rafi shrugged. “From what I hear, he was all balls, so I stand corrected.”

Molina fumed visibly as her face turned a dull beet-red, but she literally bit her lip.

Temple had the funny feeling Molina had known Max danced.

Or was the Iron Maiden of the LVMPD recalling when she and Max had done the martial arts tango in the strip club parking lot several months ago? Good ole Carmen the Cop had told Matt that Max had gotten sexual with her then, but she was always ready to blacken Max’s motives. Temple had never confronted Molina about that. Maybe she should.

Luckily, right then Crawford Buchanan oiled on stage and crooned into his MC’s handheld mike.

“Welcome to Dancing With the Celebs, Las Vegas’s answer to presenting new terpsichorean stars of the entertainment firmament.” Every eye was on the top of each side staircase, where the first couples would pose and descend. Temple knew that walking head up and smiling down steps without looking at your feet was a demanding art.

She was also as rapt and eager as the junior girls to ogle the lavish costumes, makeup, and hairstyles. Stagecraft always delighted her. She figured Zoe Chloe was a glamour groupie too.

Temple had wedding bell stars in her eyes when his name was announced and Matt came out with a fragile-looking Glory B. on his arm.

“The first dance is a waltz,” she whispered to no one in particular, eyeing the women’s full, floating skirts and the guys’ formal evening getups. On either side, her undercover escorts tried to blink their eyes wider open to stay attentive. Obviously Molina and Rafi had never treasured wedding day dreams even when they first met years ago.

A full, formal wedding, yes! In Chicago and maybe again in Minneapolis. She was Glory B.’s size. Those yards of white organdy and trailing chiffon and pearls and rhinestones, a bride on a cloud with Matt glitteringly blond—what had they done to him? Oh, the spray tan, spray-in platinum highlights, then black-and-white formal dress. Matt would seethe about the artifice, but Zoe Chloe would have to beat them off with a baseball bat.

Ooh! The first threat of brutal violence at this competition and it was in Temple’s head.

“Prince Charming,” Rafi conceded, reading her besotted reaction and realizing he had just dissed her fiancé. “I guess a father-of-the-bride would put up with that if the guy could play pool.”

Temple felt ridiculously pleased, as if her father were sitting there okaying Matt.

Molina kept silent.

Did the woman have no hormones? Temple wondered, gazing happily on her beloved. The other couples weren’t tacky, either. She sighed as she absorbed the romantic costumes. And here Zoe Chloe was exiled to the lost-and-found department of teen angst: painted-on Goth tears and bedhead hair, long waif legs in funky hose under ultrashort skirts. Schoolgirl decadence.

Then she pulled herself out of the pack of overwhelmed audience and back into the persona of eagle-eyed observer. This dress rehearsal was the first time anyone had seen the contestants perform and could evaluate them. Even the judges would not arrive until the actual performances to give their thumbs-up and thumbs-down.

Temple’s innards were fluttering, hoping she hadn’t led Matt astray. Hoping he would perform as well as he looked. Hoping she got a hell of a wedding reception waltz with the groom out of this stunt.

Molina was looking more forbidding than ever, keeping a keen eye on Mariah and her giggling young cohorts and the smooth boy-band stars sitting behind the girls. The four junior couples would perform one to a show the four days before the finale.

What was different about this program was that the celebrities would take turns dancing with each other, after being coached by their propartners.

So, trailing down the treacherous stairs after Matt and Glory B., came the Cloaked Conjuror in stunning Phantom of the Opera mask and costume with a red-silk-lined cloak that preserved his anonymity even as it glamorized it. He had drawn escorting the ripe (firmly past fifty but sucked and tucked to make a TV living) Olivia Phillips as the Lady in scarlet satin and tulle.

Next came the lean and darkly handsome Olympic fencer, José Juarez, escorting the Amazonian wrestler Wandawoman, clad in off-the-shoulder jonquil satin that displayed her pumped up shoulders and arms, yet made power look feminine.

Last came celebrity chef Keith Salter, whose Three Tenor physique had somehow been jammed into a suave formal dress profile. His partner was the self-described “Hip-Hop Ho,” Motha Jonz, who had been corseted up and toned down into a jazz age queen in mocha chiffon and sequins.

Temple loved these onstage transformations. That was what made Dancing With the Stars a hit. Sure they were B- or C-level celebrities on the brink of has-beenship. It was never too late. Anyone could apply themselves to a new discipline, work hard, and come out fresh and even svelte from the chrysalis. It was Cinderella and the American dream all over again. Over and over. Make overs were ratings kings.

Why anyone would want to taint such a glorious American showbiz tradition with sabotage and death threats was puzzling.

What with Awful Crawford botching his intros, backstage costume problems, and ladies’ high heels catching in trailing, floor-length skirts, it took the entire two hours for each couple and the first junior contestant to get their full moment in the sun of the spotlights.

Matt’s waltz was smooth and sweeping. He was a dream prom date. Mariah’s compadres were giggling and whistling and clapping up a storm for him.

Temple relaxed, well pleased.

The Cloaked Conjuror already had a dramatic stage presence, and if he was heavy on his feet, he had an operatic majesty that made a stately frame for Olivia’s seasoned charms.

José Juarez executed a number of swoon-inducing masculine flourishes that made light of the task of steering the statuesque Wandawoman smoothly around the floor.

Weakest was the Keith Slater–Motha Jonz combo. Both were portly, and neither cooking nor hip-hop seemed professions that lent themselves to the froth of performing an elegant waltz. Both seemed embarrassed by everything: dance, costume, music, each other.

No one would be booted off until the end of the week, but judges would score everyone each night. Viewers would call in their votes daily, each call contributing twenty dollars to the cancer fund. In a reverse of the usual order, the judges’ scores would remain secret while the viewers would dominate the scoreboard. The kicker was that the judges could overturn a ranking.

Because both dancing partners were being scored separately, it would be hard to tell the leaders from the losers until the very end. And the viewers would become more frantic to visibly boost their favorites as the scoreboard player favorites.

“Care to make a bet?” Rafi asked Temple, leaning in to whisper.

“My money is on blond over black,” she said. “Our boy is looking good, but I admit José has the edge on the Latin dances. Polish is not the Latin type or temperament. I’m sure they started with the waltz to put everybody on an even basis to begin with.”

Molina leaned in on Temple’s other side, as if competing with Rafi. “This is all hopeless hoopla. If Ekaterina didn’t look like a lost sheep, I’d jerk Mariah out of here in half a heartbeat. Rafi, you’re backup. Watch her!”

He nodded. “I’m glad she’s not competing. That’s where all the attention is focused.”

“My point exactly. We’ve got to focus on Mariah because she’s in the background.”

“So far this has been pretty tame,” he said.

Molina eyed her large, serviceable watch. “Everyone gets a dinner break before the show. Zoe-ee can take her cat and hang in the junior girl’s dressing rooms. You and I can split,” she told Rafi, “to cover the men’s and women’s dressing rooms.”

“Uh,” said Temple, “I might want to buzz by the men’s dressing room for some hit-and-run secs.”

Both stared at her. She realized what “secs” sounded like.

Molina frowned. She might not rock ’n’ roll, but she was becoming a champion Botox candidate overnight. “You don’t want to blow your cover as a ditsy Goth girl.”

“Pish! Zoe Chloe is a total man groupie. She just wants to google-oogle the guys in the changing room and report back breathlessly to all the junior girls. It’s part of her job building rapport with her peeps!”

“Will you stop using that asinine expression? No one is . . . are . . . your ‘peeps.’ ” Molina eyed them both, then made an executive decision. “You,” she told Rafi, “will watch this loose cannon and make sure she doesn’t roll right over all our efforts to lock down the danger quotient at this contest. And you,” she told Temple, “will keep your contact with your fiancé to the bare minimum.”

Zoe Chloe smiled like a cherub. “I wish I could make certain that those female contestants did that too.”

Zoe Chloe was one subdued little Goth girl by the time they arrived at the men’s dressing room door.

Rafi Nadir wasn’t the dumb, disgruntled ex-cop Molina acted like he was. Maybe he’d been bitter and angry when he’d first discovered his ex-roommate was alive and well with his unsuspected child in Las Vegas. That was then. He’d pulled it together since, as far as Temple could tell, maybe because his ex-roommate was alive and well with his unsuspected child in Las Vegas.

And maybe he was just a tad jealous of any man Molina knew in this town, which included two of Temple’s.

Rafi knocked on the open dressing room door. “Femme coming through.” He must have done touring show security work to know the backstage routines.

A leg trousered in black kicked the ajar door wide. “We’re loaded with femmes. Bring her on in.”

José Juarez was lounging in a metal folding chair, his dress shirt open to the navel. He eyed her. “You one of the kiddie dancers? Sure you’re old enough to be here?”

Rafi was there like a bodyguard. “Ms. Ozone is the celebrity emcee for the junior competition. She wanted to acquaint herself with the adult division competitors.”

José spread his arms to display his pecs and washboard stomach, reassured she was of age. “Acquaint yourself.”

Obviously God’s gift to the female gender. Temple eyed the women costumers who were still fussing around with final touches.

Three of the four men contestants were stationed at mirrors framed with lightbulbs as thick as dotted Swiss. Tasty snack food on hotel ware lay amid the scattered hair products and makeup, a buffet for the harried hoofer.

At Keith Slater’s station, a full dinner filled a room service tray accessorized with linen, sterling silver, and a single rose in a vase. Too bad Keith was standing, with a weird air of satisfaction and embarrassment, as a female costumer knelt before him to repair an entire seam on the fly of his pants that had ripped out during the rehearsal.

His food was getting cold, but he must be so severely corseted for the dance that the trousers couldn’t be removed for repair. Backstage mishaps broke down the usual modesty bounds, and at least Salter’s corset ensured he’d have good posture during the waltz.

Matt was at the other end, wolfing down a ham sandwich while being admonished by Tatyana.

“Shoulders back and you will be perfect,” she was saying.

His grooming remained perfect, except for his tucked front white shirt, open at the neck for breathing and eating room, and revealing a bit of tan rub-off inside the collar.

“You were awesome in rehearsal,” Zoe Chloe cooed. (When you had a name like Zoe Chloe, you could coo.)

Tatyana rolled her hazel eyes. “When he has shoulders back properly, he will be this ‘awesome.’ Do not swell his head too much, little Miss Muffet, or his collar will not close for the actual performance. A good rehearsal can jinx the real thing.”

She huffed away to pick at another of her pupils, the Cloaked Conjuror, whose costume and full-face mask forced him to stand and watch the others eat while he killed time. He was just visiting, as Zoe and Rafi were. Because of constant threats on his life, he’d been given a separate dressing room, with his own bodyguards on duty as well as hotel security.

Matt sighed relief to see Temple and Rafi.

“You are looking at an airbrushed portrait of a person,” he said. “Was the waltz all right? I felt like a badly soldered tin soldier on parade.”

“First-rate,” Temple whispered in her own voice. “Right, Rafi?”

“Jumping around in that monkey suit must be worse than having shingles,” Rafi said, “but even Molina shut up to watch you. You must be doing something right.”

Matt momentarily shut the unexpectedly brown eyes that made his enhanced blond hair look so electric. “That’s right. This is not radio anymore, Dorothy. Everybody will be watching me. I just ask that my performance be passable, and the kids’ leukemia fund gets lots and lots of money.”

“Don’t let that dance machine hear you say ‘passable,’ ” Temple warned, eyeing Tatyana. “She is a Russian bear down to her size-five jackboots. Besides, you were great! Unbiased reaction from a Goth brat totally unimpressed by anyone and anything. All right?”

“All right,” Matt answered. “You better spread your unbiased sunshine elsewhere for a while, but not on Mr. Leer near the door.”

“He is so lame,” Zoe Chloe said. “Hitting on a teen babe like me. I mean, I go for younger guys, like those Los Hermanos hotties. Speaking of which, I gotta peel to see what the deal is with my crew in the junior division.”

“Mariah okay?” Matt asked, his eyes darting from Temple to Rafi.

“Super,” Zoe answered. “I’m leavin’ my man Raf here to watch all you big, bad boys, and will be hangin’ with my homeys down dressing-room row. Mariah is in her girlie element, believe. I will have her running off with a Hermanos brother before Mama Molina can say ‘Amber Alert.’ ”

“Poor Molina,” Matt said.

“You watch the kid,” Rafi ordered Temple. “This isn’t all fun and games.”

She left them, Rafi standing uneasily by Matt, eyeing the guys being fed and primped down the mirrored line, looking like a visitor from another planet who’d like to level this one.

Malfunction II

If there is anyone in this entire place who is fully qualified to smell a rat, it is I.

I mean this quite literally.

A lot of scents assail my highly developed sniffer during these recent, critical moments since I pushed my way past a phalanx of human legs to the side of the little doll who was most cruelly afflicted.

First, human foot odor. Arghh!

This alone is enough to knock a sensitive dude—a short, sensitive dude—off his four pins. Why will they insist on confining and cooking the unhappy aroma of their pathetically unclawed feet inside these thick leather and canvas boxes?

Air, my fellow Americans! Please! We four-footed citizens only ask that you aerate your tootsies as fully and often as we do ours. You will notice that we are not subject to such ills as bunions, corns, hammertoes, and athlete’s foot, although we are better natural-born athletes than the whole kit and caboodle of you put together.

Having fought my way through this chemical hazard of foot odor, I am able to insinuate myself next to the maternal unit, which is swamped in a chemical cosmetic haze of other, supposedly pleasant odors.

A word to the wise: cover-ups never work.

In the confusion, and under the cover of this one large, hysterical lady who goes by the appellation “Mama,” I am able to thrust myself into the heart of the problem: the tiny dancer’s still twitching feet.

Whew! I will give credit to the heat of the dance. This little doll’s feet are sniffing up a storm. It is not the unnatural natural odor I am accustomed to.

It is rank, but artificial. In fact, it makes me draw back and box my snout to stifle a sneeze. Itching powder? I have heard of such an item being used for practical jokes, but this is no joke.

The first solo dance in the junior division has turned into a debacle. Although Miss Sou-Sou is something of a snot deserving of a comeuppance, I cannot endorse dirty tricks among the young teen set.

As the fascinating feet in my purview are lifted aloft by the awesome CC, I resolve to do what my human associates cannot do in their present guises. I will accompany the victim until I learn what is going on, and who and what might be behind it.

Ouch! Of course some careless foot has kicked me in the puss.

Dodging these ticky-tacky boxes of milling footwear, I manage to maintain a low profile by stifling any indignant meows.

At last I insinuate myself into the junior girls’ dressing room, although I am by no means either a junior or a girl, and join the privileged circle surrounding the now crying child, who alone of her group is still in the set area. For a thirteen-year-old human kit in pain is just that, no matter how many slinky costumes she wears.

In a moment or two, it is as if I am back in my checkered past, fence-sitting at midnight and yowling some selected riffs guaranteed to attract any nubile females in the vicinity. Only I do not attract nubile females of any species, just the usual hurled footwear reeking of abysmal pedal swamps . . .

These are a pair of petite mary jane-style shoes ripped off the feet of the suffering little doll. I dodge the Cuban heels, which could make a nasty dent in my cranium, and put my nose to work. You may notice I understand the fine points of female footwear, thanks to my roomie’s formidable shoe collection.

The whines of the victim and coos of the comforters vanish from my consciousness as my nose for trouble inhales a big gulp of the hot and bothered linings of the shoes in question.

Yeow!!! I leap back, forced to swallow my natural vocalizations. My pea-green peepers beloved of females of all species tear over and cry crocodile tears onto my jet-black bib. My sensitive, exposed nose skin burns like the very devil was exhaling the breath of Hell itself on it.

I know what has happened, if not why yet.

What a despicable plan, a dirty trick of the first water, and I do mean watering eyes! I backpedal out of the room as fast as I can, my mitts eager to box the obnoxious, polluting fumes from brutalized nostrils.

No wonder the poor girl was screeching.

Who would commit such a nefarious act?

It is clever and underhanded and mean, and thus totally and utterly human in its conception and execution from first to last. I cannot wait for my humans to find out what has gone wrong.

Molina came charging down the hall outside the junior girls’ hotel suite so fast the two hotel security guards at the door put their palms on their gun butts.

“Chill,” she said, “LVMPD shield.”

She produced it after transferring the tote bag containing Midnight Louie to Temple’s custody.

“He was in the dressing-room area already. Pesky cat,” she growled at Temple. “And he weighs the advertised ton.”

The guards glanced from the tote bag cat to Molina’s retro-sixties headband and love beads to her jeans and moccasins.

“We’ve been told there were undercover city cops on the premises,” the old guy said.

“The little girl will be all right,” Molina said. “It was a nasty prank. I want to interrogate the other girls and their mothers without it looking like it, so Ms. Ozone here and I will be doing that. And I’ll probably take a couple of the girls back to our high-roller suite, where your assistant security chief is . . . on duty 24/7. Of course no one is to know who I am or any of this, right?”

“Got it, Lieutenant,” the young guy, Hank, said. “Rafi Nadir made me floor boss on this detail. You can count on me.”

The older one just gawked. Lieutenants weren’t usually out in the field. Then he eyed Zoe Chloe and Midnight Louie and swallowed.

“I’ll be ordering a couple of room service pizzas,” Molina added. “Check ’em and the waiter out, even though I said they’re coming. You know the room service waitstaff, right?”

“There are an awful lot of ’em in a place this size,” Roy said.

“I know the equipment and the drill, Lieutenant,” Hank assured her. “I’ll call human resources on them if there’s anything suspicious.”

“I got a granddaughter these girls’ age,” Roy added as further reassurance.

“Okay.” Molina knocked at the door and nodded at Temple to go in first. “Tell ’em the Goth fairy is bringing cat hair and pizza.”

Molina might be a security fanatic, but did she know kids.

Everybody in the room squealed when Zoe Chloe fronted in. She was the next best thing to a Los Hermanos brother.

An announcement of pizza for all was the third best thing.

And Louie to coo over was a solid fourth.

Molina dutifully called room service like the Zoe Chloe Ozone middle-aged flunky she was portraying while the girls shouted out their druthers for toppings. Like most hotel order-in pizzas these days, an outside franchise handled the calls, so the menu was pretty standard.

Except when Zoe Chloe Ozone ordered a custom shrimp, artichoke heart, and jalapeño one for her star-self alone.

“Any news on Sou-Sou?” the question came from kids and mothers alike.

Neither Temple nor Molina had gotten a good group look at the mothers. The overblown Smith woman was with her absent daughter, leaving only the two others present, since Mariah was serving as EK’s “manager.”

Patrisha Peters, the only African-American contestant, was a lean, leggy skateboarder, but her mother was a pleasantly plump, attractive woman with a calm manner. She introduced herself as Frances Peters. Meg-Ann’s mother wasn’t anything like her hard-driving soccer-athlete daughter. Angie Peyton was unpleasantly plump, her clothing straining at all the most unfortunate places, her hair showing dark roots, and her manner both harried and disinterested. In a sense she was the sloppy side of Yvonne Smith. Temple guessed she was underemployed and financially stressed, probably through no fault of her own but divorce and bad luck.

Snap judgments were often all wrong. Now was the time to ask the women to reveal themselves.

Zoe Chloe plopped down cross-legged (all the better to show off her skull-head white-on-black tights) on a sofa.

“This is my personal assistant, Vicki,” she said, waving at Molina. “I had her check with the staff backstage. What’d they say, Vick?”

As she’d hoped, Zoe Chloe had invented a name for Molina that the policewoman hated, from the expression on her face.

“Sou-Sou got a literal hotfoot from a substance put into her shoes,” Molina said, sounding way too copish with that “substance” talk.

“Then it was deliberate?” Frances Peters asked. “Sabotage? None of us here would do that.”

“That’s the thing,” Zoe Chloe said. “It doesn’t look good for any of the other contestants. So we gotta find out who and What everybody is, so we’re ready when the police get involved, if they do.”

“The police?” Angie Peyton asked, alarmed. “God, that’s just what our girls don’t need right now. They have enough stress.”

“Hotel security was talking about calling them in,” Molina, aka “Vicki,” put in virtuously, as if she wasn’t one. “Ms. Ozone is right. The more we know about the junior group, the more everybody will be off the hook.”

“What about that soap star whose heel broke?” Angie asked. “That was just an accident. Why isn’t this?” She seemed a woman born to be in denial.

“It could be,” Molina answered. “We’ve got to be ready if it isn’t. You know tabloid TV will be all over this.”

The girls remained listening, bright-eyed with curiosity and excitement at the mention of national TV exposure. The mothers’ brows were wrinkling with a realization of what bad press could do. Mariah was watching them all, not obviously. Even Ekaterina was serious and alert, trying to figure out what this meant.

Would a girl like EK, with so much riding on winning this contest, be the one to stoop to sabotage? Temple wondered.

“I suppose,” Frances Peters said slowly, “it’d be hard to say whether the girls or us mothers are the bigger suspects?”

Molina jumped in. “Everybody is suspect. I’ve spent years trying to spin good publicity from bad, and it can’t be done. Even Ms. Ozone is suspect. You moms are here to protect your daughters, but I’m here to make sure Ms. Ozone’s career isn’t damaged.”

Temple had to admire Molina’s gift for throwing a scare into people.

Meg-Ann and Patrisha exchanged the uneasy looks of kids who might know more than their mothers did, and Ekaterina’s waif-wide eyes expanded to pizza pan size.

Only Mariah remained unworried. She knew she was an undercover kid.

“So, anyway, peeps,” Zoe Chloe summed up, “things could get pretty unpleasant for all of us until someone finds out who put the hot sauce to Sou-Sou’s shoes. Hey, sounds like a funky song title. I say we can turn this into a fun gig and find out about each other and chill with some hot pizza and Dr Pepper.” She turned to her personal assistant. “You did remember to order Dr Pepper, didn’t you? That’s all I drink.”

Molina set her teeth and picked up the phone to order from room service, asking the other girls if they had any preferences.

Awestruck by the Zoe Chloe Ozone presence, they only wanted what their idol ordered.

Man, Temple could dig being a pop tart . . .

It is not like me to be so clumsy but it is like me to be so nosy.

Of course I did not “accidentally” overturn the red pepper shaker. That was just an excuse so that I could sniff around on all the shoeless feet and unguarded purses on the floor as children and mothers eat like starving lions and chatter like parrots.

Oh, that silly fellow. He just has to have his nose into everything.

Of course what I get for my sleuthing efforts is a flake up my left nostril and a sneezing fit. For this reason I doubt that actual pepper flakes were used in the incident.

It is not easy to conduct discreet investigations while sneezing up a storm. So I hunker under a chair to smother my nasal paroxysms and wait for the fit to subside. It is actually a clever way to get all present to totally forget about literally little me.

And that gives me plenty of time to overhear this and that, especially when Yvonne Smith comes in breathless about the vicious attack on her daughter and with a long report on Sou-Sou’s poor feet being tended by the hotel doctor in a security-guarded location. She is urged to sit down, relax, eat, and drink.

Thus, everyone has been lulled into forgetting my presence and I have reduced my aversion to red pepper flakes to the occasional sniffle. Floor-sitting ladies tend to forget against which object of furniture they have laid their precious purses. I slink out from concealment and sniff my way to each in turn.

Unfortunately, my clever red pepper exposure has served to blunt my usually sharp sniffer.

Miss Frances Peters’s bag is a large leather Stein Mart affair decorated with safari pockets and lots of metal hardware. You would not want to take it through an airport security line.

I detect a few ancient flecks of tobacco in the very bottom. Since I detected no such scent on the owner, I make the deduction that she purchased the bag from a resale establishment.

Nothing wrong with that! My Miss Temple does that all the time, especially in regard to high-end high heels, an item the original owners of which turn over almost daily, like Band-Aids for bunions.

This purse was never high-end, though, so I am guessing the Widow Peters is putting a lot of her money into survival. Patrisha’s win in this contest would get the kid opportunities her mother could never afford. Something to bear in mind.

Next I snuggle up to the bright yellow ruched leather bag favored by Angie Peyton, mother of the innovatively named Meg-Ann. You would never know her daughter was an athlete, but maybe Meg-Ann needed to overcome that first name.

Parents are even worse at naming offspring than they are at naming animal companions. I cannot complain about “Midnight Louie,” though. It is my street name, bestowed on me in my first neighborhood before I moved uptown. It is a moniker used by the street people who shared their humble meals with me when I was a kit, and I wear it proudly. My magnificent mature physique is a tribute to the less fortunate and their care and consideration for the even less fortunate.

If my Miss Temple does not have me down to a wraith again with her slavish devotion to feline health food! But I am not here to criticize anyone’s home cooking, and Angie Peyton’s bag is sweet rather than hot, holding loose chocolate-covered raisins and Oreo cookie four-packs.

Next I push my schnozz into the late-arriving Smith purse. This is a scarlet patent leather hobo bag, within which I pick up the scent of a woman: peppermint—achoo!—candies from restaurants. Aha! A careful woman. Burt’s Bees lip balm, which indicates a nervous woman; and . . . aha! . . . a not tightly capped can of pepper spray!

Granted it is not unusual for women to carry such self-defense items in their purses, but the scent is dead-on exact to the smell inside Sou-Sou Smith’s dainty little Mary Jane dancing shoes.

Should I sound the alarm on Mama Smith?

If I can so easily find this incriminating item in her purse so could anyone who hangs out in the junior suite. In addition, these tween girls all carry fashionable little purses, except for Mariah, who totes one of those sensible, small oblong wallets.

I see I have a long night of purse snatching, unlatching, and searching ahead of me while others eat, drink, and make merry.

After many wearying attempts to break unnoticed into everything that could be construed as a purse, including a Hello Kitty one that belongs to EK, I return to the scarlet Smith one. It is large enough and an excellent color. I curl up on it and pretend to sleep so well that I actually do.

The next thing I know, I am being shaken awake by my dear little doll. I remain limp and “sleepy.”

“Louie! We have to leave. Come on.”

She bends to heave me up. I have cleverly stuck my paw into the ajar frame and as she pulls me up the purse opens wide, like for a dentist. Oh, look what the purse fairy has left! A nice big can of pepper spray.

Of course my brilliant associate immediately gets the message. She looks over her shoulder at Yvonne Smith, who is busy yakking with Mrs. Peters. She reaches for the spray, hesitates, and appropriately purses her lips.

I can guess what she will do: alert those who need to know that Sou-Sou’s mother probably sprayed her own daughter’s dancing shoes to up the sympathy vote. It can’t be proven and I doubt Miss Temple would blow the whistle unless Sou-Sou wins.

“What a good boy, Louie,” she tells me as she lifts me up to her face for a mushy cuddle. “You always get into mischief in just the right way.”

That is ever the lot of the undercover operative, and he is glad to be of service even if he does not get full credit.

Especially if he can also snatch one last slice of free-range pepperoni after he is put down and before he leaves the scene of investigation.

“Capsaicin in her shoes? That’s red pepper, isn’t it?”

Temple pretended to be stunned by this news, despite relaxing with a glass of sangria in Zoe Chloe’s suite. Rafi had used his position as assistant security chief to order up a pitcher.

Molina, looking more in the mood for a whiskey sour, had even permitted him to pour her a glass.

“It was a prank!” Temple didn’t so much ask, as exclaim. She couldn’t pin the prank on Mrs. Smith for sure, despite Louie’s valiant detecting efforts. Lots of women carry pepper spray.

“A nastily effective prank,” Molina said. “The hotel doctor said the girl’s feet are swollen and tender, but guarantees they’ll be normal by morning.”

“What’s the treatment?” Rafi asked.

“Think you’ll have another case of capsaicin poisoning at the Oasis soon?” Molina jeered.

“I can ask the doctor.”

Molina swallowed the sangria as if it were hemlock. “Don’t bother. I got the routine. They try shampoo or other soaps first, then oils or creams. This was an extreme enough case that he ordered milk-soaked rags from room service, as well as ice to relieve the burning symptoms. Poor little kid was severely unnerved and in real pain.

“Still, I think what hurt her most was that her dance number was ruined.”

“They’ll let her repeat it another night,” Temple said. “Mariah thought so, anyway. If she recovered.”

“The Smith girl is moving to another hotel room with her mother. Now that we know how competitive they are, not a bad idea. I wish Mariah hadn’t ever bunked with those other girls.” Molina eyed Rafi as if the show rules were his fault.

“I pulled in more female security guards from off duty,” he said. “One will be in the hotel suite with the two remaining mothers and daughters at all times. And the costumes are now under guard.”

“Mariah said,” Temple put in, “that Sou-Sou was ‘a little bitch.’ ”

“She didn’t learn that word at home,” Molina assured, bristling.

“This smacks of a malicious trick,” Rafi said. His dark eyes seemed ringed in charcoal. It wasn’t just his daughter’s safety involved, it was his ex sitting here on his recently acquired turf, judging every move he made. Or didn’t make.

So far, he’d maintained his cool better than she had.

“How does this tie in with the death threats?” Molina mused out loud. “With the seriously homicidal kooks the Caped Conjuror always attracts? With the threat of the Barbie Doll Killer? With the tension and jealousy of the adult competition?”

“I don’t know,” Temple said. “It could be the junior rivalry is hotter than the senior.”

“You’re putting your own true love in the ‘senior’ category?” Molina asked acidly.

“Relatively speaking. Actually, there’s more rapport building among the adult contenders than the teens.”

“Adults know how to lose gracefully, or at least to pretend to,” Rafi put in.

Molina shot him a sharp look.

Temple shivered internally. Everything exchanged between these two had an unspoken double edge. Being with them was like acting as the net during a killer championship tennis match. Something had to give, eventually. Hopefully, it was not her, the separating agent.

Volleys of unspoken recriminations were bouncing over her head.

And yet she detected a certain heat.

It was hard to think of Molina having a sexy bone in her body, but the lieutenant’s iron professional control was probably a challenge to certain overly macho men.

Not Max. He was too smart to act macho. Rafi came by his Mideastern macho culturally and was trying to overcome it. Dirty Larry was another case entirely. She didn’t think she or Molina quite knew what he was about. Temple guessed that Molina unwittingly posed a challenge to these men that she really didn’t want or need.

Life was funny. People often attracted the people who were worst for them. She herself was a case study in attracting a daring lone ranger like Max and a supportive sweetie like Matt. If only she could compress them into one delicious totally perfect boyfriend.

Eek! Zoe Chloe Ozone stomped a black lace-up oxford worn over fishnet hose down hard on Temple’s ruminations. Was she even speculating that women didn’t really know what they wanted? Or needed? And men too?

Her head hurt, and her feet ached in sympathy with Sou-Sou’s. The girl was obnoxious, but young girls often got confused about which way to go, Wicked, as in the Broadway play, or nauseatingly “good.” Either extreme was an overdose.

Witch way would this crazy dance competition go now?

Rehearsals for Monday night’s dance began at 8:00 A.M. the next morning.

Temple and Louie padded down the hall leading to the junior rehearsal rooms. The big black cat was terminally tired of the tote bag and had adopted dog behavior, heeling alongside Temple like a well-trained spaniel.

They had barely turned down the hall before they had to stop. People were crowding wall to wall, and a constant murmur of voices echoed off them.

“Excuse me,” Zoe Chloe said, trying to elbow her way forward. “I’m in the cast. I have to get through.”

People gave way, barely sparing her a glance, which was saying something. She wore a black derby hat, blue lipstick, an orange-striped leotard, hot pink tights, and chartreuse Minnie Mouse platform shoes.

The bulk of TV station cameras loomed over the crowd ahead.

By the time Zoe Chloe and Louie reached the door to the first rehearsal room, it was obvious a media feeding frenzy was underway.

“Oooh,” Zoe Chloe trilled. “Hellooo remote feed. Pardon me while I boogie my Cheshire cat and me into the dancing party. I’m the emcee-ess of this little super circus and I need to see my dear little emcee-ees.”

That got the lights and cameras turned her way.

Temple knew they expected the third of the usual trilogy—Action!—so she danced sideways through the small tunnel they made singing, “Cockles and mussels, alive-a-live-oh.”

Zoe Chloe inhabited Alice in Wonderland territory as Temple saw it, and the more nonsensical she could be, the better. American Idol proved eccentric sold.

Rafi’s hotel troops kept the room uninvaded and Hank Buck saw that they let her through with a recognizing grimace while Roy stood by shaking his head.

The major media reporters and videographers were already inside, clustered around Sou-Sou and her feet. They were bare and normal this morning, but her mother was busy describing them as swollen as if a thousand bees had been at them the previous evening.

A series of foot-soothing devices were lined up for the famous feet: bubbling footbaths, soaking salts, blowing air dryers, ice baths and steam aerators. Sou-Sou was poking her hot pink footsies in them, as instructed by various media folks, as though they were exotic shrimp in need of many exotic sauces.

A second wardrobe malfunction had become a major media opportunity.

“Glorious, isn’t it?” a deep voice thrummed at the exact level of her ear, which was about four inches higher than usual, thanks to the chartreuse platform shoes.

Zoe Chloe eyed Crawford Buchanan and his glistening gaze agog at the publicity.

“Gross,” she responded. “Like cannibalism on Survivor.”

“Exactly!” he crowed. “You can’t arrange another interesting mishap, can you? That’d really raise ratings.”

“Someone sabotaged her Mary Janes,” Zoe Chloe pointed out. “That is baaad behavior, even on a reality TV show.”

“Hey! No permanent damage, just maximum media. That is goood showbiz. You’re just jealous, ZC.”

“Like her!” a woman yelled.

Zoe Chloe looked up to see Mrs. Sou-Sou pointing at her hot pink tights. “That’s how bright my poor Sou-Sou’s feet were last night. Like a boiled lobster’s.”

“Would you mind losing the shoes for us, Ms. Ozone?” a bold cameraman asked.

Crawford nudged her in the side. “Your big moment.”

She stepped out of the platform shoes and went flat-footed, herded by the reporters next to the preening Sou-Sou so they could pose with tiny feet together. Cameras crowded in to fixate on Zoe’s hot pink socks next to Sou-Sou’s hot pink bare feet. Flashes winked.

Then everybody laughed.

A large black paw was dipping in the footbath as if trolling for colorful koi.

When it came to scene-stealing, Midnight Louie was a master.

But his interference also gave the avid media maggots the money shot they craved. They faded away into the hall, leaving Zoe to mount her platforms again and assess the situation.

“So Sou-Sou can dance tonight?” she asked Yvonne Smith and her “Proud Parent” name tag.

No wonder the daughter had an exotic first name.

Mrs. Smith honored Zoe Chloe with a displeased once-over, but bowed to her online notoriety.

“Oh, yes. Doctor said a night’s elevation of her feet, along with ice packs and soothing ointment would have her in top tiptoe condition, and she is. Doctor said she just needs to keep her feet soothed between learning the new dance’s steps. She’ll trip the light fantastic like Tinker Bell by tonight.”

The woman smiled happily, basking with her daughter in the afterglow of media attention. Nobody would even wonder if mom had planned the shocking, attention-getting mishap.

Only Zoe Chloe had such a nasty, suspicious mind. And Midnight Louie.

The Internet had been as unrevealing as his memory.

He’d visited the Hummerbar again for a nightcap. He was revved. Revienned. Couldn’t sleep. An Internet search for the Mercedes license plate had gotten him nowhere. A Bailey’s Irish Cream and coffee in the bar only deepened his phony Celtic accent. He was a faker without a memory.

He limped out of the hotel onto the Bahnhofstrasse, still teaming with foot traffic a lot more sound than his three-way thump of cane and then two footsteps.

He’s paced this expansive, expensive tourist trap avenue for a day and a night. Was he grinding his legs to permanent disability? He sensed he never knew when to give up.

And then, there it was, a gift of the teeming night.

Black car. Zurich license plate, pulled up to the curb, pulsing there with a muted Mercedes purr. A blond woman in a pink wool suit was pushing out of the open back door as if her skirt was too tight (it was), her boot heels too high (they were) . . . and the pale pink leather was shriveled up the heels as if they had been thrust repeatedly down into resisting dirt. (They had been.)

Revienne! Trap or lucky break? That was the price of amnesia, constant second-guessing.

She struggled upright, glancing around wildly, staggering away from the car.

He bounded forward (ouch!) to grab her elbow in a gentlemanly way.

“Need help, miss?”

Her stricken eyes met his without recognition, only panic.

He pulled her away from the car and behind him. Right. Like he and his game legs were any kind of wall. But this street was Tourist Central.

Two beefy men poured from the car, one from the front seat, the other from the opposite back door. He felt Revienne shrink against his back.

He lifted the cane.

“Hey!” An American GI on leave, probably from some hellhole, was making this his fight. “This guy is handicapped and this woman wants out. What’s going on, buddy?”

Now three American Army buddies gathered around, the word buddy needing no translation.

“Michael! Is it you?” Revienne breathed in his ear like an answered prayer.

So just right. So suspicious. But the cards were all falling his way. Play them.

She eyed the instant rescue party and spoke in English. “I don’t want to go with these men. They separated me from my husband. Call the police!”

The three GIs had brawny bodies and three months of boot camp behind them, marine-tough expressions and, if you looked very, very close, far too young eyes. He knew their breed well. They form a wall much better than he can.

“Until the police come, we’ll do the policing,” one announced.

By now a crowd had clotted around them, a cross of casual tourist class and well-heeled Swiss natives enjoying an expensive night out on the town.

American soldiers on leave weren’t necessarily a rooting-for entity in Europe these days, but attractive women fleeing obvious muscle had propelled many a movie plot and was always box office magic.

One thug reached for a firearm against the eager young soldiers.

Max used the cane like a sword to ram him in the stomach just before the trio swarmed him. Whirling, he used its length to trip the other man as Max spun Revienne hard into the custody of his free arm. Backstepping with long strides abetted by using the cane for leverage, he saved Revienne from tripping on the cobblestones and clasped her close to his hip while he watched the incident’s last act.

The firearm never appeared because its owner was clasping his cane-punched gut as the two middle-aged thugs retreated before three young jaws jutting outward, fists leading, and witnesses well able to testify. They vanished back into the car as quickly as they’d appeared and it glided away into the teeming traffic.

Revienne had arranged herself artfully against Max’s side but stopped leaning on him and pulled herself upright, for which he was grateful. He wasn’t quite ready for dance partners, not even in a sexy pasodoble.

“Thanks, mates,” he told the three American soldiers.

“Aussie?” they asked.

“Irish,” he answered.

“Same diff.”

What did they know, at this age? Maybe more than he did.

The men from the Mercedes had vanished like all bad guys do when foiled. Max didn’t believe in happy endings but Revienne was clinging to him, smelling like freesias, keeping him upright in more ways than one, and he didn’t want to argue right now with fate or connivance. He could learn from both of them.

“Thanks, fellas,” he said with a grin.

They grinned back and swaggered away. He led the prize, Revienne, back to the Hotel California, where you can never leave. Or never want to. Revien.

It means, in French, “I return.”

Revienne.

It means, in English, “I’m an idiot, but I wonder, and I burn to know more.”

Instead of urging her fiancé to find his inner Zorro for Tuesday’s pasodoble, Zoe Chloe should have been worried about her upcoming patter as emcee tonight, when the quickstep ruled.

Instead she was watching the huge flat-screen TV in the greenroom. It was nerve-wracking for the kids of the cast to have to sit here nightly watching the adults flash their footwork while they had all evening to get nervous before their own big moments. So Zoe Chloe had come in to keep them company.

Each dance lasted less than two minutes, but the hour show was expertly managed to reap the most major commercials and milk Crawford Buchanan’s oily chitchat over the mike and with the judges.

Meanwhile, the young performers’ nerves felt no mercy.

Sou-Sou’s mother had her off to the side under her literally protective wing: a filmy bat-wing tunic. The girl’s foot injury seemed to have subdued her adult-encouraged air of superiority. She looked smaller, more human now. Humbled.

Temple couldn’t help wondering if that had been the point of the nasty prank. It was hard to imagine a child coming up with that subtle a form of harassment. Yet for an adult to stoop to hurting and scaring a child was chillingly sick.

She eyed the other contestants’ mothers. Frances was relaxed but alert. Angie looked the usual distracted. Temple recalled the Texas cheerleader mother who paid a man to kill the mother of her daughter’s rival, feeling a dead mother would take the girl out of the running for a cheerleader spot.

Pinning adult ambitions on a child would curdle the blood.

None of these moms looked that loony, not even Yvonne Smith with her overdone, aging beauty queen look.

Meanwhile, Temple tried to weigh the performances of Matt’s rivals between watching her possibly lethal brood of mothers and daughters.

Sou-Sou would repeat her sabotaged dance on the third night. Ekaterina would be tonight’s featured junior dancer. Her thin limbs were drowning in a ruffled ball gown for the lighthearted foxtrot. She nervously eyed her dancing Hermanos brother, Adam, while watching the performing adults with intensity.

Matt had drawn the right to squire the lean and glamorous Olivia through the quickstep. The aging actress had played a heavy for decades on the soaps, so she grabbed at the chance to unveil a lighthearted, flirtatious flair that took decades off her face and figure.

Matt had responded to her theatrical lead by morphing into a twenties playboy, the Great Gatsby on speed, as they smiled and flirted and flounced all over the stage. How amazingly the costumers and makeup artists could remake their contestants completely to match each dance. Matt and Olivia were delightful together. They had this dance knocked!

The judges thought so too. Danny’s enthusiasm for them both was champagne-bubbly. Leander, himself past sixty, was clearly smitten with Olivia Phillips. Savannah was now fully into Matt, and babbling about them starring together in a revival of The Boyfriend. Nine, eight, eight.

The Cloaked Conjuror had drawn Wandawoman, and they were two people never destined to quickstep anywhere for any reason. Here the costumes went wrong. The decision to “lighten” CC’s look with a diaphanous black cloak only made him look like a large gray moth.

Wandawoman, stuffed into billowing, knife-pleated pink chiffon studded with black sequins, resembled an overblown rose about to wilt from black spot. Her muscular power would shine in the ponderously sensuous Latin dances but now CC could barely steer her to keep up with him, nor did her moves evoke any sprightliness.

Even Danny Dove became acid in evaluating the dance: “Too slow, the steps were more galumphs out of Lewis Carroll. I thought your costumes were competing for an Oscar for ‘most sickening sunset clouds in collision.’ ”

Leander tsked. “I can’t say either of you were convincing. This is one case where lightness of being is a prerequisite and you two are not angel food, but pound cake.”

Savannah was, predictably, on a different page. “I thought it was magnificent. The metaphor of the large gay . . . I mean, gray . . . moth flitting about the sparkling rose in the garden to sip its essence is so profound.”

“That’s butterfly and rose,” Danny put in, teeth gritted as tight as Molina’s had been earlier this week.

Savannah babbled on. “One would expect the courting gray moth to be awkward and heavy . . . er, winged. And the rose is full-blown, fat and fluffy as a dandelion head just when the wind shatters it and blows it away.” She sighed deeply. “Touching beyond words.”

Six, six, ten.

“The first ten of the competition,” Crawford crowed, caressing the mike.

Ick.

José’s lean and lethal fencer’s frame looked sexy in formal evening wear. He had the speed and the lilting moves down, but Motha Jonz, wearing white full-length feather streamers, looked like a poorly plucked chicken. It was the aristocratic fencing foil engaged with the street switchblade or, worse analogy, the kitchen shears.

Seven, seven, seven.

Temple watched the others follow Matt and Olivia and fail to better them. She cheered inside, mostly for Matt, but also for the token older woman in the lineup, who wasn’t expected to win.

Last came the celebrity chef and the troubled pop tart teen, another match not made in Bob Fosse heaven.

Keith Salter was too rotund to do anything quicker than short-bread, even though Glory B. was giving the dance her all, looking as adorable as a butterfly flitting over a hot stovetop. She’d have scored big if she’d been partnered with Matt instead.

But it was Olivia who’d been as flushed and happy as a bride when she and Matt had taken bows for their standing ovation. He’d stood aside to give her the center stage, kissing her hand with European flair when she turned to give him the applause. It wasn’t his nature to take the spotlight, but in partners dancing a gracious man looked like a prince for deferring so effortlessly to the woman.

And Matt had that part knocked before he’d ever touched sole on a dance floor.

Temple was ready to burst with pride and declare him the winner in her head, when the last couple galloping around the floor took a sudden tight spin and broke apart.

Everyone in the greenroom took in a deep breath.

The camera closed in on Keith Slater, flabby white face studded with rhinestones of sweat. He broke contact with Glory B., then spun away. She automatically tried to resume a partner position, but he sank out of her grasp, writhing to the floor.

All the kids and adults in the junior greenroom were on their feet.

The camera drew back on the main stage. It showed a fallen Salter twitching horribly before Matt and the Cloaked Conjuror ran to him. The burly magician’s beastlike masked face glowered at the camera, then CC swept his ludicrous diaphanous cloak over the scene, obscuring the fallen man.

The camera panned in tight on the judges’ shocked faces . . . well, the shock showed only on Danny and Leander’s faces. Savannah Ashleigh looked merely stupefied, emphasis on stupid, and the camera caught Danny Dove in the act of vaulting over the judges’ table to get to the fallen dancer.

The producer sat as if cast in stone, in place and silent.

Crawford Buchanan, however, was stalking forward into the camera’s face, achieving a tight close-up, gloating with phony horror and all too real zest to be the center of attention.

“Oh, my gosh, ladies and gentlemen. We have another mishap. Keith Salter, celebrity chef known the world over has fallen unconscious to the floor. It is another Marie Osmond dive. Let us hope that Keith Salter has only fainted like a girl, folks. He was a bit chubby and these dances take a lot of starch out of the old pancake gut.”

Danny Dove appeared to wrest the hand mike from Crawford’s death grip.

“Mr. Salter is being attended to by medical personnel the show has standing by at all times. Break. We’re going to break,” he ordered the camera operator, “and will be back as soon as we can.”

The door to the junior greenroom burst open as a harried floor director burst in.

“Quick! We need to get back to the live broadcast with the baby dance. Who’s up tonight?”

EK stood, looking grim and fragile, as usual. Adam rose behind her, shaken.

“You two, into the wings, ready to foxtrot this crowd’s anxiety away. You. Introduce them.”

Temple recognized her outer Zoe Chloe being called to man the ramparts.

Okay. She couldn’t be any more upset and scared than her young introducees.

“Snap to it, Broadway babies,” she ordered her petrified dancing troupe of two. “We’re gonna save the show and you’re gonna foxtrot the audience to distraction.”

Luckily, there was no time to think.

Temple was on camera clutching a mike before you could say “Midnight Louie.”

The two kids were standing behind each other in the wings off-camera.

The floor director hissed a last instruction to her, and then backed away, holding onto his headphones and pointing a silent, demanding finger at . . . Temple. Counting down with his four fingers.

Oops.

Zoe Chloe was on!

She strutted over so the camera could pan on the judges behind her.

“Here we are all in our places wearing shiny dance-mad faces. Keith Salter is doing well backstage. It looks like a touch of stomach flu for the famous chef, folks. All that hip-hopping about is hard on the duodenum.

“Meanwhile, we have to ask . . . just what can a pair of these junior dancers do with that most fabulous, flying squirrel of a dance called the foxtrot? So here we have the youngest and, oh my, cutest—an eleven on the Zoe Chloe one-to-ten hot guy meter—Los Hermanos Brother, Adam. We have the lightest-on-her-feet girl squirrel and you have a heap of hype and entertainment comin’ your way . . . Miss Ekaterina and the Sole Brother Hipster on the q.t. doing the quickest hot crossed biscuit step you ever saw. Gentlemen, waggle your Adam’s apples, and ladies, put your hands together for Adam and EK!”

Temple breathed her relief to see the red light of the active camera wink out, taking her out of the picture.

Crawford sidled up. “That bastard judge stole my thunder, but I see that you still have a little lightning left, ZC. Now give me that mike.”

“Not until somebody else tells me to,” ZC. gritted between smiling teeth.

You never knew what camera might be on, and on you, on a panic-stricken set.

Behind the curtained area, she heard the flurry of Keith Salter being loaded onto a gurney and rolled out by EMTs. Not a good sign.

Who would have it in for a chef, for heaven’s sake? Crawford Buchanan she could get. Uh, get that someone might have it in for him. Not “get” personally, as take revenge on.

Although . . .

Meanwhile, Adam and EK were tripping the foxtrot fantastic, as only lightweight teens could, with dazzling, show-must-go-on desperation. Wispy Ekaterina had pulled out a bundle of endless energy. The pair mimicked their elders’ skill and sophistication so perfectly that the crowd was standing and applauding them even before their dance was over.

Talk about the perfect distraction!

Temple heard the music peak triumphantly, then end as the pair stood holding hands, panting and grinning and bowing. Innocent youth was sure the ideal distraction.

EK was radiant, a performer whose charisma couldn’t be measured until the dance began. Adam made an ideal partner. They both seemed stunned by their own success.

Temple didn’t even notice when the mike was gently pulled through her hands.

“A truly rare performance,” Danny Dove told the audience, who knew it, with a calm smile. “I’m sure everyone is also eager to know that Mr. Salter is fine and being attended to. Check www.dancingwiththecelebs.com for a progress report on his condition. Of course, the judges must score only on what they saw of the full dance, and so must the audience.”

Behind them, Crawford was leaping and capering, trying to regain center stage.

Zoe Chloe let Danny Dove pull her close, like a coconspirator, like a cohost.

“Meanwhile, this is Danny Dove and the effervescent Zoe Chloe Ozone pulling the curtain closed on another episode of Dancing With the Celebs. And wasn’t that Matt Devine and Olivia Phillips quickstep, well, divine?” he finished with a totally inappropriate plug.

Temple could only nod and grin.

The camera’s bleary red eye winked out as the floor director pantomimed brushing a hand over a sweaty brow.

Staff and judges, and the other adult and child dancers, came pouring from the backstage area to gather around, congratulating the shell-shocked kid dancers, chattering, and asking how Keith Salter really was.

Danny called for quiet.

“He’ll be all right, we think, but for now we don’t know what hit him, possibly . . . food poisoning.”

The buzz all around them only heated up.

“Yes,” Danny said. “The hotel contracted to keep a buffet going for our performers and staff, and everybody used it. If any of you feel the least bit queasy, call the hotel doctor immediately. The Oasis has three more on call now, in case we’re dealing with something more than a quirk here. Meanwhile, I’d suggest you patronize the hotel restaurants from now on.”

Temple spied Mama Molina with Mariah in tow and Rafi Nadir on the fringes.

Having the whole ruptured family Molina-Nadir together was awkward with a capital AWK. Not to mention EK as a fourth wheel.

Temple frowned, mind back on the poisoning problem.

It was possible that Keith Salter had eaten something too exotic or heavy for bouncing over the dance floor. He was built like an opera singer, as in a sack of cement.

Who would poison the food of a cook? Okay, a chef, not just a common cook. A celebrity chef with the airs and chutzpah and tummy roll to prove it.

A chef who’d made a media name for himself by descending on unalerted restaurants and totally trashing their food, their preparation, their reputation, and their house chefs.

There was a whole country full of suspects primed to slip some E. coli in Keith Salter’s personal appetizers. Especially before he made a public appearance on TV.

It couldn’t have been in the buffet food, or several people would be tossing their cookies by now.

Then she remembered glimpsing Salter in the men’s dressing room with his own special tray.

He was too snobbish to eat hotel food from a buffet.

And in a dressing room, his tray could be quickly doctored by almost anybody.

It was time Zoe Chloe had another tête-à-tête with her new hottie hero, Matt Devine.

She reached him on her cell phone and answered his “Hello?” with a breathy . . .

“Ooh, Mr. Devine. I do so want a private quickstep with you. This miserable, unpaid show did give you a private room, didn’t it? If not the private star dressing room you so richly deserve.”

“Listen,” he answered sharply. “I don’t know how you people get my cell phone number, but I’m here to perform for charity, not crazed fans. I can guarantee I’ll have a different cell phone number faster than you can quickstep off this line.”

“Matt, no! Don’t hang up. It’s just me being silly.”

“Temple! I thought they’d be keeping you on the set to figure out tomorrow’s show if Keith is too ill to dance.”

“Or too dead to dance.”

“He was in bad shape, and you can’t tell in these cases until the stomach pump,” Matt said grimly.

“Ah, gross as that news is, I’m still waiting with bated breath to hear whether you bunk alone. We can’t do much confidential public consulting in our current personas.”

“You’re the only one with a persona. You mean you’d desert your happy, high-square-footage home in a high-roller heaven with Molina and surprise family to visit my lowly plain hotel room?”

“Oh, yes. It’s like rooming with Mothra and Godzilla up here, and Spawn and Friend have joined Mother Mothra.”

“I bet Molina is a joy to associate with right now.”

“You know what’s going on, don’t you, Matt?”

“Some of it, maybe.”

“That I’ll have to torture it out of you after this road show is over. So, do you want to meet Zoe Chloe in your room or not? And just how many fans have managed to snag your cell phone number?”

“Zoe Chloe, no. Temple Barr would be welcome, but I’ve got to wash off my makeup and peel off my costume and shower first.”

“First? Sounds like you could use a dresser. Or an undresser, rather.”

“You want to talk, or something else?”

“I’ll take both when I can get it.”

“Room twelve thirty-four. I do have to leave for the radio station by eleven thirty.”

“Don’t worry, Cinderfella. I’ll be through with you by then.”

Temple snapped her cell phone shut. She wasn’t kidding about the undressing part. Zoe Chloe was such an impetuous little gangsta girl. They’d have plenty of time to talk after.

Sometimes the show seemed like a guided trip to Europe. If it was Tuesday, it was Spain and pasodoble night.

Temple had to choose a new Zoe Chloe wardrobe fit for an emcee role, which was getting tedious. It was hard to be a clotheshorse. Who knew how much effort pop stars must put into looking outrageous? Luckily, the show costumers were into the ZC look and welcomed her to their rack of castaways and boxes of accessories and trims.

“Red, black, and purple tonight,” Temple told them when they had attired their charges and were relaxing with sodas and cigarettes.

“Kinda Red Hat Lady-delinquent-Goth?” asked Brandi, a gamine-haired sprite who looked much younger than she was thanks to a hip wardrobe.

“Got it.”

“You seem edgy tonight, Zee,” Manda mentioned after Temple had rejected three choice looks.

“Yeah. The improvisation when things go wrong is getting to me.”

“We’re glad our deadlines are backstage.”

“How’d it go?” innocent Zee asked. “Who are your odds on tonight?”

“The pasodoble always makes or breaks the guy,” Brandi declared. “I mean, you either break hearts or break wind out there.”

While everyone giggled, Tee in Zee guise probed further.

“Which guy, then, will win?”

“José is in the zone, and the ethnic bullring,” said Yolanda. “Olé!”

“The Cloaked Conjuror will comport himself well, as usual,” the older Manda said.

“Salter is gone! History in haut cuisine.” Brandi was the group’s talker. “And wait’ll you see what we did to the blond. He is locked and loaded. All he has to do is deliver.” Her eyes rolled with wicked anticipation.

“Really?” Zee Tee squealed, hoping for more racy girly tidbits.

She was disappointed. They returned to critically eying her getup, adding a large scarlet silk rose here, pinning up her full skirt with one, judiciously ripping her fishnet hose, adding temporary tattoos and a red feather boa. One thing about Zoe Chloe Ozone. She could never be overdressed or overexposed.

Well, Zoe Chloe Ozone would certainly get a breathless play-by-play from the dancing tweens, if not the jaded young Los Hermanos Brothers who’d mastered their own dance routines. She left the costume room to hang with her crew in the greenroom.

There she found that Zoe Chloe’s “posse,” Rafi and Molina, had joined the group, next to Mariah and EK. A little parental rivalry there? She sat on the long couch between the exes, on principle, and to make someone else as uneasy as she was tonight. Rafi and Molina scooted over to avoid crowding, but wanted some whispered guidance on the night’s program.

“What’s the dance?” Rafi asked Temple.

“Pasodoble.”

“Paso what?”

“Spanish for ‘double step.’ Inspired by the bullring. Matador, cape, bull.”

“So what’s a girl doing in that dance?”

“She’s either the cape or the bull. Gets tossed around a bit. It’s a sexy, intense confrontation.”

“ ’Tossed around,’ ” Rafi repeated, looking at Molina. “Sounds like someone could get hurt.”

“Nobody’s gone after Motha Jones yet,” Molina speculated.

“Or Wandawoman.” Rafi rolled his eyes, as if he doubted anyone would.

“Or Matt,” Temple finished up.

Got ’Em

Poor, poor Mr. Matt Devine.

I understand why my Miss Temple has a hard time concealing her anxiety for the end of this pasodoble episode of Dancing With the Celebs.

I have drawn midnight dance duty myself, and well remember having to deal with honeys in heat who outweighed me by a third. Females of my species can be quite a handful any day of the month. When they are in heat, they literally can be too hot to handle.

These celebrity human females have already demonstrated their flair for temperament in the tabloids. I would hate to have to lead them around the floor, gazing hotly into their eyes and bumping intimate body parts right and left.

But this does not matter. I am too short for the job anyway. The job I am not too short for is keeping an eagle eye on the dance floor. If the judges really wanted to know the scoop on fancy footwork, I could consult on this in a heart beat. In fact, my four-onthe-floor pick up the vibrations of a whole lot of stomping going on, particularly in this fiery Spanish dance with Cuban heels on the guys and the usual spike heels on the gals.

I almost do not recognize Mr. Matt. The wizards of the dressing rooms have even further darkened any of his skin that shows: face, hands, and the deep open-front V of his white, long-sleeved, clinging, semitransparent shirt. I do not understand the need or purpose of a semitransparent shirt. Apparently the females in the audience do, for they had become quite rowdy just on his entrance on stage.

The theme du dance here is Spanish gypsy. Mr. Matt’s golden hair is hidden by a gaudy scarf from forehead to nape of neck, where it is tied, and from which a brunet ponytail hangs. He now has black eyebrows and (ghastly vintage fashion!) long sideburns. He looks quite the different fellow.

Nor is Miss Wandawoman recognizable. Her dishwater blond hair is now a tangled mass of raven-black. I cannot fault this judgment call to multiply her locks: when it comes to hair color, black is beautiful. Miss Wandawoman wears much gold dangly jewelry. I much prefer the simple large hoop Mr. Matt sports in one ear.

Her gown is backless and hipless on one side, held up only by flesh-colored elastics my sharp eyes detect. A wide black satin ruffle runs from one shoulder across her body, back and front to the opposite hip. It would resemble the sashes that beauty queens wear, except there is almost no gown under hers, and the sash is ruffled, like her full skirts.

All and all, I must admit they look the parts.

When the music starts, they assume the taut upright poses, one arm flung high, heads haughtily erect, as if sniffing skunk.

Stomp! They are stalking across the floor eyeing each other like mortal enemies, he down on one knee to swirl her around him like a ruffled cape. He rises to seize her for a pair of matched close steps, then swings her aside, thrown away. She circles around to cling as their profiles nearly touch while they glare fiercely.

And so it goes. The audience is whistling and stomping and clapping and hooting, so I suppose this folderol is passing as pasodoble mastery. Much ado about nothing much, think I.

He twirls her tight to one side, spinning her away and then close again. She is leaning hard into him, and when he steps away to give her his back (this is not a polite dance), she slides slowly down his leg.

The audience is shrieking with delight. People here have very high auditory pain thresholds.

He reaches down, twirls her on the floor in a spectacular spin as she executes a full split, and then pulls her prone body through his wide-legged stance to slide halfway across the stage.

The audience is on its feet at this spectacular move, drowning out the sound of the music’s final flourish as Mr. Matt strikes a victorious pose beside his partner and then bends to mime one of those frozen passionate lip locks that end dances around here, despite seeming to be a serious contradiction in impulses. Passion is not usually a freezing and posing matter, I would think.

Her supposed-to-be-proud neck bobbles onto her shoulder. Her legs remain splayed and inert, not moving to assist gracefully in her own resurrection for a bow.

While everyone there on two legs freezes in position, possibly passionate, I am there like a bullwhip on a horsefly, sniffing at her mouth and nose. I smell scented lipstick, metal and sweat, and nothing telltale. I think I feel the slightest stir of breath.

And then I am near trampled as the tardy security detail surrounds Mr. Matt and his partner, who will be taking no bows and getting no judges’ ratings tonight.

a Pasodoble

Molina watched the walking Barbie doll bounce offstage toward the wings, not at all subdued by the anxious ending to the final adult dance, the egocentric glee of youth personified. She needed to get back to deal with the major mishap situation, but knew Rafi would be on it, a surprisingly soothing idea.

Meanwhile, she had to find out how a living Barbie doll had ended up center stage at the kind of event that drew a stalker who was leaving a wide swath.

“That went over great,” Sou-Sou bubbled at her, jiggling with teen hyperactivity. “My makeup number and costume was even cooler than the first one. Did you see it? Did you?”

Molina nodded, not to Sou-Sou but to Dirty Larry, whose firm grip held Sou-Sou’s mother in check from the same theatrics as her daughter.

Scattered metal folding chairs for waiting performers caught Molina’s eye.

“Let’s all sit a bit and talk,” she suggested.

Dirty Larry started rounding up chairs and seating Smiths on them.

“You’re with Ms. Ozone’s manager,” Mrs. Smith realized. “Oh, my Sou-Sou is an up-and-coming client for you. That Ozone girl is getting too old.”

“I’m her manager’s assistant, but this is Officer Podesta of the Las Vegas police. I’m helping ask some questions. How did Sou-Sou happen to wear a Barbie doll getup?”

“Well,” Mrs. Smith seesawed her ample behind into place on the skimpy metal seat. “That was my idea. I act as her manager. Glad you liked it. Barbie is an icon, and that’s what I want Sou-Sou to become. I even had some Polaroids taken before her entrance, if you want to see them—” She reached into her garish yellow purse.

“That won’t be necessary, Mrs. Smith,” Larry said. “What I need to know is why you dressed Sou-Sou that way? Anything trigger the idea?”

“Nooo.” She set her purse on the floor. “I’m just creative. Maybe I saw something in the paper about Barbie dolls being found at shopping malls, but it doesn’t take much to stimulate my brain.”

“Those Barbie dolls found that way might be calling cards for a predatory killer of young girls, ma’am,” Larry said. “You couldn’t have done a better job than we would in setting your daughter up as a decoy.”

“Oh. Oh!”

Sou-Sou’s eyes were pie-plate round.

“Better get that outfit off of her pretty quick,” Molina told the mother. “These dirty tricks are no joke, and your daughter is already the victim of one.”

“You mean,” Mrs. Smith asked, “a killer could be loose?”

Before either Molina or Larry could answer, a strange metal trolling sound came into their midst.

Everyone glanced at the black-painted stage floor. A small metal canister with a red cap was wobbling among their circled feet. A large black cat had joined their circle, one paw still lifted like a golfer holding up his club while waiting to see his shot land on the distant green.

The cat was positioned next to an open scarlet purse that now lay on its side, the contents spilling out, Polaroid photos, lipstick tube, nail file.

Larry bent to bag the rolling tube. “Pepper spray, Mrs. Smith? From your purse? We think that was used to doctor Sou-Sou’s shoes the other night. Another creative idea?”

“Oh.”

“Moth-er!” her daughter accused with a screech. “That hurt!”

“Lots of women carry pepper spray,” Mrs. Smith insisted, bending to stuff the items back into her purse.” She held out an imperious hand to Larry, open. Her fingers were trembling and Sou-Sou was standing, pouting rebelliously.

Molina nodded.

He slapped it into her waiting hand. “That was child endangerment, ma’am. I’ve got bigger game to track here but you try anything further like this and your daughter will be blackballed on the dance circuit. Now get her out of that Barbie outfit and burn it.”

The pair scuttled away, sounds of shrill recrimination echoing from the hall outside.

Molina looked around for the cat. It was gone. Of course.

“I’ve got to get back to the main event,” she told Larry. “Looks like this Barbie connection was just a coincidence.”

He nodded.

“I’m not certain your being here is one, though.”

“You mean where? Near the stage?” She was silent. “In the hotel, on this case? Yeah, I sorta assigned myself. I’m not useful?”

“Yes, you make yourself useful. Too useful. I’m not sure why and I’m thinking you don’t want me to know why. “

“You really don’t think a man would simply be attracted to you? You have lost yourself in your job, Carmen.”

“And you haven’t, undercover man?”

“I’m on leave from that.”

“Don’t fool me and you won’t fool yourself. You’re still working undercover and you’re using me to do it. I’m seeing things a lot more clearly now. Sometimes friends look like enemies and enemies like friends. Which one are you?”

He stepped close, his voice low and intense. “I’m your friend. Really I am. You don’t know how much.”

Was it a promise, or a threat? She didn’t know but she would, eventually.

“You showed up on the scene of the local Barbie doll killing, and here you are still today, pushing your way into my investigations. What? You want to make me or to make detective? Or something else?”

“You are so wrong.”

“Again? Is that the unsaid ending? I have been wrong and I may be wrong again, but right now I have a choice of dumping you or watching you, and I prefer the latter.”

Method Dancing

In the Hummerbar, all heads turned as she entered, as if a prima ballerina had just spun onto the stage.

Disheveled, distracted, Revienne remained a femme fatale.

Max, meanwhile, calculated all the amazing coincidences that could have led so quickly and incredibly to their reunion. And if he could get her into bed tonight. He’s the knight-errant, after all, the guy left behind who soldiered on and caught up with the girl. He’s had a lot of pain, no gain, and he so needs a lay.

Does it always come down to this? Naked need? Probably.

In a vague sense, he understood what he needed more: Garry Randolph is the man who knows who Max is and why he ended up here in this condition, and what he really needs. But Garry is a figment now. Revienne is real, and she needs a martini.

“Mein Gott, Michael! Those . . . monsters. They grabbed me off the street in Alteberg, held me overnight in a filthy, dark warehouse. Why? What have I done?”

Her gray eyes narrowed over her Gray Goose vodka gimlet. Nice combo. “What have you done?”

Not enough with you, lady.

That was the trouble with lust. It was utterly unreliable. Secret agents like himself must deal daily with the unreliable, yet must crave the reliable. That was a delusion. God, his left knee ached. The left knee of God. God must have had them, because so many of His devotees kneeled . . . .

Max didn’t believe in luck, in kneeling, in Gods who demanded both, or in good women who turned up fortuitously in bad places. Maybe he didn’t need to get laid that bad.

“Was that the village’s name, Alteberg?” he asked.

“Yes.” She gazed at him over the glittering rolled rim of her martini glass. “I’d gone out for breakfast. You were comatose.”

“Not like in the clinic.” He had dropped the Irish accent. Sounded like himself, whoever that self was.

“No, just from food and wine and . . . overstimulation.”

Her massage.

“You were dead to the world.”

All too much so.

She shrugged. She had wide shoulders for a woman. He didn’t find that unattractive. She must work out hard on her upper body strength. Why?

“That’s when you were kidnapped,” he prodded. “Do you know who? Why?

“No more than you do.” She waited.

He waited.

She ran the tip of her tongue over the cocktail glass rim.

The muscle in his right calf jerked. Overstimulated. The more seductive she was, the less his mind wanted her.

This was a game of cat and mouse. The roles hadn’t been assigned yet. He’d thought he’d needed to find her, to make sure she was safe. He’d thought he’d needed to find her, to prove he could. And he thought he’d needed to find her to seek shelter, to find out for sure if she wasn’t to be trusted.

Now it was all too easy. You’d think a man with a short-term memory loss and two bum legs would want it easy. But he didn’t. Hell, he was Irish. He knew that much. Some people thrive on adversity, and he was one.

He rose from the dim table in the storied bar. Tossed a ten euro tip on the varnished surface.

“I’ve reserved a room in your name. You should be able to rest and freshen up there. I doubt those men will bother you further.”

Her gray eyes flashed fury.

“I’ll be gone before you are in the morning,” he said. Threatened. “Thanks for your help.”

“That’s it?” she said before he could take up his cane and walk. “I nearly break my own ankles walking down half an Alp and I get a drink and a . . . what is it called in the American movies? A kiss-off? You don’t even want to know what happened to me, what those men wanted?”

“Do you know what they wanted?”

Her anger ebbed as she sat farther back into the leather club chair, reassured that he wasn’t leaving quite yet.

“They took me, but they wanted you. It seemed they were sure you would follow. They drove down the mountain slowly. Stopped for lunch! All the while holding a pistol on me.”

“What kind?”

“Black, sleek, how do I know what kind? I am a psychiatrist, not a policeman.”

“And they came straight to Zurich?”

“It’s the biggest city at the bottom of the northern Alps. Anyone leaving the clinic would have to go through Zurich.”

“How did they come across you? Know you? Know you were with me?”

“From the clinic.”

“And they didn’t force you to take them to me in the village?”

Her eyes grew evasive. “They didn’t want to cause a fuss in that little town. They said they’d make their move in Zurich.”

“In what language?”

“English,” she said, surprisingly. “But not American, as you speak. It had a more musical sound.”

“An accent?”

“I suppose so.” She frowned as she sipped again, more deeply. “It wasn’t British English. I’ve heard that on the BBC. Maybe English wasn’t their native tongue. Maybe they were Latvian. I don’t know!”

“Maybe what you don’t know is a safeguard.” He’d slipped back into a soft, nonstagy Irish brogue.

Her eyes widened like a child’s. “Yes! They spoke exactly like that.”

Max smiled, although he didn’t feel like it. The IRA was defanged these days, of its own volition. Why would Irish muscle still be after him? Unless it was the rogue branch, and even then, such a connection was ridiculous. Yet, the accent had enveloped him like a second skin when he’d wanted one to cloud his identity.

“What is it?” she asked.

“You haven’t heard a Celtic accent before?”

“Celtic? You mean Scottish?”

He didn’t correct her because she seemed sincerely puzzled.

European countries could be insular, despite being closer cheek by jowl than most American states. She’d probably heard a bit of a brogue in passing, but had never bothered to assign it to any particular foreign country. The French were almost fanatical about preserving their language from creeping Americanisms. Her ignorance of other accents seemed reasonable.

“You have come up in the world, Mr. Randolph, since we parted.”

He mentally shook himself to attention again. She meant his upscale new clothes.

“Same method of shopping?” she said.

“I haven’t won the lottery in the past twenty-eight hours.”

“Only twenty-eight hours? You counted. Is that all it’s been?” Her sleek features sagged momentarily.

“I take it you prefer my company to your friends in the Mercedes.”

“They are not my friends! Oh, they didn’t hurt me beyond worrying me to death, and you were as much responsible for that as they were.”

“I was?”

“You are my patient, infuriating and uncooperative as you are! I am responsible for you.”

“For my mind and emotions, maybe, but this is no longer a therapeutic situation.”

“Actually, it is.” She was all business now, as when she had first visited him in the clinic room, but she didn’t stop sipping the cocktail. Emotion and alcohol were warming her cool blond cheeks, and him by proxy.

“You have made an impossible physical recovery in the past few days. I daresay running for one’s life could now be recommended as excellent physical therapy. You laugh? I’m dead serious.”

“But you were being sarcastic, even funny. You’ve never been funny before.”

“I am not amusing. I am angry, rightly so. It’s clear that you have also recalled some survival strategies that indicate you have a most interesting history, professional or personal, I am not sure which yet, but I mean to find out.”

“And if I don’t mean you to?”

“Given the progress you have made in these last few days, if we had a few solid hours of consultation, you might make a real leap. Then you would know who these men are who tried to use a hypodermic to silence you, and who kidnapped me off the cobblestones of innocent Alteberg to use me as a hostage and lure. Why did they think I would be valuable to you? Why did they even bother with me?”

If she truly was the innocent bystander she claimed, that was an interesting question.

He felt his face flush. Going after her when she’d vanished, in his condition, with the distrust he harbored, was idiotic. Apparently, someone who wanted to kill him—or maybe someone else who wanted to use him—knew that he would be just that idiotic. Was he a fall guy for a pretty face? Or someone with an overactive sense of responsibility?

In a way, only time and maybe Revienne would tell. She was the sole link he had now to his past, both for what she might be able to do for him as a psychiatrist and how useful she might be as an ally, or a secret enemy.

Either way, having taken all this trouble to find her, it was even more idiotic to let her go.

“We can discuss this in your room,” he said.

Her pale eyebrows raised as she lifted her martini glass to finish it off.

“I ordered a bottle of champagne,” he added.

She lowered the wide-mouthed glass without drinking, eyeing him with approval. “A nice thought, but that is too . . . sleepy-making for the work we have ahead of us tonight. This is an occasion for unconventional methods. Martinis would be better to loosen up the unconscious.”

“Mine, or yours?”

“Let’s try it and see what happens.”

Temple had never felt a worse case of stage fright.

Wednesday night. Cha-cha cha.

She was stationed in the wings, pleased to be going on second, long after her bête noire, Crawford Buchanan.

For a “black beast,” as the French phrase put it, his face looked as white as a ghost, but then he’d always been pasty-faced. The undertaker-severe black suit he wore tonight didn’t help.

But Temple’s stage fright wasn’t for Zoe Chloe Ozone, who was wearing a spiderweb body stocking under a purple tutu with pink ballet flats and a pink marabou feather-covered top that made it look like she actually had a bosom.

It was for Matt Divine and his fourth-night debut as a master of the hip-slinging cha-cha. He was again partnering with the overbuilt Wandawoman, probably to reassure the audience that the reputed “killer” slinger of the wrestling ring wasn’t down and out for the count.

Temple spotted Molina in watchdog disguise in the opposite wing, fairly drooling to find Wandawoman guilty of Latin loitering or dancing without a license.

Temple just hoped Matt didn’t suffer any more dance-floor hit and runs involving the hefty wrestlin’ mama who was his partner.

His “costume” was black and white: black slacks and white shirt, the long sleeves rolled up to the elbow and the first four buttons undone to display the spray-on tan gilding all the men, even the pretanned José Juarez.

Call it clean-cut sexy. The simple clothes suited him. Although there was a lot of hip-swinging and over-the-shoulder partner smiling, the pairing came off amazingly well. There was a minimum of close contact, which kept Wandawoman from looking like an overdressed gravel truck dancing with a Maserati sports car.

Her legs on high heels looked sleek and strong and Matt managed to make the moments when he supported her in a dip or a pose look effortless.

All in all, a surprisingly respectable performance. Wandawoman came back strong from last night’s fainting spell, and got a standing ovation when she finished.

The complimentary judges gave them eights.

Glory B. and José Juarez were agile and athletic together, but somehow uninspired. Maybe it was the vast height distance, at least a foot. They never seemed “together.”

They racked up two eights and a seven.

Temple held her breath when Keith Salter stood back-to-back with Olivia before they began for their version of the cha-cha. After ten days of rehearsal and performance his abdominal profile was notably shrinking, especially following Monday night’s stomach pump. He almost looked sleek next to the elegantly gaunt Olivia.

The cha-cha was a busy little number, but not the most demanding. If Keith could hold it together, he’d be over the hump. His shirt and pants were slimming black. He and Olivia didn’t generate any onstage heat, but they managed their steps and took a very spectacular bow.

Two sevens and an eight.

That left only the Cloaked Conjuror and Motha Jonz, a partnership made in media Hell.

Temple could think of no disguise for CC that would fit the fast and lighthearted cha-cha. And Motha Jonz, well, she was criminally hot in law enforcement circles as well as on the Dancing With the Celebs stage, but how would the choreographers and costumers turn her into fun and fluffy instead of fat and puffy?

The band struck up some familiar chords from oldies radio.

Oh, it was crooner Barry Manilow’s old eighties’ standard “Copacabana.”

This was one of those funky Frankie and Johnny “story” songs about Lola, a dancer at the famous Copacabana night club, “where music and passion were always the fashion,” her lover Tony, and Enrico the new guy in town.

The first shock was the initial pose of the dancers, also back-to-back. Motha Jonz had a real man as a partner. No mask, no bulky fake head for a face. The Cloaked Conjuror was going barefaced! This was big news! Also a big risk, given the disasters that had dogged the show so far.

Without his full coverage head disguise, CC was a tall man with a dark pompadour and sideburns, and a pencil-thin mustache.

He wore a glitzy red satin shirt with sleeve and chest ruffles edged in black thread. Black skintight trousers and Spanish boots of black Spanish leather made his usual bulky figure seem to tower sleekly.

The audience was still audibly gasping at the Cloaked Conjuror revealed . . . until they saw what Temple had just realized as she began laughing with knowing surprise.

CC was still wearing a mask! A celebrity one. He was the spitting image of that Dancing With the Stars Las Vegas favorite: Wayne Newton. He had revealed nothing but another entertainer’s iconic persona.

Applause broke out for the clever conceit and the costumers who’d accomplished it.

Which meant that many had missed Motha Jonz’s equally inspired transformation. Until now Motha Jonz had most resembled a dreadlocked punching bag attired in overdone and glitzy flour sacks. Not any more.

Temple was clapping for that transformation from the wings.

Someone had turned Motha Jonz into a sleek cross between Queen Latifah and Catherine Zeta-Jones in the musical, Chicago. Her hip-hugging costume billowed out into salsa-hot orange ruffles at her thighs below and her shoulders above, giving the impression of a waist. Her dreadlocks were swirled into an updo that sported chrome yellow feathers and a rhinestone Spanish comb a foot high.

Her sleek lower legs and arched foot ended in four-inch platform spikes.

All of this made her look as tall and almost as thin as her partner.

The song said the Copacabana nightclub was the “hottest spot” north of Havana. As the impudent rhythmic lines of the song were sung by the show vocalists, CC and MJ circled and strutted, enacting their onstage love affair . . .

Lola had “yellow feathers in her hair.”

CC was her waiter-lover Tony, who moved from the “bar”—the beaming judges’ table . . . well, except for producer Leander Brock—to join Lola on the dance floor to court her.

The audience gasped as a third figure in black appeared at the fringes of the dance floor.

José Juarez posed there in his Zorro outfit, sans mask, cape, and sword, with a four-carat diamond ear stud. He cut in on Tony and Lola, and wrested her away in a twirl of ruffles, dragging her across the floor pasodoble style before Tony dashed in to draw her upright again.

The song lyrics said there was “blood and a single gunshot,” but only red spotlights smeared the dance floor.

The gunshot, though, was real: a sharp bark that pierced the amiable Latin beat.

The music and dance reached a crescendo.

Music and passion is always in fashion.

“But who shot who?” the lyrics asked as audience members started standing up one by one to see. The dancers froze in place.

“Lola” Motha Jonz was posed with her ruffled skirt pulled up to one hip, a tiny pearl-handled pistol lifted from a red satin garter on her fishnet-hosed thigh. Smoke wafted from the tiny silver barrel as a spotlight caught it dead-on.

Music and passion were always the fashion.

And “Rico” José lay still on the dance floor . . . .

Music and passion were always the fashion.

At the Copa, Copacabana.

Wait a minute!

Rico hadn’t fallen, as in the song. That was what was so confusing. Both men wore black, but one was bulkier.

“Tony” CC had fallen. Hard. Gracelessly. His limbs were splayed in ugly disarray.

Music and passion were always the fashion.

The audience giggled at the awkward staging.

The music stopped.

The cast froze in place.

Music and passion were always the fashion.

Lola’s shot had gone wild, which wouldn’t have mattered if she had been firing blanks as planned. If not . . .

Someone breathed “Oh, my God” over a microphone in a deep, dramatic voice, Crawford Buchanan finally getting to use his most sepulchral tone.

A man from the sidelines executed an emergency knee slide toward the fallen fencer. Rafi Nadir of all people, also all in black.

The audience actually broke into scattered, spontaneous applause.

This was all part of the show. “Wasn’t it?” they were asking each other.

For a moment Temple recalled Max’s identical knee-slide entrance on the stage of the Elvis impersonator competition at the Kingdome.

But the next onstage speedster was Danny Dove, the choreographer-judge used to handling dance floor injuries. He joined Rafi in gauging the fallen man’s condition.

Molina didn’t slide on her knees but she was there almost as fast as Danny. Her hands, gloved in latex, which went oddly with her hippie garb, snatched the toy gun from Motha Jonz’s hand.

“He’s been shot,” Rafi announced softly, pressing hard on the downed man’s upper arm. “We need a doctor!”

“Oh, my God,” Crawford Buchanan intoned again. “Commercial break, goddammit! Commercial break. What the hell?”

José and Motha Jonz, after freezing with disbelief, had edged over to the fallen man.

Temple’s close observation of the scene was rudely interrupted.

Crawford grabbed her arm and twisted her to face away from the crime scene. “Thirty seconds to the Brat Brigade. Thirty seconds until you’re on.”

Temple opened her mouth like a fish told it was headed to a sushi bar.

He shook her a little. “You are the distraction, ZC. Get yourself and your junior hoofers onstage. Now!”

Yeah, right.

Temple wanted to know what Danny and Rafi were doing, how CC was. Instead, she had to amp up the annoying Zoe Chloe Ozone. What would even she say in the face of televised mayhem?

Something snappy and ad-libbed.

The cameraman was pointing to her. The red light on his camera flashed as if a train were coming right at her. Five, four, three, two . . . live!

“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. And dance freaks everywhere. This is your instigative reporter, Zoe Chloe Ozone, on site and on—ah, none-of-your-business-unless-you’re-a-narc—here at Dancing With the Celebs, said celebs taking a well-deserved break as all old folks should.

“Do not worry. We are going to shake and shiver and quiver your YouTubes. I am here to hype those two teenage masters of the samba, Meg-Ann and Chris.

“Now, Chris you know as the senior, sexiest, and most-likely-tobe-mobbed Los Hermanos Brother. Meg-Ann you don’t know as the girl most likely to kick a soccer ball to kingdom come.

“They are here up close and personal to kick assumptions about young dancers to bits and bytes. Get your home videos rolling; let’s give it up for a couple of young up-and-comers who never give up, Chris and Meg-Ann, dancing the samba!”

Zoe Chloe clasped her fingerless gloves together in a gesture as much prayer as goad.

The young couple galloped into camera range on cue, heads level, feet flashing, and butts bouncing like Meg-Ann’s carroty curls.

Girls in the audience started screeching like banshees to see a nobody like themselves primped up and polishing the hardwood with the oldest Los Hermanos hotshot. To Temple he looked like a full-cheeked choirboy with unfortunate sideburns. To teen girls everywhere, he was the hottest thing on Clearasil.

Temple watched her kids with an almost maternal pride. Much as she was invested in EK and her booster, Mariah, athletic Meg-Ann was displaying lots of pizzazz and personality as she moved from intense sport to hard-driving dance.

Their energy and enthusiasm were banishing the image of the Cloaked Conjuror being wheeled away on an emergency gurney like a downed football player, surrounded by people never introduced from the stage, except for Danny Dove, who got a round of applause when he vaulted the judges’ table again to take his seat at the far right.

Savannah Ashleigh was looking around as if still not sure what had happened, her mini-Chihuahua purse pooch scrabbling its claws in tune with its owner’s panic and scattering judging papers to the floor. Producer Leander Brock was still frozen in disbelief.

Zoe Chloe’s emergency stint as emcee ended with the wild applause for the junior dance routine.

Unfortunately, nothing about tonight’s show had been routine, except for yet another onstage mishap.

Temple was mobbed by young autograph seekers as she tried to escape along the hallway to the back elevators.

“You were sooo coool,” her girly admirers cooed.

“We wanta see you dance!”

“What did it feel like to be right next to Chris after they left the stage?”

“Is he hot or what?”

“Meg-Ann is kinda butch for a hot guy like that.”

“Patrisha would rock his world.”

“Dustin is hotter, don’t you think?”

“Brandon is, you dork!”

“Adam!”

“Where do they hide out before and after the dances? We can’t find them anywhere!”

Zoe Chloe retreated, disappearing into the service elevator finally. “Forget about Adam and Chris and Brandon and Dustin. Where’s Waldo!” she asked as the doors closed, citing a kids’ picture book from before when these ardent fans were born.

That oughta confuse them long enough to make a getaway.

“How bad is CC’s arm wound?” Rafi wanted to know.

They’d all been waiting in the suite for Molina to return.

“Nasty,” she said, collapsing into an armchair. “But everyone’s happy, including the Cloaked Conjuror, because they can put him on pain pills, wrap up the arm, and he can still dance the tango for the final round tomorrow. The mishaps just up the ratings. Showbiz!”

She laughed, adding, “Look at you all! I’ve never seen a sadder set of glum clowns, including me. The show will go on, but I’m not sure the junior division will be onstage for the awards shows.”

“Mo-ther, no!” Mariah wailed from the huge ottoman she shared with EK.

“There’s been gunplay on the stage, sweetie. No way am I going to risk any minors.”

“Did Motha Jonz fire the shot?” Matt asked. He’d returned to the suite and shared one of the living-room love seats with a sober-faced Zoe Chloe Ozone.

Molina raised an eyebrow. “You supposed to sling an arm around that underage professional brat?”

“I’m eighteen, copper,” Zoe crowed, sticking out her tongue, much to Mariah’s giggly approval.

“Forget staying in character,” Molina said. “It’s wearing; on us, if not you. We all have some serious thinking to do. I haven’t given the producer the go-ahead on the show. They’re continuing rehearsals for now.”

“You can shut this whole thing down?” Matt asked.

“You betcha, chorus boy.”

“Mo-ther!

Molina glanced sourly from Matt to her daughter and back. “And you’ve all got dance fever.”

“You don’t want to shut down the show,” Rafi said.

“And you have a say in this, because—?”

“I don’t have a say in it, but I am involved, Carmen, and you know why.”

During the ensuing silence, Mariah glanced from Rafi to her mother, sensing the unspoken tension and wondering how a security guy could call a police lieutenant by her first name that almost nobody used, even her mother. Except when she sang.

Molina’s jawline grew tighter than a drum skin in the show band. “I would think the assistant director of security at this hotel would want to avoid further disruptive . . . violence.”

She left it unclear just what kind of violence she was referring to.

Rafi remained unruffled. “These are acts of sabotage so far. You didn’t answer the question. Did the shot that hit the Cloaked Conjuror come from Motha Jonz’s gun?”

“Yes.”

Matt got it. “So . . . a prop gun was loaded, instead of just having a dummy smoke-generating shell in it. Nobody offstage was shooting.”

“And this is better, how?” Molina asked Rafi.

“It’s criminal endangerment so far. Nothing lethal. You shut down the show, we’ll never catch who’s doing this.”

“Sometimes avoiding violence is better police work than catching perps and risking lives.”

Rafi shook his head.

“It’s always better to catch a stalker than let him disappear back into the woodwork to crawl out again. I think that’s what we’re dealing with here, and what you’ve dealt with before. I wouldn’t want my teen daughter on the loose without it being settled. I’m sure if you ask the other junior moms, they’ll go along. Me and my staff will cover those girls like a blanket. I have a lot of good female staff. They’re bunking together, easy to supervise. Your people can handle the adult cast.”

Molina’s sallow cheeks flared with color at his reference to a stalker. “If anything happens to those kids, I’ll have your job and your head.”

“Nothing new, Carmen.”

Again, one of those loaded silences. Temple snuggled into Matt’s shoulder, glad it was unwounded. “I wish you didn’t have to go back and forth to the radio station nights,” she whispered.

Molina must have had ears in the back of her head.

She hiked her neck around to stare at them. “I am not in the mood for eavesdropping on Love’s Young Dream. You don’t want to follow through as Zoe Chloe, Barr, so much the better for me and my nerves.”

She snapped her head back to face Rafi. “Okay, Nadir. You’ve got the whole world in your hands. Don’t freaking drop it.” Only she didn’t say “freaking.”

Mariah’s gasp was audible, but she managed to ask, “Does that mean EK and the other guys can still finish out the show?” “Guys” stood for the teen girls and their pop star partners.

Molina nodded, once. “And then there are those Hermanos brothers to guard like British royals. Aii, carumba.”

“Tango’s the last dance,” Matt put in.

Molina’s glare was so toxic that he rose right away. “I’d better get along to the radio station.” He eyed Rafi. “Zoe Chloe is one of the ‘juniors’ you’ve sworn to protect, right?”

Rafi rose to shake Matt’s hand before he left. “Absolutely. Although I’ll probably need to protect Crawford Buchanan from her more than her from anybody else.”

“Crawford!” Zoe spat. “I can outemcee that dude in a New York, New York hotel minute. Talk about useless. I don’t even know why he’s here.”

“That’s a very good point,” Molina said after Matt left, staring at Temple. “He has a stake in the show attracting media.” She turned to her daughter and little pal. “Okay, kidlets. Time to hit the hay. Into your trundle beds and no whispering, giggling, or eavesdropping.”

The pair, ecstatic about the reprieve, hustled away, eager to engage in all specifically forbidden activities.

Temple and Zoe Chloe were a pretty tickled pair too. The so-called “trundle beds” were a pair of imported cots, and the staff had been disdainful to the max to import such homely items to a high-roller suite.

As the door shut on the kids, sounds of two forbidden activities trickled under the door, whispering and giggling.

“Mama” Molina did sorta know how to handle tweens.

At that very moment Mama Molina sat heavily and lifted a curled hand. “Some of that fancy freebie wine,” she ordered Rafi.

Amazingly, he complied, and poured glasses for Temple and himself. He delivered Temple’s next, with a wink.

It was just the three of them again, and that felt scarily right, Temple thought.

After all, they’d been in on this almost from the beginning.

“How many have access to Ma Jonz’s prop gun?” Rafi asked.

Molina said, “Anyone backstage, and anyone who wanted to wander backstage. You’ve got to plug those holes.”

“It’s a typical showbiz operation,” Temple said. “Even at a major regional repertory theater that I PRed, like the Guthrie in Minneapolis, putting on shows is chaos.”

“I know,” Rafi agreed. “Vegas is no exception, but ‘typical showbiz’ will kill us. Or someone else.”

Temple sighed heavily. “We’ve all got someone at stake here. We better solve this thing.”

“What if it’s more than one thing?” Molina asked.

Rafi turned a desk chair around to straddle it. “What have we got for incidents so far? Motives? Suspects?”

“You always wanted to make detective,” Molina charged. Remembered. Her tone had been dangerously . . . personal.

Rafi winced. Temple read his reaction. He was so far from that lost uniformed officer position. Molina was a lieutenant of detectives. He looked at Temple to escape staring the implications in the eyes.

“You have any ideas, Ms. Ozone?”

“Ah . . . yes.”

“Something about these incidents is bothering me,” Temple said.

Rafi regarded her raptly, but only because he wanted to shut Molina out at the moment. Molina was frowning at her hotel notepad, doodling.

“Matt’s getting to be the only one who hasn’t had a personal mishap,” Temple noted.

“Other than getting engaged to you,” Molina put in without even looking up.

“Yet,” Rafi said.

“He’s the only celebrity who doesn’t have a visual presence in the media,” Temple went on.

“You mean he’s the most obscure and least celebrated,” Molina suggested.

Temple went speechless. Molina was in a major down-on-men mood.

“And the best-looking,” Rafi put in, “as if you hadn’t noticed.” He turned back to Temple. “You’re right. We’ve had enough ‘incidents’ to look for similarities and differences.”

“Unfortunately,” Temple said, “the contestants were chosen for their variety. Entertainers, athletes, and quasi-glamorous careers like chef and radio show host.”

“Except they are all celebrities of one sort of another,” Rafi added. “They have fans, and fans can get obsessed.”

Molina turned in her chair to face them fully again. “That’s what I meant. You’re assuming that one mischief-maker is at the root of every troubling incident. What if more than one motive and one person were behind these ‘accidents’ that are coming too fast to be accidental?”

“It would have to be somebody involved in the show, near it every day,” Temple mused. “Or who could seem to be legitimately near it. You’re saying there are several freaked-out fans here all at once?”

Molina was unshaken. “This is a variety show as far as the competitors go. Why not a surfeit of suspects all working separately?”

“That’s an Agatha Christie novel,” Rafi said sourly. “Murder on the Orient Express. It narrows down nothing.”

“You read Christie?” Molina pounced.

“They make movies,” he retorted. “Look. The Oasis Hotel is one huge interior metropolis of support staff and the public milling around together. Temple is right. Looking for suspects starting from the outside in is futile. We’ve got to work from the victims out. There are five of them.”

“And only three who haven’t been victims,” Molina pointed out, “which may be more telling.”

“Let’s go through the possible attacks,” Temple suggested. “First would be Glory B.’s jungle gym fall.”

“Pure accident,” Molina said. “She’s a kid practicing new tricks.”

Temple disagreed. “Danny Dove tested that equipment and took it apart. He said it could have been rigged and if anyone in Vegas knows stage equipment and rigging, it’s Danny Dove.”

“The second was Olivia Phillips,” Molina said.

“Nothing suspicious there,” Rafi said. “How do you figure that?”

“You’re the assistant security chief here. Guess, or figure it out yourself.”

“He’s a guy,” Temple told Molina. “He’s handicapped.” She eyed Rafi, who was starting to look steamed. “Olivia Phillips’s wardrobe malfunction, when the heel of her pump collapsed. It could have been rigged too.”

“Was rigged,” Molina corrected.

“A guess?” Rafi jeered.

“I checked it after the show, and bagged the shoe for evidence. They were faint, but forensics found half-moon imprints in the red satin: a small hammerhead hitting the inside of the spike heel. The nails holding it on were weakened, and it snapped. Next?” she suggested, consulting Rafi.

“The most blatant case of tampering so far involves the chef, Salter,” he said. “Appropriate name for a cook, huh? Poisoning is the easiest method to pass off as an accident unless you can identify the toxic substance, and the toughest to bring home to any one suspect.”

“You do read Christie,” Molina pounced again.

He shrugged. “Had to do something on all those sit-down security jobs after I left the L.A. Police Department.”

She was smiling like the cat who’d nailed the Camembert.

“Okay,” said Temple. “Agatha Christie is not going to solve this thing for us, no matter who reads her, including me. It’s interesting that Salter is such a persnickety chef he didn’t eat from the buffet the hotel provided the cast. He would be easy to poison without hurting anyone else.”

“A suspect with a conscience?” Molina asked. “No collateral damage.”

“Or,” Rafi said, “a suspect who wanted to make dead sure he or she got the intended victim. Any diagnosis yet on the cause of Salter’s tummy upset?”

“The forensic staff is overworked, as usual here.”

“L. A. East?” Rafi suggested, almost sympathetically.

Molina sighed, and nodded.

Hmm, Temple thought. “Okay,” she said. “The first two cases are iffy as official ‘incidents,’ but Salter did collapse of food poisoning, Wandawoman did pass out from drugs, and someone substituted real ammo for the blanks in Motha Jonz’s garter gun.”

“‘Ammo’?” Rafi echoed her with amusement. “Sounding real cop shop there, kid.”

“Zoe Chloe gets around.”

“Can we keep on track?” Molina said. Ordered.

That was the real Molina, too. All work and no idle talk. No wonder she didn’t get along with anyone.

Temple shrugged. “All the dancers are responsible for keeping track of their costume pieces, but the costume and prop people are all over the dressing rooms. It would be easy to do the switch. I could have done it.”

“It was a revolver,” Molina said. “Only three of the bullets were live.”

“That conscience again,” Rafi noted.

“One could kill.” Molina was adamant.

“But Motha Jonz wasn’t aiming for a vital organ,” he said.

“Could have hit one so easily.”

“Didn’t,” he said.

“Doesn’t prove anything,” she said.

Temple inserted herself into the verbal Ping-Pong match. “This is an odd incident. Was it aimed against José or CC or Motha Jonz?” she asked.

Rafi leaned back, arms folded as if Temple had just gotten off a killing salvo for him.

“Temple’s really hit the bull’s-eye, Carmen. The loaded stage gun hurt both of them, the Cloaked Conjuror physically, but Jonz . . . I guess in reputation and morally, you’d say. This incident will bring up her sordid past, and she easily could have been made into a killer.”

“Nothing new for her,” Molina said, “she hung out with enough of them.”

“The only criminally involved celebrity dancer,” Rafi pointed out, “involved with the most potentially lethal ‘prank,’ if you want to call it that.”

“She’d gotten away from all that,” Temple objected.

“But had ‘all that’ gotten away from her?” Rafi shot back.

Molina sat up, her vivid blue eyes flashing with speculation. She caught her breath as if she had a sudden stitch in her side as well as an inspiration.

Rafi’s eyes narrowed. “What the hell is really wrong with you, Carmen?”

“Shut up. I’m thinking.” She glanced feverishly from him to Temple, and back again, her tone rising as she began speaking. “That may very well be it. I don’t keep up with tabloid papers or TV gossip shows or online rumor. Barr! Just what all was Glory B. put into jail and rehab for?”

“Uh, I don’t exactly—”

“Think!”

“I don’t have to,” Temple said, turning to flip open her laptop. “I can do a search for it.”

She keyed in some words and then clicked through various sites. “I know Glory B. was DWI in her new Porsche and rowdy when arrested. She hit another car . . . here it is! Last year. Just had her license for four months. Leaving a nightclub. God, she not only let down her hair but the whole top of her dress and it didn’t have much to begin with. Anyway, the text says the car she hit was occupied by a mother and nine-year-old daughter . . . mother’s face hit by the air bag, daughter on passenger side had intrusion from the collision. Ooh. Both legs broken. Lawsuit. Hush-hush settlement. Glory B. did ten days in jail and three months public service, volunteering at an animal shelter, and required time in AA.”

Temple looked up. “And Glory B. could have broken both legs or her back if that jungle gym failure had been more . . . effective.”

Molina looked both grim and triumphant. “That is a triple-A class motive.”

Rafi wasn’t so sure. “That ‘dirty trick,’ if it was that, was lame. Glory B. was fine.”

“It was the first attempt, Molina said. “Practice makes perfect.”

“There’s an escalating element to the incidents,” Temple said. “Glory B. just had a minor fall. Chef Salter got really sick, and the Cloaked Conjuror could have been killed. That could show a variety of amateurs, some good, and some bad. At being bad, I mean. Nobody is good.”

“Or one person learning?” Rafi asked.

“Damn, we are good!”

Temple and Rafi turned to Molina to see a glitter in her eyes and fever spots on her dusky cheeks. Stick an orchid behind one ear and she’d look like Carmen the lounge singer.

“I mean,” Molina said . . . modified, “there might be some good ideas floating around there. Number one is we raise security on the show tomorrow night ten notches. Done deal?” she asked Rafi.

“Signed, sealed, and delivered,” he agreed.

Temple was just glad he hadn’t made it “delivered with a kiss.”

That would have been just too icky even for a post-tween like her.

“You sure this daily dance gig ain’t burnin’ out your baby browns, boy wonder?” Ambrosia asked Matt as they shut down their mics and she became just plain Leticia again.

He nodded as he yawned.

His “Midnight Hour” stint at WCOO-AM was over. Rehearsing dance numbers days to perform them live on TV evenings, then doing a two-hour live radio show at midnight was getting to him.

Leticia also passed him a yellow message form as soon as he had hung up his headphones for the morning. “Two A.M. and all is well, or not well?” she pressed.

“No rest for the wicked,” he muttered, reading the name and phone number, then the message scrawled beneath them, and groaning. “So my Dancing With the Celebs taskmistress is insisting I need an after-hours, early-morning rehearsal to ‘brush up’ my tango footwork. I’m glad this is the last dance. You remember the formidable Tatyana?”

“You sure that’s all she wants?”

“Sure. This woman is all business.”

“All business shaking her jiggle parts.”

“You seemed to have that routine down too, when you visited me at the rehearsal,” he reminded her with a laugh. “No, life is all work and no play with Tatyana. The other prodance instructors lighten up a little, but never her. You’d think she wanted to rehearse me to death.”

“Then don’t go. You’re the ‘celeb,’ sweet boy. Show a little temperament yourself. You’re too easygoing, Matt. Always accommodating other people. I like that when I’m the ‘other people,’ but you need to put your foot down more.”

“Believe me,” he said, rising, “I’m putting my foot down plenty these days. Especially in those Spanish dances. It’s okay, Leticia,” he said. “You know it’s always hard to settle down after two hours live on the air anyway.”

“Yeah, you and Wayne Newton. Or should I say Elvis?”

“Haven’t heard from his ghost lately, thank goodness. No, I could use some exercise after hunching over a hot mike for two hours.”

He didn’t add that his fiancée was bunking in an alternate persona at the dance competition hotel and he had no one to go home to at the Circle Ritz. Odd how having that option had made relaxing after a show no issue at all. That’s why he’d taken the comped room at the Oasis all the celebs got.

In the mellow hot-fudge night outside, he smiled ruefully as he clicked his silver Crossfire unlocked under the lone blazing parking lot light, waiting to see Leticia’s silver Beetle pull safely out of the driveway before he left.

In an hour he’d be drilling with Tatyana in the empty rehearsal room far below Temple and Louie sleeping above in a giant suite with two tweens, Molina and her ex.

Politics wasn’t the only thing that made strange bedfellows.

Of course no one recognizes that were it not for my extreme sensitivity to vibes of both a physical and psychic nature, no one would know Mr. Matt Devine was suffering from duel fatigue and blood loss deep in the deserted part of the hotel.

Even my Miss Temple did not suspect I was fresh from clawing my way up the silent butler shaft from the high-roller suite service area two floors below, which includes a fully staffed kitchen as well as twenty-four-hour maid, bar, and concierge services. It pays to be rich in Vegas.

So it just looks like I was idly sleeping on her vibrating cell phone when in fact I had just arrived there, panting and not much better off than Mr. Matt Devine himself at the moment. But I knew he would be phoning her if he could manage it, and I had to make sure our joint Sleeping Beauty would hear it.

This may seem a desperate and frantic ploy, but I am not Lassie. I could run howling through the casino and no one would heed and follow me, except to boot me out onto the Strip.

I have done what I could through this whole awful nightmare of lethal surprise attack.

I have no doubt that both the masked attempted murderer and our own Mr. Matt have the impression that they were dueling mano a mano all over the Dancing With the Celebs set. And quite a thrilling, but lamentably unfilmed, contest that was.

But no, the contention was mano a gato in some respects. (“Gato” is the Spanish word for cat.)

I keep a keen eye on all the Circle Ritz folks at this shindig and happened to be sniffing around the company buffet table backstage during the very wee morning hours, hunting clues about the mishap involving Mr. Keith Salter. Okay, he ate separately, but you never know. Not that I was copping a free meal, although I was not loath to lap up any unclaimed crumbs from said spread for a Midnight mid-night nosh.

Be that as it may, or may not, my sharp olfactory senses can pick up what humans overlook even without a supersensitive canine nose. I did find crumbs of things I would rather die than eat, such as cranberry muffins, but nothing that I could die from if I ate it.

So it is the wee-est hours on the deserted set when I hear footsteps and decide to widen my area of inquiry.

I am there when Mr. Matt blunders in, searching for Miss Tatyana.

Any other investigative dude would suspect him of making an unlawful romantic rendezvous. I, however, know Mr. Matt is already uneasy enough about his unsanctified hanky-panky with his own fiancée and my dear sweet roommate, so I doubt he would be canoodling with a hot-tempered Russian fireball.

At that point, I am as innocent of suspecting lurking menace as he is and am merely curious about this after-hours rehearsal. Perhaps Miss Tatyana thinks she can draw out more of his secret Latin soul with late-night sessions. He was not Antonio Banderas material until he did that righteous paso doble the other night.

I myself, on the other hand, was born with dark, Latin good looks, masculine grace, and cojones (and I kept them despite now being politically correct for my species in the reproduction department).

As I was saying, I was born with the brunet swagger to stomp and slither about the stage intimidating the ladies into swooning at my feet. All four of them. Feet, I mean, not ladies. Though I am not averse to social quintets.

I expected to have some merriment watching Mr. Matt trying to go Latin lover again in the tango, and then Zorro shows up.

I see instantly that Mr. Matt is outmatched.

I see instantly that the only dude here who can fight Hispanic fire with Hispanic fire is a longtime alley shivmeister.

So while Mr. Matt does his best to sidestep the unexpected weapon, I am playing the cape in this lethal pasodoble for dudes.

This means I must hurl my much outweighed self into the fray.

Alas, the cameras are not rolling.

They would see my agile, unbooted toes doing a fierce flamenco with the unnamed dude in black’s high-heeled boots. Any stomp that I failed to elude would break all my shivs, not to mention my toes.

It is very close. Only my lithe full-body twists keep me from death by stomping.

The dark dude is as fast as his rapier work. I dodge both boots and sword-point, seeking two vital goals. One is keeping Mr. Zorro from spearing my roommate’s current beloved (okay, I cannot yet forget Mr. Max, who is a dude after my own parts). The other is attempting to mark the masked man’s hide with my four-on-the-floor: the wide track of my shivs that will identify him later if I can but manage to install a full house of claws to the epidermis.

I must say that Mr. Matt is surprising both the attacker and myself. He is faster on the draw—and the withdraw—than I expected. And what is any dance but drawing closer and retreating farther, much like human relationships.

In fact, I must admit that my own amatory adventures are a continual process of advance and retreat.

Perhaps this attack is a far, far better dancing lesson than Miss Tatyana could administer, if she had truly been hoping a late-night challenge would unleash Mr. Matt’s deepest emotions. Which at this point would be to live, now that he has finally attained the hand of my lovely roommate in marriage.

Recognizing what is at stake for me and mine, I hurl myself at our opponent without regard to life or limb. I am an unseen shadow tripping his every step, leaping to catch and capture his sword arm on every blow.

At times the flurry of steps catches me in the staccato enemy fire of his boot heels and I go rolling over the darkened dance floor, my torso caught in the crossfire and beaten and bruised.

I have not been in such a rumble since I was a young blade. So it is Zorro versus gato. Fox against cat. We are both sly and agile creatures, which is not exactly how I would describe Mr. Matt, splendid fellow that he is.

He needs his shadow ally and I rise to the occasion, literally leaping into the billows of Zorro’s cloak, rending as I fall, ripping it to shreds. But I am outweighed.

My ribs are bruised, and my breath heaves in and out like a bellows.

A random kick sends me spinning like a Frisbee to the edge of the dance floor. I heave myself upright, cheered to see that Mr. Matt has backed our adversary into the heavy velvet stage curtains and smartly rolled him up like a fried rice and bean enchilada.

Revived, I push myself to my feet and rush forward, slipping under the heavy curtains, risking the flamenco stamp of our contained enemy to leap high one last, desperate time. My shivs flare out, curved scimitars seeking purchase. Both my sword arms sink like pitons into the man’s rear face (except it is hardly his face, heh-heh) as I slide down the mountain of human flesh, leaving a grooved bloody trail of skid marks.

His screams of frustration are satisfying. This dude will be IDed by his ass for the next six weeks . . . if anyone can find out who he is and order a strip search.

Parting is such sweet sorrow, as one far more famed than I has noted.

The dude’s parting scream is muffled by the thick velvet curtains Mr. Matt is using for an impromptu winding sheet.

Dude! I would slap pads and palms with Mr. Matt if I did not have only ragged shivs to offer.

We did it!

Oh, wait. I will get no credit.

I am so bummed out. You did not notice my baaad, baad moves, my self-sacrificing footwork, my killer rock, rhythm, and rakes? I am to the dance floor born. I should win this thing.

What is new? My kind is always underestimated.

All I can do is race to the nearest elevator, eel into a car crowded with people too drunk to notice an unauthorized passenger, sneak onto the all-night celebrity-catering floor, operate a silent butler, silently, with my snagged nails, crawl back into the suite my roommate occupies, and cuddle up to her cell phone so she can get your call for help, Mr. Matt Devine.

Who should win this competition, paws down?”

The dude in black who is not carrying a grudge and a sword, only shivs and street soul.

Me and the ghost of Johnny Cash.

Okay, we fade to black. Together.

Matt was beginning to know what a sultan would feel like.

He’d been established naked on his back in the thousand-thread-count sheets on the huge double king-size bed in Temple’s bedroom. (Getting him pajamas at this wee hour hadn’t exactly been a priority.)

His left arm was positioned on a feather pillow beside him to feel the least stress. Another feather pillow supported his head and a satin soft cotton sheet covered him to the shoulders. On his right side, a satiny soft Temple, clothed in some skimpy slip thing, cuddled against him.

The lights were all on rheostats and dialed down to a peaceful glow. On one of the elaborate bedside tables rested a room service tray of sirloin tips. Temple would feed him one bite-sized piece from time to time. The doctor had recommended eating protein, but had not prescribed the soft kisses that bracketed its administration.

How wonderfully decadent, Matt thought, to lie here while Temple doted on him, unable to keep her hands and lips from constant caresses. It wasn’t passion; it was an expression of love and fear.

The danger had drawn them closer.

“You don’t really know,” she whispered, “how much you love a person until you realize you’re in danger of losing him.”

“I couldn’t stand to think of dying without seeing you again, saying how much I love you. The thought of you kept me alive, Temple.”

Their mutual smiles of complete understanding felt like a soul kiss. This seemed like a honeymoon.

Matt closed his eyes and drifted into sleep for a while.

He opened them a few minutes later to find her still there, right there for him. “It might not have been a man,” he said.

“Zorro, you mean?”

“Wandawoman is about that size, and strong.”

“And trained to fight. But why her?”

“José is too obvious a suspect. Still, neither one of them have motives.”

“You forget José’s your closest rival for the men’s championship, and you beat him at his own game, the pasodoble. It may not seem like a big deal to you, but he’s an Olympic champion already. They live to win.”

“Hmm. For a small-time dance contest? I don’t think this has anything to with that. Whoever it was bellowed, ‘Die, bastard, die!’ in such visceral hoarse tones it didn’t sound human, the rage was so intense.”

“How could you evoke that emotion in anyone, Matt?”

“Maybe it’s not me personally. Maybe it’s what I represent.”

“An ex-priest? A radio shrink. That’s pretty far-fetched. Still, you really shouldn’t perform the tango tonight,” she said. “It’s only twelve hours away, and it makes you a target again.”

“The police and hotel security are determined to end this tonight. As for the dance, we all rehearsed steps from all the dances the previous week before the competition. Each number is just ninety seconds. Tatyana will figure out a way to help me memorize the steps without walking through them full tilt over and over.”

“I know you can do it, but should you? Other performers have been attacked, maybe not as obviously, and they’re real celebrities. In fact, if you think of it, several of them have been celebrities behaving badly. I wonder—”

He was following his own new line of thought.

“The loaded prop pistol incident was just before me, and that was the most serious so far. Until now. Olivia’s broken heel could have been a repaired shoe that malfunctioned, or minor sabotage, and Keith Salter’s illness could have been ordinary food poisoning.”

“It’s escalated from a sabotaged dancing slipper to a sickened performer to a drugged one, to a shot one, all onstage during the dances. You were lured here to your attack, alone, at night. That was one-on-one with a deadly weapon. You must have done a heroic job of fighting off a surprise assault like that.”

“Amazing how the life force kicks in. Whoever it was should have some pretty good body bruises. Once I had the . . . person—can’t say ‘bastard’ back, could have conceivably been a woman—temporarily disarmed by rolling ‘Zorro’ up in that curtain,’ I did my best to disable the attacker with martial arts blows. But I was already weakening.”

“So if it’s another dancer, he or she might move a bit stiffly.”

“Wandawoman was a victim herself,” he objected, going back to the earlier suggestion.

“Self-administering too many antianxiety meds would put her out cold and remove suspicion. And she could control the timing.”

“I suppose you’re going to suggest the Cloaked Conjuror as a suspect too.”

“Good idea. Just because we know him a little . . . who can tell what size and build he is under that costuming?”

“He doesn’t need a mask for something like this, though. Going maskless would be a better disguise.”

“True. Brilliant, in fact,” she said. “Apparently you have plenty of blood to the brain despite it all.”

“Yeah. Other places too.”

“Oh?” Temple looked deliciously wicked at the moment. “Maybe I’m as good as Tatyana at figuring out a way to help you go through the steps without having to go over and over it again. But I’m aiming at a bit more than ninety seconds.”

Humid warmth wafted from the small-by-American-standards bathroom when Revienne opened the door thirty-five minutes later, her pink skirt and the suspected black garter belt over one arm.

Max’s automatic inventory was part investigation, part self-indulgence.

The black camisole was really a thigh-brushing teddy. If she’d ever worn a bra in this escape escapade, it wasn’t on her now. Not that she needed one. Probably never had worn one. She was French. Whew.

“I can’t stand another moment in that suit! Okay with you?” she asked.

“I’m sometimes an idiot, but not now.”

“You Americans. All for sex but so ignorant of sensuality. I suppose you will stay fully dressed, wearing that tight belt, although it is Versace, those nice new shoes, that silk tie with the subtle but expensive tack.”

“Good tailoring is as comfortable as pajamas.”

“Well said. I know you are rich, but rich Americans usually go for the obvious. How did you escape that?”

She settled in the other upholstered chair, like Venus curling into her clamshell, her bare legs tucked under. They were shaved, but a slight stubble caught the light. Whether there was anything under that slip of a skirt was up to the imagination of the beholder.

“Is seduction a part of your therapeutic technique?” he asked.

“Not usually, but thank you for noticing. I have been through hell for you, Mr. Randolph. I am going to enjoy the first few decent hours I’ve had in days. I am clean, I am not wearing the same clothing, I have a cool drink coming and a handsome man hanging on my every . . . word. I plan to enjoy it. I also plan to strip your psyche down to the bare neuroses, whether you intend to let me or not.”

“Fair enough.”

He settled into his chair, enjoying sinking his bone-tired frame into a cradle of goose-down upholstery. This psychic striptease was not going to be a one-way street. His chair was placed to observe both the door and the windows. And even if there was any “consummation devoutly to be wished” tonight, he’d be fully clothed and ready to fight, flee, or some other appropriate f word.

“I’ll buy you some new clothes in the morning and a ticket to wherever you need to go,” he told her. “I owe you much more, but that’ll have to wait until I’m far away from your friends in the Mercedes and their ilk.”

“They weren’t very friendly.”

As she lifted a hand to push back her dampened hair he saw the bracelet of bruises on her pale wrist.

“I see that.”

“What?” Her eyes followed his gaze. “Oh.” She turned the wrist and looked at the other one, also marked. “Didn’t know that showed. I didn’t just hitch a ride, as you put it, with them. Although, once they produced their firearms I admit I cooperated. I wouldn’t make a good Bond girl, would I?”

“In that outfit, maybe. But you’re too cerebral.”

“Cerebral?” English wasn’t her first language and some words weren’t in most textbooks.

“Smart.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You like that in a woman?”

“No.” He’d surprised her, as he’d meant to. “I require that in a woman.”

“‘Require.’ That is a demanding word. Are you demanding, Mr. Randolph?”

“Of myself.” He stirred uneasily.

“I see you don’t like that in yourself.”

“What? Why? How?”

“Your restless body language.”

He laughed. “My ‘restless body language’ isn’t giving away my inner state. It’s because my ‘banged-up’ body can’t stand any position for too long at the moment, no matter how cushy.”

“You can’t stand?” She sat forward, alarmed. “Just a few minutes ago you did, and walked quite well.”

“‘Stand’ is an expression. It means I can’t tolerate”—she still looked blank—“endure”—she nodded—“the same position long.”

A soft knock came on the door. “Room service,” he said, starting to struggle out of the chair softer than quicksand.

She leapt up to anticipate him.

“You can’t answer the door in that,” he said. “That’s why I stayed fully dressed.”

“I can, but I’ve a feeling you wouldn’t . . . stand . . . for it.”

He threw her a grin. By then he had used the cane to get him to the door. He nodded to the bathroom, and she ducked inside.

He used the peephole, then opened the door to admit a waiter rolling in a room service cart. He laid the cane atop the cart as he signed the bill and indicated the tip. His curled left hand concealed a roll of coins from a money exchange kiosk in the street, his only weapon besides the cane.

The balding waiter murmured “Danke sheine” and left.

Max double-bolted the door and swept the cane under the cart’s tablecloth, ensuring no assassin lurked beneath the snowy linens.

“You are suspicious.” Revienne spoke from the open bathroom door.

“And you’re not, after what you went through?”

“Of course. But I’m also suspicious of you.”

“Me?”

“Obviously, you are a tough guy. Who knows what you’re capable of?”

“Why don’t you see what goodies are on the table here, before turning it on me.”

“Sometimes you speak nonsense.”

“English idioms. Figures of speech. I can use German. Or French, if you prefer.”

“In bed, yes. Both.”

“I don’t think either of us is ready for bed yet,” he said dryly. “Regardez.”

“Mon Dieu!”

She picked up the champagne in its silver bucket to read the label, then the bottles of red and white wines. She eyed him, mischievous.

“You must surely bear a platinum card from a titan of industry.” Under the silver domes she lifted in turn lay croissants, a huge salad for two, salmon and pommes frites—the original French fried potatoes, as thin as angel-hair pasta—fruit and cheese and small candied sweets.

“This is a feast,” she said.

She looked at him leaning on his cane, slipping his homemade set of brass knuckles into his pants pockets, not that she knew what he was doing.

“Now you do as I say. Sit. On that hard chair, where you will not sink like a stone.”

She was right that he needed support now, not wallowing comfort. He couldn’t assume they wouldn’t be traced here and attacked in the night.

“I will serve you,” she decided, rolling the table to his chair and handing him an elaborately folded serviette.

He took it, watching as she lifted the cart’s side extensions, pulled a chair to her side of the table, selected the red wine for the salad, poured it. He watched her bare arm muscles shift with purpose under her creamy skin, her breasts ebb and flow against the thin silk netting them, tender and pink as the salmon.

She understood the show she was putting on, of course, but that only made him feel free to enjoy it.

When she sat and pushed the salad plate toward him so they could eat off both sides, she suddenly gasped in surprise. Her white linen napkin was in the shape of a graceful swan, not the formal roll that had come with the service.

“You do napkin origami!”

Surprising her in this small way gave him an unexpected bolt of pleasure, completely nonsexual. She quickly turned the moment to the more adult.

“I’d noticed what long, agile fingers you have.”

She gave him a Princess Diana smile, head cast down, eyes cast up, shy and seductive at the same time. Now he remembered her very well, the late, unhappy royal wife. He washed some of the exquisite wine over his tongue and resolved to enjoy every nuance of both the drink and the woman.

Was she seducing him for some undercover purpose? Or was she just a woman who’d survived an arduous mountain trek that had stripped every scintilla of womanliness from her?

They began forking pieces of romaine lettuce, walnuts, blue cheese, and caramelized pear slices into their mouths, not speaking, just savoring the enjoyment of a leisurely fine meal, sipping wine between every bite.

If he knew the French, this dinner would take at least an hour. No bolting the food American-style. He supposed his butt might go numb on this hard chair by then, but numbing the nether regions was probably a good idea right now. He didn’t want to be swept away before he knew more about her than she knew about him.

“Why did you become a psychiatrist?”

She looked up, surprised. “It’s a good profession. I meet interesting people.” She tossed him a smile and a bow of her head. “I help them.”

“And you make a lot of money.”

She shook her head as she sipped wine, not quite able to answer. “I do now. That wasn’t my motive. Actually, your generous contribution for my services here in Switzerland will help me meet with my Algerian patients in Paris.”

“You’re an altruist.”

“Pardone-moi?”

“You try to help mankind, not just . . . man.” He returned her smile with the bow of his head as he sipped wine. Great stuff! Great verbal fencing too.

“I believe everyone who is blessed has an obligation to serve those unlucky enough to have been unblessed.”

“So amnesiac millionaires who fall off mountains are just a charity case for you?”

Her gray eyes warmed with appreciation. “So you have . . . turned the tables on me now?”

“You catch on fast.”

“You didn’t fall off a mountain, Mr. Randolph. You are not the type to climb cold, hard Old World mountains.”

“Then how did I fall?”

She sipped wine, shut her eyes, tilted her head. “I see you climbing . . . a skyscraper.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“You are one of these urban daredevils. You are in New York City. You reach the eightieth floor before the police can arrive and you snap a line to an opposite building. You will wire-walk over the urban chasm while everyone below gets stiff necks watching and waiting for you to fall. You won’t fall, but you will get arrested at the end of your stunt, and a great deal of publicity. When you have your press conference, you will present the lovely lady from Channel Five with a flower shaped like a dove, and take her to bed later.”

He laughed, longer and harder than he thought he was capable of.

“Will the lovely French psychiatrist the court orders me to see take me to bed also?”

“That depends how much she likes her swan-shaped flower.”

Revienne daubed her lips with the limp corpse of his swan napkin.

“That’s a wonderfully inventive scenario, but it still doesn’t tell me why you became a psychiatrist.”

She sipped wine again, setting aside the demolished salad plate and uncovering their plates of salmon.

“I’ll tell you after we eat the main course.”

So they ate in silence, flake by savory flake of baked salmon, crunch by crunch of the tiny strips of potato, sip by sip of the white wine until the bottle was gone.

He thought over Revienne’s imagined high-wire act.

He’d felt in that position often during his stay at the clinic and later escape. It was an apt metaphor for what he knew of his life these last few days. He watched his hands with the exquisite Christofle sterling flatware. His fingers were indeed long and strong, as his legs would be again. As other parts were rehearsing for being again.

This escape, this idyll, was almost over. He was sorry about that.

He was startled from his reverie when she poured from the opened bottle of white wine into fresh glasses, and swept the empty dinner plates together and to the side.

He took sliced fruit and cheese from the desert plate, and sat back.

Revienne nibbled on a wedge of pungent white cheese. “Why I became a psychiatrist.” She sighed. “How could I be anything but, after Sophie.”

He waited.

“My younger sister. Do you have brothers and sisters? We don’t know, do we, Mr. Randolph? I had the one sister. There were four years between us, enough for me to feel superior. Cruelty, indifference must be educated out of the young, I believe. They are greedy, self-centered, and frightened.”

He said nothing, the best way to keep a story being told, but he wondered if she was obliquely referring to him in his amnesiac state.

“Sophie trailed me and embarrassed me in front of my cool new friends. She still had baby fat, while I had breasts and boys. Her skin was unfortunate but my parents assured her that she’d be just like me someday. Frankly, I would not want to be like I was then, vain, selfish, and stupid.”

There was nothing of the seductive woman in her now, just the voice of truth and self-disgust.

“She lost a great deal of weight. No one suspected bulimia. Her skin got worse, but she was thinner than I was. She had no breasts and she never would. I came home one day when our parents were away to find Sophie outside the third-floor mansard, poised like a diver.

“I called to her from the street, begged her to wait, to hang on.

“‘I can fly,’” she told me. “‘I am finally light enough to fly.’”

I screamed for the neighbors to call the police and ran up the four flights to the roof. While I ran up step after step until my legs shook, she took flight. I arrived where she had been to see her on the street below.”

She crumpled the napkin into a tight ball in her hand.

“My God.”

He felt an odd kinship with her. Had he failed a brother? He felt a wave of anger and guilt, and then fury with his fled memory that forbid him responsibility for his past.

“I shouldn’t have asked,” he said.

“It was a long time ago. It gave me purpose. The public was ignorant then of the suffering of young people. I’ve specialized in trauma cases, but I work gratis with the young from poor families in Paris. Don’t weep for me. I make a lot of money on my celebrity cases to underwrite my charity work.”

“I’m a celebrity case?”

She smiled. “Presumed so. You have the money to afford the clinic and my exclusive time.”

“This has been more exclusive than I’d imagined.”

“It’s been . . . invigorating for me, in a way. You are difficult. I like the challenge.

“Will I ever fully remember, do you think?

She assumed her professional face. “These cases are unpredictable. The added pressure of someone trying to kill you might choke off your memory even longer. Your best course is to reunite with your uncle. Once I put myself together again and return to the clinic, I can contact him, direct him to where you’ll be. It’s time you had another keeper, Mr. Randolph, and you know it.”

He nodded.

“Why did you pursue me when I vanished instead of going your own way?”

“A number of reasons.”

“Yes, Mr. Randolph?”

“I panicked. Yes, I did. You were indeed my keeper. I needed you. And, I knew you wouldn’t have vanished like that of your own will, unless you had an underlying motive. I needed to know why you had disappeared.”

“You still don’t trust me, Mr. Randolph.”

“No, Dr. Schneider, I don’t. Until I have my memory back, I won’t trust anyone. And even then it’ll be dicey. Difficult.”

“And if you never do recover your memory?”

“In time, I might find people to trust. But I have to make sure I live that long.”

“I don’t envy your future.”

“I don’t envy your past.” He refilled their glasses. The wine glowed.

“What of our present?” she asked.

“That’s ours to determine.”

“If someone doesn’t kill you first.”

“Apparently I’m harder to kill than someone counted on.”

“I knew you were an extraordinary man five minutes after I entered your room for an interview.”

“I look good in a hospital gown?”

She smiled. “You looked like hell, but you still were—let me find the exact English words. You were wary. Proud.” She made a fist, searching for the right idiom. “You were prickled, like a land mine of the mind.”

“Prickly, I think you mean.”

“Hard to get close to, to see into. Mental spikes all around you. Lightning snapping.”

He laughed. “This from a head case with no memory and bum legs?”

“Yes.”

“Am I still so prickly?”

“Yes . . . and no. So—”

She leaned forward to push him into the chair back so quickly the cane fell to the floor. His muscles automatically tensed for an attack and it was one.

She knelt before him. Looking down, he saw the gaping camisole barely supporting her rounded breasts under taupe aureoles and rose tips. Just.

She looked up, easing off his Bally slip-on ankle boots. “This is my restaurant. No shoes—”

She rose, her breasts pressed against his thighs (oh, God) . . .

“No belts, unless you have any kinky after-dinner notions—”

. . . to loosen and pull away the narrow Bally snake of smooth leather.

“No tie—”

Her torso pressed his as she arched upward to undo the tack and the silken Ermenegildo Zegna knot and draw them away.

“. . . allowed.”

He caught her hands in one of his, put his other at her nape and pressed her face to his for a long, luxurious, five-star kiss. Or several. He liked the appetizers at her restaurant already.

His free hand slipped the camisole straps off her lovely, strong shoulders, one by one. She shrugged them farther away. Seducing and being seduced felt like the most civilized parlor game in Europe.

He felt the physical and mental pain of the past six weeks melting like marzipan after-dinner sweets into the sour landscape of his soul. It wasn’t just the sex, it was breaking the touching barrier. He’d needed comfort more concrete than words. This had been coming for some time, and would be worth it no matter the cost.

Mostly.

Maybe.

Oh, baby . . .

Since it is Miss Topaz’s hotel, as she puts it so firmly, I am forced to let her lead.

Ordinarily I resist a subservient position on principle, but I am not a fool.

Ordinarily an extraordinarily svelte and attractive lady of my species is not walking, tail high and swaying, directly ahead of me.

I am already checking out the surroundings for romantic rendezvous spots, but Topaz’s lively mind is on other matters.

“The moment I noticed the hotel security forces converging on the theater, I knew something fishy was up.”

“‘Converging’? ‘Something fishy was up’?” That is usually my line. Why has the lithe Miss Topaz started talking like an ungodly combo of Miss Lieutenant Molina and Sam Spade?

“The perp was gone,” she goes on, “and your mistress’s significant other required lifesaving treatment. However, I concluded his attacker must have been somewhat attacked in turn, or he would not have ceased to harass Mr. Matt, as you call him.”

“What do you call him?”

“Hot. Did you see that pasodoble he did? I trust we will still see his tango tonight.”

Oh, no. Females are so shallow. “The show must go on,” I say sourly.

She stops and turns. I find I have trailed her to the theater area, where yellow crime-scene tape warns off all comers.

Topaz walks under the streamers, tail high. I follow.

“No, Louie. ‘The Shoe Must Go On.’”

Yikes! Has she been talking to my Miss Temple lately? What is it with these females and fancy footwear?

I soon discover what. The area is deserted while the forensics people are back at the lab doing CSI: Las Vegas film montage tests and things to music. Who would ever imagine major network viewers would be seduced into watching science how-to films in the name of crime drama? Mr. Wizard would have been proud. Bill Nye, the PBS “science guy” would have been begging for cameo roles.

Miss Topaz trots through the empty audience seating and onto the wooden set floor, bold as old gold. She stops by the velvet curtains backing the stage above the set of four risers.

I can see where the curtain has been torn and dusted for prints. Blood runs down the velvet in an ugly dark snake of color to the floor, where it has dried to a carmine color.

I come from a hunter breed. Normally blood is no big deal, even though I have not had to eat live game in years. But when it is the blood of someone you know. . . .

“He could have bled to death.”

“I know,” Topaz says. “But it is lucky he bled here.”

I eye the many drops. I know the forensics people numbered and photographed each one. We should not be leaving pad prints on the scene of the crime. I am about to say so when Topaz darts to the side of the stage.

She has zeroed in on the last tracked blood drop of Mr. Matt, no doubt on the perp’s Cuban heel, because it is moving toward the aisle to the exit.

“He stepped in Mr. Matt’s blood as he was leaving,” I say, shuddering.

“Now, Louie. I know you are emotionally involved, but we must keep a clear head.”

“‘We’ must keep a clear head? You were not in the heat of battle, rushing into the churning size-twelve footwork of two men fighting to the death. You did not take the body blows that I did, the kicks that spun me almost into the aisle. I am black and blue all over, except it does not show.”

“Poor Louie,” she purrs, polishing my indignantly heaving sides with her close-cropped satin coat.

Not bad.

“No doubt you are too distracted to notice the significant difference in this particular blood drop.”

I put my eyes to the floor. The light here is horrible. “The blood mark sinks in the middle.”

“It does not sink. The heel has a flaw. It marks the floor with a small depression, and the blood drop is uneven.”

I look again. Sure enough, the heel has left a small dent in the floor. I sit. And think. I lash my tail about for effect. Miss Topaz watches me, her vibrissae shivering with anticipation.

“Mr. Matt said he was drawn onto the stage by the stamp of flamenco heels that he took for Miss Tatyana in Spanish mode,” I finally say. “But the stamping sound was made by a man wearing Cuban heels. Those heels sound so sharp and loud because pounded-in nail heads pave the bottom surface. During his frenzied stomping, a nail must have been vibrated loose, and . . . bent back into the heel from the pressure of the next stomp, producing—”

“A lovely little dent that will follow him wherever he goes.”

“Yes. I take it you have explored that direction.”

“Down the aisle and out into the carpeted casino.”

“Carpeting.” I frown, fearful.

“A bent nail head leaves an indent there too, but we must hurry, Louie. Foot traffic is fierce out there and could erase the trail.”

“Would a Zorro in retreat not attract attention?” I ask.

“Yes. But you say he left the sword behind and likely took the hat and gloves away in a—”

I glance at the empty bandstand to the side. “An empty guitar case would do it.”

“Brilliant!” she coos. “Let us make our own tracks.”

So we do the feline hustle out of there and into the noisy casino, where we must dodge the constant kick of tourist shoes to follow the trail of the bent nail.

It is not so arduous as I supposed.

The man’s stride is about eighteen inches and the nail is snagging the carpet strands. In forty feet we have dodged around some deserted slot machines far from the central aisles where they are set “loose” to lure tourists.

A plain door in the wall is where they stop.

“What is this, a janitor’s closet?” I ask.

Topaz looks thoughtful, then solemn, which is not hard to do with those pieces-of-eight eyes.

“Better, Louie.”

I wait.

“It is an employee bathroom, opening only with a key, not usable by the public.”

The truth sinks in.

This was an inside job.

Somehow I did not expect my first date with Topaz to be staking out an employee rest room at the Oasis.

I was hoping for one of those storied Italian dinners behind the restaurant at the Venetian. Gondoliers poling tourists through the faux canals and singing “O Sole Mio,” which pays tribute to a variety of fish much prized in feline circles.

My green eyes meeting Topaz’s golden ones as we each chow down on the same long strand of angel-hair pasta until our vibrissae duel delightfully. . . .

Instead we are crouching under a pair of empty stools waiting for a croupier to need to take a leak.

Romantic, not!

Actually, it is a little waitress doll who unlocks the rest room door and allows us to shadow her inside. This is not good. She senses our soft furry sides on her hosed calves and looks down with a frown just as we dash out of sight into a cubicle. Euw. These floors are never cleaned to the demanding standards of those who have to put four unshod feet down on them.

Luckily, the waitress just wanted to repair her lipstick and quickly waltzes out again.

We return to the rest room’s main area and loft up on the countertop to wash our feet in moist sink bowls. I manage to put my weight on the flipper that lowers the paper towels and we soon are high, clean, and dry.

Topaz nods to a row of metal lockers on the entry wall. All boast combination locks. These must be assigned to key personnel. We sniff around the locked doors, but accomplish nothing but sneezes from all the scented products within.

“How are we going to get out?” Topaz asks.

I can tell she has never done a stakeout before. Before I can explain that we will get out as we got in, the key scrabbles in the door again. We whoosh back into the cubicle, undoing all our good footwork.

“Listen!” I hiss.

Our backs arch in unison as we hear the scrape of a shoe cleat on the plain tile floor. I duck my head under the door to peek. A pair of large, black, Cuban-heeled shoes stands before the locker. We hear the combination lock spinning and clicking, the door opened and shut.

Then the shoes and wide-bottomed black trousers head for the door.

I poke Topaz in the shoulder with a rude claw and whisk out to race through the door before it closes and locks automatically. The minute I am through, I throw all my weight against it to force it to a standstill.

Miss Topaz eases out at an unruffled pace while I huff and puff from my effort. “Quick!” she says, “he is wasting no time.”

All we have seen from our floor-bound rear viewpoint is that he is a tall white male with a loping stride. I was right! He is carrying a stolen guitar case, and his hands are gloved in black leather. The shirt, cape, and hat must be in the case.

We weave in and out of the forest of moving legs, leaving squeals and curses in our wake, rather like Moby Dick, only unlike the white whale, we are black. And not a marine mammal.

Black Legs leads us on a hard chase all through the casino and then the shops and then the meeting areas and then the service areas to the utter rear of the building. A last gray metal door opens at his push, a one-way exit. Before it shuts on his vanishing heels with the one bent nail we elect to eel through.

The heavy door slams shut, but we have split—literally—to either side and the shadows. He turns to check that no one is coming through the door behind him.

A Dumpster awaits; his goal all along. I hear the huge truck gears grinding a few blocks away. This one knows a fast trash pickup will swallow the evidence he deposits now in minutes.

He will leave his load and vanish. We need a way to ID him. My shivs are still throbbing from marking his rear pants. At least they were not denim, but something sleazier for dancing. I am betting he is not dumping those, because his blood is on the ass. Not enough to drip and leave evidence unfortunately.

“We must mark him,” Topaz’s hot breath wafts in my right ear. She has slipped into my shadow.

I explain I already have, and how.

“Something visible to humans,” she insists.

“I know. I suppose I could claw his face.”

“You are already bruised from fighting this man. He would smash you to the ground.”

I am not afraid of taking on this literal bruiser again, but claw marks would only mean something to someone who knew and believed in my crime-fighting nature, like Miss Temple.

The light from the dim security lamp in the distance catches on Topaz’s collar.

“Duck,” I tell her, nudging her behind me, with her amber crystal drops swinging like a lady’s earrings.

“How do these come off?” I ask. “When the tourists collect them for the prize?”

“Something called a ‘spring ring.’”

“Sit still. I am going to see if my front fang can spring one of those babies free.”

“Louie! This is no time to be collecting prizes. You are cheating.”

“No, but he will be. Now be patient and keep quiet.”

“Well!”

But she does. Of course I am forced into some very intimate quarters, mouth to mouth almost, as I struggle to work a topaz drop free without the aid of an opposable thumb.

Our hot breaths mingle. I growl a little. Topaz unintentionally purrs a little. I could get used to this, but—dang!—the glass jewel suddenly is in my mouth. I mean, good!

Our quarry is squatting by the open guitar case, drawing out the black accessories of villainy: the flat-brimmed hat and cloak. Which he folds back in the guitar case. He stands and strips off his long-sleeved black shirt, revealing pale white skin. He dons a short-sleeved shirt from the case and sits on the concrete to take off the flamenco boots and pulls out a pair of simple black slip-on shoes. His folded pants are beside him.

I slip up on them soft and silent as a shadow, and tuck the pendant in the left rear pocket. Just for a backup. And because I am enough of a street cat still to believe that tagging a perp should fit the crime, I use my strongest remaining front shiv to slash an initial into the back heel of one shoe: the letter L.

After a not-so-jolly room service breakfast at eight, Rafi sat on the suite’s sprawling main sofa manning his cell phone and jotting notes on the hotel stationery.

He was Mr. Action Center. Molina sat beside him, frowning and periodically checking her own cell phone. Forensics wouldn’t have much to report for hours. Rafi’s security staff was checking out the entire Dancing With the Celebs support staff and cast, but only after Molina had put Rafi through a catechism of where they were allowed to investigate and how they were to deal with any evidence they found. Dirty Larry was on another couch, far away, analyzing his informal footage for likely Zorro candidates.

Temple curled up on the couch opposite Rafi and Molina with Matt, who was soon to head for rehearsal with Tatyana. Mariah and EK were still sleeping in their bedroom, after the late hours and excitement of this day’s very wee hours.

Louie’s presence was MIA. He had exited with the waiter to go off on errands of a peculiarly mysterious nature.

Temple hoped he was getting the goods on someone.

Meanwhile, this was Rafi’s operation, his hotel, his expertise.

He flipped his cell phone shut and regarded his ex. Professionally. Like they were long-standing colleagues, which they had been, long ago.

“The fencer was found safe at home in his hotel room, pretty zonked.”

“That can be faked,” Molina noted.

“Not with hooker twins zonked out next to him on the bed. My people roused him enough to learn his Zorro and other costumes had always stayed in the wardrobe room.”

“They roused him?” Temple asked alertly. “The hooker twins?”

“No. My staff.”

He eyed Molina again.

Temple watched them both. Such an interesting situation. She had her cops, he had his hotel cops. Wow. Equal again, in a way, as when they’d been rookie uniformed officers together on the streets of L.A.

Temple was torn between feeling sorry for Molina and cheering on Rafi. She wondered where Mariah would fall on that continuum if and when she learned Rafi Nadir was her father.

At the moment, he looked like an okay candidate, and her mother, wearing vintage seventies garb and fighting whatever physical problem she had been, looked pretty lame and tame.

It was always a mistake to underestimate Molina. Rafi was feeling pretty cocky now, for all the right and wrong reasons.

Matt stirred, his head on Temple’s shoulder heavy but welcome.

She swallowed. Hard.

He’d been ambushed alone by a seasoned swordsman, Matt armed with nothing but his occasional martial arts workouts and his wits. He’d done a Max Kinsella job of coming out of that intact. Except for his left hand, which rested on her thigh, under the loose clasp of her contrite right hand.

Could one have a contrite right hand?

She did. She’d encouraged Matt to enter this orgy of dance, publicity, and public self-revelation. Temple Barr, fiancée, expert PR woman, and rotten advisor in all roles.

Rafi looked up at Temple. He then announced fresh info from his staff, probably just to frost Molina.

“Zorro costume’s missing, all right. I guess the sword was left in the attack area because it had no fingerprints, the usual quick ditch and run for it.”

He glanced at Molina, whose olive skin had flushed deeply red at that phrase, “a quick ditch.”

And hadn’t she done just that to Rafi, fourteen years ago in L.A.?

Temple shivered, partly from the idea of Matt’s bandaged hand and wrist on her thigh, partly from watching Molina come apart before her eyes. Max would enjoy this. Or . . . would he? She was petty enough to like it on his behalf, scared enough to dread it on Matt’s behalf. Someone had tried to kill him!

She needed Molina and all her homicide skills, as Molina needed Rafi and his hotel security history.

Shoot! She and Molina were twins right now, needing exactly the people they most despised and distrusted.

Temple eyed Rafi. His usual five o-clock shadow was now purely 3:00 A.M. satanic smudge and his Cheshire cat expression said that he was aware of every damn nuance Temple was.

He winked at her, then his glance moved to the sleeping Mariah and Ping-Ponged between anger and regret.

Yeah. He had daddy genes, probably to his own great surprise.

She wondered if Matt or Max did, and could think of half a dozen reasons why either might not . . . or did. A dozen reasons why she didn’t want to be her own mother, wobbling erratically between seasoned insight and neurotic overcontrol of her only daughter and youngest child.

And poor Mariah was both.

Temple had only one more night after this to don Zoe Chloe Ozone garb, the awards show on Friday.

She could hardly wait to dump the annoying little spotlight-grabber.

What had almost happened to Matt made this entire competition, for charity or not, seem trivial. She knew she should lighten up, and would later. People just want to have fun, and that’s very good for the human race.

Someone, or several someones on these premises, didn’t.

Temple glanced around. She saw Dirty Larry and his camcorder plying the aisles along with other pro and amateur videographers. Hank Buck stood at the far stage wing, arms folded, eyes scanning the audience. His gaze met hers and he gave a little nod. Other discreet, safari-uniformed hotel guards dotted the back of the house. One was seated almost invisibly behind the judges’ table.

Molina had insisted Leander Brock give her a list of the dancers in order.

When Temple saw it, she knew she was still enough of a competitor to rejoice that Matt had been paired with Olivia Phillips again. By the fifth show and final dance, repairings were inevitable.

Olivia was an ideal partner for Matt. Their heights were right for the cheek-to-cheek tango, and they liked and therefore enhanced each other. Olivia’s tall, slender frame was made for the tango, and Matt had proven he had Latin cojones in the pasodoble. (And even later in the Paso Duel with “Zorro.”)

Temple wasn’t sure that the dance partners were “drawn” for this final performance night. Glory B. was paired with Keith Salter, not the greatest dancer but a good height match. The tango was built on sharp head motions and close body contact by both dancers, facing each other, then apart. Matched heights made it work. So CC had “drawn” the statuesque Wandawoman and José was stuck with Motha Jonz. Giggle.

Temple eyed the “thermometer” graphics board. Despite no personal onstage mishaps and therefore no sympathy votes, Matt had edged out José. Temple would bet his working against type was winning over voters. Olivia and Glory B. were neck and neck on the women’s side.

The dance order would be Salter and Glory B., José and Motha Jonz, CC and Wandawoman, and Matt and Olivia last. Some thought last was the best position in a competition. You stay on the judges’ minds better. Yet mostly call-in and e-mail voters counted these days.

Zoe Chloe would only be onstage at the end, to award the junior dance studio scholarship. That vote board showed Patrisha and EK at the top.

Temple crossed her fingers for EK as she eyed “her girls.”

The four wore glittery tops and short skirts, less trashy but a mirror of what older teen celebrities wore. Molina had sprung a mint for Temple to take Mariah and EK to lunch at the Fashion Show Mall on the Strip and on a shopping spree that midday, so Mariah was looking successfully “teen queen” too.

Temple had welcomed the outing. It took her mind off Matt, his rehearsal demands and physical condition. Although by early this morning he had been remarkably ready to, ah, rise and shine.

“What are you grinning about, ZC?”

Crawford Buchanan had breezed close to whisper in her ear. He loved taking these hit-and-run liberties and could play his fingers across his victim’s neck if he didn’t think she’d call him on it. ZC would. She was wearing the radically high, platform wedge, black satin ballet-style shoes she’d splurged on at the mall for Zoe Chloe’s final appearances, so she could stomp him like a bug if she wanted to.

“Just thinking,” she said, “that my junior dance corps look darling but age-appropriate. Even the Los Hermanos Brothers are giving them a new look.”

“Eh. They’re okay. A little mousy, maybe. Never your problem,” he added with a patented leer at her black-and-white polka-dotted hose. She also wore a kilt-length fuchsia plaid taffeta balloon skirt and white, puffed-sleeved cropped jacket with a giant fuchsia silk peony on the shoulder that hosted a black rhinestone spider pin as big as a teacup.

On this last competition night (and because Molina and Rafi refused to watch from the greenroom), the ZCO party had seats along the front row on the judges’ side.

Sitting in the audience was so different from watching on a TV screen in the greenroom. They still had their little “family” row: Rafi, Temple, Molina, and Mariah.

The final introductions began as the band played the first couple on stage.

Tango music was sophisticated, like the dance, sometimes brighter and jazzy, sometimes darker.

Wisely, Glory and Keith had been given a quick, intense routine, with lots of dips, leg wraps, and intricate steps for the agile and petite Glory. Keith wore men’s formal black and she sparkled in vibrant orange taffeta. Keith pretty much functioned as the pole in a stripper club. That quieter role enhanced his dignity, so the applause was warm when the couple finished with Glory doing the splits in front of his upright figure.

“Your best dance,” Danny could honestly tell Keith. “A subtle job of supporting your partner so she could perform some very demanding moves. Fabulous job, Miss B. You’ve come far. I expect to see you in a High School Musical touring company shortly.”

“Really?” Glory B. radiated new confidence even while panting hard.

“Nine,” said Danny, looking at Glory B. so she’d know the rating was hers, not theirs.

The audience went wild. Glory B. grinned and waved at them as she left the stage.

“There’s one contestant whose self-esteem has visibly soared during the competition,” Temple whispered to nobody in particular, her eyes glued on the stage.

“Actually,” said Molina, “you’re right.” She glanced at her rapt daughter, visibly reconsidering.

Audible breaths were drawn in when Crawford announced “José Juarez . . .”

“. . . and his partner, Motha Jonz.”

Their held breaths whooshed out like a disappointed tide at the news of his partner, a cumbersome dancer at best.

This was another dance opening that placed the partners at opposite ends of the stage.

Jose wore the tight, chest-baring black shirt and pants of male ballroom dancers in sexier routines. His rolled-up sleeves showcased forearms muscular from fencing. A tilted black fedora with a crimson band shadowed his chiseled features.

Motha Jonz glittered in basic black studded with bloodred rhinestones, but she still was shaped like a saguaro cactus, round and fully packed. They stalked each other around the dance floor, their steps measured between intricate twining moves and sudden hip-to-hip turns. They’d break apart to pose, then resume the tease.

The audience was whooping at every sexy move now, with pockets of applause bursting out. In this light and this dance, Motha Jonz looked like a contender for the first time.

The judges thought so too.

“Your best dance, both of you,” Danny said while awarding them a nine.

Leander was almost in tears. “A terrific recovery from the sad mishap last night. Motha Jonz, you looked ‘mahvelous.’ And, José, you are perfection in this dance.” He awarded them his first ten of the competition, which had the audience in an uproar.

“What was with the hat?” Savannah Ashleigh complained. “We want to see all of Mr. Juarez, don’t we, ladies?” she asked the audience. “Even his face!” Her raucous laughter was echoed by approving shrieks from the female audience members.

The shrieks died fast when the Cloaked Conjuror strode out in a Darth Vader mask, wearing a long black leather coat slashed open along the sides and back so every stride cracked like a whip or the flap of giant batwings. Wandawoman stalked after him in a Spider Queen outfit, a spandex catsuit slashed open more than it concealed, accessorized with torn net and tattoos, working a red-satin lined cloak like combination train and tail.

Some nervous high-tech music emphasized both the robotic rhythm of the tango and the simmering passion beneath it. It was a mad, bad dance and the audience loved it.

The judges, not so much.

“Power, yes,” Leander said. “Physically, you two are the most powerful of the men and women. But . . . finesse, my friends! The tango does not celebrate the birth of the Death Star but the intimate, dangerous dance of the sexes. Your footwork did indeed live up a military march, not a dance, and despite the magnificent visuals, no underlying feeling came through.”

He waved a “seven,” with Savannah and Danny brandishing “eights.”

So far no “mishap” had marred the evening. Temple hoped Matt and Olivia would make that a record of four couples unmolested.

Tension in the ballroom was tangible. Matt’s paso had knocked them dead. How could he improve on it? Those few who knew what a harrowing night he’d spent were figuratively nibbling their nails. Temple could sense the tension from Rafi and Molina on either side of her, not only for Matt, but for knowing that if the evil luck that had dogged the contestants was to strike again, tonight, now would be the last chance.

Temple had felt the mood in the audience and among her “posse” heightening with every dance. Even Rafi and Molina stopped scanning the audience like presidential bodyguards and applauded the end of José’s number. They better not be disloyal to Matt, Temple thought. Her nerves were twitching inside of Zoe Chloe’s faux adolescent little body while waiting for Matt’s tango.

She tried to remember her new platform shoes made her almost five-and-a-half feet tall and Crawford would look like a total shrimp when they were onstage together for the junior award later and at tomorrow’s adult award show. Matt had called her cell phone before the show began to tell her he felt fine and ready to rumble. She’d semi-punned back that the rumba wasn’t the dance of the day.

“And now,” Crawford finally crowed, sensing his reign as emcee peaking, “our last couple of the night performing the . . . Last Tango in Vegas! The glamorous Olivia Phillips and her partner, new Latin king Matt Devine!”

Oh, wow. Temple’s eyes were glued on the staircase. She wanted someone’s hand to grab. She looked right past Molina and saw that Mariah had scrunched down on her mother’s other side and was staring raptly at the stage. “He’s gonna be okay, he’s gonna be okay,” she was mouthing, as if making up for her unguarded and selfish blurt when she saw Matt streaming blood in the wee hours of this morning.

Kids have to learn to deal with shock; it doesn’t come naturally.

No couple arrived at the top of either stairway in the wings.

The audience stirred, uneasy.

Temple fidgeted in her seat. Was he ill?

Then Matt was there, sliding down the curving banister as he’d first done to escape the masked attacker fifteen hours ago. Talk about capitalizing on real-life experience.

He shot off the end doing a spectacular airborne split over the four risers to the dance floor, landing perfectly in a wide-legged stance, his martial arts training coming into play. He turned and looked back up the stairs as if willing an apparition to appear.

“Oh, wow,” Mariah squealed.

Temple echoed her internally. The makeup and costume crew had made a totally bold move. Matt’s hair was the natural color, but gelled close to his head except for a blindingly blond high-rise top. His black leather pants and shirt were “skinfully” tight. A black leather gauntlet on his wounded left arm stretched up to his shoulder, a brilliantly kinky twist on a practical costume necessity. The recent strains had chiseled features set in the expression of predatory intensity affected by male ballroom dancers.

The effect was startling for a tango: a blond man, totally icy-hot Nazi cyborg fetish awesome.

The look made a certain historical sense, Temple told herself while swallowing hard. Many Nazis had escaped to South America after World War II, and Argentina streets gave birth to the tango and refined it later after World War II.

Mariah didn’t get these nuances, but she got the one that mattered. “He is smokin’. The girls at school will be so freaking jealous!”

Olivia appeared at the top of the stairs in a clingy backless burgundy gown slathered with sequins. Its fluttering “car wash” skirt was slit strategically up to her hips at every opportunity.

Age did not wither, nor custom stale her utter feline sensuality.

This was the couple to beat. The audience rose in a standing ovation to acknowledge that.

That motivated Olivia to move. She glittered like a glamorous serpent as she slithered and slid down the banister, spinning down the four stairs to plaster herself against Matt’s back and wrap a possessive cocked leg around his braced thigh.

O-kay, Temple told herself. She was watching Rico and Lola at the Copa, right? Music and passion were always the fashion. Disengage, Zoe Chloe!

That was kinda hard. The audience was clapping and hooting at every move, and there were lots of them. The tango was a deliberate dance with sharp leg flicks keeping the couple entwined in a sexy procession of moves, scissoring their lower legs in and out.

In this version Olivia was the attempted aggressor. Her sharp, spike-heeled leg flicks flirted between Matt’s wide-planted legs very . . . dangerously. Throbbing, aching violin music dictated each nerve-wracking flirtatious advance and retreat of the dancers’ legs and hips.

Temple couldn’t even imagine rehearsing this dance. The guy would have to wear a suit of armor. At least an athletic protector.

On her left, Rafi was emitting a low, admiring laugh.

On her right, Molina’s eyes were no longer wandering like a bodyguard’s, but transfixed on the stage and Matt.

Olivia was all flashing naked leg, stretching a supernaturally long and straight gam to, uh, Rico’s broad shoulder. He caught her arched ankle and turned her legs like the hands of a clock, until she slid slowly down his side in the splits, an amazing feat for her age. Grandma Gypsy Rose Lee.

Even more amazing, Olivia moved from lying at his feet by drawing herself up through his legs from the back in a torso-clinging move that defied gravity . . . and decency.

The audience frenzy was drowning out the music now. Temple glimpsed Molina quickly distracting Mariah’s eyes from the stage with a whispered comment.

Temple had heard network dance show judges comment once that a routine was so hot and intense that they felt like voyeurs, like it was too private to watch. That was happening now with an ex-priest and a grandma who’d just met a week earlier. Dance was an amazing art form.

Zoe Chloe was blushing and Temple was thinking someone should call the police to shut this show down when the couple executed a series of sharp spins and Olivia sank into the splits again, clutching at . . . Rico’s . . . disdainful hip. Was there such a thing as a disdainful hip? If there could be a contrite right hand, sure.

The applause and screams were overriding everything, even the couple going to the judges’ table. They took bow after bow at center stage.

“Some full recovery,” Rafi growled on Temple’s left.

“Max certainly nailed the competition there, and practically the girl,” Molina muttered on her right.

Max?

Temple stared at Molina, to find her longtime antagonist flushing. “I meant ‘Matt.’ God, Barr. Can’t you manage to get boyfriends without mirror names?”

That’s when the audience gasped.

Molina snapped her head back to the stage and a dazed Temple changed focus a split second later.

While she was ambling toward the judges’ table arm in arm with Matt, Olivia’s shoe had hit a slick spot on the shiny wooden surface. One high heel kicked out from under her.

She was going to land flat on her back, the worst kind of impact. Especially for a sexy senior citizen.

Matt’s knees buckled as he tried to push himself beneath her before she hit, hard.

Molina and Rafi were sprinting onto the dance floor as were a bunch of beige shirts from hotel security, not to mention Dirty Larry slinging his camcorder strap over his shoulder to rush down the aisle to the scene of the accident.

Another dirty trick—sabotage—was all anyone in the know could think. The triumphant couple went from a strut to the judges’ table to being swallowed by a clot of converging security personnel.

The center of the stage looked like a football field with a loose ball.

Temple charged over, late, picturing Matt and his already disabled arm crushed at the bottom of the pile.

Feet lost purchase and skidded, bodies and arms flailed about on a floor as slippery as an ice rink.

Danny was standing, leaning over the judges’ table on the dais that gave him an overview of the melee. “He’s holding something! Striking. Get him!” Danny yelled with the overriding vocal command of a choreographer who could call whole chorus lines to attention.

A mantra of screamed “Die, bastard, die” came from the unseen heart of the struggle.

“Get him. Get him. Get him!” male voices chanted between desperate grunts. “Get who?”

“Man in beige,” Danny bellowed, leaping over the tabletop to help. “He’s got some kind of weapon.”

Midnight Louie, long MIA, suddenly came streaking past Temple’s side vision, making for the tumbled bodies in the pile.

He paused to eye the flailing limbs and feet, lifting a snarling face featuring an amazingly wide and bloodred maw lined with white, sharklike fangs.

Then he leaped onto the struggling pile of flesh, bones, and clothing with what Temple would swear later was a martial arts cry. Or the feline version, anyway.

Louie chomped down hard on one particular exposed khaki butt, ripping a back pocket clear off, so the contents scattered, including a small brittle comet that flew across the wood floor.

The accosted man screamed with pain and reared up, revealing a clenched fist.

It was the oddest sight. All the other men in the pile lifted up too, as if it was a modern dance movement, chaotic, brutal, choreographed.

The man Louie had targeted was pushed up by their pressure, one fist held high, something in it.

“Matt!” Temple cried, spotting a pool of black at the very bottom of the pile.

She charged forward, glimpsing Danny Dove on her left trying the same rescue maneuver. Her brand-new shoe sole slipped, but it wasn’t an issue.

She was suddenly stopped in midleap by a blow at her midsection that knocked the breath out of her, partly because of her own rash forward momentum.

Matt! her mind screamed.

Her body was being hoisted in a lift, and then slammed back down to earth, every bone shuddering from the impact.

She couldn’t move. She was held fast to a living wall and every eye was turning to her and whatever imprisoned her, the guards’ . . . Danny’s . . . Molina’s . . . Matt’s . . . a black cat’s . . .

The silence in the ballroom became profound, like total deafness.

A fist shook in front of her vision. Big. White-knuckled. Clutching . . . something small and silly and insignificant.

She could hardly see it.

A thread? A hair? A cat whisker?

“Thisss,” a guttural voice in her ear whispered, and then shouted to everyone. “Thisss is a sssyringe of pure, uncut heroin. One jab and she’s dead meat.”

Temple realized that her feet in their empowering platform wedgies were dangling, that the man had again hoisted her like a Barbie doll.

Damn! She always knew there was some seriously big disadvantage to being short and slight. On the other hand, she might be able to do an Olivia and kick her Goth shoe up behind her, right into the family vault.

“Don’t move,” Molina ordered. “Anybody.”

The policewoman was pushing herself up from the floor like a Greek tragedienne coming back to life, like a really pissed off Medea.

“Hank,” Rafi Nadir called from the rear. “Give it up.”

The guy spun, Temple’s limbs flopping doll-like as he turned.

The chest she was pasted against heaved, powerful and iron-hard, like a machine. “I can’t get the bastard,” the voice heaved out behind her, “I can get her. Again. And again and again.”

She saw his arm rising above her. He wasn’t brandishing a cat whisker. It was a hypodermic needle. Heroin! No, God!

She’d seen slow-motion, damning scenes like these in live theater. The helpless chorus writhing in joint impotency on the floor. The mad, cursed central figure lifting an arm to tear out his own eyes, to drive daggers into her innocent children’s bodies, to rend garments at the cruel fate the gods decree. . . .

Temple lifted her foot in its industrial-strength Zoe Chloe Ozone Goth shoe just as ahead of her Danny leaped up, up, and awaaay in his beautiful balloon of a powerful dance kick, and behind her someone shouted, “Hike!”

Hike? Why not?

She kicked hard up and behind her like a tango diva with gladiator-style spike heels and a life wish.

The man screamed, tumbling away and down behind her, and she was on the floor as the flying tackle behind her hit home.

She was belly down, face-to-face with a horizontal Matt, who grabbed her hands and pulled her hard toward him in a paso move. On the slippery floor they could roll far away from the kicking feet and churning arms and legs behind them both at last.

Temple examined what she could see of herself. “No hypos?” she asked.

“God willing,” Matt said, patting her limbs and torso, hunting hypos.

“You were way too hot in the tango to be doing that right now,” she managed to huff out. “I might explode.”

He pulled her up to her feet as if doing an Olivia lift and held her even closer as Molina and Rafi and Dirty Larry pulled a man in an Oasis guard’s uniform away from his fellow guards and into custody.

The face was a deranged mask, but Temple was able to identify it. Hank Buck.

Rafi held the lethal hypo in his hand and moved carefully over the slick floor to show it to Matt and Temple. Empty.

“Good thing you’re so short,” he told Temple. “And have happy feet. And a berserk cat. Between the two of you, he missed harpooning you and did in his own shoulder.”

“What happens now?” Temple asked.

“In seven or eight minutes he’ll be as high as a fruit bat and we’ll read him his rights and interrogate him backstage while he’s euphoric before the EMTs get here. Because the horse was injected into a muscle, he’ll have two to four hours before it kills him. A nasal mist called Narcan can reverse an overdose.

“Buck was obviously hoping to dose Matt during the confusion of helping him and Olivia up. Floor was probably sprayed with silicone. Being on duty here, he’d have watched the rehearsal and figured out where Matt would end up.

If he’d gotten away before Matt realized he’d been ‘stung,’ or if Matt just didn’t register what had happened, we’d have no idea he’d been drugged or what was used and how to reverse it. So, though Buck is the bastard who should die, he’ll live to stand trial for attempted murder.”

Rafi slapped Matt on the shoulder. “Lethal dance, man.” He smiled at Temple. “You still have Supergirl chops, babe, and your cat rocks.” He sighed. “And Molina will happily take my ass to the cleaner’s because one of my staff was the wacko.”

The law enforcement types had shuffled the rogue Oasis guard off the dance floor so Matt and Temple stood dazed and embracing alone at the center.

The hypo had been intended for Matt, and then turned on Temple.

She slowly realized she’d been aware of Crawford’s droning voice circling the struggle. Now she could see and hear him. He was circling her and Matt now, like a media shark.

“Ladies and gentlemen, you have been hearing the blow-by-blow account of the capture of the dangerous lunatic who’s been sabotaging our wonderful dancers. Tune into the KREP-AM radio 88.6 on your dial, where I’ll be broadcasting my eyewitness account just as soon as I get back there this evening. By then I will have the name of the man who just tried to kill Mr. Matt Devine and my broadcast assistant, Internet darling Zoe Chloe Ozone.”

He minced carefully forward, came close, and thrust the microphone into their faces.

“How did it feel to come so close to death?”

Danny Dove came near with an expression that indicated he was close to a homicidal act, and extracted the mike from Buchanan’s hands.

“This is Danny Dove, head judge.” He put his free arm over Matt and Temple’s shoulders and started walking them offstage. “We respectfully request that Matt and Olivia visit the judges’ table to receive their scores for an amazing performance. Then, if our stalwart Miss Ozone feels up to it, she will award the junior dancer scholarship.”

Applause broke out.

“We appreciate your patience and forbearance,” Danny added, “and will return for the final adult results tomorrow.”

He turned to hand Temple the mike and returned to the judges’ dais. Olivia had been standing on the fringe and smiled tearfully as she walked over to stand by Matt. All three embraced, not with the usual euphoria of a great dance finished, but with a survivor’s fervor.

Temple stood between them, holding the mike, while the judges held forth.

Danny was the evening’s Iron Man. His calm control eased everyone back into normality.

“What can you say to perfection?” he began, then answered himself. “Bravo and brava! And to Miss Tatyana”—he turned to see her standing, subdued for once, in the wings—“let’s have her step into view for a round of applause. She choreographed the most superbly sexy tango I have ever seen.”

Applause and shouts erupted.

“And,” Danny added, “though the audience and judges were unaware of it, I’ve been told that Matt was recovering from blood loss from a previous attack with a knife in the wee hours this morning, but he and Tatyana were able to still stage an unbelievable routine.

“As for the dancers, you completely gave yourselves over to your roles. You were precise, you were edgy, you embraced the music even more intimately than you embraced each other. You gave us an incredible experience. Ten.”

Leander Brock was silent for a long, dramatic moment. “I confess that my emotions have been through a buzz saw. To go from the thrill of watching . . . no, experiencing such a dazzling tango, to the life-and-death struggle that followed on this stage . . . to think that an event designed to raise money for deathly ill children might have resulted in someone’s death on this very stage, it’s too much for me. I can only thank God and second Danny. Ten.”

Savannah too seemed as subdued as Tatyana. Then she threw her score cards on the floor at Matt and Olivia’s feet.

“You two are off the charts. I’d give you a fifteen if I could. That was Oscar-worthy acting and entertainment. And Matt, honestly, I thought you were too nice to win this thing. Dirty dancing is where it’s at these days. But you were amazingly, sizzlingly, devilishly, almost X-rated naughty in that dance and I loved it! Tell me you haven’t sold your soul to the Devil, because I’d sure like to be next in line for it.”

She smiled at Olivia. “Sistah, you give all us seasoned ladies hope! What about those sexy flicks and splits? Have you been possessed by the ghost of that leggy legend, Cyd Charisse, who just left us not too long ago? Like Fred Astaire said of her decades ago, you were ‘beautiful dynamite’ in that tango. Ten with whipped cream on top, because you two got me in a lather.”

The standing ovation lasted for two minutes.

Danny nodded at Temple and held out a sealed envelope.

The mike was shaking in her hands and her knees were trembling. She faced the audience but her eye was on the floor director, who nodded encouragingly and held up two fingers. Two minutes to go. Two minutes to fill. She wanted to rush backstage and hear what Hank Buck had confessed to. He was just now probably reaching the euphoric spill stage.

“I have to admit that I am not up to the usual Zoe Chloe Ozone speed right now,” she began. “The events tonight have been too awesome, as have been everyone on this stage, cast and crew, including the security and law enforcement personnel who averted a tragedy I would tend to take very personally no matter what had happened.”

The audience laughed lightly, easing tension.

She smiled. “It’s appropriate that we honor first the winner of the junior competition, for this show was produced to raise hope for the young. The scholarship will benefit . . .”

She struggled to open the thick paper of the envelope while holding the mike.

“Would you believe my hands are shaking?” she asked the audience during the lull.

More laughter and applause.

“The scholarship will benefit”—now her voice went shaky—“Patrisha Peters.”

Shrieks from offstage brought an ecstatic Patrisha and her partner Brandon running to Temple and the mike.

“Thank you all so much,” Patrisha said, in tears. “This has been the best experience of my life and, gosh, dancing with a Los Hermanos Brother was the coolest thing in the world.”

The other Hermanos brothers and the girl contestants and their mothers came running on stage to surround the winning couple, with the judges soon joining them and the adult contestants streaming out from backstage to surround and embrace Olivia and Matt.

Temple stood alone at the mike watching the floor director’s two spread hands, the fingers counting down from ten.

“And so we thank you all for your generous votes and will meet one more time tomorrow to name the winning Dancing With the Celeb stars. Same time, same place, and same cast, thank God.”

Danny came up to hug Zoe Chloe just as the final little finger folded into the director’s palm and he beamed at Temple for her perfect timing.

Even the audience came streaming down onto the stage now, dazed and happy and emotionally drained.

“Oh, Danny,” Temple said, finally allowing tears of relief and joy to saturate his shoulder. “Thanks for getting me through this. I was so out of character at the end. I just couldn’t conjure Zoe Chloe.”

“You did it just right. Zee Cee will be back tomorrow all sass and savvy. After all, she’s going to be the sole MC, if she wants to be. Buchanan is history on this show. Matt and Olivia are mobbed right now, but I bet you want to catch up with your police ‘posse’ backstage, so let’s slip away and let you do what you do best, unravel this conspiracy.”

“Yes, please.”

Molina intercepted them outside the greenroom, which was now a temporary police interrogation room.

“He’s not happily hostile yet. It’s hard to tell how much he’s had and how fast it worked,” she told them, as Danny slipped away to return to the love fest on stage.

“But I’m not too late?” Temple said. “I didn’t miss anything?”

“This show hasn’t started yet. But this is the guy.”

“Why would anyone hate Matt that much?” Temple asked.

“A teensy bit prejudiced, are we?” Molina asked in turn, as Rafi joined them. But she smiled.

“It’s a legitimate question,” Temple insisted. “This guy is a local. The only thing vaguely aggressive Matt did since coming to town was to track down his stepfather. So this Hank Buck was a friend of that scumball? Really? I can’t believe that. Cliff Effinger didn’t have any friends. Whoever tied him to the bow of the pirate ship at the Treasure Island so he drowned could not have been Matt. If that was anything, it was a hit.

“And another thing,” Temple added. “What about the Barbie Doll Killer? Could Hank Buck be it?”

“I doubt it,” Molina said. “I can’t deal with that issue here and now, but I have a nasty suspicion that I’m gonna get on ASAP. Right now why Buck wanted to kill Matt is a priority.

“My detectives are even now breaking down Buck’s bio like he was Lee Harvey Oswald,” Molina said. “They’re going to his neighbors, his car mechanic, anyone. If there’s a connection to Matt, they’ll find it. Two attempts at murder must have a powerful motive behind them.” She looked over her shoulder to Mariah’s father. “He was one of yours.”

Rafi shook his head. “He was one of yours first. That was on his application that my people pulled. He was hired here before I was, but before that he was on the force. We found no record of dishonorable discharge. Your detectives are trying to find out why he quit the force. He was seeing the department psychologist, but those records are protected.”

“Not for long. Either way,” Molina said, “he was one bad cop, public or private. Why’d he target this event and these people?”

“That’s sure what I wonder,” a new voice said.

They all turned, shocked to see that Matt had joined them, and doubly shocked by the sight of his current tough-guy tango image.

“I finally escaped my fans,” he said. “I want to know why this guy almost killed me and Temple. I don’t see a reason.”

“I don’t see it, either,” Rafi admitted. “It’d make more sense if one of the celebrity dancers who was a victim of dirty tricks was the murder target. I can see it being Motha Jonz. Buck could have been hired to off her by the gangsta rappers, say, whoever Motha Jonz was involved with at the time of the Vegas shoot-out. I could see using the dance show to do that.”

“Hey,” Temple said. “Buck didn’t have to be hired. Wasn’t a teenager shot and killed during the gunplay on the Strip? I need my laptop. I could look that and all the other celebrity ‘sins’ right up. There are hundreds of sites on stuff like that.”

Rafi had a cell phone to his ear. “Nadir here. Collect a hot pink laptop from the—?”

He handed Temple the phone and she described it and told the guard where in the central bedroom it was. Then Rafi took back the phone and said he wanted the laptop in the dancing show greenroom “yesterday.”

“‘Hot pink’?” Molina mocked. “Can you never stop being girly?”

Matt pulled Temple close to his leather-clad side. “I don’t ever want her to.”

“You see the benefits,” Temple purred, watching Molina look away and shake her head. Temple straightened up and got back to business.

“Maybe that messenger boy shot in the rap star shoot-out was a relative of Buck’s,” she said.

“But Buck didn’t try to kill Motha Jonz,” Matt said. “Rafi, your gangsta rap slaying idea is interesting. Exchanging live ammo for blanks was the most dangerous dirty trick, but Motha Jonz was the shooter. The Cloaked Conjuror and José were more in danger from her.”

Temple had sat on an empty guard’s chair and now looked up and nodded.

“She might have gotten a police charge out of the incident,” Temple said. “That would have hurt her career even more than it has been. And she might have been found guilty and convicted.”

“What about all those other dirty tricks?” Matt wondered. “What was the point?”

“Obvious.” Molina was brusque. “Diversions to mask that you were a target, the target. I don’t know if he intended the Cloaked Conjuror to be injured by Motha Jonz’s loaded gun, but the fact that he did get hurt got us police thinking the whole thing might be a follow-through on the continual death threats he gets.”

“There must have been more to it,” Matt insisted. “We’re missing something.”

“What about the shoe incidents?” Temple asked.

“You would get on the shoes,” Molina said, rolling her eyes. “They were the most minor ‘accidents.’ At worst, Olivia could have twisted her ankle. As it was, her dancing through the problem and CC upholding her only enhanced her ratings with the audience. And you told me your nosy cat pretty much targeted very early on that the stage mother dosed her own daughter’s shoes with the pepper spray for the same reason—audience sympathy and votes.”

Molina eyed Rafi. “Now do you understand why I’m so set against Mariah getting into the kid performer stuff?”

“Wait a minute.” Temple sat up straighter. “I’m getting something. I’m seeing something.”

“So now you’re psychic?” Molina said.

“No, I’m . . . I don’t see how it relates to Hank Buck, that’s all. But, what you said: the onstage ‘accidents’ raised the victim’s scores. They got a sympathy vote. Olivia’s heel was first and the rating went up. That inspired Yvonne Smith to make Sou-Sou an underdog with another, far more dramatic shoe problem. And it worked. Her daughter’s score went up.”

Rafi was leaning forward, elbows on knees. “That’s right. It snowballed. Salter was poisoned, Wandawoman drugged, CC shot, and Matt was personally attacked by someone in Juarez’s guise. That had to be Hank, but could Sou-Sou’s mother have set up the other incidents to disguise the fact that her daughter’s problem was staged? And then there’s Temple’s idea. Maybe somebody in the competition or around the competition is a relative of the people these celebrities hurt. I mean, look at them. They’re quite a crew. In a way what happened to them fit their crimes.”

Matt caught his drift and kept the ball rolling. “Glory B. was the first one to have an almost accident even before the first show. She fell on the jungle gym and Danny Dove thought it had been tampered with. She got a DUI citation for an accident a few months ago, and a little girl has serious leg injuries.”

“I just Googled Glory B. online to get the facts straight,” Temple said. “There’ll probably be a huge settlement for the family of the girl. I don’t find anything obviously bad about Olivia,” Temple said, “but Keith Salter was all over the entertainment gossip shows for some cases of food poisoning at his restaurant in Aspen. E. coli. It was especially bad. A toddler died. No one was found derelict, but the media loved broadcasting the problem because Salter had raked so many other chefs over the coals on his Butcher’s Holler show.”

Molina spoke. “The hospital said there was no way to ever tell if his poisoning had been accidental, or intentional.”

“Wandawoman being drugged in the pasodoble?” Matt asked.

“Oh, my gosh,” Temple said, “that could have been done to make you look bad too. I’ll look her up.”

Molina shook her head. “Who needs detectives anymore? Everything is online.”

“And it stays there forever,” Temple said. “Sometimes good, sometimes bad.”

“The ‘bad’ refers to Zoe Chloe, right?”

Temple, tapping away on her laptop keyboard, shrugged at Molina. “Zoe Chloe has her uses. I just wish I could figure a way to earn money off of her popularity.”

“Everybody wants to earn money these days, especially these annoying celebrities behaving badly,” Molina noted.

“Maybe even Hank Buck,” Temple said.

“What are you getting at?” Rafi asked.

“Let’s say he always was in this to get Matt. I know, we don’t know why, but it looks like that. Let’s say . . . he saw he could use the competition to get other people too. Then he went wild, was a revenge machine. All these celebrities going wild in Hollywood and Vegas, getting away with things. That could irritate a law officer, right?”

“Irritate. Not drive nuts.”

“What if he already was nuts?”

“Any evidence?”

“Only in what he did at the other end of his mania.”

“What are you getting at?”

“I’m getting at, who could hate Glory B., Olivia, Chef Salter, Wandawoman, Motha Jonz, and Matt enough to persecute them? Persecute. But kill? The only person Hank Buck tried to kill was Matt.”

“He’s the most innocent of the innocent,” Molina protested.

“That before his tango, or after?” Rafi asked.

“Forget the dancing,” Molina snapped. “The last thing this is about is dancing. The dancing was the pretext.”

“Amen,” Temple said. “And there was Hank Buck, full of whatever venom he had, having all these people on his turf, and at his mercy. Most of all, for reasons we don’t know, Matt.”

Dirty Larry’s buzz-cut dirty blond head came through the greenroom door.

“Our boy Buck is reaching smack high. He’ll be singing his soul out like Janis Joplin and I’ve got the camcorder and a tape recorder rolling to capture every sweet, demented syllable of it.”

The audience has finally emptied the house, the crew has left, and only the ghost light is on in the wings, along with the soft ambient lighting along the aisles.

I sit center stage. Alone.

Waiting.

At last a lone figure comes slinking slowly down one aisle from a seat on the very back wall of the theater.

Legs longer than yesterday. Doing the model walk, one lean smooth gam crossing in front of the other. Eyes glittering in the semidark, fixed on me, not on the ladder of steps she is descending. The jewels at her neck matching their color and fire.

I was made for nights like these.

I wait. Rock solid, holding my powerful limbs in check, no longer breathing hard from my earlier heroic exertions, breathing hard from expectation.

I wait and she comes to me, crossing the wooden dance floor surefooted, never faltering even on the slippery section.

She walks straight up to me until our blinkless gazes are only inches apart.

At the last second she veers left, brushing my side, coiling her long black train around my powerful shoulder.

I stand and look over my shoulder blade, her head is turned likewise toward mine.

She executes a sudden spin and then stalks close along my side again, brushing her face fast against mine before she is walking away.

I follow with one sharp step forward, catch her passing train and draw my mitt along it. She stops. Makes two dazzling shrugs with her sexy shoulders, then our feet are moving in the time-honored way of our kind, making impatient stuttering, kneading little steps, flicking around each other, between each other.

She lashes her train high, letting it quiver in time with her steps.

Our feet are silent, we are silent. The stage is silent for all the intense motion at its center.

She spins away again, and I follow fast. She turns. I turn.

She suddenly slides close along my side again and we turn and turn, our sides undulating together and apart, together and apart.

After another intense round of these steps, she suddenly executes a slow slide down my shoulder and rolls on her back, her golden eyes never leaving my face, her lithe body curled into calculated surrender.

I know this is the climax of the dance, that we will hold our triumphant pose for a few seconds and accept the silent applause of our kind that our routine has won for centuries.

But this is the twenty-first century. Midnight Louie may be a fearless crime-fighter, conquering hero, and primal tiger of the night but he is also a canny suitor.

I move to the side and pick up the small something I have been guarding ever since the stage finally cleared and I could find it. My many schemes to ID the perp for later plucking weren’t needed when he gave himself away but that is no reason to let a jewel languish underfoot, unclaimed by the jewel to whom it belongs.

I pick it up delicately in my fangs and turn to Topaz.

Those glorious eyes had narrowed at my seeming desertion at so critical a moment, but now they flare with understanding and renewed passion.

She lies still as I approach her supine beauty. I bend down and with the most skilled ministrations of my teeth and tongue, reattach the precious topaz pendant on her collar so the set is whole again.

Now the dance is truly over.

Let the games begin!

Max awoke, alive and well.

What do you know?

He awoke with Revienne draped over him, asleep and looking like a Botticelli angel. Of perhaps a couple dozen positions he could recall at this point, he was only physically capable of one or two so far. Apparently they’d sufficed.

He felt . . . mahvelous. Rested. Relaxed. He’d managed to satisfy this gorgeous woman with two game legs and a memory that couldn’t access High School Seduction One, much less the Kama-sutra.

He supposed, on reflection, that he owed an awful lot of that to her. As he owed his very survival. He felt the double afterglow of fulfillment and escaping mortal danger.

Not that he could trust her any more than before.

Still. He caressed her tousled yellow hair, kissed her pale temple.

Temple. The word gave him a twinge of something. Guilt?

Revienne stirred.

“I’m going to have to buy you clothes today,” he murmured into her Venus-pink ear. “I sorta hate to do that.”

“Sorta?”

“I’m reluctant to do that right now.”

She stretched, using him as a bed. “We could stay like this for weeks, couldn’t we?”

“Weeks,” he whispered back. “I’d be getting stronger every day. You wouldn’t have to work solo to satisfy me. I’d satisfy you every day from Sunday.”

“’Every day is nice, but why ‘from Sunday’? I do Sundays, Mr. Randolph. You can come with me after to church, to sanctify us.”

He gazed into her changeable gray-green eyes. “You have no sense of sin?”

“Over this? No. Do you?”

He did a quick examination of conscience. Where had that phrase come from? Ireland, probably, and the Church. He was aware of bitter bile rising from his gut. Ireland. The Church. Examination of conscience. He knew Revienne the psychiatrist could make hay of these phrases if she knew their effect on him.

An unwelcome thought, or maybe emotion, pricked his conscience. “You mean I could have been cheating just now, cheating on an unremembered woman?”

Her fingertips stroked his frown lines. “A man like you must have at least one woman somewhere. Cheating would be a way of life.”

“No. I can’t tolerate liars.” He frowned. “If there is such a woman, I’ll have to find her and find out if she and I can fall in love again.”

“And . . . this, you’d confess it?”

“Yes. If she asked.”

“And if you did confess?”

“If I’d been in love with her, she’d understand.”

He shook away the thought of this hypothetical woman. “What did you mean, ‘a man like me’?”

“Rich, clever, with enemies. Sexy even flat on his back with two broken legs.”

He shut his eyes. He was more than the sum of all those enviable things, flattering as the last evaluation had been.

If he’d been rich and powerful, as she’d assumed, his current situation had stripped any pride he’d taken in that anyway. He’d needed this encounter. Desperately. Needed her. A woman’s touch, and what passed for her love. He’d been wounded in body and mind.

He would not apologize to anyone for the human connection and bliss and self-confidence he’d gotten from her this past night, whatever she was, whether her intentions toward him were for good or ill. Why did he have to have this suspicious core? Why couldn’t he take anyone or any act at face value? He must be a very lonely man. Rich, yes. And with that came certain kinds of power, probably overrated.

He had the right instincts. Revienne had loved the expensive room service feast. Or had she loved his thoughtfulness, his thinking of her? That was free. That cost nothing but caring for another.

He looked at her again, remembering the moment of mutual orgasm. Thinking of hers, not his. How cool it was to be part of it, like he was rediscovering sex. Rediscovering himself.

She opened her eyes as his fingers stroked her brow. Caught him unawares.

“You are a very strange man, Mr. Randolph. You almost look right now as if you loved me.”

“This is only a situational liaison,” he said, smiling.

“Exactly what I’d call it, professionally. We are two, mostly healthy, heterosexual individuals forced by danger into close quarters. It is only natural that our will to live should manifest itself in an overwhelming attraction and sex. Classic.”

“I’m glad you didn’t say ‘underwhelming sex.’ Classic feels very good.”

“Yes,” she said. “It does. Are you still determined to be rid of me right away?”

“What about your sexual liaisons? A woman like you wouldn’t sleep alone unless she wanted to.”

“And what is ‘a woman like me’?”

“Intelligent, beautiful, sophisticated, compassionate.”

Her smile faded. She bit her lip on his last word. “You think this was a pity fuck.”

“Where’d you hear that phrase?”

“I’ve treated Americans before.”

“In bed?”

“Americans are not usually such a treat in bed. Nor Irishmen.”

“Based on your wide reading, or personal observation?”

“You think I’d tell a monogamous prig like you?”

“We don’t know for sure that I’m that warped. Check it out.”

“Again?”

She did.

“I need to talk to you, privately.”

Temple stared at Molina.

“The Casablanca Bar okay with you?”

“Uh, yeah, except I’m not sure Zoe Chloe Ozone is old enough to drink.”

“Surely you’re carrying your own ID somewhere.”

Temple nodded.

“Then we’ll both have to visit the ladies’ room, but you to dig out your ID. You first.”

Right. Separate visits. The idea of sharing a rest room with Molina was oddly appalling.

Vegas hotel bars and restaurants did have nearby rest rooms but they weren’t always apparent. Temple left New Age Molina staring gloomily into the tent of exotic sheer draperies that was the bar while she went off to do her duty to her kidneys after all the excitement, and dig her driver’s license out of her Miracle bra.

She paused before the mirror to make sure Zoe Chloe’s blueberry-colored lipstick wasn’t smeared. This would be almost goodbye to ZCO. Temple sighed. What a relief not to be “on” and in frenetic character every moment.

It would also be a relief to get past this awkward semipalsy moment with Molina. Drinks at a bar? Why would the disdainful detective want that?

Molina was waiting in the same spot.

“Your turn,” Temple said.

“I’m okay. There’s another rest room that way. I suggest we snag a couple of drinks at the bar and then a table. A waiter could be a good long while.”

Temple nodded, reaching into her tote bag when they found a gap in the barstools.

“I’m buying,” Molina said.

Temple was sure glad Zoe Chloe never betrayed surprise.

Her last offstage chance to be Zoe saw her ordering a Green Appletini. Yup, she had to produce her driver’s license. Molina went the hard-boiled route and ordered scotch on the rocks.

It felt very odd to be weaving a path around tables in Molina’s wake, clutching a martini glass.

The first empty table was lit by a candle flame trembling like a caught bird in a pierced metal cage, a small draped tent of faux isolation meant to make a vast space seem intimate, or at least private.

Temple set her drink down on the glass circle that topped a swagged tablecloth.

Even sitting, Molina seemed to loom in the miniature tent.

“So what’s the occasion?” Temple asked. “You surely aren’t thanking me for going along with this masquerade as Zoe Chloe.”

“No, but I suppose I should. You’re right that this isn’t my idea. Your fiancé suggested we have this chat.”

“Matt? Why?”

“To clear his conscience.”

“What can you tell me about him that he wouldn’t?”

“Such perfect trust,” Molina said, her voice brittle. “He won’t be responsible for keeping my secrets any longer. I made the mistake of confiding something in him that he won’t keep from you, no matter how disturbing it is.”

“Disturbing?”

“Shut up and sip. I can’t say this won’t hurt me more than it will you.”

Temple felt a cold chill curl around her innards.

Molina took a good swallow of scotch, and began. This was obviously both a reluctant confession and a kind of story.

“As you can see, I’m a certifiably lousy judge of men,” she said. “First there was Rafi Nadir, now Dirty Larry. Perhaps the colorful names misled me.”

Temple’s PR genes revved up. Time to soothe the anxious client. “Rafi doesn’t seem so bad now, maybe to you too. And Dirty Larry was useful in this case.”

“Useful,” Molina repeated with odd emphasis. “Yes, I suppose he is that, among other things.” She smiled. “You’re always looking for the rainbow behind the rain, Little Miss Sunshine,” Molina mused, gazing into the distance, her eyes unfocused. “I wonder if that’s what attracts them?”

“Who?”

“Men.” Molina’s eyes met Temple’s, blue as the bottle of curaçao on the shelves behind the bar.

“Which men?”

Molina ignored her. “I suppose I shared my . . . predicament with Matt because it was something we had in common.”

“Being Catholic?”

“No. Being knifed.”

Temple felt her eyes widen in a way Zoe Chloe would never allow. “So that’s what—”

“That’s what is wrong with me. It’s been six weeks, but Matt can tell you eighty-six stitches have a way of reminding you about them for a long time.”

“Eighty-six! Who? Why?”

“A moment, kiddo,” Molina said in an almost motherly voice. “I gotta brace myself a little longer.” She swallowed again. Then sighed, and sat back in her chair. “I’m actually glad this is just us girls,” she said sardonically. “Men do require keeping one’s guard up.”

“Your men, maybe,” Temple answered almost as sardonically. “Rafi is always edgy around you and Dirty Larry is half manipulative and half scared . . . ah, spineless.”

“Is he really?” Molina asked, surprised.

“Who, what?”

“Rafi is edgy?”

“From my viewpoint, he’s been coming on like gangbusters,” Temple said.

“Maybe. But it’s for Mariah, not me.”

“You going to let him escort her to the father-daughter dance?”

“She’s gone beyond gaga over the new Matt.” Molina grinned. “Even I may have. Who knew? Maybe you. If I decide to come clean on this before the fall dance, Rafi will have to overcome that.”

“She’ll just be glad that Matt isn’t a father figure. By then she’ll probably be into Los Hermanos Brothers. It’s great that Danny Dove is giving Ekaterina a personal scholarship for classes and Mariah’s ecstatic that Adam wants EK in their next video. She’s been pretty selfless about this whole thing.”

“Yeah. Surprise. Maturity peeking through. She’s actually being apologetic to me. So”—Molina took a slug of her drink—“you don’t think much of Larry.”

“Don’t know. He’s one of those guys who could be bad news. Or not. What does my opinion have to do with your slashing?”

“Too much.” Molina made a sour face as she swallowed more scotch. “It’s how I got slashed that’s the literal sticking point. It was in your ex-fiancé’s house.”

“Ex?” It took Temple a moment to identify Max as an “ex-fiancé.” And then, really out of left field, “House?”

When she did, she rejected the whole phrase: “ex-fiancé’s house.”

“Max doesn’t have a house.”

“He did. No sense to deny it. He lived somewhere and it certainly wasn’t with you at the Circle Ritz, at least not in residence.”

“Why on earth were you and Matt discussing Max and his house?”

“That’s where I got knifed.”

“Excuse me, are you trying to lay another bogus charge on Max? He’s out of Vegas, was planning to before—I don’t know where he’s gone, or why, or when. Just that he’s gone. For good.”

“I would have said that a few weeks ago myself. Gone for good. And good for you, though you didn’t want to believe it. But I’m not so sure now. That house on Mohave Way says different.”

“You were there? That must have been during the Red Hat convention.”

“No. I was there later.”

“But . . . there was nothing there later. Nothing in the house. Why would you go there?”

“I can give you reason to stop excusing Dirty Larry. I had him follow you, and one time he followed you to Max’s house at 1200 Mohave Way. That’s how I knew where to go myself. Later. Alone.”

“Max would have been gone by then.”

“Right. And he was.”

“Then how did you get in?”

“You don’t have a need to know.”

“You broke in. But what about the woman who lived there?”

“What woman? The house was unoccupied.”

“The aging chorus girl.”

“Really? You saw her?”

“Yes, I went to the house and she said she’d bought it. She was moved in totally, every stick of Max’s furnishings was gone, even the magical props in storage.”

“The opium bed?” Molina asked quietly.

“The opium bed, the trick boxes . . . wait! How do you know about the opium bed?”

“I saw it. The house was fully furnished.”

“I was there on a Tuesday night.”

“I was there the following Sunday.”

Each was silent and each communed with her drink again.

“Then—” Temple began, choking back fear, pain, and rage.

“It was a magician’s trick,” Molina declared, “a vanishing act on a house-moving scale. You saw the illusions, the end result of it. I saw the stage restored to normal.”

“But why?”

“He wanted to be completely out of your life, leaving you free to do what you did. Forget him, marry Matt.”

“But . . . why?”

“A rolling stone gathers no moss. Maybe the same old story. The demons from his past were after him again and he wanted you out of danger.”

Temple sat there feeling Zoe Chloe Ozone melting off her body like a greasepaint clown face. Was Max gone, or dead? Dead or gone? Or were they just the same thing?

“You said no one was there,” she told Molina, looking for a hole in her story. “Who cut you then?”

“I have no idea. True. The house was dark. I heard someone moving around after I’d gotten in. A strange tearing sound in one of the rooms. I can tell you Kinsella’s clothes were slashed to ribbons in one closet.”

Temple gasped. “Who’d do that?”

“I’d had a stalker at my home the past few weeks. I thought it was Kinsella.”

“Max? Stalk you? Are you crazy?”

Molina shrugged that one off. Temple noticed she wasn’t sharing what Matt had gleaned: that she thought Max had come on to her once, during a physical showdown that had turned psychological.

“Now,” Molina said, all policewoman, “I’m beginning to think that same stalker was in his house that night. That’s when I began to believe that he might be ‘innocent’ in some ways. I almost could make a case for my stalker being his stalker. And don’t ask me why, because that motive is very cloudy and twisted.”

“And the stalker cut you?”

Molina nodded. “I confronted the person in the hallway. A large butcher knife was missing from the kitchen block as I came in, I recalled too late. My scar will make Matt’s look like a needle scrape.”

Temple nodded. “Someone hateful after Max. I’d almost think it was that woman who cut Matt, except she’s dead. But her associates need not be.”

“The woman from Max’s counterterrorism past that Matt keeps talking about?”

Temple nodded, dazed and almost feeling knifed herself.

“Could be,” Molina said. “That’s all IRA stuff, though, and they’re pretty old news. Inactive. Terrorism is a wholly owned subsidiary of Al-Qaeda and suicide bombers now.”

“You don’t suppose Max went off to work on that front?” Temple asked with a shudder.

“Wouldn’t seem his culture, but he is a chameleon of sorts. No, there’s something rotten going on in Vegas tied into all this, but I have no idea what it is.”

“So,” said Temple, finishing her martini and actually debating ordering another. “Matt will be okay now that you told me it looks like Max stage-managed his own vanishing act and is alive and well and somewhere far away?”

“He didn’t want to be the one to tell you he knew Max had pulled another now-you-see-him, now-you-don’t. But he didn’t want to be the one to keep you in the dark, either.”

“Matt has a pretty fine meter on his conscience, doesn’t he?”

Molina nodded. “Yes, he does. An excellent thing in a man.” She drained her glass. “You do realize that Max made it look like he was gone to end any hope you might have of a relationship.”

“He’d been . . . drawing away lately. In a way, I wasn’t surprised.”

“Or . . . he could have known that he was again the target of some nasty international assassins and he wanted you out of the way forever.”

“Possible. Max takes his personal responsibilities seriously.”

“Or, to be totally realistic, he may have been taken out by those same shadowy figures and the scene set up to convince the one constant in his life that any search for him was futile.”

Temple would not tear up in front of Molina. Or choke on her words. “Yes, that too.”

There was a pause. Was it possible that Molina was choking on something too, like regret?

She finally spoke again. “What say we get another round and toast your fiancé.”

Temple assumed she shouldn’t ask which one, the old or the new.

Maybe this round they could discuss the possible sins and saving graces of Rafi Nadir and Dirty Larry Podesta. Who would ever have thought?

“Where’s that pesky cat of yours, anyway?” Molina asked as they returned from the bar.

“Louie seems to have made some new friends at the Oasis. It’s always good to have connections in this town.”

“Skoal,” said Molina, lifting her glass.

“Cheers,” said Temple, wondering how Molina was ever going to sort out the guys in her life without one of them proving to be crooked or going AWOL.

Meanwhile . . .

Max of Arabia, swarthy in desert burnoose, lurking near some ancient market.

No, the land of IEDs and suicide bombers made the IRA look like Boy Scouts by comparison. Temple hoped Max was on a cushy assignment in the Caribbean, chasing tax evaders.

The hotel was within walking distance of more than shops and restaurants. He was heading for the Bahnhof train station, one of the busiest in Europe. It was an imposing nineteenth-century building as sleek and remodeled inside as a modern airport, with yet more shopping on a lower level. And where there was shopping, there were pockets to pick.

He needed to ditch the credit cards after each use in an urban area, and Zurich was unusually small and insular even for a European city. He couldn’t bury them in anything here but refuse, which was regularly accumulated and could be searched, unlike endless alpine meadows.

He rubbed his chin as he thought, surprised by the scrape of his own carefully cultivated stubble across his palm. Revienne hadn’t complained, but he wanted to kick himself for forgetting about it during the heat of their moments. So, more data to process. Thoughtful lover. Usually. Add that to the list of attributes he was compiling about his habits and likes and dislikes. Faithful? Apparently. That was inconvenient.

So. What was the verdict on Revienne? If he’d truly trusted her, he’d have used her given name in bed, he’d sensed that much. Yet the honorifics were inciting in a Victorian pornography way. Close, but not completely close. Unrestrained but still restrained.

As his memory was: still restrained, in a straitjacket.

He’d been constantly and unconsciously scanning the street and pedestrians. He stopped at a shop window to examine the reflection of a slow-moving silver Audi that seemed inclined to window shop too. It moved on, and after a couple of minutes he did too.

The railway station’s looming bulk was only three blocks away. It would present an array of problems for him, but mass ground transportation was safer than the airport.

A portly fellow in a homburg hat gazing too intently at the footpath brushed by. His cane tangled with Max’s ankle.

Like most street mix-ups, it quickly became a bungled Fred Astaire routine. Max grabbed the cane and spun out of the way, but the man’s cane slipped to the street. The old fellow was tilting off balance with no support.

Where the devil had the fellow’s cane gone?

Max bent to help him look for it. Then the cane reappeared between his ankles, knocking him off balance. He fell back against the rear fender of a stopped car.

He was perfectly placed to tumble inside an open backseat car door.

Oh, no, they didn’t. His arms grabbed each side of the frame as he prepared to thrust himself back onto the sidewalk and freedom.

“Max, you ass,” the old man hissed, “get in and make no more fuss about it. We’re attracting attention.

“Sorry, young fellow,” Garry Randolph added loudly in German. “Many thanks for catching me. Come, my car will take you where you were going.”

By then Max had managed to draw his long legs inside without too much pain as Garry pushed into the backseat after him and pulled the door shut.

The car eased back into traffic.

“Where’s—?” Max started to ask.

Randolph snapped his wrist and a telescoping cane unfurled in the space between them.

“I don’t need a cane anymore, but my fingerprints are on the one you left behind,” Max complained.

Garry Randolph jerked his head behind them.

Max rubbernecked backward. A teenage boy was bending to retrieve the cane.

“He’s mine.” Garry said. “I knew I could lose the walking stick in the confusion of the moment. The boy’s been paid to burn it.”

Max eyed the driver, who had never looked back.

“Doesn’t speak English and wears earphones playing Vivaldi anyway. A long-ago associate. How is the lovely doctor?”

“Wearing a lovely new suit and en route back to the clinic.”

“Do you trust her?”

“No. She did help me escape the place.”

“After the attempt on your life with the hypodermic needle.”

“What was in it?”

“Phenobarbital.”

“Know why I’m worth so much dead?”

Gandolph scratched the bristly gray mustache, then pulled it off. “No. You’re walking well. I’m amazed.”

“The bones were healed, so my atrophied muscles were the problem. Running for your life makes for very motivated physical therapy. How did you find me?”

“You had to pass through Zurich. I actually located you yesterday, but the lights in your room burned all night and I was reluctant to be seen in the hotel anyway. Had a siege of sickness, did we?”

Max cleared his throat. “That was actually Dr. Schneider’s room.”

“I see. A rather different kind of siege.” Garry shook his head. “Max, Max, Max. A deceptive woman got you into this whole counterspy mess twenty years ago. Boys will be boys, I suppose.”

“Is there some reason I shouldn’t have been doing what I was doing?”

“She may be employed by an enemy.”

“Beyond that.”

“Any reason why you should have slept alone last night, you mean?”

He nodded.

“You left the love of your life behind in Las Vegas when you crashed into the wall of a nightclub during an airborne magic act.”

Max stared at this man he was supposed to know, and trust.

“Good God! I was in Las Vegas? Not on some damn mountain? I knew I was never on a mountain! Damn mountains, particularly Alps. But, Garry, I had a . . . wife? Lover?”

“Yes and no. Even you realized you couldn’t commit to marriage while your life was in danger, and you finally told her that. Freed her just recently. You also told me if anything ever happened to you, I had a mission: to find the first woman who deceived you and gave you a grief you couldn’t lose and set you on the path of espionage.

“You were unconscious after that murder attempt in Vegas, and then amnesiac. I used every resource I had from our active espionage days to smuggle you out of the United States to the Swiss clinic. I even set it up so that your Las Vegas love saw your house emptied of all your possessions and occupied by a stranger.”

“That was brutal.”

“She’s a tenacious young woman. I needed to be brutal. Then I installed you in that Swiss clinic at great expense and manipulation and set about trying to trace Kathleen O’Connor. The Kathleen O’Connor from twenty years ago in Northern Ireland.”

“Kathleen O’Connor. The name means nothing.”

Garry’s now mustache-less face grimaced. “‘Kitty the Cutter’ is what your ex-girlfriend named her.”

“And what is the ex-girlfriend’s name?”

“Temple. Temple Barr.”

Max winced to remember kissing Revienne’s temple and feeling an odd tenderness, a moment of fugitive memory.

“Oh, God. Why didn’t I remember that there was someone?”

“You’d decided to let her go, Max. Another man loves her, one she became attracted to when you disappeared before, for almost a year. You knew it was too dangerous to associate with her when we were making inroads, finally, on uncovering the Synth.”

“The . . . sinth? Is that some Star Wars thing?”

Garry chuckled sadly. “So odd how you remember all the minutiae of our crazy modern world and nothing significant to your current situation and life. The Synth is a presumed international cadre of spies and magicians. That’s a very natural mating of interests, as you and I prove. We’re going to the airport, but we have a small private jet at our disposal, so we don’t risk exposure. I’ve got the proper forged passports. The flight will be long.”

“My duffle bag—” He wasn’t used to baggage and had dropped it at the scene.

“The musically inclined Hans scooped it up while we were tussling before pulling the car away. It’s on the front seat. Any weapons in it?”

“Just clothes and grooming items.”

“Apparently not a razor,” Gandolph commented dryly.

“Don’t you like my Pirates of the Caribbean look? It took a very expensive electric razor to cultivate this unkempt appearance.”

“The question is, did Dr. Schneider appreciate it?”

Max grew thoughtful. “I don’t suppose I care at the moment. How could I forget the ‘love of my life’?”

“Hopefully, or sadly, you may not forever. Meanwhile, we’re on the trail of the woman who ruined your life.”

“To extract justice?”

“She’s dead too.”

“Then what’s the point?”

“Closure,” Garry said.

Closure.

Maybe it took a memory to see any point in that, Max thought.

At night the underwater lights in the Circle Ritz backyard pool made the aquamarine rectangle gleam like a glimpse into Atlantis.

Temple sat in the temperate night air, on a lounge chair, watching Matt do his laps.

“Now I know what the expression ‘bronze god’ means,” she commented dreamily. “Will that spray-on tan fade fast?”

He lifted his wet head from the water, his blond hair silvered in the moonlight.

“I sure hope so. Why do you think I’m swimming in chlorine? I want to wash that dance show out of my hair and off my epidermis.”

“Why? You won.”

He dived and resurfaced at the edge near her chair, crossing his bronzed arms on the edge to hold himself up.

“Yeah, and the show raised $180,000 for the kids’ cancer fund, so it was worth the hassle, although not the attempts on my life. And that doesn’t include being mobbed by tween girls from thirteen to ninety-three after the final show.”

“It was great that Glory B. won the women’s vote. She was so grateful. You could see her maturing on the spot. What a wonderful moment. All the contenders won something—self-confidence, renewal, fresh job opportunities.”

“Fresh commercial temptations.”

“So your perfectly highlighted blond head hasn’t been turned?”

“Lord, they want me to do spray-tan TV ads.”

“You’d make more money for good causes, including a house fund maybe.”

“Not spray-tan anything. I’ll let my agent handle it. Tony knows my bottom line is human dignity, even though I’ve played fast and loose with it lately. At least my dance gig exposed and stopped one very sick man from harming more people. I never dreamed my radio advice could get someone killed.”

“Your advice didn’t kill her. Her husband did.”

“He was insanely bitter about so much. He’d fit the Barbie Doll Killer’s stalker profile.”

“Hank Buck was a local problem. I think Molina got a lead on that Barbie doll case during this dance show stalking. She has to win that one. Her kid’s bedroom was targeted with one of the mutilated dolls.”

“Now that she knows her homegrown stalker isn’t Max.” Matt tilted his head to watch Temple. “You must be pleased about that. You always told Molina he wasn’t the villain she thought.”

“Yeah. I wish Max knew she was coming around to reason about him. If there’s a Max out there to know anything.”

“You think he’s . . . dead?”

“I hope not.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Oh, Mr. Radio Shrink! You are so not going to trick me into missing Max mode! Not now, when I want to go over the Temple tango moves as soon as you get out of that water, dry off, and dance me back to our lovely pied-à-terre.”

He laughed and let the flat of his hand hit an arc of sparkling water toward her chair. “You don’t like to swim.”

“Not in pools. Along the turquoise Riviera . . . that’s different.”

“You’re an expensive little sea nymph.”

“Darn right.” She sighed. “Rafi really wants a relationship with Mariah. He’s got a head start. I hope her mother will cooperate.”

“This injury has broken down her resistance to reality. Like Kitty the Cutter’s slash did mine.”

“Really? That was . . . liberating?”

“It’s liberating to confront that some people want to hurt you, for no reason you can see, and you don’t have to hurt back. ‘Hurt’ was too much a part of my so-called nuclear and extended family in Chicago. We don’t have to keep up the tradition.”

“We’re supposed to head north and meet your family and mine someday soon.”

“Someday soon. You don’t want to come into the water with me? It’s as silken and warm as unchilled wine.” He lifted a hand. “Come on.”

“I’m dressed.”

“Clothes dry.”

“My hair.”

“Is perfect, dry or wet.”

“I paddle like a springer spaniel.”

“I’m a merman from shining, sunken Atlantis. I’ll hold you up, and you’ll breathe underwater.”

“Really?”

“No. Don’t breathe underwater. But come with me.”

His hand pushed closer.

Temple sighed, stood, kicked off her slides, and went to squat by the pool’s edge. “You are a very metaphysical guy, you know that?”

He grasped her hand and pulled her down. “Shut your eyes and think two stars to the right and straight on till morning.”

He pulled her forward into the alien element. The water was tepid and as silken as he said. She sank in it until her chin broke water and he buoyed her up. She gasped with surprise at the buoyancy, the way cares seemed to float up from her like bubbles.

“Take a deep breath,” he said, “and don’t breathe after that.”

They sank down together to Atlantis, kissing until she saw its gleaming turquoise towers behind her eyelids. Her hair swirled like seaweed. They were no place on earth. It felt heavenly.

“. . . and the food is vershtunken.”

I am sitting in the parking lot of the Circle Ritz apartments and condominiums, an elegant five-story fifties’ doughnut of a building wrapped in black marble, listening to my jet-black dam unleash a flood of invective about my home, sweet home.

I mean the word dam not as a water barrier or a swear word—cat heaven forbid!—but as the word that indicates the alma mater of myself, Miss Ma Barker.

I hasten to ease her aggravation. “Free-to-Be-Feline is highly regarded as an earth-sensitive, digestatory product, literally green, which you must admit is all the politically correct rage these days,” I say, not believing a word of it.

I am known to loathe the stuff by one and all, save my devoted roommate, Miss Temple Barr. Clever as she is, she has never tumbled to the fact that her favorite feline health food is—not to put too fine a point on it—“vershtunken.”

Meanwhile, Ma Barker, a pretty testy old dame who commands a feral colony, rants on.

“I led my loyal entourage all the way down from north Las Vegas to this so-called Promised Land to hand them bowlfuls of dried, army-green rabbit turds? Served in sterile plastic? Not so much as a fresh, grease-soaked fast-food wrapper for a napkin? Even the do-gooder brigade of homeless cat-trappers and ball-snappers did better by us than you, son.”

“They mean well!” I cry. That was ever the best, though weak, defense for ignorant humanity. “I, ah, find Free-to-Be-Feline in my own personal food bowls daily.”

I nimbly dodge admitting to actually eating it.

“You have gone over to the Dark Side, son. I understand. Mere security is a powerful lure.”

“Hey! I provide security, I do not crave it.”

“Whatever, I have been scouting the neighborhood and have found a more amenable location.”

“The Circle Ritz is a very good address!”

“That may be, but I have never been an uptown girl, except geographically. Look at us, son. We are marked by the Tipped Ear. We have been trapped, ’napped, and lopped off at the ear and in other, more personal, external and internal places. The world knows us for a neutered colony, but we are not about to give up our rep as a mad, bad street gang.”

“I know that, Ma. Getting free vittles is not a sign of defeat.”

“I do not object to the free vittles, just the quality at your pad here. I have found a better free lunch.”

“Yeah?” If I am dubious, it is because I am well aware how little the feral elements of our breed are welcomed anywhere.

“Yeah. I am talking juicy, greasy burgers. I am talking long, lank, salty fries. I am talking the dregs of thick, creamy milkshakes. I am talking doughnuts.”

“Doughnuts! That is the worst of empty calorie foods. No carnivore worth its fangs would sink them into a glazed doughnut.”

“That is where you are so wrong, son. Follow me.”

She pushes up onto her venerable limbs and stalks off, her knife-sharp shoulder blades parting the steamy Vegas daylight like shark fins.

I have busted my derriere getting Ma and her gang to a safe house. How annoying that she spurns it. Those of our breed are masters of spurning, however, and food is the prime example of what we can achieve in that direction.

Speaking of directions, Ma Barker is heading northeast of the Circle Ritz, cross-country. She is a cagey mitt-to-mitt fighter and even vanquished a raccoon, a feat for one of her advanced years. Still, I do not trust her alone in new territory.

We finally halt in some weeds near a low, undistinguished-looking brick building. The spunky, funky Circle Ritz it is not.

Call it one-story bland.

However, my nose sniffs old, cold oil that has dripped from cars and . . . fast food. The place has a manly aura, and I am ever in favor of that.

I spot a lot of cars at rest, otherwise known as parked. They are also marked.

“This is it?” I ask. “The site you have chosen over my own premises?”

“Right.” Ma Barker’s still-skinned nose lifts to inhale stale oil and dead fish and overcooked cow.

“Are you crazy, Ma? This is the southeast substation of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. They have a no-tolerance policy toward gangs. They will sweep up your posse and cart them off to stir and the so-called ‘shelter’ death chambers faster than you can hiss Free-to-Be Feline.”

“You think so, sonny? Look, my lead agent has made first contact.”

I look, and I have to admit my old lady is a pretty canny strategist.

None other than Gimpy, the gangly adolescent three-legged victim of a car accident, is hopping around the station’s back door, mewing piteously. I hate to see our kind stoop to begging for what we should be given, but the cruel breaks of life on the street have made Gimpy into an orphan out of a Charles the Dickins tome.

A bicycle officer in summer Bermuda shorts uniform is leaning down to share some double cheeseburger with little Gimpy.

“She is female and an easy touch,” I hiss to Ma Barker. “No way will the male cops let your gang set up shop here.”

Another officer steps out the door, the burly sort just the right size to kick an inconvenient cat out of the way.

“Poor little bastard,” he says. “Ear is nicked, so he has had his balls cut off too. I got some take-out Chinese shrimp he might go for.” He ducks back in and soon returns with Gimpy’s fish course.

“Somebody underwrote getting that leg surgically removed,” Miss Bicycle Officer, heretofore IDed as Miss BO, says. Hey, it is hot in this town!

“He must have been in horrid shape to need it removed,” she goes on, staring into the surrounding brush. “There must be a colony around here. The trap, neuter, and release programs say it is better to keep them on the streets until all the clodder members die out.”

“Clodder?” the guy asks, “like in cluttered?”

“Naw, it is the official name for a community of stray cats.”

“Huh.” The guy squats carefully beside Greedy Gut, aka Gimpy. He chuckles. “Look at the little fellah eat. He must still be putting on muscle.”

In his dreams!

Meanwhile, Ma Barker is massaging me with her mitt, shivs out. “That clodder talk was our cue, Louie. Time to take a bow. We can hang back like we are bashful, and you lower one ear so they do not see you have two whole ones.”

I gaze at Ma’s face with the rakish ear at half-mast. I thought a raccoon or another cat had taken a chunk out of it, but now I see that the missing piece has been nipped off in a nice straight line.

Nobody nips the ear off Midnight Louie!

I growl and would retreat, except that Ma has her claws in me right where it could do some damage to my perfectly functional male member and satellites.

I too am politically correct in the failure-to-reproduce department, but my neutering was accomplished internally, with a human procedure called a vasectomy. That is my license to thrill in this town. I cannot strew unwanted litters anywhere, although I can distribute my personal favors hither and yon as I please.

Trouble is, my lack of littering capability does not show, and I could be whisked away and stripped of my will to love, by mistake. What a tragedy!

So when Ma Barker wants me to step forward into a lineup of two, I am hesitant.

“Move it, lad!” She whacks me in the rear, all four shivs at full extension.

We bound as one into the limelight, the bright open sunshine of a Las Vegas spring day.

“There is a couple more!” BO cries, delighted at my quandary.

Officer Shrimp Combo goes from a squat to a looming position. “Yeah. A couple more members of the Off-Strip Clodders, right? One pretty tough-looking gang.”

“Oh, those poor cats. They look so ragged and hungry.”

I beg your pardon, ma’am! I am sleek, well-fed, and well able to see to it that I remain so. Ma may be a bit ragged from her fight-to-the-death with the raccoon, but I am as smooth as George Clooney in a black dinner jacket for the Oscars.

“Come on, kitties.”

I have not fallen for that con game since I was six weeks old, but Ma Barker inches forward, doing a pretty good imitation of Gimpy’s pathetic gait.

Officer Shrimp Combo is galvanized into action. “I better see what other tidbits the crew has. That is one skinny old raggedy cat.”

Ma Barker looks over her sharp-boned shoulder to shoot me a triumphant wink with one still half-swollen-shut green peeper.

I shake my head and disappear back into the scratchy brush.

How could any self-respecting feline give up the moderne comforts of the Circle Ritz under my protection to put her gang’s lot in with a bunch of beat cops?

She gets up and lurches back to the bushes and me for a farewell.

“This is a superior setup for us. We are used to fast food, in fact, we prefer it. So you can continue running your fancy P.I. firm from the fancy-schmancy Circle Ritz, and we street cats will hang with the street cops. I am sure we will be able to pick up a lot of hot tips for you about nefarious goings-on, and we can help these folks in beige keep crime down. Now that we are all fixed, we need a hobby.”

It is considered bad form among all species to talk back to one’s mother and I am speechless anyway.

I nod and slink off, returning home to a bowl full of Free-to-Be-Feline. I must summon all my energy to perform the daily scam job that gets my Miss Temple to slather edible little nothings on top of that noxious base so a guy can eat.

Somehow, I fear that the feral crew I hoped to help has helped themselves to the better cuisine. Life is not fair.

Mulls Many Matters

Plays the Dance Card