Then the French doors to the patio, the patio, and back to the living room and bedroom for a second check.
It took thirty-five minutes.
When Kinsella came to sit on the Kagan sofa, he spoke at ordinary volume.
“A good thing you have such a spare design for living. Hard to bug. And no one has. Yet, I take it. You should check the phones, though, like I did, after I go, and every day. If you know what’s supposed to be in there, you recognize what isn’t. So what’s going on?”
“I wouldn’t have bothered you—”
“You have never bothered me.” Kinsella’s smile was so slight it was anorexic.
His face was angular and arresting, rather than handsome, but Matt guessed that women didn’t notice the difference.
“You wouldn’t call on me unless something was drastically wrong,” Kinsella went on. “What?”
Matt pointed to the snake ring.
Kinsella’s long, spidery fingers plucked it like a grape, then held it up to the light as if his fingertips were a bezel for a jewel.
“Good quality. Craftsman made. Perhaps not in this country. Not very valuable. A few hundred dollars maybe. The worm Ouroboros, of course. It symbolizes eternity.”
“Is that all?”
“Probably not. More would take research.” He held the ring toward Matt.
Matt couldn’t help it; he drew back as from a live snake.
“Speak,” said Kinsella, as if addressing a trained dog.
“I thought it came in the mail when I got back from out of town. But I dumped all the mail on that table.” He pointed to the matching cube still covered in unopened letters. “I now think this was ‘delivered’ earlier. When I was gone.”
“Someone surreptitiously entered your unit, that’s why you suspected bugging. But who? Who’d want to bug you?”
“An acquaintance of yours.”
Max’s gaze shifted to Matt’s midriff. “Kitty the Cutter. Temple does have a way with words, doesn’t she?”
“Yes, she does, and this Kitty woman is your auld acquaintance not-to-be-forgot, not mine. She’s…attached herself to me, I don’t know why, but she’s getting dangerous.”
“Not ‘getting,’ my lad. She always was.”
“Drop that phony brogue. This is not Ireland, north or south. This is not twenty years ago, and this is not my problem.”
“Why would Kitty O’Connor send you a worm Ouroboros?”
Matt picked up the Post-it note and handed it to Kinsella.
“Don’t you have tweezers?”
“No.”
“Pliers?”
“No.”
“Sugar tongs?”
“For the love of God, no! What has that to do with anything?”
“Only that we shouldn’t be handling these artifacts. Pieces of physical evidence, in fact. In case we need the police to take fingerprints.”
“I don’t have any pincerlike devices. You saw the place.”
“Then get on the phone, call Temple, and ask her to bring up some tweezers.”
“Do we have to involve Temple?”
“You called her in the first place.”
“I don’t want her to know about this.”
“All right. Go down, come up with whatever story it takes to get them, and borrow some tweezers.”
Matt rose, left the apartment door open, took the stairs beside the elevator a floor down, then headed for the small private hallway to Temple’s apartment.
Before he rang the bell, he put his palm on the door, like a medium reading the scene of a haunting. This was the scene of a haunting, all right, his own haunting.
He rang the bell, waiting on pins and needles for her to answer.
“I need a pair of tweezers,” he blurted out on sight.
Temple blinked, signifying polite mystification that he should be eager to dispel. She knew something was up. He didn’t dispel anything. She was more suspicious than ever.
“Tweezers? Has Max—?
“I’ve got a…domestic emergency. Have you got some tweezers or not? Quick!”
Still blinking, Temple disappeared. She reappeared a moment later with tweezers rampant in a raised, closed right hand. A fist, as it were.
“Will these work?”
“Thanks.” Matt snatched them before he had to look into her soft steel blue eyes too long. He was bound to start saying more than he should. “I’ll bring ’em back…tomorrow or sometime.”
He raced down the little hall, around the big circular hall, and up the stairs again.
In his apartment, Kinsella was bending over the cube table staring at the Post-it note.
He looked up to say, “Plastic baggie?”
“That I’ve got.” Matt went to the kitchen to fetch a big one.
Taking Temple’s tweezers, Kinsella placed the manila envelop and the Post-it note in the baggie. “A present for Molina. She’ll do anything for you, right? It would be best not to mention the suspected source. Tell her a demented female fan is stalking you.”
“It’s the truth.”
Kinsella cocked his head. “Sit down and tell me about it.”
Matt sat, but he couldn’t bring himself to speak for a moment. He still felt like a body double for the real actor in this instance.
“I don’t get it,” he exploded finally to Kinsella. “She’s a demon from your past. What’s she doing in my present?”
“Bad luck, I guess. What does this phrase mean, ‘Wear me’?”
“I think the snake is a ring. She’s approached me a couple of times again recently.”
“To maim again?”
“No. She knows I’d never let her get that close again.” Matt felt his hand go to his scarred side, despite himself. “This TitaniCon I took Mariah Molina to—”
“And how did that happen, I wonder?”
“That has nothing to do with this. Temple showed up there, and a woman I used to work with at the volunteer hotline, ConTact. And all three…females were somehow attacked during the convention, including Mariah.”
Kinsella became very intent. “I didn’t know that.”
“You don’t know everything, after all, I guess.”
He smiled. “No, I just act like I do. Part of the magician’s code of behavior. I know you hate coming to me with this, but it’s better than Temple, isn’t it? Why?”
“Because this Kathleen threatened Temple. And Sheila, the ConTact employee, and Mariah, and even poor Janice.”
“Janice?”
“You don’t know her. I hope. She’s an artist, does sketches for the police sometimes.”
“Hmmm. The talented portraitist of Miss Kitty. I did see that piece of work.”
“The fact is, this woman has threatened everybody. And now she sends me this…token. Like she’s daring me to not do as she says, or she’ll take it out on the people around me.”
“Why you?”
“Because you’re not available, right? You’re Mr. Invisible. You’re her real target, you have to be. But you’re holing up somewhere no one can find you, except Temple probably, so the rest of us have been turned into targets. She is your old girlfriend, after all.”
“Besides my professional services, what do you want?”
“I want you to tell me everything about her and your relationship with her.”
“Sorry, Father, I’m not about to confess my youthful sins to you.”
“I’m not a priest anymore, and you’re not a kid anymore. Whatever happened in Northern Ireland twenty years ago triggered what’s happening here and now. I’ve got to figure out what’s driving her. Don’t you understand? Temple is in danger. We’re all in danger. Except you.”
Kinsella smiled and turned the Ouroboros ring in his fingers.
“No, I’m in danger too. It’s just not obvious yet.” He glanced at Matt. “I suppose she’s targeting you because you’re the equivalent of the seventeen-year-old boy I was all those years ago. You’re a virgin, right? Don’t bother denying or claiming it. I don’t care about your sex life, or lack of it, as long as Temple isn’t involved. You’re me seventeen years ago. An overeager innocent trying to right global wrongs in a single summer. You don’t come across greenhorns like that every day, or at least Miss Kitty doesn’t, not with the role she’s played for the IRA all these years, seducing rich old men for gun money. Guns and roses, that’s been her specialty. Fortunately, she’s spent most of her time in Central and South America. Until now.