“I can read ’em better than I can type. You should see my typing, you want hieroglyphs.”
“It could cause trouble in court,” she said. “You can have the captain’s secretary type them up.”
“Captain wouldn’t like that.”
“You mean you can’t sweet-talk Arietta into doing you a favor? Just show her these pathetic notes. Her sense of order will put her at your disposal.”
“You overestimate his charms, Lieutenant,” Su told her. “Morey’s bashful act doesn’t go over with uptown women like Arletta.”
“Then you type ’em up for him, Su. You are partners,” Molina told her with a frigid smile that meant business. “You’re supposed to compensate for each other’s weaknesses. But do it after this case is over. We have a lot of folks already involved at Rancho Exotica. And we haven’t even looked into the upscale clientele.”
“You mean the sick weekend hunters,” Su said.
“You think the animal-rights people have a cause?”
“Darn right they do. Saw a feature on one of those TV news magazines. Had some kind of wild ram pinned against a fence. Shot so many arrows into his body he looked like a pincushion. Poor thing was panting and heaving, just lying there, waiting for the macho incompetent to kill him inch by inch in order to spare the head and chest for mounting. I’m a homicide cop and it made my stomach turn. I was ready to off the hunter myself.”
No one wanted to break the silence. Then Alch shifted to look at the scowling Su. “That cute little fuzzy jacket you wear when the temp dips below sixty, what’s that made of?”
“The magenta one? I guess, well, maybe, fur. Something they raise on farms. It’s not the same thing.”
“They don’t waste time with arrows, I bet, but I also bet that Peter Cottontail didn’t want to die for your fashion sense, either.”
Molina raised her hands to head off a serious spat in the detective team. Morey was right, a lot of things were easy to swallow if you didn’t know, or think, or see too much about them.
“That part of the case is not our jurisdiction,” she reminded them both. “We’re here to get people-killers. We don’t even have proof that Van Burkleo’s place was a hunting ranch, and we’re not about to waste man, or woman, power on that. It’s only relevant as a motivation for the animal-rights protesters, and I have a hard time buying a group kill. That only happens in Agatha Christie mysteries.”
“Maybe not a group kill,” Alch said. “Maybe one did it and the others are protecting him, or her. Or just don’t know. Somebody let that leopard into the house.”
“How about Van Burkleo himself?” Su asked, engaged again. “Maybe he liked to live dangerously. According to his wife, he was alone in the house that night because she stayed over in town.”
“Accidental death?”
Su shrugged. “We’ve seen some pretty incriminating death scenes that turned out to be accidents. Remember the alcoholic woman who went into a fit and tore up her living room? The place looked like an interrupted break-in, with attempted rape and successful murder.”
Molina nodded. Anything was possible. The medical examiner had reported head and body blows and bruises, but those could have happened while V. B. was running from the leopard.
“And then, for another theory—” said Su. And stopped.
“Yes?”
“There was the usual black cat on the premises.”
“What ’usual black cat’?”
“The usual black house cat we keep running into on crime scenes lately.”
“If it’s showing up at crime scenes, it can’t be a house cat,” Molina said.
“Big, shorthaired male?” Alch asked Su with interest, ignoring the boss.
Molina kept a dangerous silence.
Su made a point of consulting her notebook, just for show. “Not so big. Not so shorthaired. Maybe not so male. The description sounds female.”
“Oh,” said Alch. “The other one, then.”
“Sorry.” Molina slapped her palms on the desktop for attention. “I refuse to believe that Las Vegas domestic cats could get out into the desert like that. Must be a stray attracted by the big-cat food.”
Su shrugged. “Some of the attendants spotted it, earlier the same day that Van Burkleo was killed. Said it was hanging around the leopard’s cage. A little too coincidental, Lieutenant?”
“It’ll be a little too coincidental if I catch you wearing a jacket that looks suspiciously like cat fur, that’s when I’ll concede coincidence. Forget the house cat. What could a house cat have to do with a murder? We have enough big cats mixed into this case to make even Siegfried and Roy suddenly allergic to the species.”
After they left, Molina finished her too-strong, too-cold coffee, then headed for the women’s rest room, brooding.
The ethical line she was walking was fishing-line thin. If Raf was at the scene of another murder…he should be brought in and questioned. She could let Team Su-Alch do it. He didn’t have to see her at all. She could warn them not to mention her name…no, that would be out of character.
The door whooshed shut behind her the way rest room doors always do. She was alone in here, which wasn’t odd. Not that many women in a police facility even now.
Normally she didn’t check herself out in mirrors, but she glanced up while washing her hands. Granted even the brutal overhead fluorescent lighting, she looked haggard. Not good. Looking frazzled would generate questions, and questions would generate evasions, and then she was down the slippery slope and heading face-first into a tree….
A sound from one of the three cubicles interrupted her self-reflection. She hadn’t felt another presence. Sounded suspiciously like a sniffle. Someone with a cold, or one of the secretaries with a bum personal life.
While she considered how to graciously retreat, she realized that she had been frozen in silence for some time, first while studying her unlovely face, then while thinking…
A cubicle door swung open and Su emerged, stopping when she saw Molina.
Her eyes looked red.
“Merry?” Molina asked.
“Nothing.” Su stomped to the other sink and ran both taps full force, washing her hands with the furious energy of Lady Macbeth.
“Merry—”
“Never mind, I said!”
“It’s not, not Alch’s crack about the coat, the jacket, is it?”
“I just spotted it and tried it on.” Su lifted her hands and shook them, spraying Molina with ice-cold drops. She jerked a fistful of tan paper towels from the wall dispenser. “I didn’t even look at anything besides the price tag. I didn’t think.”
“That was Morey’s point, I guess.”
“Damn!” Su jerked another unneeded wad of paper towels from the wall. “I loved that jacket. Now what’ll I do with it?”
“Donate it to the homeless? They’ll wear it out using it for the right reasons, to keep warm, like the cave people, right?”
Su suddenly laughed. “Yeah, it’d look great on Crazy Clementine, wouldn’t it? She’s sure no size two on the streets!”
Molina smiled at the mention of one of the chief characters along the Strip. “It’s done. Move on.”
“Right. No one is going to wear a bunny in my presence scot-free from now on. Unless it’s Bugs.”
Su headed for the door, then stopped. She didn’t look at Molina.
“I hope it isn’t one of the animal people.”
It was almost seven by the time Carmen Molina slogged from the attached garage into the kitchen.
Something about the silence in the house alerted her.
She charged into the living room, alarmed, to find Mariah making like a hammock on the comfortable old couch, a book propped on her awkwardly swelling chest. A Buffy the Vampire Slayer book. Oh, well, it could be worse.
“Where’s Dolores?” Carmen asked, carefully.
“I told her to go home. She’s got dinner to fix for her family.”
“Dinner.” Carmen sat on the nearest chair.