He tried not to breathe too deeply, but even shallow breaths brought the heavy bouquet of rotting flesh.
The room was like a lab: big, inhabited by stainless steel tables, sinks, and equipment. People seemed superfluous in here. Matt accepted the clear safety goggles and latex gloves Molina also donned like a seasoned astronaut used to looking like a parody of a person.
Matt ran a prayer through his overactive mind. For the dead. For Kathleen O’Connor, who had been somebody’s precious baby once.
She lay on a stainless steel bier, naked.
Matt realized that he had never seen a naked woman before.
But she wasn’t a woman now. Death made her unreal, a department-store mannequin glimpsed in an unfinished window-dressing set.
He kept his eyes on what he was here to see: her face. Was this truly her? Was she truly dead? And gone.
She looked tiny, fragile on that large steel bed.
Odd that she had hurt him with a small steel blade.
Now the blades had been at her. Her torso was seamed like a Raggedy Ann’s body. Her stuffing seemed to have been removed, and returned, like Scarecrow’s after the Flying Monkeys had dispersed him.
Her face, though, was whole, such as it was. He couldn’t say the same for her head, and avoided looking above her eyebrows. Raven eyebrows. Her eyelids were shut and her cheekbones and chin bruised and scraped. Somebody’s child had taken a great fall.
“Motorcycles,” Bahr snorted. “Hate ‘em. Make hash out of my bodies. She wore leathers, so the limbs are pretty solid, what’s not broken. But the face … restructuring by Gravel, Inc.”
Matt sighed, then was sorry he’d exhaled. He’d have to inhale sooner, and ingest the air of decay.
“Is it her?” Molina asked.
He’d forgotten about her in the presence of Milady Death.
Was it?
Kitty had been vital and certain, threatening and powerful. This … corpse was none of that. It wore a skullcap where the surgeon’s saw had sliced through her cranium. She was like an Egyptian prince, her vital organs removed and weighed and stored elsewhere.
Still, beneath the matted raven-black hair, behind the abraded facial skin, Matt saw flesh as white as snow, lips as red as blood, eyes as liquid as Caribbean waters .
“Her eyes,” he said aloud.
Molina held up a plastic baggie. It contained, not the furtive glimmer of Temple’s opal-and-diamond ring from Max Kinsella this time, but two pale, flat gemstones, aquamarines when he bent closer to look.
“Colored contact lenses,” Molina said. “She wore them. Like her archenemy, the Mystifying Max, Miss Kitty altered her eyes. Their natural shade was gray-green, if you believe romantic coroners like Grizzly here.”
Bahr hawked out a laugh as another man might expel phlegm.
“The eyes have it,” Molina went on. “Contact lenses. Vivid blue-green. Looks like the lady couldn’t make up her mind. Was she blue, or was she green?”
“Green,” Matt said. “She worked for the IRA.”
“Or maybe Ralph Nader,” Bahr put in. “You do know her, then?”
Matt wasn’t sure that his relationship with Kitty O’Connor could be described as “knowing.”
He tried for the objective eye. Saw long, narrow neck. Pale skin paler now in death. Small determined chin. Slightly upturned nose. A pretty girl without the hatred that made every feature sharp and feral. She should behanding out appointment cards in an office somewhere, a dentist’s or a chiropractor’s.
All the anger that had propelled her, made her vivid, living, had left her.
She’s gone. She left.
“Is it Kitty O’Connor?” Molina asked, unconsciously shifting into the neutral reference that remains demanded. It. The remains.
He glanced over the entire figure again, this time seeing something like a spider on one of her prominent hipbones. Even as he thought somebody should brush away the trespassing insect, he caught his breath as he realized the black blot was a tattoo. Of a serpent swallowing its own tale, just as Kitty’s lifelong flirtation with death had finally been consummated. The worm Ouroboros celebrated in the unwanted ring she had given him, and taken away.
Only she would bear such a mark.
“Yes,” Matt said.
“You’re sure?”
“I was sure when I walked in. But I needed to make double-sure. It just seems … impossible.”
“She was mean, but she was mortal.”
He nodded. That terse epitaph fit his stepfather too. But Cliff Effinger plainly had been murdered.
Kitty had not died so obviously. Could mere accident have claimed her when bitter opposition could make no dents on her stainless steel soul? Anything was possible.
Including the fact that his worst enemy was dead, that he was free.
Free to live out the legacy she had left him: a lot of atypical acts, enough guilt to ensure Purgatory for eternity, eternal regret for another life lost.
He heard Molina and Bahr conferring, as if Kathleen O’Connor’s dead body were just another conference table to gather around.
“A couple of odd abrasions on the nape of the neck, almost cuts,” Bahr was saying.
“Hmmm. Know what I’m thinking?” Molina asked.
“Women can get those from abrasive labels at the back of the neck. I’ll check out her clothing.”
“—the only anomaly, and it’s a minor one for a spinout into a dry wash like this,” Bahr’s voice was grumbling.
A spinout in a dry wash. It sounded like an epitaph for a frustrated and wasted life, Matt thought.
A hand closed on his ann.
Molina’ s.
“We can leave now,” she said.
Matt wasn’t so sure you ever left Grizzly Bahr’s realm, not once you had seen it.
“Good job,” the man himself said, grinning. “You didn’t upchuck once. Disappoint an old man, will you? Out of here, then. You’ve graduated Ghoul School with honors.”
Chapter 41
Sweat Shop
“What’s the story on the man with the golden arm?” Molina asked Alfonso later that morning. He stood before her desk with a manila folder in his hand and a Cheshire-cat smile on his well-used face.
“How’d you guess?”
“I assigned my detectives to sweat a possible witness who’s clammed up. First you’d do a thorough background, which I assume is what fattens that manila folder in your hand. Next, I told you to let me know when you had him ready for the ropes. And here you are bright and early Monday morning.”
“Awesome, Lieutenant. You’re wasted behind that desk.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Yup. You got it. Guy’s name is Herb Wolverton. Energetic, strong for his size. Was in the merchant marine years ago. Can lift hefty luggage as easily as he can pocket hundred-dollar bills. ‘Retired’ to Vegas from Biloxi, where he had accumulated quite a rap sheet, all petty stuff but as long as an octopus’s arm. Drunken brawling, gambling … and it used to be illegal there unless you were on a licensed riverboat. Nothing felonious, just cantankerous. Had a chip on his shoulder, old Herb did, and it turned into a brick when he drank.
“Anyway, vice was no stranger and when he hit Vegas eight years ago he settled down to work his way up as a bellman. Since he’d been used to greasing his palms in Creole town, he fit right in. Real accommodating to anyone with green palms.”
“What have we got on him that we can use?” Molina rose and headed into the corridor for the interrogation rooms.
Alfonso’s grimace exaggerated his hangdog features as he caught up with her, huffing slightly. “Not much. He’s threatening to call a lawyer, but we keep telling him we’re just interested in his testimony as a witness. I have a feeling this guy is real scared, but I can’t tell of who.”
Molina quashed an urge to correct him. Whom, it was whom. She’d told Mariah that at least a couple hundred times.
“Alch and Su in?” she asked instead.