“Instead my wardrobe—and you—got shredded, I hear. So you were stalking me,” Max asked, “because you thought I was stalking you?”
“Someone was. You were the only suspect I was after who had the obvious … skills … and gall to do such a subtle and thorough job in my own house.”
“More kudos. I may take up my abandoned onstage career yet.” Max grinned.
“You still want to remain a mystery man for some reason. Until it suits you.”
“We’ve both had ‘closet’ issues.”
She didn’t quite get the connection at first. Then she tumbled. “You think my stalker was your stalker?”
He nodded. “My closet’s contents were obliterated. Yours apparently acquired alien articles of clothing.”
“Why me and mine?”
“She wanted to make you more suspicious of me, angry enough to hunt and hassle me even more.”
“She? I hadn’t figured on a woman stalking a woman. Why would it be your nemesis? You’re just habitually cynical about women.”
“I wasn’t always. Not until her.”
“Weren’t you very young then?”
“Seventeen.”
“Only … three years older than Mariah.” Molina seemed stunned by the comparison.
“Kids were more naïve back then.”
“Your same-age cousin died in a pub bombing at the same time.”
Obviously Temple had thoroughly briefed Molina on Max’s history with the IRA, probably to defend him.
“More like a brother,” Max said brusquely. “So how were you stalked in this house? That takes a lot of nerve, going after a police detective.”
Molina hesitated, reluctant to change the subject, then moved on. “It could have been someone I closed a case on. What happened … ended. It was a warped, sick scenario. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Temple Barr knows.”
“Yes,” she admitted. She stood, walked around the sofa behind him, leaned her hands on either side of his shoulders, and asked, “Matt Devine knows?”
He paused to decide what to say, what to admit. “Yes.”
Molina took an audible deep breath. She leaned in, so the meter of her words huffed across his skin. “That’s too many already.”
“Why can’t I know?” Max asked.
“Why do you have to know?”
“It might affect your detecting ability. I want your objectivity working for me.”
“You think I could be objective about you?” Molina asked.
“Yes, I do.”
She came around to the front of the couch, looming as only a five-foot-ten woman could. “The stalker tried to manipulate me. I’m willing to concede now that wasn’t you. Probably. But even I don’t claim I’m objective about you.”
“Everything and everyone needs to be questioned now—motives, goals, what strings are being pulled by whom. We all do the best we can to pull back the curtain, don’t we? While still keeping a veil over our deepest fears and oldest sins.”
“Heavy.” Molina let herself sink back onto the couch. “This time you fetch me a beer from the fridge.”
* * *
The second soldier was empty on the snack bar between the kitchen and the living room, and Max was crawling around in the bottom of Molina’s closet. “A shrink would have a lot of fun with your shoe collection.”
“More so with Temple Barr’s, I’m thinking.”
“It’s all about height, or the lack of it, with women. She overcompensates for short physical stature, you temper your ability to intimidate male coworkers with an array of low-heeled loafers for work. Even at home you wear moccasins.”
“I see your association with Miss Barr has made you a sidewalk connoisseur of shoes and psyches.”
“And sometimes you just want to break out of the career closet. What’s this?” Max looked up, one forefinger dangling the ankle strap of a pale nile green satin sandal with a half-inch platform on the sole. “Lady Gaga boots it isn’t. Don’t tell me you share a vintage clothing jones with Temple Barr.”
Molina snatched the slipper up, up, and away.
“And Cinderella you’re not,” he commented. “Also not a size five, looked like—”
“None of your business.”
“Wrong. It’s my business. Any of your shoes or mates go missing during the stalking incidents?”
“No. I told you. The stalker added to my wardrobe.”
Max let his fingers page through the soft five-inch swatch of floor-length hanging gowns in deep jewel-toned silk velvet. “These are Carmen’s, your warbling alter ego’s. Which one didn’t you buy?”
She reached out to one. “The blue. At least I didn’t remember it.”
“It looks a lot like the others.”
“Gowns of that 1930s’ vintage are very similar and there isn’t much good light in the closets of these old houses.”
“So you can’t be sure.” Max leaned back to study the gowns. “They’re all the same length.”
She nodded. “That’s what made this first discovery creepy. I sensed it didn’t belong, but it looked like it should.”
“What was the next leaving?”
“Nasty. Obvious. Meant to chill.”
He waited and she averted her eyes.
She answered in a monotone, turning away. “It was a gift-wrapped slim little box on my bedspread, looked like candy. I couldn’t conceive that Mariah would do that, although teen girls often do owe their mothers an apology. But I opened it.”
“Not a letter bomb,” he said to diffuse the tension.
Her laugh was short. “A filmy piece of cheap lingerie, with a note: ‘You dress like a nun.’”
“And of course, that sealed the deal that it was me.”
She turned on him, blue eyes blazing like midnight specials. “You always like to … taunt me.”
“I honestly can’t remember.”
“You were doing it just now.”
He thought. “Yeah, I was—”
“You think I’m too buttoned-down and uptight.”
“I am getting a bit of that vibe, but it’s hitting me more like … that’s there because you’d be a lot hotter if it wasn’t.”
“That comment is sexist, not sexy. Like that invasive ‘gift’ was stalking, not … not courting behavior.”
“But you know now that it wasn’t me.”
“Mostly.” She sounded almost as sullen as a teenager fessing up. Learned that from Mariah, likely.
“Look. I’m sorry. I don’t think I’d do that. A magician gets used to manipulating people, to getting a reaction from an audience. It’s nothing personal.”
She shrugged, her anger and embarrassment spent.
“Um, I have to ask. Was the article of lingerie black?”
Oops. She was annoyed again.
“‘Articles’ like that usually are.”
“Then, Lieutenant. Molina. I think there’s a clue you’ve missed because you couldn’t possibly know it. That ‘gift’ wasn’t a sexual come-on. Not at all.”
“What?”
“You went to school with Catholic nuns.”
“I’m half Hispanic. Of course.”
“And the habits they used to wear were—?”
“Black.”
“You don’t wear black. Navy maybe, but not much in this broiler climate. I think that gown was left by a woman.”
She looked doubtful.
“Who was out to get me.”
“It’s always all about you.”
“In this case, it really is.”
“And the next time, when I came home to find the radio on and a trail of rose petals down the hall to Mariah’s bedroom?”
Max sighed. Kathleen O’Connor had done a job on Molina. No wonder she’d risked her career to break into Max’s house to prove he was the stalker, and then had the bad luck to run straight into Kitty the Cutter.
“She likes to play with her prey, but she is armed and dangerous. She slashed Matt Devine trying to get at me.”
Molina let herself sink down upon the bed, in a way reclaiming it from being a scene of a crime. Max didn’t want to loom, so he sat beside her, with no protestations.