“It’s no secret that two bodies have been found on this site.” Molina lowered her sunglasses and looked sideways at Farnum. “This entire lot is a crime scene, including your trickster building. I’m posting officers around the clock, and not even Harry Potter will slip past them.”
Temple remembered that Harry had an invisibility cloak. Molina had read Harry Potter? Probably when Mariah was a kindergartner.
“Prepare to give me a list of who bankrolled what, or I’ll get a court order to view all the permits,” Molina told Farnum. “Even invisible buildings can’t go up these days without plenty of paperwork.”
Farnum backed away, bowing like a spurned suitor, his straw hat clutched to his heart.
Molina turned to Temple. “I see you’ve been chatting up the gathering UFO Looney Tunes division. You’re coming to headquarters with me to give a full oral report.”
Yo, ho, ho and little green gray men on a dead man’s chest.
Chapter 29
Fringe Benefit
Only in Las Vegas.
In only an hour or two, my spectacular Olympic-level performance in Downhill Racing is forgotten in the resulting chaos, although I am sure it will soon go viral and reality TV will be calling … and calling my name.
Police DO NOT CROSS tape has expanded to encompass most of the lot and now includes the nakedly exposed building. Crawford Buchanan is in all-too-prominent evidence, chatting up the crowd for a slot on the ten o’clock news. Onlookers and schlock-sellers form a thick lunatic fringe between the tape and the curb, creating a street circus atmosphere to mirror the Strip, although in small scale.
Still, it is hard for a dude of my stature to make an evidence-gathering stroll of the grounds. My Miss Temple captured me while I was still a bit disoriented from my ten-story slide. She hugged me and petted me and called me her very own, in full public view, which was terribly humiliating, then admonished me and locked me “safely” in the Miata convertible and flounced off to do spin control and snoop, as she is wont.
Foolish girl. She ordered the Mazda model with the push-button top. The day, or night, Midnight Louie cannot paw-punch a button with enough force to operate it is the day I hang up my crime-busting credentials. She should know that by now. I have pussyfooted over enough of her landline and fax buttons in the past.
Granted, Miss Temple is somewhat dizzy from being the PR person in charge of this big-time would-be alien sideshow despite herself. I had heard her muttering about being stuck as “Molina’s Junior G-string Girl” or some such as she left me in temporary custody in the Miata.
I do enjoy the sweet smell and cushiness of leather seats, but I like a crime scene—no matter how grimy and bizarre—better.
So now I am footloose and fancy free, and following in Crawford Buchanan’s nosy newscaster footsteps, which smell of rose-scented athlete’s foot powder—oof! Above me, his oily baritone is drawing sensational comments from the gathered loonies—er, legions of UFO believers—and the usual Vegas suspects: onlooker tourists and local gawkers.
“I saw that UFO thingie just swallow up a building whole,” testifies an elderly dude wearing a Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops that sport gel-green frogs on the toes. Definitely a keen eyewitness. “This is obviously the first scout ship,” he adds, “but these alien thingies will be downing the Monte Carlo next. We are witnessing Armagideon.”
And Joshua and Jericho too.
The next camera subject wears jeans and Earth Shoes. I would have sworn that this ’70s’ artifact would have vanished from the earth, but no. It is a pleasure to see long pants in Las Vegas, and lots less human hair that looks like it escaped a coconut shell. I delicately walk my foretoes up the leg of the oblivious wearer and spot a halo of ungoverned Einstein hair on his head.
Perchance this dude will share a brainiac perspective.
“I was able,” he confides to Crawford and myself and the camera, “to shoot a cell phone pic of the unfortunate fallen corpse. This is clearly a returned alien abductee who either died in custody or was … experimented on to the death. Just like the helpless animals in our research labs. Our own sins are being visited upon our abducted members.”
This guy has a point. Should the wrong individuals spot me on the loose, I am in danger of going from confinement in a locked Miata to a wire crate on death row. This thought has me hotfooting into a swarm of tennis shoes, which are bulkier to hunker down behind.
However, the Crawfish’s two-tone loafers catch up with me.
“Your theories on the visitation to Paradise?” Buchanan asks the Nike-clad feet of a female of the species, holding out his mic like it was as tasty as a licorice lollipop.
People today gravitate to the sweet smell of self-advertisement. Resistance is futile.
“Obviously,” says a woman in a MISKATONIC U T-shirt, “this is a close encounter of the sixth kind.”
“Sixth kind?” Buchanan sounds confused. “I’ve heard about the first kind and the second and third, but—”
“You reporters are so behind the times,” she enlightens us all. “The body expelled from the alien ship is obviously a captive of ancient aliens who’d preserved his life for hundreds of years before some space accident or just time caused him to finally expire. Surely you glimpsed the swarthy complexion, the noble Mayan profile, as etched into the stones of Calixtlahuaca. This is an ancient Mayan astronaut whose extraterrestrial duty has sadly ended after hundreds of years, yet … too soon.”
She flashes the face of her cell phone at the video camera eavesdropping over Buchanan’s shoulder. “This man was hot.”
I cringe in embarrassment for Miss Temple’s species.
Looks like alien abductees are the new multimedia, multicultural sex symbol, and then some.
Chapter 30
Fallout
“You don’t need to take me downtown, honest,” Temple said when Molina escorted her to a parked squad car.
“I should,” Molina answered. “I said to keep me informed, not to take us all to Oz, and your big cat too.”
Lieutenant Molina’s face wore a slightly sour professional scowl. Detective Su, Alch’s partner and a petite Asian woman who could out-scowl her superior officer, was leaning against the squad car’s door, keeping Temple sitting tight in the passenger seat.
Temple remembered she’d left Louie locked in her Miata ten minutes earlier. She needed to get him out before it got too hot, although he actually liked to snooze under the dashboard on the passenger side in the Circle Ritz parking lot … a spot that was warm, dark, and defended. And also kept close watch on her comings and goings.
Often she wished the shoe were on the other paw.
Molina was in the driver’s seat, one long leg jackknifed in the crowded under–steering wheel area, the other on the street through the ajar door.
The black-and-white’s interior was hot, crammed with equipment, and smelled like a spilled strawberry soda, thanks to an odor remover. Temple was thinking if she stayed here too long, she might throw up.
“Things,” Temple said, “went horribly wrong terribly fast.”
“Just your speed.” Molina was tapping the keys of the built-in computer. “I want to know why your cat was the only one to understand that building had a fully climbable, completed interior.”
“Legendary curiosity?”
Molina’s scowl deepened into furrows, and her fingertips beat the keys even faster. Temple decided to go for it. “Speaking of curiosity, why all the crowd rumors about the corpse being a Mayan or an Aztec?”