“Awesome,” she says. “I must admire these people for sustaining such a prodigious appetite in the face of daily death. Although it is all junk calories.”
“Cheetos? That is dairy protein. You know how we like our milk. Pepperoni ’n’ cheddar. That is dairy and protein.”
“Pretzels?” Louise’s tone is withering.
“Ah, salt is the saline solution that is the staff of life, along with, uh, wheat.”
“Gluten.” She glowers. “High-fructose corn syrup.”
“Fiber. Low, er, sodium.”
We have faced off over this bounty we do not have time to break into.
Louise nods as sagaciously as a babe of her type can. “If we can contemplate breaking into the fast-food automat, we can crack any autopsy cabinet in the place. Do you think they will make it easy for us and have drawers?”
“One can only hope, Louise.”
* * *
Of course, identifying one dead dude among so many is a challenge. I somehow think our ancient alien will not be in any old drawer, so we tour the rooms off the main autopsy area.
“Where would Grizzly Bear stash a prime candidate for illegal paparazzi snapshots?” I ask.
Midnight Louise sits down, curls her flurry tail around her neat forefeet and pretends to meditate like Bast. “I would mislabel the most desirable exhibit.”
So. Looking for “ancient alien” on stainless steel drawers as if they were file cabinets is not likely to be successful.
Suddenly, Louise lifts her head. “Idiots!”
People certainly are.
“We have overlooked the obvious,” Louise announces without giving me a hint of what she is referring to.
“Obviously. And that is—?”
“Where do you hide a leaf?” she asks.
“In a forest. Father Brown, the priest-detective I have cited before, figured that out before your one-thousandth great-grandmama was born.”
“Where do you hide an alien being fallen to earth?”
“Under … oddities?” I hazard.
“Under … suspected suicides?”
“It is true that there was not a mark on him, except ours, and no Cat Pack attacks are fatal. Is there a suicides room?”
“There should be, in Las Vegas,” she says.
“Yes, people win, and most people lose, and lose and lose. I believe,” I decree, “I would file him under ‘Anonymous.’”
That is how we locate the one unlabeled room. We sit upon an empty autopsy table—excellent construction, sturdy stainless steel with the look of those modern recto-linear sinks all the best home redos feature these days, almost an old Roman grandeur to them. I feel quite importantly supported by a pedestal, always a flattering position for my breed, from Bast on down.
Together, we leap, and push open a door that takes the force of a human palm in ordinary circumstances.
We are in! And, more important, the door has sprung wide and is not creeping closed again, as in all the best summer slasher movies.
We loft up in tandem to view the sole corpse occupying this unlabeled room. Talk about anonymous.
“He looks perfectly human, almost alive,” Louise comments reverently.
“They did a good job. The broken limbs are straightened to fit the table, the Y-incision in the torso is neatly sewed up, and the cranial sawing looks almost like a hippie headband.”
“A sign of respect and excellent workmanship.”
“He might become a museum exhibit ultimately.”
“Not so good,” Louise says, wrinkling her nose.
“They can freeze-dry him. No odor.”
“It is not that. Observe the faint white lines to the sides of his bronzed torso and legs.”
“Almost like the scars of a wire whip.”
“Or … these.” Louise lifts the spread four shivs of her right mitt.
“Our slashes tend to be a bit ragged.”
“These wounds are healed,” she points out (quite literally, running her fanned ninja knives through the air just above the rib scars). “I would like to see the back.”
“Not possible without human cooperation. This dude must weigh one-eighty. Could this man have contracted the Cat Pack slashes here in Las Vegas and still be from outer space?”
“Possibly. What do you think of him?” she asks.
“He does have an exotic look.”
“More of a human model, say a romance novel cover hero.”
“His hair is oddly slicked down close to his skull for that,” I say. “I have heard my Miss Temple quote Mr. Grizzly Bahr, our esteemed coroner, that faces relax in death so that the features may seem entirely alien.”
Louise pats his cold dead face with one velvet-soft mitt. “Poor mystery man. I have the oddest feeling that I have seen him somewhere, but that is not likely.”
In Las Vegas, the unlikely is always possible.
Chapter 36
Stunt Double
Temple sat in her condo in a funk as she grazed through the morning paper, viewing what Silas T. Farnum hath wrought.
She was probably the last person at the Circle Ritz who subscribed to the local paper. Staring at that day’s “second front” with its slightly out-of-register color photos of the parking lot crowd wasn’t the kind of promotion she’d want to get even a not-quite client. It was a sea of Spock ears and tinfoil hats.
She was even in one pic, caught in the act of turning Rens over to his happy owner. Temple wondered if Penny could recognize photos of herself. Or see herself in the mirror even. Just then, Louie skittered through the living area from the second bathroom litter box, his tail fluffed to radiator-brush size. He dashed across the glass cocktail table, claws razoring right through the opinion pages and classifieds section, a bizarre marriage in modern journalism, and raced on into the bedroom.
“Louie! Slow down, Mr. Black the Ripper.” Cats did that, suddenly tore through the house as if they’d gotten a moth in their ears or laid a major stinky in the litter box.
Temple bent to retrieve the scattered papers, thinking she should save the savaged second section, half-client or no half-client, and then stared at the paper’s yet-unread front page.
DEAD “ALIEN ASTRONAUT” HAS CLASSIC JUNGLE TEMPLE FEATURES, read the headline on the story below the fold. A sketch purported to be “obtained” by a freelancer was obviously based on smartphone shots caught on the run when the body first fell. Next to it was a photo of a purported “alien astronaut” from a Mayan temple. Temple squinted at the image—it did look like “air hoses” were coming from his head, and the figure was tilted at the angle of astronauts leaving Earth’s gravity.
This whole mess made “good print” and YouTube these days. She turned to the story’s “jump” to make sure no one had mentioned her name, and there was Farnum in a photo, beaming like he’d just ballooned into Oz.
Temple’s mind was on a mad, mad, mad merry-go-round.
She had no idea how she’d answered one phone call and was now involved with a notorious site of double murder, or at least of double body-dumping.
Not to mention a “ghost” hotel-casino building that was expected to attract hordes of customers by being invisible.