Nuns who taught school, for instance, had never carried purses either, now that he thought about it. "No frills" was the message: no makeup, no trivialities; no need to produce evidence of my identity unless I feel like it; nothing to weigh me down but authority.
He remembered his grade-school teachers in their full, long, black habits, and the nun who directed the choir who prowled the lines of trilling students, swinging the gigantic, knee-length rosary suspended from her belt-cord. It felt like a lethal weapon, that swinging arm of wooden beads. Sister Mary Lariat, they called her behind her back.
Still, those muffling habits conferred a kind of magical power on their wearers.
In a sense Molina was a magician, bureaucratic-style, though she'd despise comparison to the Mystifying Max: everything came out of the pockets---her police ID, a notepad and pen, maybe even an occasional Kleenex.
Now it was a small, clear-plastic Baggie that emerged, weighed down in one comer by a nugget of metal.
"You recognize this?"
Matt leaned forward on the hard kitchen chair to take it. The room's arched white ceiling provided reflected light. Matt felt something in him lurch: heart or hormones, which he didn't know.
"It looks like--l can't swear to it. I only glimpsed it for a second. Where on earth did you find it?"
She nodded. "Looks like that to me too. Small enough."
"Didn't that Shangri-La woman skip town with her confederates? She's the one who last had it."
"Right." Molina's lips tightened to grimness. "Found it at a murder scene."
"That has nothing to do with Temple."
"Oh, right." She shook her head as if mere babblers should just be ignored. "It was found at what may be the second murder some in a series. In both cases, neither victim had any personal belongings or jewelry on or near the body."
"Except for this ring."
"Except for that ring."
"That's . . . freaky. That's odd. But what has it to do with Temple? She was not the last person in possession of this thing. You saw it taken from her yourself."
"I know who took it from her and l know who gave it to her.
What l don't know is much about this missing magician, Shangri-La, and I don't know why this ring would have surfaced--deliberately. I'd say--at this particular murder scene." Molina fidgeted on the sofa seat again, unaware of her discomfort with its severely chic fifties form.
"I'm not going to ask her, and I'm not going to ask him, at least not until l have more of a notion to what's going on. You know a little about both of them and about everything else involved here. You get to be my guinea pig."
"Lieutenant . . . what do you want? I suppose you don't want me to tell poor Temple her ring has been found, and where, but what else?"
"The victims are complete mysteries. Both women, both stripped of personal belongings other than their clothes, which is even odder; each killed miles from the other, one near the presence of this ring. I want to run the facts of the cases by you, see if anything rings any alarm bells. One of them was killed in a church parking lot."
"What does that have to do with it? Or me?"
"Don't sound so exasperated. I thought you might have some expertise in that area, that's all."
"Church parking lots? I don't think so." He sighed. "What denomination was it?"
Molina produced a narrow notebook from her other pocket and flipped pages. "More Holy Roller than Holy Roman Catholic Church, admittedly. 'Desert Spring Well of Christ Triumphant.'
You frown. Does that mean you know it?"
"It means I've seen churches like it. Tiny, unaffiliated, often either interesting or seriously weird." He stood up.
"I'm not through."
"Neither am I. l want to look it up in the phone book."
He returned from the kitchen with the formidable bulk of the Las Vegas phone book and began riffling the yellow pages even before he sat back down. "Do you know that Las Vegas has more churches per capita than most U.S. cities?"
"Heard that."
"A lot of Baptist congregations, tons of Mormon ones. The usual Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Episcopal. Then the zillions of Churches of Christ and Churches of God.
Inspiring, isn't it? Only one Unitarian Universalist Church, though. I guess we can't blame Temple too much for neglecting to attend."
"I don't care what church Temple Barr would be attending if she were a churchgoer. I should have figured she'd be something Wishy-washy like a Unitarian."
"A fallen-away Unitarian," Matt amended, smiling. "Here's the Sacred Well or whatever is, under 'Nondenominational.' I guess! No, I haven't been there."
"I didn't think you had."
"I could have been. I've visited a lot of local churches. Most cities don't have this rich range."
Molina shook her head. "To each his own hobby."
"What do you want me to do, if not offer expert testimony on churches?"
"I want you to come to headquarters, review the evidence, see if anything seems remotely familiar, or connected."
"To Temple?"
She nodded.
"To Max Kinsella?"
She nodded again.
"I can try, but the odds are--"
"I've been in Vegas a lot longer than you have. I know what the odds ate." He shrugged and handed the ring bag hack to her. "Guess Temple won't get that back for a while."
"Maybe never, if these cases aren't closed."
"Really? The police can do that? The ring must be valuable."
"You really so anxious to see it back on her finger again?"
"No. But it hurt her to lose it. You saw that."
"Better you be hurt than she?"
He shrugged again, then changed the subject. "You say the two murders were far apart.
Where was the other one?"
"The first one." Molina stood, jamming the Baggie into her bottomless pockets. They never bulged, but they were never empty. If she ever made captain, they should nickname her
"Kangaroo."
"It happened at the Blue Dahlia," she added on her way to the door. "I found the body, or, rather, Carmen did. But that's classified information."
She never turned hack to look at him, never slowed down. She simply left.
He stood in his open doorway, staring clown the empty hallway leading from his apartment, realizing why he had been called in as a semi neutral observer. More than two people he knew were personally linked to the puzzling murders. Lieutenant C. R. Molina's alter ego Carmen was too.
Chapter 26
Little Green Apples
They were just manila folders, bland vanilla-colored poster board rectangles. He would never even notice them in most offices. But on a homicide lieutenant's desk. . . .
Matt found his glance flickering over them even as he absorbed Molina's deliberate, monotone recital of the facts surrounding two brutal murders.
Her manner reminded him of priests who sleep-talked their way through the Anointing of the Sick--a sacrament once more dramatically called Extreme Unction, the last anointing-their droning murmurs downplaying the ritual's mortal nature. Routinely looking death in the face seemed to demand a defensive stoicism.
"There aren't as many serial killers around as the media would have the public think,"
Molina was saving. "Thanks to all the books and movies, they're the superstars of the crime-entertainment industry: exotic, scary, and masters of bizarre, random murders meant to shock the public. So-called crimes of passion are much bloodier, and more intimate. Only one person, or a cluster of persons, are targeted. Of course we're now in the era of the terrorist-style murder, where anger at the one person targeted overflows to everyone nearby. That's another unsettling pattern."
"But."
"But: These two murders have earmarks of both single killing and serial killings. But: just as one swallow does not a summer make, neither do two apparently similar killings a serial "killer indicate."
"What do you think I can tell you?"