Then he saw that his right hand had automatically gone to his side and he felt melting warmth flooding his fingers, oozing between them. The night air held a sudden, tungsten tang.
Blood, Matt thought. His blood. She had ... cut him.
He finally heard the words Kitty has breathed into his ear as tenderly as a mother to a sick child as she departed. "Remember me, you bastard."
He had killed his first man tonight. Did she mean ... himself?
Chapter 16
Dead Again
"Hell of a crime scene."
"That's why we called you at two in the morning, Lieutenant."
Molina pulled her attention away from the body grotesquely attached to the Roman galley's prow. Sometimes she was a camera, and now she was panning back into a long shot.
The worklights glaring down on the dock and the water made the death scene into a stage set.
"Hair and Fiber is bitching about their technicians having to hang upside down like bats,"
Detective Morris Alch went on.
`He was a dapper, low-key man on the cusp of fifty, whose graying mustache existed more to hide a sense of humor than add distinction, which it also did.
She nodded, stifling a yawn. "We'll lose a lot more than bat droppings if we don't do this right. You talked to the crew?"
"Gaithers did."
"Do they use any kind of small boat to clean or touch up the ship?"
Alch nodded at a uniform waiting near them, who disappeared into the corona of spotlights.
That was how, in ten minutes flat, two rowboats lay poised in the water before the galley's gently bobbing bow, a fresh plastic dropcloth stretched between them. A third boat waited in the shadows to receive the body once the technicians were through and it could be detached.
"Bizarre," Alch commented.
"This is Las Vegas. What do you expect?"
Molina watched stoically, which was more than the Oasis crew boss could do. She also serves who stands and waits in larger-than-life scenes with her ID tag clipped to her lapel.
The hotel crew boss paced soft-shod in Nikes, a wiry, worried man in his fifties.
She had to credit the work crew; they snapped to like a Navy detail to man the boats. The crew boss, clasping his walkie-talkie to his mouth like a seventh sense, muttered reports and encouragement to the crew manning the other galley on a distant dock.
The evidence technicians cut the body free, sparing all knots for later analysis and fighting to keep any fragments from falling to the jerry-rigged plastic net below. Suspended from the barge's decks by ropes, two technicians eased the body bag over the lower limbs of the now-dangling corpse. If only the tourists could see this.
So far the Oasis had only canceled one show, but Molina figured she wouldn't be able to release the barge until after dawn's early light.
"The show must go on," Alch muttered, not disapprovingly.
"The real show will be on the autopsy table. This body won't be talking until the ME's report."
"You think he was dead before he was bound to the, uh, front lady here?"
"It's called a figurehead. Wonder if that means something?"
"We're hardly into the New Year and we land a freaky stiff."
"Freaky, yeah. Reminds me of those casino bodies last year."
"But those were interior death scenes, with the bodies stuffed up in the ceiling."
"They were still found publicly, in the heart of Las Vegas attractions. Somebody thinks this whole damn city is one big set for murder."
Molina walked to the water's very edge to squint into the corpse's garishly lit face. It resembled a ghost of olden days with cerements meant to hold its jaw shut obscuring its features.
"If the guy's hands weren't bound to the carving at his hips," she said, "I'd say he had tried to tear at the face wrappings while the galley was being submerged. He was alive, and I bet there's a gag in his mouth under the gauze."
"You mean they weren't just trying to make him look like a mummy?"
Molina shrugged. "It fits the ambiance."
"Ambiance, Lieutenant?" Alch mocked.
"This is Vegas, Morey. It's all ambiance, including us."
"Yes, ma'am." But his mustache grinned.
******************
An hour had passed before the plastic had been folded and stashed in the evidence van, before the rowboats were off the water, and the body lay in its garbage-bag-green body bag on the dock.
Molina stared down at the hidden face in its soggy carapace of ordinary medical gauze. The man's wet clothing was unremarkable: jeans, shirt. He had died with his boots on. Someone had stage-managed this; and more than one person had executed it, had executed the victim in a particularly cruel fashion.
She could finally snap on the latex gloves, crouch like a kid over some gruesome find, and work back the waterlogged gauze. She felt a bit like an archeologist as the rigid features were exposed to the worklights.
Nose, mouth, fish-eyes. It was enough. She wasn't aware of having frozen in thought until she realized Detective Alch had stopped searching the dead man's face to study hers.
"You know him, Lieutenant?"
Molina sighed, and stood. "Know his kind. Let me know when the ME schedules the autopsy," she told Alch. "And it better be soon."
Her features sharpened. Contrary to TV crime shows, cops seldom ventured into the autopsy room; reports said it all, or should.
"Hey." Molina offered one of her rare smiles. "We don't often get to see a mummy unveiled."
She turned to go, to go back home and hopefully not to wake up Mariah. To free Delores to return to her house and her own family two doors down. To try to sleep before getting up again to another administrative day. Being a cop and a single mother was hell on hot wheels, dragging her out with little notice in the dead of night to commune with the dead. To interrogate the silence. To speculate about the living. But it had been worse before she had made lieutenant.
Now she was only called when the case was particularly puzzling, or politically delicate, and, luckily, most murders were depressingly routine. But she doubted she'd sleep much tonight, even if she got home in time for a couple of hours rest. Too much to think about.
The dock felt exotic in the chill of a Las Vegas winter night. She could smell wet rope and dank water, could barely hear the disturbed water's slight slap against the pilings. She could have been standing on any exotic shoreline from Lake Mead to Lake Titicaca in the Andes to Lake Victoria in Africa.
At the fringe of the spotlit space she noticed a couple of upright objects.
Not objects, figures. Feline figures.
One was big and muscular with a low-pile coat. The other silhouette, half the size of the first, was blurred by frills of longer hair. They sat like Egyptian statues, still as the massive figures girding the Oasis facade, watching with eyes that changed to UFO-green as she walked away and the light illuminated the eerie night-time neon of their irises.
Leaving the bizarre crime scene, for the first time that evening, Lieutenant C. R. Molina felt a chill of apprehension, even though she wasn't superstitious.
She knew those cats, and, if so, she certainly knew they meant trouble. But who could interview a cat? Luckily, there were plenty of Homo sapiens around to do the talking, or the not-talking.
"Round up the usual suspects," she muttered.
And, she added mentally, maybe some very unusual ones.
This was Las Vegas. A cop could bet on that, and win every time.
Chapter 17
A Beached Barge
"It is most interesting to observe a police crime-scene team in action," Miss Midnight Louise says once everything human--and formerly human--has left the death scene.
We are alone, for the barge crew has finally accepted that the show must not go on until Lieutenant Molina says it can. Only the dead-in-the-water barge remains, nudging the dock like a whale calf cozying up to Mama.