Matt hesitated. The details were deeply disturbing. He would never tell Temple. Molina was far less on his side, but she had been reared Catholic; she knew the ambiance. She knew the lingo. She would understand the implications.
"She mocked me. Mocked everything that's sacred to me. Knew just how to do it."
Molina considered the implications. She wasn't stupid. "So she didn't mock your manhood--
"
He wasn't going to confess.
She inhaled the insight like pure oxygen. "--but your priesthood."
Trust Molina to understand that they were, and were not, the same thing.
"And then she stuck you." She frowned. "Let's see."
He lifted the shirt and pulled away the already loosened tapes, feeling exposed far more than skin-deep.
Molina was as clinical as any battlefield medic. "Straight edge. Not deep, but deep enough.
Long, but not that long. Just about right." She looked away as he dropped the sweater back over the wound like a curtain.
"You, my friend, have been the victim of a hate crime. I can pursue that."
"The weirdest thing was, she kissed me while she did it. It was a kind of farewell."
Molina stood, snapping her notebook shut as if it had jaws. "We'll get the bitch."
He blinked, and she laughed. "I can do squad-room rap as well as the next cop. I've just got an impressionable preteen daughter to think about. Look at it this way. You did not suffer in vain. We can swear out an assault complaint on . . . the little darling."
"An assault complaint? A woman against a man? I don't think--"
"Now we get to the manhood part, right?"
"Not exactly. I just don't think it sounds credible. This is a woman I've never met before except in answer to a missing-person quest of mine. It doesn't make sense."
"It's a crime. It doesn't have to make sense. Listen, Devine, don't go wishy-washy on me.
Effinger's dead. You're a prime suspect in any cop's rule book. This lethal lady and her razor could get the heat off you. Don't let her get away with hit-and-run."
"You're really ticked off about this."
"You bet I am. She's a sicko, at the very least. And she smells of out-of-town interests."
"You think she's a hit woman?"
"Don't sound so incredulous. Women can do everything nowadays, you know, hunt as well as be hunted. But, no. You'd be dead if she was, which was one of the messages she was sending. She kiss as good as she cut?"
He shook his head. "It was symbolic, like the razor."
Molina nodded. "A sicko. Although how you would know the difference, I'd like to know."
Sardonic was her hard-bitten style of humor. Interrogation over.
"Think about swearing out a complaint. You have a name, for what it's worth, and a description," she added. "You might find it to your advantage. Statute of limitations doesn't run out for some time, and you'll be scarred for life."
"So what's new?"
She shrugged. She was done probing his wounds. Like a deliberately lousy surgeon, she had left a scalpel sewn in to irritate the site until he came back for corrective surgery. Maybe.
Matt wondered if he should have revealed the sketch of Kitty O'Connor and let Molina really go to work. He wondered if he should have repeated, and recorded the final humiliation, the words the woman had breathed at him as she departed, when he first felt the liquid warmth oozing onto his fingers and hadn't yet grasped what it was.
Remember me, you bastard.
Was that a symbolic attack too? Or worse?
Because, as few people outside a very small neighborhood in Chicago--and the late Effinger--knew, he was indeed a bastard.
Quite literally.
Chapter 33
Forbidden Planet
"Yo, Sherlock!"
"Temple?"
Max sounded surprised by her gung-ho tone.
"I've read your manuscript and I've spent far too many hours at the library looking up forms of hyacinth. Does Gandolph have any books there that might pertain to hyacinths?"
"Nothing flowery. But what about the manuscript?"
"What about it?"
"Can it be saved?"
"Modest Max. Perhaps. What are you going to give me for dinner?"
"What can you bring?"
"Boston Market?"
A pause. "Home cooking isn't my style, but beggars can't be choosers. Just don't spill anything on the manuscript."
"You can always print out another one."
"I know, but it doesn't feel that duplicatable."
Temple smiled. Max was used to making magic out of transient impressions and other people's blind spots. The concrete power of words awed him. Maybe he understood her bailiwick better now.
"Be over in half an hour."
Temple packed her tote bag and took an uneasy tour of the apartment. Louie was certainly making himself scarce lately. She wondered if he were trying to send a message.
But she had another message to decipher. Hyacinth.
She tucked a couple of flower books from the library into her tote along with Max's manuscript, checked to make sure one last time that Louie's bathroom window was ajar, and then locked the condominium on the way out.
She had to admit to a snare-drum rattle of excitement. Going over to Max's place felt like Minneapolis all over again. Just meeting Max, going out. Okay, not exactly going out. The only times recently she had gone out with Max it had been a major undercover operation, or a breaking and entering.
Still, they were working on things together. They were working on being together. Temple's red two-inch Cuban heels did a Castanet click over the Circle Ritz marble lobby floor. The ghosts of Fred and Ginger and that happy, chattering rhythm followed her to the parking lot.
Even cocking the pepper spray on her key ring as she neared her car couldn't dampen her spirits.
Her long red corduroy skirt refused to dampen its folds to fit into the Storm on the first try.
So she collapsed it like a recalcitrant umbrella and then locked herself in, after checking the back seat. Then she sighed. Twilight time. A beautiful January night, with the sun hanging over the western mountains like a bloodshot moon.
It was dusk by the time she pulled into Boston Market's car-jammed lot and inched through the crowded line, buying everything hot and homey, so it would drive Max bananas: corn and meatloaf and mashed potatoes and all that midwinter, Midwestern comfort food.
Loaded with one brown bag, and sure this time that no bogeyman would be lurking by her car, unless he was an escapee from Night of the Living Dead, gruesome thought, Temple clicked out to the car, stowed her goods and revved the Storm away from the sun sweltering into a burnt-orange puddle behind the mountains.
The sky was still the faint, pale blue of the Madonna's cloak when Temple carefully parked on the border of Max's lot line and carried her burdens to the house.
This time the door was infinitesimally ajar and she glided through without having to shift her packages.
"What?" she asked the darkness inside. "Am I Midnight Louie, with an automatic entrance/exit?"
Max shut the door behind her, and closed her mouth with a kiss as he off-loaded the food bags.
"Editors can be snakes, I understand," he said. "So I left the door open just wide enough to accommodate one."
"Not all editors," Temple protested. "Just a few bad ones. I thought my literary skills were going to be respected around here now that you're an aspiring author."
"I don't know what you think of my opus; until then, I'm prepared to consider you the enemy."
"Ridiculous." Temple followed him into the awesome kitchen. There was something charming about eating fast food in such an intimidating atmosphere of haute cuisine. "You want my opinion, then you shrink from getting it. Listen, if the manuscript stank, I'd return it in a plain manila envelope marked 'Illiterate, irrelevant and immaterial,' so all the neighbors would know."