Chapter 1
Hello Kitty
Homicide Lieutenant C. R. Molina's desk hosted two very different images.
One was a glossy 11-by-17-inch poster of a Barbie-doll-cute teen girl tricked out in industrial-strength amounts of hot pink.
The other was the same image, cut into jagged pieces that had been grafted onto photographed body parts of an actual Barbie doll.
The phrase "Teen Idol" on the first poster had morphed into "Twisted Sister," with a welter of blood-red spatters, on the second one.
"Sick," Molina said, unnecessarily.
They all stood gazing down on the twisted twin posters, neither of which was exactly wholesome. One was merely Extreme Fashion. The other had been refashioned into something freakishly violent.
"Being the mother of a newly teenaged daughter, finding this stuff strewn around a shopping mall parking lot makes me shudder," Molina said. "The slashed poster reminds me that some things are scarier than adolescent hormones."
"Mariah's thirteen already?" Detective Morrie Alch asked, surprised. He was comfortably into his mid-fifties and his lone daughter was grown, gone, and a mother herself.
How Molina envied him.
"Just turned," she said. "A month ago. I'm already considering a barbed-wire perimeter around the house. This is so sick."
"The Teen Idol concept," Detective Merry Su asked, "or the threatening poster?"
"Both." Molina shook her head. "So tell me about this Teen Idol thing."
"Reality TV hits Las Vegas," Su said. A petite, twenty-something, second-generation Asian American, Su looked ready to compete for a teen title herself.
"Can't prove it by me," Molina answered. "We've been hosting reality TV since the New Millennium Hotel went up five years ago."
"It's a quest to name a'Tween and Teen Queen," Alch said.
"Two age groups, thirteen to fifteen and sixteen to nineteen," Su said.
"Got it. Teens-in-training and the full-media deal. Is this a singing competition?"
Being a closet vocalist herself, Molina had actually caught a few episodes of American Idol. She found the concept exploitive of the pathetic wannabes every art form attracts and a mockery of true talent by letting the public select winners for emotional reasons. Look who they felt most sorry for.
"More than that: talent of any kind, made-over looks and improved attitude." Su was always eager to overexplain. "This is the triathlon of reality shows."
Alch nodded at the unadulterated poster. "Yup. This girl here looks real athletic, all right. I bet it challenges her biceps to load on that amount of mascara and lip-liner every day."
"‘Lip-liner?'" Molina called him on it. "Still keeping up with the girly stuff, Morrie, even with the daughter long gone?"
"You haven't hit the bustier stage in your house, I bet. Hold on to your Kevlar vest."
Molina chuckled, imagining some busty contestant wearing a bulletproof vest in a glamour roll call on TV. Whoa. Maybe that would have a perverse attraction.
She tapped her forefinger on the oversize plastic bag encasing the altered poster, protecting it for forensic examination.
"We've got … what? Dozens of teenage girl competitors from around the country pouring into a Las Vegas shopping mall in their Hello Kitty finery for auditions—and one sick puppy already announcing that he's out there waiting?"
"That's about it," Alch said. "No fingerprints. No way to trace the color copier to a local Kinko's."
"Kinko's are us," Su said.
"No kidding." Molina frowned. "You know the routine. Keep it quiet, keep an eye on the audition event. If we're lucky, the uniforms will find him before this ridiculous show launches. When?"
"This week's local auditions finish the selection process," Su said. "Then they narrow the field down to twenty-eight finalists in the two age groups and seclude them all in a foreclosed mansion on the West Side. For two weeks."
"Two weeks?" Molina didn't like the wide window of opportunity that much time afforded a pervert with a publicity addiction. "This could be the work of a kook as harmless as Aunt Agatha's elderberry wine. Or not. Keep on it."
Molina was still at her desk, with a different wallpaper of paperwork covering it, at seven thirty that evening when someone knocked on her ajar door.
No one knocked in a crimes-against-persons unit. She looked up—glared—from her paperwork. As the only woman supervisor, she never let down her guard.
A man entered as if he owned the joint.
Brown/brown. Five ten or eleven. A stranger who acted way too at home on this turf. On her turf. In her hard-won private office.
"Yes?"
"Working late?"
"Always." She waited. His clothes were casual but hip: blue jeans, black silk-blend tee, khaki linen jacket, big diver's watch face full of specialty minidials, and a sleek gold bracelet with a subtle air of South American drug lord. Couldn't see his shoes. Too bad. A man's shoes told as much about him as a woman's.
"You don't recognize me." He sat in the single hard-shelled chair in front of her desk, meant to discourage loiterers.
Recognize? No. He was way too hip for what usually showed up in police facilities, except for a five o'clock shadow too faint to be anything but a trendy shaving technique.
"You'll have to excuse me—" she began sardonically, still searching her memory banks.
"I consider that high praise."
"That you'll have to excuse me?"
"That you don't recognize me in civvies."
Okay. She ran a mental roster of uniforms, and came up blank. This was beginning to get annoying.
"I'm heading out," she informed him, slamming her desk drawers shut, picking up the black leather hobo bag she toted to and from work and nowhere out on the job.
"How about a drink en route?"
"How about an ID? And … no."
He laughed then. "You're usually onto this stuff. Tough case on your desk?"
"They're all tough. What's your name?"
"You really don't recognize me?"
He cocked his head, and then she had him.
"Dirty Larry?"
"All cleaned up."
"Gone Chamber of Commerce! To what do I owe—?"
"How about a drink on the way home? Some noncop bar."
"Why?"
"Personal police business."
She didn't like the way he drawled that out but checked her watch. Mariah had stayed after school tonight. Sock-hop committee at another student's house. Her baby daughter! Thinking about dancing with wolves. All harmless teenybopper stuff, hopefully. Staying at the Ruizes' for dinner until eight or so.
Dirty Larry, the Mr. Clean edition, waited. He watched her with an amusement that hinted he knew the pushes and pulls of her private life.
Bastard! Her vehemence, unjust, pulled her back from the brink. This was a colleague, after all. An undercover narc. Maybe he had something for her. He'd be used to private rendezvous in public places.
"Okay. Five minutes?"
He nodded, got up, and ebbed into the hall. She speed-dialed the Ruizes and got a commitment that they'd keep Mariah until ten, just in case.
Copyright © 2005 by Carole Nelson Douglas
