Cat in a hot pink Pursuit

of this mess. Some amateur sleuth you are. You just led Alch to Beth Marble. This woman turned out to be a victim, not a criminal.”
    “Why does her killer have to be Mrs. Klein’s killer?”
    “We have a serial situation here. There was a young girl killed in the parking lot outside the shopping mall where you and your... peers auditioned two weeks ago. We’ve found defaced posters of the show flyer all over the place. Someone is targeting the competition and its entrants.”
    Temple absorbed this, even the additional details, with no surprise. “Those were the arguments you used to blackmail me into becoming Mariah’s chaperon. You’ve always suspected an outside stalker.”
    Molina, her face sober to the point of grimness, nodded. “Look. I don’t for a minute believe that you’d stab anyone in the heart... unless they were going after your sainted Max Kinsella. You can bet I’d never turn my back on you in that regard. But you’ve put me in an impossible position. You were found where you were found. I had to abstract you.”
    “‘Abstract?’ Like I’m a hologram you erase?”
    “Abstract like ‘take out’ before you’re taken out. First, I’d like to know why you thought Beth Marble killed Marjorie Klein. It’s quite a leap of logic.”
    “Who do you think killed Beth Marble?”
    “Haven’t a clue yet. She apparently was not only the mastermind behind this piece of reality TV tripe but her personality was all grins and roses. A cloying personality type, I grant you, but why target her as a killer?”
    “Why should I tell someone who ridicules my deductions and jerks me around like a puppet?”
    Molina leaned back in her skimpy executive chair, not even big enough to hide a dead body. She tapped a pen on her desktop.
    “You build a good case, I’ll buy it.”
    “And that’s worth something?”
    “It’s worth our deal about Kinsella continuing.”
    “Okay. My reasons aren’t entirely logical—”
    “So I’ve been telling you about Kinsella. But go on.”
    “I just... felt from the first that the house’s history had something to do with the sinister goings-on now.”
    “‘Sinister goings-on.’ Very good. Very Agatha. Go on .” Molina was always a hard house to play. “I think, from the old photos in your fairly lousy news-clipping copies that Beth Marble was really that blonde trophy wife of yore, Crystal Cummings.”
    Molina neither moved nor spoke.
    “After all, she didn’t die in the attack years ago. She just went off the radar after all the court trials and hoopla and her estranged husband’s disappearance. So did her seriously wounded teenage daughter. They became the forgotten victims.”
    “Have you any idea how many cold case files there are? How many suspects and almost victims drift off into the great anonymity of modern life? It’s easier to lose people than to find them.”
    “Exactly. But I figure that this poor kid, Crystal’s daughter, she would have had enormous emotional trauma. Maybe enough to create an eating disorder, which is a cry for control. Enter Marjorie Klein, an inflexible, doctrinaire therapist. Believe me, I had to sit in her office swallowing her legume regimen, and poor Mariah—”
    “What about ‘poor’ Mariah?”
    “You know Mrs. Klein was hard on her weight issue.”
    “Hispanic girls often have baby fat but they get it off later.”
    “Right. A Weight Watcher would know, wouldn’t she?” Molina’s face darkened but she didn’t say anything-Kids will blab. Temple felt her ground hardening under her.
    “And you’re only her mother and Mariah was only in Mrs. Klein’s hands for a few days and I did tell her to ignore the woman... and already the veins are standing out on your forehead.”
    “They are not.”
    “They would be if you allowed them to. So figure it’s not just a few pounds and your daughter but Crystal Cummings’s teenage daughter with a serious case of traumatic anorexia or bulimia brought on by the attack in the Dickson house.
    “So she eventually dies, the daughter. Cummings would be her last name. Or maybe she’d have the last name of her actual, forgotten father. But maybe Crystal just used her mother’s own last name. I hear that sort of thing happens all the time. Much cleaner, especially if the father has abandoned the child.” Molina’s face was getting grimmer by the second. “The point is, this young girl was only a stepdaughter to Dickson. That was the tragedy of her getting hit by