Cat in a hot pink Pursuit

all her physical reactions dampened as she frowned at the photograph in her custody, knowing she was being watched carefully by her troops. Seeing Rafi Nadir again a couple weeks ago had been easy. No one would believe he’d been a former lover and was even Mariah’s father. He was a loser. She was a winner. She’d frozen, ignored, brushed by, brushed off, rushed out of there. Maylords Fine Furniture was just a crime scene and Rafi Nadir was just an innocent bystander in that instance. Or not so innocent. He’d found her again and now knew about her, who she was, what she was. Homicide lieutenant. He had reveled in delivering the murderer to her, bound over. And Temple Barr had reveled in helping him to do it.
    Maybe she thought turnabout was fair play. Molina had pursued Temple’s significant other; now Molina’s ex-SO was in a position to embarrass, if not pursue, her.
    But what about Mariah? Temple was supposed to be protecting her. Instead the poor kid had already had the rare life experience of finding a dead body. Now she was in danger of finding out her father wasn’t a dead-hero cop but the disgraced private cop currently on the reality show premises. Molina’s hands started trembling with fury. Alch was watching her curiously. He knew. Too many people knew. Just not Mariah yet, thank God. She spun the photo back to Su as if returning a tennis serve.
    “We’ll put him on the possibles list.”
    Molina put her mind as well as her emotions in cold storage. Nadir had been interred in the box of her past, which was locked up, like a gun in a cabinet. Safe behind steel doors.
    Now... his orbit and her daughter Mariah’s had intersected in this insanely trivial place, a reality TV show. His daughter Mariah, who he’d ensured had entered the world by foul means, not fair, but who’s existence he had never suspected.
    Not even the sleaziest producer could have scripted such an ironic, maddening moment. And Molina had to keep the peace, keep the secret, no matter what. What was Temple Barr trying to do? Destroy her before she destroyed Max Kinsella? They had a deal.
    Everyone but Alch was watching her under the mistaken assumption that she was brilliantly analyzing the case at hand. She needed to distract them from watching her chewing on the conundrum of her personal and professional life and onto something else....
    “What about the cat?” she asked.
    “Louie?” Alch smiled at a closeup shot of the feline in question. “The usual suspect. Big, black, and known to the police.”
    “Cut the humor, Alch.”
    “You’re the one who sent the kitty pillow.”
    “My daughter shares the room.”
    “Oh, I see. The pillow was a two-fer: Trojan horse for the roommate and motherly gesture for the kid.”
    “Trojan kitty,” Su said, snickering.
    “The reality show may be a joke. What’s going on there isn’t. Who else on the grounds is suspect, just because?” Su frowned, which drew her creatively plucked eyebrows into the kind of fretwork you’d find on an Asian table. Molina had never dared inquire into the inspiration for those brush-stroke eyebrows plucked into lines beginning thick and ending as fine as a mouse-hair brush. She didn’t know if the motive was cultural or simply creative. But they made Su memorable. She’d never seen the like, and nobody else had dared to inquire either, not even sticklers for uniformity at high rank. It would be one mystery this homicide lieutenant would never solve.
    “Everybody who’s on the premises was ‘picked,’ in one way or another, except the producers.”
    “But they’re all supposedly strangers,” Alch added. “Back at the time of the murder, everybody was related, one way or another.”
    “Could the fallout from that violent episode be haunting this show? The suspected perp is at large.”
    “Disappeared,” Alch objected. “There’s a difference. Everybody’s given up looking for him.”
    “Not me,” Molina said grimly. She tapped the crackling white oversize sheets of paper with their blurred fine lines of newsprint. “Check out what happened to all these people.”
    “You think one of them might have come back somehow?” Su sounded unconvinced.
    “I think something’s going on that has nothing to do with Teen Queens or TV.”



Past Tense

    The man who looked too much like Matt, or vice versa, shifted his weight from foot to foot. He glanced back over his shoulder, down the corridor leading to the law offices.
    But Brandon,