"I'm a former investigative reporter for a TV station. I came here on the trail of a… missing girl." Well, Lilith was missing.

"You came here from where?"

" Wichita, Kansas."

"And you think Christophe knows something about this missing Kansas girl?"

"I think he knows a lot about shady dealings in this city."

"How do you know this girl is here?"

"I saw her, on television."

Malloy nodded. "Yes, the networks and cable TV are always here filming Las Vegas crowd scenes for various shows."

I didn't correct her. Lilith had been filmed in a very uncrowded scene. Autopsy rooms generally are.

"How old is this missing girl?" Malloy asked.

"About my age."

"Twenty-four, then." Uh-oh, someone had been looking in my personal file. Maybe it was my FBI file. "There's nothing the law can do unless we find her and she's a victim of a crime."

"I know. That's why there are people like me."

"And you're like?"

I wanted to squirm. My new "profession" seemed theoretical so far. "A private investigator, I guess, but not the mean streets kind. I do paranormal investigation."

"For how long?"

"First for the Wichita TV station and, on my own here, uh, officially, a few days." That would be official in several months when a new Yellow Pages directory came out. My new Web site would be much faster…when I set it up.

"You get a license?" Malloy asked.

"They don't give them for my specialty."

Perry intervened. "It seems this town, and these times, could use paranormal investigators."

"If they're not jailed on suspicion of murder themselves," Malloy said sourly, licking her pale lipstick and apparently discovering it was Green Apple Sour Gloss.

I still suspected her secret heart was set on Ric and she didn't like my showing up and getting in the way. Jeessh! A homicide captain and a Snow groupie, both jealous of an orphaned Kansas virgin (until very recently). You'd think they'd have enough hardened Las Vegas femmes fatales to worry about.

Malloy ignored me again and squinted at the screen. "Here it comes. The hair shtick. You still want to say nothing's going on between you and Christophe, Street?"

The camera angle was at my rear. The gown was backless, but that was the style in the thirties: prim high necklines in front, tailbone-dusting plunges in back. Well, not quite that backless.

In the tape, Snow was teasing out hairpins until my chignon came undone. I remembered him making some sexy insinuation about his long white hair and my long black hair blending in the mirror over his bed. I'd figured it for a hint that he wasn't the Albino Vampire he was rumored to be, the way seducers before the Millennium Revelation used to assure girls they'd had vasectomies.

I blushed now, hoping it didn't show but knowing it probably did.

"He's very forward," I murmured.

"'Forward'? Is that a word out of a convent school?" Malloy demanded. "The man is obviously seducing you."

I blushed more. She'd hit the nail on the head. Out of Our Lady of the Lake Convent School in Wichita, to be specific. "Only if it works," I retorted, "and it didn't. He's leaving now, see."

"And here comes the frantic fan," she added.

"She's been watching them for some time from the group of people at the left," Perry pointed out.

The next scene that I did remember word for word played out with only moving lips, inaudible against the background music.

The woman, shorter and dumpier than I, swathed in a patterned velvet shawl, bent to retrieve my dislodged hairpins from the floor. She rose with three fanned in her fingers, souvenirs of the rock star called Cocaine. Addictive to her.

My hand made a motion that she could keep them.

She came as close to me as Snow had, like an unwanted dance partner pushing too near. Even on film her feverish eyes looked mad. Her hands reached for my loosened hair, fingers twitching to tangle in it.

I shook my head and my hair loose. Said something serious. Sharp. The damned woman had wanted to cut off a lock of my hair. No way was I letting a lock of my hair go off on its own.

But Snow had touched my hair when undoing my chignon, and this woman wanted anything he'd touched, including parts of me. She's the one who should have been under suspicion, not me. Except she ended up dead by the Inferno Hotel Dumpster in the back service area later that night while I went home to Quicksilver.

"This is all you have?" Perry asked.

"The women did have an altercation."

"The dead woman had an altercation. Miss Street simply stood there and defended her person from pawing."

"She didn't from Christophe, a.k.a. Cocaine."

Perry turned to me. "Did the man do more than hold you in the traditional social dance position and pull a few hairpins from your hair?"

"No."

He'd made a verbal pass and once his cool white hand had trespassed on my bare back below the waist. The floating Inferno "eyes-in-the-sky" mirrored balls-a metaphor for the boss's ego and brass, perhaps?-had missed recording that. I saw no reason to cop to a copped feel if I didn't have to.

Perry shrugged and eyed Malloy.

"I see no reason to question Miss Street further," the captain said, "and obviously she isn't planning on leaving Las Vegas with her new career in gear."

The glance she flashed me added "… and Ric here."

I nodded politely and smiled.

And that's when the door burst open.

Chapter Twelve

"YOU can't just let her walk! What about the charge of resisting arrest?"

The man had burst through the door, legs and arms splayed to both confront and bar anyone from leaving. Haskell could have been any aggressive, middle-aged guy with a receding hairline and advancing gut when I'd I first met him over the dead skeletons in Sunset Park. Since then, he'd gotten a werewolf bite or two and it hadn't improved his looks or attitude.

"Detective Haskell," Malloy said in Ice Queen tones, "you were only to observe."

Ice Queen authority was not going to cut it with this guy.

I'd risen by instinct. Spittle was dotting his unshaven chin. He hadn't seen me since we'd tangled physically in Cesar Cicereau's office at the Gehenna before the boss's head muscle man, Sansouci, had hauled him off me.

His features had coarsened, as if halted in the middle of a werewolf change, sprouting tufts of hair here and there that were neither beard nor pelt.

His eyes seemed smaller, his nose and teeth larger, his body hunchbacked.

His anger toward me from the moment we met at the crime scene in the park had not changed, though.

"You gonna let this witch go? You afraid, Malloy, of that Meskin ex-Fed, or what?"

His sneer made pretty clear what "or what" he suspected Malloy of harboring toward Ric.

I hadn't heard anything, but Perry Mason was suddenly standing beside me, a huge black-serge wall. "Captain?" he asked.

Haskell answered, still spraying spit. I guess fangs make it hard to speak the Queen's English.

"She resisted arrest for questioning and you have her back for a tea party, Malloy, instead of a grilling? Leave me with her for two minutes and I'll get the real story."

Haskell prowled around the table's end, pushing into my territory.

Malloy was standing now too. "Haskell, you were ordered to stay out of here."

"That's what you want from detectives now? Do what they're told. I know things about this bitch, where she's been and where she shouldn't be, at the Inferno, the Gehenna. She's sucking up to all the mob bosses in town."

Wow. Haskell was a perfect case of what the shrinks call "projection." That meant accusing someone else of your own missteps.

"You selling out, Malloy? To Meskin ex-feds and CinSim shysters?"