Макс Коллинз: No One Will Hear You

“Looking sharp,” she said, over the siren.

“Dress for success, my old man taught me.”

She smiled, weaving in and around traffic. “Like me, you mean?”

“Lieutenant, you know I respect you. We only been partners, what, a month? But I already known you’re a hell of a cop.”

“Thank you, LeRon.”

“Only...”

“Only?”

“You look like you’re going to the division softball game.”

“Ever been to the Hollywood sign before, LeRon?”

“Seen it all the time. I can see it right now.”

Heading north on Gower, Amari took a second to glance up at the Hollywood sign in the distance. Facing south, near the top of Mount Lee in Griffith Park, the huge white letters were as iconic of Hollywood as Bogie, Marilyn, or James Dean.

“Yeah,” she said, “but you ever been up there?”

Polk shook his head. “Why?”

“No reason.”

Amari navigated the twisting streets and their slower traffic until she got into the park and eventually wound her way around to Mount Lee Drive. She shut off the siren and removed the roof bubble.

To one side of the normally locked gate sat a patrol car; the officer within waved their unmarked car through. Only the security company that kept an eye on the sign had the right to use the road, except in the case of emergency. Murder qualified.

They followed the curving road to the top of the seventeen-hundred-foot rock. At the summit, Amari added her unmarked vehicle to the three patrol cars and the coroner’s wagon already crammed in the scant space just in front of the jungle of radio antennas.

One officer stood near the edge of the parking lot above the sign, and the coroner’s assistant and his helpers were near their vehicle. The other five patrolmen who went with the three patrol cars, as well as the security guard who’d called in the body, were not in sight.

Still in their car, Polk frowned and asked, “Where’s everybody at?”

“Down at the sign,” Amari said.

“Which way are the stairs?”

“Stairs?”

“I mean, this is a famous place — it’s all fenced off and maintained and shit, right? Like a park?”

“Well, it’s fenced off. But otherwise... no.”

He gave her a sick look. “Which is why you wore jeans and sneakers.”

She shrugged, threw open the door, and got out, knowing her young partner had no alternative but to follow.

Which he did. Amari was already out front a little. “Careful, LeRon — rattlesnakes up here.”

“Now you’re just screwin’ with my head, Lieutenant.”

“Am I?”

From up here, Los Angeles went on forever. At a distance, she could even feel a fondness for the badly misnamed City of Angels. Sure there was smog, and crime, and traffic, and a hundred other bad things. But you couldn’t tell from this sunny view. On the other hand, a nude murdered woman awaited them not far down the hill.

A lone officer met them at the top of the slope. Clancy Jackson was a heavyset light-skinned African-American cop.

“Anna Amari,” Jackson said, and exchanged quick nods with Polk. “Been some time. How is it you still look twenty-five?”

“Morning, Clancy,” Amari said. “Does that ass-kissy bullshit work on your wife?”

A big white smile blossomed. “Now and forever. And I’m in full-gear now — six months till retirement, and Betty’ll have me underfoot 24/7. Got to keep on her good side.”

“She’ll cut you plenty of slack. She can finally stop worrying for a living.”

“You got that right, Anna.” He nodded down the hillside. “Weird one.”

“Yeah?”

She could see the seven-foot cyclone fence surrounding the massive assembly of letters — forty-five feet high, two hundred feet long. A narrow dirt road cut down to a gate, unlocked and open, a red car from A2Z Security parked just outside.

Next to the gate, perhaps a foot off the ground, partially hidden in some scrub brush, a squat gray box was attached to a low pole.

Inside the gate, down the far side of HOLLYWOOD’S first O, stood five uniformed cops and a scrawny guy in the drab gray uniform of A2Z Security. Just barely visible beyond the O’s nearest edge were a pair of bare white feet.

“What’s the story, Clancy?”

“Dead nude woman, mid to late twenties.”

Not the first dead nude woman under the sign. In 1932 actress Peg Entwistle had famously jumped to her death from the top of the letter H. For a sign that represented the glamour of Hollywood, to cops it meant suicides and vandalism.

Amari said, “Chief indicated this was murder, not suicide. How’d she die, Clancy?”

“Stabbed and... well...” The veteran cop seemed uncomfortable, a warning sign to Amari. “Anna, better get down there and see for yourself.”

How did the killer get in that fenced-off area? Was the woman already dead and carried in? Was she a willing participant on a daring expedition to the famous sign? Either way, there were locks, cameras, motion detectors to get past...

“Better take the road down,” Jackson advised. “Not much better than a trail, and steep as hell, but it’s something.”

Amari trotted down the dirt hill, Polk barely keeping up as he watched out for his shoes. And snakes.

Stopping short of the gate, Amari went over to the gray electrical box that contained the controls for the cameras and motion detectors. Careful to avoid adding to a group of preexisting footprints, Amari squatted to one side.

A gray metal box maybe twelve inches wide and eighteen inches tall. With a clasped padlock.

Judging from the footprints, someone — either the guard who discovered the body, the killer, or both — had been near this box.

Yet it was locked.

She hoped that the guard had not closed the lock after finding it open — she’d find out. In the meantime, she studied the ground around the box, seeing nothing other than footprints... and when she got a closer look at those, they didn’t seem that promising. Not a clean print in sight.

“Anything?” Polk asked, still standing on the dirt path.

Amari shook her head. Then she spotted something. Or was the sunlight playing tricks?

“Whatcha got, Lieutenant?”

“Not sure.”

She took a couple of steps back up the hill, then stopped, withdrew a latex glove from a jacket pocket, and snapped it on. Squatting, Amari picked up a small red tube no longer than a quarter of an inch, and dropped it into a cellophane evidence bag.

She held it up to the sun, studied it, then returned to Polk and handed him the bag.

“Some kind of casing?”

“I think it’s the sheathing from one of the wires in that control box.”

“It’s padlocked.”

“Now it is. Does that look fresh to you?”

Polk nodded. “Still a bright red. Hasn’t been in the weather long.”

“That’s what I was thinking too. File that in your pocket and let’s go see our body.”

Polk obeyed.

They passed through the gate, carefully stepping down between the giant letters to where the group of six uniforms, four patrolmen, a patrol-woman, and the security guard stood in a semicircle around the body.

A young uniformed cop, unknown to Amari, joined them. His nameplate read KAYLAN, and he had curly dark hair and glasses. He looked just a little older and more with it than a kid dressed as a policeman at Halloween. The other patrol officers, who seemed to be holding an impromptu memorial service over there, looked equally young.

So many babies on the force now, she thought .

After making introductions, Amari said, “Forensics team been here, Kaylan?”

“Not yet,” he said.

“So, are you fellas finished trampling the crime scene? Or do you need a little more time?”