Макс Коллинз - No One Will Hear You

“Get Jenny on it,” Harrow said to Carmen.

Byrnes finally found his voice. The tanned exec was now blister pale. “My God... we created a serial killer.”

“No, Dennis,” Harrow said. “We didn’t.”

The network president stared at him blankly, his mind obviously awhirl.

“Dennis, a killer like this? He’d be at it whether we had a show or not. In his twisted mind, Crime Seen provides a rationalization — it tells him that his actions are somehow acceptable.”

Byrnes pointed to Carmen’s computer, the way the Ghost of Christmas Future pointed at Scrooge’s headstone.

“You meet the parents of that young woman,” he said, “you think they’ll give a damn about semantics? ‘Don Juan’ said he wanted to star on Crime Seen , and that’s all people will hear.”

Well, Harrow thought, at least Byrnes hadn’t reacted by saying they had a new ratings sensation on their hands. But it would have been more encouraging had the exec acknowledged that they just watched a young woman die. On screen.

Byrnes was saying, “Kate, get legal on the phone and get them the hell up here.”

Steady in the storm, Harrow said, “Dennis — there’s something far more important to do first.”

“What could possibly be more important than protecting the network’s ass?”

Harrow held Byrnes’s gaze. “Assuming that film is real? We need to call the LAPD, and help them get this madman off the street.”

Nursing an abiding anxiety neither would have admitted to the other, Lieutenant Anna Amari and Detective LeRon Polk stood in the parking lot above the Hollywood sign, at the edge of the hill, looking down. Next to them loomed the black truck of the LAPD bomb squad.

The vehicle looked like a fire engine, but rather than hoses and axes, its cabinets were filled with the tools of the bomb-disposal craft, the robot with the tank treads used for observation and disposal, and the suits of the technicians who actually disarmed the bombs.

Sergeant Platt of the bomb squad had provided Amari with a headset, so he could communicate with her while he worked on the suspicious control box just outside the Hollywood sign’s fenced-in area.

Below, Platt knelt before the metal box as if in prayer (Amari wondered if prayer was constant in that phase of the process). But his hands weren’t in prayer mode — they held a ten-inch vitamin-pill-shaped XR-150 portable X-ray machine.

Polk said, “What’s he doing? Should this be takin’ this long?”

She covered her headset’s mic. “He’s x-raying the S.O.B. And, yes, he should take as long as he feels necessary. Would you rather he rush?”

“He can take all day,” Polk said, backtracking. “We safe up here?”

“Hide behind the truck if you like.”

Polk’s expression said, That’s not fair , and it wasn’t, but she saw him glance at the truck, as if considering the offer.

Down the hill, Platt rose in slow motion and stepped back the same way.

In her headset, Amari heard, “We’ll develop the picture, then we’ll know if we have a problem or not.”

“That a lengthy process?” Amari asked.

She didn’t run into bomb-squad situations much on the sex crimes beat. Actually, this was a first.

“Not long,” Platt said, and he turned and climbed up toward them.

Platt might have been an astronaut in his olive drab spaceman-style suit. When he finally reached the top, he handed off the XR150 to a colleague, not so attired, and pulled off the hooded helmet with its clear plastic visor. He stood before them dripping sweat and grinning, a guy with a military-short blond crew cut and friendly, regular features.

“I’m pretty sure there’s something in there,” he said. “We’ll know in a few minutes.”

Amari nodded.

“Probably a good call,” he told her, “bringing us in.”

Perhaps feeling bad for being short with her partner, she told the bomb squad guy, “It was Detective Polk’s idea. I’d’ve got us both blown to hell.”

Platt nodded to Polk. “Better to have a good head on your shoulders, son, than to get it blown off.”

She could see Polk was trying not to show he was proud of himself. She’d had worse partners.

Platt’s buddy handed the spaceman a Diet Coke and a towel and they waited. Amari thought, If I was risking my life on a daily basis, I’d drink a regular Coke — hell with calories .

When the X-ray had been developed, Platt showed Amari the device they’d discovered inside the control box.

“Pretty straightforward,” Platt said, studying the picture. He showed it to the detectives. “This wire that’s shadowed? That might be something.”

Polk frowned. “Might?”

“I’ll know better when I get the box open...” Platt shrugged. “... but it looks pretty simple.”

“You sure?” she asked.

“No,” Platt admitted. He slipped the helmet back over his head and lumbered back down to the control box.

They watched as he again approached the metal altar, knelt before it, and used bolt cutters to take the lock off.

“Here we go,” he said into Amari’s ear.

Superficially, Platt seemed calm. But she could hear the anxiety.

Platt popped the door...

... and a ball of fire erupted.

“Shit!” Polk said, jumping back.

“Shit,” Platt said in Amari’s hear, so close to simultaneously that it might have been comic in other circumstances.

She had jumped, too, and now watched in horror as gray-black smoke consumed the area where Platt had stood. Before the smoke had utterly blotted the lower hillside out, she thought she’d seen Platt blown backward.

Then she was running, Polk’s footfalls echoing just behind her, crunching dry grass.

They got to Platt in just seconds, the plume of smoke already thinning, rising into nothing, and they only coughed a few times as they found him sitting on the ground with his legs out, like a picnicker waiting for a basket. He was pulling off the helmet.

“Are you all right?” she asked, sliding to a stop next to him.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, irritably. He lumbered to his feet, Polk helping him. “Small explosive, nothing really — smoke and sparks. Just enough to burn up any evidence... and put a scare into us.”

“Worked,” Polk said.

“It did,” Platt admitted. “I damn near pissed myself, which is no fun in this suit, let me tell you.”

Amari said, “So it was more a ‘screw you’ than anything?”

“Yeah.”

Platt trudged up the hill, to get out of his spaceman suit and snag another Diet Coke and towel.

The smoke was gone, just an acrid memory, by the time the crime-scene techs moved in, and when they were done with the scorched box, all Marty Rue had to show Amari was several plastic bags filled mostly with burned wiring from where the killer had spliced into the camera feed.

“That’s the whole shootin’ match?” Amari asked.

“From an evidentiary standpoint,” Rue said, “yes indeed.”

“Well,” Polk said, “what is there not from an evidentiary standpoint?”

Rue pulled off his glasses, wiped the sweat from his face with a hand, then put the glasses back on. “Most of it was burnt to a crisp, but I did see enough to know how the bastard did it.”

“That’s something, anyway,” Amari said. “How?”

“Spliced into the webcam and fed in a loop of a normal night — something he had recorded in the last few days, probably.”

“What about the motion detectors?”

“That’s the cool part,” Rue said.

“Cool?” Polk asked skeptically.

Rue shrugged. “From the killer’s standpoint, cool. From a security standpoint, stupid. Y’see, when he got into the box, and spliced into the camera feed? He just turned off the motion detectors.”