Макс Коллинз - No One Will Hear You

This attractive young woman worked as a dental assistant in Burbank for twenty-five dollars an hour. She lived in a modest apartment with several roommates as a way of saving money, banking the bulk of what she made.

Apparently she knew the road to stardom was a tough one (tell me about it!) and was preparing for the day when she started getting roles and could phase out of her day job.

Don Juan had worked day jobs, too, in addition to training to become an accomplished actor. His area of expertise was computers, which had proved very, very helpful of late.

After he’d first met Gina, at one of her acting classes, he sent her an e-mail with a Trojan horse. With her computer infiltrated, he could take control. He could even watch her through her own camera, unaware.

He followed her keystrokes and learned the passwords for her every registered site, including of course her bank.

All that frugal living and savings-account hoarding had added up, which made Gina a perfect candidate for conquest. After the loving, he would sweep in, electronically transfer her nest egg to an off-shore account, where he would finally put her cash to good use.

And Gina would not be the first to be so unknowingly generous.

The trick was to find women who were well-endowed in several senses — money and beauty. Despite his tepid personal interest in the female sex, he knew that as Don Juan his standards must be high. In Hollywood, image was everything.

She leaned against him as they made their way out of the bar and into the cool night air. The parking lot was unlit, but a three-quarter moon provided an ivory glow. Gina was a lovely girl, curvy and with all that blonde hair... though her wobbliness detracted, some.

He helped her over to his little red Mitsubishi Eclipse — sporty but not over-the-top expensive, just right for a successful indie producer. He lifted her into the passenger side, and by the time he settled in behind the wheel, she looked like a junkie on the nod — heavy eyelids, chin sinking.

She slept through the drive toward Chatsworth where Louis St. James kept a bungalow near the almost-empty reservoir. The actor playing both St. James and Don Juan did not live at this address.

Finding a place to perform as St. James — actually, perform as Don Juan playing St. James, a tricky, layered reading — had not been tough. Housing-crunch foreclosures had provided any number of out-of-the-way bungalows to choose from, for an indie producer wanting to live away from the Hollywood rat race.

He pulled in under the darkness of the carport, where its one solid wall protected him from view by his only neighbor, fifty yards away.

Gina had faded into a malleable heap that he half carried, half dragged through the side door into the house.

She woke, groaning. “Oh... I... I... don’t feel too good...”

“Well, you look lovely,” he said. “You just need to lie down awhile. You’ll feel better. Trust me.”

“Okay,” she managed.

They moved through the small kitchen, the neat, barely used living room, then down a hall to the bedroom, already arranged for tonight’s tryst.

A rather plain wooden double bed, with a spread of pink satin, elegant in its simplicity. Bouquet of roses in the nightstand vase. A wall mirror with a gold-gilt frame.

You would never guess an HD camera was behind the reflective glass, ready to document tonight’s lovemaking. And postcoital surprise...

As he swept Gina past the mirror, she noticed the flowers and wobbled toward them.

“Roses,” she said, blinking as if trying to see underwater. “So pretty. They smell so good.”

“They’re for you,” he whispered into her ear.

He kissed her neck. Softly.

Then she turned, a languid turn but a turn, and gave her lips to him, her arms going around him, her tongue as quick and darting as her movements were otherwise slow.

The pair tumbled onto the bed and, stoned or not, she became a passionate thing. She didn’t bother to get under the covers, just stripped out of her clothes, watching him hungrily as he undressed, and her mouth was on him, swallowing him, and he liked it, he did like it...

Then he was on her, his mouth moving quickly from one breast to the other, licking and nibbling at the hard pink tips, so caught up in the role of Don Juan he could not get enough (he was Method) .

Her hands went to the back of his head, guiding him, as his kisses moved down her tummy. Her legs parted as he moved even lower, knowing the camera was capturing every erotic moment he lavished upon this beautiful woman.

His tongue explored her center, her thighs tightening around his head, her moans growing deeper, more passionate with each second.

“Now,” she whispered. “Put it in me now!”

But he wasn’t ready yet.

He had been ignored by Harrow and his team of superstar losers. Well, soon they would see that Don Juan was the greatest of all lovers, he would take his time satisfying his conquest, and when the moment came for the real climax, he would show Harrow, show all of them, that Crime Seen was wasting precious air time on nothings like scam artists and gangbangers and white-collar crooks, when they could be covering a star.

A real star!

Even if he did have to keep his back to the camera.

Amari felt a hand gently shake her shoulder and opened her eyes to the glow of sunshine around the edges of the drawn shade of the airplane window.

Laurene Chase said, “Welcome to Dayton, Ohio, where the time is ten-thirty a.m. Be on the ground in about an hour, Lieutenant.”

Then Chase was gone, and Amari was sitting up, stretching, yawning. She had the first-class-style seat to herself in the small, cream-colored cabin of the Cessna Citation XL, UBC’s small corporate jet. The only other passengers were Chase and Carmen Garcia, up in their own single-seat rows. No camera crew.

Carmen had explained that despite the success of the “Kansas thing,” network budget cuts meant the Dayton UBC affiliate would supply camera and sound.

Amari squeezed into the tiny bathroom and gazed into the tiny mirror. She cleaned up as best she could. She put a breath strip on her tongue, applied some fresh lip gloss, then pronounced herself human. Before boarding, she’d changed into a black suit with white blouse from the trunk of her Mazda.

Forward in the cabin was a conference area and this is where she found the other two women, having coffee. Garcia was in a gray designer suit and Chase in a lavender silk blouse and dark slacks; they looked professional, rested, ready.

Amari joined them and poured herself a cup, black.

“It might help,” Chase said, “if you brought us up to speed on Billy Shears.”

Amari hesitated only momentarily.

“We’ve found a number of people who vacated their hotel rooms,” she began, “leaving behind some or all of their luggage.”

Carmen frowned. “Is that typical?”

“Surprised me, too. Particularly since skipping out on a hotel bill is next to impossible these days, with credit card check-in.”

She filled them in on the second murder and its as-yet-unidentified victim.

“Staff at the former Ramada in Reseda checks out clean. Nobody remembers mentioning the busted security system to anyone, or anyway admitted as much. They all have more or less decent alibis for what appears to be a second Billy Shears killing.”

Carmen’s frown was both thoughtful and troubled. “Billy Shears. Don Juan. Two gaudy serial killers appearing at the same time. Anybody think this might be one case?”

Chase shook her head. “Signature’s too different.”