Макс Коллинз - No One Will Hear You

“Good.”

She frowned at him, not angry, just serious. “Listen, J.C. — Chief Daniels phoned Captain Womack personally today. Now that Don Juan appears to have killed three times — prerequisite for bringing in the FBI — the chief had to call in the Behavioral Science Unit. They’ll have agents here tomorrow.”

“Just for Don Juan, or Billie Shears, too?”

“That I can’t tell you. I can say — as you see by my eager willingness to get help from your TV show lab — I am feeling flexible. Normally the FBI is about my favorite thing next to stomach influenza. But right now anything that helps get these two evil assholes off the street is fine by me.”

“Agreed.”

She arched an eyebrow. “In the meantime, what does Don Juan want?”

“Attention,” Harrow said without hesitation. He didn’t need Michael Pall to feed him that.

“Okay,” she said calmly. “If Don Juan wants attention... why not give it to him?”

“How exactly?”

“On tonight’s show, announce that the FBI is coming in to lead the Don Juan investigation. Turn the heat up a little.”

“Last time we turned up the heat, a dead body wound up on my doorstep.”

“Last time you turned up the heat by ignoring him. This time, let him have all kinds of attention from J.C. Harrow and Crime Seen . Maybe he’ll get cocky and make a mistake.”

Harrow frowned. “Well, we’d love him to make a mistake, but we don’t want another innocent woman paying for it.”

Amari was shaking her head. “What I mean is... tell Don Juan he needs to communicate with you now , so you can help him tell his story. That the FBI will insist on taking Crime Seen out of the equation.”

Harrow called in Michael Pall for his opinion.

“We have precious little forensic evidence,” Pall said. “I’m starting to think the only way we’ll catch this guy is to smoke him out. You don’t need to be a profiler to know this one’s a narcissist of the first order. He thinks he’s the world’s greatest lover — what more do you need?”

When Harrow ran it past Byrnes, the executive’s only complaint was that he hadn’t gotten the word soon enough to plug it on the UBC nightly news.

Everyone was in agreement — the show would deal with Don Juan by announcing that the FBI would soon join the investigation. Amari (and Polk) went happily off to arrange for that Killer TV crime lab work.

Harrow retired to his office. He read the latest drafts of his script, okayed them, sent them along to Byrnes. With still an hour till air, just killing time, he returned to his interrupted fan mail. After that, he decided to at least check his e-mail account.

Very few people had this address and fewer still used it, since everybody knew Harrow rarely checked it. Mostly what he got was jokes from his Iowa buddies.

One name and subject line did catch his attention: a message from Carmen, the subject line reading Re: Don Juan , with an attached file.

Carmen was high on the list of those who knew how rarely Harrow checked his e-mailbox.

He phoned her.

“I didn’t send you an e-mail,” she said. “You’d never read it.”

“That’s what I thought — thanks.”

He ended the call before she could question him.

Then he phoned Jenny Blake. “Can you come to my office?”

“Shouldn’t you be in hair and makeup?”

“I think I have an e-mail from Don Juan.”

Her response was the click of a hang-up.

He tracked down Amari and Polk. Soon they and the rest of the team, including Carmen, were in his office. Bad news traveled fast.

Half were seated across from Harrow’s desk, the rest standing. Harrow was on his feet, Jenny in his chair at the desk with the laptop before her.

Polk said, “So you really think it’s from him?”

Whether he was asking Harrow or Jenny wasn’t clear.

Jenny said, “Date is today, but the time is one forty-seven a.m.”

“I was in bed then,” Carmen said. “I did not send that.”

No one had accused her of it, but she seemed a little rattled. After all, the last Don Juan video had come in via her e-mail.

Jenny downloaded the file, then played it.

Like the others, it showed a beautiful drugged woman being made love to.

When Amari saw the woman’s face, she said, “That’s her — Hollywood Boulevard victim.”

She was a brunette, her hair longer than Ellen’s, but with the same type body as Harrow’s deceased wife. Another woman he couldn’t save.

When she screamed, Harrow made himself watch.

Then when the blade flashed into the screen, there was a millisecond of red (not blood — cloth?), and the blade came in from a different angle. Though the woman was still centered in frame, the camera was more to her right now.

As usual, the metallic voice of the killer came on. “A promise is a promise, Mr. Harrow. Next week, would you like to try for four?”

“Something’s different,” Pall said.

“Very different,” Harrow said.

“What?” Laurene asked.

“That camera moved. Don Juan has an accomplice.”

They were all idiots.

All of those TV stars and “forensics superstars” and Emmy-winning reporters — fools.

Billie Shears laughed and the sound was brittle and echoey in the bathroom of the nonsmoking motel room. The morons still seemed think she was a “he,” unless they were withholding that theory for their own sneaky purposes.

Naked, she sat on the lidded john, listening to the muffled blather of commercials on the TV as she smoked her third filter-tip Kool. Exhaust-fan hum made it a little tough to tell when the show came back. She let smoke curl out her nose. What was the old axiom, never commit a misdemeanor while committing a felony?

Like she gave a crap!

She took another deep drag, held it in, blew it out. When she heard the Crime Seen theme music, she stood, lifted the toilet lid, pitched the butt in, let the lid slam back in place, and went out to where she could sit on the bed, next to her victim.

He was already dead, of course, dark, slender, handsome, in his mid-thirties, the blood pooling in the lowest places where his body touched the mattress.

Tonight’s Crime Seen had given a good share of its attention to Don Juan. Had to hand it to ol’ Don Juan — placing that nude slaughtered bimbo outside UBC’s front door was real showmanship. She almost wished she could match him.

But Don Juan was less an artist and more an egotist. The kind of grandstander who thrived on the attention that such public displays brought.

Billie was more private. She was no exhibitionist, no sexual show-off — to her, each assignation was intimate. Lying back on the bed, she touched the corpse’s cool shoulder.

This man, for example, was special to her. They all were, of course, but this one possibly more so. Until now, her victims had been straight men, seduced by a woman, though she had shrewdly led the police to misinterpret her work as gay-themed homicides.

Now she would throw the authorities this curved ball ( these curved balls?): the late gentleman lying next to her really was gay — openly so (as their investigations would soon determine).

And this sweet gay man had fallen for her ruse as hook, line, and sinker as the police had. Could even Meryl Streep have delivered a performance so multilayered? An actress playing a transvestite male?

But Billie had pulled it off.

That was how her date had wound up on this bed next to her, slowly assuming room temperature.

She gazed over at him with clinical affection, the gaping wound in his abdomen, in and up, tearing through lung, liver, stomach, and heart. Swift, even merciful — he had been dead before he could know what was happening.