Макс Коллинз: No One Will Hear You

“I saw Carmen heading out,” he said, sitting.

Body-building enthusiast Pall wore wire-frame glasses and a mild manner that belied the Superman he was, physically and mentally. He was in a navy polo with a Crime Seen logo stitched over the breast.

Laurene said, “Maybe for the best.”

“That was her guy, huh?”

“Yes,” Laurene said crisply, “but you missed that part. Look, we have to get back ourselves, so let’s get on with it.”

Chris frowned. “We’re doing this without Carmen?”

“She’s management.” Jenny said, “Billy isn’t management.” “No,” Laurene said, “but we know where he stands, don’t we? So... everybody up for this?”

Jenny shivered. “J.C. doesn’t like ultimatums.” “Who does?” Laurene said. “But sometimes that’s what it takes.”

And for half an hour, they intently talked.

Ten days ago Lt. Anna Amari had stood in a West Hollywood hotel room with a dead body that might or might not belong to one “Jeff Bailey.” And all she had to show for it was a severe tension headache.

Her partner, Detective LeRon Polk, had gone through the security video from the Star Struck Hotel.

Even though the video quality was (as Polk put it) “medium shitty,” Amari could clearly see that the man who’d registered was not their corpse. Their as-yet-unidentified vic had died in that bed, but the room had not been his.

This man was slighter, had dark hair, and was obviously shorter than Bailey.

They had two males tied to this room, one via the front desk, the other by a blood-soaked bed. And either male — or neither — might be named Jeff Bailey.

Also, the hotel thoughtfully honored their guests’ privacy by positioning security cameras only in the lobby.

Consequently, Amari had no footage of the victim anywhere else in the hotel, nor of the man who’d registered as Jeff Bailey. And zero footage of the two together — anywhere.

Even the assumption that only “Bailey” and the victim had been in the room was unsupportable — “Bailey” might be the killer, or an accomplice, or none of the above. A third party might have been there. A fourth. A fifth...

The bull pen of the Sex Crimes Division was set up in an old-fashioned way for such a cutting-edge facility — the Police Administration Building at 100 West First Street across from City Hall was new enough you could almost smell the fresh paint. Sex Crimes needed a constant interchange of ideas, so cubicles or separate offices (except for the captain’s) were out.

Seated at her desk with a morning cup of black coffee, Amari raised a hand to her temple and rubbed, making small concentric circles with three fingers.

Both her desk and Polk’s nearby were relatively free of clutter. Polk’s was particularly spare, because he was compulsively neat; Amari’s side, however, came a close second, because other than evidence, she kept most things in her head.

Beyond her phone and desk lamp, the clutter was pretty much limited to one Dodgers coffee cup and three Dodgers bobble heads: Jackie Robinson, Sandy Koufax, and a very dreadlocked Manny Ramirez. No one in the division dared touch them — they were her holy trinity.

The joys of Anna Amari’s life were her work and a passion for the Los Angeles Dodgers. The latter had been passed down to her by her late father.

Polk said, “Rubbin’ your head like Aladdin’s lamp again, huh? Think a genie’ll pop out? You do know it’s only Monday, right?”

“Weekend was too short,” she said.

“That’s ‘cause you had me workin’ both days.”

She shot him a murderous look, but he survived it somehow.

After a frantic weekend in the Southland, the bull pen seemed a haunted house this morning, only a few other detectives scattered here and there. All the sex crimes detectives had heavy caseloads. Hell, all the detectives anywhere in the department had heavy caseloads, from Central Division to Hollenbeck, from Mission Division to Pacific and all points between.

The city was averaging around two homicides a day. Crime was up, good publicity down. That the cops had dubbed the killer “Billy Shears” — essentially giving that gift to the media — had pissed off everybody from the captain on up, until the shit, as was shit’s wont, started rolling back down hill.

Amari was at the bottom of that hill.

Well, actually, Polk was; but she didn’t have the energy or the ill will to do any more than just share the misery with him.

On the other hand, it wasn’t every day she got a call from the chief himself, and on her cell phone on the way to work, at that.

“Would you like to explain, Lieutenant Amari, how it is that Fox News knows that this department has come up with a comical name for a killer but not a name for the victim?”

“I take responsibility for the case, sir, but not for the uniformed officers out of Hollywood Division. As for not identifying the victim, we’ve exhausted every traditional avenue — AFIS and CODIS come up empty. He’s not the room’s registrant. Fingerprints, DNA gave us nothing, so far. We are still waiting on some lab results.”

“What about dental?”

“Sir, we can’t do dental without knowing the dentist.”

This had made the chief look stupid, which was really a smooth move on her part, she at once knew.

“Well, I would like a progress report, Lieutenant, if you ever do make any progress.”

And he hung up on her. Imagine that.

She told Polk about the call from the chief, and for once her partner was speechless. On the other hand, his expression was eloquent; it said, How the hell much trouble are we in?

She ignored the unspoken question, asking him, “Any word from the lab yet?”

“There’s a backlog. You know what it’s been like the last couple weeks.”

“So the chief is calling personally to say hustle it up, and the lab crew are sunning themselves. Well, at least local news ran the drawing.”

“Yeah,” Polk sighed, “pretty much every broadcast since Saturday night. And the newspapers ran it yesterday. So that’s good.”

“It is if we got some hits out of it.”

“We did get hits.”

“Could you be more specific, LeRon?”

“You talking legit leads, or total calls?”

She didn’t like the sound of that. “Legit leads, LeRon.”

“Uh... that’d be zero.”

“Not a one?”

“Not a one, Lieutenant.”

“Out of how many calls?”

“Four.”

“Four? A city this size, and we’re on every newscast, and every paper, and we get four freaking calls?”

Polk nodded. “There were half a dozen obvious cranks. Four were what you might call... sincere. But none amounted to anything. I even checked the FBI Kidnapping and Missing Persons web page. If you were wondering how desperate I got.”

Without realizing it, she began rubbing her right temple again. “Who the hell is this guy, anyway? If he wants his murder solved, why can’t he cooperate, goddamn it?”

“Thoughtless prick.”

“He’s from out of town,” she said grimly. “Gotta be. Let’s e-mail a link of the drawing that’s up on our website to the Doe Network, and the Forgotten Network, too.”

These were websites dedicated to finding the identifies of missing people.

“Somebody somewhere has to know this guy,” Polk said.

They had gone back to the hotel repeatedly to interview staff and guests — nothing. Various routes had been used to try to identify the victim — nothing. With the crime lab in slow motion, this case was already starting to feel like an unsolved murder.

“Okay,” Amari said, realizing she was rubbing her temple, and stopped. “We’re not having any luck with IDing the vic — what about the killer?”