Макс Коллинз: No One Will Hear You

Polk gave her a look that said, What about him?

She answered the unasked question sternly: “This guy’s definitely going to kill again.”

“With us gettin’ no help from the crime lab, he will,” Polk said, shaking his head. “We haven’t got jack. Maybe I should check that FBI Missing Persons web page again and see if our lab rats turn up there.”

“What about video from other buildings, LeRon? Traffic lights?”

“I’ve been taking DVDs home at night like a coach studying game films. There’s nothing there, Lieutenant. The only shot where I saw the guy who rented the room comes from a traffic cam, and he ducks his damn head. Like he knew it was there, and avoided the sucker.”

“He was in his car?”

“Yeah.”

“So this is where you turn the whole case around, right, LeRon? And surprise me with his license number?”

”Wrong. Mud smeared on the plate. Kinda artfully smeared, but smeared.”

“And the car?”

“Silver Honda Accord.”

Amari snorted derisively. “And how many of those in California?”

“Lieutenant... there’s no chance of tracking that car, with no more than we have.”

She rubbed concentric circles on her clean desktop with the same three fingers that had massaged her temple. Maybe the desk had a headache, too. “What have we missed?”

Polk considered that briefly. “Something, probably. This was a brutal, bloody kill. There should be plenty of forensic shit to help us along.”

The lab again.

Amari’s mouth tightened to a slash. “Then... god-damn-it... there’s probably only one way we’re going to catch this son of a bitch...”

Polk’s face was solemn as he nodded. “Catch him when he screws up on the next one.”

Her sigh started at her toes and seemed to make its way through her psyche before emerging from her mouth.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s back up a step. Our victim was not the guy who registered at the front desk.”

“Check.”

“So... if we assume for the sake of argument that ‘Bailey’ is the killer, we have him registering on the day of the murder, well before the murder. Plenty of time for him to take his weapon up to that room and stow it somewhere... somewhere convenient for his purpose... ready and waiting for when the vic showed up.”

“Yeah,” Polk said. “Maybe what we have is a homophobic killer — he picks up a gay guy, lures him to a hotel room, and then butchers the poor bastard. Because he sees gays as evil or something, and oughta be killed.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself, LeRon. Same scenario works for a closeted gay man who lures a pickup to that room to have sex with him, and then murders his sex partner out of shame and guilt.”

“Killing himself, in a way.”

“Either of those scenarios makes sense of a sort. But there are others that work just as well. Let’s focus on what we do know.”

“Okay, Lieutenant.”

“The vic is from out of town.” Amari rose. She thought better on her feet, and pacing alongside their nearly abutted desks was a common practice of hers. “That’s not a fact, but is it an assumption we can buy?”

“I buy that,” Polk agreed. “Nobody in Southern Cal seems to’ve ever seen the dude before.”

“So... how does a guy from Bum Fart, Utah, end up at the Star Struck in West Hollywood?”

Polk shrugged. “If he’s a gay man, a closeted one from out of town here to play... or work with a little play on the side... he might well know all about the Star Struck.”

“Granted,” she said. “But remember — he wasn’t booked to stay there. He’s not Jeff Bailey. Or anyway he’s not the guy who checked in calling himself Jeff Bailey.”

Polk frowned at her.

“What, LeRon?”

“We don’t believe he was a guest in room four twenty-five,” Polk said tentatively. “But could he have been a guest in some other room? Who got picked up in the hotel bar by the guy in four twenty-five?”

“That means he hasn’t been around to check out in the last ten days.”

“Not when he’s cooling his jets in the morgue, he hasn’t.”

“Right. Check with the Star Struck and see if there were any deadbeats — any guests there who skipped without paying in the last week and a half.”

“Damn good thinkin’, Lieutenant!”

“If that’s the case, and he was a guest, his stuff would still be there. It’s worth a try, LeRon — call the hotel.”

Polk did so, and he was still holding the receiver in his hand when his expression turned disappointed and he shook his head at Amari.

As he hung up, she said, “Well, the basic idea is a good one. See if you can get a couple of the Explorers to call around to all the hotels in town, starting with West Hollywood and the surrounding area, and see who’s skipped out on their room in the last ten days, leaving their stuff behind.”

The Explorer program allowed interested high school — age kids to learn about law enforcement by helping out doing menial office activities, freeing up officers to get out on the street.

Amari’s cell chirped. She plucked it from her jacket pocket. Caller ID: WOMACK.

The head of the Sex Crimes Division, Captain Charles Womack, owner of the immediately recognizable gruff tenor in her ear.

“You and Polk need to get your butts out to Griffith Park.”

“Care to be more specific, Cap?” Amari asked, not unpleasantly. “Last time I looked, Griffith Park is forty-two hundred acres.”

“Mount Lee. The Hollywood sign.”

“Not really ...”

“Really. Dead nude girl.”

It would be.

“Better haul ass,” Womack said. “Sounds like we’ve got a real sicko this time.”

Womack clicked off; then so did she, feeling a tug in her gut.

Turning to Polk, she said, “We’ve gotta shake it.”

“What is it?”

“Murder scene.”

“Billy Shears again?” Polk asked.

He almost seemed eager — another Shears murder would mean a chance at fresh clues. A twisted way to think, but every cop who worked on serial murders wound up doing it.

And Billy Shears had all the earmarks of a serial.

Amari shook her head. “Don’t think so. Female victim. Womack said this killer’s a real ‘sicko.’ ”

“And Billy Shears isn’t?”

Her sentiment exactly.

Monday was casual day around the Crime Seen offices, and Harrow took advantage, button-down blue chambray work shirt, faded jeans, and his customary Rockys, the preferred footwear of police everywhere.

His cell phone rode on his right hip like his pistol back in his sheriff days in Story County, Iowa. After he’d stepped down from the sheriff’s post, to please his late wife Ellen, he’d signed on as a field agent for the Iowa Department of Criminal Investigation — his job at the time of his wife and son’s murders.

He had lunch with cameraman Maury Hathaway at a deli two blocks from the UBC complex, in plenty of time for the regular start-of-the-week production meeting.

But when he entered the eighth-floor conference room, sunlight filtering in through the tinted windows, everybody else had beat him there. A first.

The long oval table was surrounded by a dozen chairs, five filled with the people Harrow had recruited to help him hunt his family’s killer in the on-air investigation that had made Crime Seen a national obsession. No Carmen Garcia, though — she was tied up shooting promos.

Harrow’s chief lieutenant, Laurene Chase, occupied her usual seat to the right of Harrow at the head of the table.

To Chase’s right sat Clark Kent clone and DNA expert Michael Pall. Having retired from the Oklahoma state crime lab to join Harrow’s team, Pall had made an excellent addition as much for his profiling skills as his original discipline.