Макс Коллинз - You Can’t Stop Me

Naturally, each host had his or her own strengths and weaknesses, though Carmen felt the only advantage they had over her was experience. True, former network White House correspondent Moreno brought an undeniable gravitas to each story, but the others were local news veterans plucked from obscurity more for their looks and camera ease than any journalistic chops.

For the next four hours, Carmen dealt with the e-mails until yet another paper pile had grown, this one outgoing mail, mostly cheap black-and-white photo reprints of on-air personalities with stamped autographs. Requests for Harrow’s pictures made up a considerable pile of their own.

Those requests went to Harrow’s desk, where he actually signed each photo and often enclosed a note himself. Whether two requests or two hundred, each day their star personally dealt with his own fan mail. She liked that about him.

With a Diet Coke and a salad a co-worker brought her from the commissary, the production assistant worked through lunch. She was back on the Internet doing research into various crimes around the country when something about a small town in Florida caught her eye.

The wife and two kids of the town marshal of Placida had been murdered.

Everybody on the staff looked sideways when the family of a cop got killed — their relationship with Harrow made that natural. But, as they’d all learned over the past six months, these types of crimes, while uncommon, were not unheard of.

Still, for the next hour, she dug into everything she could find about Placida, Florida, and the crime. She printed dozens of documents, gathered them into another pile — working on her second rain forest — then started at the top and began studying, instead of just swiftly scanning.

Placida was a Gulf Coast town of less than a thousand souls. Maybe fifty miles south of Sarasota and just north of Ft. Myers, the hamlet lay on a jut of land out into Charlotte Harbor. Local law was a town marshal and three part-timers. For any real trouble, the Charlotte County sheriff handled it.

The median age of the citizenry was just a hiccup short of sixty. The average income was twenty-five thousand dollars above the national average because 71.2 percent of the population had white-collar jobs. Placida was a classic bedroom community — or anyway it was until the night town marshal Ray Ferguson came home to find his family murdered near their kitchen.

The murders took place back in September, not long after Crime Seen! first aired. When Carmen went to start an electronic file on the case, she noticed one already existed. She opened it and read it quickly: in early October, segment host Shayla Ross had done a cursory study of the case, then abandoned it as a dead end.

The dirtiest little secret about Crime Seen! was the mandate to choose crimes that had enough threads for their team to follow. Cold cases were avoided, as were crimes where no suspects were on the horizon. TV viewers wanted closure, and soon.

As Carmen pored over material from the case, she could not shake the feeling that some important detail had been overlooked. Something small and insignificant to Shayla and the investigators, but enough to set off a tiny if mournful alarm in the back of Carmen’s mind, a foghorn on a faraway shore.

She stopped, rubbed her eyes, shook her head, then rose, stretched, and walked to the break room for a soda — maybe a little distance would shake something loose. She fished change out of her pocket, got a Diet Coke from the vending machine, and tapped lacquered nails against the lid as she mentally riffled through thousands of bits of information she’d read about the Ferguson murders.

At the end of his shift, Ray Ferguson had come home in a well-tended Placida neighborhood. Though he didn’t make nearly as much money as the other members of the community, his real-estate agent wife, Stella, did. The Fergusons had two kids, a boy, Jeff, eleven, and a girl, Jessica, fourteen.

Like Harrow’s wife and son, mother and children had been shot in the chest. Unlike Harrow’s family, each was only shot once. Also unlike her boss’s case, these victims were shot in one room, apparently executed in turn — Harrow’s wife and son with a .357, the Fergusons with a nine millimeter (though in the latter case the efficient assassin had gathered up his shell casings).

A gruesome touch set the Ferguson killings apart, however — the fourth finger of Stella Ferguson’s left hand had been cut off, post-mortem. Forensics indicated a gardening tool had been used.

As at the Harrow home, no fingerprints were found, the only piece of evidence (if that) turning up on the Fergusons’ driveway: a leaf from a corn plant. As far as the investigators were concerned, that leaf might have come from anywhere. But Illinois farm kid Carmen discerned a clue.

Some quick work on the Internet garnered Carmen more — seemed Florida produced more corn than she’d have thought, nearly one hundred thousand acres in all. But compared to the twelve million acres harvested in Harrow’s home state, that wasn’t much...

And a particular photo at the Placida News website sealed her suspicions — it showed a transparent plastic evidence bag with that single corn plant leaf inside.

Rural kid Carmen recognized the difference between a sweet corn plant and a field corn plant. Charlotte County, Florida, home to Placida, was on the northern edge of the highest-producing area for sweet corn in Florida. Virtually no field corn was grown in the northern half of the state. The state’s small field corn crop, produced in the southern end, centered on the ocean side, not the gulf.

Why, in a county that grew exclusively sweet corn, was Carmen looking at the leaf of field-corn plant?

She couldn’t answer that question yet, but she knew one thing: city kid Shayla, formerly of Boston, would never ask it.

Carmen needed help, and she knew precisely who to ask. But she would do more than just ask — this was her shot — this was her chance...

The PA found Harrow, back in his office after lunch, dutifully signing publicity photos. She knocked on the jamb of the open door, then smiled when Harrow looked up.

“Got a minute, boss?”

Carmen knew that many TV stars made outrageous demands for their offices, turning them into virtual apartments. Harrow’s was quite the opposite. A glance would make any visitor think Harrow was nothing more than your average corporate attorney. Furnishings were nice enough but not extravagant, bookshelves filled with research material, his desk a mahogany island mid-room, piled with papers that marked this a workplace and not a showplace. Two leather chairs sat opposite him.

Harrow tossed his Sharpie aside and smiled. “I can spare a minute just to avoid the writer’s cramp.” He nodded to a chair.

Carmen sat on its edge. “Around the fourth or fifth episode, we were in a production meeting where you mentioned a DCI case you worked involving the specificity of plant DNA.”

Harrow gave her a sideways look. “That’s not a question.”

“No. It’s a preamble.”

Wearing half a frown and half a smile, he said, “Fourth or fifth episode. How do you remember stuff like that?”

She shrugged. “You never know when ‘stuff’ will come in handy — like today.”

“Today, huh? What are you up to, today?”

She told Harrow what she’d found so far. No places, no dates, just the circumstances. She connected no dots, however, between the Ferguson and Harrow murders.

“So,” he said, softly, eyes tight, “this was Shayla’s story...”

“Yes, sir. And she thought it was a dead end.”

“‘Sir,’ yet. I am in trouble.” He shifted in his leather chair. “And you went in on your own, and maybe found something?”