by Matt Clemens
“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.
Chapter Five
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.
Beyond Pall, Billy Choi seemed the DNA scientist’s polar opposite, dark longish hair disheveled, his Crime Seen T-shirt no more wrinkled than your average Shar Pei.
Opposite were the other two team members, who’d begun tentatively dating, although the tabloid media assumed theirs was a love of the ages, nicknaming them “ChrisJen.” Individually, they were computer expert Jenny Blake and chemist Chris Anderson, the latter on loan from Shaw Services, a private-sector crime lab out of Meridian, Mississippi.
Taking his seat, Harrow said, “So … am I late for my own meeting?”
“This isn’t exactly your meeting,” Chase said. “We wanted to talk before any weekly grind stuff. Okay?”
Harrow wasn’t loving the sound of that. “Normally I wouldn’t say this to a roomful of ex-cops, but … shoot.”
“End of the season is coming,” Chase said.
“Yes it is.”
“We signed on for just this second season,” she said. “We weren’t even around for season one. So naturally, we’re all wondering what’s going to happen now.”
“I don’t see why we don’t just keep going,” Choi said. There was something stubborn, even sullen, in his tone. “We’re in a position of strength to ask for new contracts and raises. People, we’re a hit, for crissakes.”
The DNA expert, Pall, shot him a look. “You were unemployed when J.C. recruited us. And the job he recruited us for wasn’t really to play TV star.”
Choi frowned. “Is that a crack?”
Pall shrugged his considerable shoulders. “I was about to retire, Billy. I was headed for a nice white beach. I can see where, from your perspective, you’re better off now.”
“And you’re not?”
“Attention and money don’t mean jack to me. No judgment to anyone who feels different is meant or even implied.”
“Compared to the crime labs we all came out of,” Choi insisted, “this is like retirement … with pay. And it’s at least as sunny out here as on that white beach of yours, Michael.”
“Billy,” Anderson said, “the rest of us have day jobs to get back to.” His southern drawl had faded slightly with his time on the coast.
“And lives to get back to,” Chase added. “J.C., we didn’t quit our jobs, we took leaves of absence. You know that.”
Choi was about to say something, when Harrow raised a hand.
“Before this goes any further,” he said, “you should know I might not be coming back, myself.”
A net of surprised silence dropped over the room.
“Not coming back?” Choi asked, as if the words were foreign and untranslatable. “We’ve got a hit show, J.C.! Am I the only one that sees that? People would kill to be in our position!”
“People kill for a lot of reasons,” Harrow said. “As we know all too well. And we all know
that our show’s a hit. That the hard work we did tracking down my family’s murderer is how it became a hit. But nobody in this room went into law enforcement to be a TV star.”
“Jesus!” Choi blurted. “The six of us do more good with our big budget and high profile than any sixty other cops in America! We are paid well, and we have state-of-the-art lab equipment. Why the hell are you all so eager to leave it behind?”
Jenny Blake sat forward a little. “You like this life, don’t you, Billy?”
“What’s not to like?”
“What’s not to like is not being able to go out to eat or to the grocery store or to a movie or anywhere without someone taking your picture.”
Choi smirked. “Well, I think that’s pretty cool.”
“Nobody else here does,” Chase said flatly.
Choi’s eyes went from face to face and his features fell. Nothing cocky remained in Choi’s voice as he asked, “You’re on the same page as everybody but me, J.C.?”
“Afraid I am, Billy,” Harrow said. “For several years, I had to put up with this TV nonsense, because that was what it took for me to accomplish my goal. Justice for my family. I admit we do some good with Crime Seen—and that a case can be made for staying on.”
Choi frowned in obvious frustration. “Then why are you on their page and not mine?”
“Because life in a goldfish bowl was not the point of the exercise. Take Chris and Jenny, here—they sure as hell didn’t sign up for a tabloid relationship.”
Anderson and Jenny traded a look.
“Honest to God,” Anderson said to Choi, not unkindly, “I never once thought about all this fame stuff. I just signed on to help out Mr. Harrow, and maybe get some experience outside my home state.”
Harrow turned his gaze on Choi. “Let’s face it, Billy, except for you and me? Everybody else gave something up to be here. To come and help me.”
“All right,” Choi said softly. “But then why are you leaving, J.C.? I don’t mean to be tactless or anything … but what do you have to go back to?”
A sharp intake of air came from Chase, and everyone sensed the immediate discomfort. Choi saying he didn’t mean to be tactless made it no less a breach to trivialize the loss of their leader’s family.
“I didn’t say I was leaving.”
Choi frowned again. “J.C., are you trying to drive me frickin’ nuts?”
Harrow smiled just a little, still playing his cards close. “Billy, I said, ‘I might not be coming back.’ “
“Okay,” Choi said. “So you’re on the fence. Why are you?”
“I would stay, Billy, and I would try to convince our friends and colleagues here to stay, if I could answer just one question to my … to all of our … satisfaction. Namely—what’s left to do here?”
Nobody, not even Choi, seemed to have a ready answer for that.
Harrow sighed, smiled wearily, and said, “Tell you what, Billy. If I do go, I’ll put in a good word with Dennis Byrnes for you to take my place.”
Choi was smiling in a shell-shocked sort of way. “You’d do that for me, J.C.?”
“When I recruited you for this, Billy, I asked only that you learn to play well with others. You’ve held up your end. I’ll hold up mine.”
“I … I don’t know what to say, J.C.,” Choi said.
Chase said, dryly, “Try ‘thanks.’ “
Choi admitted to Harrow, “Laurene’s right, J.C. Thanks. You gave me a second chance when nobody else on the planet would have.”
“You’re welcome, Billy.”
“Look, Billy,” Chase said, no sarcasm now, “none of us’re trying to burst your bubble. It’s just that I’m a crime-scene investigator, it’s what I’ve always been. Feels like maybe it’s time I got back to it.”
Turning to the shy couple, Choi asked, “We know where Michael stands. Where does that leave ‘ChrisJen’?”
Anderson said, “I’ve got a job waitin’ back in Mississippi.”
“Me in Wyoming,” Jenny muttered.
Or maybe Mississippi, Harrow thought.
Harrow’s cell phone thrummed in his pocket. A text from his assistant, Vicki: D.B. WANTS YOU NOW.
In cop parlance, “D.B.” was dead body. But this D.B. was the living breathing president of UBC, Dennis Byrnes.
Harrow told his team that they would have to adjourn the meeting for the present, but he’d get back to them as soon as he could.
But he didn’t share what he might tell Byrnes.
I quit.
Chapter Six
After the captain’s call dispatching her and Polk to the Hollywood sign, Amari had gone to the locker room to exchange her suit and silk blouse for jeans, blue Dodgers T-shirt, navy blazer, and New Balance running shoes.
In the driver’s seat next to her, however, Polk maintained his usual “Superfly meets Ralph Lauren” look, gray suit, lavender tie, purple shirt, and Bruno Magli loafers.
“Looking sharp,” she said, over the siren.
“Dress for success, my old man taught me.”
She smiled, weaving in and around traffic. “Like me, you mean?”
“Lieutenant, you know I respect you. We only been partners, what, a month? But I already known you’re a hell of a cop.”
“Thank you, LeRon.”
“Only …”
“Only?”
“You look like you’re going to the division softball game.”
“Ever been to the Hollywood sign before, LeRon?”
“Seen it all the time. I can see it right now.”
Heading north on Gower, Amari took a second to glance up at the Hollywood sign in the distance. Facing south, near the top of Mount Lee in Griffith Park, the huge white letters were as iconic of Hollywood as Bogie, Marilyn, or James Dean.
“Yeah,” she said, “but you ever been up there?”
Polk shook his head. “Why?”
“No reason.”
Amari navigated the twisting streets and their slower traffic until she got into the park and eventually wound her way around to Mount Lee Drive. She shut off the siren and removed the roof bubble.
To one side of the normally locked gate sat a patrol car; the officer within waved their unmarked car through. Only the security company that kept an eye on the sign had the right to use the road, except in the case of emergency. Murder qualified.
They followed the curving road to the top of the seventeen-hundred-foot rock. At the summit, Amari added her unmarked vehicle to the three patrol cars and the coroner’s wagon already crammed in the scant space just in front of the jungle of radio antennas.
One officer stood near the edge of the parking lot above the sign, and the coroner’s assistant and his helpers were near their vehicle. The other five patrolmen who went with the three patrol cars, as well as the security guard who’d called in the body, were not in sight.
Still in their car, Polk frowned and asked, “Where’s everybody at?”
“Down at the sign,” Amari said.
“Which way are the stairs?”
“Stairs?”
“I mean, this is a famous place—it’s all fenced off and maintained and shit, right? Like a park?”
“Well, it’s fenced off. But otherwise … no.”
He gave her a sick look. “Which is why you wore jeans and sneakers.”
She shrugged, threw open the door, and got out, knowing her young partner had no alternative but to follow.
Which he did. Amari was already out front a little. “Careful, LeRon—rattlesnakes up here.”
“Now you’re just screwin’ with my head, Lieutenant.”
“Am I?”
From up here, Los Angeles went on forever. At a distance, she could even feel a fondness for the badly misnamed City of Angels. Sure there was smog, and crime, and traffic, and a hundred other bad things. But you couldn’t tell from this sunny view. On the other hand, a nude murdered woman awaited them not far down the hill.
A lone officer met them at the top of t
he slope. Clancy Jackson was a heavyset light-skinned African-American cop.
“Anna Amari,” Jackson said, and exchanged quick nods with Polk. “Been some time. How is it you still look twenty-five?”
“Morning, Clancy,” Amari said. “Does that ass-kissy bullshit work on your wife?”
A big white smile blossomed. “Now and forever. And I’m in full-gear now—six months till retirement, and Betty’ll have me underfoot 24/7. Got to keep on her good side.”
“She’ll cut you plenty of slack. She can finally stop worrying for a living.”
“You got that right, Anna.” He nodded down the hillside. “Weird one.”
“Yeah?”
She could see the seven-foot cyclone fence surrounding the massive assembly of letters—forty-five feet high, two hundred feet long. A narrow dirt road cut down to a gate, unlocked and open, a red car from A2Z Security parked just outside.
Next to the gate, perhaps a foot off the ground, partially hidden in some scrub brush, a squat gray box was attached to a low pole.
Inside the gate, down the far side of HOLLYWOOD’S first O, stood five uniformed cops and a scrawny guy in the drab gray uniform of A2Z Security. Just barely visible beyond the O’s nearest edge were a pair of bare white feet.
“What’s the story, Clancy?”
“Dead nude woman, mid to late twenties.”
Not the first dead nude woman under the sign. In 1932 actress Peg Entwistle had famously jumped to her death from the top of the letter H. For a sign that represented the glamour of Hollywood, to cops it meant suicides and vandalism.
Amari said, “Chief indicated this was murder, not suicide. How’d she die, Clancy?”
“Stabbed and … well …” The veteran cop seemed uncomfortable, a warning sign to Amari. “Anna, better get down there and see for yourself.”
How did the killer get in that fenced-off area? Was the woman already dead and carried in? Was she a willing participant on a daring expedition to the famous sign? Either way, there were locks, cameras, motion detectors to get past. …
“Better take the road down,” Jackson advised. “Not much better than a trail, and steep as hell, but it’s something.”
Amari trotted down the dirt hill, Polk barely keeping up as he watched out for his shoes. And snakes.