by Matt Clemens
“Carmen,” Harrow demanded, patience frayed, “what the hell is this?”
“Not what you think it is—keep watching.”
The blonde on screen was clearly enjoying the vigorous lovemaking, but the longer Harrow watched, the more he realized that something was slightly off-kilter.
Maybe the woman was drunk or high, but something, something, seemed amiss. When the man finished, the blonde turned over on her back, her eyes open but half-lidded and unfocused. She was very pretty.
Harrow threw Carmen a look, but she pointed to the screen. “Keep watching.”
As the man disappeared completely off camera, the woman tried to get up and slowly slumped back to the bed.
Byrnes and Kate had moved around to where they could see the screen better.
“What’s wrong with her?” Byrnes asked.
“High,” Kate and Carmen said in unison. They exchanged an awkward pause, adversaries suddenly teammates.
Shaking his head, Byrnes asked, “Why get so high you can’t even enjoy …”
“You assume,” Kate said, cutting him off, “it was her choice. Ever hear of roofies, Dennis?”
Even as the pair traded a frowning glance, Carmen shushed them.
On-screen, the woman was on her back on the bed, head lolling slightly. She had given up trying to rise.
A metallic voice came through the speakers. “Beautiful, isn’t she?”
“Voice filter,” Harrow said.
A hand came into view, stroked the woman’s hair, getting it out of her face, improving the view of her blurry-eyed beauty.
“You may call me Don Juan,” the voice said. “This is my audition tape—I intend to become your next star … the new star attraction of Crime Seen”
All eyes went to Carmen for some sort of explanation.
“Watch,” she said, grimacing. An order, but an apologetic one.
A knife flashed through the frame and slashed into the woman’s throat, severing the carotid artery. Blood spurted and a weak gurgling scream reminded Harrow of a rabbit’s cry when a hawk swooped in and carried it off. Then the scream dissipated amid more gurgling and the struggle for air as a victim drowned on her own blood. …
Kate recoiled from the computer, and Byrnes had to catch her.
Harrow, though, remained glued to the screen, watching this beautiful young woman grasp feebly at her neck, trying to hold in the spurting blood, turning her fingers runny, smudgy scarlet. She only grew weaker, her attempts more feeble….
Then she was gone.
“Don Juan again. When I love a woman, she has been loved so completely, so well, that she has no more reason to live. Nothing else to look forward to, since I never repeat myself—no woman is worthy of receiving my love twice.”
“Sick,” Kate said, looking like she would be.
“I do apologize for making demands—I know producers do not like to be bossed around by talent.”
Harrow and Byrnes shared an awkward glance.
“You will cast me as your new star on Crime Seen, or I’m afraid, face the consequences. Give me my rightful glory, my proper respect … and air time … and I will keep my fatal seductions down to one a week.”
Harrow frowned.
“But if you do not accede to my demands … let’s call them ‘requests,’ we are all friends here, collaborators … I will have to accelerate the frequency. Now, you may be asking yourself if you have just witnessed a master of special effects … no. This is real. This is realism. By way of proof, you will find the body of my latest lover within twenty-four hours. She will serve as proof that I am sincere.”
Harrow said, “My God—he’s not kidding. It is a goddamn audition tape….”
“I will expect your answer on this Friday’s show, or next week you will meet two of my satisfied lovers. The week after, three lovely women will die on camera … and I have the stamina and will power and seductive skills to expand to daily conquests if need be. So it’s up to you, UBC. And to the star of the show—J.C. Harrow? I have this personal message.”
“Bastard,” Harrow said.
“Don’t be envious. My popularity will soar—it will exceed your own. But jealousy is beneath real artists like ourselves, Mr. Harrow. You know … and I know … that a true hero is only as strong as his adversary. And now you have a worthy one.”
Carmen’s laptop went blank, and the audio ended.
Feeling like he’d been poleaxed, Harrow said, “Where in the hell did this come from?”
“Cyber tip line,” Carmen said. “Came in as an attached file.”
“Is it real?” Byrnes asked.
Verging on hysteria, Kate said, “It looks real! It looks terribly real!”
Carmen said, “Effects on screen—like the Saw movies, and those Rob Zombie ones—they look real, too.”
“I missed those,” Harrow said dryly. “But like Don Juan himself said—those aren’t special effects. Not in my opinion, anyway.”
Kate leaned into Byrnes, who put an arm around her, a protective father standing there, just shaking his head.
“Get Jenny on it,” Harrow said to Carmen.
Byrnes finally found his voice. The tanned exec was now blister pale. “My God … we created a serial killer.”
“No, Dennis,” Harrow said. “We didn’t.”
The network president stared at him blankly, his mind obviously awhirl.
“Dennis, a killer like this? He’d be at it whether we had a show or not. In his twisted mind, Crime Seen provides a rationalization—it tells him that his actions are somehow acceptable.”
Byrnes pointed to Carmen’s computer, the way the Ghost of Christmas Future pointed at Scrooge’s headstone.
“You meet the parents of that young woman,” he said, “you think they’ll give a damn about semantics? ‘Don Juan’ said he wanted to star on Crime Seen, and that’s all people will hear.”
Well, Harrow thought, at least Byrnes hadn’t reacted by saying they had a new ratings sensation on their hands. But it would have been more encouraging had the exec acknowledged that they just watched a young woman die. On screen.
Byrnes was saying, “Kate, get legal on the phone and get them the hell up here.”
Steady in the storm, Harrow said, “Dennis—there’s something far more important to do first.”
“What could possibly be more important than protecting the network’s ass?”
Harrow held Byrnes’s gaze. “Assuming that film is real? We need to call the LAPD, and help them get this madman off the street.”
Chapter Ten
Nursing an abiding anxiety neither would have admitted to the other, Lieutenant Anna Amari and Detective LeRon Polk stood in the parking lot above the Hollywood sign, at the edge of the hill, looking down. Next to them loomed the black truck of the LAPD bomb squad.
The vehicle looked like a fire engine, but rather than hoses and axes, its cabinets were filled with the tools of the bomb-disposal craft, the robot with the tank treads used for observation and disposal, and the suits of the technicians who actually disarmed the bombs.
Sergeant Platt of the bomb squad had provided Amari with a headset, so he could communicate with her while he worked on the suspicious control box just outside the Hollywood sign’s fenced-in area.
Below, Platt knelt before the metal box as if in prayer (Amari wondered if prayer was constant in that phase of the process). But his hands weren’t in prayer mode—they held a ten-inch vitamin-pill-shaped XR-150 portable X-ray machine.
Polk said, “What’s he doing? Should this be takin’ this long?”
She covered her headset’s mic. “He’s x-raying the S.O.B. And, yes, he should take as long as he feels necessary. Would you rather he rush?”
“He can take all day,” Polk said, backtracking. “We safe up here?”
“Hide behind the truck if you like.”
Polk’s expression said, That’s not fair, and it wasn’t, but she saw him glance at the truck, as if considering the
offer.
Down the hill, Platt rose in slow motion and stepped back the same way.
In her headset, Amari heard, “We’ll develop the picture, then we’ll know if we have a problem or not.”
“That a lengthy process?” Amari asked.
She didn’t run into bomb-squad situations much on the sex crimes beat. Actually, this was a first.
“Not long,” Platt said, and he turned and climbed up toward them.
Platt might have been an astronaut in his olive drab spaceman-style suit. When he finally reached the top, he handed off the XR150 to a colleague, not so attired, and pulled off the hooded helmet with its clear plastic visor. He stood before them dripping sweat and grinning, a guy with a military-short blond crew cut and friendly, regular features.
“I’m pretty sure there’s something in there,” he said. “We’ll know in a few minutes.”
Amari nodded.
“Probably a good call,” he told her, “bringing us in.”
Perhaps feeling bad for being short with her partner, she told the bomb squad guy, “It was Detective Polk’s idea. I’d’ve got us both blown to hell.”
Platt nodded to Polk. “Better to have a good head on your shoulders, son, than to get it blown off.”
She could see Polk was trying not to show he was proud of himself. She’d had worse partners.
Platt’s buddy handed the spaceman a Diet Coke and a towel and they waited. Amari thought, If I was risking my life on a daily basis, I’d drink a regular Coke—hell with calories.
When the X-ray had been developed, Platt showed Amari the device they’d discovered inside the control box.
“Pretty straightforward,” Platt said, studying the picture. He showed it to the detectives. “This wire that’s shadowed? That might be something.”
Polk frowned. “Might?”
“I’ll know better when I get the box open …” Platt shrugged. “… but it looks pretty simple.”
“You sure?” she asked.
“No,” Platt admitted. He slipped the helmet back over his head and lumbered back down to the control box.
They watched as he again approached the metal altar, knelt before it, and used bolt cutters to take the lock off.
“Here we go,” he said into Amari’s ear.
Superficially, Platt seemed calm. But she could hear the anxiety.
Platt popped the door …
… and a ball of fire erupted.
“Shit!” Polk said, jumping back.
“Shit,” Platt said in Amari’s hear, so close to simultaneously that it might have been comic in other circumstances.
She had jumped, too, and now watched in horror as gray-black smoke consumed the area where Platt had stood. Before the smoke had utterly blotted the lower hillside out, she thought she’d seen Platt blown backward.
Then she was running, Polk’s footfalls echoing just behind her, crunching dry grass.
They got to Platt in just seconds, the plume of smoke already thinning, rising into nothing, and they only coughed a few times as they found him sitting on the ground with his legs out, like a picnicker waiting for a basket. He was pulling off the helmet.
“Are you all right?” she asked, sliding to a stop next to him.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, irritably. He lumbered to his feet, Polk helping him. “Small explosive, nothing really—smoke and sparks. Just enough to burn up any evidence … and put a scare into us.”
“Worked,” Polk said.
“It did,” Platt admitted. “I damn near pissed myself, which is no fun in this suit, let me tell you.”
Amari said, “So it was more a ‘screw you’ than anything?”
“Yeah.”
Platt trudged up the hill, to get out of his spaceman suit and snag another Diet Coke and towel.
The smoke was gone, just an acrid memory, by the time the crime-scene techs moved in, and when they were done with the scorched box, all Marty Rue had to show Amari was several plastic bags filled mostly with burned wiring from where the killer had spliced into the camera feed.
“That’s the whole shootin’ match?” Amari asked.
“From an evidentiary standpoint,” Rue said, “yes indeed.”
“Well,” Polk said, “what is there not from an evidentiary standpoint?”
Rue pulled off his glasses, wiped the sweat from his face with a hand, then put the glasses back on. “Most of it was burnt to a crisp, but I did see enough to know how the bastard did it.”
“That’s something, anyway,” Amari said. “How?”
“Spliced into the webcam and fed in a loop of a normal night—something he had recorded in the last few days, probably.”
“What about the motion detectors?”
“That’s the cool part,” Rue said.
“Cool?” Polk asked skeptically.
Rue shrugged. “From the killer’s standpoint, cool. From a security standpoint, stupid. Y’see, when he got into the box, and spliced into the camera feed? He just turned off the motion detectors.”
“No,” Amari said, wide-eyed. “Flipped the switch?”
Rue nodded, half smiling. “It’s still in the off position. But I checked to make sure. No evidence the motion detectors had been tampered with or that there were any extra wires in there. He knew his stuff, Anna.”
Amari said, “Some serious planning.”
“Oh yeah,” Rue said. “Guy either picked the lock or had a key. He sure as hell didn’t hurt it.” Rue held up a bag that contained two pieces of lock, the hasp still neatly clasped.
“Thoughts, Marty?”
“This is an organized killer,” he said. “And my guess is he’s one smart bastard. You better find a way to stop him fast, Anna, or this ‘Don Juan’ of yours will be collecting more lovers.”
Amari smirked. “You do know we already have a psycho in West Hollywood to catch?”
“I heard. You know what the song says, Anna.”
“I do?”
“Never rains in California. It just pours. Just pours.”
While Amari and Polk walked back to their car, the coroner’s team was bringing the body up the hill to their wagon. Up top, she watched the sad procession, Polk at her side.
When the body bag had gone into the back of the vehicle, she said to Polk, “That girl was alive and well yesterday, LeRon.”
“Yes she was.”
“Let’s do our best not to have to stand and pay these kind of respects to any more victims. Okay?”
“I hear you, Lieutenant.”
As the coroner’s van pulled away, Amari called her boss to deliver a preliminary report on what they knew so far.
When Captain Womack answered, the first words out of his mouth were, “Just getting ready to call you.”
“Yeah, sorry,” Amari said. “Took longer than we thought.” She filled him in on the booby-trapped control box, then gave him the details about the crime scene.
Womack asked, “You say he signed the note Don Juan?”
Her boss’s voice had a funny edge.
“Yeah,” Amari said, brow furrowing. “Why, does that mean something to you?”
“Hell, Anna, that’s the reason I was getting ready to call you.”
“What is?”
“Don Juan.”
“Really.”
“Really. Anna—before you come in, stop by UBC.”
“What, the TV network?”
“Yeah. They received some sort of video communication from somebody calling himself ‘Don Juan’ just this morning.”
“Hell. Okay. Who do I ask for?”
“J.C. Harrow.”
“Aw shit,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Frickin’ Crime Seen’s got this? So we can’t even grab a breath before this goes straight to media circus?”
Womack paused, then: “You don’t know Harrow, do you, Anna?”
“No, but I saw the show once,” she said, not wanting to confess she watched it every Friday night.
“Well, I’ve
met the guy,” Womack said. “He’s former law enforcement, as you must know. A straight shooter, Anna. He’ll work with us. I think you can probably trust him.”
There was a ringing endorsement.
“All right, Cap,” she said with a sigh.
She rang off and told Polk about the call.
“J.C. Harrow’s a damn TV star,” Polk said. “What makes the cap think he’s going to play ball?”
Amari shrugged and put the car in gear. “Ours is not to reason why, LeRon. Ours is but to—”
“I know the rest of it,” Polk said.
Chapter Eleven
Laurene Chase and the rest of the Killer TV team group took the chairs provided in a loose semicircle around Byrnes’s desk, where the network president already sat. Harrow and a massive, bald, well-dressed African American were at Byrnes’s shoulders, like bodyguards.
To nobody’s surprise, Harrow took charge.
“Meet Lucian Richards Jr.,” he said, “from UBC legal.”
“Sorry to take you away from your lunch break,” Richards said, in a God Almighty voice. “You’ll soon understand why.”
The team traded wary looks.
The attorney’s navy-blue three-piece suit draped smartly, for so large a man, and Chase figured his gold Vacheron Constantin Patrimony watch retailed in the neighborhood of twenty grand.
Harrow swung the laptop on Byrnes’s desk to-ward the group, merely saying what they were about to see had come in on the tip line.
Chase watched until it turned gruesome, then turned her attention to the team. She saw them all, from stoic Harrow to boisterous Choi, set their jaws firmly when Don Juan’s metallic voice cut through the speakers.
Carmen was looking away—she had seen it enough times already.
When the homicidal home movie ended, Michael Pall spoke. “Lot of fake snuff flicks out there. This one looks real.”
His voice uncharacteristically soft, Choi said, “Those weren’t special effects.”
Jenny, with no more expression than a bisque baby, said, “Nothing digital there.”
Someday, kiddo, Chase thought, all of that stuff you push down is going to come roiling up.
Carmen said, “I was going through the overnight stuff and ran across the damn thing.”