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.”