Smiles blossomed on the Killer TV faces, even the skeptical Anderson’s; but Byrnes and the attorney remained somber.
The latter looked at his expensive watch, cleared his throat for effect, then said, “I, uh, just remembered I have another meeting. Anything you’ve said so far is strictly hypothetical, understood? Why don’t you people discuss the situation, while Dennis and I step out of the office.”
“No,” Byrnes snapped, “I want to hear this.”
“Actually,” Richards said, with a meaningful glance, “you don’t.”
Not used to being ordered around, the executive seemed about to protest when Richards held up two fingers, as if he were making the peace sign.
In his deepest, richest baritone, the attorney said, “Two words, Dennis — plausible deniability.”
Byrnes rose. “Funny thing is, I have an appointment, too.”
They left.
“Alone at last,” Choi said.
Taking the president’s desk chair, Harrow said, “Look, if the cops find out we’re working on this, the shit will be about chin high. Anybody got a problem with that? You might not get a job in real law enforcement again.”
Nobody said a word.
“Okay. Jenny, start tracing the sender of that foul thing. You can do that?”
“Depends on how smart he is,” Jenny said.
“We’ll assume extremely. Carmen, you start working on identifying the victim. Get a good screen capture of her face and discreetly distribute it. Rest of you, go through this video frame by damn frame. We need something and we’ve only got five days till air. After that, we’re going to have him on the prowl again.”
Chase asked, “What about the LAPD?”
“We cooperate. We do whatever they ask, short of staying out of the investigation. We don’t advertise that we’re conducting, as Jenny put it, our own sub rosa inquiry.”
“With cameras on us,” Chase said.
“Yes. Dennis gets his due. And what we’re up to eventually will come out — within five days, likely.” Harrow sent his eyes from face to face. “Everything comes to me first, then straight to the LAPD.”
Carmen said, “We’ll need an LAPD officer to be our liaison. I can look into that.”
“Do it.” Harrow rose, and so did everybody else.
Jenny collected the laptop from the desk.
Quietly, Harrow said to her, “I don’t want this video sent around by e-mail. Strictly DVD copies to our key team members.”
“Sure. I’ll get on that right now.”
“Then how soon do I call the police?”
“Fifteen minutes.”
He nodded.
Then to the team: “Let’s go, people. Clock is running and, the opinion of the Rolling Stones notwithstanding, time is definitely not on our side.”
Each team member had his or her own office — glorified closets, admittedly, but home when they weren’t on the road. The furniture was strictly functional, gray metal office gear, although some had brought in their own stuff, to lend the cubicles a personal touch.
Chase’s furniture was strictly what UBC had provided. Her only homey touches were a framed desk picture of Patty, her life partner who’d succumbed to cervical cancer two years ago now, and another of current squeeze, Nancy Hughes.
Also a philodendron that she had brought from Waco. The plant hadn’t taken over the office yet, but the threat was there. Feed me...
Choi somehow finagled a slightly larger space and seemed to have moved in, lugging in a dilapidated couch Chase refused to touch, let alone sit on (she had the feeling it had been lifted from a particularly nasty crime scene).
Before long, Jenny brought around a DVD for her, and Chase settled in with a bottle of vending-machine iced tea and prepared for a terrible afternoon at the movies.
She watched the disturbing images straight through, once. She had no doubt she was watching a genuine snuff film — a real murder captured on film. Or anyway, video.
Second time through, she turned her head away from the screen, not out of disgust (though she had plenty), but to take in only the sound, searching for any background noise that might provide a clue.
Chase was well aware that Jenny and her computer could do this better than such old-school methods, but she listened hard anyway. And anyway there was still plenty her human brain could process that an electronic one couldn’t. She got nothing out of it, though. She repeated the process and again zippo.
Turning the sound down this time, she started working through the video a frame at a time.
The video was high-def. At least that small detail told her something — this killer either had some money or was a thief. Home-video high-def camcorders had come down in price, but were not cheap.
No sign that the woman, during the sex act, sensed anything wrong until the last second. Nor any indication the victim knew she was being recorded.
Still, this was the acting town, so who could say? The camera stayed in a fixed position, hidden, possibly behind two-way glass.
Next time through, Chase studied the room itself. Walls were dark, furniture limited to the brass bed and a barely visible nightstand, covered with some sort of filmy fabric, atop which sat what appeared to be a simple glass vase filled with roses.
She focused on the flowers. Aside from that philodendron, she knew squat about plants. Roses came in colors and there were scads of varieties, but that was the extent of her expertise.
Bed against a wall. Not a hotel room — Don Juan had a place of his own, she figured. She looked for shadows that might give away the position of a window or the sun or any damn thing...
... but there was nothing.
This bastard would kill again if they didn’t stop him; he would accelerate, as promised, if they didn’t get him before he knew Harrow had not acceded to his demands.
There had to be something in this video, but Chase was damned if she could find it. Sitting back and sighing and shaking her head, she hoped the rest of the team was having better luck.
Then she started again.
Chapter Twelve
Amari felt something twist inside her as she watched this morning’s corpse return to life. Not quite vibrant life, because the blonde seemed druggy to Amari. Still, the woman appeared to be enjoying the sex she shared with her barely glimpsed lover.
She made a mental note to make a priority of checking the victim’s tox screen. She already suspected that Don Juan had dosed his victim with flunitrazepam, better known by the trade name Rohypnol, more commonly called roofies.
When the video ended, Harrow closed the lid of the laptop with a somber finality.
Polk sat with a wide-eyed, bloodless expression, still trying to process what he’d just seen.
They were in Harrow’s office at UBC. Harrow was behind his desk, and network president Dennis Byrnes and attorney, Lucian Richards, Jr., bookended Amari and Polk, in visitor’s chairs.
Amari said to Harrow, “When exactly did you receive this, Mr. Harrow?”
“One of our writer-producers, Carmen Garcia, showed it to me early this afternoon She interrupted a meeting I was having with Dennis.”
Amari nodded. “But you didn’t call the police until when?”
“I’m sure you know when the call came in.”
Byrnes said, “We wanted to get an educated opinion on what this thing is, before calling you.”
“Well, it’s somebody cutting a woman’s throat, Mr. Byrnes, and then stabbing her repeatedly.”
“Lieutenant Amari, we get a lot of prank and crank tips at Crime Seen. We needed to try to ascertain if this was genuine or staged, before possibly wasting your time.”