“No, I don’t. And after you read it, you won’t, either.”
His next call was to Amari.
“Nothing for you yet,” she said. “Spent most of the day at Errol Flynn’s star.”
“I just got a fan letter.”
“So you’re popular.”
“From Billie Shears.”
“Hell you say!.. And you didn’t know what it was, so you got fingerprints all over it.”
“Not all over it. On it.”
“I’ll grab Polk and be right over there.”
“Good,” he said. “Laurene’s coming up to bag it.”
“Twenty minutes,” she said and clicked off.
Eighteen minutes later, the two detectives entered his office.
They both read the letter in its new cellophane home. They also studied the envelope.
Polk said, “He’s a little vague about the trophy.”
“Seems pretty suggestive to me,” Harrow said.
“If we send it to the lab,” Amari said, “we won’t know whether it’s authentic for weeks — even if I put a rush on it.”
Harrow shrugged. “I know where there’s a pretty good crime lab.”
“Is that right?”
“And you’ll go right to the front of the queue.”
Polk was frowning, but Amari wasn’t.
She said, “I have the go-ahead from the chief himself to work hand in hand with you and your team.”
“So the answer is yes?”
“Answer is yes. Use that kid Anderson as our conduit, to protect the chain of evidence, but the answer is hell yes.”
“Good.”
She frowned at him, not angry, just serious. “Listen, J.C. — Chief Daniels phoned Captain Womack personally today. Now that Don Juan appears to have killed three times — prerequisite for bringing in the FBI — the chief had to call in the Behavioral Science Unit. They’ll have agents here tomorrow.”
“Just for Don Juan, or Billie Shears, too?”
“That I can’t tell you. I can say — as you see by my eager willingness to get help from your TV show lab — I am feeling flexible. Normally the FBI is about my favorite thing next to stomach influenza. But right now anything that helps get these two evil assholes off the street is fine by me.”
“Agreed.”
She arched an eyebrow. “In the meantime, what does Don Juan want?”
“Attention,” Harrow said without hesitation. He didn’t need Michael Pall to feed him that.
“Okay,” she said calmly. “If Don Juan wants attention... why not give it to him?”
“How exactly?”
“On tonight’s show, announce that the FBI is coming in to lead the Don Juan investigation. Turn the heat up a little.”
“Last time we turned up the heat, a dead body wound up on my doorstep.”
“Last time you turned up the heat by ignoring him. This time, let him have all kinds of attention from J.C. Harrow and Crime Seen. Maybe he’ll get cocky and make a mistake.”
Harrow frowned. “Well, we’d love him to make a mistake, but we don’t want another innocent woman paying for it.”
Amari was shaking her head. “What I mean is... tell Don Juan he needs to communicate with you now, so you can help him tell his story. That the FBI will insist on taking Crime Seen out of the equation.”
Harrow called in Michael Pall for his opinion.
“We have precious little forensic evidence,” Pall said. “I’m starting to think the only way we’ll catch this guy is to smoke him out. You don’t need to be a profiler to know this one’s a narcissist of the first order. He thinks he’s the world’s greatest lover — what more do you need?”
When Harrow ran it past Byrnes, the executive’s only complaint was that he hadn’t gotten the word soon enough to plug it on the UBC nightly news.
Everyone was in agreement — the show would deal with Don Juan by announcing that the FBI would soon join the investigation. Amari (and Polk) went happily off to arrange for that Killer TV crime lab work.
Harrow retired to his office. He read the latest drafts of his script, okayed them, sent them along to Byrnes. With still an hour till air, just killing time, he returned to his interrupted fan mail. After that, he decided to at least check his e-mail account.
Very few people had this address and fewer still used it, since everybody knew Harrow rarely checked it. Mostly what he got was jokes from his Iowa buddies.
One name and subject line did catch his attention: a message from Carmen, the subject line reading Re: Don Juan, with an attached file.
Carmen was high on the list of those who knew how rarely Harrow checked his e-mailbox.
He phoned her.
“I didn’t send you an e-mail,” she said. “You’d never read it.”
“That’s what I thought — thanks.”
He ended the call before she could question him.
Then he phoned Jenny Blake. “Can you come to my office?”
“Shouldn’t you be in hair and makeup?”
“I think I have an e-mail from Don Juan.”
Her response was the click of a hang-up.
He tracked down Amari and Polk. Soon they and the rest of the team, including Carmen, were in his office. Bad news traveled fast.
Half were seated across from Harrow’s desk, the rest standing. Harrow was on his feet, Jenny in his chair at the desk with the laptop before her.
Polk said, “So you really think it’s from him?”
Whether he was asking Harrow or Jenny wasn’t clear.
Jenny said, “Date is today, but the time is one forty-seven a.m.”
“I was in bed then,” Carmen said. “I did not send that.”
No one had accused her of it, but she seemed a little rattled. After all, the last Don Juan video had come in via her e-mail.
Jenny downloaded the file, then played it.
Like the others, it showed a beautiful drugged woman being made love to.
When Amari saw the woman’s face, she said, “That’s her — Hollywood Boulevard victim.”
She was a brunette, her hair longer than Ellen’s, but with the same type body as Harrow’s deceased wife. Another woman he couldn’t save.
When she screamed, Harrow made himself watch.
Then when the blade flashed into the screen, there was a millisecond of red (not blood — cloth?), and the blade came in from a different angle. Though the woman was still centered in frame, the camera was more to her right now.
As usual, the metallic voice of the killer came on. “A promise is a promise, Mr. Harrow. Next week, would you like to try for four?”
“Something’s different,” Pall said.
“Very different,” Harrow said.
“What?” Laurene asked.
“That camera moved. Don Juan has an accomplice.”
Chapter Twenty-four
They were all idiots.
All of those TV stars and “forensics superstars” and Emmy-winning reporters — fools.
Billie Shears laughed and the sound was brittle and echoey in the bathroom of the nonsmoking motel room. The morons still seemed think she was a “he,” unless they were withholding that theory for their own sneaky purposes.
Naked, she sat on the lidded john, listening to the muffled blather of commercials on the TV as she smoked her third filter-tip Kool. Exhaust-fan hum made it a little tough to tell when the show came back. She let smoke curl out her nose. What was the old axiom, never commit a misdemeanor while committing a felony?
Like she gave a crap!
She took another deep drag, held it in, blew it out. When she heard the Crime Seen theme music, she stood, lifted the toilet lid, pitched the butt in, let the lid slam back in place, and went out to where she could sit on the bed, next to her victim.