No One Will Hear You

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.