No One Will Hear You

Chapter Thirty-one

Carmen Garcia did not feel safe.

Doors locked, alarm system set, lights on, TV too (some stupid infomercial), but alone and on her couch, cell phone at her ear (ringing, ringing, ringing) and not feeling safe at all...

On the coffee table before her, laptop open, the innocuous if suggestive file name with its small black letters somehow screamed at her.

Finally Harrow’s voice came: “Carmen, what do you need?”

“You, I’m afraid... Don Juan e-mailed me again.”

“Another video?”

“Another video.”

“Sure it’s from him? You didn’t—”

“I did look at it. Started to. It’s from him.”

“I can come right over.”

“Could we do it at the office?” She didn’t want to stay here a second longer than necessary.

Harrow said, “I don’t think we should sit on this till eight, do you?”

“No. I meant go in a little early.”

“Early, like... now?”

Quarter till three. No one in the place except... me.

“Early like now,” she said.

“Okay. I think that’s a good call. I’ll round up everybody, and inform UBC security.”

She threw on a sweatshirt, jeans, and running shoes, and prepared to go out into the night, or anyway the early-morning dark. Not that she was afraid of the dark — the dark didn’t kill women — but the monster who knew enough about her to send a video to her personal e-mail certainly did.

The others on the Killer TV team, with their former cop status, were licensed to carry firearms. But Carmen was not former law enforcement, so she went into the kitchen and selected (to tuck away in her purse) the biggest kitchen knife from a cutlery set she’d purchased on another sleepless night watching infomercials.

In fact, when she switched off her TV, Billy Mays was smiling and shouting at her. That Mays was still hawking stuff on the airwaves, long after his death, creeped her out. She wondered if any of Wendi Erskine’s infomercials were still airing...

Her only stop on the way to the office was at a convenience mart for a cup of coffee — too early for drive-thru latte. At nearly three a.m., the freeway was weirdly user-friendly, and the streets of Los Angeles, particularly the downtown, were all but deserted.

Even as she neared UBC, her eyes kept returning to the rearview mirror. She supposed she was just being paranoid, but was it paranoia considering what she’d been through? Was it just caution?

Like most people her age, she had never considered the fragility of her own life. That was before Kansas. Now she knew better.

She pulled her Prius up into the UBC parking ramp. If a parking garage could be naturally unsettling, being in an almost-empty one was worse — and not long ago, Don Juan had left a body on the UBC doorstep, and could certainly get in here and kidnap someone, and...

... and that, she thought, was paranoia.

Empty garage or not, she drove to her reserved parking space on the third level. She got out, saw no one else around in the concrete chamber, locked her car, and started the walk halfway across the garage to the elevators.

She strode quickly, her heels tapping on concrete echoing like machine-gun fire. Under one arm was her laptop, her purse (with butcher knife within) thrown over that same shoulder. In the other hand was a pepper-spray mini-canister, finger on the trigger.

Security lighting was minimal and most of the garage remained shrouded in darkness, a breeze whipping through to help hurry Carmen across.

Then, breathing heavily, as if she’d just run the hundred-yard dash, she found herself at the elevator, pushing the button.

The elevator doors whispered open, and a voice just behind her said, “Carmen...”

She whirled and saw only a blur of black leather jacket and black hair. Bringing up the pepper spray, she was about to trigger it when she realized the figure was Billy Choi.

Her coworker held up his hands in surrender and turned his head away, figuring out that he was on the pepper-spray precipice.

“Sorry, Billy.”

“Talk about close calls,” Choi said.

“I’m so sorry...”

The elevator arrived and they stepped on, Choi pushing their floor.

“It’s okay. You got another video and you’re edgy. I get that. But let’s work on that itchy trigger finger.”

She beamed at him, relieved she hadn’t hurt him, glad not to be alone.

He grinned at her. “Jeez, don’t you know my voice by now?”

“I thought you were Don Juan.”

“Never been mistaken for him. Been taken for John Cho a few times... Ken Leung, once...”

“Could have been worse than pepper spray.”

“Yeah?”

She opened her purse and the butcher knife winked at Choi. He did not wink back.

Soon they were in the conference room, where (predictably) Jenny had beaten them. The little computer queen — in pale blue T-shirt, jeans, and ponytail — quickly and wordlessly hooked Carmen’s laptop up to the big screen.

Within five minutes, everyone had arrived, coffee distributed. No doughnuts or other goodies, though, not considering what they were about to watch.

Harrow came in last. He wore a yellow polo and jeans and looked far more alert than the rest, with the exception of Jenny. Of course.

“You’ll note again that no cameras are present.” He sat. “All right — let’s look at this damn thing...”

Chase said, “Where are the LAPD? This is evidence.”

“Lieutenant Amari, Detective Polk, and Special Agent Rousch are already at the crime scene.”

“Which is where?” Michael Pall asked. He was in a suit, whereas the rest were in whatever they could grab — T-shirts, sweatshirts, jeans. But at least he didn’t look so bright-eyed behind the Clark Kent specs.

“Griffith Park,” Harrow said.

Anderson blurted, “Hollywood sign again?”

“The observatory,” Harrow said.

“Griffith Park Observatory,” Pall said, as if tasting the words. Then: “Why there? Doesn’t make sense.”

When their profiler made an observation like that, everything stopped until he’d explained.

He did: “The Hollywood sign, the network doorstep, the Errol Flynn star, the Chinese Theater... they all have something to do with show business. What does the Griffith Park Observatory have to do with show biz?”

Chase said, “A lot of movies have been shot there.”

Choi said, “Yeah, right — Rebel Without a Cause.”

“No,” Carmen said. She’d known at once. “Griffith Park Observatory — where you go to see the stars.”

Harrow was nodding. “Which is what Don Juan and Billie Shears want to be — stars. Superstars.”

No one challenged the theory.

Choi said to Harrow, “Did your friend the lieutenant say whether there are any clues this time?”

“Nothing significant had turned up when I spoke to her half an hour ago. She said the observatory closed at ten last night, and isn’t open on Monday. Victim was on the front doorstep.”

Chase asked, “Who found the body?”

“Same security guard who found Wendi Erskine, and he’s being looked at hard. The victim has been tentatively identified as Erica Thornton — she was on a reality show called Survival Island.”

“I remember her,” Choi said.

“That’s a UBC show,” Carmen said. “Don Juan sticking it to us again?”

“Not just us,” Chase said.

“No,” Harrow said gravely. “Not just us... Okay, let’s get to it.”

Harrow nodded to Carmen, and she made a keystroke.

And then it began...

... the drugged nude woman on the bed, blade slashing, woman writhing, spraying blood, this attack even more brutal, more vicious than the others, over and over, again and again, knife arcing, flaying, the life literally bleeding out of the victim...

Carmen made herself watch.

She had viewed the start of it at home, before shutting the thing off and calling Harrow. Now the sheer ferocity of the attack shook her, terrified her. So incredibly savage was the slaying that even in this room full of people, she felt alone with her fear.

“You failed to grasp the inevitability of my ascension to stardom,” the now-familiar, processed, metallic voice said. “You insult me by suggesting this also-ran Shears is my equal. For this indignity, you must pay. How you will pay is my little secret — mine is a scenario with surprises yet to be revealed. Suffice to say my next lover will give you no alternative but to acknowledge that Don Juan is without question... the greatest lover of all.”

The video ended, the lights came up, and no one said anything for what seemed forever to Carmen. Thirty seconds.

Michael Pall said, “He’s devolving.”

No one disagreed.

Harrow asked, “What do we do about it?”

That the seasoned investigators around this table had no immediate response was almost as disturbing to Carmen as that video.

Choi said, “Yeah, I know the profiler lingo, too — he’s devolving, he’s accelerating. Well, we know he’s picking up speed. But we also know he’s playing us. That’s bullshit about us insulting him — he and Billie Shears are in it together.”

“But he doesn’t know we know that,” Harrow said.

Pall, brightening, said, “And that gives us a small advantage. He’s playing out a narrative, which would suggest an end goal — some spectacular surprise to really make him a ‘star.’ ”

“Maybe we already know that surprise,” Harrow said. “Maybe his big finish is to reveal that he and Billie are collaborators, or even lovers.”

“Maybe,” the profiler allowed. “But I would think not — this is building to a special kill... though what we do having going for us is, finally, we are a small step ahead. We know he and Shears are in cahoots. So do the LAPD and the FBI. We have to keep that knowledge out of the media.”

“We are the media,” Carmen said.

“No,” Harrow said. “Not anymore. We’re just a group of hard-ass investigators who are going to find and stop this bastard.”

That got a few smiles.

“You know,” Choi said, “I think I could stomach a doughnut about now. You know — like all hard-ass investigators.”

And that got a few laughs.

But Carmen neither smiled nor laughed.

She was seeing that blade arcing down...