You Can't Stop Me. Max Allan Collins
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Maybe it was time to start making the message more clear. More emphatic. Without really thinking about it, he withdrew from his pocket the garden shears the boy had tried to use on him.
Maybe this brave boy had been sent to deliver a message to the Messenger.
Perhaps it was time for him to spell the message out. Hadn’t his own marriage been severed?
Just taking the ring was not a strong enough sign. He understood that now. He bent down, as if proposing, and took the woman’s hand in his. It was still warm. Placing the fourth finger between the blades of the shears, he squeezed.
It took more effort than he had expected, but in the end, the finger crunched and snapped like a thick twig, the ring and finger coming off as one, the blood spill minimal since the heart no longer pumped.
He found a plastic sandwich bag in the kitchen, slipped his prize inside and put the shears back in his pants pocket. He had a new trophy, in the ring finger…and a new tool. Despite the trouble he’d gone through, and the sacrifice of a brave child, this message had been successfully delivered.
If only someone out there could understand. Only then could he stop.
Chapter Five
The day began as uneventfully as any of Carmen’s, or yours, for that matter. But this seemingly routine day at the office would mark the real start of Carmen Garcia’s life, which, coincidentally, was what the eventual cost of her big break might be.
A tall, reedy brunette in faded jeans and an Ozomatli T-shirt, hair tucked up in a loose bun, Carmen tightrope-walked to her cubicle, towering triple mocha latte clutched in a death grip in one hand, stack of folders tucked precariously under her opposite shoulder.
Her doe’s brown eyes gave her an earnest, innocent look that belied an ambition to get to the top of the television news game, her high cheekbones and heart-shaped face aiding in that effort.
So many piles of papers covered her desk that Carmen could only wonder if she were personally responsible for the death of an Amazon rain forest. She dropped the wad of folders onto the dead trees, flopped into her chair, slid her purse off her shoulder onto the floor, and sipped the hot latte with the passion of a true addict.
Carmen had climbed aboard a plane the day after graduating summa cum laude from the television production school of Columbia College in Chicago, and moved here to LA, where she’d gotten a job as a production assistant with Crime Seen!, a first-year reality-crime show for the faltering UBC network.
The United Broadcasting Company had run sixth in a six-network race for so long, they were threatening to get lapped, the network such an industry joke that Carmen knew getting a job there might hurt her résumé more than help it.
But Crime Seen! had sounded interesting…in addition to being the first and, yes, only show to look past her lack of experience and make her a job offer.
So UBC it had been. At least United was an over-the-air network, and not cable. Even a sinking ship in the broadcast ocean carried more prestige for your average rat than cable—not much of a rationalization, she knew, a sinking ship being a sinking ship whether the Titanic or a tugboat….
Now, nine months later, she found herself enjoying working on the show. This was in part, of course, because Crime Seen! was UBC’s surprise ratings winner.
In one season, the series—which brought coverage of interesting local crimes to a national audience—had led to the capture of over a dozen felons in half a dozen states. No small feat in only twenty-one airings since last August.
Two wife beaters, three armed robbers, four burglars, two scam artists, two serial drunk drivers, and three murderers had been apprehended thanks to Crime Seen! The show was moving from hit series to national phenomenon, and now—with two weeks to go before the season finale (airing live as a ratings grabber)—everyone was busting their butt, following the example of their boss.
J.C. Harrow was not your typical celebrity host. Coming up on six years ago, the former Iowa sheriff turned criminalist had become a tragic American hero when—on the very day he saved the life of the President—his wife and teenage son were brutally murdered. The case made national headlines when the criminalist, briefly a suspect, launched his own investigation into the deaths of his family.
Even though the killer’s trail went cold, Harrow’s search for his family’s murderer continued to fascinate the public, generating an acclaim that led to UBC approaching him to host Crime Seen! At fifty, Harrow possessed the charisma and rugged good looks of a natural TV star with his piercing blue eyes and a wavy shock of dark brown hair just now going gray at the temples.
Being on prime-time television kept his family’s case alive, but through the first twenty-one episodes of Crime Seen!, Harrow had not once mentioned the tragedy on air. Instead, he and the show’s staff had tracked down other felons, often with Harrow there to capture their arrests on camera. To UBC, it was reality show heaven.
As for Harrow, well, Carmen couldn’t exactly say what he was getting out of it.
She cleared a small space for her morning’s monster latte, turned on the computer, and shifted the piles of paper as the machine booted up. As usual, show-runner Nicole Strickland had funneled all the fan mail to production assistant Carmen, whose inbox was jammed.
The e-mails ran the gamut from “love the show,” to “hate the show,” from “screw Harrow,” to “I want to screw Harrow.” Suggestions how to make the show better ranged from showcasing more sexually oriented crimes to actually gunning down suspects on air. Some wanted signed pictures from Harrow or a segment host, of whom there were four: Angela Batten, Steven Wall, Carlos Moreno, and Shayla Ross.
Naturally, each host had his or her own strengths and weaknesses, though Carmen felt the only advantage they had over her was experience. True, former network White House correspondent Moreno brought an undeniable gravitas to each story, but the others were local news veterans plucked from obscurity more for their looks and camera ease than any journalistic chops.
For the next four hours, Carmen dealt with the e-mails until yet another paper pile had grown, this one outgoing mail, mostly cheap black-and-white photo reprints of on-air personalities with stamped autographs. Requests for Harrow’s pictures made up a considerable pile of their own.
Those requests went to Harrow’s desk, where he actually signed each photo and often enclosed a note himself. Whether two requests or two hundred, each day their star personally dealt with his own fan mail. She liked that about him.
With a Diet Coke and a salad a co-worker brought her from the commissary, the production assistant worked through lunch. She was back on the Internet doing research into various crimes around the country when something about a small town in Florida caught her eye.
The wife and two kids of the town marshal of Placida had been murdered.
Everybody on the staff looked sideways when the family of a cop got killed—their relationship with Harrow made that natural. But, as they’d all learned over the past six months, these types of crimes, while uncommon, were not unheard of.
Still, for the next hour, she dug into everything she could find about Placida, Florida, and the crime. She printed dozens of documents, gathered them into another pile—working on her second rain forest—then started at the top and began studying, instead of just swiftly scanning.
Placida was a Gulf Coast town of less than a thousand souls. Maybe fifty miles south of Sarasota and just north of Ft. Myers, the hamlet lay on a jut of land out into Charlotte Harbor. Local law was a town marshal and three part-timers. For any real trouble, the Charlotte County sheriff handled it.
The median age of the citizenry was just a hiccup short of sixty. The average income was twenty-five thousand dollars above the national average because 71.2 percent of the population had white-collar jobs. Placida was a classic bedroom community—or anyway it was until the night town marshal Ray Ferguson came home to find his family murdered near their kitchen.