died every day in a town the size of Berkeley, but most of them died of heart attacks or cancer or pneumonia or automobile crashes. Occasionally someone picked a basket full of beautiful wild mushrooms and cooked them for dinner and died of liver failure. Once in a great while a construction worker fell from a high scaffold or an industrial worker got caught in the jaws of a deadly machine and wound up crushed or mauled or torn to bits.
But this somebody had died in the seemingly safe surroundings of a radio studio, had apparently dropped dead in front of an open mike and an audience of uncounted thousands of listeners. When the cry came in to the emergency dispatcher the caller was hysterical.
The station had received a threat on their community news fax line. The mid-afternoon political show was about to go on the air. If KRED’s regular commentator went on the air today he would die, the message warned. It was worded in a weird broken English.
Nobody took the threat very seriously. KRED had a reputation for championing unpopular causes. It had a history of controversy and turmoil. If every threat, demand, or ultimatum that came to the station were for real, KRED would have disappeared from the airwaves long ago.
The commentator laughed off the threat. He’d heard it all before. He settled himself in front the microphone and there he died.
Marvia arrived at KRED three minutes after the message hit her desk. The first people dispatched had been paramedics furnished by the Berkeley Fire Department. Their ambulance stood in front of the KRED building, its roof lights flashing.
The station’s building was on Berkeley’s recently renamed Barbara Jordan Boulevard, just a few blocks from the Hall of Justice on McKinley Avenue. Police headquarters and city jail were crammed into one outdated building, due to be replaced soon. It had been due to be replaced soon for years.
As she jumped from the cruiser she took in the surroundings of the station’s two-story terra cotta structure. To the left, on the corner of Jordan Boulevard and Huntington Way, was the Bara Miyako Japanese restaurant. To the right were a couple of retail shops, Bix’s Wax Cylinder and the Amazon Rain Forest.
A second black-and-white and then a third screeched to the curb beside Marvia’s cruiser and uniformed officers piled out. Marvia signaled to them and they scurried to secure the front and rear entrances of the radio station’s building.
Marvia glanced up at the building’s theater-like marquee as she hurried through the glass doors. Oceana Network—KRED/FM—One World Radio. Inside, a terrazzo hallway ran between bulletin boards plastered with handbills and posters for public events. The receptionist’s post, shielded by a sliding Plexiglas panel, was unoccupied.
A second set of glass doors opened into a surprisingly bright lobby. Marvia blinked up and saw that the lobby rose into an atrium; the sliding, frosted-glass roof had been rolled back to admit the clear April afternoon’s strong sunlight and refreshing air.
Half a dozen people were milling around. Just off the lobby a door had been smashed down, jagged shards of glass and splinters of polished wood lay on the terrazzo floor. A white-suited EMT turned and spotted Marvia. The tech was a young man; he wore his blond hair in an old-fashioned pompadour, a nice trick for adding a couple of inches to his height. Marvia asked him what he had.
“Fresh cadaver, Sergeant. Still warm, no rigor. Really looks odd—I’ve never seen such a red complexion.”
“Red as in Navajo or red as in Irish?”
“No, I mean red as in tomato, red as in danger flag.”
“What happened to the door?”
“It was locked from the inside. They saw him through the big window. There’s a control room.” He pointed. “There’s a big glass window onto the studio where he was. The engineer looked into the studio and saw—well. When we got here nobody could unlock the studio door so we knocked it down. Just in case he was still alive, see, but he wasn’t.”
Marvia said, “Okay,” and stepped past the tech. She read his nameplate as she passed him. J. MacPherson. The man lying across the table in front of a battery of microphones looked plenty dead, and J. MacPherson had been accurate about the color of his skin.
She turned back. “MacPherson, you have any more work to do here?”
He shook his head. “Just some paperwork. The scene is yours now, Sergeant.”
Marvia grunted. If Dispatch was on the ball, the evidence wagon should be arriving in a few minutes. The coroner’s people would follow later on. They didn’t react with the same urgency as the EMT’s or Homicide. If one of their subjects ever got up and left before they arrived, they didn’t belong there in the first place.
Summoning a uniform, Marvia had him secure the studio, including the cadaver and all its other contents, and the smashed door. Then she snagged the nearest civilian, a very young, heavyset woman with pale skin and intense crimson lipstick, wearing a perky yellow beret. At Marvia’s question the woman identified herself. “Jessie Loman. I’m a producer. Well, I’m working as receptionist today, but I’m going to be a producer.”
Marvia asked who was in charge. Jessie Loman pointed to a cluster of people swirling around a tall African woman in dreadlocks.
“She’s in charge of everything,” the heavyset woman managed. “Sun Mbolo. With the—” She made a gesture, indicating the heavy, curled hairdo. “She’s the station manager.”
Marvia pulled elbows aside and confronted the taller woman. Marvia had always thought of herself as dark-skinned, but she had never seen a person as black as Sun Mbolo actually looking pale. But Ms. Mbolo’s skin had the whitish, pasty look that meant she was close to going into shock.
Marvia identified herself. Even in uniform, it couldn’t hurt to establish her authority. That one word spoken aloud, police, could change the atmosphere in a room in a fraction of a second. Marvia hustled Ms. Mbolo to the nearest chair. She turned and ordered the nearest individual to bring a glass of water.
Marvia squatted in front of Sun Mbolo’s chair and put her hand on Mbolo’s wrist, in part to offer support to the station manager and in part to check her pulse and the feel of her skin. The pulse was strong and the skin didn’t have the moist, clammy feeling that Marvia had feared. Sun Mbolo was past the worst moments of her reaction.
“Ms. Mbolo, are you able to help me now?”
The woman rested her elbows on the chair arms, her forehead in her hands. Marvia asked if she knew the dead man. Mbolo said, “He’s Bob Bjorner. He’s our chief political analyst. He’s dead?” she asked, “You’re sure he’s dead?”
“EMTs are sure of that. The coroner is on the way.” Mbolo nodded. Marvia resumed, “This must be quite a blow to you. To lose a friend and colleague this way.” Marvia looked up into the taller woman’s face. Mbolo had a long skull and thin, finely sculptured features. She must have Ethiopian genes to have that kind of face and those long, slim bones.
Clearly Mbolo was shocked but she did not look grief-stricken. “He was not a friend of mine and he was not going to be a colleague for long. We were struggling to get rid of Bjorner and he would not go quietly. We were having a hell of a fight. I am sorry that he is dead but I will not deny that I am relieved, also. But what a way to go. Right in the studio. About to go on the air. He must have had a heart attack.”
“I doubt that,” Marvia said. “His skin is bright red. I never heard
