perhaps broadcast it live. He was with the station for a thousand years, he had a following of old leftists he could rally to his defense when we tried to get him off the air. Let them rally to his defense now.”
Someone stood behind Marvia. “Sergeant.” She stood up and turned around. It was one of the police department’s evidence techs. The van had arrived and they were ready to go to work.
Marvia addressed the tech. “Felsner, you people all have booties and gloves, yes?”
“Masks too. Sometimes there’s funny stuff in the air. That’s a sealed room. We don’t know what might come from the cadaver.”
To a uniform she said, “Look, we can’t have all these people milling around. I want the building cleared except—Ms. Mbolo, I want your cooperation—anybody who was in that studio this afternoon or had any contact with the victim. Anybody else, let’s get names and contact info and send them home. What about your broadcasting, did KRED go off the air when Bjorner fell over?”
“We switched to live news.”
Marvia inhaled suddenly. “Oh, no.”
“Yes.” Mbolo was regaining her composure. She actually smiled. “We have our contingency plan. When something breaks we go to all-news. The earthquake in eighty-nine, the fire in ninety-one, Desert Storm, we drop everything and just do news.”
“For how long?”
“We will probably cut back to regular programming at four o’clock. We take a satellite feed from Oceana and run it in real time so we can get back to normal quite easily. Then our local news at five. The news department has its own studio and control upstairs.” She raised her eyes and her fine eyebrows, indicating the direction as clearly as if she’d pointed a finger. “And we can do the evening shows from A.”
“What’s that?”
“Mr. Bjorner was broadcasting from Studio B when he passed out. Studio A is a mirror image at the far end of the control booth. We will just do everything from A until we are cleared to get back into B.” She craned her long neck and shook her head at the smashed door. “We’ll have to get that fixed. Those medics, whoever they were, they broke it down. It’s ruined. Who’s going to pay for it?”
“Those were the emergency medical technicians, Ms. Mbolo. MacPherson told me nobody had a key. Isn’t that odd?”
“Bjorner was—well, let us say, slightly paranoid. No, he was more than slightly paranoid. He always locked the studio from the inside. He had a little locking device. You could only open it from his side. He used to lock himself in, then unlock the device when he was ready to leave.”
Marvia tilted her head. “You can file a claim with the city, Ms. Mbolo. Can you run the station without that room for a while?”
Mbolo looked into the distance. “We can do everything from A until we get back B. Everything that is not from Oceana or from news.”
Marvia turned away. She surveyed the lobby. The crowd had thinned. How many people did it take to run a radio station, anyway? She’d never been inside one before. To her, radio was voices or music coming out of her car speakers or her bedside mini-stereo.
She crooked a finger at another uniform. “Rosetti, I want a quick canvass of the establishments in this block. Talk to the people at that restaurant and the record store and the, whatever the heck it is, the fern place. Divide the job with Officer Ng if you need help. Move.”
Rosetti disappeared and Marvia returned her attention to Sun Mbolo. The woman’s English was flawless but lightly accented and formal.
“Is there someplace where people can go, Ms. Mbolo? The ones who might have some information for us? So they won’t just wander around.”
Sun Mbolo nodded. So tall. Even seated, sitting up straighter now, collecting herself and coming out of her crouch. She might have been a—Marvia felt a flash of inadequacy. She didn’t know the African peoples. How could she do her job at home if—
“There is a conference room. Directly at the head of the stairs.” Sun Mbolo’s words cut off Marvia’s train of thought. She had a rich voice. No wonder she’d succeeded in radio, with that voice and with her clear diction and intriguing accent.
Marvia took control of herself.
“Okay. Listen, you’re being very helpful. See if you can herd your people up there. We’ll want to talk to them soon and then they can leave, too.”
“What of the news staff?”
“Right. You said you were going to switch to a network program at four?”
“Oceana. We are part of the Oceana One World Network. We take network shows from four to six, then back here for the news and our own evening shows.”
“Okay. Send in the news people at four. We’ll try and get them out first, so they can do their work.” She studied Mbolo’s face. “You all right now? You need to lie down or anything?”
Mbolo pushed herself upright, stood at her full height. She wore an African robe and head cloth. All those wonderful dreadlocks were covered up now by the modern executive woman. “I am all right, thank you. I will carry out your instructions, Sergeant.”
Back at Studio B, the evidence technicians were dodging around each other, snapping photos, drawing diagrams, cataloging every item of furniture, every piece of paper and kipple in the room. The fingerprint crew would follow, and the vacuums that would pick up every hair, pebble, and loose fiber.
Marvia surveyed the scene. Bob Bjorner had not moved.
A uniformed officer named Holloway was keeping a harried-looking man in T-shirt and jeans out of the studio. Marvia took charge. “Who are you?”
“I’m Jem Waller.”
“And?”
“I’m chief engineer around here. I have to get in there and see what’s what. We’re running a radio station here, you know?”
Marvia looked into the man’s face. “We’re running a potential crime scene here. There’s a dead man still in that room. You’ll get in when we finish, Mr. Waller.”
The engineer’s eyes popped. He raised a hand and pushed a mop of light brown hair off his forehead. He nodded angrily and strode away.
Even as the technicians went about their work, Marvia studied the victim and the room. Sun Mbolo might think that Bob Bjorner had died of natural causes. It might even be convenient for her to think that, or to pretend that she did so. The coroner would make his determination, but Marvia Plum had seen homicides in her life, and she’d seen natural deaths. And she didn’t believe there was anything natural about Bjorner’s death.
The glasses the fat man had been wearing at the time of death piqued Marvia’s curiosity. She’d spotted them the time she’d peered through the doorway, over the shattered door. Now she could get a closer look. The lenses were extremely thick, and one was cracked. The frames looked like something out of an old file photo. Bjorner wore a white dress shirt and a hand-painted tie that had somehow flopped out from under his body. Like the glasses, it was decades out of style. He wore a pair of brown suit trousers, badly frayed and dirty, and a pair
