white hair did not look as clean now as it had from a distance, but his complexion was still a marked, angry red. Marvia looked more closely at his features. It was hard to be sure, especially with the lurid discoloration of his skin, but she thought he might be African American. With a light complexion to start with, and with the peculiar flush, he might look just this way.
The corners of several sheets of paper protruded from beneath his torso. Marvia made a mental note to be sure the pages were collected as evidence. She looked at them more carefully. She’d expected to see a typewritten script, or at least a set of handwritten notes. The white paper was marked with a pattern of raised dots. Was Bjorner’s eyesight so bad that he used a Braille script?
But the Braille started one-third of the way down each sheet. At the top of each page, written in what looked like dark crayon, was a day and number. MON 1, MON 2, MON 3. Even a person with very poor eyesight would probably be able to assemble the pages in correct order, then read their contents with his trained fingertips.
A tech would inventory the dead man’s pockets and collect his wallet, keys, whatever.
A metal wastebasket beside the desk held several empty food containers of the folded cardboard sort with thin wire handles. One container held a spork, one of those ugly plastic spoon-and-fork mutants, and a crumpled paper napkin.
There was an ashtray near Bob Bjorner’s elbow, and in it several matches, a partially-empty matchbook, and the roach of what appeared to be a marijuana cigarette. The matchbook had a logo on the cover and peculiar, psychedelic lettering in the shape of swirling naked bodies. It said, Club San Remo.
That was intriguing. Marvia had been in the Club San Remo, she knew something of its history, and she wouldn’t expect Bob Bjorner to frequent it. Marvia turned away, bent over the shattered door and found the portable lock that Sun Mbolo had told her Bjorner always used. She signaled an evidence tech and warned the tech to make sure that the lock was collected. Then she walked thoughtfully back to the station’s lobby.
For a moment she was the only person there. She thought about Bob Bjorner, the dead man with the red face and the old-fashioned apparel. He’d been a fat man, a very, very fat man. It might be possible after all that he had died of natural causes. Congestive heart failure, something like that, the kind of disastrous events that grossly overweight people were prone to.
But the red face haunted her. What had MacPherson said? Red as in tomato, red as in danger flag. Something moved and she looked up and saw a leaf floating down through the skylight atop the atrium.
CHAPTER TWO
The yellow crime-scene tapes would stay up outside Studio B until evidence technicians had completed their tasks and the coroner had removed the late Robert Bjorner. Certainly the food containers and the marijuana roach would be tested, possibly at the same time Edgar Bisonte, the Alameda County Coroner, ran his autopsy on Bjorner.
In fact there was no official crime scene—not yet. That would depend on the determination made by the Alameda County Coroner, Edgar Bisonte, M.D. Dr. Bisonte and company could get pretty territorial about making determinations, and it was still possible that the coroner would find that Bjorner had died of natural causes. But Marvia was ready to bet a week’s pay that Bjorner had been poisoned.
She sprinted up gray-carpeted steps to the conference room where KRED staff were assembled. A couple of uniforms followed in her wake, and she instructed them to get the statements of everyone in the room. She felt her heart racing and knew that it was not the exertion of climbing a flight of stairs that made the adrenaline flow. It was the thrill of the hunt, the excitement of her job.
She loved being a cop.
She’d given it up just months before, run off like a hormone-crazed schoolgirl to marry Willie Fergus. Willie had been her mentor years before when Marvia was a military police corporal, halfway around the world and totally at a loss as to what life was about. She and her friends had set out to bed the biggest prizes they could, and Marvia had won the contest, bagging handsome young Lieutenant James Wilkerson.
Bagged him, against all regulations bedded him, and then discovered that she was pregnant.
When Lieutenant Wilkerson heard the news he’d frozen. This could be the end of his army career. His family had money. If Marvia would have a quiet abortion and say nothing about the matter, she would be taken care of.
She’d appealed to Sergeant First Class Fergus, a man twenty years her senior. He’d guided her through the army’s peculiar bureaucratic maze, helped her stand up to the considerable pressure that Lieutenant Wilkerson brought to bear against Corporal Plum. She’d had her baby, and he had his daddy’s name on his birth certificate, and Lieutenant Wilkerson had been married to the baby’s mama when that baby was born, even if Marvia and James had been divorced as soon after that as Wilkerson’s lawyers could move the paperwork.
And then, a dozen years later, Marvia had run into Willie Fergus again. By now, Fergus was retired from the army and a sergeant with the Washoe County, Nevada, Sheriff’s Department. Marvia had been deeply involved with a sweet man named Hobart Lindsey but the relationship was floundering—as much Marvia’s fault as Lindsey’s—and here was Willie Fergus to the rescue, all over again.
In a trance, Marvia had married Fergus, resigned from the Berkeley Police Department and moved to Reno. When she emerged from her bridal daze she realized that she had made a dreadful mistake.
Sun Mbolo sat at the head of a polished conference table, looking as if she were about to call a meeting to order. Marvia caught her eye and signaled to her. Mbolo rose and glided across the room in what seemed like two giant strides. Marvia asked if Mbolo had an office where they could talk. Mbolo nodded, and they walked down a carpeted corridor; Mbolo bowed Marvia into the room, majordomo fashion. She walked around her desk and slid into an executive chair. Marvia closed the office door and seated herself in a cloth-upholstered chair facing the desk. She opened a snap on her equipment belt. Sometimes she felt like Batgirl, she carried so much paraphernalia, but things came in handy.
She set a micro-recorder on the desk between them. “All right if I record our conversation?”
Mbolo said, “Of course,” Then she lapsed into silence, waiting for Marvia to speak.
“You say you had a warning that Mr. Bjorner would be killed if he went on the air?”
“That he would die.”
“Are we mincing words?”
“Sergeant Plum, I am not mincing words.” Mbolo turned her head slowly to one side, then to the other, then faced Marvia again. Was she giving Marvia a hard time on purpose, or was she just that reserved and precise?
“Do you have the warning?”
“I have the fax.” Mbolo reached for a piece of paper on her desk. Marvia gestured her not to touch it. “I have already handled it, Sergeant.” Yes, a smart one.
“Just the same.” Marvia picked up the fax with latex-gloved hands. She spread it on the desk in front of her and leaned over it. The fax was date-and-time stamped by the machine. It had come in at 14:58, two minutes before three o’clock in the afternoon. Time enough for someone to run to Studio B and warn Bob Bjorner. It was scrawled in childish letters. It said, three hours murderer stay quite no speke brethe speke no brethe.
There was no signature.
Marvia looked at Mbolo. “Three hours means three o’clock, do you think?”
