You Can’t Stop Me Read online

  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.

  The murders took place back in September, not long after Crime Seen! first aired. When Carmen went to start an electronic file on the case, she noticed one already existed. She opened it and read it quickly: in early October, segment host Shayla Ross had done a cursory study of the case, then abandoned it as a dead end.

  The dirtiest little secret about Crime Seen! was the mandate to choose crimes that had enough threads for their team to follow. Cold cases were avoided, as were crimes where no suspects were on the horizon. TV viewers wanted closure, and soon.

  As Carmen pored over material from the case, she could not shake the feeling that some important detail had been overlooked. Something small and insignificant to Shayla and the investigators, but enough to set off a tiny if mournful alarm in the back of Carmen’s mind, a foghorn on a faraway shore.

  She stopped, rubbed her eyes
, shook her head, then rose, stretched, and walked to the break room for a soda—maybe a little distance would shake something loose. She fished change out of her pocket, got a Diet Coke from the vending machine, and tapped lacquered nails against the lid as she mentally riffled through thousands of bits of information she’d read about the Ferguson murders.

  At the end of his shift, Ray Ferguson had come home in a well-tended Placida neighborhood. Though he didn’t make nearly as much money as the other members of the community, his real-estate agent wife, Stella, did. The Fergusons had two kids, a boy, Jeff, eleven, and a girl, Jessica, fourteen.

  Like Harrow’s wife and son, mother and children had been shot in the chest. Unlike Harrow’s family, each was only shot once. Also unlike her boss’s case, these victims were shot in one room, apparently executed in turn—Harrow’s wife and son with a .357, the Fergusons with a nine millimeter (though in the latter case the efficient assassin had gathered up his shell casings).

  A gruesome touch set the Ferguson killings apart, however—the fourth finger of Stella Ferguson’s left hand had been cut off, post-mortem. Forensics indicated a gardening tool had been used.

  As at the Harrow home, no fingerprints were found, the only piece of evidence (if that) turning up on the Fergusons’ driveway: a leaf from a corn plant. As far as the investigators were concerned, that leaf might have come from anywhere. But Illinois farm kid Carmen discerned a clue.

  Some quick work on the Internet garnered Carmen more—seemed Florida produced more corn than she’d have thought, nearly one hundred thousand acres in all. But compared to the twelve million acres harvested in Harrow’s home state, that wasn’t much….

  And a particular photo at the Placida News website sealed her suspicions—it showed a transparent plastic evidence bag with that single corn plant leaf inside.

  Rural kid Carmen recognized the difference between a sweet corn plant and a field corn plant. Charlotte County, Florida, home to Placida, was on the northern edge of the highest-producing area for sweet corn in Florida. Virtually no field corn was grown in the northern half of the state. The state’s small field corn crop, produced in the southern end, centered on the ocean side, not the gulf.

  Why, in a county that grew exclusively sweet corn, was Carmen looking at the leaf of field-corn plant?

  She couldn’t answer that question yet, but she knew one thing: city kid Shayla, formerly of Boston, would never ask it.

  Carmen needed help, and she knew precisely who to ask. But she would do more than just ask—this was her shot—this was her chance….

  The PA found Harrow, back in his office after lunch, dutifully signing publicity photos. She knocked on the jamb of the open door, then smiled when Harrow looked up.

  “Got a minute, boss?”

  Carmen knew that many TV stars made outrageous demands for their offices, turning them into virtual apartments. Harrow’s was quite the opposite. A glance would make any visitor think Harrow was nothing more than your average corporate attorney. Furnishings were nice enough but not extravagant, bookshelves filled with research material, his desk a mahogany island mid-room, piled with papers that marked this a workplace and not a showplace. Two leather chairs sat opposite him.

  Harrow tossed his Sharpie aside and smiled. “I can spare a minute just to avoid the writer’s cramp.” He nodded to a chair.

  Carmen sat on its edge. “Around the fourth or fifth episode, we were in a production meeting where you mentioned a DCI case you worked involving the specificity of plant DNA.”

  Harrow gave her a sideways look. “That’s not a question.”

  “No. It’s a preamble.”

  Wearing half a frown and half a smile, he said, “Fourth or fifth episode. How do you remember stuff like that?”

  She shrugged. “You never know when ‘stuff’ will come in handy—like today.”

  “Today, huh? What are you up to, today?”

  She told Harrow what she’d found so far. No places, no dates, just the circumstances. She connected no dots, however, between the Ferguson and Harrow murders.

  “So,” he said, softly, eyes tight, “this was Shayla’s story….”

  “Yes, sir. And she thought it was a dead end.”

  “‘Sir,’ yet. I am in trouble.” He shifted in his leather chair. “And you went in on your own, and maybe found something?”

  “I think so, but I need that plant expert you told us about last year to verify my theory.”

  Harrow studied her for a long moment. Carmen might have been a slide under the criminalist’s microscope.

  “Then,” he said, “once you’ve found out you’re right, you’ll hand all the information over to Shayla—correct?”

  Carmen sat silently for a moment. This was her opening, and she knew it.

  “If this pans out,” she said, “I’m hoping you’ll make me the reporter who covers the story.”

  After a long silence, Harrow said, “You know I can’t promise you anything.”

  “If you tell me you’ll try, that’s all I ask.”

  She could tell he was intrigued; but was he also irritated?

  Giving away nothing, he said, “And why do you think this nearly eight-month-old case is so important that it merits you a promotion from PA all the way to on-air personality?”

  “It’s a juicy murder case we can feature on the live show.”

  “We’ve had those before.”

  “Not ones that might be related to your case, as well.”

  And there it was: out in the open.

  She said, “You heard the circumstances. You can see the similarities. And the link back to Iowa, or anyway the heartland, if that plant is what I think it is.”

  Harrow’s eyes held hers. Was he trembling? If so, was it with anger? Had she gone too far?

  He said, “You think that would influence my decision?”

  She stared right back at him. “Frankly, yes.”

  He began to protest, but Carmen cut him off. “J.C., I know you’re not like most people in this business….”

  “And yet,” Harrow said, exasperated, “you’re trying to blackmail me.”

  “I don’t consider it that.” She risked a tiny smile. “Maybe…manipulate you, a little?”

  He just looked at her.

  She gestured, and her nervousness showed. “J.C., you’ve told me a dozen times you believe in my potential. I’m just asking for the chance to prove you right.”

  Was that a smile? Small, barely discernible, but…a smile?

  She sat forward. “Give me the name of the man at that seed company, and I’ll follow the lead wherever it goes. I’ll give you the info, all the info, and you can decide who deserves the story—Shayla or me. Is that blackmail?”

  He considered that, then asked, “Why didn’t you just ask me for the name of my plant guy? Make up a reason, or just not go into what you’d found?”

  “I owed you more than that.”

  Harrow grunted a laugh. “Call Settler Seed in Dekalb, Illinois—your old stamping grounds. The man you want is Dr. Brent Caldwell. Tell him I sent you. See what you can get, and be back here within twenty-four hours.”

  She burned with pleasure, pride, enthusiasm, and outright glee, but remained coolly professional as she said, “Yes, sir.”

  Rising slowly, forcing herself to move deliberately, she eased toward the door.

  The sound of Harrow’s voice stopped her. “Carmen?”

  Turning, she said, “Yes?”

  “The killer cut off Mrs. Ferguson’s finger. My wife didn’t suffer that…indignity.”

  “No.”

  “But her killer did take her wedding ring.”

  “Mrs. Ferguson’s killer did too—he just took the finger along with it.”

  A deep crease formed between Harrow’s eyes. “Why, do you suppose?”

  “If it’s the same killer…and I think it is…he’s devolving.”

  “And if he’s devolving…”

  “He’ll acceler
ate. There’ll be more killings. Soon.”

  He was nodding, slowly. Then he said, “Get back to it.”

  And she did.

  Chapter Six

  Shortly before the special live-broadcast season finale of Crime Seen! went on air, Dennis Byrnes—early forties, close-clipped black hair, languid gray-green eyes, five o’clock shadow, thousand-dollar Armani suit (charcoal)—surveyed his kingdom.

  During a broadcast, the control room was surprisingly silent but for the piped-in studio sounds, even though a dozen technicians hovered over control boards and personal monitors, the audio world sequestered in a booth off at right. The near silence was punctuated by commands from director Stu Phillips, who perched stoically in the center of the back of three tiered rows—the eye of the storm. In his late fifties, Phillips had been at both NBC and CBS, where his fortunes had fallen in favor of younger men, and thanks to the competition’s shortsightedness, UBC had snagged a real pro.

  Byrnes liked to brag that “UBC is a young network, but we don’t put up with ageism,” though he neglected to mention that he could get away with paying older pros like Phillips half, or less, of what the big boys had.

  Behind the director, show-runner Nicole Strickland leaned against the back window wall, her arms folded, her mouth a tight, thin, straight line. The slenderly shapely, striking woman’s tousled red hair vied for attention with her green eyes. This evening she wore a sharply cut, cream-colored Dolce & Gabbana suit with matching Jimmy Choos. Byrnes relished having a beautiful woman as his hatchet man.

  Also against the back wall, in the center where an aisle cut down the three tiers of techs, stood Byrnes himself, with a perfect view of the large plasma screen (labeled: PROGRAM) above the bank of similar oversized monitors, whose screens were sectioned into eight windows reporting individual camera shots, remote feeds, and cued-up prerecorded material. The PROGRAM flat-screen reflected the finished product going out over the airwaves.

  Crime Seen! had saved two very juicy cases for the finale, and Byrnes would be shocked if this were not the highest-rated episode of the season. He watched with half-lidded eyes as Carlos Moreno demonstrated that two young girls had not been kidnapped, as their mother had reported, but were murdered by her and buried on a piece of farmland owned by the mother’s parents. Footage of her arrest—not seven hours before—was the capper.