“But you’re the officer in charge of the investigation. That means you’re the guy with all the answers,” Gabe said. “You know you are, Lieutenant. It says so right here on the box.”
Colin told him where to put the box, and how to fold it before he did. Sergeant Sanchez laughed. He could afford to; he wasn’t the officer in charge of the investigation. Neither was Colin Ferguson, or not exactly. Even counting Mrs. Peterfalvy, only seven of the South Bay Strangler’s victims lived in San Atanasio. Other poor harried cops were looking for him all over the region.
But Colin was the man on the spot right now. He walked out to face the wolves. He wished they were wolves. He might have thrown them raw meat. He might have shot them. If all else failed, he might have reasoned with them. Reporters were immune to reason, and there wasn’t enough raw meat in the world to make them happy. Opening fire would have got him talked about.
He strode out onto Mrs. Peterfalvy’s neatly kept front lawn. Sure as hell, the newsies bore down on him like the slavering beasts they were. The TV and radio reporters thrust microphones in his face. He disliked them more than the ones who worked for newspapers. The latter actually had to be able to write. TV people just had to know how to read, and they didn’t even need to be especially good at that.
Video cameramen aimed the tools of their trade at him like so many bazookas. Unlike bazookas, though, video cameras could blow up an unwary man’s reputation. The cameramen watched what they filmed with a certain ironic detachment. Unlike the pretty people they abetted, they actually had to know what they were doing.
Reporters’ manners came straight out of preschool. Four shouted questions at the same time. They didn’t go Me!.. No, me!.. NO, ME! but they might as well have.
Like a playground monitor, Colin held up a hand. “If you all talk at once, I can’t hear any of you,” he said. That made them yell louder. But they started waving their hands, too. Colin pointed to a porky Hispanic guy from what he thought of as Eye-witless News. “Yes, Victor?”
“Is that the South Bay Strangler in there?” Victor asked, neatening his hair with the hand that wasn’t holding the mike.
“No, sir,” Colin answered, his face expressionless. “The victim is Maria Peterfalvy, age seventy-nine.” He spelled the last name. Some of the reporters, as he had reason to know, couldn’t spell their own right more than two times out of three.
Victor stamped his foot on the sidewalk. He pooched out his lower lip like a three-year-old working up to a tantrum. But he did manage to say, “No! What I mean is, did the South Bay Strangler strangle her?”
Then why don’t you say what ean? In Colin’s experience, people who didn’t speak clearly also didn’t think clearly. Then again, if you expected a TV reporter to think clearly, you were much too naive to make a good cop. “We don’t have anything back from the lab, of course,” Colin said. “As a matter of fact, the lab techs aren’t even here. So we can’t be sure yet.”
“But you do think so?” The redhead in the dark green suit couldn’t have finished lower than third runner-up in the Miss California pageant six or eight years earlier. Had they hired her for her reporting skills or for the way she filled out that suit? Colin couldn’t be sure about that, either, but he knew how he’d guess.
He also knew that, if he said no, most of the newsies would leave in a huff. The South Bay Strangler was sexy, especially during a sweeps month. Who cared about some dumb, ordinary murder, though? Poor Lupe Sandoval hadn’t so much as made the news, even though she was just as dead as Mrs. Peterfalvy.
“Everything we see is consistent with what the Strangler does,” the detective said reluctantly. “It could be a copycat case, of course, but that doesn’t seem likely.” Certain details about the Strangler’s M.O. hadn’t reached the media yet. (If they had, one TV station or another would have shouted them to the skies, with a big EXCLUSIVE! label pasted on.)
“How long will you let the Strangler continue his terrorization of women throughout this broad area of Los Angeles County?” another TV reporter demanded, as if it were all Colin’s fault. Colin had been positive that kind of question would come from somebody. It was one of the reasons he’d so looked forward to meeting the press.
“We’re doing everything we can to catch this guy, Dave,” he said. “If you can suggest anything we’ve missed, we’ll listen. Believe me, we will.”
“That’s not my place!” Dave sounded indignant. And well he might-the next idea he had would be his first. He went on, “What you’ve done hasn’t helped Mrs., uh, Peterfalk much, either, has it?”
Colin might have known-hell, had known-he would get the name wrong, and probably wrong like that. “Peterfalvy,” he corrected with cold politeness, and spelled it again. Useless, of course. The only time reporters were shown to be morons was when they came on with nothing to read-during a car chase, for instance. Otherwise, scripts from smarter people disguised their vapidity and foolishness.
“Any sign the Strangler’s slipped up here?” asked Mort Greenbaum, who’d covered the crime beat on the Breeze for about as long as Colin had been a San Atanasio cop. Not quite long enough to have started out in a snap-brim fedora, in other words, but long enough to give the impression that he had.
“Well, like I said before, the lab hasn’t turned the house upside down and inside out yet, so I can’t say for sure,” Colin replied. “Offhand, though, doesn’t look that way.”
“Gotcha.” Mort had a recorder, but he took notes, too, probably to organize his own thoughts. Looking up from the scribbles, he went on, “He’s bound to sooner or later, isn’t he?”
“Lord knows I hope so,” Colin said.
“Or maybe he’ll pick on a little old lady who sleeps with a. 45 under the pillow.”
“Maybe he will,” Colin agreed. “I’m still hoping we catch him, though. We don’t want to have to rely on civilians for do-it-yourself justice.”
“Woudn’t you have a better chance if the San Atanasio Police Department-if all the police departments in the impacted area-weren’t so incompetent?” Dave had finally figured out that Colin had mocked him for screwing up Mrs. Peterfalvy’s name. Cops weren’t supposed to do that to TV personalities: the natural order of things was the other way around. Now, stung, the handsome man in the Hugo Boss suit was trying to get his own back.
The TV news would be a hell of a lot better if you clowns weren’t brain-dead, too. Colin didn’t-quite-come out with it. You couldn’t let them know what you thought of them. And the chief would ream him out if he got into another slanging match with a reporter. Life was too short. A damn shame, but it was.
“I already told you, we’re doing everything we know how to do to go after him. State personnel and the FBI have given us a hand, too,” Colin said. “We expect to succeed.”
“How many more innocent victims will perish before you do?” Dave asked dramatically. He never knew how close he came to becoming one of them.
The coroner and the lab technicians pulled up then. Some of the reporters descended on Dr. Ishikawa for pearls of wisdom. He and the techs hadn’t done anything or viewed the crime scene yet, but that didn’t trouble the Fourth Estate. Other newshounds went after the neighbors for quotes about the late Mrs. Peterfalvy. If the neighbors didn’t tell them she was a nice old lady who never bothered anybody, Colin would learn something new about human nature.
Sergeant Sanchez came up behind Colin. “Boy, that musta been fun,” he said in a low voice.
“Always is,” Colin agreed. “I want a cigarette, and I don’t even smoke. I want a drink, too.”
“I notice you aren’t saying you don’t drink.”
“Good for you, Sherlock! But I don’t. On duty I don’t. Unless I really and truly need one. Or more than one.”
“I’ll never tell,” Sanchez said.
“Somebody will. Or a surveillance camera will catch it. Or something else will go wrong. I don’t need one that bad. Wouldn’t mind writing a ticket for that cocksucker from Channel 2, though.”