LITMIR.BIZ

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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 of a heart attack causing that.”

      “Well, a stroke then. Whatever it was, we shall make the proper gesture, perhaps put on a memorial service for him, 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

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