LITMIR.BIZ

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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 of scuffed wing-tips.

      His 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

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