LITMIR.BIZ

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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?”

      Mbolo raised thin, elegant shoulders in her African costume. “One would so infer.”

      “And the rest? ‘Stay quite no speke brethe speke no brethe.’ What did you think that means?”

      “Am I asked to interpret?”

      “Ms. Mbolo, I’m asking for your cooperation.”

      “In the name of sisterhood?”

      “In the name of the law.” Marvia clenched her jaw and inhaled deeply. “A man is dead, and the circumstances are highly suspicious. Your people told us that a death threat had been received, and I assume that this is it. But I’m not supposed to assume anything, so I ask you again, Is this the threat, and if it is, what do you think it means?”

      “Aside from the poor spelling and lack of punctuation?” Mbolo’s accent was not the musical sound of a native Swahili speaker or the almost Caribbean lilt of Africa’s West Coast; it sounded Middle Eastern, nearly Arabic.

      “I think it means, ‘Stay quiet. Do not speak and you will breathe. Speak and you will not breathe.’ That is what I think it means, Sergeant.”

      Marvia exhaled. She studied the white sheet and its scrawled message. She looked at Mbolo’s face, looked into her dark eyes. “This fax doesn’t have a source code on it. Do you have any idea where it could have been sent from?”

      “None.”

      That was bad news. PacTel sometimes cooperated voluntarily, sometimes under threat of subpoena, but they were only good at tracing outgoing calls. Incoming calls were a much harder nut to crack.

      “It could even have come from within the building. There are several fax machines. In the mail room, in the newsroom, in the business office.”

      Marvia made a note to have the techs check all the wastebaskets in the building, especially the ones near fax machines. Just in case the sender had crumpled up his original when he finished transmitting it and tossed it in the nearest receptacle. A very long shot.

      Certainly the fax itself was worth keeping. It might be possible to get a handwriting match, although that seemed unlikely, too. The scrawl had the looping, uncontrolled look of a right-handed person writing left-handed to disguise his or her usual penmanship. Or of a lefty writing right-handed.

      The odd usage and spelling suggested a person with little or no education. Or one who was seriously challenged. Or didn’t have much English.

      Or someone trying to simulate one of those categories.

      This was a damned mess.

      But the case was barely under way. There was a body, there were physical clues, there were plenty of possible perps. Not so bad for starters.

      “You told me downstairs that you were not a friend of Mr. Bjorner’s, and that you weren’t sorry to see him dead.” Marvia waited for Mbolo to comment on that, but she didn’t, so Marvia prompted. “Would you like to elaborate on your statement?”

      “Am I being interrogated?”

      “I’m just looking for information.”

      “Do you not have to read me my rights?”

      “Do you want me to?”

      Mbolo was silent again. Marvia knew the use of silence in question-and-answer sessions. With a lot of people it was a good tool. You just wait, and they get uncomfortable, and they decide to fill in the silence with words. Sometimes with important words.

      But Sun Mbolo just sat in her executive chair.

      Marvia waited.

      Mbolo waited.

      Finally Mbolo said, “I was interrogated by the Dirgue. I am not afraid of questioning, believe me.”

      Marvia waited.

      “The Dirgue were the Communist secret police in my country. Ethiopia. Mengistu’s people. When you have been questioned by them, nothing else is frightening.” Mbolo smiled thinly. Marvia could see the shape of the bones inside her flesh, the

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