“There is an app for that.” Raley picked up. Across the room at his squatter
’s desk, Rook overheard and came to join them as the media king briefed Heat.
“There’s not only an actual app, but we found a slew of consumer software out
there for altering voices. All you need is a laptop to change how you sound.”
His partner continued, “You can do the Darth Vader like our man, or girls can sound
like old ladies, or men can pretend to be women…”
Rook jumped in. “That’s why I always say…”
“ ‘Check the Adam’s apples,’ ” said Roach in a singsong chorus.
Heat stayed on task. “So this is all widely available?”
“Maybe not as much as skate wheels and string,” said Raley, “but close. Plus a
hobbyist could probably go to his neighborhood Radio Shack and find all he needed to
build his own electronic voice box.”
“Then we start calling Radio Shacks.” As Nikki said it, she knew—and they knew—
it could be tail chasing. The kind of thing she’d put Sharon Hinesburg on. “We
have to take every shot.”
They split off to work it, and she called after them, “And ask Detective Rhymer to
reach out to the app vendors.” To Heat’s irritation, Rook stayed put. “A little
busy,” she said, picking up a report.
“Well, when are we going to talk about this? And you know the ‘this’ I mean.”
She gestured to the bull pen with the file. “I doubt the Homicide Squad Room is the
optimal place to talk about your romp in the South of France with an old flame.”
“No, the Homicide Squad Room is perfect. Because this is murder for me.”
“Very glib, Pulitzer Man. We’ll definitely talk. But I have enough distraction to
deal with right now, and two murders to work.”
“Make it three.” They turned to Detective Feller as he made his way over from his
desk. “Can’t be sure it’s your boy’s doing, but another one just turned up.”
And just like that, another ball got juggled up in the air.
In the category of extended-stay, hybrid hotel-apartments, the HMS pressed the
envelope. The über-hip HMS, acronym for Home Meet Stay, catered more to the actor in
town for a movie shoot than the road warrior looking for a plexi cylinder of
Cheerios at a breakfast bar. On the way through the dour, mood-lit lobby, Detectives
Heat and Feller had to pause while Rook got snagged by an Irish rock legend who was
camping there while he scored a Broadway musical. Rook freed himself with a vague
promise of cocktails sometime, and they moved on to the crime scene upstairs.
A pair of uniforms stood a little taller when Heat got off the elevator on nine and
walked the herringbone carpet toward their posts at an open door. Camera flashes
from inside popped against their backs, briefly printing their shadows on the
opposite wall.
“African-American male, age sixty to sixty-five,” recited the medical examiner on
their arrival in the bedroom of the suite. “Photo ID on the deceased indicates he
is one Douglas Earl Sandmann.” The top mattress had been pushed aside, and Heat and
the other two had to move around the bed for a look at the victim, whose body
reclined faceup on the box spring.
Feller asked, “Isn’t this the exterminator dude from those TV commercials?”
“Oh, my God, it’s Bedbug Doug,” said Rook, who then recited the deceased’s
catchphrase, “ ‘We squash the competition!’ ”
“Easy, Rook, we get who he is.” Nikki turned to her friend Lauren Parry, whom she
had been seeing too much of lately for the wrong reasons. “What about COD?”
“Prelim cause of death is asphyxia. But not strangled like Maxine Berkowitz. Mr.
Sandmann was suffocated by a mattress.”
“Ironic on so many levels,” said Rook. “But mainly because Bedbug Doug was killed
with a bed.”
Heat forgave his irreverence because Rook had made a point. “Just like the
restaurant inspector being killed by a pizza oven and a Channel 3 reporter getting
strangled by a TV cable.”