As we climbed the steps to the new opera house, we were caught in a stream of high-scho
ol students--a band or music class--led by a woman talking excitedly about the production to come. I knew why the police hadn't issued a warning and yet...well, I couldn't shake the urge to grab that teacher and tell her to get the kids out of here, get as far away as they could.
The truth was, as cruel as it seemed by not letting people know of the threat, the police were doing their best to end that threat...for everyone else. This was their first chance--an excellent chance--of catching the Helter Skelter killer.
If they'd refused to play along and canceled the show, any criminal psychologist could predict the killer's next move. Ruin his game, and he'd do something worse, as payback. Here, they could monitor every variable and ensure the guests' safety.
Once inside the doors, we found ourselves funneled into a line through a portable metal detector and a wand-wielding guard.
"My bag?" sniffed a matron at the front. "No, you may not paw through my bag, young man."
The queue ground to a halt.
"Oh, come on," I muttered. "They're not worried about the flask you stuffed in there."
Jack craned his neck to see around the mob. After a moment, a guard took the woman and her party aside to let others pass though.
"Unbelievable," huffed a diamond-dripping woman about my age. "It's opera, not a rap concert."
"There's a whole industry getting rich off this terrorism nonsense," said the gray-haired man at her side. "Did I tell you what happened on my flight to Tokyo last week? They body-searched first-class passengers. First-class! As if any of us..."
He continued to bitch about the injustices visited on the upper classes, but I turned my attention to mentally reexamining Quinn's blueprints of the opera house. One front entrance, one staff entrance, one delivery door and three fire exits. Easy to guard and, according to Quinn, guarded they were, with no one allowed in or out any way but the front door tonight.
According to Quinn's source, even staff had needed to pass through those main doors earlier, with the metal detectors and bag search. That would likely be the ruse the killer would use--pretending to work here. With a new business, employees would still be accustomed to seeing unfamiliar faces and wouldn't question one more. If that was his plan, he'd have found himself out of luck. There had been a manager at the door, ticking off names, and if a new or replacement worker showed up, the Feds had turned him away.
We made it through security without incident. We weren't armed. Too risky. The Feds would probably have wand-waving agents inside, too. Not having a gun made me uneasy, but I knew the killer wouldn't have risked bringing one in, either. He wouldn't need to. A real pro doesn't need a traditional weapon to do his job.
Once inside, we veered left. Quinn said the Feds were setting up base in a storage room behind the bar, so that's where I wanted to go first. Get an insider's feel for security precautions, and we'd see where the holes were.
It took some wrangling, but we found a spot where we could, with the help of listening devices provided by Felix, hear what was going on in the FBI's control room. We arrived just as they received a call from the front door, about a woman refusing to let them search or scan her evening bag. It could have been the same woman we'd seen, but I suspected they'd been dealing with similar complaints all night.
"I don't care if she's the wife of the goddamned president," a man boomed. "No one gets in without a search and if you can't handle that, then find someone who can." He signed off. "Fucking unbelievable. Old bats thinking we're going to swipe twenty bucks from their handbags, delivery men too lazy to carry boxes to the front door, but if something goes wrong, they'll be the first to raise a stink, calling the papers to complain that we weren't doing our jobs."
"Nothing's going to go wrong, Marty. A woman couldn't get groped in here without us knowing about it."
"Yeah, but if she does, I'll have ten deadweight rookies in here asking me what they should do about it, while that fucker has free run of the building."
The door creaked open.
"What the hell are you two doing back--?" the first man boomed.
"There's been a seat mix-up," a woman said. "An elderly couple is in ours--"
"Then tell them to move!"
The women continued in the same calm voice. "The usher feels it would be less intrusive if we took the seats beside them--"
"I told you where to sit! We picked out the sight lines to cover every--"
"We've checked the sight lines and they'd be the same."
"I don't care. You sit where I assigned you, and if there's someone there, then you move them. Why the hell you couldn't figure that out without bothering me--"
"Because you asked to be apprised--personally apprised--of all complications."
"This isn't a complication, Chin. It's ass-wiping, and you can damned well do your own."
The door clicked shut. I looked over to see a young couple in formal wear heading back to the foyer.