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half a dozen states. No small feat in only twenty-one airings since last August.
    Two wife beaters, three armed robbers, four burglars, two scam artists, two serial drunk drivers, and three murderers had been apprehended thanks to Crime Seen! The show was moving from hit series to national phenomenon, and now—with two weeks to go before the season finale (airing live as a ratings grabber)—everyone was busting their butt, following the example of their boss.
    J.C. Harrow was not your typical celebrity host. Coming up on six years ago, the former Iowa sheriff turned criminalist had become a tragic American hero when—on the very day he saved the life of the President—his wife and teenage son were brutally murdered. The case made national headlines when the criminalist, briefly a suspect, launched his own investigation into the deaths of his family.
    Even though the killer’s trail went cold, Harrow’s search for his family’s murderer continued to fascinate the public, generating an acclaim that led to UBC approaching him to host Crime Seen! At fifty, Harrow possessed the charisma and rugged good looks of a natural TV star with his piercing blue eyes and a wavy shock of dark brown hair just now going gray at the temples.
    Being on prime-time television kept his family’s case alive, but through the first twenty-one episodes of Crime Seen! , Harrow had not once mentioned the tragedy on air. Instead, he and the show’s staff had tracked down other felons, often with Harrow there to capture their arrests on camera. To UBC, it was reality show heaven.
    As for Harrow, well, Carmen couldn’t exactly say what he was getting out of it.
    She cleared a small space for her morning’s monster latte, turned on the computer, and shifted the piles of paper as the machine booted up. As usual, show-runner Nicole Strickland had funneled all the fan mail to production assistant Carmen, whose inbox was jammed.
    The e-mails ran the gamut from “love the show,” to “hate the show,” from “screw Harrow,” to “I want to screw Harrow.” Suggestions how to make the show better ranged from showcasing more sexually oriented crimes to actually gunning down suspects on air. Some wanted signed pictures from Harrow or a segment host, of whom there were four: Angela Batten, Steven Wall, Carlos Moreno, and Shayla Ross.
    Naturally, each host had his or her own strengths and weaknesses, though Carmen felt the only advantage they had over her was experience. True, former network White House correspondent Moreno brought an undeniable gravitas to each story, but the others were local news veterans plucked from obscurity more for their looks and camera ease than any journalistic chops.
    For the next four hours, Carmen dealt with the e-mails until yet another paper pile had grown, this one outgoing mail, mostly cheap black-and-white photo reprints of on-air personalities with stamped autographs. Requests for Harrow’s pictures made up a considerable pile of their own.
    Those requests went to Harrow’s desk, where he actually signed each photo and often enclosed a note himself. Whether two requests or two hundred, each day their star personally dealt with his own fan mail. She liked that about him.
    With a Diet Coke and a salad a co-worker brought her from the commissary, the production assistant worked through lunch. She was back on the Internet doing research into various crimes around the country when something about a small town in Florida caught her eye.
    The wife and two kids of the town marshal of Placida had been murdered.
    Everybody on the staff looked sideways when the family of a cop got killed—their relationship with Harrow made that natural. But, as they’d all learned over the past six months, these types of crimes, while uncommon, were not unheard of.
    Still, for the next hour, she dug into everything she could find about Placida, Florida, and the crime. She printed dozens of documents, gathered them into another