Euterpe, daughter of Zeus, one of the nine muses. She was, of course, the muse of music, pictured often in a robe and carrying a flute or pan pipes, a handsome face, an intelligent face, as befit the offspring of a god.
He drove around, a half-dozen blocks, until he was positive no one followed.
With his muse in mind, another thought occurred. Stefan, a distracted boy in school, had nonetheless liked mythology. He recalled that Zeus had fathered other children too, and one was Artemis, the goddess of the hunt. He couldn’t remember who her mother might be, but she was different from Euterpe’s; they were half sisters.
But that didn’t mean the women were in harmony. Oh, not at all. In fact, now just the opposite. They were enemies.
Euterpe, guiding Stefan to Harmony.
Artemis—in the form of the red-haired policewoman—trying to stop them both.
But you won’t, he thought.
And as he drove he forced away a budding Black Scream and concentrated on his next composition. He had a good piece of music in mind for his next hangman’s waltz. Now all he needed was another victim, to provide the perfect bass line, in three-quarter time.
Chapter 8
Sachs finished walking the grid and stood back to examine the scene.
The gallows was a jerry-rigged arrangement—the noose affixed to a broom handle jammed into a gap in the cinder blocks of the uranium factory wall. The wooden-box base, which Robert Ellis had been forced to stand on, was old, marked with military stencils—indecipherable numbers and letters—in faded olive-drab paint on the sides. By the time Sachs had inadvertently tackled him, he’d reported, he wasn’t sure he could have stayed upright more than five minutes. He was already growing light-headed from the effort.
She walked outside, where the evidence techs were finishing up with chain-of-custody cards. There wasn’t much to document; the fire’d worked real well.
She asked Robert Ellis, “You talk to Sabrina?”
“No. I haven’t heard back. The time. I don’t know the time in Japan.” He was still bleary. The medics had pronounced him largely uninjured, as he himself had assured Sachs, but the drugs and presumably the tightened noose around his neck—to elicit gasps for the recording—had muddled his thoughts.
With disbelief in his voice Ellis said, “He kept doing it—three times or four maybe.”
“Doing what?”
“Pulling the noose, recording me choking. I heard him play it back, over and over. As if the sounds I was making weren’t what he wanted. He was like a musical conductor, you know. Like he could hear in his mind the sound he wanted but he wasn’t getting it. He was so calculating, so cold about it.”
“Did he say anything?”
“Not to me. He talked to himself. Just rambling. I couldn’t hear most of it. I heard him say ‘music’ and ‘harmony’ and just weird stuff. I can’t really remember exactly. I feel pretty spacey. Nothing made sense. ‘Listen, listen, listen. Ah, there it is. Beautiful.’ He seemed to be talking to some, I don’t know, imaginary person.”
“No one else was there?”
“I couldn’t see—you know, the blindfold. But it was just the two of us, I’m sure. I would’ve heard.”
What are you up to? she wondered to the Composer—it was the name they had selected for the unsub, Rhyme had told her. It seemed to fit a complex, sinister perp better than today’s date.
“Still no thoughts on why he went after you?”
“I don’t have any enemies, no exes. I’ve been with my girlfriend for years. I’m not rich, she’s not rich.”
Her phone buzzed. It was the officer who’d driven around the perimeter of the plant and found the witness—a boy—who reported that the Composer was fleeing. She had a brief conversation.
After disconnecting, she closed her eyes and sighed.
She called Rhyme.
“Sachs, where are you?”
“I’m almost on my way.”
“Almost. Why almost?”
“The scene’s done. I’m just getting the vic’s statement.”
“Somebody else can do that. I need the evidence.”
“There’s something you should know.”
He must’ve heard the concern in her tone. Slowly he said, “Go on.”
“One of the respondings was looking for more witnesses near where the unsub escaped. Didn’t find anyone. But she did spot a plastic bag he must’ve dropped while he was running. Inside were two more miniature nooses. Looks like he’s just getting started.”
Rhyme’s eyes scanned the treasures Sachs and the evidence collection techs had brought back.
The ECs left, one of them saying something to Rhyme. A joke. A farewell. A comment about the weather or the cleanliness of the Hewlett-Packard gas chromatograph. Who knew, who cared? He wasn’t paying attention. His nose detected the whiff of burned plastic and hot metal—radiating from the destroyed evidence.
Or the evidence the perp had tried to destroy. In fact, water is a far more efficient contaminant than fire, though flames do remove DNA and fingerprints pretty damn well.
Oh, Mr. Composer, you tried. But let’s see how successful you were.
Fred Dellray was gone. He’d been summoned to Federal Plaza unexpectedly—a confidential informant had reported an impending assassination of a U.S. attorney involved in a major drug prosecution.
Rhyme had complained: “Impending versus actual, Fred? Come on. Our vic has been one hundred percent certified snatched.”
“Orders’re orders,” the agent had replied as he left.
And then, insult to injury, Dellray had just called back saying that it was a false alarm. He could get back within the hour.
“Fine, fine, fine.”
Lon Sellitto was still here, presently canvassing law enforcement agencies around the country to see if there were any echoes of the Composer’s MO.
None, so far.
Not that Rhyme cared about that.
Evidence. That’s what he wanted.
So they began poring over what had been collected at the factory.
Here, a single Converse Con shoe print. Ten and a half.
Here, two short pale hairs that seemed identical to the one found on Ellis’s cell phone.
Here, four slivers of shiny paper—photo stock, it looked like.
Here, a burned T-shirt, probably the “broom” used to obliterate marks on the floor and wipe fingerprints.
Here, gone almost completely, the dark baseball cap he’d worn. No hair, no sweat.
Here, plastic globs and metal parts—his musical keyboard and an LED light.
Here, a Baggie, one-gallon, containing two more miniature nooses, probably made of cello strings. No fingerprints. Not helpful in any way, except to tell them that he had more victims in mind.
No phone, no computer—those devices we so dearly love…and that betray us and our secrets so nonchalantly.
Though he’d swept, Sachs had collected plenty of dust and splinters of wood, and bits of concrete from the floor around the gallows room. The GC/MS rumbled for some time, again and again burning up samples. The results revealed traces of tobacco, as well as cocaine, heroin and pseudoephedrine—the ingredient in decongestants that was present here because of its second utility: making methamphetamine.