She continued on, the six cylinders exhaling fiercely.
The other cars were directly behind her.
In less than a minute she was at the building that was burning. There was no indication of fire in the front; the smoke was billowing from the back, though it would also be filling the interior, which Sachs and the others now had to hurry through, if they wanted to save the victim.
They had no masks or oxygen but Sachs hardly thought about that. She grabbed a Maglite from the purloined car. Drawing her Glock, she nodded to two other officers--one a short, handsome Latino man, the other a blond woman, hair in a severe ponytail.
"We can't wait. You two, with me. We go in, smoke or no."
"Sure, Detective." The woman nodded.
Sachs, the de facto commander, turned to the others. "Alonzo and Wilkes're going up the middle with me. I want three of you around back, flanking the unsub. And somebody take wheels and circle the perimeter. He can't've gotten very far. Any vehicle, anybody, assume it's hostile."
The others left.
The blond officer, Wilkes, covered Alonzo and Sachs as they shouldered their way through the door--thank God, unlocked. She dropped to a crouch inside, sweeping with light and muzzle. Wilkes followed.
It occurred to her just as she breached the portal that the perp was probably certifiably crazy and might have decided to hang around and kill some blue, in a suicidal fit.
But no gunshots.
Listening.
No sounds.
Was Ellis dead? If so, she hoped he'd died from the hanging, not the flames.
The three now started jogging through the corridor, Sachs trying to stay oriented and keeping in mind--in general--where the smoke had been coming from. The factory was decrepit and it stank of mold. Near the entrance, the walls were decorated with graffiti, and there was a collection of used condoms, spent matches, needles and cigarette butts on the floor. Not a lot, though, and Sachs supposed that even the most desperate johns and addicts knew what a toxic-waste Superfund site was and that there were healthier places to shoot up or get a blow job.
Signs above or beside the doors: Machine Operations. Fissile Research. Radiation Badge Testing Center--Do Not Pass Checkpoint B Without Test.
"Funny, Detective," the man beside her said, gasping from the jog.
"What's that, Alonzo?"
"No smoke here."
True. Odd.
The black column had been quite thick, rising into the sky from a source very close. But there was no smoke directly around them.
Hell, she thought. This was a facility that had fabricated radioactive materials. Maybe at the end of this corridor they would find a thick, and impenetrable, security door, keeping the smoke out--but barring their way, as well.
They came to an L in the hallway, and paused at the juncture but only for a moment. Sachs crouched and went low, sweeping her gun forward.
Wilkes covered her again, with Alonzo going wide.
Nothing but emptiness.
Her radio crackled. "Patrol Four Eight Seven Eight. Gap in the fence in the back, K. A local outside said he saw white male, heavyset, beard, exit five minutes ago, running. Bag or backpack. Didn't see where he went or if he had wheels."
"K," Sachs whispered. "Call it in to the local precinct and ESU. Anyone in the back of the building? Source of fire?"
No one answered. But another officer radioed that the fire department had just arrived and were through the chain link.
Sachs and her colleagues continued up the dogleg of a corridor. Keep going, keep going, she told herself, breathing hard.
They were almost to the back of the wing. Ahead of them was a door. It wasn't as intimidating or impenetrable as she'd expected: just a standard wooden one and actually slightly ajar. Yet still there was no smoke, which meant there had to be another room, on the other side of this portal, sealed up, where the victim would be.
Sprinting now, Sachs ran through the doorway, pushing forward fast to find the chamber that was in flames.
And, with a breathtaking thud, she slammed directly into Robert Ellis, knocking him off the wooden box. He screamed in terror.
"Jesus Lord," she cried. Then to her backup: "In here, fast!"
She clutched Ellis around the waist and lifted hard to keep the pressure of the noose off his neck. Damn, he was heavy.
While Wilkes covered them once more--there was no certainty that the fleeing man was the perp or, if he was, that he was operating alone--Sachs and the other officer lifted Ellis up; Alonzo worked the noose off and pulled the blindfold from his eyes, which scanned the room frantically, like a terrified animal's.
Ellis was choking and sobbing. "Thank you, thank you! God, I was going to die!"
She looked around her. No fire. Here or in an adjacent room. What the hell was going on?
"You wounded, hurt?" She helped him ease to the floor.
"He was going to hang me! Christ. Who is he?" His voice was groggy.
She repeated the question.
"I don't know. Not bad, I guess. My throat hurts. He dragged me around with a fucking noose around my neck. But I'm all right."
"Do you know where he went?"
"No. I couldn't see. He was in the other room, I think. That's what it sounded like. I was blindfolded most of the time."
Her radio clattered. "Portable Seven Three Eight One. Detective Sachs, K?" A woman's voice.
"Go ahead."
"We're in the back of the building. The fire's here. It's in an oil drum. Looks like he set it to burn up the evidence. Electronic stuff, papers, cloth. Gone."
Pulling on gloves, Sachs removed the duct tape binding Ellis's hands and feet. "Can you walk, Mr. Ellis? I want to clear the room here and search it."
"Yeah, sure." He was unsteady, his legs not working right, but together she and Alonzo helped him outside the building to the empty lot where the fire had been extinguished.
She glanced into the drum. Shit. The clues were ash, scorched metal and plastic globs. So this perp, the Composer, might be insane but he'd had the foresight to try to destroy the evidence.
Madness and brilliance were a very bad combination in a suspect.
She sat Ellis down on what looked like a large spool for cable. Two med techs turned the corner and she waved them over.
With bewildered eyes, Ellis scanned the scene, which seemed like a set of a bad dystopian movie. He asked, "Detective?"
"Yes?"
Muttering, Ellis said, "I was just walking down the street and next thing I knew he had this thing over my head and I was passing out. What does he want? Is he a terrorist? ISIS or something?"
"I wish I could tell you, Mr. Ellis. Fact is, we have no idea."
Chapter 7
He sweated.
Palms, scalp, his hair-coated chest.
Damp, despite the autumn chill.
Moving fast, partly to keep from being seen.
Partly because the harmony of his world had been shaken. Like kicking a spinning top.
Like hitting the wrong notes, like losing the perfect rhythm of a metronome.
Stefan was walking down a street in Queens. Manic. Armpits prickling, scalp itching. The sweat ran and ran. He'd just left the transient hotel he'd been living, well, hiding, in, after slipping out of the horrible, silent world where he'd been for years.
He now carted a wheelie suitcase and a computer bag. Not all his possessions, of course. But enough for now. He'd learned that, while the kidnapping had made the press, no one seemed to connect him personally to it or to composing a tune that had a very impressive if unsettling rhythm section.
His muse...She was looking out for him from Olympus, yes. But still the police had come close.
So close!
That red-haired police woman he'd seen on the webcam. If he hadn't set the thing up or if he'd missed the tone it uttered announcing their presence, he might have been captured by them and Harmony would be forever denied him.
Head down, walking quickl
y, fighting off a Black Scream--as he felt discord prickle his skin.
No...
He controlled it, barely.
Stefan could not help but think of the music of the spheres...
This philosophical concept moved him to his core. It was a belief that everything in the universe--planets, the sun, comets, other stars--gave off energy in the form of audible tones.
Musica mundanus, the ancients had called it.
Similar was Musica humana, the tones created within the human body.
And finally there was Musica instrumentis. Actual music played on instruments and sung.
When these tones--whether planets, the human heart, a cello performance--were in harmony, all was good. Life, love, relationships, devotion to the god of your choosing.
When the proportions were off, the cacophony was ruinous.
Now the spheres were tottering, and his chance of salvation, of rising into the state of Harmony, pure Harmony, was in jeopardy.
Stifling an urge to cry, Stefan dug into his jacket pocket and pulled a paper towel out. He mopped his face, his neck, and shoved the damp wad away.
Looking around. No eyes focused on him. No red-haired policewomen moving toward him, in four-four march time.
But that didn't mean he was safe. He circled the block twice, on foot, and stopped in the shadows near the stolen car. Finally, he could stand it no longer. He had to get away. He had to be safe.
Pausing at the car, another look around, then he set his suitcase in the backseat and the computer bag on the passenger's side in the front. He climbed in and started the engine.
The grind, the cough, the purr of cylinders.
He pulled slowly into traffic.
No one followed; no one stopped him.
He thought to Her: I'm sorry. I'll be more careful. I will.
He had to keep Her happy, pleased with him, of course. He couldn't afford to offend Euterpe. She was the one guiding him on his journey to Harmony, which, according to the music of the spheres, corresponded to Heaven, the most exalted state one could exist in. Christ had his stations of the cross, on his journey. Stefan had his too.
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.
Sachs said, "Not a lot of traffic but the place had its crack-house attractions."
One find, more or less intact, was a scrap of paper:
CASH T
EXCHA
CONVER
TRANSAC
"Wheel of Fortune," Mel Cooper said.
"What's that?"
Nobody replied to Rhyme's question, as they all tried to complete the words, Thom too. Nothing, so they moved on.
The remains of the musical keyboard, presumably the one on which the Composer had recorded his eerie composition, contained a serial number. Sellitto called the manufacturer but the company, in Massachusetts, was presently closed. He'd check again in the morning, though the Composer had been so careful about so many aspects of the kidnapping that he'd surely bought the Casio with cash.
No fingerprints on it. Or anything else.
The noose that had been used to try to murder Robert Ellis was made of two gut instrument strings tied together in a carrick bend knot. This was a common knot, Rhyme knew; knowing how to tie it did not suggest any special nautical or other professional background.