'It really is then?' he asked.
'Yes.'
Drummond began to nod rapidly. 'He was going to take her away, see,' he said. 'For good. That's why he had to die.'
'I understand.'
Drummond turned slowly toward the stereo cabinet behind him, touched the play button.
Christa-Marie seemed to return to the moment. She began to play a new piece, plucking one of the strings — the same note, twelve times.
'What is Danse Macabre without the chorus?' Drummond asked. He turned up the sound.
A moment later, beneath the resonance of Christa-Marie's cello, was a mix of sounds — street sounds, sirens. Beneath it all a chorus began to sing:
Zig, zig, zig, Death in cadence,
Striking a tomb with his heel,
Death at midnight plays a dance-tune, Zig, zig, zag, on his violin.
But somehow the loudest part of this new background was the sound of a baby cooing.
'The dead own the world tonight,' he said. 'Listen to them. I've been collecting their voices for years.' 11:56.
The voices began to grow in volume. Screams, shrieks of terror, death wails.
'Look,' Jessica said. She circled to her left. She had to get into the kitchen. 'My gun is down, Michael. I can't hurt you. The doctor is dead. Let the girl go. We'll talk.'
'It's not about me. It's never been about me.' Drummond began to sweat. He waved the razor around, bringing it perilously close to Lucy's face. The chorus of screams grew in the background. Christa-Marie's playing increased in volume.
The lady, it's said, is a marchioness or baroness
And her green gallant, a poor cartwright.
Horror! Look how she gives herself to him,
Like the rustic was a baron.
'She gave herself to him,' Drummond said, pointing at the body on the floor. 'She doesn't have long, you see. It had to be done.'
'Who doesn't have long?'
'Teacher. She's dying. That's why I had to write faster.'
Drummond took one step backward, into the kitchen, dragging Lucy with him. 'Listen to them all,' he said. 'Can you hear?'
'I hear, Michael.' 11:58.
Jessica moved forward.
'What about Gabriel Thorne?' she asked, gesturing to the body on the kitchen floor. 'Christa-Marie didn't kill him, did she? It was you, wasn't it? You and Joseph Novak?'
'Thorne was in love with her. He manipulated her.' Drummond shook his head, his eyes filling with tears. 'Joseph was weak. He was always weak.'
'But you let Christa-Marie take the fall.'
Tears ran down his cheeks. 'I've had to live with that for twenty years.'
Drummond backed to the center of the kitchen as Danse Macabre neared its final glorious section.
From somewhere beneath the cacophony came a man's voice: 'Michael.'
Inside, where the music lives, in that gilded hall, i watch and wait. Teacher knows what I must do.
There is one note left to play.
One final note.
At the sound of the man's voice everything slowed. Drummond held Lucy even more closely. Slowly, he lifted the straight razor to his own forehead and drew it swiftly across. Bright crimson blood washed his face, spilling onto Lucy.
Again, from somewhere: 'Michael.'
Drummond hesitated for a moment, his head cocked to the sound. 'Dr. Thorne?'
One more note.
One more voice.
Drummond looked at Christa-Marie, playing furiously in the music room.
They push forward, they fly; the cock has crowed.
Oh what a beautiful night for the poor world!
Midnight.
Michael Drummond lifted the razor high into the air. He pulled back Lucy's hair, exposing the white of her throat.
'Teacher…' he said.
As he brought the razor down Jessica saw the body on the floor move.
It was not David Albrecht.
Detective Kevin Byrne rolled to his right, raised his Glock 17 and fired, slamming a single bullet into Drummond's head, just above the man's right eye. Thick gobbets of bone and brain tissue burst from the back of Drummond's skull, onto the white-tiled wall.
Drummond collapsed face down onto the counter, onto the band of cloud-white paper, his bloodied face painting the sheet in a grotesque parody of a musical staff. His body slumped to the floor.
Jessica looked into the kitchen, the sounds of the discharged weapon ringing in her ears. As she stepped into the corner of the music room, and embraced Lucy Doucette, she met Byrne's gaze. He was covered with blood, not his own. He had been lying in wait. He looked at her, but his eyes saw something else, perhaps something that had happened in this room a long time ago, something that had just now come to a close.
The Echo Man was dead, his symphony now complete.
Chapter 101
For the second time this night, the Philadelphia Police Department processed a crime scene at this address. Dozens of personnel moved like silent ghosts through the now brightly illuminated spaces.
Outside, Jessica and Byrne stepped into the shadows. When they were alone, out of earshot, she turned to him, her anger at being left out of the loop seething within her. 'You've got about five fucking seconds to start explaining all this.' 'I know you're upset.'
'I'm way past upset,' Jessica said. 'When did you set all this up? Yesterday?'
'No,' Byrne said. 'Bullshit.'
She paced. Byrne gave her time.
'Jess, trust me on this. The arrest was real. Diaz and his team had evidence that the tattoos were mailed to my address. They also had hair and fiber evidence from my van. They came in hard to get me. I was completely blindsided.'
'What the hell were you doing here?'
Byrne looked at the house, then back. 'I'm not sure my answer is going to be good enough for you.'
'Try me.'
Another pause. 'I knew the answer to all of this was locked inside Christa's mind. I knew time was short, but I had to work that angle.'
Jessica just listened, deciding not to tell Byrne that she already knew about the evidence Diaz had. But she now realized that it was Drummond who had planted the evidence, hoping to buy himself more time tonight, counting on the arrest of Kevin Byrne.
'When we got to the Roundhouse they patted me down,' Byrne said. 'They took my cellphone. Russ Diaz started scrolling through the calls I'd made today. He also saw the folder that holds the photographs. He saw this.' Byrne held up his phone. 'I hadn't really looked at it before. When I did, it all fell into place.'
Byrne tapped the screen, showed Jessica a picture. In it, Christa- Marie stood on the steps of a huge stone building. Next to the scarred oak doors was an inscription. Byrne tapped the screen again, enlarging the words.
What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.
Jessica looked at Byrne. 'This is what Drummond said at his leaving party.'
Byrne nodded.
'And this picture was taken at Convent Hill,' she added.
'Yeah.'
Jessica recognized the place. It was in the photograph that she had found in Joseph Novak's journal. The photo captioned with the word Hell.
'Drummond had been to Convent Hill to visit Christa-Marie. That was where he got the inscription. From the Roundhouse we called the Prentiss Institute and had them look through the records. Michael Drummond studied with Christa-Marie. Both he and Novak were her students on the day when Gabriel Throne was murdered.'
Jessica took a step away, absorbing the new information. She turned back, her anger far from dissipated.
'I had my weapon out, Kevin. More than once.'
'I know.'
'Something could have gone really wrong, really fast.'
Byrne pointed to the six SWAT officers gathered on the grounds. They had a direct line of sight to the eastern side of the mansion, the side where the kitchen and the music room were located.
'At no
time were you in jeopardy, Jess. They had Drummond in their sights through the windows. If he had made a move toward you they would have taken him down. We just hoped it wouldn't be before he talked. We had to get him to make the admission.'
'Why? What are you talking about?'
Byrne held up a CD in a crystal case.
'What is that?' she asked.
'It's the whole event. Christa-Marie has a very sophisticated recording studio upstairs. The music room has six microphones in it. Mateo is up in the studio now. He's like a kid in a candy store.'
'You're saying everything that happened in there was recorded?'
Byrne nodded. 'When Drummond got here tonight he slipped upstairs, into that room, started the whole process. It's all on here. Christa-Marie playing Danse Macabre, including the background of Drummond's sick recordings of death screams. He finally got his magnum opus.'
Jessica's head was spinning. 'What about Lucy?' she asked. 'I don't care how good the SWAT guys are — Drummond had that razor at her throat.'
Byrne looked away for a moment as the ME's transport van pulled into the long drive. He looked back.
'We didn't plan on Lucy,' he said. 'I had no idea she was here.'
Ninety minutes later, with the house sealed and guarded, Byrne was waiting for Jessica in the large circular drive. They would head back to the Roundhouse to begin the long process of piecing together the horrors of the last few weeks.
Jessica stepped through the front door, closed it behind her. She looked at her watch. It was 2:52.
It was All Saints Day.
Chapter 102
Tuesday, November 2
There was no shortage of media interest. For the still photographers and videographers alike, the Tudor house at Chestnut Hill was a feast of images. It would probably be on the list of horror tours next Halloween. The road in front of Christa-Marie Schцnburg's house was crowded with national and international media. Two days after the horror, the numbers were still growing.
For the police, the whole story would take far longer to assemble. The investigation revealed that Michael Drummond and Joseph Novak had both attended Prentiss, had both taken private lessons from Christa-Marie Schцnburg. Over the years the rivalry between the boys had grown, not for first chair in an ensemble but rather for the affections of Christa-Marie.
On Halloween night 1990, it came to a head. Although investigators might never know exactly what had happened, they believed that Michael Drummond and Joseph Novak killed Gabriel Thorne that night. Drummond, being the dominant one of the pair, held this over Novak's head for the next twenty years.
The two men formed a small, unprofitable company, through which they published limited-edition reproductions of sheet music, penned reproductions in the composer's hand. The paper they used was Atriana.
When Drummond, who had taken a job at Benjamin Curtin's law firm — Paulson Deny Chambers — learned of Christa-Marie's illness, his own psychosis led him down a path of destruction, a reign of terror that would be felt for a long time.
It was Michael Drummond who had supplied the forged visitor's pass and clothing to Lucas Anthony Thompson.
Real-estate tax records traced back to Drummond led to a small commercial building in South Philly. Police found his killing room full of recording equipment, as well as a cache of nearly two hundred CDs and audiocassettes — all meticulously dated — of street and human sounds, some of them of people in their death throes. It would be months, maybe years, before police forensic audiologists would be able to make sense of the recordings, if ever. Michael Drummond had been building to this dark denouement for a long time.
At Josh Bontrager's direction K-9 officers from PPD found an unconsious David Albrecht at the bottom of the ravine on Sawmill Road. Albrecht had lost a lot of blood, but paramedics reached him in time. Investigators were certain that he had been attacked and left for dead by Michael Drummond, but Drummond would escape this charge posthumously.
None of this explained the murder of George Archer.
Lucy Doucette, in her statement, told police about the man she had met. The man who called himself Adrian Costa. The Dreamweaver. Police checked with the management of the apartment building off Cherry Street. The landlord said that a man had rented Apartment 106 for six months, paying cash in advance. He gave police a vague description.
They had showed Lucy the video recordings made on Halloween Night at the hotel, recordings of the hallway on the twelfth floor. Jessica had freeze-framed the image of the man in the wizard's costume and mask passing by the camera.
Lucy said she couldn't remember.
Jessica had also visited Garrett Corners again, researched the name Adrian Costa. No one with that name had ever been registered as a voter or resident of the area. The people knew the reclusive van Tassels to be travelers, carny people. The only photograph of the family was nearly fifteen years old. When Jessica revisited Peggy van Tassel's grave, she looked at the two plots next to it. One was the grave of a man named Ellis Adrian. The other was the last resting place of an Evangeline Costa.
Was the Dreamweaver Peggy van Tassel's father?
From what the investigators could gather, it appeared that Florian van Tassel had tracked Archer for years but had not known for sure that it was Archer who had kidnapped both Peggy van Tassel and Lucy Doucette back in September 2001. As the Dreamweaver, van Tassel enticed Lucy to submit to hypnosis sessions during which van Tassel determined that he had been right. George Archer had killed Peggy. It seemed that van Tassel also gave Lucy a post-hypnotic suggestion to leave a note for Archer in his room, drawing him up there at 9:30p.m., then instructed her to open the door to Room 1208 at the right moment.
The enhanced video taken from the twelfth-floor hallway that night showed the man dressed as a wizard — believed to be Florian van Tassel — with an old-style school bell in his hand.
While all of this was circumstantial, it wasn't until forensic results started to come in that police issued an arrest warrant for Florian van Tassel, aka The Dreamweaver. Blood belonging to George Archer was found on the old photograph left behind in the room where the Dreamweaver had met with Lucy Doucette.
The George Archer file sat in a file cabinet at the Roundhouse.
The case remains open.
Chapter 103
Monday, November 8
Byrne sat in the small lunch-room at the back of the Roundhouse. The four-to-twelve shift had already come and gone and were out on the street. Byrne, who had been on administrative leave since the shooting, sat by himself, a cold cup of untouched coffee in front of him.
When Jessica entered the room and approached him she saw something else on the table. It was Byrne's fifty-cent piece.
'Hey, partner.'
'Hey,' Byrne replied. 'You finish that FAS?'
A Firearms Analysis System form was a trace request sent to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
'All done.' Jessica slid into the booth across from Byrne. 'You heading home?'
'In a while.'
They sat in silence. Byrne looked tired, but not nearly as tired as he had looked recently. He'd gotten the results from all his follow-up tests. There was no tumor, nothing serious. They said it was a combination of fatigue, poor diet, insomnia, with a Bushmills chaser. Jessica glanced at the menu displayed over the counter in the corner, and thought about how eating in this place might be part of the problem.
Byrne looked up, at the scarred booths, the plastic flowers, the line of vending machines against the wall, at the place to which he had come to work for more than twenty years. 'I didn't do my job, Jess.'
She'd known this was coming, and here it was. Everything she planned to say vaporized from her mind. She decided to just speak from her heart. 'It wasn't your fault.'
'I was so young,' Byrne said. 'So arrogant.'
'Christa-Marie confessed to the crime, Kevin. I wouldn't have handled it any differently. I don't know any cop who would.'
'She confessed because she was ill,' Byrne said. 'I didn't dig any deeper. I should have, but I didn't. I turned in my report, it went to the DA. Just like always. Boss says move on, you move on.'
'Exactly.'
Byrne spun the coffee cup a few times.
'I wonder what her life would have been like,' he said. 'I wonder where she would have gone, what she would have done.'
Jessica knew there was no answer to this, none that would help. She waited awhile, then slipped out of the booth.
'How about I buy you a drink?' she said. 'It's fifty-cent Miller Lite night at Finnigan's Wake. We can get hammered, drive around, pull people over, do some traffic stops. Be like old times.'
Byrne smiled, but there was sadness in it. 'Maybe tomorrow.'
'Sure.'
Jessica put a hand on Byrne's shoulder. When she got to the door she turned, looked at the big man sitting in the last booth, surrounded by all the whispering ghosts of his past. She wondered if they would ever be silent.
Chapter 104
He found her behind the hotel. She was sitting alone on a stone bench, on her dinner break, an untouched salad next to her. When she saw Byrne she stood up, hugged him. He held on as long as she wanted.
She pulled away and turned, brushing off the bench for him. Ever considerate, Byrne thought. He sat down.
They were silent for a few moments. Finally Byrne asked, 'You doing okay?'
Lucy Doucette shrugged. 'Just another day in the big city.'
'Did you have any problems giving your statement?' He had put out the word that she was to be treated with kid gloves. The report back was that she had been. Byrne wanted to hear it from her.
'Yeah,' she said. 'But if I never go back to a police station for the rest of my life, that will be okay with me.'
'About that other matter,' Byrne said, referring back to Lucy's detainment for shoplifting. 'I talked to the DAs office, and to the owner of the store on South. It's all smoothed over. Just a big misunderstanding.' Because Byrne had intervened before Lucy was charged there would not be a record.
The Echo Man jbakb-5 Page 38