by B. V. Lawson
“Two young women are dead and there may be more. I’m not asking you to get involved or give me your real name.” Drayco was glad Sarg wasn’t around to hear that part. “Just a few questions, I promise.”
She chewed on the inside of her cheek. “Promises are same as lies in my business.”
A fading bruise lingered on her chin that makeup hadn’t managed to cover. The souvenir of one of those promises. “You may not be able to help, since this is going back a couple of months, to August.”
“These girls you mentioned. Were they … were they in the biz, too?”
“Both were college students. One moonlighted as a stripper.”
Alice gave a tight-lipped smile. “I have an A.A. in Business Admin, can you believe it?”
She dropped her hands to her sides although her feet were still positioned in sprint mode. “Guess that girl who moonlighted, she needed the money, huh?”
“She was on a scholarship and her family wasn’t wealthy. She’s originally from the Virginia end of the Eastern Shore.”
Alice’s eyes widened. “You shitting me? That’s where I’m from, well, the Maryland part. A postage-stamp town you’ve never heard of.”
“You’d be surprised. I’ve got a place on the Eastern Shore myself. In Cape Unity.” A rundown empty Opera House could count as a place, of sorts.
“My mother still lives over there with my daughter. I’m hoping to save up so my little girl can go to college one day.”
“What about that business degree?”
“This … manicure business … pays better. Not many jobs over there, which is why I’m here. Got more blue crabs than people on the shore. People eat the crabs, but the crabs don’t bother them. People ’round here,” she pointed toward the street. “Bother whoever, whenever. They’ll eat you whole.”
A slight smile played around her lips, and she looked him up and down. “I don’t put out for free.”
He pulled out his wallet and peeled off some bills he handed to her. She snatched them and tucked them into the envelope-style purse slung over her shoulder. Then she fished out a small business-style ledger. “What’s the date in August?”
“He wouldn’t have given you his name.”
“They never do. That’s not the kind of notes I keep.” She flipped to one page. “Take this one, for example. September fifth, five p.m. Mr. Cheap Blond Toupee.” She glanced up. “I give ’em the only names I need. Mr. CBT, 50ish, wears a girdle. He’s in sports marketing, wife thinks he’s in a meeting, smells like peppermint Tums and garlic. Enjoys toe massages and dressing in a loin cloth.”
“Is this a form of accounting or a form of insurance?”
“Take your pick.” She flipped a few more pages. “August which day?”
“The thirteenth.”
“Lucky thirteen?” Her smiled faded as she read the entry. “Mr. Sad Musician. Curly hair, glasses. Calluses on left hand. Most of my clients I forget the next day, but this one … he near broke my heart. Didn’t want to talk, so we had a few drinks and joints instead. Who’s Kay Lynn? Is she one of those dead girls?”
Drayco nodded. “Did you put a time down?”
“Nine p.m. Usually, I boot ’em out after their time’s up, but he was as good as passed out. I wasn’t much better. When I woke the next morning, he was still there.”
“Have you seen him since, say two nights ago?”
“I’ve seen him around, but he doesn’t acknowledge me. And he hasn’t asked for my services again.”
Drayco leaned forward with his arms propped on his knees and considered her information. It cleared Futino for Cailan’s murder. But not for a revenge killing against Shannon, with or without the help of Troy Jaffray. Loose ends of cases like this dangled and twisted around as kites tossed in shifting winds. Good thing he liked kites.
Alice reached over and ran her hand through his hair. “You paid for more than an hour, and you’ve only used ten minutes. I know a place nearby where I can make those other fifty minutes really count.”
Alice’s parted Valentine-red lips were doing their best to seal the deal. Nelia Tyler had found it funny when a prostitute in the Prince of Wales County lockup came on to him. Until the woman realized he wasn’t a lawyer or cop and couldn’t help her out. Tyler never wore lipstick on the job. Too unprofessional. With her natural beauty, she didn’t need it.
Drayco said, “Some other time.”
“You promise? I don’t get your type, only the losers. It’d be nice to have some real fun for a change.”
He smiled at her. “Promises are lies.”
31
Looming shapes, muted colors, distant sounds, and whispered voices hovered around him. Silhouetted blobs focused into familiar faces so detailed, Drayco felt he could reach over and touch them, if he weren’t paralyzed.
He held up used food wrappers and said, “Someone’s been here recently.” In the rear corner of the main warehouse room, Officer Decker straightened up after retrieving an object on the floor and yelled “I’ve got something.” Then the flash of a dark figure hurtled out of the room Sarg had hurried past without searching.
The corrugated sulfur tones of gunshot echoes reached Drayco’s ears as he turned to see Officer Decker falling to the floor with a bloom of red growing on his chest. Another shot, more sulfur tones, Sarg down. Drayco fired his own gun, one-two-three, hitting the shooter’s arm, leg, chest.
Sarg was breathing, he must still be breathing …
Drayco’s clothes were drenched with sweat. He’d fallen asleep on the couch watching the Washington Capitals game, after temporarily abandoning attempts to solve the music puzzle from Shannon’s room.
In his first crack at the puzzle, no phrase combinations of the Schumann wheel made any sense. That was not acceptable. This was not going to be the first puzzle of any kind he couldn’t solve.
He grabbed a Manhattan Special from the refrigerator and headed to the piano. Caffeine and Bach usually did the trick. Setting the drink aside, he concentrated on his fingers as they dug into the keyboard and let his mind flow with the notes.
So many things about this case felt off. The puzzles, Kenilworth Gardens, the murder-suicide theory. A Troy Jaffray-Liam Futino collaboration, cloudy motives from Elvis and Happy.
Gary Zabowski certainly had all the right criteria-music knowledge, computer skills, a strong tie to both victims. Sarg and Gilbow both would say Gary had some elements of the sociopath. Drayco didn’t trust easy solutions.
Solutions. That damned puzzle of Shannon’s. What did it mean? He launched into Bach’s Italian Concerto, but after a few measures, his hand cramped. He stopped and tried again, but it took even fewer notes for the pain to shoot up his arm. He banged his hands down on the keyboard, then patted it by way of an apology.
Maybe it was the pain, maybe the anger sharpening his brain. Because he suddenly remembered Schumann wasn’t the only composer who loved music codes. Olivier Messiaen created something he called a communicable language, using a musical alphabet to encode sentences. It was much more complicated than Schumann’s—a combination of word painting, numerology, fixed note durations, Latin declensions and matching vowels to various notes.
Drayco hopped off the bench and grabbed a Messiaen biography from the shelf. He’d been fascinated by the composer since he heard “Quartet for the End of Time” and later discovered they had something in common—Messiaen was a synesthete.
After re-reading the section on codes, Drayco headed to the sofa, grabbed Shannon’s puzzle and stared at it, focusing on one repeated pattern. Grabbing a pad of paper, he made a chart of notes and letters, arranging them in different ways until he found one that spelled out a phrase: DEATH STING IS SIN. One of Messiaen’s coding rules was that only verbs, nouns and adjectives were allowed. No pronouns.
“Death sting is sin?” Drayco read it aloud. A biblical reference, if he interpreted this correctly.
Death and sin, a possible ritualistic MO with a possible ritualistic
dagger. Why did the puzzle sender switch methods, if this was indeed the same sender? More importantly, did Shannon’s death really mean the end, the coda, or would there be more repeats, more victims?
“The sting of death is sin.” One of Drayco’s grandmother’s favorite Bible verses, from First Corinthians. What had Shannon done that her murderer deemed to be a sin, had blamed on her?
He must have fallen asleep again on the sofa. It took several seconds of the Prokofiev ringtone on his cellphone to wake him. He glanced at the time, 2 am, and at the caller ID—Nelia Tyler.
It wasn’t Nelia on the other end. A man’s slurred voice yelled, “Goddamn bloody bastard. You’re fucking my wife. Don’t lie to me because I’m an attorney and I know all about lying.” Then came a series of loud burps and more slurring. “You’ll pay for your sins. You’ll pay all right because I’ll see that you pay.”
A “thunk” signaled the phone being dropped, followed by murmured voices. The murmuring continued, and then he heard faint snoring in the background.
Nelia picked up the phone and immediately apologized. “I’m so sorry. Tim had a bad day, and when he gets that way, he starts drinking. Then he starts in on the crazy talk.”
Drayco had never seen Nelia cry, but he detected an unusual huskiness. It was hard to tell, since voices lost their color over cellphones, the limited bandwidth squeezing formants and harmonics into a gauzy gray mess.
“Are you okay, Tyler?”
“We’ll be fine. He just needs to sleep it off. I’ll call you tomorrow or in a few days. I feel I owe you a big crab cake dinner from the Seafood Hut, but—”
“Yeah. But.” He hung up with her and tried to get back to sleep. Before the phone call woke him, he’d switched from nightmares about Sarg and the shooting at the warehouse to dreams of giant stinging bees attacking him. With the added adrenaline from Nelia’s husband’s drunken rant, Drayco would end up watching the clock rather than sleeping.
He got up and grabbed a book of conversations between Messiaen and critic Claude Samuel and began reading. Messiaen, the composer, was also Messiaen the theologian and ornithologist.
Drayco read one passage, “My faith is the grand drama of my life. I’m a believer, so I sing words of God to those who have no faith. I give bird songs to those who dwell in cities and have never heard them. Make rhythms for those who know only military marches or jazz. And paint colors for those who see none.”
Colors for those who see none. Drayco got up again, this time to find a recording online to download to his stereo system. Messiaen’s haunting “Vocalise” for voice and piano filled the room with silver and blue, ethereal soap-bubble shapes. The mezzo on the recording sounded a little like Cailan. But this soprano was still alive, still performing and recording.
He conducted a Web search and found a bio of the singer, who’d be forty-seven now. The same age Cailan once said she’d envisioned a big birthday gala to celebrate living to an older age than her mother.
He switched off the recording and the lights and sat on the couch in the dark.
32
Saturday, 25 October
Another weekend, another visit from Darcie, ostensibly to pick up a dress she ordered last time. After receiving the “DEATH STING IS SIN” note and that disturbing late-night call from Tyler’s husband, Darcie was a welcome distraction.
She brought him a cup of tea at the table where he sat checking his computer for more social traces of Cailan, Shannon, and their friends. He looked at the cup. Tea? He had tea? Must have been in the cabinets for years. He sniffed the brew. Earl Gray. Well, at least he’d been neglecting the best.
She looked around the room. “Kinda lonely here by yourself, I imagine.”
He blinked at her. Was she suggesting she move in with him? He started to bring out the usual string of excuses for why that wouldn’t be a good idea, when she added, “You need a dog. Or a cat. You do like animals, don’t you?”
Drayco thought about Shoggoth, the black Savannah cat who’d almost adopted him in Cape Unity. Sort of half-dog, half-cat. “Yes, but I doubt they’d love my schedule. But thanks for the reminder.”
“Reminder?”
He got up and went into the kitchen long enough to grab a bowl and pour in some kibble. Opening the back door to his postage-stamp yard, he placed the bowl beside the door. “Stray cat,” he explained. “I hate to see an animal starve. It’s too skittish to make friends with—I think it was abandoned and has trust issues.”
“I didn’t know you were a pet psychiatrist, too.” Darcie sat beside him when he reclaimed his seat at the table and peered over his shoulder. “How’s the case coming? Anything new?”
“I spent last night with a prostitute.”
She almost dropped her cup. “That’s not funny.”
When he saw the way her lip trembled, he apologized. “I was merely asking her some questions about the case.”
She glared at him. “I’m surprised you don’t think of me that way.”
He pushed the computer away and reached for her hand. “Of course I don’t. Besides, if anything, I’m the gigolo. Your bank account is a lot bigger than mine.”
That prompted a smile. “I like that. My own private gigolo.” She took a sip of her tea, then asked, “I repeat, so how’s the case coming?”
“Not well. There was another murder. Another Parkhurst co-ed.”
“More music puzzles, too?”
“Unfortunately. As mocking as the others and equally unsolved.”
“See, I told you it wasn’t a crime of passion.”
He couldn’t argue with that. Just what it was a crime of, however, was still up in the air.
Darcie massaged his right arm. He looked at her with a raised eyebrow. “I appreciate the attention, but what prompted that?”
She continued massaging without missing a beat. “Because I want you to play the piano for me.”
“I could soak that arm in warm water like usual.”
“This is a lot more fun, don’t you think?”
He smiled and let her work on the arm for a few minutes, then headed to the piano. His baby, his Steinway, always looked like it was chiding him when he stayed away for too long. He sat in front of the keyboard. “What do you want to hear?”
“Something romantic.”
He flipped through a mental list for a moment, then dug into Chopin’s Nocturne Opus 27, number 2 in D-flat major. It was one of the first Chopin pieces he learned to play, and it remained one of his favorites. The opening cantilena was quick to transport him into that alternate reality where nothing else existed except him and the piano. So much so, that when the last notes died out, he was surprised to find he wasn’t alone. And then he saw Darcie standing there.
The same Darcie who watched him through watery eyes as she sniffled.
“Didn’t you like it? Or not romantic enough?” he asked.
She wiped her eyes. “It’s absolutely horrible.”
His eyes widened, then she added, “Horrible you don’t get to play for other people. You are so good and so sensitive. It’s a crime against the universe you aren’t doing this for a living. Isn’t there some surgery they can do on your arm?”
He shook his head. “They already did. Besides, the window of opportunity for a piano career is long gone. I’m too old now to start over.”
“Thirty-six is too old?”
“In piano years, yes.”
“Oh.” She chewed on her lip. “You should give a recital at the Opera House. As a fundraiser, maybe.”
“Think anyone would come?”
That made her laugh. “You’d pack the house.” She joined him on the bench. “You are one of a kind, you know that? A detective pianist with synes … synesh … oh, you know what I mean.”
“Synesthesia.”
“That’s it. Did those murdered girls have it, too?”
He blinked hard. Where had that come from? He hadn’t mentioned it, and those details weren’t in any of the news acc
ounts. He looked over at Darcie, whose eyes were full of innocent curiosity.
When he didn’t answer, she said, “I’ll take that as a yes.”
“I shouldn’t discuss details of the case.”
“Aren’t you worried the killer will come after you, too?”
“Unlikely, since the victims were co-eds.”
She put her head on his shoulder. “What’s it like living with that synes-thingie?”
He pointed at a painting hanging on his wall, a Jackson Pollock knock-off with blue and gray swirls and a thick texture from embedded burlap. “When I hear sounds, they’re like that.”
“Even voices?”
“Yours is like red piano felt. It’s quite pleasant.”
“It had better be!” She lifted her head to kiss him on the cheek. “Have there always been people who had that gift?”
“I’m not sure you’d call it a gift. But synesthesia has likely been around a long time.”
“I can imagine how well that went over in the Dark Ages. They probably thought it was from the devil and burned them as witches.”
She was probably right about that, too. It was hard to imagine one of those Dark Age-holdovers going around killing girls with synesthesia at Parkhurst College. Still, the world was filled with people killing others in the name of some God due to some perceived “wrong” belief.
He didn’t buy into the love-triangle theory, but the motive had to be something more mundane than witchcraft or a mini-religious war. Whatever it was, he had that feeling he got when the answer was bubbling under the surface of his brain.
Since Sarg had the weekend off to take Elaine to a harvest festival in Fredericksburg, maybe Darcie’s visit would help Drayco see the problem in a new light. Or maybe he’d go ask Abraham Lincoln for some advice. Because he was finally going to take Darcie on that sightseeing tour, starting with the Lincoln Memorial.
33
Monday, 27 October
Onweller called a sudden ten o’clock meeting without saying why, making Drayco scramble to get there on time. He couldn’t blame Sarg for shifting around in the low-slung chair in the unit chief’s office waiting for Onweller’s latest pronouncement. Fighting the desire to do the same, Drayco sat up straight. Maybe not the picture of calm, but as good an impression as he could manage. This must be about the new musical puzzle. Had to be.