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.