Jeffery Deaver: The Burial Hour

‘Damn,’ Rhyme muttered. ‘Anything else?’

‘No, but this was a first. Her mother, Claire, asked if I — or somebody I knew on the force — would want to moonlight as a waitperson at a party tonight.’

‘What’s she paying?’ Sellitto asked.

In no mood for humor, Rhyme said, ‘First, the noose. Any prints?’

Cooper tested the cord in the fuming tent to raise invisible fingerprints and said, ‘A few slivers. Nothing to work with.’

‘What’s it made out of?’ Dellray asked.

‘I’m checking now.’ Cooper looked at the material closely under a microscope — set on relatively low magnification. He then consulted a visual database.

‘I can run the chromatograph but I’m sure it’s proteins — collagen, keratin and fibroin. I’d say catgut.’

Sellitto wrinkled his nose. ‘That’s disgusting.’

Thom was laughing. ‘No cats involved.’

Cooper said, ‘That’s right. It’s called catgut but it’s from sheep or goat intestines.’

Sellitto said, ‘Why’s that any less disgusting?’

The tech was online. He continued, ‘Gut was used as surgical sutures. Now the only use is musical-instrument strings. Steel and synthetic materials’re more frequent nowadays, but’ — he gave a shrug — ‘catgut is still common. Could’ve come from a hundred stores, concert halls and schools around the area. The length of this one? Probably from a cello.’

‘And the noose?’ Dellray asked. ‘Isn’t it s’posed to have thirteen coils? For bad luck?’

Rhyme didn’t know about catgut, and little about musical instruments, but he was familiar with nooses. It was properly called a hangman’s knot. It was not meant to tighten, like a slipknot, and choke. Death was from a snapped neck, which led to suffocation, yes, though not because the throat was closed but because signals from brain to lungs shut down. The wide knot, expertly positioned behind the left ear of the condemned, cracked the spine not far above where Rhyme’s had broken.

Answering Dellray, he said, ‘Some had thirteen coils. Most hangmen used eight back in the day. That worked just as well. Okay, what else?’

Sachs had used a gelatin lifter and an electrostatic device to capture the shoe prints that were probably the unsub’s, based on the girl’s account of where he had stood and walked.

Cooper consulted a database. He said, ‘A Converse Con. Size ten and a half.’

Naturally, a very common sneaker. Impossible to trace to a single retail source from the tread alone. Rhyme knew this about the shoe, since he was the one who had created and still helped maintain the NYPD’s database of footwear.

Sachs’s attempt to lift tire treads had been, on the other hand, unsuccessful. Other cars and trucks had driven in about the same path as the kidnapper’s sedan, obliterating distinctive tread impressions.

Rhyme said, ‘I suppose we better ask. What else did the child have to say?’

Sachs described how the kidnapping had unfolded.

‘A hood over the vic’s head. And he went limp?’ Sellitto asked. ‘Suffocated?’

Rhyme said, ‘Pretty short period of time. Drugs maybe. Chloroform — a classic. You can also use homemade concoctions.’

‘What color was the hood?’ Cooper asked.

‘Dark.’

‘I’ve got a fiber here,’ the tech added, looking at the evidence bag notation. ‘Cotton. Amelia, you rolled it up right next to where he left the noose.’

Rhyme looked at the monitor on which a tuft of fiber was displayed. He had a decision to make. The intact fiber could have important evidentiary value. Say they found a hood in the possession of a suspect; he could be linked to the crime if its fibers could be associated with this one (you didn’t say ‘matched’; only DNA and fingerprints actually matched).

That would be good for the prosecutor’s case at trial. But having the fiber in its present state didn’t get you any closer to discovering who the perp was and where he lived or worked. Cotton, though, was wonderfully absorbent and this tiny piece might hold very helpful clues. The problem was that they could be unlocked only with the gas chromatograph — an instrument that isolated and identified substances. And to analyze the fiber required that it be destroyed.

‘Burn it, Mel. I want to know if there’s anything inside.’

The tech prepared the sample for the Hewlett-Packard. The whole process would take no more than twenty minutes.

In the meantime, Sellitto and Dellray checked in with their respective supervisors. There’d still been no ransom demands, and no CCTV in the area had recorded the incident or the car speeding away. Dellray then uploaded all the information they had to NCIC, the National Crime database, to see if similar incidents had been reported elsewhere. None.

Rhyme said, ‘Let’s get a chart going.’

Sachs pulled a whiteboard close and took a dry marker. ‘What do we call him?’

Often the month and day were used as a temporary nickname for an unknown subject. This perp would be UNSUB 920, for September 20.

But before they decided on a moniker, Cooper stirred and looked at the screen of the GC/MS computer. ‘Ah. You were right, Lincoln. The fiber — presumably from the hood — shows traces of chloroform. Also, olanzapine.’

‘Knocky-out drug?’ Dellray asked. ‘Roofie for kidnappers?’

Cooper was typing. ‘A generic antipsychotic. Serious stuff.’

‘From our boy’s medicine cabinet? Or the vic’s?’ Sellitto wondered aloud.

Rhyme said, ‘Media buyer and psychosis don’t fit together felicitously. I’d vote for the perp.’

Cooper took soil samples from an evidence bag marked, Vicinity of the unsub’s shoes. ‘I’ll GC it too.’ And he stepped to the chromatograph.

Dellray’s phone hummed and a long finger stabbed Answer . ‘Yeah?... No... We’ll take a look-see.’

He said to the room, ‘Special agent BFF of mine, in Des Moines, was being all diligent. Had just read the NCIC wire when he got a call from some woman. She saw her son watchin’ YouVid, the streaming site? Nasty stuff. Live video of a guy being strangled — in a noose. We oughta see.’

Sachs walked to a laptop, which was connected via a thick, flat HDMI cable to a large monitor against a nearby wall. She typed and called up the site.

The video depicted a man in shadows. It was hard to see for sure, and he was blindfolded, but the face could have been Robert Ellis’s. His head was cocked to the side — because the noose was tugging his neck upward. Ankles bound with duct tape, arms tied or taped behind his back, he stood on a wooden box, about two by two feet.

As horrific as this was, the soundtrack was just as eerie. A snippet of a human gasp had been recorded and used as the downbeat for music being played on an organ or electric keyboard. The tune was familiar, ‘The Blue Danube.’

You could count out the time — a waltz — as gasp , two, three, gasp , two, three.

‘Christ,’ Sellitto muttered.

How long, Rhyme wondered, could a man stand like that before collapsing or slipping off, before his legs gave way or he fainted — and fell to the noose’s grip? The short fall would not, like traditional executions, break his neck, but would slowly and agonizingly strangle him to death.

As the video continued, the music began gradually to slow, as did the gasps, still keeping perfect time to the flagging music.

The image of the man began to fade too, growing darker.

At the end of the three-minute running time, the music and desperate gasps faded to silence, the image to black.

Words in blood-red type materialized on the screen — words that because they were otherwise so ordinary became unspeakably cruel.