Jeffery Deaver - The Burial Hour

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.’

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 quickly, 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 running 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.

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.