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‘Fred?’

‘My, we are impatient this morning. Phone belongs to one Robert Ellis, head of a teensy start-up – my own description – in San Jose. In town lookin’ for seed money. No record, pays his taxes. Profile’s as booooring as a corset salesman’s. And when I’m saying start-up don’t be thinkin’ Facebook, Crap-Chat, anything sexy and lucrative. His spec-i-al-i-ty’s media buying. So it’s not looking like a competitor snatched him.’

‘Associates or family hear from the taker? About ransom?’ Sellitto asked.

‘Nup. Phone logs show calls to a mobile registered to a woman lives at the same address he does. So, status ‘o’ girlfriend’s a solid guess. But the provider says her phone’s, of all things, way, way over in Japan. Presumably in the company of said lady, one Ms Sabrina Dillon. My ASAC called her but hasn’t heard back. Other numbers aren’t remarkable. Just a guy in town for business. Doesn’t seem to have much else in the way of family we could find.’

‘Domestic issues?’ Mel Cooper asked. He was a lab specialist, yes, but also an NYPD detective who’d worked cases for years.

Dellray: ‘Nothin’ on the radar. Though, even if so, I’m thinking a bit of cheatin’ nookie doesn’t really make you trunk-worthy.’

‘True,’ Sellitto said.

Rhyme said, ‘No OC connection.’

‘Uh-uh. Boy is not a gangbanger, ’less they’re teaching that now at UCLA. His alma mater. A coupla years ago.’

Sellitto said, ‘So, we’re leaning toward some crazy.’

There was the noose, after all …

‘May be agreeing with you there, Lon,’ Dellray said.

‘Speculation,’ Rhyme grumbled. ‘We’re wasting time.’

Where the hell were Sachs and the evidence collection teams?

Cooper’s computer made a cheerful noise and he looked it over.

‘From your evidence folks, Fred.’

Rhyme wheeled forward. The federal crime scene unit – the Physical Evidence Response Team – had analyzed the phone carefully and found no fingerprints. The perp had wiped it before pitching it out of the car.

But the techs had found some trace – smudges of dirt and, wedged invisibly into the OtterBox cover, a short, light-colored hair. Human. There was no bulb attached, so no DNA analysis was possible. It was dry and appeared to have been dyed platinum blond.

‘Picture of Ellis?’

A few minutes later Cooper downloaded an image from California DMV.

A nondescript man of thirty-five. Lean face. His hair was brown.

Whose head had the paler hair come from?

The kidnapper himself?

The aforementioned Sabrina?

The door opened and Rhyme could tell that Amelia Sachs had returned. Her footfalls were distinctive. Before she even breached the doorway, he was calling, ‘Sachs! Let’s take a look.’

She entered through the archway, nodded a greeting to all. Then handed over the milk crate, containing evidence bags, to Cooper, who set them aside. He now dressed in full protective gear – booties, gloves, bonnet and splash guard, which mutually protected examiner and evidence.

He set the items out on examination tables, which were in a separate part of the parlor, away from where the others, dressed in street clothing, clustered, to avoid contamination.

The pickings were sparse. Rhyme knew this, as he’d been ‘with’ Sachs, via video feed, as she’d walked the grid at the scene. All she’d found was the noose, random trace from where the abduction had occurred and shoe print and tire mark evidence.

But even the tiniest of substances can, in theory, lead directly to your perp’s front door.

‘So?’ Sellitto asked. ‘What’d the munchkin say?’

Sachs: ‘I’d trade the girl – Morgynn – for two of her mothers. She’ll be in politics someday. Maybe a cop. She wanted to hold my gun. Anyway, the unsub was a heavyset white male, long dark hair, full beard, wearing dark casual clothes and dark baseball cap, long bill. A little taller than me. Same age as her tennis coach, Mr Billings, who is – I checked – thirty-one. She didn’t know the kind of car except it wasn’t a Tesla, which her father drives – and tells everybody he drives. Morgynn didn’t catch any distinguishings, but he was wearing blue gloves.’

‘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.

© The Composer

CHAPTER 5

‘Rodney?’

Lincoln Rhyme was talking to their contact at the NYPD Computer Crimes Unit, downtown. One Police Plaza.

Rodney Szarnek was brilliant and quirky (a geek, say no more) but also into the most obnoxious head-banging, heavy-metal rock music from your worst nightmares.

‘Rodney, please!’ Rhyme shouted into the speakerphone. ‘Make it vanish.’

‘Oh, sorry.’

The music diminished, though it didn’t vanish.

‘Rodney, you’re on here with a bunch of people. Speaker. Don’t have time to make introductions.’

‘Hi, every—’

‘We’ve got an abduction and the perp’s rigged something so the vic only has a little while to live.’

The music shut off completely.

‘Tell me.’

‘Amelia’s sending you a YouVid link right now. A video of the victim.’

‘Is it still up?’ he asked.

‘As far as we know. Why?’

‘If there’s a violent video – real life, not fake – YouVid’ll probably take it down. If there’re complaints or if their algorithm catches it and their vid police decide it violates TOS, terms of service, down it comes. Have somebody download and record it.’

Dellray said, ‘Our folks’re all over it. Done and done.’

‘Hi, Fred.’ A pause, then Szarnek said, ‘Got it … Man. Already twenty-thousand-plus views. And a ton of likes. Sick world out there. So this’s that guy snatched a few hours ago? I read the wire.’

‘We think,’ Sachs said.

‘Hey, Amelia. Okay. And you need the location where this was sent from. Hoping he’s still alive. Okay, okay. There. I’ve sent the vid and an expedited request to the Warrants Desk. They’ll be on the phone with a magistrate, who’ll approve it ASAP. Minutes, I’m talking. I’ve worked with YouVid before. They’re in the US, New Jersey, thank God, so they’ll cooperate. If the server was overseas, we might never hear from them. I’ll call you back as soon as I can start tracing.’

They disconnected. Rhyme said to Sachs, ‘Get that chart going. What do we have so far?’ A nod at the whiteboard. She grabbed a marker and started.

As she wrote, Rhyme turned to the computer to look at the video again. The screen changed. A red block of type came up.

This video has been removed for violation of our Terms of Service.

A moment later, though, the video arrived from Dellray’s technical people, via an email. An MP4 file. Rhyme and the others viewed it again, hoping it might yield clues as to where the footage had been shot.

Nothing. A stone wall. A wooden box. Robert Ellis, the victim, struggling atop the improvised gallows.

One slip, one muscle cramp would kill him.

Sachs was finished jotting a moment later. Rhyme looked over the chart, wondering if there was anything in it that might hold clues to let them narrow down where their perp lived or worked or where he’d taken his victim to make the perverse tape.

213 East 86th Street, Manhattan

• Incident: Battery/kidnapping.

MO: Perp threw hood over head (dark, possibly cotton), drugs inside to induce unconsciousness.

• Victim: Robert Ellis.

Single, possibly lives with Sabrina Dillon, awaiting return call from her (on business in Japan).

Residence in San Jose.

Owner of small start-up, media buying firm.

No criminal or national security file.

• Perpetrator:

Calls himself the Composer.

White male.

Age: 30 or so.