Chapter 8

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.

With disbelief in his voice Ellis said, “He kept doing it—three times or four maybe.”

“Doing what?”

“Pulling the noose, recording me choking. I heard him play it back, over and over. As if the sounds I was making weren’t what he wanted. He was like a musical conductor, you know. Like he could hear in his mind the sound he wanted but he wasn’t getting it. He was so calculating, so cold about it.”

“Did he say anything?”

“Not to me. He talked to himself. Just rambling. I couldn’t hear most of it. I heard him say ‘music’ and ‘harmony’ and just weird stuff. I can’t really remember exactly. I feel pretty spacey. Nothing made sense. ‘Listen, listen, listen. Ah, there it is. Beautiful.’ He seemed to be talking to some, I don’t know, imaginary person.”

“No one else was there?”

“I couldn’t see—you know, the blindfold. But it was just the two of us, I’m sure. I would’ve heard.”

What are you up to? she wondered to the Composer—it was the name they had selected for the unsub, Rhyme had told her. It seemed to fit a complex, sinister perp better than today’s date.

“Still no thoughts on why he went after you?”

“I don’t have any enemies, no exes. I’ve been with my girlfriend for years. I’m not rich, she’s not rich.”

Her phone buzzed. It was the officer who’d driven around the perimeter of the plant and found the witness—a boy—who reported that the Composer was fleeing. She had a brief conversation.

After disconnecting, she closed her eyes and sighed.

She called Rhyme.

“Sachs, where are you?”

“I’m almost on my way.”

“Almost. Why almost?”

“The scene’s done. I’m just getting the vic’s statement.”

“Somebody else can do that. I need the evidence.”

“There’s something you should know.”

He must’ve heard the concern in her tone. Slowly he said, “Go on.”

“One of the respondings was looking for more witnesses near where the unsub escaped. Didn’t find anyone. But she did spot a plastic bag he must’ve dropped while he was running. Inside were two more miniature nooses. Looks like he’s just getting started.”