by BV Lawson
Drayco took out his Leatherman and opened the screwdriver. The screws in the grate weren’t tight and came out readily, leaving the front to plop onto the floor. He carefully folded his long frame even lower to the ground, maneuvering a hand into the duct and wrapping his fingers around what felt like a fret. As he pulled the Strad gently out of its hiding place, an air filter mask was pulled along with it and tumbled at his side.
“Extraordinary!” Jonas drew even closer as Drayco held the Strad up to the light. “However did you know?”
“As I said, timing was the key.” Drayco cradled the Strad in his arm. He’d never held one before. It was surprisingly lightweight, about a pound, or $125,000 an ounce, by Belinda’s estimate. As he ran one finger slowly across the violin’s surface, not even touching the strings, he imagined he heard “La Gitana” playing again.
Drayco added, “Smoke bomb goes off via timer, mask goes on. The thief arrives at the case, opens it, removes the violin—about fifteen seconds total. Twenty-five seconds to open the vent with its intentionally-loose screws, then insert the violin and push the grate back into place. That leaves ten seconds to return to the starting point, before Mabie heads off in search of the sprinkler valve.”
He looked from the Strad, the lights glinting off the warm reddish-amber veneer, to Jonas, whose unblinking eyes were riveted on the instrument as if hypnotized. “Why did you do it, Jonas? I don’t believe this has anything whatsoever to do with your retirement account.”
Jonas swallowed several times, then sneered, “You think I did this? I’m a curator. I take care of artifacts, I don’t steal them. Maybe it was taken by the devil himself, he seems to be in the thick of things these days. As you say, it’ll probably end up in the hands of some rich lawyer. Another symbol of the pestilence in our society.”
“That’s the second time you’ve used that word.”
“What?”
“Pestilence. Common in the Bible but not in everyday usage. Yet, in the threatening note, which Mabie said he’d shown only to me and no one else, it references ‘the pestilence of Lucifer.’”
Drayco’s skin and hair had dried out after the sprinkler drenching, so he doubted the beads of water forming on Jonas’s forehead were sprinkler souvenirs. And a small vein in Jonas’s temple was bulging, where it hadn’t been before.
Drayco continued, “A museum curator, who does restoration work like you, must have some background in chemistry, classes in conservation science—perhaps enough of a background to fashion a crude smoke bomb?”
Jonas had begun to resemble a time bomb himself, muscles tightly wound, jaw clenched. When he finally exploded, it was more like a controlled burn—low, intense, inflamed.
“That damned Nazi violin.” His contorted face resembled the mask on the curio cabinet, as his whole body shook. “Oh so sweetly it plays, the experts say. Ask my grandparents and my uncle how sweetly that violin played for them. They were marched to the gas chamber at Auschwitz, as every swipe of that bow over those strings brought them closer, step by step, to annihilation. The Nazis put more value on a piece of wood than a human life. It’s every bit a pestilence. A pestilence in our collective human soul. And that violin is its hateful progeny.”
Before Drayco had a chance to respond, Jonas thrust a hand into his pocket and hissed, “It’s the devil’s violin. Don’t you understand? It must be destroyed.” He whipped out a multitool like Drayco’s, only this one had a razor-sharp pair of pliers that popped out with one flick of the other man’s wrist. Jonas lunged, and the pliers sliced painfully through Drayco’s skin but were stopped by the side of the violin.
Drayco fell over from the impact, instinctively cushioning the Strad as he landed on his back. Jonas stood over him, holding the tool poised in his uplifted hand, eyes like a rabid dog with pupils dilated, his breathing hard and rasped. The sound of approaching voices made him pause for a second. The hand with the pliers quivered like he was going to strike again, but then he dropped his hand and ran from the room.
Mabie, Belinda, and two police officers strolled in, stopping short as Drayco hauled himself up. Mabie ran over and grabbed the Strad, overjoyed. As Drayco wrapped his handkerchief around his arm, Mabie clucked at the sight of specks of blood on the violin and carefully wiped them off with his shirt.
Belinda was almost giddy. “I’m glad I waited to call the boss after all. Looks like my neck is safe from the chopping block.” She looked around. “Where’s Jonas?”
Drayco replied, “Fleeing, I would imagine.” He nodded his head toward the hall where Jonas had disappeared. The police officers, taking the hint, ran after him.
“Jonas was behind this?” Mabie shook his head. “Well, I’ll be. And to think I trusted Jonas with our most prized collections. I hope they throw the book at him.”
Belinda was all too quick to agree. “I saw in the newspaper the other day where some lowlife got twenty years for grand larceny after he pinched an Impressionist painting. Jonas needs to be put behind bars where he can’t steal again and make problems for people like me.” She added halfheartedly, “And the museum, naturally.”
Both Belinda and Mabie were stroking the Strad, unable to take their hands off it. No questions about Jonas or his motivations, no concern whatsoever for his welfare. How long had Jonas worked here? Fifteen years?
Drayco looked at the blood beginning to soak through the handkerchief on his arm, then back in the direction Jonas had fled. Maybe Jonas was right. Maybe this was the devil’s violin, attracted to blood and human suffering. And tomorrow it would go on tour and be played again. He hoped the Lafleur Quartet had good life insurance.
Blood Antiphon
A command performance in front of an alleged killer hadn’t figured high on Scott Drayco’s “To Do” list when he woke up this morning with a temperature of 101. He sat in his car in front of the jail waiting to see if the cocktail of codeine cough syrup, ibuprofen and guarana would kick in. The sleet-laced winds pushing him against the car as he struggled to climb out didn’t help matters.
Once safely inside the building, Drayco signed his name in the ledger, under the police sergeant’s watchful eye, and handed over his ID. The duty guard buzzed Drayco and the sergeant through metal doors, and they headed down the empty hallway. Only the sergeant’s raspy breathing and his booted footfalls punctuated the otherwise silent promenade.
Drayco was grateful for the lack of conversation. It gave him time to re-run the mental tape of the phone call from his former FBI partner, Mark Sargosian, which had jarred him out of sound sleep a mere six hours ago. Sargosian dropped the mini-bombshell that the man accused of sexually assaulting and murdering a nineteen-year-old male dancer and suspected of similar crimes against five others—the same man who’d hardly uttered a word since his arrest—broke his silence long enough to say he’d talk. But only to Scott Drayco. The suspect’s court-appointed attorney had been apoplectic and threatened to resign, but the prisoner insisted.
The suspect’s name was Andrew Wyse. Drayco hadn’t heard of him before he saw the name on TV, and the name itself was ordinary enough. Serial killers often had ordinary names—John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson—and now, Andrew Wyse. After Drayco got the call from Sargosian, he’d done his research and knew more about Wyse than he wanted to know, including a disturbing personal link that bound him and Wyse together.
The sergeant ushered Drayco into an eight-by-ten room painted an appropriate icy white where an occupant was waiting, wearing waist and ankle chains and handcuffed to a metal table. “You know the drill,” the sergeant grunted, nodding at the panic button located at eye level above the metal chair where Drayco sat down.
The sergeant left, and the five-inch-thick door thudded slowly behind him. The clang of the lock signaled there was no longer an easy way to get in or out.
Drayco turned to get a good look at his adversary. Wyse was near sixty, but his face was bereft of wrinkles under closely cropped auburn hair with only a sma
ttering of gray. He could pass for a respectable corporate executive—if it weren’t for the orange jumpsuit and the steel hardware holding him in place.
Drayco stretched out his long legs, trying to get as comfortable as he could, but it felt like the ambient temperature had gone down ten degrees. Great. His fever must be spiking. He straightened his shoulders and focused on the eyes of the alleged serial killer.
The man’s overall appearance might be unexceptional, but his eyes were not. Looking into them was like shining a light into dark water and watching ordinary objects twisted into distorted, colorless shapes.
Drayco shouldn’t have agreed to this interview or whatever it was Wyse had engineered. But he couldn’t turn down a chance of getting useful information for a conviction. Or at least fill in a psychological profile. He focused on his own breathing, slow, deep, steady.
Wyse, for his part, studied Drayco as a technician would a lab rat—right before dissecting it. After two minutes of the staring contest by Drayco’s estimate, a knowing smile crept across Wyse’s face. “You’re not well, Scott.”
Drayco cleared his throat. “I’m well enough. You wanted me, Wyse, here I am. Either talk or I head back to bed with a couple of pills and a hot toddy, heavy on the bourbon.”
Without looking down at his hands, Wyse traced concentric circles on the table with his finger, as much as the handcuffs would allow. Small circles at first, expanding, then small again. “You don’t know me, but I know you quite well. I’ve been following your career for years. Fifteen years.”
A hollow burning settled in the pit of Drayco’s stomach, and he didn’t think it was from the virus. “I didn’t know I had a fan club. If you wanted my autograph, I would have sent it along with the nice sergeant out there. You could hang it on the wall in your cell. Free of charge.”
“I wouldn’t call it a fan club. After all, you killed my son.”
That wasn’t the way Drayco remembered it. Fifteen years ago, he was looking forward to a career as a concert pianist, when his hand and arm were mangled during a violent carjacking. But as Drayco discovered in his research this morning, the punk who’d nearly killed Drayco during the crime, Martin Hafften, was Wyse’s son.
“You’ve got it backwards, Wyse, don’t you think?”
“Perhaps you didn’t kill him directly, but your testimony put him away and he was murdered in a prison riot one year later. He was only nineteen.”
Drayco shook his head. “If you want to blame someone, blame the other inmates. Or Martin himself for his bad choices.” Drayco narrowed his eyes. “Perhaps this is misdirected blame? At the trial, the only mention of Martin’s biological father—you—was that he’d run off and disappeared when the boy was five. Hardly qualifies you for Father of the Year.”
Wyse’s enigmatic smile never faltered. “I had to leave. It was for the best.”
“Whose? Yours or his?”
Defense evidence at the trial noted Martin’s stepfather married the boy’s mother two months after Wyse vanished. Perhaps there’d been an affair between the wife and Martin’s stepfather? Or Wyse’s disappearance was based on something far worse. With the formative pieces of a theory coalescing in the back of his mind, Drayco blurted out, “Barry Favata.”
Wyse’s face registered no emotion. “What about him?”
“One of your victims. After leaving a nightclub, he was found dumped in an alley with evidence of being sodomized before he was strangled. According to my FBI contacts, the wire used to bind his hands and feet is the same type of string harpists use.”
“So?”
Drayco pointed to Wyse’s hands, cuffed to the table. “You have calluses on the pads of your fingers. Harpists get such calluses.”
Wyse smiled. “While I appreciate the music lesson, Scott—you don’t mind if I call you Scott, do you?—I have a feeling such wire could be used for many things. Those FBI contacts you mentioned have presumably found the harp in my house, but again, hardly damning evidence. Just another point of connection I have with you, Scott.”
Drayco eyed him warily. “I don’t play the harp. Never have.”
“Ah, but you were a pianist, weren’t you? The up-and-coming prodigy, New York Philharmonic at age twelve, world travel, recordings. Until my son ended all of that by destroying your music career and forcing you into law enforcement instead. Tell me, Scott. How does it feel to have all of your hopes and dreams dashed in mere seconds? By a ‘two-bit punk’, I believe the prosecutor called my boy. Did it give you satisfaction to testify against him, to put him away, send him to his death?”
Drayco hesitated. At the time, part of him had felt anger, then relief. But satisfaction? He shook his head. “What about you, Wyse—did you enjoy hurting those boys, feeling them struggle for each breath as you wound the wire tightly around their necks?”
Wyse stopped tracing his concentric circles for a moment. “I imagine anyone labeled a serial killer might enjoy the act of snuffing out a life or he wouldn’t do it to begin with. Speaking hypothetically, of course.”
“The evidence against you is much more than hypothetical. No doubt your attorney has gone over it.”
“You’re not going to spew forth hackneyed detective clichés like ‘cooperate with us and it’ll go easier on you’? I expected more from you, Scott.”
Drayco’s throat felt like sandpaper rubbed into raw dust, and he stifled a cough. “Since we’re speaking hypothetically, let me tell you a story. A story about a boy from an all-American family in an ordinary small town. Sounds fairly dull. Except as the child grows up, he becomes aware he has urges not considered normal by society, an obsession with other boys. But this boy grows up, tries to do the right thing by getting married and having a child, only to realize it’s a sham and the urges never went away. Unable to keep from acting on those impulses, worried what he might do, he leaves his wife and son and disappears. Without the anchor of home life, his urges become a compulsion. Then the man kills his first victim, and finds the thrill becomes an addiction demanding more thrills, more victims. What do you think of my story so far, Wyse?”
Wyse’s hands lay still on the table. “It’s a fascinating tale, Scott. But I don’t think I’d send it off to a publisher any time soon.”
“The ending hasn’t been written yet but I have a feeling it’s not far away.”
Wyse lurched in his chair, sending the chains clanking as he leaned forward toward Drayco. In another room, the watching police and FBI agents had probably jumped up, too, ready to push their own panic button.
Wyse continued his unblinking stare into Drayco’s eyes for a full minute. “I have a little tale for you, too. A story of a boy whose mother abandoned him at age five, leaving him, his sister and father to fend for themselves. This woman had taught her son to play the piano and, perhaps, as a desperate means of holding on to a piece of her, the boy pursued a piano career. Until that career ended abruptly at age twenty-one. Which makes a third way in which we’re linked, Scott. Your mother left you when you were five and I abandoned my son when he was five.”
For the moment, Drayco pushed aside knowledge Wyse had checked into his background, uncovering information not too many people knew. Where was it all going? Why did Wyse feel such a need to connect with him, part taunting, part reaching out?
“As a matter of fact,” Wyse continued, “My son would be the same age you are now, mid-thirties. I wonder, Scott—when your mother held you, did she realize she loved you too much? Is that why she left? You’re such a pretty one, aren’t you? I’ll bet you were a beautiful little boy, just like my Marty.”
Now they were getting down to the deep, dark nitty-gritty, the heart of it all—what Drayco had intuited earlier, the true reason for Wyse’s sudden disappearance from his son’s life. Why he wouldn’t want to be around a “beautiful little boy.” It wasn’t a nice thought, not at all.
Wyse was watching him differently now with his wide, unblinking gray eyes. Drayco tried to mask his discomfort at the clo
se inspection. Just a gambit the man was using to unnerve his opponent. As if the damn flu bug wasn’t already making Drayco feel he’d been thrust through a warped Carollian looking glass.
“Do you know why I play the harp, Scott? I love the feel of the cool strings vibrating against my skin. It’s a very sensual experience from an instrument depicted as a tool of angels. But perhaps I am an angel. The first book of Samuel in the Bible says, ‘Let our lord now command thy servants to seek out a man who is a cunning player on a harp. And it shall come to pass, when the evil spirit from God is upon thee, he shall play with his hand and thou shalt be well.’ So you see? I am the cunning player on the harp. Making everything well.”
“I’d say you’re more of a modern-day Orpheus, charming saints and devils alike with that harp playing of yours.”
“It depends upon your definition of charm.”
“To charm, as in being fascinating or pleasing. Charming as in using personal wiles to gain influence. Charming as in being able to lure young men like Barry Favata into a false sense of security before leading them to their deaths.”
“Oh dear, now you are starting to sound like clichéd Johnny one-note detectives. I’d much rather talk about you, Scott.”
“Why? You’ve mentioned three nodes of connection, music, abandonment and your son, whose death you blame me for, but I still can’t see why you wanted me here. I doubt you’re that lonely.”
“Lonely? I’m plenty happy inside my own thoughts. I brought you here for absolution, my boy.”
“You’re admitting to the murders?”
“Not my absolution, Scott. Yours.”
Drayco had slumped down in his seat, but hauled himself up straight again. “I’ll admit I’m no saint, Wyse, but I don’t require absolution from a serial killer.”
“Alleged serial killer,” Wyse said, with a smile. “I remember when you gave testimony at my son’s trial, Scott. I was there in disguise watching the proceedings. You had quite a presence for such a young man. Strapping, self-assured, articulate. Most impressive. The type I would love to get to know better. Yet part of me hated you, hated the part you were playing in convicting my son.”
