satisfaction from taking vengeance on a dead man? ”
“Maybe it makes perfect sense if you’re an abb, ” Bobby said, “with a
screwed-up brain.”
“I guess.”
“Or maybe this whole crow thing is just cover, to make everyone think
these kids were snatched by your standard-issue pervert, when maybe
they’re really being caged in a lab somewhere.”
“Maybe, maybe, you’re full of too damn many maybes, ” I said.
He shrugged. “Don’t look to me for wisdom. I’m just a wave-thrashing
board head. This killer you mentioned. The guy in the news. He leave
crows like this? ”
“Not that I’ve read.”
“Serial killers, don’t they sometimes leave things like this? ”
“Yeah.
They’re called signatures.
Like a writer’s byline.
Taking credit for the work.” I checked my wristwatch. Sunset would
arrive in about five hours.
We would be ready to go back to Wyvern by then. And even if we were not
ready, we would go.
With a second bottle of Mountain Dew in hand, Bobby sat on the cellist’s
stool, but he didn’t pick up the bow.
In addition to all the instruments and the composition table, the former
dining room contained a music system with a CD player and an antiquated
audiotape deck. In fact, there were two decks, which allowed Sasha to
duplicate tapes of her own recordings. I powered up the equipment, which
added as much feeble illumination to the room as the dreary daylight
that seeped in at the edges of the blinds.
Sometimes, after composing a tune, Sasha is convinced that she has
unwittingly plagiarized another songwriter. To satisfy herself that her
work is original, she spends hours listening to cuts from which she
suspects she has borrowed, until finally she’s willing to believe that
her creation has, after all, sprung solely from her own talent.
Her music is the only thing about which Sasha exhibits more than a
healthy measure of self-doubt. Her cooking, her literary opinions, her
lovemaking, and all the other things she does so wonderfully are marked
by a wholesome confidence and by no more than a useful amount of
second-guessing. In her relationship to her music, however, she is
sometimes a lost child, when she’s stricken by this vulnerability, I
want more than ever to put my arm around her and to comfort her though
this is when she’s most likely to reject comforting and to rap me across
the knuckles with her flute, her scaling ruler, or another handy
music-room weapon.
I suppose every relationship can be enriched by a small measure of
neurotic behavior. I certainly contribute a half cup of my own to our
recipe.
Now I slipped the tape into the player. It was the cassette I’d found in
the envelope beside Leland Delacroix’s reeking corpse in the bungalow
kitchen in Dead Town.
I turned the chair away from the composition table and, sitting down,
used the remote control to switch on the cassette player.
For half a minute, we heard only the hiss of unrecorded magnetic tape
passing over the playback head. A soft click and a new hollow quality to
the hiss marked the beginning of the recording, which at first consisted
only of someonei assumed it was Delacroixtaking deep, rhythmic breaths,
as if engaged in some form of meditation or aroma therapy.
Bobby said, “I was hoping for revelation, not respiration.” The sound
was utterly mundane, with not the least inflection of fear or menace, or
any other emotion. Yet the fine hairs stirred on the nape of my neck, as
though these exhalations were actually coming from some one standing
close behind me.
“He’s trying to get a grip on himself, ” I said. “Deep, even breaths to
get a grip on himself.” A moment later, my interpretation proved true
when the breathing suddenly grew ragged, then desperate.
Delacroix broke down and began to weep, tried to get a grip on himself,
but choked on his pain, and let loose with great trembling sobs
punctuated by wordless cries of despair.
Although I’d never known this man, listening to him in such violent
throes of misery was disturbing. Fortunately, it didn’t last long,
because he switched off the recorder.
With another soft click, the recording began again, and though Dela