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"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."
Chapter 7
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.
