Girl, Missing, page 15
The door shot open. A coffee-wielding Ripley peered in and shouted, “Dark, get over here.”
Ella perked up, adrenaline instantly curing the headache. “What? You got something?”
“Remember how I said our killer might not be a tech wizard?”
“Yeah.”
“Turns out I was right. You need to come and see this.”
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
When Ella got into the chief’s office, her mind was a deadfall of questions.
“Look, I’m no expert on these things, so forgive me if I get some things wrong,” said Chief Sawyer. He was hunched over his desk, Ella and Ripley flanking him on either side. “But we’ve been looking into Mr. Schaffer’s eBay transaction with this mysterious buyer. The one who bought the record player pretending to be Ethan Harlow.”
“Right,” Ella said. “You traced it to a bank account?”
The Chief said, “Not quite. The payment was made through an anonymous wallet app called PayMeNow. None of the usual channels. No bank account attached. The wallet that was used is a standalone thing. You can attach bank accounts to it if you want, but this one didn’t have any linked channels.”
Ella followed along. “Of course.”
Ripley asked, “But the money has to be deposited from somewhere, right? It must go from a bank account to the online wallet. How else would it get there?”
“Exactly,” the chief said. “And the money that went into the buyer’s wallet came from a separate PayMeNow account, but this one was attached to a bank account.”
“He’s trying to put steps between his transactions so we can’t track him.” Ella fired up, ready to hear the new suspect’s name for the first time. Electricity jolted through her veins and now her violent headache was a thing of the past.
“Who owns the account?”
“A local gentleman by the name of Harry Gardner.”
Ella felt a twinge of recognition, like a spark of memory that had been long forgotten.
No, not long forgotten. Very recently.
“Gardner?” she asked.
The chief turned to her. “You know the name?”
Harry Gardner, 46, accomplished songwriter and composer for a vast array of mediums.
“I do now,” Ella said, rushing out of the chief’s office, into her own and back again, this time armed with her laptop. “I was just looking at composers in the area. I found this guy on a freelance site for musicians.”
“Same person?” Ripley asked.
Ella dug into Harry Gardner’s profile, and saw his location listed as Oakmont. “How far is Oakmont from here?”
“Barely fifteen minutes. It’s the next town over.”
Ripley said, “Chief, can you pull up this guy’s address?”
Ella glanced at Harry Gardner’s work history, his feedback, and testimonials. Bizarrely, his last job through the site had been in 2016, six years ago.
Redemption, she thought.
An out of work musician, desperate to prove himself in a scene that had forgotten his name. Six years without work could drive a man to terrible things, she reasoned.
“1463 Follett Street,” said the Chief. “We could get there in twenty minutes given the time.”
Ripley was already halfway out of the door. “You stay, keep an eye on Alex. I don’t want him going anywhere until his alibi for last night is cleared.”
“You got it.”
“Coming, Dark?”
Ella was lost in her screen. She’d searched Harry Gardner’s name online. The first result had been the freelance site, but the second result had surprised her.
“Dark?”
“Harry Gardner’s transparent compositions are derivative of the greats who he so desperately tries to emulate, except Gardner delivers these audible car crashes with all the subtlety of a Pitbull on steroids. He’s the daytime soap opera of modern classical music: cringeworthy, unwanted, filler material that passes the time until something better comes along. Give this a pass because the world deserves better.”
Ripley pulled on her jacket, checked her ammunition levels. “What?”
“Not my words, the words of Grayson Miller.”
***
Ripley drove while Ella did more research. Harry Gardner had popped into their lives suddenly and unexpectedly, but Ella welcomed his intrusion. He was a forty-six year old songwriter, composer, and cellist who’d apparently been a lifelong musician, yet had nothing but one self-produced album to his name. That had come out in 2016, and after that, Harry Gardner seemed to drop off the face of the earth.
“We got pictures of this guy? Any employment history?”
“A bunch of pictures. Slick black hair, pencil moustache, beady little eyes. Employment history just lists self-employment. No specific workplaces.”
“Here. This is Follett Street.”
A calm and tranquil row of houses, windows gleaming in the late afternoon sun. Ripley pulled the car up outside a neighbor’s house. They’d do the rest of the journey on foot.
“Ready?” Ella said.
“Always. Let’s bring this guy in without any drama, right?”
“I strive for no drama,” Ella said. She checked her pistol, left the car, and led the way to house number 1463. It was a modest two-story home, gleaming white paintwork, a porch straight out of a country music album cover. Through a wooden gate, a sea of grass rippled at her feet in the gentle breeze, patterned like an intricate velvet quilt. Up the path to the porch, Harry Gardner’s back gate burst open like a thunderclap. A figure shuffled through, lawnmower in hand, the bulky torso bouncing off the man’s shins.
“Oh, hello?” he said.
Ella recognized him from the few available pictures, although he’d changed a lot in six years. Harry Gardner was sun-kissed and muscular, a forty-six year old in a body half the age.
“Mr. Gardner?” Ripley asked.
“That would be me. And you are?”
“I’m Agent Ripley and this is Agent Dark. We’re with the FBI. Could we talk to you for a minute?”
“Sure,” Harry smiled as he lay his garden equipment down. “Anything for the cops.”
Ella kept an eye on his nonverbal signals. Overly positive on the outside was usually compensation for inner turmoil. “We’re investigating a series of homicides in the area,” she said. “Your name has cropped up.”
Harry laughed off the comment, bellowing to the sky. “You’re kidding? Funniest thing I’ve ever heard.”
Ripley asked, “Funny?”
“Oh yeah. Do I look like a murderer to you?”
Ella said, “A little bit.”
Harry pointed at her, laughed, and winked. “I like you. But I promise you, I’m no murderer. Who am I meant to have killed?”
Ripley reeled off the names. “Vicky Haben, Grayson Miller, Ethan Harlow. Know any of them?”
Harry gripped the handles of his lawnmower and gasped. “Ethan Harlow? You’re not serious?”
Ella asked, “You knew him then?”
“Who doesn’t? Big shot. Turned me down once but I let it go.”
“Turned you down?”
“Yup. Pitched a nice little project to him around…. God… ten years ago. But let’s be honest, Ethan has turned everyone down. No sweat off my nose.”
Ella gave her partner a firm stare, not quite sure what Harry’s game was here. If he was their unsub, he was being a little too honest for his own good.
Ripley asked, “What about Grayson Miller? Pretty harsh reviewer, that guy.”
“Who?”
“Runs a site called the Seventh Hex. It slammed your self-release pretty hard.”
Harry cackled again. “That and everywhere else. Look, I’m not a bitter guy. I sucked at commercial classical music, alright? Not everyone is an artist, and that’s perfectly fine. That’s why I bailed on all that crap.” Harry flexed his gigantic bicep then tapped his abs. “Best thing I ever did was leave all that rubbish in the past. Now I just raise my kids, do some little jingles here and there.”
Ella couldn’t see beyond the façade, to the point she doubted there was a façade at all. All signs pointed to Harry being genuine, but she still had a few questions for him.
“Could you tell us where you were the past three nights?” she asked.
Harry tested the lawnmower. It roared to life for a second then died out. The man scratched his temple and said, “I can’t tell you exactly where I was, no.”
Ella arched her brows. “Odd.”
“My friends might be able to though. I’ve been in Vegas, drunk as a skunk since Thursday. I barely remember getting home last night.” Harry clicked the lawnmower on again, ran it over a small patch then killed it. “I’ve only been back a few hours and already the wife’s got me mowing. You ladies married?”
“Still waiting,” Ella said. She pushed on. “Mr. Gardner, our perpetrator used an app called PayMeNow. A deposit was made into that account from your PayMeNow account.”
“Of course. I pay a few of my workers through that thing. Keeps transaction fees low.”
“Your workers? You’re listed as self-employed.”
“Yup. If you want to make money these days, you gotta outsource. I make little jingles for ads, radio shows, video games. Easy work, not a ton of stress. I got a lot going on, so I sometimes advertise for guys through freelance sites. I learned that stuff the hard way.”
Ella violently rubbed her face, applying the jigsaw pieces one by one. The unsub had brought a record player from Alex Schaffer using PayMeNow. The money in the unsub’s account was transferred via Harry Gardner’s PayMeNow.
So, their unsub had to be an employee of Harry Gardner’s.
Ripley beat her to it. “We’ll need the details of this employee of yours. According to the transaction, you transferred him fifty dollars around two weeks ago.”
“Fifty dollars?” Harry asked. “That’s pretty low compared to…. Ah, wait a minute. That’ll be a trial job. Yeah, I remember now.”
“You have this person’s name? Location?”
“Oh no. Nothing like that. I advertised for a musician, got a weird email from a guy. Super confident, really played himself up. The kind of guy who could sell a dildo to a nun. Usually I kick guys like that to the curb right away, but something about it tickled me so I gave him a trial job. Good I didn’t hire him right away because his work wasn’t that good.”
Ella felt them getting closer, closer to a name, closer to something that could unveil this unsub’s identity. She tried to hard silence the doubts, the conceivable theory that this could be another one of the unsub’s misdirects.
“So he’s got an email address?” Ella asked. “And he must have used a name during your conversation?”
Harry said, “Well, that’s the weird thing. He had an email address, but it was one of those temporary ones that implodes after a while.”
Ella silently cursed, slamming her fist against her thigh. She guessed it was too good to be true.
“I sent him his payment through the app, and a few days ago I emailed him to say that his little melody had been used in some mobile game. My clients usually get a kick out of knowing their stuff is out there somewhere. But the email wouldn’t send, just kept coming back with an error. That’s when I realized it had self-destructed.”
Ella clung on to a shred of hope. If the email address had existed at all, then there would be a record of it. She wasn’t a technical expert by any means but she knew that once something was on the Internet it was on there forever.
Ripley, “And he never gave you a name? You did business with an anonymous, nameless individual?”
Harry laughed. “Oh, he had a name. In fact, that was the part that tickled me the most. Wannabe artists always have the craziest egos, don’t they?”
Ripley asked, “What did he call himself?”
Ella couldn’t explain why, but she felt her heart sink to the bottom of her chest. She had something of a premonition, a feeling of unease. The temperature outside descended, bringing a sudden overcast sky and a trickle of rainfall.
“It wasn’t a normal name, he just called himself the Maestro.”
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
In just twenty-fours, this unsub had gone from being lucky and mildly organized to one of the most cunning perpetrators Ella had seen in her life.
Ripley pulled their car into the precinct parking lot. Ella rested her temple against the window, staring into the obsidian sky as she scanned the recesses of her brain for answers. The killer had handed them everything they ought to need to catch a predator - three bodies, hard evidence, musical clues, email trails – and he still evaded them.
The Maestro. She repeated the name over and over in her head until it meant nothing. This was what the press would call him when news of these murders hit the mainstream. His physical attacks were relentless and chaotic, but it distracted from the fact that he was a cold, obsessively organized narcissist. He’d even controlled the one thing serial killers strived to control – their own narrative. By assigning himself his own moniker, he controlled his image until someone said his name for the last time, which could be hundreds of years from now. To Ella’s disgust, the Maestro’s crimes would still be talked about long after she and Ripley had departed.
“This is no accident,” Ella said. “He’s toying with us. He knew we’d spot Alex on the camera. He knew we’d end up finding Harry. He’s playing us like a musical instrument.”
“The irony,” Ripley said. “I have to commend this guy. He covered his bases. He purposely took a small job that would net him the money he needed in his e-wallet to buy a record player. Doing so, he led us to Harry, then vanished at the end.”
“Yeah. He’s playing this game and he’s taking every chance. I have no idea how he’s pulling it off.”
Ella’s phone pinged. Edis’s name flashed up. His message read: Need answers. Call me ASAP.
“I know that ping. The boss wants you.”
“Yup.”
Ripley slapped her partner on the leg. Ella winced. She wasn’t in the mood for sisterly vibes. “Sometimes you just gotta be honest,” Ripley said. “We’re not magic. We can’t see things that aren’t there.”
Ella sparked up at the irony of Ripley extolling the importance of honesty. This whole trip she’d been miserable as hell and refused to reveal why. “Things that aren’t there? Mia, he’s given us everything. No other serial killer in history has left behind the mountains of evidence that he has. We’ve got three record players, and a bunch of electronic receipts. We should have had his identity yesterday.”
“But we haven’t. So, all we can do is keep looking. Harry is going to send over all his email correspondence with this Maestro. There could be something in there we can latch onto. That’s what you do best, isn’t it?”
“I doubt it. This guy is as controlling as it gets. He’s manipulated every crime scene and had us chasing our tails. He knew we’d find Harry, so he wouldn’t slip up there either. Hence the use of a self-destructing email account.”
Ripley sighed and said, “When you’re right, you’re right. I’m going inside. Are you coming? I’ll deal with Edis if you want. I need to talk to him anyway.”
Ella unlocked the door and stepped one foot onto the pavement. “I’d be grateful if you could answer the director,” she said, “but right now I’m going somewhere else. I’ll be back later.”
***
Ella drifted along the sidewalk, exhausted and rain soaked. She wished she had a vice to comfort her. She had no such thing.
The worst part about all this was lives hung in the balance. Every breath she and Mia wasted snapping at each other and exchanging woes could be used to figure this perpetrator out. This unsub had a motive, just like every other serial killer in history. All she had to do was figure out what he was trying to say, what grim message lay beyond the surface of these murders.
Puzzles were easier solved if you looked at them linearly, so Ella pieced everything together from the start.
Vicky Haben had been a violinist. Successful, accomplished, not famous. The killer had stabbed her in the abdomen, then left Mozart’s No. 9 playing at the crime scene. Post-mortem, he’d also briefly wrapped a violin string around her neck.
Grayson Miller had been a music reviewer with a poison tongue. His writings were usually satirical and overblown, and he only touched a handful of classical pieces in his entire bibliography. He too had been stabbed to death, this time to the tune of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
Ethan Harlow was a noted music producer. Affluent, successful, a world-renowned name in his industry. The unsub had been a little more careful this time around, organizing a record player to be delivered to his home in the night hours. He’d then been slayed to the melodies of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal.
But the music had not been original. They were all amateur recordings, cover songs of iconic classical pieces.
Who had recorded them – and why? Why not simply use actual recordings? It would have taken much less effort.
Ella’s mind raced as a thought began to take shape, but she quickly brushed it aside, instead focusing on the unsub’s behavioral patterns. All signs pointed to him being a musician himself, so he might have been the one to record these cover tracks. But for someone as narcissistic as he clearly was – the kind of person who calls themselves the Maestro – simply covering songs that had been covered a million times before would bring him no prestige. It would be like a budding rock star singing Paradise City. Entertaining maybe, but by no means ground-breaking. It might have been enough for reality talent shows and the like, but this unsub fancied himself something exceptional. The music was the focus, the murder was the punctuation mark.
Digging into the music pieces themselves had yielded very few connections, other than the sense of mystery that plagued the three compositions. There was also the theme of redemption, although even Ella had to admit she might be making leaps with that.
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