Crime Plus Music (27 page)

“Better how, exactly? I've got a 2.1 GPA and a part-time job selling lipstick at the mall. Nobody's giving scholarships for girls in the color guard.”

“There are always options.”

It was Penny's first lie of the night, and it sobered her. If she were in the mood for honesty, though, she would have told Lark that her boyfriend was an average ballplayer. Oh sure, good enough for high school, but not likely to make a college team. A brat to boot. And that's what made her mad, not willing to admit that you're like everyone else. It sounded too familiar, and Penny finally felt something like fear, that everything she could accomplish, she'd accomplished, that a gift certificate to a local bait-and-tackle store was the closest she'd ever come to success, to being the best at anything.

“What's wrong with a C average and a job?” she finally said, knowing the answer was “everything.” The Greatest. Some joke. Penny was smiling when Lark pulled the trigger.

PLAYED TO DEATH

BY BILL FITZHUGH

G
RADY
S
HERMAN
CAME
TO
IN
darkness and motion and pain. And from somewhere, music played, a song he'd never heard before. This mattered to Grady more than it would most people under the circumstances because Grady considered himself a music expert. He made a good living telling radio programmers what to play. He knew all the songs people wanted to hear and this wasn't one of them.

But for now, Grady had to let that go. He was in the fetal position, dazed and confused as to how and why he'd ended up . . . wherever the hell he was. He tried to sit up but banged his head on something metal that put him back down.

Then, in the corner of the space, a light blinked four times, accompanied by a sound Grady recognized, the rat-a-tat of tires on pavement markers. Now he knew. Okay, I'm in the trunk of a car, he thought, that's a start, but whose car? My own? Someone else's? Was there an answer to either of those questions that could possibly explain why I'm in the trunk?

He didn't feel so good.

Grady drank too much. He knew that. Didn't need to be reminded. But
this
wasn't the solution. Take my keys away, fine. Call a cab, whatever, but you don't throw a man in the trunk of a car to get him back to his hotel. I don't care how drunk he is.

He banged his fist on the trunk lid. “Hey! Let me out of here!” The yelling made his head throb even worse.

The song, the unfamiliar song, grew louder as someone in the car turned up the volume, apparently to drown out the yelling. Was this some sort of practical joke? Stuff me in the trunk of a car and play music nobody recognizes? If so, it damn sure wasn't funny. Grady wondered if he had gotten belligerent at the bar. Wouldn't be the first time. He could be a real prick. He knew that, but he didn't care. He banged on the trunk again. “I'm calling nine-one-one asshole!”

Grady felt for his cell phone but it was gone. That discovery forced his pain to yield to fear and a feeling in the pit of his stomach like dread. No, it was more than a feeling, it was dread itself multiplying like ebola in his gut.

A sudden turn off the smooth pavement threw Grady against the trunk's wall as the car made a jarring transition to a rough dirt road. Another song came on. Grady didn't recognize this one either. This song wasn't on any list he'd ever approved. Who would listen to this? None of this made sense to him.

Five minutes later the car stopped and with it, the unfamiliar music. The driver's door opened. Footsteps approached in the gravel. “I'm going to open the trunk now,” a man said. “I have a gun.”

“Who are you?”

“Don't do anything stupid.”

The trunk popped open. A man, older than Grady and sturdier, stood a few feet away, a gun in his hand. The man said, “Get out.”

“Who the fuck are you?”

“I'm the guy with the gun telling you what to do,” the man said. “Now do it unless you want to die right there. Up to you.”

Grady struggled to do as he was told. Good God, his head hurt, a chemical throbbing deep in the folds of his brain rendering him helpless, confused, feeble. Had he been drugged? Nothing else made sense. Hell, being drugged didn't make sense. None of it made a damn bit of sense.

When he finally had both feet on the ground, Grady sat on the lip of the trunk, took a deep breath, tried to focus. The rot of dead fish filling his nose, he turned to see a lake, a wooden pier jutting into a spread of black water reflecting a half-moon. Grady said, “Who are you are? What's this about?”

“I'm a consultant, for lack of a better term.”

“A consultant that kidnaps people?”

“I was hired.”

“By who?”

“The people I answer to,” the man said. “They hired me and I'm taking care of business. It's not personal.”

“I don't understand.”

“We did some call-out research,” the man said. “Results were unequivocal.”

“What are you talking about, call-out research?” Grady glanced back at the trunk. Maybe there was a tire iron, something he could use as a weapon.

“You know how it works,” the man said. “We had a good sample of the demographic we're trying to appeal to and we asked what they wanted, and this is what they said. We're just giving them what they asked for.”

“Which is what?”

“Bad news for you, I'm afraid.”

“Look,” Grady said, “I don't know who put you up to this but . . .”

“Are you a religious man?”

“What do you care?”

“I'm asking as a courtesy,” the man said. “I want to give you the chance to pray if you're so inclined.”

“Pray.”

“You know, when you find yourself in times of trouble, mother Mary speaking words of wisdom to you, all that. Some people take comfort in it,” the man said. “A last rights kind of thing, I guess.”

“What are you saying, last rites?”

“Put another way, this is the end of side two for you.”

It finally dawned on Grady. “Your research said I should be killed?”

“Yes. Do you want to pray?” The guy smiled and said, “Jesus is just all right with me.”

Something in the way the man said it was terrifying. Grady realized these would be the final moments of his life unless he did something. He knew he couldn't outrun a bullet so he mustered all the cognitive skills he could and said, “Maybe you didn't ask the right questions. You know, it's not as easy as people think to get the questions right. To get the answer you need.”

“Trust me,” the man said. “We know what we're doing and this tested really well. Off the charts, as they say.” He nodded, saying, “We've got faith in our research.”

“Listen,” Grady said, “you can get people to tell you they love whatever it is you're selling, if you phrase the question correctly.”

The man shook his head. “You're not doing yourself any favors talking like that.”

“Okay, look, I've got money,” Grady said, patting for his wallet. “Name your price. I'll make you rich!”

“Grady, don't give me that do-goody-good bullshit.”

“What?” The phrase gave Grady pause, though for the life of him he couldn't figure out why.

“This isn't negotiable,” the man said. “Now turn around.”

Grady held his ground. “Please, no, don't do this! I won't tell anybody. You can say somebody drove up, interrupted before you could do the job. Just let me go!”

“What, like give you three steps, a little head start?” The man shook his head. “Dream on,” he said. He motioned with the gun toward the dock. “Now let's go, walk this way.”

“I want to live!”

The man paused, as if deeply disappointed. Then he said, “Grady, you, of all people, should know, you can't always get what you want.”

The man zip-tied Grady's hands behind his back and walked him down the pier. At the end, a few fishing boats tied off on cleats, including a rusty aluminum skiff filled with straw, a single swivel chair rising in the middle on a post. The man pulled a fat cigar from his pocket, a 60 gauge Maduro. “Open your mouth,” he said.

Grady clenched his teeth, shook his head. He wasn't going to cooperate any more.

The man cracked the side of Grady's face with his pistol.

“Open!”

Grady let the man put the cigar in his mouth.

The man pulled another cigar and did the same. And another and another until Grady's jaw was locked open from the pressure of it all. “Get in the boat.”

Hands behind his back, Grady's balance was compromised, so the man steadied him into the skiff and buckled him into the swivel chair. The man pulled a pack of matches and struck one, tossing it onto the straw. Then he shoved the boat with his foot, sent it gliding onto the lake, like a cut-rate Viking funeral.

“Take it easy,” the man said.

A
DEPUTY
FOR
THE
COUNTY
sheriff's office got a call about a report of some kids having a bonfire out on Greasy Lake. When he got to the pier, he saw how someone might think that. A breeze had blown the skiff back near shore. From a distance, it might look like a bonfire. The deputy grabbed his extinguisher, hopped in one of the other boats and went to see what he could do.

He put out the fire and towed the boat back to shore, called it in. “Send CSI,” he said. “Don't know if it's homicide or suicide but the man's dead and I wouldn't call it natural causes.” Wasn't long before there was quite a crowd. Coroner, the sheriff along with more deputies, fire department, some press. They found Grady's wallet in his back pocket, saved from the flames by the swivel chair.

They'd been taking pictures and collecting evidence for a half hour when a black sedan pulled into the clearing. Two men. Agent Yates, fifty-nine, and Agent Ball, mid-thirties. FBI. They got out, went looking for whoever was in charge.

As they approached the command post, Agent Yates was talking to his young partner, saying, “It's deuce, not douche.”

“Wrapped up like a deuce? What's that supposed to mean?”

“Revved up,” Agent Yates said. “Springsteen? ‘Blinded by the Light'? ‘Revved up like a deuce,' a '32 Ford, a hotrod. Jesus.”

They found the sheriff who told them what they had so far. “Middle-aged white male, mouth stuffed with ten big cigars, buckled into the chair, hands tied behind his back. Probably died of smoke inhalation. Would have burned to death but the straw was a little damp, according to the Fire Chief. Made for a lot of smoke.”

The two agents nodded like the whole thing fit a pattern. Agent Yates turned to Agent Ball. “What do you think?”

“Seems pretty obvious,” the younger agent said. “‘Smoke on the Water.'”

The sheriff cocked his head. “Like the song? Dum, dum, dummm . . . dum dum da da. I love that one.”

“Yeah,” Agent Yates said. “So did I the first ten thousand times I heard it.” He looked at his partner and said, “He's getting more elaborate. He's combining titles now. ‘Smoke on the Water' plus ‘Have a Cigar' and maybe ‘Light My Fire,' too.”

Agent Ball nodded. “The Floyd for sure, can't say about the Doors.”

“What're you guys talking about?”

“Serial killer,” Agent Ball said. “He leaves a signature.”

“Ohhh,” the sheriff said. “And he's a Deep Purple fan?”

“Not exactly,” Agent Ball said. “The victims' deaths are staged to evoke the titles of different classic rock songs.”

Agent Yates turned to the sheriff and said, “First guy we found, and I think you'll appreciate this for obvious reasons, the first guy we found had a plastic sheriff's badge stuck on his chest. He'd been shot. That was the simplest one.”

“Who was he?”

“Some programmer,” Agent Ball said. “Used algorithms to determine the fewest number of songs necessary to get the best ratings for the format in any given market. Didn't want anybody to hear a song they'd never heard before.”

“Another guy was beaten to death,” Agent Yates said. “Now, usually that's done with an easily identified blunt object, you know, a bat, crowbar, a big wrench.” Yates shook his head. “Took the coroner a while to figure out this guy'd been beaten to death by what appeared to be a large cowbell, then beheaded with a scythe.”

“A what?”

“The big curved blade you always see with the Grim Reaper.”

“Ohhh, yeah, I know the song you're talking about. Love that guitar part,” the sheriff said, playing it on air guitar. “You got a name for this guy? Like the Son of Sam or the Hillside Strangler?”

Agent Yates said, “I call him the ‘Stairway to Heaven Killer.'”

“I prefer ‘Highway to Hell Killer.'”

“It's a generational thing I guess.”

“You got any suspects? Motives?”

Agent Yates said, “Our profilers have him pegged as a former
FM
DJ from the free-form era, which makes him a white male in his mid-sixties, most likely. Guy who worked in
FM
radio during its heyday, when the DJ selected the music from a vast library, none of which was off limits and you were free to speak your mind. They imagine the guy stayed in radio through the late seventies, the AOR years, then eventually got fired or quit when they whittled the playlist down to the last two hundred songs and gave him liner notes to read.”

“You'll have to forgive the Agent of Aquarius here,” Ball said. “He's been diagnosed as morbidly nostalgic with a complicating vision problem that makes him see everything from back in the day through rose-colored granny glasses.” He put his hand on his partner's shoulder. “I'm sorry to tell you, but those days are gone forever, over a long time ago.”

Yates took the ribbing in stride. “Go ahead, hit me with your best shot,” he said. “It's not your fault you weren't there, got no idea what you missed. But believe me,
FM
rock radio was a thing to behold when it was in the right hands. The DJs, the good ones anyway, were curators in a vinyl museum, playing things you'd never know about if they hadn't unearthed them for you. People were passionate about it. People loved it. And if you take away something that someone loves, something that had meaning in their lives, and you debase that thing? You force it to behave in all sorts of degrading ways, like double-shot Wednesdays, all Zep weekends, and twenty-six minutes of commercials an hour? You force someone to watch as you kill the thing they held so dear? Who wouldn't snap?” Agent Yates shook his head. “You can only push people so far.”

The sheriff asked about a triggering event.

Agent Yates said, “Profilers can't say, but my guess is, the poor guy snapped after hearing ‘Free Bird' one time too many.”