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LJ Idol 9.21: The music made me do it...
Sep. 16th, 2014 02:18 pmEsther Dodgins clucked her tongue as she used her passkey to let herself into the rent house she had leased to Kurt Cobb and his friends. Not answering the door might suggest there was nobody home, but the two motorcycles and car in the driveway said otherwise. Despite her seventy-three years, diminutive physique, and seemingly delicate appearance, she did not faint or scream when she beheld the bloody scene in the large living room off the entry foyer. She did, however, have the good sense to step back outside the house to vomit before using her cell phone to call the police.
* * *
"The place looked like a slaughterhouse," said Detective Junior Grade Frank O'Malley. "According to the doc, it looks like someone tried to decapitate the base player, Mike Craft, with Kurt Cobb's guitar, and almost succeeded. Then…"
"Spare me the recitation, O'Malley," said Chief Detective Jack Naquin, who was in charge of the investigation. "I'm sure I'll get all that from the doc in his report. Aside from the victims, did you find anything of interest?"
"Yes," said O'Malley. "There was a video camera set up to catch whatever it was the band had been doing, but there was no memory card in it when we checked. The perp—or perps—must've taken it."
"Any suspects?"
"Nope. The landlady suggested drugs might be involved, but we'll know better once the tox screens come back." The tests came back several weeks later, but as it turned out, no member of the band had taken so much as an aspirin in the hours before death had come calling.
A closer examination of the crime scene had not yielded anything concrete, except for the fact that blood spatter patterns made it physically impossible for any outsider to have been involved during the deadly mêlée. The last man standing—Babin, the drummer—had committed suicide in a most improbable manner. Naquin had also made extensive notes regarding entries in the band leader's "journal," which tended to ramble along with all sorts of yearnings for stardom, and kept returning to the idea of "an exciting new sound" that would "compel people to act out being happy," but ultimately, the scribblings led nowhere.
"Nowhere" was where the case remained, and Naquin couldn't help but wonder, from time to time, whether the band hadn't indeed found a "new sound," but not the one Cobb had been searching for. Instead of happiness, maybe what the band had stumbled upon was music that compelled people to a murderous and ultimately self-destructive rage. He recalled the Cajun stories of his youth, which included rumors of music that compelled people to fall in love, and researched a song titled Szomorú Vasárnap that was written and recorded in Hungary in the early 1930s, and was widely considered responsible for a rash of suicides in Budapest. The song was eventually banned in that country.
Six months or so after the Cobb killings, a call came in about what looked to be a double-murder with a strikingly similar look and feel to it. The victims turned out to be a well-known music and video bootlegger and her boyfriend.
"I think we found the memory card from the Cobb case," said O'Malley when he reported to Naquin. "A card of the same type was found inserted in the dead woman's computer. The evidence tech did a quick check, and the files on it are dated the day Cobb and his buddies died. There was a DVD-burning app open on the desktop, the optical drive was cracked open, and a package of blank DVDs—with one disk missing—was sitting on the desk. Considering the business she was in, I'm figuring she acquired that memory card from someone we should talk to, so I've ordered a check of her recent financial transactions."
"Good work," said Naquin, and then, after a moment, added: "Is there any chance this was a murder–suicide?"
"Well," said O'Malley, "after the woman was killed, someone flung the boyfriend headfirst so hard against the steam radiator that it actually bent the pipe it was attached to. I can't imagine anyone getting up that much of a head of steam to do something like that on their own, but the doc can answer the question better than I can when he's through."
Naquin nodded, and asked: "You find the burned DVD?"
"That's the funny thing," said O'Malley. "The evidence guys about tore the apartment up, but aside from a bunch of commercially produced CDs and DVDs in their respective cases, there wasn't a single burned disk of any kind in the apartment."
"What do you think?" asked Naquin. "Someone killed the girl and her boyfriend and then burned and took a DVD?"
"It doesn't make sense, boss," said O'Malley. "It'd be easier to just take the memory card. And even if you did want to make a DVD, why leave the memory card behind?"
The two men sat quietly for a minute. Then Naquin spoke.
"Why don't you detail a couple of your guys to canvas the area within a five-block radius of the apartment? Maybe our girl took the DVD somewhere. Maybe someone saw her and followed her home."
"Will do, boss," said O'Malley, and left, as Naquin turned to pick up his ringing phone.
"I've got some bad news for you, Jack," said the senior computer forensics tech at the other end of the line. "When my guy checked the date and time of the files on the memory card, it triggered some custom system code that automatically deleted the files on the card."
"Can't you recover the files?" asked Naquin.
"Nope," came the answer. "It wasn't a simple deletion. Not only were the file entries removed from the card's directory, but the file data was overwritten with garbage. In effect, the memory card has been wiped clean. Whoever did the programming had some serious skills, let me tell you!"
* * *
The dead bootlegger's financial data revealed that a sizeable payment had been made to Esther Dodgins, the landlady. When she was brought in to the station for questioning, Esther admitted to having taken the memory card with the idea of eventually selling it, justifying her action as a way of collecting the back rent owed to her. After establishing that Esther had not viewed the recording—"Heavens no!" had been her response. "I'd rather be struck deaf and blind than have to listen to the awful noise those boys made!"—Naquin personally read the old woman the riot act about tampering with crime scene evidence, whereupon she was set free, with a warning not to leave town in case the district attorney elected to pursue the issue further and press charges.
The canvas came up with one hit. Someone had seen the dead woman at the post office, but she had not shown up in any of the surveillance video recorded of the counter area. Naquin decided to follow this lead up himself.
* * *
Naquin stood in the post office lobby and did his best to take in every detail of the place. The place was clean and well-maintained. There were no places one could reliably hide anything the size of a DVD for very long. The post office boxes were key operated, but there was no corresponding key on the dead woman's key ring.
As he stood in the lobby, twirling the key ring around his finger and wondering what to do next, Naquin allowed his attention to be drawn to the shapely figure of a young woman who had entered through the same set of doors he had, not to conduct postal business, but to cut through the lobby to the next block. On a hunch, he followed the woman's example, and mentally cursed himself for telling O'Malley to have his men canvas a five block radius, because apparently, the instruction had been followed literally. There, in front of him, six blocks from the crime scene, was the storefront to an Internet café.
* * *
"Have you seen this girl, Izzie?" asked Naquin, after glancing at the name tag worn by the bearded young man behind the counter. He flashed a photograph of the dead woman in Izzie's direction.
"Yeah," said the man. "She does some work for me, from time to time."
"What kind of work?" asked Naquin.
"She's my sysadmin," said Izzie.
"Meaning…?"
"She takes care of the computer and network setup in the store," explained the man. "Before she came, every wannabe hacker and script kiddie in the neighborhood was in here trying to screw with my computers, but she put a stop to that right quick. What's the deal, is she in trouble?"
"She's dead," said Naquin.
"What? That girl in the news, that was her?" said Izzie, wide-eyed. After a moment, he added: "I had nothing to do with that!"
Naquin ignored the outburst, and asked if the woman kept any of her stuff at the café.
"Sure," said Izzie. "She's got what she calls her 'office', though it's really an old closet I let her use for free in exchange for her keeping my system humming and the computer creeps at bay."
"You mind if I take a look?" asked Naquin.
"Knock yourself out," said Izzie, "but I don't have a key. She had the lock changed and she doesn't—didn't—let anyone in there."
The key to the door was on the key ring. Naquin opened the door to reveal a neat, clean work space with neatly stacked boxes with hundreds of burned CDs and DVDs. And there, leaning up against the monitor, was a DVD neatly labeled with a date and the words "Last Cobb session." The way Naquin figured it, after burning the DVD, the dead woman had apparently made a special trip here just to put the disk in a safe place, and then returned home to actually watch the recorded performance, and then meet her maker.
Naquin picked up the disk with his fingertips and looked around. He was alone. He mentally reviewed what was known about the case, recalled how utterly depressed his uncle Ambrose would become every time he listened his recording of Billie Holiday singing Gloomy Sunday—it was like the music itself was making the old man play the song over and over—and wondered how, if his suspicions were correct, anyone could listen to the music in the video and survive the experience.
Could his hunch be wrong? Might the music be harmless and the video a key piece of evidence? Maybe. But the way it stood, its continued existence could result in more death, and if it really got loose in the world—if it got onto the Internet and went viral—it could be more devastating than a plague or asteroid impact.
His decision made, Naquin grasped the DVD with both hands and exerted mild pressure until the plastic snapped in two. He then put the halves together and snapped the pieces into four segments before leaving the café. As he walked briskly back to the precinct with a clear conscience, Naquin disposed of the pieces in different trash bins along the way.
"The place looked like a slaughterhouse," said Detective Junior Grade Frank O'Malley. "According to the doc, it looks like someone tried to decapitate the base player, Mike Craft, with Kurt Cobb's guitar, and almost succeeded. Then…"
"Spare me the recitation, O'Malley," said Chief Detective Jack Naquin, who was in charge of the investigation. "I'm sure I'll get all that from the doc in his report. Aside from the victims, did you find anything of interest?"
"Yes," said O'Malley. "There was a video camera set up to catch whatever it was the band had been doing, but there was no memory card in it when we checked. The perp—or perps—must've taken it."
"Any suspects?"
"Nope. The landlady suggested drugs might be involved, but we'll know better once the tox screens come back." The tests came back several weeks later, but as it turned out, no member of the band had taken so much as an aspirin in the hours before death had come calling.
A closer examination of the crime scene had not yielded anything concrete, except for the fact that blood spatter patterns made it physically impossible for any outsider to have been involved during the deadly mêlée. The last man standing—Babin, the drummer—had committed suicide in a most improbable manner. Naquin had also made extensive notes regarding entries in the band leader's "journal," which tended to ramble along with all sorts of yearnings for stardom, and kept returning to the idea of "an exciting new sound" that would "compel people to act out being happy," but ultimately, the scribblings led nowhere.
"Nowhere" was where the case remained, and Naquin couldn't help but wonder, from time to time, whether the band hadn't indeed found a "new sound," but not the one Cobb had been searching for. Instead of happiness, maybe what the band had stumbled upon was music that compelled people to a murderous and ultimately self-destructive rage. He recalled the Cajun stories of his youth, which included rumors of music that compelled people to fall in love, and researched a song titled Szomorú Vasárnap that was written and recorded in Hungary in the early 1930s, and was widely considered responsible for a rash of suicides in Budapest. The song was eventually banned in that country.
Six months or so after the Cobb killings, a call came in about what looked to be a double-murder with a strikingly similar look and feel to it. The victims turned out to be a well-known music and video bootlegger and her boyfriend.
"I think we found the memory card from the Cobb case," said O'Malley when he reported to Naquin. "A card of the same type was found inserted in the dead woman's computer. The evidence tech did a quick check, and the files on it are dated the day Cobb and his buddies died. There was a DVD-burning app open on the desktop, the optical drive was cracked open, and a package of blank DVDs—with one disk missing—was sitting on the desk. Considering the business she was in, I'm figuring she acquired that memory card from someone we should talk to, so I've ordered a check of her recent financial transactions."
"Good work," said Naquin, and then, after a moment, added: "Is there any chance this was a murder–suicide?"
"Well," said O'Malley, "after the woman was killed, someone flung the boyfriend headfirst so hard against the steam radiator that it actually bent the pipe it was attached to. I can't imagine anyone getting up that much of a head of steam to do something like that on their own, but the doc can answer the question better than I can when he's through."
Naquin nodded, and asked: "You find the burned DVD?"
"That's the funny thing," said O'Malley. "The evidence guys about tore the apartment up, but aside from a bunch of commercially produced CDs and DVDs in their respective cases, there wasn't a single burned disk of any kind in the apartment."
"What do you think?" asked Naquin. "Someone killed the girl and her boyfriend and then burned and took a DVD?"
"It doesn't make sense, boss," said O'Malley. "It'd be easier to just take the memory card. And even if you did want to make a DVD, why leave the memory card behind?"
The two men sat quietly for a minute. Then Naquin spoke.
"Why don't you detail a couple of your guys to canvas the area within a five-block radius of the apartment? Maybe our girl took the DVD somewhere. Maybe someone saw her and followed her home."
"Will do, boss," said O'Malley, and left, as Naquin turned to pick up his ringing phone.
"I've got some bad news for you, Jack," said the senior computer forensics tech at the other end of the line. "When my guy checked the date and time of the files on the memory card, it triggered some custom system code that automatically deleted the files on the card."
"Can't you recover the files?" asked Naquin.
"Nope," came the answer. "It wasn't a simple deletion. Not only were the file entries removed from the card's directory, but the file data was overwritten with garbage. In effect, the memory card has been wiped clean. Whoever did the programming had some serious skills, let me tell you!"
The dead bootlegger's financial data revealed that a sizeable payment had been made to Esther Dodgins, the landlady. When she was brought in to the station for questioning, Esther admitted to having taken the memory card with the idea of eventually selling it, justifying her action as a way of collecting the back rent owed to her. After establishing that Esther had not viewed the recording—"Heavens no!" had been her response. "I'd rather be struck deaf and blind than have to listen to the awful noise those boys made!"—Naquin personally read the old woman the riot act about tampering with crime scene evidence, whereupon she was set free, with a warning not to leave town in case the district attorney elected to pursue the issue further and press charges.
The canvas came up with one hit. Someone had seen the dead woman at the post office, but she had not shown up in any of the surveillance video recorded of the counter area. Naquin decided to follow this lead up himself.
Naquin stood in the post office lobby and did his best to take in every detail of the place. The place was clean and well-maintained. There were no places one could reliably hide anything the size of a DVD for very long. The post office boxes were key operated, but there was no corresponding key on the dead woman's key ring.
As he stood in the lobby, twirling the key ring around his finger and wondering what to do next, Naquin allowed his attention to be drawn to the shapely figure of a young woman who had entered through the same set of doors he had, not to conduct postal business, but to cut through the lobby to the next block. On a hunch, he followed the woman's example, and mentally cursed himself for telling O'Malley to have his men canvas a five block radius, because apparently, the instruction had been followed literally. There, in front of him, six blocks from the crime scene, was the storefront to an Internet café.
"Have you seen this girl, Izzie?" asked Naquin, after glancing at the name tag worn by the bearded young man behind the counter. He flashed a photograph of the dead woman in Izzie's direction.
"Yeah," said the man. "She does some work for me, from time to time."
"What kind of work?" asked Naquin.
"She's my sysadmin," said Izzie.
"Meaning…?"
"She takes care of the computer and network setup in the store," explained the man. "Before she came, every wannabe hacker and script kiddie in the neighborhood was in here trying to screw with my computers, but she put a stop to that right quick. What's the deal, is she in trouble?"
"She's dead," said Naquin.
"What? That girl in the news, that was her?" said Izzie, wide-eyed. After a moment, he added: "I had nothing to do with that!"
Naquin ignored the outburst, and asked if the woman kept any of her stuff at the café.
"Sure," said Izzie. "She's got what she calls her 'office', though it's really an old closet I let her use for free in exchange for her keeping my system humming and the computer creeps at bay."
"You mind if I take a look?" asked Naquin.
"Knock yourself out," said Izzie, "but I don't have a key. She had the lock changed and she doesn't—didn't—let anyone in there."
The key to the door was on the key ring. Naquin opened the door to reveal a neat, clean work space with neatly stacked boxes with hundreds of burned CDs and DVDs. And there, leaning up against the monitor, was a DVD neatly labeled with a date and the words "Last Cobb session." The way Naquin figured it, after burning the DVD, the dead woman had apparently made a special trip here just to put the disk in a safe place, and then returned home to actually watch the recorded performance, and then meet her maker.
Naquin picked up the disk with his fingertips and looked around. He was alone. He mentally reviewed what was known about the case, recalled how utterly depressed his uncle Ambrose would become every time he listened his recording of Billie Holiday singing Gloomy Sunday—it was like the music itself was making the old man play the song over and over—and wondered how, if his suspicions were correct, anyone could listen to the music in the video and survive the experience.
Could his hunch be wrong? Might the music be harmless and the video a key piece of evidence? Maybe. But the way it stood, its continued existence could result in more death, and if it really got loose in the world—if it got onto the Internet and went viral—it could be more devastating than a plague or asteroid impact.
His decision made, Naquin grasped the DVD with both hands and exerted mild pressure until the plastic snapped in two. He then put the halves together and snapped the pieces into four segments before leaving the café. As he walked briskly back to the precinct with a clear conscience, Naquin disposed of the pieces in different trash bins along the way.
