'Try me.'
Another pause. 'I knew the answer to all of this was locked inside Christa's mind. I knew time was short, but I had to work that angle.'
Jessica just listened, deciding not to tell Byrne that she already knew about the evidence Diaz had. But she now realized that it was Drummond who had planted the evidence, hoping to buy himself more time tonight, counting on the arrest of Kevin Byrne.
'When we got to the Roundhouse they patted me down,' Byrne said. 'They took my cellphone. Russ Diaz started scrolling through the calls I'd made today. He also saw the folder that holds the photographs. He saw this.' Byrne held up his phone. 'I hadn't really looked at it before. When I did, it all fell into place.'
Byrne tapped the screen, showed Jessica a picture. In it, Christa- Marie stood on the steps of a huge stone building. Next to the scarred oak doors was an inscription. Byrne tapped the screen again, enlarging the words.
What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.
Jessica looked at Byrne. 'This is what Drummond said at his leaving party.'
Byrne nodded.
'And this picture was taken at Convent Hill,' she added.
'Yeah.'
Jessica recognized the place. It was in the photograph that she had found in Joseph Novak's journal. The photo captioned with the word Hell.
'Drummond had been to Convent Hill to visit Christa-Marie. That was where he got the inscription. From the Roundhouse we called the Prentiss Institute and had them look through the records. Michael Drummond studied with Christa-Marie. Both he and Novak were her students on the day when Gabriel Throne was murdered.'
Jessica took a step away, absorbing the new information. She turned back, her anger far from dissipated.
'I had my weapon out, Kevin. More than once.'
'I know.'
'Something could have gone really wrong, really fast.'
Byrne pointed to the six SWAT officers gathered on the grounds. They had a direct line of sight to the eastern side of the mansion, the side where the kitchen and the music room were located.
'At no time were you in jeopardy, Jess. They had Drummond in their sights through the windows. If he had made a move toward you they would have taken him down. We just hoped it wouldn't be before he talked. We had to get him to make the admission.'
'Why? What are you talking about?'
Byrne held up a CD in a crystal case.
'What is that?' she asked.
'It's the whole event. Christa-Marie has a very sophisticated recording studio upstairs. The music room has six microphones in it. Mateo is up in the studio now. He's like a kid in a candy store.'
'You're saying everything that happened in there was recorded?'
Byrne nodded. 'When Drummond got here tonight he slipped upstairs, into that room, started the whole process. It's all on here. Christa-Marie playing Danse Macabre, including the background of Drummond's sick recordings of death screams. He finally got his magnum opus.'
Jessica's head was spinning. 'What about Lucy?' she asked. 'I don't care how good the SWAT guys are — Drummond had that razor at her throat.'
Byrne looked away for a moment as the ME's transport van pulled into the long drive. He looked back.
'We didn't plan on Lucy,' he said. 'I had no idea she was here.'
Ninety minutes later, with the house sealed and guarded, Byrne was waiting for Jessica in the large circular drive. They would head back to the Roundhouse to begin the long process of piecing together the horrors of the last few weeks.
Jessica stepped through the front door, closed it behind her. She looked at her watch. It was 2:52.
It was All Saints Day.
Chapter 102
Tuesday, November 2
There was no shortage of media interest. For the still photographers and videographers alike, the Tudor house at Chestnut Hill was a feast of images. It would probably be on the list of horror tours next Halloween. The road in front of Christa-Marie Schцnburg's house was crowded with national and international media. Two days after the horror, the numbers were still growing.
For the police, the whole story would take far longer to assemble. The investigation revealed that Michael Drummond and Joseph Novak had both attended Prentiss, had both taken private lessons from Christa-Marie Schцnburg. Over the years the rivalry between the boys had grown, not for first chair in an ensemble but rather for the affections of Christa-Marie.
On Halloween night 1990, it came to a head. Although investigators might never know exactly what had happened, they believed that Michael Drummond and Joseph Novak killed Gabriel Thorne that night. Drummond, being the dominant one of the pair, held this over Novak's head for the next twenty years.
The two men formed a small, unprofitable company, through which they published limited-edition reproductions of sheet music, penned reproductions in the composer's hand. The paper they used was Atriana.
When Drummond, who had taken a job at Benjamin Curtin's law firm — Paulson Deny Chambers — learned of Christa-Marie's illness, his own psychosis led him down a path of destruction, a reign of terror that would be felt for a long time.
It was Michael Drummond who had supplied the forged visitor's pass and clothing to Lucas Anthony Thompson.
Real-estate tax records traced back to Drummond led to a small commercial building in South Philly. Police found his killing room full of recording equipment, as well as a cache of nearly two hundred CDs and audiocassettes — all meticulously dated — of street and human sounds, some of them of people in their death throes. It would be months, maybe years, before police forensic audiologists would be able to make sense of the recordings, if ever. Michael Drummond had been building to this dark denouement for a long time.
At Josh Bontrager's direction K-9 officers from PPD found an unconsious David Albrecht at the bottom of the ravine on Sawmill Road. Albrecht had lost a lot of blood, but paramedics reached him in time. Investigators were certain that he had been attacked and left for dead by Michael Drummond, but Drummond would escape this charge posthumously.
None of this explained the murder of George Archer.
Lucy Doucette, in her statement, told police about the man she had met. The man who called himself Adrian Costa. The Dreamweaver. Police checked with the management of the apartment building off Cherry Street. The landlord said that a man had rented Apartment 106 for six months, paying cash in advance. He gave police a vague description.
They had showed Lucy the video recordings made on Halloween Night at the hotel, recordings of the hallway on the twelfth floor. Jessica had freeze-framed the image of the man in the wizard's costume and mask passing by the camera.
Lucy said she couldn't remember.
Jessica had also visited Garrett Corners again, researched the name Adrian Costa. No one with that name had ever been registered as a voter or resident of the area. The people knew the reclusive van Tassels to be travelers, carny people. The only photograph of the family was nearly fifteen years old. When Jessica revisited Peggy van Tassel's grave, she looked at the two plots next to it. One was the grave of a man named Ellis Adrian. The other was the last resting place of an Evangeline Costa.
Was the Dreamweaver Peggy van Tassel's father?
