XO

Chapter 48

DANCE AND O’NEIL conducted the search themselves.

It felt good, being with him again, working with him. Some of this was simply the comfort of being with a person you were close to, whose subtle looks and smiles and gestures communicated perfectly, without the need for words.

But part of the pleasure was their combined skills as law enforcers. A Gestalt-the whole greater than the sum of the parts. Policing’s a tough business and can’t be done alone. The job can be a nightmare when you aren’t connected with your partner-and that not only makes for a tough working day but it also means the bad guys are less likely to get caught.

Police investigation can be an art form, like ballet, a choreography of technique, purpose, and she felt this in near perfection with Michael O’Neil.

The scene where they were practicing their harmonies was Bobby Prescott’s trailer and what had inspired the search here was the revelation by Harutyun about the Fab Four.

Dance believed she now knew what had been stolen the morning after the roadie had been murdered-by the person Tabatha Nysmith had seen in Bobby’s trailer. And the object of this theft wasn’t Kayleigh Towne memorabilia. Indeed, it had nothing to do with the singer at all or with the stalker-except to the extent that, yes, Edwin Sharp probably was a fall guy as he’d claimed all along.

“Well,” she said, somewhat breathlessly, examining a binder from the shelves where she’d noted something missing several days ago, when she was here with P. K. Madigan.

O’Neil stepped closer and together they looked over a spiral notebook in which Bobby Prescott’s father had jotted details about the recordings he’d helped engineer at Abbey Road Studios in London during the 1960s and ’70s.

Dance recalled that Tabatha had mentioned Bobby’s father’s illustrious career.

It was a breathtaking list of talent from the era: Cliff Richard, Connie Francis, the Scorpions, the Hollies, Pink Floyd and of course the Beatles, who recorded Yellow Submarine and Abbey Road there. Much of the man’s scribbling was cryptic-notes about synthesizers and amplifier dynamics and acoustic baffles and instruments.

But the most relevant was a carbon copy of a letter to Bobby’s father.

June 13, 1969

Bob Prescott:

Hey mate, thanks for the GREAT job, you’re the best engineer, we mean it. Loved working with you. So, in appreciation for all those sleepless nights the tapes to those songs we did playing around after ‘Abbey Road,’ are yours, all the rights, everything. The list’s below. Cheers!

“Wait,” O’Neil said. “Are those…?”

Dance said in a whisper, “I think they are. My God, I think they are.” At the bottom of the letter were the titles of four songs. None of them was a known Beatles song.

She explained that the composing and recording of the songs on the Abbey Road album began in the spring of 1969. It was the group’s last studio album. Let It Be was released a year later, though that song was finished by January of ’69.

Dennis Harutyun-the “librarian of the FMCSO,” as Madigan dubbed him-had indeed done some impressive research into the life of Bobby Prescott and his family to see if anyone other than Edwin might have a motive to kill him. The deputy had found some rumors, buried on the Internet, that his father might have had some outtakes of Beatles songs he’d helped engineer in London years ago.

But these weren’t outtakes; they were complete songs, original and unreleased, never heard in public.

“And the Beatles just gave them away?” O’Neil asked.

“The band was breaking up then. They were rich. Maybe they just didn’t care about them. Or maybe they just didn’t think they were any good.”

“The letter’s not signed by any of them.”

Dance shrugged. “A handwriting expert could verify which of the four wrote it. But they talk about ‘after “Abbey Road.”’ Who else could it be? They must’ve stayed around the studio afterward and just thrown a few songs together. Doesn’t matter; they’re still Beatles songs.”

“Bobby got the tapes from his father.”

“Right,” Dance said, gesturing at the shelves. “The perp found out and has been waiting for a chance to kill him and steal them.”

“Waiting for Edwin or somebody like him to show up as a fall guy.”

“Exactly.”

O’Neil said, “So it’s somebody who knew Bobby and his archives and would have heard the rumors about the Beatles songs.” He regarded the lyrics. “Could the perp sell them, though?”

“I’d think at the least he could work out a finder’s fee in the millions. Or maybe he could sell them to a reclusive collector-like that Japanese businessman who got busted for spending fifty million for a stolen Van Gogh. He was going to keep it in his basement, never let anybody see it.”

O’Neil pointed out, “Well, we know the motive. The second question is, who’s the perp? You have any ideas? I don’t know the cast of characters here.”

Dance thought for a moment, looking round the trailer.

A to B to Z…

“I need you to do something.”

“Sure,” the detective said. “Evidence, crime scene? You’re a better interrogator than I am but I’m game.”

“No,” she said. She took him by the shoulders and walked him backward five feet. She then stepped away and examined him closely. “Just stand right there and don’t move.”

As she walked out the door, O’Neil looked around and said, “I can do that.”

A HALF HOUR later, Dance and O’Neil, along with a contingent of FMCSO deputies, sped through the hazy late-summer afternoon toward a motel off Highway 41.

It was a Red Roof Inn. Decent, clean but surely far below what the guest they were about to arrest had been used to at certain points in his life.

The four cars approached silently.

There were jurisdictional considerations, of course, but Dance and O’Neil weren’t here to claim the trophy, merely to help out. They were happy to let the local constabulary handle the arrest. She had, after all, agreed to let Madigan take the collar and corner the publicity, though it would be FMCSO in general who’d get the credit, since he wasn’t on active duty.

The three police cars and Dance’s Nissan slipped silently up to the motel and parked. With a shared smile and tacit understanding, Dance and O’Neil glanced at each other and wandered to the back of the place, while Harutyun, Stanning and four other deputies sprinted through the halls to the room where surveillance had revealed the suspect was staying.

As they’d guessed, the nervous perp had been anticipating the visit; he’d seen the cars approach and he literally leapt out the window of his room onto an unpleasant patch of grass reserved for dogs doing their business. He righted himself fast, wrapped his computer bag strap around his chest and poised for a sprint, then wisely chose to stop as he glanced at the guns in the hands of Dance and O’Neil, both of the muzzles pointed steadily at his head.

Two other somber deputies, one Latino and one Anglo, joined them in the back. They were the ones who slapped the cuffs on Kayleigh’s producer, Barry Zeigler, and led him toward the parking lot around front. It was Kathryn Dance who took possession of the computer bag that would contain the priceless songs that he’d stolen from Bobby Prescott’s trailer, the morning after he’d killed the roadie.

Chapter 49