Racing the Devil (30 page)

Mr. Perfect.

Mr. Eric-Fucking-Cad.

My jaw tightened, and I started toward him. He saw me coming too late to avoid a confrontation. “Hey, man.” He laughed nervously. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

“No shit, Sherlock.” I took his arm firmly, but probably not too painfully, and turned him toward the dance floor, where Jay was pretending not to notice us. “You see that guy in the gray suit? Blond hair. A little thin. You see him?”

Eric swallowed hard, eyes flitting like caged butterflies. “I see him.”

“You said you’d call him.”

“I . . .” He looked at me and seemed to get his courage back. “Hey, man. I got busy.”

“Yeah? You too busy to act like a decent human being?”

His face flushed. “Hey, you got no call to—”

“I got call,” I snapped. “I
got
call. I’m the one who has to watch him beat himself up when dickheads like you lead him on and use him and then dump him like yesterday’s trash. I got call, all right.”

“All right.” He backed away, looking for an escape, but I had him firmly by the arm. “All right, man.”

“It’s not all right. You understand? You hurt him. He thought you were something special, and you treated him like junk. You want to know a secret, Dickhead? You’re not good enough for him. A dozen of you wouldn’t be good enough.”

“I meant to call,” he said.

“Oh. You meant to call. You know what? Then call.”

“I will. Let go. I’ll go talk to him now.”

“If you’re just going to dump on him again, then you can just leave him the hell alone.”

“I’m not. I mean it, man. I really meant to call him. It’s just . . .”

“Just what?”

He sighed. “It’s just that he’s so damn needy.”

“So what? He gets a lot, he gives a lot.”

“He’s got the virus.”

“I see.” I let go of his arm. “You think he’s going to get sick and you’ll be stuck with nursing him.”

He had the grace to look ashamed. “It happens, man. I’ve been there before, and believe me, it sucks.”

A muscle in my cheek pulsed. “Let me put your mind at ease. Jay doesn’t need you to nurse him, and he doesn’t need you to take care of him. I’m there for that, Eric, and I will always be there for that. What he needs is someone who will love him.”

“And you don’t?” He rubbed his arm where I had grabbed it. “Coulda fooled me.”

“I’m not gay,” I said.

“Uh huh.”

“You going to ask him to dance, or you going to give up what might be the best thing that ever happened to you?”

He looked at Jay, slow dancing with a young man wearing tight black jeans and a black mesh muscle shirt. The look that crossed his face was almost enough to make me sorry I’d called him a dickhead.

He started toward the dance floor. “I’m going to ask him to dance.”

F
IRST THING MONDAY MORNING
, I put in a call to Frank.

“You talk to Shannon?” I asked.

“Yeah. I did.”

“The guy in the red car. I think it might be Sonny Vanderhaus.”

“We checked him out. For Amy and Hope both. He was on the radio both nights. Live show. So, unlikely as it seems, we’re looking for another blond guy in a red Corvette.”

“Is he about the same size as me?”

“Pretty close.”

“The guy served time. Could you look up his record for me?”

“No need. We already pulled it. Sonny Vanderhaus. There was a series of B&E’s in his old neighborhood, and word on the street was he was behind them. Sharp guy for a junkie, always had some sugar mama to look after him.”

“They catch him for the breaking and entering?”

“Porn. Mostly doctored photos, mix and match stuff, Marilyn Monroe’s head on some stripper’s body, stuff like that. Some kiddie stuff too, that’s what got him. Indications are, he wasn’t into it himself, but he’d make photographs and videos for other people. For a price, of course.”

“And he only did six years?”

“He didn’t take the pictures himself. Just doctored ‘em. Plus, he made a deal. Ratted out some of his clients.”

A child pornographer and a rat. I bet that made him a popular boy in prison.

“So he could’ve made the pictures you found in my truck. Do you know if he and Walter were in at the same time?”

I heard him shuffling papers on the other end. “Looks like it,” he said. “How’d you ever guess?”

SHORTLY BEFORE ELEVEN
, I took Interstate-40 downtown to Demonbreun, then took a sharp left off Music Square to the office complex where Sonny Vanderhaus worked at AudioStyle Recording.

At noon, I saw him come out and get into the custom-painted Corvette. When he’d turned the corner and was out of sight, I got out of the van and went inside.

The woman at the desk looked to be in her mid-forties. Rich, coffee-brown skin, thick-lashed, almond-shaped eyes so dark they looked black, elegant understated makeup. She wore a light green, short-sleeved sundress with matching earrings and a necklace of large, brightly colored beads.

Nice.

I flipped my wallet open to my detective’s license and held it across the counter to her.

“Afternoon, Ma’am,” I said. “Would it be possible to ask your mastering engineer a couple of questions?”

She looked at me doubtfully. “Which one?”

This was unexpected. I’d expected her to tell me he was gone, and I would say that I could talk to someone else, then. This was better.

“It doesn’t really matter. I need to know about the job, not about a specific person.”

“Oh.” She looked relieved. “Just a minute.”

She spoke into the intercom on her desk. “Mr. Schroeder, there’s a detective here who would like to talk to you about mastering. Do you have a minute for him?” She was silent for a moment. Then she gestured toward the hall behind her. “He says you can go back. End of the hall, first door on the right.”

The mastering room had ninety-degree angles on three sides, with the fourth wall resembling half a hexagon. Three video screens and two speakers adorned that wall, and parked directly in front of them was a desk with a computer, a mixing board with a mind-boggling array of slide controls, and a swivel chair which held, barely, a burly man with bushy brown hair and glasses. He looked like a bear wearing spectacles. There was some kind of maroon cloth covering the walls. I poked it with my finger, and the cloth gave beneath the pressure.

“It’s girl-cloth,” said the man behind the desk. At least, I thought that’s what he said.

“Giri-cloth?” I asked.

He gave a boisterous laugh. “Griiie-cloth. It absorbs sound, keeps the echo down. That’s why the room has these crazy corners, too. No square rooms in the recording business.”

“I wondered. You’re Mr. Schroeder?”

“Kerry. Kerry Schroeder. You wanted to know about mastering?”

“That’s right.”

“What do you want to know?”

I wasn’t sure, but I took a stab at it. “You guys do the audio work for that Sunday morning preaching show, right? The one they do for Road to Glory Church of the Reclamation?”

“Sonny does that. It’s kind of a personal project for him. We don’t make much on it.”

“Well, let’s just use that as an example. He records it at the church, right?”

“Right. It would cost too much to rent the studio time every week.”

“So, he records it at the church. And then?”

“Well.” He picked up something that looked like a miniature videocassette and handed it to me. It was about two inches long, an inch and a half wide, and maybe a half-inch thick. “That’s a DAT. D-A-T. That’s Digital Audio Tape. We just call them dats. They’re not real reliable, because they’re so tiny, which makes them really delicate. Lots of stuff can go wrong, so you always have a backup DAT.”

“Why use them, then?”

“Because they’re so easy to use. He records the service onto a DAT first. He does that at the church, sets up the mikes, balances the tape machine, and so on.”

“When you say ‘balance’ . . .”

“Sets the mike level so they’re not too low and not too loud.” “Okay. Then what?”

“Then he brings it back to the studio and edits it.” I waited.

He gestured toward the computer. “Okay. What that means is, he puts the tape into the tape deck, which loads it into the hard drive of the computer. Then he can do pretty much whatever he wants to with it. The software we use is called SADIE. That’s Studio Audio Digital . . . something. We just call it SADIE.”

I looked over his shoulder at the computer. “What can you do with that?”

He shrugged. “Well, once it’s digitized, you can start changing things. Say there’s a baby crying in the church. You can separate that sound and take it out. Or if the altos are too loud, or the sopranos are too soft, you can fix that. You EQ the sound. That means you equalize it. You make everything all beautiful and even. We have compressors, which kind of . . . squash . . . the sound a little bit; it fine-tunes everything, squashes the loud sections and brings up what’s too quiet. You can clear up any static. Or extraneous noises.” He leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head. “We have this one machine, it’s called CEDAR—that’s Computer Enhanced Digital Audio Restoration. It clears up poor sounds, filters out stuff. We used it to help out the FBI a couple of years ago. They had this tape, like on an answering machine, and there was some kind of stuff going on in the background. Like an airport terminal, or something. We cleaned it up and pulled up the station sounds, took out the other stuff.”

“Like in
The Fugitive.”

“Yeah. Just like.”

“Where was he? The guy on the answering machine.”

“Oh. Somewhere out of the country. Sweden. Norway.”

“If you have a DAT with someone’s voice on it, can you change the words around? Make it say something it didn’t?”

“Sure. It’s like that software program, Photoshop. You put in a picture, and then you can add or subtract things, tweak the colors, that sort of thing. Well, it’s the same with sound. There’s software designed just for editing, and you can do pretty much anything you want to with it.”

“And the pitch?”

He frowned. “I don’t know what you mean.”

I grimaced, trying to find the right words. “Well, if I say ‘my bitch is about to have puppies,’ and ‘that horse is getting too fat,’ and ‘Aries was the Greek god of war,’ and somebody turns that into, ‘My God, that bitch is fat!’, wouldn’t the inflections be all off?”

He nodded. “I get what you’re saying.” He gestured toward a small black machine that sat to the right of the mixing board. “See this bar? You can see the shape of the music—or whatever—on it. A wide splash represents something loud. Getting smaller means diminishing sound. Once it’s in SADIE, you can take sounds out, put them in, change the pitch speed, which raises or lowers the pitch. So you could do what you were talking about. Mix and match to make a different message.”

“Any way to figure that out? If that’s been done?”

“The FBI could probably do it.”

“If I called you on the phone and recorded your voice, would that give me a good enough recording?”

“Mmmm. It might be. But the quality might not be so hot. It would be better if you had some kind of recorder on the phone. If you got my voice on an answering machine, it might do.”

Or if I had a recording device in your receiver.

“Sonny Vanderhaus,” I said. “He’s pretty good at this stuff?”

A smile flashed beneath his beard. “Man, Sonny is an absolute genius. Tapes, video, CD’s, Photoshop. He’s multimedia.”

“He DJ’s too?”

“Yeah. He does a live show three nights a week on WCNE. Same guy runs it who does AudioStyle. They broadcast out of here; the station’s just down the hall. ‘Raising Caine’ is their slogan. Cutting edge stuff.”

“But the Sunday show . . .”

“WPRZ. PRZ for Praise. Sonny isn’t really into all that stuff. He’s more into alternative rock, shock rock, industrial. But the church gig pays okay, and his girlfriend sings there sometimes.”

“Anybody else here when he does the show?”

“Not usually. Why?”

“Just wondered.” I was beginning to see how Sonny might be in two places at one time. “The live show. Is it music? Call-in? What?”

“Music, jokes, discussion. Whatever Sonny feels like doing.”

So he could have pre-taped his “live” show and left the studio without anybody knowing. The perfect alibi.

I thanked Kerry for his help and left. I had no doubt Sonny would hear that I had been there, but that didn’t matter. Let him worry. It might make him careless.

FOR SOME REASON, ASHLEIGH SEEMED
less than delighted to hear from me. “This is not exactly a good time . . .”

I cut her off. “What did you do with the tapes? The ones you got off my phone?”

“I . . . What? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I saw you take the device out of the receiver.”

She was silent.

“Come on,” I said. “What did you do with them?”

“Are you recording this?” she asked. “Is that what this is about?”

“Am I . . . Oh, for Christ’s sake, Ashleigh. If I was going to nail you for this, I would have done it a year ago.”

“Then I don’t see what this has to do with anything.”

“And you won’t, unless you tell me what you did with the tapes. Did you destroy them? Please, tell me you destroyed them.”