FM for Murder Page 7

  A noise in the living room drew her attention. Was that Tinkerbell? Possibly the old yellow tabby was sneaking around her apartment looking for some hidden treat and had knocked over a knick-knack. It had happened before. No, wait. That sounded more like the front door opening. But, she had locked the door before she went to bed, she was sure. She clutched the covers around her shoulders and sunk down further as if to hide from any potential intruder. The door clicked again and footsteps tip-toed towards the bedroom. Her bedroom door cracked open and a figure moved towards the bed and leaned over her.

  “I missed you today,” said Daniel, his cheek nuzzling hers.

  “Dan,” she shrieked, sitting up, “you scared me! You’re ice cold!”

  “I’m sorry, Sweet,” he embraced her, sitting beside her on the bed, “I tried to get away, but there was a malfunction at the plant and then another set-back with father and—oh—just a terrible day.”

  “Your father?” she asked, her arms on his, “how is he?”

  “Holding his own,” responded Daniel, “but obviously, not doing well. Makes me even more determined to track down David.” He removed his gloves.

  “Have you made any progress?” she asked.

  “Let me tell you,” he said, as he took off his jacket and placed it over an arm chair in the corner of the bedroom. He sat down next to her. “I have an appointment with an investigator tomorrow, so things are starting to move.”

  “That’s good,” replied Amy, shivering next to the cold from Daniel’s body. “Here, let me warm you up.” She wrapped her arms around him and they remained entwined and silent for a few moments. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Daniel reached for Amy’s face and placed it in his hands.

  “You’re so beautiful,” he whispered, gazing at her. “Like an angel in the moonlight.”

  “More like a frazzled waitress in the light from the sign from McNally’s Hardware,” she laughed. He kissed her gently and then more passionately.

  “Wait,” he said as he quickly slipped out of his clothes and slid under the covers beside her. “Better.” They hugged tightly until both were warmed by the bed and the body heat.

  “So,” she said, “What’s this I heard about you climbing up some sky-high loom?”

  “My god,” he moaned, “don’t tell me that’s traveling around now?”

  “My heart was in my stomach when I heard it.”

  “Some carpeting just got stuck in one of the rollers. I climbed up and extracted it.”

  “With your teeth?” she said, purring and poking his ribs.

  “I save my teeth for nibbling,” he responded and began rubbing his lips over her belly.

  “No, really,” she insisted, “what did you do? I had no idea you could repair those big monster machines. I thought you sat behind a desk all day.”

  “Didn’t know I was so macho, did you?”

  “No,” she said, teasing, “I thought you were Casper Milquetoast.”

  “Who?”

  “Casper…” She swatted him playfully.

  “Never mind. Never mind. I know who he is. And I am not one. I am a hero, at least—your hero.”

  “Always,” she squeezed him tightly. “And you don’t need to climb tall buildings or machines. You don’t need to do anything except be you.”

  “That I can do,” he said, caressing her hair.

  “And your father?” she questioned. “You said there was a setback?”

  “He had some sort of seizure,” said Daniel, “They gave him a shot of something and it calmed him down. Even so, afterwards, he was still talking to me. Not as much as yesterday, but he was still there, Amy. He’s trying so hard to hang on. Maybe he knows I’m trying to find David.”

  “Even though he says he doesn’t want you to look for him?”

  “It’s his pride. It’s all his pride,” he sighed. “David’s departure obviously hurt him deeply. If I can find David and bring him back—just think what that would do for father.”

  “If you can find him,” she cautioned, “If you can bring him back.”

  “That’s why I’m hiring this Jax,” said Daniel in Amy’s ear. “Tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow,” she replied, “and maybe the tomorrow after that we can tell your father about us if he withstands finding out about your search for David?”

  “It is the absolute next item on the agenda. Reunite father with David—then drop the bomb about us.”

  “I hope he survives all these surprises and revelations.” She put her head on Daniel’s chest.

  “He’s tough. He’s shown me that at every turn. I just have to hope he will hang on and that he’ll realize that all of this is good news—and he’ll be happy about it.”

  “Dan,” she said, worried, “what’s good news for you isn’t necessarily good news for someone else.”

  “I refuse to believe that,” he said, defiantly.

  “Ever the optimist,” she said, shaking her head, “and it worries me. Either way, it’s getting late and I have to be at work at six. I need to get to sleep.”

  “You do?” he asked.

  “Yes.” She pulled on her chain and felt the circle at the end. She grasped it tightly in her palm, as if for good luck.

  “This instant?”

  “Soon,” she said. His nose rubbed her bare shoulder as his leg encircled her torso. She reacted by wrapping her legs around his waist and tightening her arms around his neck. “But not immediately,” she said, as the chain fell between her breasts.

  Chapter 11

  Present time--Monday afternoon, December 17

  As soon as Shoop and Joan and Arliss had departed, Pamela wasted no time in loading the compact disc into her hard drive and bringing up her acoustic analysis program. She set her volume at a moderate level in case any people in the hallways might be listening. Even if they were, strange sounds often emanated from Pamela’s office as she frequently listened to peculiar sounds—human and non-human alike—for her academic research. Last year when she was analyzing the sounds that had been recorded during the murder of her colleague Charlotte Clark, she went to great lengths to disguise her efforts. Now, she didn’t even think twice about listening to the recording of the murder of the disc jockey. If truth be told, she was probably not the only person with such a recording, she reasoned. Anyone who’d been listening to KRDN Saturday night with recording capabilities on their iPod or radio might very well have a similar recording.

  She brought up the spectrograph on her monitor and set her cursor to the far left. As she opened the recording, a peaked line, something like a read-out from a seismograph filled the screen. She pressed “play” and the voice of the disc jockey, Theodore Ballard, could be heard. As he spoke, the cursor—which took the form of a vertical line that completely segmented the spectrograph from top to bottom—moved rapidly from the left of the screen to the right—where it ended abruptly. Pamela reset the cursor and pressed “play” a second time.

  The recording lasted around seven minutes and included songs introduced by Ballard as well as his patter between. Some of the comments Ballard made, she realized, were enlightening as far as providing information about Ballard’s background. However, it was unlikely that the entire seven minutes of the recording would produce much evidence regarding the killer. No, she thought. I’d better focus—at least for now--on the segment where the killer enters and the actual murder takes place. By repeating the tape again, she located the exact spot where she believed the killer must have actually come in the door of the studio. A few seconds before the killer’s entrance, she realized that Ballard was aware that he had a visitor but had no idea who the person was. Ballard gave no indication of knowing the person on the tape. That is, he didn’t call the person by name or show by the way he spoke that he had any relationship with the killer at all. This is going to be hard, she thought.

  All right, she said to herself. Let’s start with the obvious. Let’s see if I can find out anything from the killer. I wonder, she muse
d, if the killer made any noise. On first (and second and third) glance it didn’t appear so, but she reminded herself that Ballard was sitting behind the microphone and the killer was standing in the doorway. If the killer spoke at all, Ballard’s microphone which was probably uni-directional would not pick up the sound very well. But, she reasoned, that doesn’t mean that I can’t hear it. She set the cursor at the segment where she believed the killer entered and punched in directions for her analysis program to run a low pass-filter. Then, with her eyes on the cursor, she pressed “play”:

  “Oh, hi! Come on in! I’m Theodore Ballard—Black Vulture to my fans. You a fan of alternative rock? What the? That’s a gun! What do you need a gun for? Why’re you pointing it at me? Wha--? No! No!”

  The blast of the gun shook her as the acoustic profile of the explosion filled the screen. “Okay,” she said, “let’s see if there’s any sound hiding in the background. Using her cursor to zero in on various peaks and waves in the acoustic profile before her, she highlighted a segment below the regular line of Ballard’s speech. This small, faint wave appeared immediately after Ballard had said, “alternative rock” and before he said “What the?”. The acoustic program revealed that the segment lasted a fraction of a second. She set her cursor on the small wave and highlighted it. When she pressed “play” the overlapping sound of Ballard’s speech was eliminated and the only sound audible through Pamela’s desktop speakers was the brief sound of what seemed like a gasp. Yes, it seemed like a gasp, she thought. The strange sound must have come from the killer because it would have been impossible for Ballard to produce a totally separate sound wave while in the process of speaking something else. To verify this, she decided to establish an identity profile for Ballard and the suspect sound. This was a procedure that she had developed in the course of her research on vocal linguistics. All voices varied and those variations could be identified acoustically. Some variations occurred across individuals depending on various factors such as emotion, age, gender, geographical location, and a variety of other features. That is, there were certain acoustic features that all men shared—acoustically--and all women, just as there were certain acoustic features that tended to appear in all people as they got older. But there were other acoustic features that discriminated between groups. Some researchers were primarily interested in the similarities (or differences) of a certain group. Others—like Pamela—were interested in using acoustic technology to identify specific individuals. Her research and that of others like her had been instrumental in helping develop protocols for using acoustics to aid in criminal investigations as well as many other areas where the ability to identify a person was crucial. Her students had taken what she had taught them and had gone on to acquire interesting careers using this very technology.

  Now that she had separated the suspect sound—the one she believed belonged to the killer—she worked to amplify the sound and stretch it out so that she could investigate each part of it and ultimately try to identify the killer. Of course, she realized that it would probably be unlikely that she would be able to actually identify the killer because the concept of identification implied that there was a pool of suspects from which to choose. As far as she knew, no such pool existed. Even so, she believed she might be able to provide some clues for the police—something she might discover from this short gasp that the killer had probably uttered just as he (or she—a woman could wield a handgun just as well as a man) revealed the gun.

  She pressed “play” again and the brief sound jumped from her speaker. Yes, it did sound like a gasp. She felt certain it wasn’t a word. It didn’t sound as if the killer was attempting to speak. Maybe it was a snarl or a growl. She kept imagining what the killer might feasibly say or mutter just at the moment of revealing the murder weapon. As she played the sound again, she had the sense that the killer was gasping. She could hear what sounded somewhat like an intake of air. As air passed through the vocal folds, no sound was actually produced by the larynx. There was something registering on the spectrograph so some laryngeal activity took place—something like the killer producing intake of air while producing an open vowel such as “o” or “ah.” Unfortunately, no actual word appeared to be said. Even so, the small voiced vowel gave her something to go on as far as identifying the killer. It was extremely soft, far away, and very short, but she marked the wave and recreated it in an accompanying analysis program. Here she asked her software program to tell her what the fundamental frequency was. Soon she knew one thing about the killer, she was sure. It might be the only thing she would ever know from the acoustic output, but it was more than the police probably had. Pamela Barnes was quite certain that Theodore Ballard’s unknown killer was male.

  She was so totally engaged in her investigation of the murder tape that she didn’t notice when Willard Swinton, one of her colleagues entered her office, puffing.

  “Pamela!”

  “Willard,” she said, looking up at the older African American gentleman, leaning somewhat uncomfortably on his silver-topped cane. Always nattily dressed, Willard today sported a dark green suit with a bright yellow vest. His curly hair with a few wisps of grey topped his perfectly round head. “Come, look at this, will you?”

  “What have you got?” asked Willard with excitement. The two researchers had often collaborated on various linguistics projects. Willard was an expert on accents and regional dialects. If anyone could recognize a particular voice and where it was from by just a brief gasp it was Willard. He rounded her desk and peered over her shoulder at the array on the screen.

  “See this segment,” she said, pointing out the brief wave she had just listened to.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Let me tell you that after you hear it,” she said, coyly. She pressed “play” and the enhanced gasp was audible and then immediately disappeared.

  “That’s it?” asked Willard. She nodded. “Again,” he directed as Pamela repeated the sound.

  “Not much to go on, is there?” he asked her.

  “No, but, anything you can tell me, Willard…..”

  “I’d say, from the quality of the vowel…definitely Southern….”

  “And male, right?”

  “Oh, yes, male.”

  “Southern meaning local? From around here?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. I don’t think I can pin it down that much from just ‘ah’”

  “What kind of man is it?” she asked.

  “You expect a lot from just a vowel, Pamela. What project is this for, anyway?”

  Pamela looked at the door and then back at Willard standing beside her. She motioned him down and whispered in his ear. “It’s a recording of the murder of that disc jockey at KRDN on Saturday night. You heard about it, didn’t?”

  “How could I not? That’s all the students are talking about. But, I don’t get it. Why just the one vowel? If this guy was a disc jockey don’t they have a longer recording?”

  “Not him, Willard. I think—I’m not positive—but I think this gasp—or vowel—might have been from the killer—not the victim. The police can’t identify him and they asked me to listen to the recording and see if I could discover anything about the killer.”

  “My goodness, Pamela, you do get yourself into the middle of things, don’t you?”

  “I do, don’t I?” she responded smiling.

  Willard hobbled to Pamela’s couch where he carefully lowered himself. “My dear, I can’t say much more from just those few repetitions of that vowel, but if you’d be so kind as to make me a duplicate CD, I would be ever so delighted to join your efforts in crime detection and see what I can do to assist you.”

  “You would?”

  “Of course,” he replied, “That last caper of yours I only got to experience at the very end when the police stormed your office and saved you at the last minute from the dastardly villain.” Pamela smiled brightly at him, opened her desk, removed a blank CD and quickly duplicated the original CD and handed it to
Willard.

  “Welcome aboard, detective,” she said, handing him the CD, eyebrows raised.

  “I will treasure this disc and guard it with my life,” he said.

  “You don’t need to do that. Just see what you can figure out about that gasp—and anything else about the recording that you can.”

  “You have my word.”

  With that, he lifted his body with difficulty, leaning on his cane and headed jauntily down the hall, whistling.

  Chapter 12

  Previous week--Thursday, morning, December 13

  “Good morning, Mr. Bridgewater,” greeted Bernice, his secretary as Daniel strode towards his office, his face buried in a folder.

  “Good morning, Bernice,” he replied. The darkly-dressed woman started to rise hesitantly, clearing her throat.

  “How is your father, sir?” she continued. Daniel stopped beside her desk and smiled.

  “He’s holding his own, Bernice,” he said, “thank you for asking.”

  “Mr. Bridgewater,” she said, clutching her wool skirt, “Everyone here is concerned about Mr. Bridgewater. He’s in all our prayers.”

  “Thank you, Bernice,” said Daniel, closing the folder and leaning over her desk, “My father considers all of you—all of the employees of the company his family. I know it means a lot to him to know you all care about his welfare.”

  “We do, sir. We do,” she said, nodding. Daniel smiled again, hesitated and then abruptly continued towards his office. At the door, he turned and said, “Oh, Bernice, I’m expecting a Mr. Jax sometime this morning.”

  “Yes, sir,” she replied crisply and returned to typing at her computer.