Free book by Unknown

I didn’t.”
     
“Sounds good to me. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
     
 
     
 
     
IT took Payne nearly an hour to reach Mount Washington, and the drive was a miserable one. Holiday traffic was starting to pick up even though it was only midday. Payne used his master key to enter Jones’s technology lab and found his friend hard at work on the computer.
     
“Any new developments?” Payne asked as he picked up a printout of the tattoo and studied it.
     
“There wasn’t much visual data to work with on the disc, so I focused on the audio. I know it’s hard to believe, but sound can tell you so much.”
     
“You mean like her scream?”
     
“No, I mean like background noise. You know, stuff that’s there, but isn’t really obvious.”
     
“Such as?”
     
Jones walked to the far side of the room and tapped his hand on a small metallic unit. “I call this device the Listener, and for the last half hour, it’s been our best friend.”
     
Payne crossed the room for a closer look and watched as Jones typed a specific code into the unit’s keypad. The Listener responded by extending its front tray six inches forward.
     
“This unit was designed to analyze sound and place it into specific categories. Since we were dealing with a stable environment with little background noise I had the machine focus on a couple of things. The first was her voice. I wanted to see if I could understand what she tried to say after her initial scream.”
     
“You mean when her voice got garbled.”
     
“Yeah. My guess is they were probably gagging her at the time, but I was hoping the machine might be able to isolate the sound and clean it up for us.”
     
“Did it work?”
     
“Actually, it worked beautifully. Unfortunately, it won’t help our cause very much.”
     
“Why not? What did she say?”
     
Jones picked up the transcript and read it aloud. “She said, ‘Help me. Somebody help me.’ ”
     
Payne closed his eyes as Ariane’s words sank in. He had managed to stay relaxed while Jones explained the features of his computer equipment, but now that the focus of the conversation was back on Ariane, Payne felt the nausea return. What would he do if he couldn’t track her down? Or worse yet, if someone had already killed her?
     
“Jon?” Jones said. “Are you okay? I asked you a question.”
     
Payne opened his eyes and turned to his friend. “Sorry. What was that?”
     
“I wanted to know if you told the cops how many people were involved.”
     
He thought for a moment, then shook his head. “I told them that Mr. McNally saw more than one person, but wasn’t sure how many.”
     
“Well, thanks to the Listener, I’d say that there were probably three of them.”
     
Payne sat up in his chair. “How did you figure that out?”
     
“Simple. I programmed the device to filter out everything but the footsteps, and after listening to the disc, I could hear three distinct sets. But, as they were leaving, I could only hear two.”
     
“You mean someone stayed inside Ariane’s apartment?”
     
Jones shook his head. “At first, that’s what I thought, too, but as I listened to the disc again, I noticed a scratching noise in the background. I filtered out all the other sounds, isolating the scratch, and this is what I got.” He pushed his mouse button once, and a rough grating sound emerged from his system’s speakers. “What does that sound like to you?”
     
“Feet dragging on a carpet?”
     
“Bingo!” Jones was impressed that his friend had figured it out so quickly. It had taken him several minutes to come up with a hypothesis. “Remember what McNally said? It looked like your girlfriend was snookered because they were practically carrying her to the van? Well, my guess is she was drugged or knocked out. The three sets of footsteps that the Listener originally detected were Ariane and the two assailants. They broke into her place, gagged her, drugged her, then dragged her out.