Killer Riff by Sheryl J. Anderson

what?”
    “The money. The music publishing, the master tapes, everything. My dad had majority control, but now she does.”
    “But, assuming she did kill him, why now?”
    “I don’t know. I was hoping you’d help me figure that out.”
    Which was why I was standing in the middle of Russell Elliott’s elegant home an hour later. The apartment was one-half of the entire fifth floor of a magnificent old building on Riverside Drive. You could see up to the Boat Basin from one end and past the end of Riverside Park from the other. The Crowley apartment was the other half of the floor and, in the cab on the way there, Olivia had told me about running back and forth between the two apartments with Adam when they were children, as though it were all one big house—bigger than the house I’d grown up in, certainly—with musicians, actors, models, artists, and other assorted luminaries coming and going at all hours. People still came after Micah died, as Russell grew in reputation as a producer and Claire got more involved with her charity work and a clothing line; it had still been one of the great rock salons. With Russell gone, would they all still come around?
    Olivia gave me the guided tour of the warmly appointed apartment. We now stood in what Olivia called the study, a huge room with a spectacular view of the river, filled with low-slung burgundy leather furniture, coolly shaded lamps, glowing hardwood floors, and impressive stacks of electronics. Everything was tidy and sparkling, very much one of those “a place for everything and everything in its place” sorts of rooms, so it struck me as odd that a small mixing board sat on the floor in front of a stereo cabinet that was otherwise so neatly organized that there wasn’t a single dangling cord to be seen.
    I pointed to the board. “Was your dad working on something?”
    Olivia looked at the board with dull enmity. “He was always working on something.”
    “What was he working on that night, do you know?”
    Olivia looked up at me with a sour frown. Of course she knew, and she was about to tell me when a second thought occurred to her and, instead, she said, “No.”
    The very fact that she didn’t want to tell me about it made it essential for me to know. “I don’t believe you.”
    Olivia shrugged, but I didn’t buy the dismissive act. She cared, but she didn’t want to admit it. So whatever her dad had been working on had to be important, maybe even related to why she thought he was dead. I tried to imagine a piece of music that could be that monumentally important to anyone and my heart raced when I thought of it. Trying to keep my voice casual, I said, “So the Hotel Tapes are real?”
    Crimson flooded Olivia’s face, as though I’d walked in and found her doing something illegal and/or immoral. “What makes you say that?”
    “You want me to help you, but you’re hiding this from me, so it’s either huge or secret or both. And the Hotel Tapes would qualify as both.”
    Rock legend held that Micah had been a compulsive taper. Never sure when a few moments of improv on the guitar or piano might blossom into a hit song, he’d had tape recorders running all the time. Gray Benedek had said in an interview right after Micah died that the best music any of them had ever made was on those tapes. Which set up a howling demand for the tapes to be released. Russell had issued a terse statement that the number and quality of the recordings had been grandly overstated, but the rumors about tapes being found and cleaned up for release bobbed to the surface with seasonal regularity.
    “Your dad was working on the Hotel Tapes, wasn’t he.” I could feel my pulse in the base of my throat, but I wasn’t sure if the surge in adrenaline was from discovering a legend was real or finding something someone might have been willing to kill for.
    Olivia bobbed her head, as though something were keeping her from committing to an actual nod. “It was his secret