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Name was Sam Pull. World renowned collector and alleged bootlegger of records. Went by The Beat, a nickname well earned. Sam knew sounds the way priests know sins. Every drum hit, every hiss of tape, every groove ever pressed into wax. He had them catalogued, caged, worshipped.
Sleeps Numb is the uniform who locked the place down took statements from the neighbours. The cover pic’s his work too. One neighbour told him they heard loud drums and shouting before everything went dead quiet. Figured Sam was elbow-deep in his voodoo records again, rattling the walls like he always did.
But that neighbour got curious. Took a look out the window. Saw maybe ten figures spill out of Sam’s house like shadows with legs. All hooded. All fast. Turned out Sam had been hosting a family get-together and listening party earlier that night. Second cousins. Strange uncles. The Espee family.
If you haven’t heard of them, don’t worry, most folks haven’t. But you’ve seen their type before. Stuntmen. Ninjas. Gymnasts. People who make gravity look optional. They do sick flips for a living.
Funny thing about the Espee fam: none of them use real names. Just call signs and numbers. Masks for the soul. According to the neighbour, who’d had run-ins with them before - they answer to names like 202, 303, 505, 555, 606, and 808. Four of them all went by 404, though they also answered to OG, SX, A, and Marktoo.
Nobody knows their real names. Weirdos.
Now let’s talk about the room where the music died.
Sam was sprawled on the floor of his listening room, eyes open, staring at nothing. Someone had driven a blunted stylus into his neck. No sharp edge, just force and intent. Still managed to punch through the carotid. Takes commitment to kill a man that way.
Between his ribs they’d shoved a number two pencil. Jammed onto it were three cassette tapes, carefully stacked, like an offering. All rewound. Neat. Deliberate.
His hands and feet were bound with RCA cables. Red and white, no yellow. Audio only. Somebody knew the language.
The rest of the room was almost respectful. His records and tapes were sorted, untouched for the most part. Sam kept his tapes locked away in numbered crates. The numbering started at seven.
On the floor beside the seventh crate was his keyring. Every key numbered. They started at seven too.
You don’t have to be a genius to hear the rhythm in that.
Forensics already spun the tapes they found on his body. Said they were full of music. Real music. The kind you don’t just listen to, you learn from. Rare stuff. Dangerous stuff.
Now onto the leads. It’s all crooked, like everything else in this town.
1, Sam’s computer was left on and logged in to his Discogs page. Looks like it had been tampered with. Recent edits that didn’t smell right, like when the landlord paints the joint between tenants, it just draws the eye to what’s changed. Dig a little deeper and you’ll see he’d been running multiple accounts, skating the edge of the terms of service like a man daring the admins to blink first. Every alias had a little tail on it ‘-adventure’, ‘-cheap’, ‘-researcher’, ‘-obscure’. It’s like he was mapping out different versions of himself, or hiding something in plain sight. Motive? Maybe. People kill for less than a username.
2, By the French electric piano, someone had smeared the code TM3050 in blood, shaky but intentional, a dying man’s idea of a breadcrumb.
3, Clenched in Sam’s hand was a torn scrap of paper, with three words on one side: ‘auger - search party’. On the other was just one word: ‘list’. Reads less like a note and more like a warning.
So here’s what I need from you, detectives.
One man's dead. Six crates are missing. Follow the leads and find the crates. They'll take us to the killer, I can sense it.
When you crack a crate open, don’t hoard it. Share the evidence. Let the whole room hear it breathe. While you’re digging through those crates, try pairing what you find with other sounds - spare a cappellas, loose instruments, basslines that feel right. Doesn’t matter how you do it. Just see what talks back.
You’ve got fifteen days to put together your brief. Fifteen days to let the tapes tell their story.
And when you’re done, when the loops finally line up and the silence makes sense…
Tell me one thing.
Who killed the Beat?
from my FM radio days, back when I had access to a cozy galaxy of records and CDs, and found us six-seven heavy crates. looks like we're gonna have two murders on our hands the way MITT's pea-sized brain is about to burst 
from all this goodness 
