Harmony Black (13 page)

TWENTY-ONE

M
ayor Kite’s office was up on the second floor, just past a pair of curving staircases with alabaster rails. As we climbed up toward him, he stepped out of his office lugging a hefty, stuffed valise under one arm of his ill-fitting jacket.

“Mayor Kite,” I said as we approached, flashing my credentials. “Special Agents Temple and—”

That was as far as I got. He spun toward us, a look of horror plastered on his face, then he turned and ran.

He bolted down the hallway, faster than his heavy frame looked capable of, and grabbed a clerk on her way out of a side door. He shoved her to the ground, a living obstacle in our way, and kept running. She went down in a flurry of papers and open, spinning folders.

I took two seconds to make sure she was okay, and kept going. Jessie got ahead of me, her lips curling back in a frustrated snarl. Kite grabbed a rolling mail cart and shoved it backward as hard as he could, sending it rattling our way. It hit Jessie full-on, metal cracking against her kneecap, but she knocked it aside with a violent sweep of her arm and kept going.

Kite slammed against the fire exit door and barreled on through. A klaxon wailed, red emergency lights strobing in the stairwell. We followed him through, but he was already almost to the bottom, taking the steps two or three at a time, running like the devil was on his heels.

He should have been so lucky.

“Mayor Kite!” I shouted, rushing down the stairs just behind Jessie. “We just want to talk!”

He wasn’t in a talking mood. He tore through the lobby and out into the sunlight, climbing into a late-model BMW with a sheen of dried tree sap and gunning the engine. Jessie grabbed his door handle, but he threw the car into reverse and stomped the gas, peeling out of the parking lot.

“Fuck,” Jessie hissed, rubbing her fingers. “C’mon, let’s
go
!”

We jumped into the Crown Vic, and I mashed the gas pedal, clinging tight to the steering wheel as we spun out of the lot and onto the main road. I watched the redline, pushing the engine as hard as I could while we crept up on the mayor’s rear bumper.

He turned off the highway, leading us on a chase along a winding country road that slithered over a chain of forested hills.

“When we get close enough,” I said, “I’m going to PIT him. You cool with that?”

“Cool as a cucumber,” Jessie said, buckling her seat belt.

PIT stands for Precision Immobilization Technique, and it’s a hell of a lot safer—for you, the suspect, and any civilians within three hundred yards—than trying to shoot the tires of a fleeing car. Easier, too. It’s a controlled crash, where the chase car comes up and carefully bumps into the target from the back corner, then applies engine force. Do it right and the target’s wheels lose traction, they spin out, and you can force them to a more-or-less graceful stop. Or at least one where everybody survives.

We crested a hill, and down below I saw the narrow road straighten itself out. Taking him on a curve was too risky, but there was our chance, just ahead. Then something in the corner of my eye, something black and burning, flitted across the tops of the pine trees.

It
slammed
down onto the roof of the Crown Vic, shaking the car and making the shock absorbers groan. A fist, or something I thought was a fist, punched the roof hard enough to put a dent in the metal just over our heads.

“What the hell?” Jessie said. “Shake it!”

I held the wheel tight and swerved, veering from side to side, but whatever it was held on fast and punched the roof again.

I knew what it was. If I hadn’t guessed, the flood of foul magic washing over me like a skunk’s stench would have given it away. It was an aura of rot and ruin, like the taste of putrid flesh, and my stomach churned as I fought to control the car.

Nyx.

Jessie yelped as a face appeared in the passenger-side window, peering down from above. The incarnate demon didn’t bother pretending to be human, not on the hunt. She had a face like a desiccated corpse, but her flesh was rubbery black and her lips pulled back in a permanent, skeletal grin to show jutting, curling fangs. Pupil-less eyes of molten copper glared at us through the glass.

She burned. A thin sheen of flame, so blue it was almost black, rippled over her head and down the bony black chitin armoring her shoulders like a mane of burning hair. If it bothered her, she didn’t show it. She just reached out, curled a taloned fist, and punched through the window.

The safety glass shattered, spraying us with rounded chunks, and Jessie ducked as two-inch steel talons raked the air where her face had just been. She whipped her Glock out of its holster and fired two booming shots at point-blank range into the demon’s face.

My eardrums throbbed with pain, the aftermath of the shots echoing in a receding ocean wave, but I could still hear Nyx’s shrill scream. She pulled back out of sight, clinging to the roof, and I heard the scraping of her claws as she scrambled to my side of the car.

“Coming around!” Jessie shouted. I scrambled for a warding spell, a banishment, anything, but I couldn’t pay attention to the road and my magic at the same time.

“Take the wheel,” I said, and let go. Jessie lunged over, grabbing hold and keeping the car on the road, as I brought my hands up and locked my fingers in a ritual gesture.

Focus,
I thought, and took a deep breath. I couldn’t care about the road, or the trees, or anything but the task at hand. One task. One focus. I thought back to my teenage years. Endless hours in my mother’s study, kneeling beside her at the family altar, learning our craft. Learning patience. Learning to be calm in the heart of a storm. Sometimes we would go down to the shore and meditate on the water. Watching it lap up against the sand for hours, graceful and smooth and silent.

“Water flows,” my mother told me. “It does not burn; it does not break. It adapts. There’s a river in your heart; in panic, in chaos, that’s where you’ll find serenity.”

Nyx dropped into sight on the other side of my window. The bullets had gouged two deep furrows in her skull-like face, drooling with black ichor, but they were already beginning to heal. Her gaze locked with mine. In my years with the Bureau I’d crossed paths with extremists, Klansmen, and even aspiring terrorists . . . but I’d never experienced the kind of hatred I saw in those burning eyes. It felt like a fire hose being turned on me, an utter torrent of loathing and rage without cause and without end. I let it flow. It washed over me without touching me. In my serenity, I could see Nyx—really see her.

She was born with this rage,
I thought,
this fury. She can’t be anything else. She’ll never know anything else.
The waves of hatred hammered at me, trying to dig their hooks in, to tempt me to lash out and respond in kind. I couldn’t.

“I feel . . . so sorry for you,” I whispered.

Nyx shrieked and pulled back her claws to strike. That’s when I exhaled a sharp gust of wind, carrying the spell I’d summoned to my lips and my fingertips. A word of banishment, a word of peace. Just a word.

Nyx lost her grip. She rolled backward, bounced off the trunk of the car and onto the country road, flailing. A five-foot barbed tail slashed like a bullwhip, gouging scorched furrows in the asphalt.

“Unless you’ve got something more powerful up your sleeve,” Jessie breathed, “do
not
stop driving.”

She didn’t need to tell me twice.

W
e’d lost Mayor Kite. Part of me wondered if that was the intention.

“Two possibilities,” I said once we’d caught our breaths and put a few more miles of road behind us. “Either we got on Nyx’s radar when we went poking around at town hall—”

“Or Kite’s the one who hired her, and he called her for a little emergency backup,” Jessie said, finishing my thought.

“Would she do that, though? Fontaine made it sound like these Chainmen are pretty big on the law—or what passes for it in hell, anyway. Is offering an on-call assassination service part of the employment package?”

Jessie slumped in her seat, exhausted. Cool, crisp air billowed in through what was left of her side window. She tried to roll it down, making little pieces plink and shudder loose.

“He also made it sound like Nyx was kind of murder happy,” Jessie said. “And you know what? I’m inclined to agree with his assessment. Either way, Kite’s involved in this. Neck-deep.”

“Agreed. He found out what Tucker was researching, flipped out, and pulled the articles. He doesn’t want anyone knowing that the Bogeyman gave a kid back. I mean, given his reaction, I think we can take ‘It was all a mistake on the newspaper’s part’ off the list of possibilities.”

“We should rush to Kite’s house. Maybe we’ll catch him packing a bag.”

I drummed my fingers on the wheel, thinking.

“We’ll swing by just to be safe,” I said, “but I have a feeling he’s already gone underground. I hate to say it, but I know there’s one person in this town who can tell us what really happened. And he
will
tell us.”

We found Cody out in front of the police station putting a fresh coat of wax on his squad car. He stopped what he was doing, lowered the sponge in his hand, and stared at us blankly as we rolled into the spot two spaces down. I didn’t realize why until we got out of the car.

In addition to the shattered side window and a huge dent in the trunk, the roof of the Crown Vic looked like the aftermath of a war zone. Rips, gouges, and long black streaks where the white paint had bubbled, boiled, and charred.

“Minor accident,” I told him.

“Minor,” he said flatly, staring at the car.

“Just a fender bender,” Jessie said. “We exchanged license and insurance information with the other driver. She was very gracious.”

Cody looked from me to the car and back again.

“Are you okay?”

No,
I thought.
I just found out your boss might be hiding evidence about the night my father died. I’m pretty far from okay.

I didn’t say that, though. I just gave Cody a tired thumbs-up and said, “Copacetic.”

“We need to talk to the sheriff,” Jessie told him.

“Sure.” Cody gestured to the front doors with his dripping sponge. “He’s inside. Go on back.”

We found him in the records room. I stood before him, silent as the grave, staring him down.

“Sheriff Hoyt,” Jessie said, “we need to have a word with you. In private, please.”

He furrowed his brow, looking uncertain. “Hey, ladies, why so formal all of a sudden? What’s up?”

“This is a discussion,” I said, “in a formal capacity.”

“What’re . . . what’re you saying, Harmony?”

I gestured toward the cell-block corridor.

“I’m saying that we can talk in your office, or we can talk in the interrogation room. Your call.”

TWENTY-TWO

B
arry chose his office. We didn’t say a word until we stood behind closed doors. He dropped into the chair behind his desk, looking pale.

“You gotta help me here, Harmony. I don’t understand what’s going on, but I know I don’t like it any.”

“Thirty years ago,” I said, “you and my father were heading up the investigation into the Bogeyman kidnappings.”

He shrugged. “Sure, I mean, you know that. Heck, the whole department—such as it was—was working night and day on finding those kids. We brought in reservists, volunteers from three counties around, every warm body we could get.”

“And how many children were abducted?”

“Y-you
know
that,” he said. “Five.”

“Funny,” Jessie said. “We heard six.”

Barry’s mouth opened, his lips moving but no words coming out, then it shut again. He clasped his hands on the desk.

“Except history says five,” I added, “because one came back.”

“I don’t . . . I don’t know what you’re asking me.” His voice was soft as cotton, but shaky as the San Andreas Fault. It was a familiar tone of voice. I usually heard it from suspects who knew damn well they’d been cornered, but still had the faint, false hope they could still talk their way out of prison time.

“The
Talbot Eagle
wrote it all up,” I said, “then retracted it the very next day. Right before my sister was taken and my father was murdered. You remember, don’t you?”

Jessie jerked her thumb back over her shoulder, pointing in the general direction of town hall.

“Your mayor just made himself a federal fugitive,” she said. “
That’s
how desperate he was to stop us from finding out about this. So don’t feed us any lines about the article being a mistake. After the day I’ve had, I’ve got a seriously low bullshit-tolerance threshold.”

“You were there, Barry,” I said. “It was your case. You know what happened. You and my father.”

“Harmony, you’ve gotta—you’ve gotta understand, it was a different time. Everything was crazy, we were running through a hundred leads a day and ninety percent of ’em were just nutjobs trying to get attention. Sometimes we had to play things loose—”

“
How
loose?” I said. “Barry, you know something about this case. Something you’ve been hiding for thirty years. Don’t say you don’t. You were there for me the night it all happened. You were there for my mom in the aftermath, until we moved out of town. Barry . . . ”

I looked him in the eye.

“Please tell me you aren’t in on this, and please make me believe you. Tell me you aren’t bent. Don’t break my goddamn heart.”

His shoulders sagged, and he looked away from me. Staring at the portrait of my father on his office wall.

“Not bent,” he said, almost too soft to hear. “Just a coward.”

“Start talking,” I told him.

He took a deep breath. “You gotta understand something. The Kite family . . . they
are
Talbot Cove. Maybe not so much these days, with most everybody flying off to the big city and the big paychecks, but they’ve been running things since the first homesteaders broke ground here in the 1800s. That paper mill on the shore—that was the town’s lifeblood for nearly a hundred years. Everybody owed the Kites for their livelihood, and everybody knew it.”

He drummed his fingers on his desk, straining his words through a sifter.

“I got the call that morning. Young couple, wealthy, kissing cousins to the Kites. Their baby went missing in the night. I took the report, searched the house, it was just like the other abductions. Nothing. Nothing to see and nothing to find, like the kid had vanished into the air. Later that afternoon, I get a frantic call, telling me to come back. And boom, there’s the kid in his crib, right where he should be.”

“From out of nowhere,” I said.

He nodded. “From out of nowhere. And there’s Mayor Jeremiah Kite—Mitchum Kite, the current mayor? Jeremiah was his dad. Jeremiah tells me that it was all a big misunderstanding, that he’d taken the kid for a ride in the country and his mother had forgot they’d squared it ahead of time.”

“Forgot,” Jessie said. “Mothers don’t
forget
things like that. And what, he walked into their house in the middle of the night and borrowed their kid without saying anything?”

“I know, it was flimsy. But we were putting in eighty-, ninety-, hundred-hour weeks on this thing. Following dead end after dead end. I studied the case files in my sleep, when I
could
sleep. Now, I saw him with my own two eyes: the kid was sleeping in his crib, safe and sound. Case
closed
. Yeah, it was weird, but I didn’t have time to investigate weird, especially when the most powerful man in town was standing right there and telling me to let it drop.”

“And that’s your story?” I asked.

He looked like he was about to say yes. Then he stared down at his desk, eyes burning with shame.

“I wish it was,” he whispered. “Goddamn me to hell, I wish it was.”

“What did you do, Barry?”

He took a deep, shuddering breath.

“Very next morning, Jeremiah showed up here at the station. He wanted the police report, the original one about the abduction. Not a copy, he wanted to take the actual report and shred it. Said it was a misunderstanding, but ‘yellow journalists and muckrakers’ could take it and make the Kite family look bad. He wanted all traces of the original report
gone
. Now, your dad, he always did things by the book. He said the police report wasn’t public information anyhow, and he wasn’t about to mess with department records just to make the Kite family happy.”

“It got into the papers, though,” Jessie said.

He shook his head. “Just the
Eagle
, which didn’t exactly have a big circulation. Even the locals preferred the
Tribune
. You gotta remember, this was before the Internet. Tuesday’s newspaper was Wednesday’s birdcage liner and Thursday’s compost.”

“And down the memory hole it goes,” I said, “except for the one archival copy that ended up at town hall. So what happened next?”

He looked up at me.

“You know what happened next,” he said. “That was the night your daddy died.”

A hand of ice squeezed my spine, so hard I thought my bones might snap.

“Barry. Are you telling me . . . ”

“No. I mean, I don’t know. I mean . . . ” He squeezed his eyes shut, steadying himself. “The next morning, Jeremiah Kite came back. He took me aside and congratulated me on my ‘imminent promotion.’ Then he asked how my sister’s son was. My sister’s nine-month-old son, in Three Oaks.”

“He threatened you?” I asked.

“Never in a way I could prove. It was just the questions he asked, and how he asked ’em. Like, wasn’t I worried that the kidnapper might start snatchin’ kids in a different town, like Three Oaks. And wasn’t I worried, given what happened last night, that next time he might kill everybody in the house.”

“Jesus,” Jessie breathed.

“His words were murky,” Barry said, “but the meaning behind ’em was clear as glass. And then he said, hey, as long as we were standing right by the filing-room door, why didn’t I just pop my head in, grab that police report, and give it to him so he could get on with his day.”

“So you gave it to him,” I said.

“So I gave it to him,” he replied. “Because I wasn’t going to sacrifice my sister’s life, and her family’s lives, for your daddy’s principles. Jeremiah Kite was mobbed up and everybody knew it. When the paper plant tried to unionize, he bussed in a pack of gun thugs from Detroit to bust it up the very next day. He could pick up the phone and send someone to my sister’s house, and do . . . do whatever he damn well wanted. Because he had the money and the power in this town, and everybody knew it.”

“Barry, you
knew
. You
knew
Kite was connected to the Bogeyman abductions!”

He jabbed his finger at me, stabbing the air. “It was
over
, Harmony! Week after this all happened, Jeremiah got sick. Ruptured appendix. They rushed him to the hospital, but he died on the operating table. And that’s when the kidnappings ended. Case closed: Jeremiah Kite
was
the Bogeyman. Going public would have gotten me killed, or probably just sued into the gutter. In case you haven’t noticed, the Kites still own this town. I didn’t have enough hard evidence to expose him—didn’t have
any
hard evidence, at all—and it wouldn’t have brought those kids back anyhow. Besides, you can’t lock a dead man in jail. What was I supposed to
do
?”

“So you closed the case. Covered it all up.”

“No.” He shook his head. “No. I
never
stopped looking for your sister and those other kids. Never for one day since have I stopped looking. But you see? That’s why I was so sure Helen Gunderson took her own kid: I
knew
the Bogeyman was dead. Didn’t occur to me that it might be a copycat.”

We knew what he didn’t. That the Bogeyman was a real, genuine monster, not just a scary nickname for a human predator. Jeremiah Kite must have been his summoner, back in the ’80s. Maybe in the ’40s, too, if he was old enough. Who did that make the Bogeyman’s new master? His son Mitchum?

“So all these victims,” I said, “all did something to cross the Kite family.”

Barry rubbed the back of his neck, shaking his head slowly.

“Besides your dad? That’s the damnedest thing. Unless it was some scheme I couldn’t figure out,
none
of them had. I spent years trying to suss out a connection. Every one of those families either was friendly with the Kites, or never had much reason to cross their path. Whatever this was about, with the exception of your family, it wasn’t revenge.”

“What about now?” Jessie asked. “Helen Gunderson and the Morris family?”

“Nothin’. I asked, believe me. Why, you think one of Jeremiah’s kids is the copycat?”

“You,” I said, “are no longer a part of this investigation, Sheriff Hoyt. We’ll take it from here.”

“C’mon, Harmony—”

“You had information about my father’s murder and my sister’s abduction. You had a suspect. And you refused to investigate.”

“I
couldn’t
investigate, and the guy was six feet under! What should I have done, huh? What would you have done in my shoes?”

I took a deep breath, trying to fight down the anger. Beat it back with my fists, down into the pit of my stomach.

“Did it ever occur to you,” I said, “that the reason those children were never found was because investigators were looking everywhere
but
Jeremiah Kite’s house? For all you know, those kids—
my sister
—were in his goddamn basement.”

“I couldn’t get a warrant if I tried! The Kites owned every damn judge in three counties. Harmony, I didn’t have any—”

His phone buzzed harshly. Barry gritted his teeth and hit the intercom button.

“Mabel, I’m a
little
busy right now.”

“Sorry, Sheriff, but it’s Mayor Kite on the line. He says it’s absolutely urgent.”

Jessie and I shared a look.

“Put it on speakerphone,” I told him. “And if he asks, you’re here alone.”