Harmony Black (Harmony Black Series Book 1)

by Craig Schaefer

  “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

  Barry 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.”

&n
bsp; “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.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Barry turned the phone on his desk, swiveling it closer to us, and turned up the volume on the speaker.

  “Mayor Kite,” he said, trying to sound casual but failing, “such a pleasure. What can I do you for?”

  “Need your help, Barry, pronto. No time to explain. Get out to County Line Road, near the twelve-mile marker. There should be a busted-up car there with a couple of bodies inside. You’ve got to make it disappear.”

  Barry leaned forward in his chair. “How—excuse me, did you say bodies?”

  “Yeah, and brace yourself, they’re not gonna look pretty. They’ve got to go. Burn everything.”

  “Now, just hold on one second, Mr. Mayor,” Barry snapped. “This isn’t like letting your sister off on another DUI or pretending I don’t know about your nephew’s little pot farm out in the sticks. I don’t clean up bodies for you. I’m a goddamn sheriff.”

  “You’re a man with access to a tow truck, and the authority to get things done. Authority you keep only so long as I allow you to have it. Don’t fuck with me, Barry. Not now, not today. Besides, this is covering your ass, too.”

  “Really. How do you figure that?”

  “Those bodies,” Mitchum Kite said, “belong to a couple of feds who were sticking their noses where they didn’t belong. You know what happens if they turn up dead? A lot more feds come to town. A lot more. Who knows who they’ll end up arresting, or what evidence they might find?”

  “Say it plain,” Barry told him.

  “I’m just thinking ‘small-town sheriff runs empire of corruption’ makes for a great headline. Somebody’s leaving Talbot Cove in handcuffs, and it won’t be me.”

  I grabbed a notepad and a ballpoint pen with a chewed-up cap from Barry’s desk, scribbling a fast note:

  Say you’ll do it.

  I held up the note, and Barry gave me a nervous thumbs-up. “All right, fine, twist my goddamn arm. I’ll go take care of it.”

  I jotted down a second line and showed it to him:

  But you want to meet.

  “But, uh, we gotta talk,” Barry said. “I mean, this doesn’t sit right with me, none of it does. If I take care of this, I think you owe me an explanation.”

  Mitchum let out a heavy sigh. “Fine, fine, just take care of it. Tonight, six p.m. Come to the paper mill. Alone. I’ll meet you there.”

  Barry squinted at the phone. “Couldn’t you just come down to the station, or I could drive by the house?”

  “No! It’s . . . this is a very sensitive situation. I can’t be seen with anyone right now. The paper mill. At six.”

  “All right.” He nodded slowly. “That’ll do, then. See you at six, Mr. Mayor.”

  Mitchum hung up. Barry blinked at the phone, then looked up at us.

  “He’s gonna kill me, isn’t he?
”

  “No loose ends,” Jessie said.

  “Well, you two are pretty damn big ones!”

  “He sent his”—I paused—“his hired guns, to murder us. Obviously, he doesn’t know we got away.”

  Barry scratched his neck. “Well, won’t they tell him? I mean, he’s gotta be getting a phone call or something.”

  “We took care of it,” Jessie said. “And we’ll take care of this, too.”

  “Not without me,” he said. “I’m not letting you girls walk into an ambush—”

  “It’s not an ambush if you know it’s coming,” I told him, “and we’re not girls. We’re federal agents.”

  I pushed my chair back. Jessie did the same. Barry just watched us leave, silent, until I was passing through his office door.

  “Harmony.”

  I looked back at him.

  “Swear to God,” he said, “I did everything I could.”

  “I know. Now we’re here to finish the job.”

  I got in the car, leaned back against the cold vinyl-wrapped headrest, and stared at the police station like it was a million miles away. If I closed my eyes, all I could see was my father’s face.

  Jessie’s boots crinkled against bits of broken glass on the floor mat when she got in on the passenger side. “Hey.”

  “Hey,” I said.

  “You gonna be okay?”

  I shrugged. “Have to be, right?”

  “No obligation.” She leaned back, too, mirroring my stare. “Sounds like Barry was stuck between a rock and a hard place. Still is.”

  “He’s off the hook. Don’t know if I can ever talk to him again, but he’s off the hook.” I shook my head. “You know what the worst part is?”

  “What’s that?”

  “He’s dead.” I turned to look at her. “If I’m reading this right, Jeremiah Kite was behind the Bogeyman abductions in the ’80s. He summoned it; he chose the targets. He sent it after my family because my father stood up to him. And then he dies of a fucking burst appendix? Where’s the justice in that? He was never exposed, never punished, never spent a single day behind bars for what he did.”