Harmony Black (Harmony Black Series Book 1)

by Craig Schaefer

  Nyx turned without missing a beat, casually strolling back to the circle’s edge. “You were saying?”

  I wasn’t saying anything. I just watched as the mayor gave one last wheezing rattle and died, his wide eyes fixed on the broken skylights.

  “You didn’t . . . ” Jessie said haltingly. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  Nyx shrugged. “You were right. It was a good trap. You could make this one leave, and he would have broken under questioning. Only solution: remove him. Also, he was insolent. Was already thinking about killing him anyway.”

  “You’re that desperate to keep us from finding the Bogeyman’s master?” I said.

  “To keep you from getting there first. This one was trained well, in the House of Dead Roses: the prize for first place is a bounty. The prize for second place is suffering and shame. Besides, it is in your best interests to step aside.”

  “Yeah?” I said. “Why’s that?”

  “Because you cannot punish him like this one can.”

  “I can’t argue that, but it isn’t the point. This isn’t about punishment. It’s about justice, and saving those kids.”

  Nyx studied her bloody nails, like they were more interesting than anything I had to say.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Am I boring you?”

  “Just thinking, almost want you to find him. Want to see the look on your face when you realize . . . hmm. Funny. Maybe you’d let the anger out, then. A chance for enlightenment. Ready to answer your question now.”

  “My question?”

  Nyx turned her back on us, her tail snapping at my face.

  “This one leaves under her own power,” she said as she walked away. “No banishment necessary.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “So,” Jessie breathed, “that just happened.”

  Nyx was long gone. So was the sun, plunging the gloomy mill into darkness. We stood in the light of the four pillar candles, still protected by the circle of herbs and salt. In the shadows, Mitchum Kite’s corpse was a mangled lump on the concrete floor, slowly cooling.

  “She killed him,” I said. “She actually killed the man who hired her just to keep us from talking to him. You’d think there’d be a rule against that.”

  Jessie holstered her pistol. She touched my sleeve.

  “Wait a second. Did she? Remember what he said before she took him out: I don’t know what we hired you for. Mitchum might have been in on the deal, but she made it pretty clear she didn’t answer to him.”

  “Somebody else hired her,” I said. “Somebody knows the answers we’re looking for. Somebody connected to Mitchum Kite. And unless Nyx feels like volunteering the information, they don’t know that Mitchum is dead.”

  “Unless we call it in,” Jessie said, eyeing the corpse.

  It wasn’t even a debate. It should have been, but I ran the numbers in my head, and the math wasn’t hard. Mitchum’s next of kin, whoever they were, would wait to get the bad news. Keeping his murder under wraps could give us an edge, and we needed every edge we could get.

  I hated this. All my training, all my experience, screamed that leaving a murder victim to rot in an abandoned factory was as far from good police work as I could get. Still, I thought, it’s not like anybody in this world can bring his killer to justice. Anybody besides us.

  “We’re not calling it in,” I said.

  Special circumstances.

  “So,” Jessie said, “what now?”

  “Now’s the hard part.” I looked down at the circle of salt. “How bad do you think Nyx wanted to kill us?”

  “Not sure. Felt like she was laughing at us more than anything. Why?”

  I pointed at the barrier.

  “Because,” I said, “to leave, we have to step outside the circle. Which means, if she doubled back and she’s hiding somewhere in the dark . . . ”

  “Hmm. Yeah. May have been a tiny flaw in your brilliant plan.”

  “Well, I thought I was going to end up banishing her.”

  No point wasting time. Either she was lurking or she wasn’t. I took a deep breath, pushed my shoulders back, and stepped over the line of salt.

  Nothing. Nothing but a cool night breeze whistling through the broken skylights.

  “I’m not going to say it,” Jessie told me.

  I stepped all the way outside the circle. Jessie joined me, hesitant.

  “Say what?”

  “I’ve seen enough horror movies to know how this goes down,” she said. “If I say, ‘I think she’s gone,’ that’s gonna be her cue to jump out of nowhere and eat our faces. So don’t say that.”

  “You . . . just did.”

  “Oh.” Jessie shrugged. “I think she’s gone, then.”

  I’ll admit it, I flinched.

  We didn’t discover Nyx’s parting gift until we stepped outside. She’d shredded all four of the Crown Vic’s tires, nothing left but scraps of torn rubber clinging to bent rims. The mayor’s BMW got the same treatment.

  “Technically,” Jessie said, “she did us a favor.”

  I couldn’t argue that. We called April and Kevin, told them to rent a car and meet us at the mill. First they had to call a taxi, then they had to take the cab to the only rental place that was still open, at a small airport fifteen miles away.

  We waited, in the middle of nowhere.

  Jessie walked the lot, doing stretching exercises, kicking the occasional stray rock. Some people are good at sitting still and doing nothing. Jessie wasn’t one of them.

  “You all right?” I asked as she walked by me on her fifth lap of the lot.

  “Huh? Yeah, sure, why?”

  “What Nyx said back there, about your ‘gift.’” I jerked my thumb toward the mill’s front doors. “Sounded like she hit a sore spot.”

  Jessie’s lip curled. “Nobody talks shit like demons. All that creepy woo-woo ‘I glimpse the shadows of your soul and call to your darkness’ garbage. Seriously, you ever read the lyrics to a Dio album? Exact same stuff, but at least Dio put some good guitar licks behind it.”

  She stopped a few feet away, her back turned to me. She picked up a rock, weighed it in her hand, and gave it a throw. It skipped across the parking lot and out of sight.

  “What my dad did, that’s got nothing to do with who I am inside.” Her voice went a little lower, a little harder. “And I don’t spread my legs for the king of anything. Best believe that.”

  Headlights flashed in the distance, glowing against a copse of trees.

  “Either the mobile cavalry is here,” Jessie said, suddenly flippant again, “or Nyx stole a car and she’s coming back to eat our faces.”

  Fortunately, it was the first option. Kevin and April drove up in a chocolate-colored Hyundai SUV with an Avis bumper sticker. Kevin rolled down the driver’s-side window.

  “Need a lift?”

  We climbed into the backseat. Jessie reached up and rubbed Kevin’s shoulder.

  “My hero. I could kiss you, if I was desperate and blind drunk.”

  “Love you, too, boss,” he said. “Get anything out of the mayor?”

  “Unfortunately,” Jessie said, “he caught a terminal case of death. Nyx wanted to shut him up.”

  “What do we know about Mitchum Kite?” I asked. “Spouse? Kids? He wasn’t the only person who hired Nyx. Her other backer, or backers, has to be somebody close to him.”

  “Practically a hermit,” April said. “No children, never been married. Four brothers, two sisters, most of whom have moved away from Talbot Cove.”

  “No relationships and no real friends outside his coworkers,” Kevin added. “And I get the impression even they don’t—I mean, didn’t—like the guy very much.”

  I buckled my seat belt as Kevin swung the SUV around in the parking lot.

  “Good,” Jessie said. “Then since nobody knows he’s dead, nobody’s going to be watching his house.”

  Special circumstances, I thought, standing in the driveway of Mitchum Kite’s house. These
lines just keep getting easier to cross.

  “Tell me you’re not going to ask for a warrant,” Jessie said, standing beside me. We’d left Kevin and April back at the motel and taken the SUV.

  “There is nothing in the world we could say to a judge to justify a search warrant,” I said, “besides the truth, and that’s the one thing we can’t reveal.”

  “Now you’re getting it.”

  “Doesn’t mean I have to like it,” I said.

  Jessie handed me a pair of disposable latex gloves, then slipped on a pair of her own.

  “Nope, sure doesn’t,” she said. “Now let’s break into a dead guy’s house.”

  The Kite family home was a two-story colonial with a gabled rooftop and a pristine, manicured lawn. It lorded over a cul-de-sac in the nice part of town, where the sidewalks were lit with modern “old-timey” street lamps and everybody was tucked in bed by ten.

  “Yep, it’s the original family home,” Kevin said over the phone. I could hear his fingers rattling like a hailstorm against his keyboard. “I cracked into the municipality database, gonna see if they’ve got the original blueprints on file. Their password, for the record, was ‘password.’ I can’t even feel proud of myself.”

  We circled the house, keeping low, our footsteps muffled by the drone of crickets.

  “Okay,” Kevin said, “want some weird? Here’s some weird. We’ve got only partial blueprints, scanned in from the originals. I’m showing first-floor access to a pretty good-size cellar. The cellar itself? Not shown. Probably wanna check that out.”

  “The cellar,” I said. “Great. Because nothing bad ever happens in the cellars of creepy old houses.”

  A brick patio with a barbecue grill stood in the backyard. Given how spotless the grill was, I figured it had never been used. Jessie crept up to a window and clicked on a penlight, casting a narrow, shimmering beam through the empty house. She carefully checked along the windowsill, then the back door a few feet away.

  “Caught a break,” she said. “No alarm system. Gotta love small towns.”

  “Doesn’t get us inside.”

  “Oh, ye of little faith.” She handed me the penlight. “Here, hold this steady and watch as I make my own kind of magic.”

  She crouched at the door and pulled a small black plastic case from her jacket pocket. The clamshell opened to reveal a row of stainless-steel picks.

  “It beats using a battering ram,” she said, picking out a thin, bent rake and a stout probe, going to work on the lock. “More importantly, we do this right, nobody will know we were ever here. Don’t need to leave more unsolvable crimes to clutter up Sheriff Barry’s case files.”

  At that moment, I didn’t much care about Barry or his files, but she had a point. The more silently we operated, the less of a mess we’d leave for the civilians to clean up after we finally left town. As it was, the mayor’s death would go down as a permanently unsolved mystery.

  The tumblers clicked and rolled over for Jessie like a well-trained dog. We let ourselves in.

  Jessie cupped her hands to her mouth and called out, “Hello? Sheriff’s office. Identify yourself.”

  The house sat silent and still. Jessie looked back at me and shrugged. “Better safe than sorry.”

  We turned on a few lights, just enough to work by; it wasn’t like anyone was going to come home and catch us. The late Mayor Kite had a flair for the spartan, furnishing his rooms with the bare minimum to get by and doing most of his shopping at antique stores: a Victorian end table here, an art deco lamp with a stained-glass hood there. Old, expensive-looking dinnerware stocked his kitchen cupboards, but the trash was heavy with fast-food takeout bags and paper plates and cups, like Mitchum had been afraid to use any of it.

  I felt a lingering unease, growing as we poked around in the dead man’s house. I wanted to chalk it up to the fact that we were committing a burglary, but that wasn’t the reason. There was something unhealthy about the Kite home.

  No, I thought, that’s just it. It’s a house, but it isn’t a home. It feels like a museum, a set piece, a stage for a play.

  We drifted through a living room with a spotless plush sofa and a single end table with a lamp, positioned to face an empty, blank wall.

  “Nobody lives here,” Jessie murmured, echoing my thoughts. “It’s like a Charles Dickens orphanage collided with a furniture-store showroom.”

  Homes mold themselves around the rhythm of their owners’ lives. Sloppiness and clutter happens, dust settles in hard-to-reach places. People leave things out on tables, intending to put them away later and never quite getting around to it. Not here. The Kite house could have passed a white-glove test from top to bottom, spotless and cold as a mortician’s slab.

  Un-lived in, I thought.

  Unloved.

  “Okay,” Jessie said, standing in the threshold of Mitchum Kite’s bedroom. “Now, that is creepy.”

  Stark white sheets and a single thin pillow lay upon the mayor’s antique four-poster bed. On the opposite wall, centered perfectly, hung the first piece of artwork we’d seen in the entire house: an oil painting of a tall, balding man, staring down in furious condemnation.

  JEREMIAH KITE, read the brass nameplate at the bottom of the frame. OUR PATRIARCH.

  “This guy didn’t just have issues,” Jessie murmured. “He had multiple subscriptions.”

  What drew my eye was the closet door. Well, not the door itself, but the little addition, bolted onto the frame with newer hardware than anything else in the house.

  “Jessie,” I said, “why is there a dead bolt on his closet door?”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Jessie squinted at the dead bolt keeping Mitchum Kite’s closet securely shut.

  “Clearly,” he said, “he didn’t want anything getting out. I can think of one good candidate. How about you?”

  “Cover me,” I said.

  She pulled her piece and held it steady, standing a few steps back. I took hold of the dead bolt. A frosty chill clung to the brass, too cold to be natural. The bolt slid free with a low, slithering rasp. I took a deep breath and braced myself.

  Ancient hinges groaned as the closet door swung open. No monsters lurked inside, just cedar walls and a dangling string attached to a single bare bulb.

  I tugged the string. The little closet flooded with light.

  Pictures covered the walls. Pictures in crayon, stick figures and stick houses, scribbled in a child’s confused hand. A couple of broken crayons sat on the cold floor, next to a metal bucket. Scrawled words ran down the right-hand wall.

  i’m sorry

  i’m sorry

  i’m sorry

  i’m sorry

  Jessie whipped out her phone, her eyes as hard as her voice the second Kevin picked up.

  “Check your intel,” she snapped. “You’re positive Mitchum didn’t have any kids? Yeah. Yeah, because there sure as hell was one here. Kevin, I—listen. I don’t care, triple-check and call me back.”

  The psychic miasma that clung to the Kite house was almost overpowering here, bordering on a physical odor that twisted my stomach into knots. Hopelessness. Dread.

  “This house,” I said. “It’s been passed down through the family, right?”

  “That’s what April says. Started with . . . Edwin, Edwin Kite, the paper mill’s founder, back in the 1800s. Why?”

  “So Mitchum inherited it when Jeremiah died. And he would have grown up in this house.”

  “That’s right,” Jessie said.

  I looked to her, to the portrait on the wall, to the closet and back again.

  “I think this might have been Mitchum’s closet.”

  “Jesus,” Jessie said. “Okay, let’s . . . let’s keep searching.”

  The last door we checked, on the first floor, offered another mystery. More extra hardware on the frame, but instead of a dead bolt, a pair of heavy-duty padlocks sealed it shut.

  “And this must be the cellar door. Want me to get the bolt cutters from
the SUV?” Jessie asked.

  I stood in front of the door and held out my open hand, waving it slowly forward and back. The air, right in that spot, was at least ten degrees colder than the rest of the house.

  “Hold off,” I said, slowly backing away. “Let’s check the rest of the house first. Whatever’s on the other side, it isn’t going anywhere.”

  A couple of rooms on the second floor might have been bedrooms once, but they’d been stripped of furniture. Nothing remained but bare floorboards and lace curtains. And closets.

  Every closet in the house had a dead bolt.

  We checked those, too, but they were just as barren as the bedrooms. Not even a speck of dust on the sanded cedar boards.

  Mitchum had sent a demon to murder us—twice—but the more we saw, the more I wished we’d been able to take him alive. I couldn’t get a grasp on this place, or the kind of man who would live here. Who was Mitchum Kite, really?

  And what had been done to him?

  He kept his private office at the end of the hall. It was the only room in the entire house that felt lived-in, and that wasn’t saying much. He had a desk, a frayed olive oval rug, a stiff-backed wooden chair, and a cheap coffeemaker next to a stack of disposable Styrofoam cups. No pictures sat on his desk, no personal mementos, just the closed shell of a laptop computer.

  “Now we’re talking,” Jessie said, sitting down in his chair and opening up the laptop. I stood at her shoulder, waiting as it chittered and hummed to life.

  “Great,” Jessie sighed. “Password protected. Okay, let’s bring this back to the motel and see if Kevin can crack it.”

  I rubbed my thumb against my chin, thinking.

  “Try ‘Jeremiah.’”

  Jessie rattled off the password. A red X popped up. Username or password is incorrect.

  “How about ‘father’?”

  She tried again. Another red X.

  Jessie turned in the chair, looking back over her shoulder at me. “Any other ideas?”