“Son,” he said, “where are you gonna go? We’re just trying to keep you safe, that’s all. Now, you’re frightened, and that’s fine, but frightened people with guns make some bad, bad mistakes. The kind of mistakes you can’t take back. Just put it down, and we can all pretend this never happened.”
A single tear trickled down Willie’s cheek.
“Don’t you get it?” he whispered. “There’s nowhere in the world I can run to. Nowhere is safe. He can always find me. Ever since I was little, when he started coming to me in my dreams . . . I never had a chance, not really. But it’s okay. Now I understand. Now I know there’s only one way to make it all stop.”
“Willie,” Cody said, “don’t—”
“It’s okay,” he said, smiling as he blinked back the tears. “I understand now.”
Then he put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
The shot boomed like a cannon in the narrow hallway, and spatters of blood and bone painted the drab beige wall as Willie’s corpse tumbled to the floor.
Nobody said a word.
We just stood there inhaling the coppery, acrid tang of gun smoke and blood as we stared down at the dead man.
Even the rattling from the vents stopped cold. I felt a prickling sensation on the back of my neck.
“He’s dead, Nyx!” I called out, holstering my gun. “Get lost.”
A rumbling from the vent, and another noise. Something that sounded like a snort of disgust. The sound retreated into silence.
“Jesus,” Barry breathed. “I didn’t—I mean, I knew Willie had problems, but you didn’t warn me he was nuts. I didn’t know.”
“Amateur hour,” Jessie said, “is officially over.”
She stepped around Willie’s corpse and stalked out the door. April rolled after her, grim and silent.
“Barry,” I said, touching his arm, “it’s okay—”
He stared at Willie with a face of pale stone.
“A man just shot himself in my station house, with a gun he took off my belt. This is anything but okay.”
I hated to ask, but I had to. I gestured toward the body. “Can you . . . take care of this?”
“Yeah.” His chin bobbed. “Yeah, sure. Might need you to sign something later, I don’t know. Don’t even know the procedure for something like this. Took my goddamn gun off my belt . . . I didn’t know he was crazy, Harmony. I didn’t know.”
Except he wasn’t crazy, I thought. Just hurting.
And he wouldn’t be the last one.
I thought back to what he’d said in the interrogation room. That he’d used his delivery list to pick victims, choosing them at random—except for the third one, the one Edwin Kite picked out personally. We knew about only two abductions, and that could mean only one thing.
The next Returned, Willie’s replacement, had already been marked. If we didn’t find a way to take Kite down, then in another thirty years or so, the cycle would start all over again. Cody followed me to the station-house door. “Harmony,” he said. I stopped with my hand on the push plate.
“I might not like Talbot Cove,” he said, “but as long as I’ve got this badge on, I’m responsible for keeping it safe. And the stuff I’ve seen and heard today . . . ”
He trailed off. I waited for him to find the words he was looking for.
“What’s happening to my town?” he asked me. “And please, don’t tell me about Willie being a witness to . . . some criminal conspiracy. Barry might buy that line, but respect me enough not to lie to my face, okay?”
“I won’t lie to you, Cody. But I can’t tell you the truth, either. I need you to just bear with me, okay? When the time comes, I’ll explain everything I can. Just trust me.”
He put his hands on his hips and chewed that over.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Just . . . let me help?”
“When I can,” I promised, and went outside to find my partner.
THIRTY-FIVE
Jessie paced across the parking lot, head down, kicking at stones. April rolled alongside her, speaking in soft tones. No cars around but ours and a couple of police cruisers—looked like Fontaine had already cleared out, and Nyx had no reason to stick around, either.
“Hey,” I said, walking up behind them.
“Our best chance at closing this case,” Jessie said, “and he shoots himself. Well, I’ve got good news and bad news. Good news is, the Bogeyman abductions are over. Bad news is, thirty goddamn years from now we’ll be right back where we started.”
“Maybe not. We’ve got one last lead to chase. Let’s head back to the motor lodge. We’ll need Kevin’s help.”
Kevin was a step ahead of me. He sat huddled over the mayor’s laptop in the motel room, muttering under his breath as his fingers flew over the keys.
“Trying to track down this CTide06 guy, but it’s no good. He’s using a free e-mail provider and routing everything through a proxy VPN. Makes it look like he’s sending all his mail from Hong Kong. Which, I can confidently say, he isn’t.”
Jessie leaned over his shoulder to read his screen. “Can’t you, I don’t know, run a back trace on the proxy?”
“Did you just make that up? Words mean things. And no. I’m a hacker, not a wizard. I know, it’s an easy mistake to make. No, this guy knows how to hide his tracks—which, to be fair, isn’t all that hard. Our best bet, though I cringe to say it, is the legal route. Get a subpoena for his e-mail service provider so we can scope out their internal logs.”
“Which will take weeks,” I said. “I’ve got a better idea. We know that the child who comes back is always a blood descendant of Edwin Kite, right?”
April, sitting at the table by the window, glanced up from her notes. “Yes. Which, at this point, enumerates several hundred people in Talbot Cove alone. Over the course of two hundred years, any family tree tends to sprout vast, long, and leafy branches.”
“But we can narrow it down. We’re looking for a family with a young child—”
“Doesn’t narrow it down as much as you might think,” Kevin said. “I’ve already tried that. I’ve spent the last four hours searching through years of birth announcements and cross-referencing them with everyone who has a passing connection to—wait. Wait, wait, wait. I’ve been going at this wrong. There’s an easier way.”
“What is it?” I asked him.
“When people put numbers in an e-mail handle, it’s always a historically significant date. Birthdays, weddings, graduation. CTide. Crimson Tide. That’s the University of Alabama’s football team.”
His fingers flew across his keyboard. I watched his screen turn into a wash of white on scarlet, and words scrolled on a pop-up window.
University Bursar’s Office
Employee Access
“If you only want employees to access your employee-only site,” he muttered under his breath as he worked, “maybe update your firmware more than once every five years.”
“So we’re looking for an alumnus who graduated in 2006,” April said, “with a relation to the Kite family. Hmm. Bigger needle, smaller haystack. I’ll help with the search.”
Kevin cracked his knuckles and glanced my way. “We’ve got this. Give us three or four hours, tops.”
It took them only two. Which, coincidentally, was the number of Kites they found.
“Jacob and Ellen Garner,” Kevin said, pulling up old photographs from a campus newspaper on his screen and lining them up side by side. “College sweethearts. Our buddy Jacob was a running back for the Crimson Tide and a short pick to go pro until he blew his knee out. Ellen, meanwhile, is a Kite cousin twice removed. It’s a stretch, but she’s got the family blood in her veins.”
“They married the summer after graduation,” April added. “Traveled a bit, and came home to Talbot Cove to start a family. Jacob is the branch manager at a local bank—”
Kevin produced a sheet of motel stationery with a flourish, handing it to me. “—and as of one year ago, Ellen became a stay-at-home
mom. Can’t say it’s them for sure, but they fit every single one of the criteria.”
He’d scribbled an address on the sheet along with turn-by-turn directions. If I remembered the spot, it was a nice little chunk of town just off Main Street. Affluent, quiet, nice place to raise a kid.
Or lose one.
Jessie and I sat in the SUV, parked curbside on a tranquil little side street. Big houses, white picket fences, and the last light of the setting sun filtering through orange and dying leaves. A beefy blue Subaru sat out in the Garners’ driveway, and the shifting lights of a television screen glowed against their living room window.
“We need to agree on something,” Jessie said, staring at the house, “before we go in.”
“Name it.”
“Unless we get something to go on here, a real lead, none of this goes in our final report. Not the Garners, not the third abduction, none of it. It ends with Willie.”
“What? Why?”
Jessie pointed a finger at the front door.
“Edwin Kite is stuck in his . . . demesne, right? And the Bogeyman can’t do squat without someone Earth-side to build and set out a beacon for him.”
“Right.”
“Well,” she said, “with Willie out of the picture, that means the only link to Edwin Kite—and the only thing that can help him snatch more victims—is the infant in that house. Vigilant Lock doesn’t leave loose ends.”
“I assumed we’d, you know, keep the kid under surveillance. Maybe run some tests, when she got older, to try and suss out how the link works. It’d be good intel.”
Jessie snorted and gave me a humorless smile.
“Our mandate is investigation and extermination. Emphasis on the latter. Vigilant isn’t in the business of taking chances when it comes to occult threats. Remember, I was a kid when I landed on their radar, too—and Linder had to be talked out of sanctioning my ass because I might be dangerous.”
“Jessie . . . are you saying Linder would give a kill order on an infant?”
“I’m saying he’s a cold-blooded son of a bitch, and I’d rather not find out if he would or not. So I’m asking you: Are you down with lying to the boss?”
It sounded like an easy question at first. Sanction an infant? And the victim of a crime? Never.
But Willie had been an infant, and a victim once, too, and now two children were gone—maybe gone forever—because he helped Edwin Kite take them. In twenty, thirty years, if the Garner kid made the same choices Willie did, the cycle would start all over again. By covering it up, we’d be leaving a time bomb in the heart of Talbot Cove.
Take the kid out of the equation and Edwin Kite lost his meal ticket for good. A quick fix. A snip of the chain. It was attractive.
Quick fixes always are, I thought, and they usually blow up in your face later on down the line. It’s the wrong way.
“One condition,” I said.
Jessie turned in her seat and gave me an expectant look.
“If that’s what it comes to,” I said, “if the investigation just dead-ends here, the case stays open. Unofficially, I mean. I’m not waiting another thirty years for a crack at Edwin Kite. We come back as often as we can, we keep an eye on this kid, and most of all we make damn sure she doesn’t turn into another Willie.”
“Shit,” Jessie grunted, shoving open her door, “that was assumed.”
We stood on the Garners’ doorstep. Their doorbell played the opening notes of “Ave Maria,” ringing out on metal chimes.
“So,” I said, “you lie to Linder often?”
“I like to think of our case files as a carefully constructed media narrative, where specific facts and incidents may be reedited or reframed in order to convey a deeper understanding and context. Sort of like reality television.”
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
Jessie shrugged. “I’ve got two priorities: my team, and our mission. Everything else takes a backseat, and that includes Linder and all his shady backroom buddies in Washington. All I need from them is funding and intel so we can keep doing what we do. All they need is to stay the hell out of our way.”
A dead bolt rattled, and the door swung wide. The man on the other side looked like an all-American gone to seed, broad-shouldered and square-jawed but hiding his potbelly under a cable-knit sweater.
“Jacob Garner?” We flashed our IDs. “FBI. Could we have a word with you, please?”
He got a deer-in-the-headlights look and stepped back, gesturing us inside with a shaky hand. “Uh, sure. Sure, c’mon in. What’s this about?”
The Garners kept a clean house. More than clean, meticulous, from the plush white carpet to a molded wood entertainment system with a stereo and racks of vintage vinyl. A place for everything and everything in its place—except for the rolling suitcases stacked in a line by the front door.
“Going on a trip?” I asked, nodding to the luggage as Jacob shut the door behind us.
A woman swept in from the dining room, thin, long-necked, and shrouded in a gray tunic dress. She put on her earrings as she walked.
“Honey? I thought I heard the doorbell. Is it—oh, hello.”
“Ellen Garner,” I said. “Good. You’re both here. Special Agents Temple and Black, FBI. We’re here to investigate your daughter’s kidnapping.”
Bull’s-eye. The color drained from Ellen’s face like someone pulled a plug, and the look that shot between her and Jacob turned the room to ice.
“I . . . I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “Mallory? Mallory is just . . . just fine. We didn’t call about any kidnapping.”
“That’s right,” Jessie said. “You didn’t call about it.”
Jacob forced a nervous laugh. “You two are way, way off base. I mean, you must be looking for another house or something. There hasn’t been a kidnapping! Mallory’s fine.”
“Then you won’t mind letting us see her,” I told him, “so we can verify that for ourselves.”
“Do you have a warrant?” Ellen asked.
Jessie smiled. “Are you really going to make us get one? C’mon, if it’s a mistake, no harm done. Just let us see her and we’ll leave.”
“It’s okay,” Jacob said. “It’s fine. I’ll show you.”
Mallory’s crib was in the master bedroom, next to a California king bed and a whole bunch of cardboard boxes with duct-taped lids. A dresser drawer hung open and empty. The Garners weren’t going on vacation—they were just going, period.
The baby lay in her crib, dressed in a tiny pink-flannel onesie and sleeping with her little fists pressed to her scrunched-up face. Safe and sound.
“See?” Ellen said. “She’s fine. Now . . . please leave.”
I unbuttoned her onesie.
“Hey!” Jacob snapped, striding toward me. Jessie got between us. She was half Jacob’s size, but she gave him a glare that stopped him dead in his tracks.
The pink flannel tugged aside, baring the sleeping baby’s shoulder. Revealing the glyph burned into her skin.
THIRTY-SIX
“I’m going to save you two a lot of time and trouble,” I said, buttoning the onesie back up and turning away from the crib. “We know about Edwin Kite and the Bogeyman. Jacob, we read your e-mails to Mitchum Kite. And we know you hired Nyx.”
“Where . . . ” Jacob said. “Where is Mitchum? We haven’t been able to reach him since yesterday—”
“Dead. Nyx killed him.”
“Oh God,” Ellen moaned. She pressed her face against Jacob’s shoulder. He curled his beefy arm around her, pulling her close.
“Who are you people?” Jacob said. “Who are you, really?”
“We’re the folks you really, really want to cooperate with right now,” Jessie said.
Ellen pulled away from her husband and dabbed at one eye with her sleeve.
“I’ll talk to them. Just keep packing.”
“Ellen—”
She squeezed his hand, then let go.
“I’ll talk to
them.” She glanced our way. “Follow me.”
The tiny room in the attic, up a flight of creaking steps and behind a locked door, might have been someone’s office once. A quiet little retreat to get away from it all, with a porthole window overlooking the street outside. Most offices didn’t have the faint residue of pale-blue chalk on the floorboards, though, marking the curves of half-erased pentacles, or a candle-laden altar draped in purple silk.
“Our family talks,” Ellen told us, slowly pacing the room. “Not all the Kites, and not all of them believe, but we’ve all at least heard the stories. About Edwin Kite, and the Bogeyman.”
Jessie’s gaze slowly took in the room, from wall to wall. “I’m guessing you’re one of the believers.”
“When I moved back to Talbot Cove after college, I got in touch with Mitchum. We were kindred spirits. He knew all about monsters, growing up in his father’s house. Jeremiah Kite saw Edwin as an . . . aspirational figure. He idolized him. When he wasn’t busy torturing his own children, he was trying to re-create Edwin’s work. Then the ‘great sorcerer’ died of a ruptured appendix, of all things, and left Mitchum with the family inheritance.”
“And the monster in the basement,” I said, thinking back to the psychic parasite we’d fought there.
“And that, too,” Ellen said. “We spent years looking for a way to get past it, thinking it must have been guarding Edwin’s old workshop. Best we could do is keep it contained. I’m afraid I’m not a very good witch.”
She paused beside the window, the golden sunset light washing over her.
“This wasn’t supposed to happen. The timing was wrong.”
“What wasn’t?” Jessie asked.
“We knew how it worked. Edwin is . . . feeding off the children somehow—they’re keeping him alive, but he can’t leave the House of Closets. So he has two tools: the Bogeyman and the returned child. They work together and send him what he needs. Then I made my mistake. The timing. I thought the timing would always be the same. The last time he hunted, it was the ’80s. Before that, the ’40s. I thought we’d have another ten years before the Bogeyman came back.”
Harmony Black (Harmony Black Series Book 1) Page 23