by Tim Stevens
She stepped to the side of the bed, gazed down at him. He hadn’t always been so cantankerous, so determined to rub everybody up the wrong way. Once upon a time, he’d been kind, if always a little gruff. He’d never suffered fools. Which was the thing Harmony couldn’t understand. He was being the biggest fool of all, refusing to take care of himself properly.
There must have been some pollutant in the airconditioning system, because Harmony felt her eyes sting. She bent forward and brushed her father’s forehead with her lips.
“Goodbye, Clarence,” she said.
*
Instead of returning to her car in the parking lot, Harmony walked through the pedestrian entrance and out onto the street.
She found a car rental place using her phone, six blocks away off Second Avenue. It took her ten minutes to select a car: a small dark-blue Fiat. She paid for three days’ rental, though she didn’t think she’d need it that long.
It took her fifteen minutes to reach the FBI offices on the river. She didn’t head for the ramp down into the underground parking lot – her privileges there had probably already been revoked, anyway – but found a spot to pull in down a side road, at an angle from the entrance to both the ramp and the doors of the building’s lobby but with both clearly within her line of sight.
The dashboard clock said it was three twenty-five in the afternoon. She expected a long wait.
Pulling an MP3 player from her pocket, she thumbed the play key. Listened to the voices once more: Teller’s and Venn’s, mostly, with the occasional contribution from Rickenbacker. And the two old people’s more reedy tones.
Venn had gotten back to the Division’s office an hour earlier. He updated Harmony and Fil on what had happened with the Van Burens, and the blood the CSI guys had found in the park. And he handed Harmony a memory card with the recording of the Van Burens’ interview.
“Take a listen to it,” he said. “See if you have any thoughts.”
Harmony had listened.
And the realization had hit her like a thunderclap.
She almost – almost – said something to Venn. But she bit her tongue at the last moment. Despite her volatility, Harmony knew she was skilled at concealing her reactions when she needed to. It made her good at undercover work.
She’d shaken her head. “Nope. Nothing there you haven’t picked up already.” She paused, thinking rapidly. “Listen, Venn. I know this goes against everything I’ve been saying. But I could use a little time out. The hospital called, and my father’s not so good. And I don’t think I’ll be much use to you today, anyhow.”
He studied her curiously. “Anything else happen?”
“No.” she resisted the urge to give a brave smile. It would’ve been out of character, and he’d have gotten suspicious. “Just... a few hours. Okay?”
“Go.” Venn waved toward the door. “Take the rest of the day. I’ll call you if we get any new breakthroughs.”
And she left, the guilt she felt at deceiving him threatening to drown her.
Now, sitting in the rental car, Harmony ran the recording on the MP3 player forward until she reached the part she wanted to focus on again.
She listened. Rewound and cued it up. Listened again.
The old man’s voice: “But there was some hair poking out. I saw it. Shirl says she didn’t. It was dark, her hair.”
Then Rickenbacker’s: “Dark? Like, black?”
“No. Kind of like yours, I guess. Dark brown.”
Kind of like yours...
The woman in the bar who’d approached Fincher was described as tall. So was the one the couple had seen in the park.
So was Rickenbacker.
Yesterday – Monday – Harmony had spent the afternoon with Rickenbacker, questioning the staff at the Rococo bar in Greenwich Village. They’d set off for there around two o’clock, Harmony recalled. Before that, Harmony and Venn had been at the FBI office in the morning, with Teller and Rickenbacker, until around ten o’clock.
Then, when Teller and Venn had gone to Chelsea to look around the hotel where Fincher’s body was found, Rickenbacker had told Harmony she’d meet her at two o’clock, here at the FBI office. She hadn’t given any explanation why she was leaving, and Harmony hadn’t thought to ask.
A four hour-window. And from the account given by the Van Burens, Alice had been taken at a little after noon.
Harmony leaned her head back against the seat, her eyes closed, her heart racing.
Rickenbacker was the killer.
And Harmony was going to take her down.
Chapter 21
She waited almost four hours before Rickenbacker appeared.
Harmony didn’t mind. She’d done more stakeouts in her time on the force than she could recall. There was nobody waiting at home to wonder where she was, and Venn had already given her the day off and wouldn’t be expecting to hear from her.
Her only worry was that Rickenbacker either wasn’t in the office at all – in which case, Harmony had been wasting her time – or that she was planning to stay there overnight. An all-night stakeout wasn’t feasible. After all, Harmony needed to be in at least some kind of physical condition when she confronted the woman.
The killer.
But at ten minutes after seven, a pair of headlights emerged at the top of the ramp and the car stopped, waiting for the cross-traffic to pass. Harmony recognized the car, a three-year-old Camaro SS convertible, as Rickenbacker’s, because the two women had ridden in it to the Greenwich Village bar yesterday.
“Got you,” Harmony breathed.
She pulled out behind the Camaro, leaving it as late as she dared. Rickenbacker headed south along the river. She was alone in the car, Harmony noted from the single silhouette through the rear window.
Several blocks down, in the Twenties, the Camaro took a right turn away from the river.
She didn’t know where the woman lived, or even if she was going home. But Harmony would stay on her, if it took all night, until she got her on her own.
Her regulation Glock rested in its holster under her arm beneath her jacket. She knew Rickenbacker would be carrying, too.
The traffic started to become more dense as Rickenbacker headed west. Harmony kept pace, coming close to running red lights when she needed to catch up, slowing to a crawl when her rental Fiat threatened to get too close to the Camaro. As always when tailing somebody, she both welcomed the Manhattan traffic and cursed it. It provided excellent cover, but it could also stick it to you at the most inconvenient moments.
The Camaro crossed Second Avenue and then Third. It slowed briefly, signaling a left turn but then thinking better of it and moving on to the next junction. Harmony got the impression Rickenbacker was looking for some location, and was unsure exactly where it was.
Harmony followed her round a corner to the left and saw the Camaro’s taillights flaring. Instead of braking herself, she drove on, eyeing the other car in her rearview mirror after she’d passed. She watched the headlamps flick off.
The Camaro had been parked.
Harmony drove on down the street. It was a narrow residential road, with almost every parking space occupied. She spied an empty stretch with two yellow lines. She’d have to risk it. Pulling up to the curb, she killed the engine.
In the mirror, fifty yards back, the Camaro sat in the shadows thrown by the streetlight on the sidewalk behind it.
After two minutes, by Harmony’s dashboard clock, Rickenbacker got out of the Camaro.
She stood for a moment by the car and gazed around. Harmony was pretty sure by now that the woman was in an unfamiliar place. But she recognized the posture, the attitude. It was a cop look. The look of somebody scoping the immediate vicinity for surprises.
The street wasn’t empty, quite. Cars passed down its narrow length every couple of minutes, sometimes waiting at one end to allow another one to get by in the opposite direction. There were people wandering along the pavement from time to time, either taking a shortcut o
r heading to or from their homes in the street. So it didn’t feel like some isolated, deserted place.
Maybe she sensed me following her, thought Harmony. Maybe that’s why she’s being cautious.
Rickenbacker was gazing across the street at one particular building, a nondescript brownstone. Harmony herself glanced at it. It looked like it had been converted into apartments, with lights on in the upper floors but not the lower.
Rickenbacker started across the street. Her hand was close to the opening of her coat in front. Close to where she could easily reach her gun.
Harmony turned her head to look out the window as Rickenbacker disappeared from the mirror. For a moment she thought the woman looked over right at her, and harmony quickly shut her eyes to reduce the risk of anything of her being visible in the darkness of her car. But no: Rickenbacker moved on.
She reached the steps leading up to the front door of the brownstone, to Harmony’s right and a little behind her. Harmony watched as she climbed the steps and peered at the panel of buzzers beside the door.
After a few seconds’ pause, she pressed one of them.
Rickenbacker lingered for a minute or so, poking the button again. After a further minute she backed down the steps and stared up at the windows of the brownstone, scanning left to right. She fished something out of her pocket – a cell phone – and looked at it, then put it away again.
She’s meeting somebody, Harmony thought. They don’t appear to be home, and she’s checking to see if they’ve called or texted her.
Rickenbacker walked along the pavement a few yards in both directions, still staring up at the house. Then she stood, apparently looking at nothing, lost in thought.
She turned and walked back across the street, still with a wary demeanor.
Harmony thought quickly. Either she resumed the pursuit, following Rickenbacker wherever she went in the city, but running the risk of losing her. What would she have then? The address Rickenbacker had just visited, or tried to visit – Harmony noted the building number and the street name – but that was about all.
Or, alternatively, she confronted the woman now.
It wasn’t the most satisfactory option. The ideal situation would be to catch Rickenbacker redhanded. Surprise her while she was stowing away some evidence that linked her to the killings, whatever that might be. But Harmony knew she was clutching at straws.
No. She needed to accost Rickenbacker, and accuse her, and if Rickenbacker tried to dismiss her, she’d get a confession from her one way or another.
When she set her mind on a course of action, Harmony was apt to follow it through without balking. She waited till Rickenbacker reached the Camaro and opened the door. Then Harmony opened the door of her own car and stepped out swiftly and made her way at a loping crouch down the pavement, back toward the Camaro.
She dodged a man strolling by with his hands in his pockets, who eyed her in confusion, and saw the Camaro ten yards ahead, Rickenbacker’s face through the windshield.
As she closed the gap, Harmony’s conscious mind registered something her primal, animal brain had already warned her of.
She kept going for a few paces more, until she was mere feet from the Camaro.
Stared through the windshield.
Her right hand dipped inside her jacket and came out in one fluid movement, holding her Glock.
She opened her mouth instinctively to yell the practiced word: Police.
But the door of the Camaro was hurled open and there was movement in the V formed between it and the body of the car and Harmony dove to the pavement, the Glock going off as she did so, not in an uncontrolled way but without the precise aim she would normally have taken before a shot.
The Glock’s blast crashed against the walls of the narrow street.
And, above the open door of the Camaro, white light flashed brilliantly, once, twice.
Harmony hit the pavement hard and rolled, the world spinning over and over crazily, and all she could think of was that she needed to keep herself aligned with the Camaro so that she could take proper aim and hit her mark, because there was no cover on the pavement at such close quarters, nowhere to hide...
The flash of light came again, piercing tough the deafening roar of the other gun.
Something punched Harmony, hard, in the top of her shoulder.
The force of the blow would have knocked her off her feet if she hadn’t already been lying prone. For a long moment she literally couldn’t breathe, as if she’d been plunged into water at subzero temperature.
The light flashed again, and as well as a second blow, this one down her back between her shoulderblades, she felt a pain so immense, so terrible, like some beast from hell raking its hot claws into her, that she was able to marvel at it in a detached way.
Another, equally detached part of her brain said to her: You’ve been shot.
You’re going to die.
Somehow, Harmony managed to clench her teeth, though it was if some outside agency was forcing her jaws closed, not her conscious will. She bit down, hard.
And pulled the trigger of the Glock.
The recoil snapped the gun almost free from her grasp. She saw, through a descending haze of pain and gray, the four wheels of the Camaro at eye level.
They were plump and round. Intact.
She’d failed to hit any of them.
The wheels span, blue rubbersmoke hissing up from where they howled against the tarmac.
Then the Camaro was gone.
Harmony felt her vision narrowing, like a telescope’s focusing ring was being gradually twisted.
She thought of her father.
She thought of Joe Venn.
And her hand, the one which she realized had now relinquished its hold on her Glock, slipped downward, across the hard surface of the pavement, though a slick of something coppery she knew had come from her body but the word for which she couldn’t quite recall.
Her hand felt under her, inside her jacket where its open lapels were crushed against the pavement.
Just a few seconds, she pleaded with whatever God was about to take her into his embrace. A few seconds more.
Her vision snapped off into nothingness.
Chapter 22
Venn was in the Jeep, about to start up the engine, when the call came.
He’d spent the afternoon in the Division office with Fil Vidal, working Fil’s database. Together they’d cross-references until he could barely look at the monitor any longer, running the algorithms Fil had developed himself to search for common features linking the victims and the killer, given the limited information they had about her.
Nothing.
Venn knuckled his brow in frustration. “Dammit. We’re missing something. There’s a link there. Right in front of our noses.”
Fil, who Venn had come to realize was one of the most placid-tempered people he’d ever met, nodded. “Yes. I agree. I sense it, too.” He looked up at Venn, who was peering over his shoulder at the screen. “We’ll find it. Tonight, or tomorrow.”
“But we need it yesterday.”
Venn looked at his watch. Five after eight. He could either continue pounding the keyboard, getting more and more frustrated. Or he could call it a night, try and get some sleep, make a fresh start in the morning. And hope his brain did a little work on the problem during the night.
“I’m heading home, Fil,” he said. “Don’t be up too late on this, will you?” He knew Fil had a wife and two small kids.
“I won’t. Night, boss.”
In the parking lot, Venn took a quick look round as he walked to the Jeep, felt a slight tension in his chest and his shoulders. It was here, in this very lot, that the woman named Gudrun Schroeder had jumped him last October. If Beth hadn’t intervened, by shooting the woman in the head, Venn would be dead now. He still couldn’t take the walk to his car without feeling a little on edge.
It wasn’t PTSD, not even close. But he got a sense of what that must feel like, the anti
cipatory anxiety, the flashbacks. Beth herself suffered from the disorder, and although she’d made huge progress in the past few months are now only rarely experienced the sudden intrusion of vivid imagery that was one of the hallmarks of the condition, she told Venn she doubted if she’d ever be free from it.
They’d become closer because of what they’d been through together. It was a cliché, but Venn believed it to be true.
Beth wasn’t coming round tonight. She was pulling a duty shift at the hospital. Venn had no particular reason to head straight home, other than that he needed to get some rest. He considered taking a ride out to the park in Brooklyn once more, walking through the scene again, but on his own this time. But he decided against it.
As his hand reached for the ignition, his cell phone rang.
The caller ID said it was Harmony. He punched the key.
“Yeah, Harm.”
For a moment he thought they’d been cut off. There was silence on the line.
No. Not silence, a peculiar, high-pitched whistling noise. Bad network coverage, maybe.
“Hello?” he said.
The rasp came, loud and harsh.
“Harmony?”
Then there was no mistaking it. It was a voice, struggling to make itself heard and emerging as a hoarse whisper.
“Venn...”
He sat bolt upright in his seat. “Harm, is that you? What’s happened?” A half-cough, half-wheeze answered him.
“Harm, listen to me,” he said, fighting to keep his voice calm. “Where are you? Can you tell me?” There was a prolonged pause. Again Venn checked to see if the connection had been lost. It hadn’t.
Then, a single word, distorted but distinct. “... Shot...”
Ah, God.
“Harm,” he hissed. “Stay on the line. I’m going to try and triangulate this call with dispatch.”
A sawing noise, a horrible ragged gasping, burst out of the phone. “... Already...”
She fell silent.
“Harmony,” Venn yelled.