Right to the Kill (Harmony Black Book 5)

by Craig Schaefer

  “He doesn’t need one,” Jessie snapped. “You know how he operates. He’d do it out of sheer spite. Payback for the betrayal and one last ‘fuck you’ from him to us before he disappears for good.”

  Harmony thought about that. She turned the wheel, checking street signs. The cop had told them where to go. They’d already called ahead and made an appointment with the medical examiner.

  “If that’s true,” Harmony said, “then he just made a very bad mistake. If he paid those men to kill Cooper—and presumably Dominguez, too—there’s a trail. And if there’s a trail, we can find him.”

  Jessie folded her arms.

  “Goddamn right,” she said.

  “We shouldn’t jump to conclusions, though. There’s at least one other possibility.”

  Jessie gave her a sidelong glance. “Which is?”

  “That Bobby was telling the truth and thought he had more control here than he did. Look, his empire is going down in flames, his own company gave him the boot, he’s a wanted fugitive. He is not a good or safe person to be close to right now, agreed?”

  “Sure,” Jessie said.

  “Say you’re Bobby’s friend. He contacts you through a back channel, says hey, you owe him a favor and he’s cashing in.” Harmony paused. “If you’re anything like he is, you might be wondering how much he can hurt you, on purpose or by accident. Can he drag you down with him? Will he drag you down, if you hand over the goods and he gets caught red-handed? Maybe trade you in for a lighter sentence?”

  Jessie nodded slowly, following her train of thought. “He can’t do anything to help me out, not with his life turning into a slow-motion Hindenburg crash. All he can do is flail his burning arms and spread his chaos around. And whatever shady business I’m in, that kind of chaos isn’t good. I might start thinking that I’d be better off with Bobby dead.”

  “So you pretend to agree,” Harmony said. “You wait for his emissary, and you grab her.”

  “And you squeeze her until she tells you how to find Bobby.”

  Jessie leaned her head back. She closed her eyes.

  “Once I took over Vigilant, I read her files. The things she had to do, the shit she had to endure to win Bobby’s confidence…the sacrifices she had to make.” Jessie’s arms squeezed tighter across her chest. “I promised her. I promised her that if it was possible, if there was any way I could make it happen, she’d be there when we took Bobby down once and for all. She earned the right to pull that trigger, Harmony. More than anyone, she earned the right to the kill.”

  “You know this wasn’t your fault.”

  “I kept her embedded,” Jessie said. “I kept her undercover, just in case Bobby poked his head up. Well…he did. And now she’s dead.”

  “Operatives die, Jessie. That’s a risk we all take when we go into the field, and we all know it. Cooper knew it better than most of us. She saw the risks, she knew the odds, and she did it anyway. She went out there, time and time again, putting her neck on the line. Because it was worth it.”

  The address was just up ahead. It was a long funeral slab of a building behind a curling fence, dun brick with horizontal stripes of sandy tan. Tall letters to the right of the door read Hillsborough Medical Examiner.

  “One other thing we all know,” Harmony said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nobody retires from Vigilant Lock. It’s not that kind of job. We fight the monsters until the monsters get lucky. And on the day that they do, the rest of us, the ones still standing and fighting, make a promise.”

  Harmony pulled into a parking spot. The engine rattled and fell silent. She turned in her seat, looking Jessie in the eye.

  “We promise that we’ll find the monster responsible. We will hunt them, we will find them, and we will make them pay. Whatever Cooper went through, in her final moments she would have known this. She would have known that we’d come looking for her. And that we’d do the exact same thing she would have done for us.”

  She opened her door. A hot and murky wind gusted in smelling of raw soil and dead grass, a boneyard in high summer.

  “We made a promise to avenge her,” Harmony said. “Now we have to keep it.”

  * * *

  Cooper’s body became an art piece under the hard lights of the morgue. The seaweed and sand had been washed away, the gristle of her wounds bloodless and glistening. She lay contorted on the steel slab, muscles locked in rigor mortis; her shoulders were bent, one arm hooked like a crab claw, partially lifting her off the metal. Her milky eyes shone.

  The cop had seen worse, but only once. His dress shirt, stiff with starch, hugged his beer gut like a cardboard sleeve. He lingered by the wall of mortuary lockers, beefy arms crossed, watching the medical examiner work. The air curdled with the warring odors of industrial antiseptic and meat-rot.

  “You don’t say one word to them unless I’m present and give the okay,” he said.

  “Understood,” the ME said, focused on his studies. He was a fastidious man, with the hands of a clocksmith.

  “Not one word.”

  “As you’ve said.”

  “This isn’t right,” the cop said. “No idea why the Feebs are poking around here, but it isn’t right.”

  The morgue-room doors swung open, and Harmony and Jessie came in on the heels of his complaint.

  “Because the victim is a witness to multiple federal crimes,” Harmony said.

  “About that,” the cop told her. “You know we got a field office here in Tampa, right? I had a word with the agent in charge. He’s never heard of you.”

  Harmony flipped open her glossy ID folder, presenting her bona fides. Jessie did the same.

  “We’re not with the Tampa office,” Harmony said. “We’re with CIRG, the Critical Incident Response Group. We provide special support nationwide, wherever and whenever we’re needed. I’d be happy to refer you to our supervisor in the Crisis Management Unit, SAC Walburgh, and she’ll provide whatever information you need.”

  He could try, anyway. SAC Walburgh was a voicemail box in an empty office. They’d showed their credentials, so he showed his, flashing a silver shield.

  “Lieutenant Briggs,” he said. “So this is what, some kind of gangland hit?”

  “That’s our working theory.”

  Briggs turned back to the medical examiner. “Right now, I’ve got one and only one question: what happened to the bottom half of her body? Because it looks like something ate her.”

  The ME was hunched low, nudging at the ragged folds of Cooper’s torso with a magnifying glass and some kind of stainless-steel probe. Unraveling the jigsaw puzzle of her flesh, one millimeter at a time.

  “The wounds are suggestive of an animal attack,” he murmured.

  “Shark?” Briggs asked.

  “I’m lining up the cleaner bites with tooth samples,” the medical examiner explained. “That will help us narrow down a specific match.”

  Briggs took a deep breath.

  “Look, I just need to know if I should close that beach or not. I’m not going to be the asshole from Jaws who lets tourists get chomped on. If there’s a man-eater out in those waters—”

  “Time, Lieutenant. Precision work takes time.”

  “What else can you tell us?” Jessie asked.

  “If you’ve noticed her wrists—”

  “The ligature marks,” Jessie said, her voice tight. “She was restrained.”

  “Not just that.”

  The examiner gestured with his probe, pointing to a line inside a line, cutting a deep channel through a pool of black bruises.

  “She was restrained twice. This was a second restraint, used only on her left wrist and after the initial injuries there. My working theory is that she was tied to something, a weight—a cinder block, for example—intended to hold her corpse underwater. They used cheap rope or simply mis-tied the knot; it came loose, and the tide brought her remains to shore.”

  Jessie looked to the cop. “You got a boat? Somethin
g you can use to trawl the waters out there?”

  “You think there’s a dumping ground? More vics?”

  “Possible,” she said. “She had a companion who may or may not have also been abducted; we can’t find him to verify. We also believe that one of her assailants suffered a gunshot wound. Small chance he died from it. If these people are using Tampa Bay as a body dump, he might have been buried at sea along with her.”

  “I’ve got boats,” Briggs said.

  Harmony had fallen silent, gears turning behind her eyes, sifting through the pieces.

  “What about the wounds on her back?” she asked.

  “Can’t even begin to speculate,” the examiner said. “Haven’t gotten that far yet. And…hmm. It looks like I’ve found a match here. I think I can confirm that the death was caused by a shark attack.”

  “So I close the beach?” Briggs said.

  “Not necessarily.”

  He raised a pair of tweezers. His test sample, a triangle of razor ivory, glistened under the overhead lights.

  “Your victim appears to have been attacked by an oceanic whitetip. Most sharks aren’t dangerous to humans at all. The majority of attacks are accidental or occur when the animal feels threatened, but the whitetip is considered an aggressive species.”

  “So I close the beach.”

  “The oceanic whitetip is a deepwater shark,” the examiner said. “Not found in Tampa Bay. Unless someone managed to unleash one far from its natural habitat—and you’d have to talk to a marine biologist about that, I don’t know if it would even be able to survive the experience—your victim was only dumped here. She died out at sea.”

  11.

  Jessie took the wheel. Harmony was somewhere inside herself, assembling puzzle pieces with mental fingertips, sliding the evidence around until it fit.

  “The rope was around her wrist,” she finally said.

  Jessie shot a glance into the rearview mirror, pulling out of the parking spot. They’d finished up with the cop, giving him Cooper’s civilian cover and a few details, mostly calculated lies, to help his investigation along. His next move was rounding up a few fishing boats and trawling the waters off the beach, hunting for bodies. He said he’d call if he found anything.

  “Yeah?”

  “So she would have been upside down underwater. People don’t normally do that. Think about the clichés, mobsters ‘fitting people for cement shoes.’ When murder victims are submerged, they’re usually bound by the ankles.”

  “Where are we going with this?” Jessie asked.

  “Theoretically, they could have done it in deep water. Take her out on a speedboat, chum the ocean to draw a school of whitetips, and toss her in.” Harmony’s brow furrowed. “But then the job’s done. If they’re deep enough for whitetips, they’re deep enough to leave her remains behind. Taking her closer to shore before dumping the body would have been an unnecessary risk. Better chance of her washing up, which she did. And the rope was around her wrist. Around her wrist because it happened after the attack. She didn’t have ankles to bind.”

  “So they didn’t throw her in,” Jessie said. “They dangled her in, maybe dragged her behind the boat. Fed half of her to the sharks and kept the rest.”

  “Again. If they were equipped to weigh her remains down, safer to do it in deep water. The methodology works. The decisions don’t. Irrational at best.”

  “If criminals were rational people, they probably wouldn’t be criminals.”

  Harmony reached for her phone.

  “I don’t think Agent Cooper was murdered in deep water,” she said. “I think it happened here. On land. Yes, Kevin? I need you to run a search on marine facilities in Tampa and the outlying area. Aquatic shows, aquariums and zoo exhibits, anywhere with exotic animals. Find out if anybody has a permit to keep oceanic whitetips.”

  * * *

  Nautilus Conservation Research had a permit. And a receipt for two mature oceanic whitetips, bought a year ago from a dodgy wildlife merchant who mostly worked with foreign zoos. At 4:00 p.m. on the dot, two days a week, they offered free tours to the public.

  Their HQ was a big box of wavy sheet metal painted a pale blue, perched on the edge of Cockroach Bay. There were boat ramps along the shore and mangrove islands in the distance, dots of lush green in the placid waters. The cicada drone was as unrelenting as the muggy afternoon heat. A barn-style door stood open on the edge of the narrow parking lot, and a small crowd was gathering out front. Jessie ducked low, swapping her dark glasses for her amber contact lenses.

  “How do you want to play it?” Harmony asked.

  Jessie looked up, eyelashes fluttering over perfectly forgettable irises.

  “Let’s pretend to be normal,” she said.

  They hovered at the edge of the pack, maybe ten people in all, a mix of elderly locals and soggy T-shirted tourists looking for anything with the word “free” in the title. Beyond the barn door, the main floor of the research center was an aquarium in miniature. Tall oval tanks dotted a concrete floor marred by faded water stains. Workstations on sleek glass desks parsed a stream of running data from the tanks, tethered by slinky bundles of bright orange cable.

  A woman came out to greet them, sheathed in a water-spotted lab coat and clutching a clipboard to her chest. She had a sunbather’s tan, golden hair, and more bubbly effervescence than a glass of sparkling wine.

  “Welcome, welcome everybody!” She flashed a perfect smile. “Welcome to Nautilus. I’m Dr. Joy, the facility manager, and I’m so glad you could all join us this afternoon.”

  She ushered them inside and held court at the edge of a low round pool ringed by faded brick. Stingrays flitted through the shallow water, their wings ruffling up clouds of pristine sand. Inside, Harmony got a better look at the layout. It really was just a big metal box, fans churning the humid air between long bars of lighting almost thirty feet up. Pathways and cables wound between the tanks, and a pair of open staircases in the back led the way to a raised platform with more workstations and a server rack.

  In one corner, near the doorway, the gray nozzle of a security camera framed them in its sights. Harmony glanced up to the platform. No security guards or monitoring station in view. So where is it feeding to?

  “We’re a think tank—and a fish tank,” their tour guide said, offering a dramatic wave to one of the six oval tanks, “coordinating with pharmaceutical and cosmetic companies across the globe. Our goal is to find more respectful, sustainable, and healthy ways to use the ocean’s bounty to benefit all of humanity.”

  Harmony had all of her eyes open now. She called to her second sight, and it painted the salt-tinged air in shades of shimmering violet. Psychic pulses pinged out like sonar, searching for a hard surface to bounce off of. They faded instead, echoing into the blue. The only supernatural presence in the room was her and Jessie.

  Jellyfish rippled in one of the tanks, their tendrils waving as they flowed through the water. Dr. Joy walked the tour group over to the glass, explaining the jellyfish’s niche in the financial ecosystem. Collagen for cosmetics, mucus for experimental biofilters.

  “Jellyfish research could even pave the way to improved methods of filtering plastic trash, which is being dumped into the ocean at an unsustainable rate.” Dr. Joy gestured to the tank. “Besides, I think these plump little guys are kinda cute. You just can’t pet ’em. Now let me introduce you to the stars of our facility…”

  She led them to the shark tank. A pair of oceanic whitetips shimmered beyond the glass, stony gray and eight feet long from nose to tail. Their sleek fins sliced the water like razor-edged wings. Harmony’s stomach went tight. She searched the clean, clear water for any trace of blood, any sign that Agent Cooper might have spent her last agonizing minutes in this room. Nothing.

  But one of the steel rafters ran directly above the tank. Perfect for dangling a shark’s dinner into the water.

  “Meet Buster and Keaton,” Dr. Joy said. “These two gentlemen—and don’t let t
he scary teeth fool you, they really are perfect gentlemen—are oceanic whitetips. And the whitetip, sad to say, is on the endangered species list. They’re hunted across the world for their meat, their hides, their cartilage, and most of all, their fins.”

  “What are their fins good for?” Jessie asked.

  Joy’s enthusiasm dampened as she looked to the gliding sharks.

  “Very little, I’m afraid. Shark fin soup is a traditional part of Chinese cuisine, and many people believe—with no scientific basis—that it’s a form of natural medicine. This led to the practice of ‘finning,’ where sharks are captured, their fins are chopped off, and the sharks are then dumped back into the ocean. Which, since sharks use their fins to process oxygen, generally leads to their slow death by asphyxiation. Thousands of pounds of shark fins are harvested every year, often illegally.”

  She paused, letting that sink in. A flicker of her smile returned.

  “The good news is, the practice is on the decline, but whitetips are still heavily overfished. Here at Nautilus, we’re investigating ways of artificially reproducing some of their most valuable gifts. For instance, shark cartilage is in high demand for medical research. We’re making strides toward creating a lab-cultured substitute, offering the same chemical properties but without the need to harm a single shark to get it. Speaking of medical research, in our next tank we have a much smaller and possibly surprising guest: the tilapia fish!”

  As the tour went on, Harmony and Jessie lingered at the back. Jessie leaned close, murmuring under her breath.

  “Been scoping the staff.”

  “Anything?” Harmony said.

  A tiny shake of her head. One of the scientists cut across their path, a man with silver hair and a tablet that streamed pages of fresh data.

  “Nobody matching the perps at the bar. Five employees plus Dr. Joy, three women, two men, and both of the guys are in their late forties at least. Witch senses tingling?”

  “Nothing,” Harmony said.

  “Dead end?”

  Harmony’s lips pursed. Nautilus Research checked out, at least on the surface level. Her gut was nagging her, telling her the water was deeper than it looked. Her gaze flicked to the security camera—one of four, by her count, capturing the tanks and balcony from every angle. The one above the entrance had moved again. It wasn’t stationary: the nozzle had tracked the tour group since they arrived, following their movements across the floor.