Their host was waiting.
He was squat and wide, built like an engine block in a tailored suit, silk cravat artfully wrapped around his broad neck. His jowls drooped, and his frog mouth and heavy-lidded eyes made him look like a relative to the maid in the hall. He wore his silver hair in a disheveled mop.
“Ladies.” He raised a glass of white wine. His sonorous voice was at odds with his brutish looks, a gentleman squeezed into a barbarian’s body. “Judah Cranston, at your service. So pleased you could join me on such short notice.”
Neptune stood beside him. Explains the Jetta out front, Harmony thought. She’d traded her lab coat for a ribbed dress in bright aquamarine, delicate earrings, and high heels with elaborate golden straps. Her gaze locked onto Harmony like a heat-seeking missile.
“The pleasure’s ours,” Jessie said.
He swapped his wine glass from his right hand to his left, freeing it up for a handshake as Jessie stepped forward. The gesture drew Harmony’s eye. Halfway up to the first knuckle, Judah Cranston’s fingers were joined by a webbing of saggy skin. He caught her looking just a second too long, and his thick lips curled in a smile.
“It’s quite all right. I’m accustomed to being stared at.” He held up his open hand. “It’s called syndactyly. When I was a child, my mother told me I was part fish. Not true, alas. It’s nothing but a birth defect, bit of a genetic quirk, but that pleasing lie sparked a lifelong passion.”
“And here we are today,” Neptune said. She gestured to a rolling glass cart. A bottle of wine, freshly uncorked, nestled in a silver ice bucket amid a clutter of crystal glasses. “Drinks?”
“Please,” Jessie said. She turned to Judah. “Your aquarium is impressive. The one here and the one at your…would you call it a laboratory?”
Jessie’s small talk bought Harmony time to concentrate. The coin fluttered against her breastbone again, insistent. There was something here. Her second sight painted the room; the neon goby were living sparklers in the water, the jellyfish blooms of pulsing flesh, as her senses pinged out like sonar. Life energy, nothing unusual, nothing unexpected. Neptune Joy was as mundane as the white zinfandel she was pouring.
Judah wasn’t. A faint web of deep violet energy clung to him, shimmering under his skin like a map of his veins. Harmony had seen that before. It was residual magic, the lingering power that clung to a magician after hours—or years—of dedicated ritual work. No telling what he used it for, but their host knew his way around a pentacle.
“Laboratory, research facility.” Judah sipped his wine with a careless shrug. “I like to think of it as a place for building a sustainable future, but that’s more of a mouthful.”
Neptune passed a pair of glasses to Jessie and Harmony. Her fingers lingered over Harmony’s for a fleeting moment, longer than they needed to. Then she retreated, looking almost bashful as she took her station by the drink cart. Harmony wondered if her boss had invited her, or if she’d invited herself.
A bell chimed. Judah looked to the parlor door with a broad smile.
“Ah. Supper’s ready. Please, ladies, follow me? We’ll continue this meeting—and this wine, excellent choice, Neptune, your palate is superior as always—in the dining room.”
They followed him down alabaster halls, chasing the ghostly echo of the bell. Jessie paused, pointing past a pair of open double doors. The room beyond was lined with tatami mats, the far walls shrouded behind tall white paper screens. Another wall sported a small arsenal in lacquered wood, blunt swords and staves for training.
“You’ve got a dojo,” Jessie said. “In your house. That’s pretty cool.”
Judah chuckled. “Why go to the gym, when you can bring the gym to you? The syndactyly wasn’t my only flaw; I was a sickly child, and the doctors expressed doubt that I’d live. My father wasn’t having it. He set me onto a vigorous regimen of exercise to strengthen my body, and I’ve adhered to it ever since.”
“I noticed the swords,” Harmony said. “Do you practice kendo?”
“I dabble. My chosen art, though, is escrima. I ended up in the Philippines as a young man and found myself utterly fascinated by the style.” He glanced sidelong at her as they walked, as if seeing her for the first time. “You have a certain…reserved discipline in your movements. Very calculated. Very spare. I’m betting you’re a martial artist yourself.”
“Aikido,” Harmony said.
The heavy folds of his eyes lifted. “I’m going to have to be careful around you.”
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“It’s one thing to face an opponent who comes armed with powerful strikes. Quite another to face one who plans to turn your own momentum against you.”
“I hope we’re not opponents,” Harmony replied.
He had an amused twinkle in his eyes. “As do I. But we should spar sometime. Just a bit of friendly competition; you don’t really know someone until you’ve tested each other’s skills.”
Candlelight danced at the heart of the dining room table, tall and slender blue sticks burning in silver holders. The wax almost matched the deep sapphire hue of the walls. Tall, arched windows looked out over a groomed lawn, palm trees shivering in a hot evening wind. Judah took his seat at the head of the table.
“I assume seafood’s not on the menu,” Jessie said, sliding into a chair at Harmony’s side.
“Never, in my house,” their host replied. “Though I certainly had more than my share as a boy. My family comes from the sea. Well, we all come from the sea, on a long enough scale, but we were New Englanders. The Cranstons were a fishing family, back to the days of Melville.”
“How did you move from fishing to oceanic science?” Harmony asked.
“We didn’t move. The fish did. Once the big commercial interests sailed in, they harvested the water to the breaking point and beyond, until there was nothing left to catch.” His eyes darkened. “As they do. As we always do. We take and take, until nothing remains.”
The maid wheeled in a cart, pulling back a silver lid to unveil a gust of steam carrying the scents of roasted meat and sea salt. She spooned a puff pastry onto Harmony’s china plate. A faint trail of scarlet leaked from a crack in the flaky skin.
“Beef Wellington,” Judah said. “It may be hypocritical of me to eschew fish while happily dining on cows, but it’s a delicious hypocrisy. Call it my revenge on the land.”
Their host didn’t skimp on the side dishes, either. Winter greens, gently wilted, joined their plates along with roasted fingerling potatoes, their skins adorned with pale green herbs. The delicate pastry crumbled as Harmony sawed into her Wellington, the meat beneath bloody rare. The flavors mingled on her tongue, buttery breading and tenderloin, simple but rich and strong.
“Revenge?” Jessie asked.
“I’m being melodramatic, but I won’t deny a certain anger drives my work. The demise of my family’s business was simply a symptom of a much greater problem. More than seventy percent of our world is ocean. Think about that. There’s more water than dry land. Even calling it ‘Earth’ is an unconscious sign of humanity’s arrogance; we can’t live in the ocean, so we don’t acknowledge it at all.”
“It’s ungrateful,” Neptune chimed in, scooping up a forkful of greens. She was the only one at the table without a beef Wellington, doubling up on the vegetables instead. “Human life came from the oceans in the first place.”
Judah lifted his wineglass to her. “Ungrateful. Perfect word for it. The ocean is our mother. She gives us food, medicine, miracles of science. Tell me, my new friends: do you know how much garbage is dumped into the ocean every single year?”
“I’m guessing it’s a lot,” Jessie said.
“Eighteen. Billion. Pounds. Over a million pounds an hour, all day, every day. She gives us her bounty, and we feed her our filth. Chemical runoff. Untreated sewage. Plastic. We have created entire spans of ocean, dead zones, where no marine life can survive.”
“And there’s no backup plan,” Neptune added
. “Beyond the damage we’re doing to the entire ecosystem, we need clean water to live, and that’s a simple fact. Once we kill the oceans, humanity dies with them.”
“An entire species,” Judah muttered, “gifted with intelligence but no vision, driven to slow-motion suicide.”
He set his fork down.
“But I do go on. Forgive me.”
“Nothing to forgive,” Harmony said. “You’re both passionate about this. That’s what drew our attention in the first place.”
“Yes,” Judah said, “we should talk about business, shouldn’t we? You have my interest, to say the least. Did you know that you’re not the first representatives from Diehl Innovations to approach me about a potential investment?”
Harmony and Jessie shared a glance.
“Really,” Harmony said.
He dabbed at the corner of his mouth with a cloth napkin, utterly casual.
“Yes. There was another, about a month ago. Oh, help me out, Neptune. What was her name?”
Neptune gazed into Harmony’s eyes.
“Natalie Cooper,” she said.
“Cooper.” Judah snapped his fingers. “That was it. Do you ladies know her?”
14.
Harmony had a natural poker face. Sometimes she was thankful for it. Like right now, with Judah waiting for her reaction and Neptune staring like she could read her thoughts.
After Bobby fled, with their stock value plunging and their investments in ruins, Diehl Innovations was left scrambling to survive. While the board of directors grappled with chaos, Agent Cooper had fallen into a murky professional limbo; she was an administrative assistant with more reach than most senior executives, stationed at a desk outside an empty office with no duties and nobody to report to.
Nobody but her real employers, anyway, and she sent Jessie regular dispatches as she kept her ear to the ground, hoping for some clue to Bobby’s whereabouts. Mostly she sat at her desk and played solitaire, collecting a paycheck. She wasn’t heading up Diehl’s new investment initiative, because Harmony had made the entire thing up two hours ago. And she absolutely wasn’t flying around the country a month ago, reaching out to random marine-biology labs.
Judah and Neptune were lying. And if they knew Cooper at all, it was from last night. When they had her murdered.
Dropping her name was the opening move in a game of shadow-chess. Was it just to test Harmony’s reaction? A probe, to find out if they really were who they claimed to be? Or did Judah want her to know he was lying, an open challenge to confront him over it?
“Cooper,” Harmony echoed. She looked to Jessie. “Wasn’t—wasn’t she Bobby Diehl’s admin before he left the company?”
Jessie pretended to think about it. “Think so. I figured they’d have either reassigned her or let her go.”
Harmony turned back to Judah. “Yeah, she’s not in our department. I’m kind of surprised she contacted you, to be honest. That’s not her kind of work.”
“Well,” Judah said. “Maybe Bobby sent her.”
There was a dare in his eyes. She declined it. Her cover story was a wall between them, holding fast.
“A month ago, you said?” Harmony shook her head. “Couldn’t have been, he’s been gone longer than that.”
“Curious,” Judah replied. “Well. I’m sure we’ll get to the bottom of it.”
Neptune had been watching the back-and-forth like a spectator at a tennis match. Harmony gave her a moment’s eye contact as she reached for her glass of wine. She didn’t have any of her boss’s cool confidence. She looks confused, Harmony thought. Or worried.
“You didn’t say,” Jessie said to Judah.
“Hmm?”
“If anything came of it.”
“Oh. Oh, no, just an initial call, we never set up a formal meeting. Not for lack of interest on my part. As I’m sure you can imagine, an organization like ours is quite expensive to maintain.”
“That fish-food budget’s got to be a killer,” Jessie said.
“Or acquiring the fish in the first place,” Harmony said. “Like those sharks of yours. Come to think of it, I was curious about that. Of all the species to collect, why an endangered species like oceanic whitetips?”
Judah didn’t blink. “Precisely because they are endangered. If we master a means of synthetically and cheaply replicating the materials they’re being hunted for—their cartilage, their fins—we can save them from extinction.”
“But aren’t they dangerous?”
Neptune seemed happy to be back in her wheelhouse. That, and she’d been drinking wine for the last couple of minutes like it was water in a desert oasis. The liquor colored her cheeks.
“Oh, not our babies,” she said. “They’re sweethearts. Trust me, I hand-feed them myself. Shark attacks are rare in the wild. For one thing, believe it or not, we’re as scary to them as they are to us. For another, well, humans are a lousy meal. We’re all stringy muscle and hard bones. Compare that to a nice yummy invertebrate or a fish they can gobble up in one bite, and there’s no reason for a shark to try and eat us.”
“But accidents do happen,” Judah said, his eyes locked with Harmony’s.
Jessie set her napkin down.
Harmony caught her body language. It was time to go. He’d shown his hand, they’d flashed theirs, each daring the other side to make the first move. Now they needed to fall back and give him room to make a mistake.
“Thank you for dinner,” she said, easing her chair back. “And your time. Can I hope we’ll be hearing from you?”
Now he was all warmth again, rising with them.
“I guarantee it. I’ll be reaching out to you soon, to talk about details. With any fortune, this will blossom into a long and mutually prosperous relationship.”
Harmony gave him one of her freshly printed business cards. Since Kevin couldn’t slip her cover identity into Diehl Innovations’ actual phone system, the number on the card was a decoy. It had a Los Angeles area code to match the company’s office tower, but it would automatically bounce to a voicemail box with a prerecorded out-of-the-office message. Just like the rest of her thrown-together story, it was sturdy enough to stand up to a stiff wind, but it would buckle under a storm.
Neptune walked them out. She hovered close to Harmony, not too close, wobbling a little as she walked. Harmony wasn’t sure if it was the wine or if she just didn’t wear high heels very often. She wasn’t sure about Neptune at all. She’d dropped Cooper’s name, shared in her boss’s blatant lie, but everything after that seemed to leave her confused. As off-balance in the conversation as she was in her shoes.
Harmony thought about what Jessie had said. Not about getting her laid, that was the last thing on her mind right now, but about stepping out of her comfort zone. Either Neptune was in on the plot to kill Cooper, or her boss was playing her for a pawn. If the latter, she probably knew more than she realized. And she wanted to talk. Harmony slowed down. Jessie picked up on her intentions; she lengthened her stride, making a gap between them as she headed for the car.
What do I say? Harmony thought. This was frustrating. Give her an interrogation room and a folder of evidence, and she could make any suspect crack. Move the scene to a warm Florida night, the breeze kissed by the faint flowery scent of Neptune’s perfume, and everything went fuzzy around the edges. There wasn’t any structure out here to keep Harmony safe. Interrogations had rules; seductions didn’t.
“I’m…glad you were here tonight,” she said. “It was nice to see you again.”
Neptune’s cheeks dimpled. “You too. So, are you headed back to LA?”
If she was in on the murder, she and Judah would probably take a shot at Harmony next. That was fine. The entire point of coming here was to provoke a response and force Cooper’s killers to show their faces. If she was innocent, she was still useful. Either way, it was time to take more of a risk and roll the dice.
“We’re in town for a couple of days,” Harmony said. “We’re staying at the Vi
noy Renaissance Hotel.”
The toe of Neptune’s shoe dug a nervous divot in the driveway.
“So I could…find you there?” she asked.
“You could,” Harmony replied. “If you look in room 215.”
* * *
“You dog.” Jessie’s fist lightly punched Harmony’s shoulder. Harmony glowered at her.
“Drive.”
They pulled out, headlights sweeping across iron fences and the long, palm-tree-studded stretch of the boulevard. Harmony checked her phone. She had one message from April and one from the medical examiner’s office.
“You heard the man,” Harmony said. “Judah was all but bragging, trying to get a reaction out of us. The way I figure it, he doesn’t know what to make of us; we could be Bobby’s shooters, or we could be undercover cops. All he knows for sure is that we’re not who we say we are, and he’s smart enough to play it safe.”
“So, Judah was his buddy with that mystery briefcase Bobby wants so badly. Bobby called his favor due, and Judah—or the guys who grabbed Cooper at the bar, working for him—took Cooper out instead of paying up.”
“That’s my theory,” Harmony said.
“What about Neptune?”
“Gave her my room number. Either she’ll show up to talk or show up with a gun.”
“Which do you think?”
“I think something’s wrong here,” Harmony said. “She backed Judah up. We know for an absolute fact that they didn’t meet Cooper last month, and she sure didn’t approach them on behalf of Diehl Innovations. It’s a straight-up lie, and not only did she back him up, she was the first person to say Cooper’s name.”
“But,” Jessie said.
“But while her boss was delivering veiled threats and all but daring me to call him a liar, Neptune looked like she wasn’t following a word of it.” Harmony set her phone to speaker mode and tapped April’s name on the speed-dial list. “She’ll show up to talk, or she’ll show up with a gun.”
Right to the Kill (Harmony Black Book 5) Page 10