Right to the Kill (Harmony Black Book 5)

by Craig Schaefer

  “This account. It’s in New York?”

  “The Caymans,” Harmony said, “but it was routed through a Manhattan bank.”

  Ariel pursed her frosted lips.

  “It’s a big ask. Not impossible, but it’s a big ask.”

  “So is letting your agent go,” Harmony pointed out. “She tries to kidnap us, and we let her go without so much as a spanking—”

  “Oh, she got a spanking,” Jessie said.

  “Bitch,” Coraline hissed. Ariel rolled her eyes.

  “What I mean is,” Harmony said, shooting Jessie a look, “I don’t think it’s out of line to ask for a little sweetener on this deal. One that could help you as much as it helps us.”

  “I like the way you think, Ms. Black. ‘Mutually’ and ‘beneficial’ are two of my favorite words. All right, no promises on results, but send me the details and I’ll make it a line item on my day planner. We can circle around after this Tampa situation is resolved and schedule a meeting vis-à-vis discussing our long-term operative paradigms. We’ll do lunch. Ciao.”

  The screen went dead.

  “Is she always like that?” Jessie asked.

  “Oh, you think she was kidding about the performance review?” Coraline said. “We have to fill out a self-assessment questionnaire and everything. Still, better than the old boss. I’ll take anal over crazy any day of the week.”

  Jessie untied the knotted bedsheets. Coraline sprang up, tossed the towel aside, and brushed past her, snatching her phone out of Harmony’s hand. She grabbed her dress off the floor and shimmied into it, scanning the wrecked furniture.

  “Where the hell is my thong? No, you know what? You can keep it. Souvenir of the best night of your life, and the best you’ll ever have.”

  “Until next time,” Jessie said.

  “There is no next time. Zip me up.”

  Jessie zipped up the back of her dress. They murmured back and forth, rapid-fire whispers, as she guided Coraline to the door.

  She saw her out, closed the door, turned, and looked at Harmony.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” Harmony said.

  “No, that’s a ‘something.’ You’re giving me a ‘something’ look.”

  “I’m still not used to this.”

  “If you’re not used to me getting freaky by now—”

  “Not that.” Harmony sat down on the corner of the mattress. Frowning, trying to work it through in her head. “Compromise.”

  Jessie stood close to her. Close, but giving her room, giving her time to sort her thoughts.

  “When I started out,” Harmony said, “I thought it was simple. Good guys, bad guys. No shades of gray. No wiggle room.”

  “Life’s a little more complicated than that,” Jessie said.

  “I didn’t want it to be more complicated than that. Conveniently overlooking the fact that life doesn’t care what I want. When I started out, the idea that someday I’d be making alliances with monsters to catch worse monsters…I wouldn’t have even been able to parse that. Then-me would have called now-me some kind of traitor.”

  “Way I see it,” Jessie said, “what matters at the end of the day is results. We’re saving lives. Doing our job. And if it takes shaking hands with someone like Caitlin or Ariel to stop somebody like Bobby Diehl, I’d say that’s a fair trade.”

  “It’s just weird. Weirder, after everything that’s happened over the last year. If someone told me that one day I would give Daniel Faust my phone number—willingly—I’d say they were crazy.”

  “Is he still doing that…thing?”

  Harmony took her phone out, scrolled through her text messages, and showed Jessie the screen.

  “Still want my car back,” read one.

  She scrolled down. “We made a great team. Know what would make us a greater team? My car.”

  She scrolled down again. “Lost: my car. If found, please return it.”

  “We are not a team,” Jessie said.

  “That’s what I told him.”

  “So, I’m curious. That bit back on the call, about Nadine?”

  “Sorry about that,” Harmony said. “I would have run it by you first, but under the circumstances—”

  “Hey, you had to make a play. I trust you, you know that. It just felt like you were fishing for more than free intel. Why’d you tell her we flipped Nadine’s accountant?”

  “So we can get a little hard proof of Ariel’s intentions,” Harmony said. “If she follows through, now that we’ve set her operative free and we’ve got nothing to hold over her, it shows she’s serious about playing nice. Doesn’t mean we can trust her, but it means she wasn’t just blowing hot air to get Coraline out of custody.”

  “With you so far.”

  “On the other hand, there’s a chance Ariel wants to kiss and make up with the other courts. Handing us to Nadine on a plate would be a great start.”

  “The thought did occur to me,” Jessie said.

  “If Ariel was lying, then most likely, right this minute, she’s on the phone with Nadine.”

  A grin blossomed on Jessie’s face. “Passing on a warning along with the bogus source. And we’ll know, because if she does that, well…Nadine’s gonna Nadine, and her next move will be tearing her accountant’s guts out. The second Dima Chakroun turns up dead, we’ll know Ariel snitched. Nice one, partner.”

  “Thanks. So, uh—” Harmony nodded to the door. “You and Coraline?”

  “I don’t know if she’s girlfriend material, but next time we’re in New York I’m going to need a night off. Maybe two. How’d things go with Neptune?”

  “She’s clean,” Harmony said. “She had no idea who Cooper was; Cranston told her to drop the name on cue, so he could see our reaction. He’s definitely trying to figure out if Bobby sent us. She also confirmed the two men who grabbed Cooper at the bar are working for Cranston. Still no word on—”

  Her phone buzzed in her hand. Tampa PD.

  “Special Agent Black speaking.”

  “Agent, it’s Lieutenant Briggs. We met at the medical examiner’s office.”

  “Of course,” Harmony said. “How can I help?”

  “Got something for you to take a look at. We rounded up some boats and trawled the waters off the beach where the first victim washed up.”

  “You found something?”

  “Another body,” he said. “What’s left of him, anyway.”

  21.

  The medical examiner’s details were sparse: male, mid-twenties, his remains bound to a cinder block to keep him weighted down. Unlike Cooper’s rope, his didn’t come loose.

  He also didn’t have a face.

  His naked, broken skull stared up at the hard morgue lights, scalp clinging on by thin strips of sinew. His bottom jaw was fractured, teeth reduced to chips and jagged shards of porcelain. The sharks had also taken one of his arms, along with his left leg up to the kneecap. The dead man’s skin was mottled and slug-white, his remains laid out on a stainless-steel slab.

  “It’s not Agent Dominguez,” Jessie said.

  Harmony stood at her side, gazing down at the ravaged corpse.

  “How can you tell?”

  Jessie pointed to his surviving arm. “Dominguez had a memorial tattoo, from his days in the Rangers. Names of the buddies he lost. This guy doesn’t.”

  His ink was on his collarbone. Solid black, the Roman numerals XIV with a pair of crossed swords behind it. Jessie’s pointed finger glided down along the slab. Toward the bloodless wound in the dead man’s abdomen.

  “What does that look like? A .22?”

  This had to be the thug Cooper shot outside the bar when she wrestled for his gun. It looked like he’d taken it in the gut. Not a fast way to die.

  “So you know who he isn’t,” Briggs said. “Any idea who he is?”

  They knew he was on Judah Cranston’s payroll, but they weren’t going to share that with the police. Harmony weighed how much she could afford to give him. Too much and B
riggs might poke his nose into their investigation. Too little and they’d look like they were holding back, which might mean he held back next time he found a lead.

  “We think there was an altercation when the first victim was abducted,” she said. “One of the kidnappers was shot with his own weapon.”

  Briggs nodded at the gunshot wound.

  “So he dies from the bullet, they toss his body to the sharks to make it harder to identify, and weigh ’em down side by side. Makes sense.”

  “Except for one problem,” the medical examiner said. “Submersion in water is a highly effective counter-forensic measure. Given enough time, water damage to a corpse can conceal any multitude of sins. That said, the body was found quickly enough that I can still issue some preliminary observations based on tissue composition, the quantity of water in the lungs, internal gases—”

  Briggs hooked his thumbs in his belt loops. “Cut to the chase, doc.”

  “The bullet wound wasn’t fatal. If he’d been taken to a hospital or attended to by a private physician with the right equipment, he almost certainly would have survived.”

  The medical examiner gestured to the corpse.

  “He either died from drowning or severe trauma from the shark attack. He was alive when he went into the water.”

  * * *

  Harmony was thinking about a case. Not one of hers. She’d learned about it at Quantico, a side mention in a seminar about the psychology of criminal gangs. A drug mule, who had been loyal and reliable up to that point, claimed he had to dump over five thousand dollars’ worth of cocaine to escape a police search. His superiors had a suspicion that he’d sold it himself and kept the money.

  “What’d they do?” Kevin asked, sitting at his console in the belly of the Imperator. “Kill him?”

  She paced behind him, chin cupped in her hand as she worked at the problem.

  “No,” she murmured. “They told him not to do it again.”

  “Organized crime is a trust game,” Jessie said. “You bring somebody into an illegal conspiracy, you’re handing them the chance to burn you, so you only bring in people you think you can rely on. More importantly, you treat ’em right. ‘You failed your mission, so prepare to die’ is comic-book stuff. Not that it doesn’t happen, but it’s a bad idea. Start offing your employees, you send a message to the rest.”

  April turned the wheels of her chair, swiveling around to face them.

  “And not,” she said, “the message one desires to deliver. It’s not ‘obey or die’ so much as ‘find a good lawyer and turn state’s evidence before your neck is next on the chopping block.’”

  “This guy didn’t even fail,” Kevin said. He rattled a few keys and brought the morgue photos up on the video wall. Five screens showed the dead man from every angle.

  “Timeline,” Harmony said. “This man and his partner pick up Agent Cooper at the bar. They coerce her into going out the back door. She goes for the weapon, shoots him, his partner incapacitates her. Cooper is tortured, presumably interrogated about Bobby Diehl’s intentions and whereabouts, and fed to the sharks. He’s fed to them alongside her, both bodies are submerged, but Cooper’s comes untethered and washes up on shore.”

  Jessie walked past her in the other direction. “Where the hell is Agent Dominguez? He hasn’t reported in, and his body wasn’t out there.”

  “Cranston keeping him prisoner?” Kevin asked.

  “Best explanation,” Jessie said, “but why?”

  Harmony pointed to the screens.

  “I keep going back to this. He had a survivable wound. Cranston had him murdered instead of saving him.”

  “Survivable in a hospital,” April pointed out, “and hospitals report gunshot wounds. If Cranston doesn’t know any underground doctors and taking him to the hospital was the only alternative, killing him might have seemed safer than risking police attention.”

  “Right.” Harmony’s fingertip bobbed at the screens. “And how do you think his partner feels about that?”

  “Seems they were tight,” Jessie said. “Neptune told us they always ran in a pair. Sounded like they did time together.”

  “You know what I’m thinking,” Harmony said.

  “You’re thinking,” Jessie said, “that right about now he’s scared and angry, and wondering how much longer it’ll be before Cranston uses him as shark bait.”

  “We can flip him. But first we need to find him. Best way to do that is by identifying the victim.”

  There were plenty of ways to identify a murder victim. Sometimes it was as simple as matching up the body with a missing-persons report. Eventually the Tampa police would learn the name of the man on the slab. “Eventually” wasn’t good enough.

  “Can’t run a facial recognition scan without a face,” Kevin said. “Fingerprints?”

  “Water damaged,” Harmony said. “Water is a nightmare for forensics. Soft tissue is the first to go.”

  “DNA?”

  “Takes too long.” Jessie stood at Harmony’s side. Her eyes glinted as she stared up at the screens. “Got to be something here we can use.”

  Harmony saw it. She pointed to the third screen, a photograph capturing the victim’s shattered jaw, his bite-ravaged and waterlogged chest. They’d taken it to study the bullet wound, but something more important jumped out at her. The black ink tattoo on his collarbone, a Roman-numeral XIV adorned with crossed swords.

  “That ink looks…standardized, like a logo, military maybe. Kevin, run it through the Bureau’s tattoo recognition database, see if we get a hit.”’

  He fired up Photoshop on his monitor. He cropped the photo, adjusting focus and contrast, singling out the tattoo and sharpening the image.

  “Kind of a long shot, boss.”

  “Right now,” she said, “I’ll take what I can get.”

  The database went to work, numbers piling upon numbers as the system hunted for a match. The XIV held steady on the left side of Kevin’s screen, a fixed image, while the right side flickered like a storm of flash cards.

  April held up a finger. “Payroll records. They work for Nautilus Research; Cranston would have to report their wages for tax purposes.”

  “According to Neptune, they’re not officially employees,” Harmony said. “I suspect they’re getting paid under the table.”

  “Professional thuggery is a cash business,” Jessie added.

  “And we’re certain we can take Neptune at her word?” April asked.

  She said “we,” but her focus was all on Harmony. Harmony was sure, then she wasn’t. She thought about that until she landed on firm ground again.

  “She’s scared,” Harmony said. “I didn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know, deep down inside. She knew something was wrong with her boss, and she doesn’t want to get caught up in it.”

  “Little late for that,” Jessie said.

  “We’ll keep her safe.”

  Kevin pointed to the screen. The dead man’s tattoo had found a twin.

  “Got a hit.”

  Harmony leaned over his shoulder. “Military?”

  “Prison. XIV with a couple of swords means you’re repping Familia 14. It’s a prison gang”—he scrolled through a database, highlighting chunks of text with a click—“offshoot of a California gang called Nuestra Familia. A former Nuestra member got out of lockup, flew coast to coast to get a new shot at a life of crime, failed hard, landed in the Cross City Correctional Institution, and started up his own version of the franchise.”

  “How widespread is it?” Harmony asked.

  “Not. Far as I can tell, it only exists at Cross City Correctional.”

  “Which is where?”

  “Dixie County, about two and a half hours north of Tampa.” He looked over his shoulder. “It also has over a thousand prisoners at any given time, and we have no idea when this guy was inside, so please tell me you’re not going to ask me to start searching through mug shots.”

  “No,” Harmony said. “T
he only identifying mark we have is that tattoo, and he got it in prison; he wouldn’t have had it when he was booked.”

  “So, dead end?”

  Harmony was thinking about Neptune. Going back over their conversation, hunting for anything she could use. Neptune’s words drifted back to her. One time I heard them joking about how the research center reminded them of the fish sticks at Hillsborough.

  “Dig back…let’s say ten years. Cross-index prisoners who have been incarcerated at Cross City Correctional and at the Hillsborough County jail.”

  She stood perfectly still while he worked, frozen with her eyes on the morgue photographs.

  “More than I expected. Sixty-seven.”

  Harmony nodded. “Now for those sixty-seven, toss out anyone who doesn’t currently have a registered address within twenty miles of Tampa. Check probation records; parolees have to disclose where they’re staying.”

  “They don’t have to tell the truth,” Jessie pointed out.

  “No, but they’ve got to live reasonably close to whatever address they give, at least if they want to make their regular check-ins with their probation officer.”

  “Down to twelve,” Kevin said.

  “Bring ’em up on the screens.”

  One by one, mug shots blossomed over the dead man’s body. Five of them were black; Kevin ruled those out right away. What remained on the video wall were seven scowling convicts and a faceless corpse.

  “Guy on the upper left is way too big,” Jessie said. “He’s pushing three hundred pounds, easy, and that mug shot is from two months ago. This other one’s out, too. Beyond being tacky as hell, the tattoo on his forehead disqualifies him.”

  Kevin furrowed his brow. “How? Our body doesn’t have a face.”

  “Double thunderbolts,” Jessie said. “You can join the Familia 14 or you can join the Aryan Brotherhood, but not both. That’d be confusing for everybody involved.”

  One mug shot caught Harmony’s eye. Olive skin, dark hair, glowering at the camera. He was wearing a shabby polo shirt, neckline just low enough to flash a hint of black ink. No telling if it was the same tattoo, but he definitely had some work done.

  “This one,” she said. “Pull up his rap sheet.”