Right to the Kill (Harmony Black Book 5)

by Craig Schaefer

  “How do you know?” Harmony asked.

  Neptune waved her around the table. She pointed to a small streak of hot-pink gloss on one corner of the white metal.

  “Because it’s mine. Was mine. Spilled nail polish on it. Listen: you hear that little drop in the sound it’s making, every three seconds or so?”

  Harmony closed her eyes. She listened to the whir of the machine, a steady mechanical thrum. Now she noticed it: every three seconds, the pitch slowed and the drone deepened for the space of a heartbeat before speeding up again.

  “The motor’s dying,” Neptune said. “I noticed it last week. I asked for funding for a replacement, and Judah said he was going to take this one and sell it for scrap.”

  Harmony looked from the countdown timer to the centrifuge to the open case waiting for its payload. A perfect tableau, artfully arranged, serious as a heart attack. It made sense until it suddenly didn’t. She took the pieces and scrambled them in her mind, rearranging them until they fit in a different configuration.

  Her fingertip pressed against the centrifuge’s rocker switch. She hesitated, just for a moment, then pressed down. The engine whirred to a grinding halt.

  “Uh, Harmony?” Jessie said.

  The centrifuge’s lid unclasped with a hiss of compressed air. She slid a plastic canister from the belly of the machine, about the size of a prescription pill bottle, and unscrewed the cap.

  “Harmony?” Jessie said, coming closer. “What happened to waiting for the experts?”

  “We have an expert right here,” she said.

  She hoped so, because she was taking a hell of a risk, but she had to know for certain. One sniff would validate her hunch. She put the canister under her nose and inhaled. Then she went a step further. Harmony’s index finger dipped inside. She scooped up a sticky fingerful of liquid, put her finger between her lips, and had a taste.

  “It’s maple syrup,” she said.

  Jessie arched an eyebrow. “Cranston’s doomsday weapon is…maple syrup?”

  “He’s not coming back. At all. It’s a scam. Either Dominguez wasn’t as convincing as he thought, and Cranston saw through his act from the start, or he’s just being extra careful.” Harmony pointed to the timer. “He concocted this story about needing a day to finish the process, set this display up to fool Dominguez into buying it, and then he skipped town.”

  “So is this whole thing one big con job or…?”

  “I see two possibilities.” Harmony held up a pair of fingers. “We know that Bobby Diehl was paying Cranston to develop a chemical weapon for him, and that he finally called to collect. The best-case scenario is that Judah Cranston is nothing but a con artist. He’s been taking Bobby’s money to fund his marine lab and stringing him along all this time.”

  “What’s the worst-case scenario?” Neptune asked.

  “Worst case is Judah did develop the weapon, but either he has another buyer or he’s going to use it himself. It’s done, it’s functional, and he just fled with it. The stalling tactic, the sudden disappearance…wherever he went, it’s a one-way trip. He’s not planning on coming back.”

  “Harmony?” Kevin called out.

  He was sitting at the workstation on the other side of the lab. His face had gone bloodless, pale.

  “You need to see this,” he said. “Right now.”

  28.

  A host of video and text files filled a directory on the wide-screen monitor. The icons were meticulous, sorted by date, and the oldest was from four years ago. The directory had a name: Clean Slate.

  As the others gathered around him, Kevin double-clicked the biggest video file. The film had been shot by a concealed zoom lens from a second-floor window, over a block away. As Harmony’s stomach clenched, she knew exactly when and where it had been filmed. Last autumn. Talbot Cove, Michigan. Festive banners, pennants in gold and harvest orange, draped the lampposts to celebrate the town’s Halloween festival.

  A delivery truck had crashed into the hardware store, half-buried in the facade, shredded tires nestled in a bed of broken glass and spilled oil. A small crowd gathered on the street, pointing, curious. Judah Cranston’s voice echoed over the workstation’s speakers.

  “Log eighty-five twenty-one. My patron is demanding a demonstration of Project Clean Slate. I’ve told him it’s not ready, in any way, shape, or form, but he insists nonetheless. He’s even chosen a target for said demonstration; apparently he’s having issues with some government agency and wants to send them a message. I didn’t ask for the details and, frankly, I don’t care.”

  On the screen, a squad car roared up to the edge of the accident. Harmony watched herself jump from the passenger seat, badge high. Suddenly she was back there, living it all over again, the world lurching into slow motion as her mind went into hyperfocus. She saw the back doors of the crashed truck explode open with the white-hot pop of a flashbang grenade. Then the gas billowed out, washing over the crowd.

  “Where is this?” Neptune whispered, transfixed.

  “Talbot Cove,” Harmony said. “My hometown. You don’t need to watch this. You shouldn’t watch this.”

  She knew what Neptune was going to see. Figures writhing in the bilious green mist, falling to their knees, contorting as their muscles tore and their bones snapped. Bodies staggered and fell, skulls deflated like basketballs as their insides turned to rubber, skin transformed to rawhide leather or serpentine scales.

  “There was a thing last year,” Neptune stammered. “I heard about a religious cult doing a, a suicide thing in Michigan. They said it was sarin gas—”

  Harmony stared at the screen. “We covered it up. This was what really happened.”

  She watched as the camera zoomed in tighter, fixing on Norma, the waitress from the town diner, a woman Harmony had known since she was six years old. Norma had sprouted a porcupine coat of bone spurs, jutting from her torn and ragged skin. She fixed her feral gaze on a police officer, opened a mouth lined with barracuda teeth, and lunged for his throat.

  The camera jerked as Harmony shot her in the head.

  “We covered it all up,” Harmony said.

  “Clearly,” Cranston’s voice said on the recording, “this was a catastrophe. Only one of the affected subjects even survived the initial exposure. Ironically, my patron is jubilant. Diehl is a simple-minded sadist; he’s satisfied with mere suffering and horror. He’s increased my funding twofold, eager for more results.”

  Cranston paused. The footage held on the street as the mists cleared, panning across the twisted bodies left behind.

  “If at all possible, I intend to make certain he’s standing at ground zero when my magnum opus is revealed. It’s the least I can do to thank him for his money.”

  The screen went black.

  “What…was that?” Neptune whispered. She kept staring at the monitor, at the empty window, like it might yield up more secrets.

  “It’s a mutagen,” Harmony said. “We thought Bobby Diehl made it himself. We also thought it was the finished product.”

  “Those people, the way they changed—”

  “It’s a mixture of some kind of chemical weapon along with an occult curse; they work in tandem like a one-two punch.” Harmony turned to Jessie. “I knew I smelled magic on him when we met for dinner. Sorcerous residue. I just couldn’t figure out what he was doing with it.”

  Jessie picked up the phone on the edge of the workstation. “Now we know. April? You getting all this?”

  “Already sending out encrypted bursts to all teams in the field,” April said over the speaker. “Locating Judah Cranston is now Vigilant’s top priority.”

  “What he said, about ground zero—” Neptune pointed a shaky finger at the screen.

  “Bobby Diehl paid him to create a weapon,” Harmony said. “But he never intended to hand it over. He built it so he could use it himself. That was the plan from day one.”

  And now he was gone, heading off on a trip he never planned to come home from. Th
ey needed a lead. Harmony thought back to the night of their dinner, poring over Cranston’s words with a magnifying glass.

  “Neptune? How much of what he told us at dinner was true?”

  “All of it, as far as I know,” she said. “I mean, obviously I never really knew the man, but everything he said was consistent with things he’s told me for years.”

  “So he really came from a fishing family?”

  Neptune nodded. “Somewhere in New England. The ocean has always been a big part of his life.”

  Harmony glanced at Jessie. “What was that thing his hired thug said? Cranston told him he was going to visit his family.”

  “Could have been a lie. I mean, he told Neptune he was out on business.”

  “It’s worth following up. When people hide, they hide where they feel safe. April, pull the entire support division together and do a deep dive into Cranston’s history. Education, housing, anything that could give us an address. We need to know exactly where he grew up.”

  “Already working on it,” April replied.

  “I’ll call Aselia and make sure the plane’s fueled up and ready to go,” Jessie said. “The second we get a target, we’re moving. What do you want to do about her?”

  Harmony looked from Jessie to Neptune. Neptune took a hesitant step back, bumping her hip on the workstation.

  “Are you going to erase my memories?” she asked. Her voice quavered.

  “That’s not a thing we can actually do,” Harmony said. “Can you keep a secret?”

  Neptune’s head bobbed.

  “Good. You want a job?”

  “Well, apparently my boss, who was the best boss I’ve ever worked for until fifteen minutes ago, is actually a maniac and a terrorist. So I’m probably going to be unemployed soon.”

  “You’d be what we call a civilian asset,” Harmony said. “A specialist on call, for when we have a case relating to your particular field.”

  “It’s part-time and the pay sucks,” Jessie added.

  Neptune’s eyes lingered on Harmony. “But I’d…get to see you again?”

  “I’d be your primary point of contact, yes.”

  Jessie thumped Harmony’s shoulder. She wasn’t sure why.

  “I’m in,” Neptune said.

  “A cleaning team should get here shortly,” Harmony said. “That’s ‘cleaning’ as in ‘making the evidence go away.’ They’ll take you to a safe house. I’d like you to stay there until we apprehend Cranston.”

  Neptune’s nerves came back in a sudden rush. “You think he’d come after me?”

  “No, no reason to, but there’s no reason to take any chances. Just want to make sure you’re safe. Meanwhile, you can do something important for us…”

  Harmony pointed to the mermaid’s corpse, its blubbery flesh turning room temperature on the damp, glass-littered tile.

  “Think you can autopsy this thing?”

  “Me?” Neptune stared at it. “I mean, I don’t know anything about magic. I didn’t know magic was real until, well, today.”

  “But you know about marine life. Just treat it like you’d treat an exotic species; open it up and see if you can figure out what makes it tick. How its digestive system works, how it reproduces—anything you can figure out could be useful in the field if we ever encounter another one.”

  “You think there are more out there?”

  “Hopefully not,” Harmony said. “Not on this world, anyway, but again, better safe than sorry. We still don’t know where Cranston got the thing in the first place. Or why he had it in his lab, for that matter.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Neptune said.

  “That’s all we ask.”

  Harmony started to turn, already thinking three steps ahead, tracing through a labyrinth of thoughts. Something in Neptune’s look made her pause.

  “Hey,” Neptune said. She hesitated, wringing her hands.

  “What is it?”

  Neptune leaned in, quick, and planted a feather-light kiss on Harmony’s cheek.

  “Thanks,” Neptune said, staring down at her shoes as her face turned red.

  Harmony blinked. She felt her cheeks go warm. “You’re, um…welcome. You’re very welcome.”

  * * *

  Judah Cranston had left a paper trail, tracing most of his life in tax returns and diplomas. He’d gotten a degree from Humboldt State University, another from Duke University, and earned his first paychecks at DuPont before striking out on his own and founding Nautilus Conservation Research with the help of a bank loan. His life, in documents, was accomplished but mundane. He paid his bills on time.

  Before college his trail was sketchier, but he had never made an effort to cover his tracks. He’d simply grown up in the obscurity of a small town in Maine, in a time before always-on Internet and a world of cell phones.

  “Paper records,” April said, back on the plane. Aselia was running flight checks for their departure, brushing past them with a clipboard and a pencil. “Never digitized. We had to pay someone to comb through filing cabinets and fax us his records.”

  “We have a fax machine?” Jessie said.

  “From there, I was able to piece together the Cranston legacy. He went to school in Bar Harbor, but in the glory days of his family, they hailed from a fishing village called Graykettle.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “When the fishing dried up, the village dried up with it. It’s not entirely a ghost town, but the current population can’t be more than a few hundred people.”

  “It’s fifty miles from anywhere,” Aselia told them. “I’m going to have to touch down at the closest airstrip. You can drive in from there.”

  Harmony and Jessie shared a glance.

  “If I was running from Bobby Diehl,” Jessie said, “after stealing the man’s money—and getting ready to unleash a bioweapon—where would I go?”

  “A place fifty miles from anywhere,” Harmony said.

  29.

  They made plans in the air. No telling for certain if Cranston had fled to his childhood home, but it was the only lead they had.

  “I can pull other operatives off mission,” April said. “Do we want strike teams on standby?”

  Harmony shook her head, pacing.

  “We have to be careful. Even if he hasn’t created the final version of the gas, we saw what it did in Talbot Cove. We can’t take chances, can’t let him set it off in Graykettle.”

  She looked to Jessie, eyes fervent, her jaw clenched.

  “Not again,” Harmony said.

  Jessie stopped her pacing with a touch. Her hand squeezed Harmony’s shoulder.

  “Not again,” Jessie told her. “We go in soft and quiet. If he’s there, he could be hiding anywhere in town. We’ll have to work the locals for intel. The nice thing about small towns is that everybody notices a new arrival.”

  “Which means they’ll notice you too,” Kevin said, hesitant.

  “We can use that,” Harmony said. “See if Aselia can line up a rental car for us.”

  “Why a rental?”

  “To bolster our cover.” Harmony tapped her chin, thinking. “We’re tourists on a road trip, exploring the charming New England coastline. Everyone expects tourists to poke around and ask questions.”

  “Works for me,” Jessie said.

  Harmony changed the bandage on her arm, buttoned up a clean dress shirt, and reloaded her gun.

  The C-130 descended over an airstrip in Maine, plunging from a sky turned stormy gray. It was the gray of a house fire, roiling and touched with the tang of distant smoke. Aselia had their car waiting: a blueberry Toyota hatchback with a Budget sticker on the back bumper, nice and forgettable.

  “How are you holding up?” Jessie asked. She and Harmony walked along the edge of the tarmac together.

  “My everything hurts and I’ll have a new scar for the collection. I’ll cope. How about you?”

  “I’m feeling pretty murdery at the moment.”

  “Well, goo
d.” Harmony pressed a remote key fob, and the car door squawked. “Let’s catch Cranston and you can indulge. And after him, Dominguez is next on the list.”

  “Oh, he’s getting extra murdered.”

  Forty minutes of highway took them to a connecting road, and the connection ferried them along an endless winding ribbon of rocky coastline. White-capped water splashed across jumbles of salt-slick stone, in the slow, ceaseless erosion of time and the ocean. The sea stretched out beyond Harmony’s vision, disappearing on a cold, bleak horizon as dark as the skies over the roadway. It started to rain, a relentless drizzle, and the car’s wipers tapped out a metronome beat.

  As the drive went on, the road got worse. She wove around potholes like craters on an alien moon and passed fallen road signs that lay abandoned in clumps of overgrown crabgrass. America was a big country; there were patches of land that had been forgotten, or forsaken, or just used up and thrown away. This one was all three.

  The road died in Graykettle. The village wasn’t much more than a tangled cluster of broken streets lined with old Victorian homes, and hand-painted wooden signs dangled from wrought-iron posts over the few stores that had stayed open. Not much in the way of tourist traps. This was a working town, the streets lined with mud-spattered pickups and rusted cargo vans, and miserly fishing boats trawled for hope out on the restless sea. It was a town held together with salt and old rope.

  There was only one place in town for an outsider to stay. It was a boardinghouse called the Bird and Barb, and the water-stained slats of a sign out front advertised rooms for forty dollars a night. They parked at the curb.

  A woman answered the door when they knocked. She was pinch-faced, with small eyes and a frog’s mouth, and she looked at Harmony and Jessie like they were a pair of Martians.

  “Ayuh?”

  “Hi,” Jessie said. “We’re here about the rooms.”

  “Rooms?” she asked.

  Jessie pointed back at the sign.

  “The rooms to rent?”

  “Oh.” The woman held her ground, blocking the doorway. “Gotta pay in cash. Money up front.”