Hope's Peak (Harper and Lane)

by Tony Healey

  “Christ,” he says, handing it back. “Looks like something out of a fucking horror movie. Are you thinking KKK connection?”

  “I’ve got Albie looking into it, yeah. I’m heading over to the medical examiner’s office now. They’re going to try and ID the girl.”

  “Right,” Stu says. “I questioned the owner of the land. Just as I thought, it went nowhere.”

  Harper brushes the hair out of her eyes. “You saw the girl earlier.”

  “Yeah,” Stu says, looking down.

  She instinctively steps in close, slides a hand inside his suit jacket and around his waist. They lock eyes and for a moment, a heartbeat, it is just the two of them. “You okay?” she asks him.

  Stu looks back up. “No, there’s something I need to tell you. It’s not about the case.”

  “Go on.”

  “Karen’s been in touch with me. She thinks gettin’ partnered with you split us up. She thinks we had an affair.”

  Harper takes a step back. “Christ . . . did you tell her that wasn’t the case?”

  “I tried to, but she wasn’t having any of it.”

  “Why?” Harper asks.

  Stu looks away, jaw suddenly tight. “’Cause she’s a fucking bitch, that’s why.”

  Harper reaches out, turns his face back to her. “Hey. It’s gonna be alright.”

  “Sure about that? Karen just won’t give it up. What’ve I gotta do?”

  Harper doesn’t say anything.

  “I’d better get going . . .” Stu sighs.

  Harper nods, tries to say something, but thinks better of it. Stu turns on his heel and heads for the station. Harper watches him go, a sudden tightening in her chest at the way they’ve parted—she hates leaving things unsaid.

  Stu turns around at the last second and makes the phone me sign.

  Harper manages a smile, returns the gesture, then goes to her car.

  Dead girls wait for no one.

  2

  Hope’s Peak is a modest tourist town on the coast of North Carolina. It has its bay, its beaches. The tourist shops line their pockets in the summer months, then take what they can get when winter hits. Boats run out of the dock every hour—fishing trips, tours of the coastline, diving charters, even a glass-bottomed boat when the weather is good and the sea is calm.

  More inland, Hope’s Peak is quaint, old-school. Life there appears to be lazy, laid-back, each day passing by in a haze of “who gives a fuck?” whimsy. The town becomes more condensed, more congested before it gives way to endless field and pastures. Miles of green and yellow. Corn crops and soybeans and all manner of things. There are a few parishes that have prospered quietly at the edges of Hope’s Peak, but they get little of its trade.

  The visitors bring the money. Their money pays for the trash to get picked up, for the hedges to be trimmed. They pay the salaries of the council members.

  They are important—they are a bloodline.

  Harper is left with her own thoughts for company, navigating the afternoon traffic, the air conditioner keeping the inside of the car ice-cold compared to the sticky heat outside.

  Six months after Harper arrived in Hope’s Peak, she got partnered with Stu Raley. Around the same time, his marriage came to an end. Nearly a year later, she and Stu went for drinks after work, and one thing led to another. There’d been no subterfuge, no affair, but Stu’s psycho ex-wife doesn’t see it like that.

  Harper thinks back to leaving San Francisco, getting as far away as she could, a failed marriage in her wake. North Carolina seemed as good a choice as any. Hope’s Peak had charm and character, a world apart from the busy city streets she’d been accustomed to.

  The day after she’d slept with Stu the first time, he tried to convince her they couldn’t continue with it, that it shouldn’t have happened in the first place. Harper shut him up, pressing her mouth against his. When she’d pulled away, she told him that it didn’t need to be complicated. They’d both served their time in failed relationships. For the first time in ages, she didn’t want to have to feel something. The breakdown of her own marriage back in San Francisco—the way it ended—had left her feeling cold toward anything approaching an emotional involvement.

  She’d told Stu it wasn’t selfish to want something just for the enjoyment of it. They didn’t have to feel guilty or bring anything heavy to the proceedings.

  From day one, Stu said how paranoid Karen had been throughout their marriage—now Harper sees it for herself. Stu’s ex-wife is imagining something that simply hadn’t happened. At least, not the way she thinks—and what Karen is imagining is in danger of becoming an unsettling obsession.

  Harper parks outside the medical examiner’s office and cuts the engine. She gets out of the car, removes her shades, thinking it wasn’t so long ago she attended the autopsy of nineteen-year-old Magnolia Remy. Found in much the same fashion as that morning’s cadaver—raped and strangled. Magnolia’s body had been left in a woodland, bloated and covered in bugs by the time they found her.

  It was no easy feat, making it through the whole examination, but Harper did it. Dead bodies rarely bother her—it’s their ghosts that cause the trouble.

  Harper walks into the medical examiner’s office, knowing what she will be told. This girl is number two—she hopes she can break the case before the killer claims a third.

  A body looks different under fluorescent strip lighting.

  The harsh illumination finds every dimple, presents the face as anything but a bland landscape of little feature. Everything looks gray, as if being dead robs you of an essential, humanizing dimension.

  Mike and his assistant, Kara, have already been at work on the girl—she has a standard Y incision across the front and down the center of her torso from their investigations. Mike talks Kara through the autopsy while his mic records everything.

  “I would posit her age to be mid to late teens,” he says.

  “Have you run prints?” Harper asks.

  “Yes. Nothing on file. Not that I expected there’d be.”

  “No, of course.”

  “The victim was hit in the head. There is bruising to her temple, and her jaw.” Mike points to the purple marks on the girl’s neck. “And strangled to death, as we thought. He applied pressure to her throat until she asphyxiated.”

  “Poor girl,” Kara says.

  “No damage to the mouth. I sent over an X-ray of her teeth. Your people are running the dental records now.”

  Even dental records can be hit-and-miss—if a victim doesn’t go to the dentist, there’s no record to be checked against. Harper has the same situation with the killer’s DNA. She has plenty of it to pin someone to the murder scene, but without that DNA being in the CODIS, it’s as useful as teeth no dentist has ever seen before.

  The sheet covering the body is pulled down to her abdomen. As clinically detached as Mike can be sometimes, he has respect for the bodies he’s presented with. “As we saw previously,” he says, careful in his phrasing, “the killer was not kind when he raped her. There is significant tearing, and evidence of internal bleeding.”

  Harper shakes her head. “Awful.”

  What this girl went through . . .

  “There was some tissue beneath her fingernails,” Mike says, lifting the young woman’s hand to show Harper. “I’ve scraped it out and sent it over.”

  “It’ll match what we have already from his semen, but that doesn’t do us any good until we have him in custody,” Harper says. “No other significant details?”

  Mike shakes his head. “Sorry. The toxicology report is fast-tracked, but it won’t come back until tomorrow at the earliest.”

  “What do you expect it to say?” Harper asks him.

  Mike turns the victim’s head to one side, revealing the puncture mark on her neck. “Dextromethorphan, like the last one. Seems to be his knockout drug of choice. Especially when you consider this girl scratched him in her final moments. You have to be somewhat aware of what’s hap
pening when you do that. Maybe he wants them like that.”

  He steps back and Kara covers the girl over with the sheet. The victim slides back into cold storage with awful finality.

  Harper winces at the sound. “Anything else, Mike?”

  The ME removes his gloves. “Right now, all we’ve got is a killer with an inclination toward raping young black girls. He likes to drug them, so we know he prepares ahead of time. That’s not passion. That’s planning. He hasn’t been caught yet, which means either he is very meticulous, or very lucky.”

  “Sounds on point to me,” Harper says. “Samples of hair and everything?”

  “CSU finished at the scene. You should get their report by this evening, if they pull their thumbs out of their asses.”

  “Doubt they’ll find anything,” Harper says.

  Mike shakes his head. “This young woman was just like the last. Killed right where he left her. There was no transportation of the body that I can tell. Once he killed her, he left her where she was. So he transported her while drugged.”

  “Otherwise we have to ask ourselves what the hell this girl was doing out in a cornfield in the middle of the night . . . okay, thanks Mike.”

  Harper steps back out into the sunshine. Her stomach rumbles. She should grab some lunch, but there’s something about a dead girl in cold storage that makes the thought of a chilled sandwich not so appealing.

  She returns to the station and, of course, Mike is right—nothing from CSU to write home about.

  John Dudley drops by her desk. “Dental records the ME sent over match those of a girl, east side of the Hill.”

  He hands her a printout. Harper reads from it. “Alma Buford.”

  “That’s her,” Dudley says. “I asked Albie to contact the parents. Do you want to bring them in here or do the interview at their place?”

  “Here. Are you okay picking them up?”

  Dudley almost grimaces. “Yeah,” he says with obvious displeasure.

  “Okay,” Harper tells him. “Use tact when you break the news to them. It’s going to hit them hard.”

  “Tact is my middle name,” Dudley says, walking off before she can say anything else.

  An hour later, Art Buford’s eyes are shot through with red. His wife, Didi, holds his hand, rubbing back and forth with her thumb. Using her other hand, she dabs at the corners of her eyes with a handkerchief, soaking up the tears that spill out.

  This time, Harper is alone. She convinced Stu and Albie that there was no need for them to join her, that having the two of them throwing questions at Alma’s parents might be overkill.

  “We thought maybe she stayed at a friend’s,” Didi says, her voice cracking with emotion. “If she didn’t turn up by midday, I was going to call the police.”

  “Lately, we’ve had some problems with Alma . . . ,” Art says. He looks sidelong at his wife, who gives him a nod of the head to go on. “Drinking and such with her friends. You think that might be something to do with it?”

  “We’re not ruling anything out,” Harper says. It’s one more thing for her to look into. “You could both try to think of some names for us. Friends she spoke about, who she hung around with . . . any feuds or fallings out. Anyone who might hold a grudge. Maybe boys’ names that cropped up. It’d be a big help.”

  Not telling them we are looking for a male killer, but seeing what they can remember that might point us in the right direction. Did the killer know Alma? Or was she selected the way a hunter tracks deer and chooses one to meet its maker?

  Didi starts to sob. “She was such a good girl. I know we had problems lately, but apart from that, she stuck to her books, kept her head down . . .”

  “Come here,” Art says, putting an arm around her as she holds the hankie to her face.

  Harper pushes a box of Kleenex across the table toward Didi. “There’s some more in there. Okay?”

  “Thanks,” Didi manages.

  “I want you both to know that we’re not taking your daughter’s death lightly. We will explore every avenue available to us, anything that will offer insight as to why she died.”

  “The detective said she was found dead, that she’d been laid out . . .”

  “Mister Buford . . . your daughter was murdered. We are looking for a killer.”

  Didi shakes her head, trembling all over. “Murdered . . . ,” she whispers in a thin, reedy voice. Her husband holds Didi against his side as she sobs, burying her face in the plaid material of his shirt.

  “I’m so sorry,” Harper says. This is not the first time she has had to do this. If she can’t catch a break in the case soon, she knows it won’t be the last either.

  Art fixes her with a cold look. “Find him,” he growls. “Find whoever killed my daughter.”

  Before she can catch herself, Harper says, “I will.”

  Captain Morelli unwraps a hard candy and pops it into his mouth. The sun is sinking outside, casting all of Hope’s Peak in deep shadows. Orange light cuts through the blinds in Morelli’s office, throwing itself at the back wall in thick contrasting bars of brightness and shadow.

  “What do we know about our victim?” Morelli asks Harper.

  “Alma Buford. Seventeen. Raped and strangled. Semen matches what we have on record already. Samples taken from under Alma’s fingernails also match. It’s the same guy.”

  Morelli sucks the candy. “Right.”

  “We’re waiting on toxicology, but I suspect it’ll come back the same thing. DXM to incapacitate her.”

  “Okay.”

  “Sir, this sick bastard will strike again. His behavior shows psychopathic traits.”

  “I know,” he says grimly. Harper frowns and watches Morelli pick up a file from his desk. He hands it to her.

  “What’s this?” Harper asks.

  “A case.”

  “If you didn’t notice, I already have a pretty big one on my hands.”

  “Listen to me for a minute, Detective.” Morelli holds her gaze. “Many moons ago, I remember there being a girl found up at Wisher’s Pond. Twenty-four years old, I believe. Anyway, everything about that case bears more than a passing resemblance to your two girls.”

  Harper opens the file. She reads the name at the front: “Ruby Lane?”

  “The lead on that case is still around. Lives in a retirement home now, if I’ve heard right,” Morelli says. “Might be worth you going to see him. See what he has to say. If this killer is a psychopath, he had to start somewhere. Could be this case has historic implications.”

  “Okay . . . I’ll get on it first thing in the morning. Can’t very well go pounding on the doors of a retirement home this late at night,” Harper says, miffed.

  Morelli stands by the window, framed by the fiery light and thick bars of shadow.

  “Be sure you do, Detective.”

  Stu Raley offers her a cup of coffee in the staff kitchen.

  “Not for me,” Harper says. “I think I’m gonna go home, put my head down.”

  She watches as Stu stirs several packets of Sweet’N Low into his coffee, then adds a drop of milk.

  “Not a bad idea,” he says. “Think I’ll do a few more hours, though. See what I can turn up.”

  Harper hands him the file. “This ought to help.”

  “What is it?” he asks, opening it.

  “The captain gave it to me. It was all a bit . . . odd. You know what I mean?”

  Stu shakes his head. “Sorry, but no.”

  “I don’t know how to describe it,” Harper says, “just that it was out of the ordinary. He said the murder of Ruby Lane matches the two girls we’re investigating. But if that’s the case, why not hand me this file when we found Magnolia Remy?”

  “Maybe he didn’t know about the file’s existence, or he was waiting to see if there was a pattern. Jesus, you’re really worked up over this, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t mean to be. There’s just something off about it, that’s all,” Harper says. “Could be I’m being
paranoid.”

  Stu sips his coffee. “Sure I can’t get you one?”

  “No, I’m off.” Harper reaches for the file but Stu hangs on to it.

  “I’ll give it to you tomorrow. Let me read through it while I’m here.”

  “Okay. If you’re sure.”

  Stu smiles. “I am.”

  Harper pats him on the arm. “Tomorrow, stud?”

  “It’s a date.”

  Morelli walks out of his office as Albie and Dudley exit the elevator accompanying a skinny white punk in a wifebeater, jeans, and black combat boots. Cuffs restrain his hands behind his back. He has two full sleeves of tattoos on his arms—the most prominent being the swastika on his right shoulder.

  “What’s this?” Morelli asks. Dudley doesn’t answer. His face is bright red and he’s gritting his teeth. His fingers are white hard on the young man’s arm. The kid hasn’t stopped running his mouth while the two detectives physically maneuver him down the corridor, past Morelli’s office.

  “You can’t arrest me! What for? I didn’t do nothin’,” he complains, eyeballing the captain as he does so. “Fuckin’ pigs!”

  Stu ambles over as Albie and Dudley steer the guy into an interview room, despite his protestations. “Skinhead trash, sir.”

  “Right.”

  “We’re interviewing a few kids, known to be part of a white supremacist group. Don’t know what we’ll get out of it,” Stu tells him.

  Morelli nods. “These little pricks hang themselves sometimes, they’re so stupid. It’s their breeding, Detective. Or shall I say, their inbreeding.”

  Stu chuckles a little. “I hear you, sir.”

  Albie emerges from the interview room, flustered.

  Morelli calls him over. “Dudley looks wired up,” he says.

  “The guy rubbed him the wrong way, sir,” Albie says.

  Stu frowns. “How so?”

  “We were talking to this one, just asking questions, when he starts mouthing off to Dudley. Dudley called him a walking cliché, and he called Dudley a filthy nigger-loving mick. Told him the only reason micks get badges is they’re too dumb to get real jobs.”