by Jim Heskett
As Harry stared at the man, he gulped. Out of breath, he’d been in pursuit of a hillbilly probably responsible for the aching pain in Harry’s midsection. That hillbilly had appeared out of nowhere, and Harry had exactly one chance to catch up to the man, but it didn’t seem likely now. Even worse, the man had been running with a pronounced limp.
“I don’t… you can’t… Phil… not right… I can’t do this with you right now…” Harry hissed the words out between labored breaths. His skin was tingling all over as he put his hands on his knees to keep from passing out.
Phil scowled, gazing down at Harry. For a gaunt man, he was still an imposing physical presence. To Harry, at least. Harry tried to look past him, but the hillbilly on foot was long gone by now. He had pivoted at the next intersection, and could have easily disappeared into one of the many side alleys. Harry’s slim chance had now thinned to nothing. Damn.
“I’m getting tired of seeing your fat face, Harry,” Phil said.
Harry coughed a couple times and then stood up straight, now able to breathe a little closer to normal. “I live here. You don’t. You don’t want to see me? Go back to Fayetteville and stay there.”
Phil bared his teeth and advanced a step, which made Harry back up in kind. “You know exactly why I keep coming here. And you know exactly why I don’t like seeing your face around. Stay away from the Sunrise Hotel and Spa, okay, Boukadakis?” Phil jabbed a bony finger into his own chest. “We at the Dugan Agency have a contract with the hotel to provide PI services. Not you. I don’t know how this keeps happening, but if it keeps happening, bad things are going to happen.”
Harry had to tread lightly here. Apparently the Dugan Agency still had no idea that Harry and the hotel’s manager Neva were friends. They didn’t know she was feeding him small hotel PI gigs on the side, despite the contract that had been signed by people above her pay grade. If the Dugans were investigators of any quality, they would easily connect Harry to Neva and unravel the whole secret hotel conspiracy. Even a cursory check of Neva’s social media posts would establish that Harry and Neva played Dungeons & Dragons together. But apparently, they were too lazy to do that. Or, it was easier to intimidate than dig.
The most simple choice for Harry would be to throw Neva under the bus. Blame it all on her and claim ignorance. But he couldn’t do that to a friend. He wouldn’t. Also, he needed to remind her to delete chunks of her social media history, at least for the time being.
“What’s going to happen?” Harry said, but he worried he already knew the answer.
Phil lurched forward again, and for a second, Harry thought he was about to be head-butted. But Phil only flinched, which made an involuntary yelp escape Harry’s lips as he backed up another step. They were the only two on this section of sidewalk, but they weren’t alone out here. Plenty of people would notice a fight breaking out. Even so, Phil might still take a swing.
“This is totally unnecessary,” Harry said, cowering.
“Here’s what’s necessary, Boukadakis. Whatever is going on here will cease right now. You’re going to pull your thorn out of my damn side and we’re going to go our separate ways. Hopefully, forever.”
“And if I don’t?” Harry didn’t know why he kept inviting Phil to narrate the discussion, but he couldn’t help himself. Some morbidly masochistic part of him wanted to know how far Phil intended to escalate this spat.
“First, we’ll go the legal route. We’ll drop a lawsuit on you and probe so deep into your history that you’ll feel it like a rectal thermometer. And we’ll dig around for as long as it takes. If that doesn’t work, we’ll smash up your office. Then we’ll work on your home.”
Harry raised his head a little and met Phil’s eyes, just for a moment. He wanted to ask what had happened to so profoundly change Phil. What had changed this man from a confidant and mentor to such a bitter enemy?
“We used to be friends,” Harry said.
“That’s your interpretation. All I see is someone who used to work for me and then stabbed me in the back. And maybe you don’t know me as well as you think you do, because when I get stabbed in the back, I’m pulling out the knife and coming straight for you.”
‘Stabbed in the back’ seemed like a gross hyperbole to Harry. Two years and some months ago, he had come to Phil and his father’s agency in Fayetteville to seek supervision for field work so Harry could apply for his private eye license in Arkansas. Phil’s father, the agency’s founder, was in poor health, so Phil directly mentored Harry. No one knew how bad the father’s condition was at first, but he came to the office less and less frequently over Harry’s time there.
For the next two years, Harry commuted to Fayetteville to work at the Dugan Agency. They had a stable of investigators who came and went, but Harry always worked with Phil. Phil spent countless hours with Harry, explaining how to collect evidence and connect dots in an investigation. He took Harry on dozens of “ride-alongs” until Harry had a solid understanding of the workflow. Phil eventually let Harry take the lead on cases, even interviewing witnesses and dealing with clients. Finally, he also helped Harry prepare for the exam.
Phil seemed like a great guy. At least, at first. Harry was so appreciative of the mentoring that he became blind to Phil’s ugly side for quite a long time.
Harry saw Phil’s father decline, and Phil took a more active role in operating the agency’s day-to-day. Right away, Harry started suspecting Phil of embezzling money. The sheen of hero worship melted away, and Harry slowly realized the many ways Phil lied and manipulated and bent the world to his will.
Over the months, the circumstantial evidence piled up. Harry kept his mouth shut, but became increasingly disillusioned with Phil. When Harry passed the exam and received his license, he declined an opportunity to work full-time at the Dugan Agency. Phil did not take this refusal lightly. Harry had been civil and polite when choosing his words, but Phil flew off the handle and the meeting quickly escalated into a shouting match.
For weeks after, Harry debated reporting Phil and his embezzling ways. But he also felt he owed the man a debt, and despite the distasteful nature of how he ran his business, Harry couldn’t see himself dropping a dime. Harry never turned him in, and he never told Phil he knew. But Phil probably knew he knew, anyway.
Declining the job was strike one of their friendship. At the time, Harry detested the tension between them, but he didn’t know how to fix it.
Soon after, both Harry’s mom and Phil’s dad passed away within a few days of each other. Harry tried to reach out to Phil, thinking that they could use their common tragedy as kindling to repair their relationship. But while wallowing deep in his grief, Phil took this approach as an insult, and demanded Harry never show his face again. Strike two.
After that, Harry had heard some wild things about the goings on at Dugan now that Phil was running the show. Wild, hard-to-believe things about how the agency now operated.
And now, Harry stood before Phil, ready to hear the ump call strike three. Harry had messed with the bull, and he knew it. He looked down at Phil’s fists, already balled. Veins popping on his forearms.
“Phil, you’re not going to take a swing at me, right? I mean, we’re in public. There are kids over there.” Harry pointed at two preteens strolling along the opposite sidewalk, both of them with necks firmly craned downward to stare at screens in their hands. “Well, maybe those two won’t notice, but come on, Phil. You really want to do this right here?”
“You deserve it.”
“What happened to you? I wish you would talk to me so we could work this out. We used to see each other five days a week, sometimes more. We used to be actual friends, and then it all exploded, and I’m still not sure why.”
Phil flinched again, causing Harry to slink back. Harry now knew without a doubt that any further attempts to soothe the gangly beast wouldn’t work.
“Stay away from Sunrise. That’s our gig.”
The big guy retreated to his car and toss
ed Harry one last snarl before shutting the door.
22
Lightning struck just as Harry closed the front door of his house behind him. For once, he’d chosen to walk home, and the rain had waited until after he’d arrived at his destination. Lingering pain tugged at his midsection as he closed the door, although it was feeling better this evening than it had all day. He kept wondering if he should’ve taken a couple days to recuperate. On the one hand, refusing rest was something an action hero would do, so Harry liked that notion. But, on the other hand, that same refusal was also something an idiot would do. The jury was still out on where Harry would land on the action hero/idiot scale.
Now alone and in the house, he felt a measure of calm return that he hadn’t experienced since leaving the house this morning. Calm and quiet, two of his favorite things.
A run-in with Phil Dugan had left Harry with a residually raised heartbeat. Strange that someone who Harry used to work alongside on a daily basis could now seem so different. So horrifying. And Harry still couldn’t decide if Phil had undergone a massive change, or if Harry had failed to see the man’s true self all along. Probably a bit of both.
The private eye dropped his dinner on the kitchen counter and opened the fridge. A meager assortment of individual things looked back at him. A trio of Chinese food boxes sat in the back, but Harry didn’t want to think about how long they’d been there, observing their own passage of time. He snatched a grape soda and then carried his bag of takeout food down to the basement. Lights around the room flicked on, machines whirred as his basement office came to life.
He set his dinner down and tapped on the keyboard to wake his computer. As it stirred to life, Harry pictured the alley where he and Phil had engaged in their heated discussion earlier. Specifically, Harry needed to find CCTV footage of the last few seconds before Phil had made his sudden and terrifying appearance. Harry wasn’t sure, but he had to hope he could catch the fleeing hillbilly’s face on screen.
He brought up a satellite map view of the area, and he studied the rears of the buildings to hunt for cameras. There weren’t many. The Italian restaurant had one at the back, as did the shoe store. There were other surveillance cams at other businesses, but these two looked like the only ones with a proper angle.
He started with the Italian place, and couldn’t find any evidence the camera was networked. If the camera linked directly to a hard drive only, then no way would Harry access it from here. Or it could be a fake camera, put in the alley for show to ward off potential vagabonds and criminals.
The shoe store’s camera yielded better results, at least at first glance. Harry found a camera feed stored in the cloud, then he used a generic “skeleton key” password for that brand of camera. Five minutes of educated guessing later, Harry found his way into the online file storage for the last seven days of camera feed.
For a minute, he sat in silence, his eyes trailing across the screen. Guilt washed over him; Harry wasn’t supposed to do things like hack into a store’s security feed. His uneasy feeling abated somewhat when he told himself he would honestly only use powers like this for good. But as much as he tried to convince himself he was a “white hat” hacker, it didn’t feel right.
But he would do it anyway, because he needed to solve this case. He could sort out his feelings later.
Harry scrubbed along the timeline to a few hours ago, then watched a black-and-white version of himself exit the Motorway. A few seconds later, a figure zipped across the screen. Harry’s heart tightened when he saw it. Carefully, he scrubbed back fractions of a second. The camera was stationary, so Harry had caught the fleeing hillbilly on camera for only a handful of frames. Not even a full second.
Harry carefully keyed through each of the frames, hunting for one with a clear picture of the man’s face. He didn’t find anything close. Each frame was blurred from the motion, revealing only what Harry already knew: he’d been attacked by an adult Caucasian man of average height and weight.
“Crap,” he said, staring at a frozen frame that appeared to be worthless. Just a bunch of blurry shapes, like the way a toddler viewed the world.
Next, onto the evening’s work. He wheeled the whiteboard over to a spot next to his desk. The board had previously been the brain map for Harry’s next chapter of the Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Since Neva couldn’t make it this week, he’d probably have to cancel their gaming session. Also, he didn’t love his plan for the adventurers to cross the River of Torment. It seemed hokey, and he needed another crack at it.
Since his eraser was nowhere to be found, he took a napkin from his dinner and wiped the board clean. At the top, he wrote: NDCS (New Day Church of the Sinner).
Then he took a few steps back and stared at the block letters on the board. Sitting there by themselves, those four letters loomed large. This cult-y religion had to be at the heart of everything. Had to be.
Any minute now, an email with the results of Kemba Wood’s financial history and phone records would appear in Harry’s inbox. If Harry could link Kemba to Lukas definitively, then it would be a simple process of filling in the blanks.
Harry tabbed through his open computer apps to find the list of names he’d sourced of NDCS members. With a Control-P, he printed the list and taped it under the board. Then, those tiny names on a piece of paper didn’t seem old-school private-eye enough, so he pulled it down and wrote the names with marker instead.
He put asterisks next to the names of people who either moved to, or spent time in Arkansas.
On the right side of the board, he listed Kemba Wood and Ginnifer Applewhite. Harry didn’t consider Ginnifer an actual suspect at this point, but it felt better to add another name underneath Kemba’s. A small suspect list was either a good thing or a bad thing, and Harry could guess which side his list had landed on.
He glanced at his email program. No new messages.
Harry drew lines to link the names on the board to anything local he could find. One potential link kept coming up over and over again: four years ago, the NDCS had met in Eureka Springs. Not in an official conference capacity, as so many groups used this little mountain town. There was no sanctioned meetup. But several members of the NDCS rented rooms during the same time period, and one member reserved a series of small conference rooms during their stay.
An idea popped up in Harry’s head so big, he set down his dinner and wiped his hands on a napkin. What if he could find a connection between the religious cult and No-Name Holler? Something small, perhaps, like tying ownership of the cabin to a member of that group?
“It could work,” Harry said. If there were some sort of criminal element in Eureka Springs, then linking it to No-Name Holler seemed the most likely option.
But then, how did any of that tie to Kemba Wood?
It didn’t, as far as Harry knew. He had a lot of suspicions and half-baked theories, but few facts.
“Crap,” Harry said as he stared at his board. Despite all of his work, he had nothing. No murder weapon. No solid motive for Kemba. No link between any of the various elements surrounding the murder.
“Right where I started,” Harry said. Except he wasn’t there. He was worse off than that, and he had the bruised ribs to prove it.
As soon as the words left his mouth, his computer dinged. He looked over to see two emails sitting in his inbox: one from the convenience store woman, with a link to view their surveillance footage.
And the other was the complete phone and financial record history of Kemba Wood.
23
Harry sat back and blinked to readjust his glasses. Black numbers on a white screen didn’t usually bother him, but his eyes felt like he’d been staring at screens for days straight.
As he listened to rain pelt the outside of his mother’s house, Harry Boukadakis decided to review the convenience store surveillance footage first. He ran through the steps in the email to access the footage, then he searched for timecodes a few minutes before the robbery.
Harry scrubbed through another grainy, black-and-white video, like the useless footage from the alley where Harry had failed to pursue his attacker. He stopped when he noted hulking giant Kemba Wood enter. Harry queued four different feeds from various parts of the store.
Kemba entered, then he looked down at his pocket. Harry paused the video there. Why was he looking at his pocket? Wondering if he left his wallet back at the barbershop? Harry shifted the time marker back and forth, checking each angle to understand where Kemba’s gaze was with each movement.
Squinting, Harry clicked to advance a few frames, then he saw why Kemba had craned his neck. The rectangular outline of a phone became clear in his pants pocket.
Kemba opened a cooler door at the back and plucked a bottle, then he headed for the snacks. Again, he paused and looked down. This time, though, he took his phone out.
For a split second, Harry saw the phone’s screen, but it happened too fast to discern the name of the caller. Harry parsed through the feeds to find one over Kemba’s shoulder, then he zoomed in. Took a few seconds of back-and-forth scrubbing to find the exact right frame where he could see the screen.
“Boo Boo,” Harry said. That was the name of the person who kept repeatedly calling Kemba in the convenience store.
Harry sat back. “Boo Boo?”
He broke out the internet to give it a search, and when combined with “Kemba Wood,” it returned one result. During an interview with the Miami Herald about playing for the Dolphins, Kemba had made a reference to his sister as “Boo Boo.”
So, his sister had called him, which meant the convenience store venture had been mostly a waste of time. Harry gave himself a judgmental shake of the head as he worked his tired jaw back and forth to loosen it.
He moved on to the other emails, and he poured through Kemba’s financial records. The guy wasn’t kidding when he’d said he wasn’t rich any longer. He’d made the same bad investments and shortsighted choices that all young humans with disposable income would.