Harmony Black (26 page)

“You remember what I said, about living in Talbot Cove? That night we talked outside the motel?”

“That you’re moving on,” I said. “Saving up a nest egg, and figuring out what you want to do with your life when spring comes.”

There was something new in Cody’s eyes. The despair faded, replaced by calm confidence. The cowboy was back. Maybe a little older, a little wiser—the kind of wisdom that comes only from getting kicked in the teeth a few times—but he was back.

“I put on this badge because I wanted to help people. I think, knowing what I know, seeing what I’ve seen . . . ” He looked all around, taking in the sleepy suburban street. “I think my calling’s definitely elsewhere.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“Don’t know yet. I need to process this. Think it over. But now I know that monsters are real. And I know I wouldn’t be any kind of a man if I didn’t
do
something about it.”

I gave him my business card.

“When you decide,” I told him, “give me a call. Day or night.”

He took the card, read it over, and slipped it into his pocket. I looked back toward the cars. Jessie waited for me, making an effort to pretend she wasn’t watching us.

“One last thing,” Cody said, “before you go?”

“Sure, what—”

He put his hand on my shoulder and pulled me into a kiss. I lifted my chin, rising up on my toes to meet him, my body responding before my brain could catch up.

“Sorry,” he murmured as he pulled away slowly, not sounding sorry at all. “But if I hadn’t done that, I’d have kicked myself from one side of town to the other the second you left.”

“You don’t hear me complaining,” I told him, swallowing down the butterflies in my stomach. “Talk to you, Cody. Stay safe.”

I tried to ignore Jessie’s smirk as I walked back to join her. To her credit, she didn’t say a word.

“So how much of this is going in the final report?” I asked her.

She pretended to think about it as we got into the SUV.

“Oh, at
least
twenty percent,” she said. “Maybe even twenty-five. We can leave out everything about your sister, for starters. Better drop Barry and Cody out of the picture, too. Don’t want Linder sending anyone around to hassle them once we leave.”

“Thanks for that.”

“Hey,” she said, “we take care of our own.”

I looked over at her.

“Yeah? That mean I passed the audition?”

“Well, there’s still a few formalities, like your membership dues and the mandatory hazing, but I’d say you made the cut. Welcome to the Circus.”

I’d spent three years flying solo, working a case with nobody to talk to but the mirror. I’d thought I was fine with that. It wasn’t until now, with people I could trust at my side, that I understood how much I’d been missing.

A team? Sure. That suited me just fine.

We watched Main Street wake up as we cruised on by. People flipping
C
LOSED
signs to
O
PEN
, setting out window displays. Just another ordinary, average day.

A day without monsters.

“So,” Jessie said, “ready to say good-bye to Talbot Cove?”

“Yeah.” I leaned back and stared out the window. Taking one last look. “Yeah. I really am.”

FORTY-FOUR

W
e met up with April and Kevin back at the motel. April packed up, slipping her books into a battered suitcase, while Kevin huddled over his laptop.

“We just took down a two-hundred-year-old sorcerer,” Jessie said, shaking her head at the swooping dragon on his screen, “and
this
is how you celebrate. You really are hopeless, you know that, right?”

“
Working
, thank you very much,” he said. “One of my contacts is online, the one I had check out that Cold Spectrum thing for you.”

“That phrase Douglas Bredford mentioned?” April asked.

“He’s got nothing,” Jessie said, “because it means nothing. The ramblings of a very sad and self-loathing drunk.”

Still, she leaned over his shoulder just like I did, reading the tiny chat box.

DuLac: Encrypted voice. NOW.

Kevin shrugged. He ran a USB cable from the laptop to his cell phone, rattling out a string of commands in a second window.

“What’s up, man? Why voice?”

“Because,” burst a panicked, breathless man’s voice from the phone’s tinny speaker, “I’m not typing those fucking words again! What did you
do
to me, man?”

“Wait, what words?”

“
Cold Spectrum!
I barely even ran a surface scan. That’s all it took. I—I triggered something. No, it’s more like I
woke something up
. All of a sudden coded comm traffic starts lighting up the grid like an electrical storm. And none of it makes sense: there’s, like, a four-star general at the DoD swapping encrypted e-mails with an IRS auditor out in Wichita. Elements in all of the alphabet agencies are getting involved,
all of them
. And near as I can tell, the big question on their minds is:
Who wants to know about Cold Spectrum?
”

“Did you get clear?” Kevin asked.

“Yeah, I’m clear. As in I’m five states away and burned two fake IDs getting here, clear. Still not far enough. I’m mobile, man, gotta stay in the wind until this blows over. Whatever you’re involved in, just leave me the hell out of it, okay? There’s only one thing that involves this much back-channel cooperation in DC: heavy,
heavy
black-ops shit. Leave it alone, man. Just leave it alone.”

The line went dead.

Jessie stood there, tapping her chin with her index finger, staring at Kevin’s screen.

“Okay,” she said, “let’s go. We need to have another chat with Douglas Bredford.”

Kevin looked over his shoulder at her. “Uh, is that a good idea?”

“Nope. But we’re doing it anyway. Besides, as a patriotic citizen, I have serious issues with shadowy government conspiracies.”

“Jess, we
are
a shadowy govern—”

“Ones that aren’t
mine
,” she said. “God, do I really need to qualify that? Some things should be obvious.”

W
e rolled into Bredford’s sleepy little neck of the woods right around lunchtime. The narrow strip of gravel outside the Brew House sat empty, but the lights were on and I could hear the strains of a Conway Twitty song drifting out through the rickety screen door.

Douglas’s booth sat empty, too. I walked over to the bartender. He gave me a grunt of acknowledgment, not looking up from his crossword puzzle.

“Looking for Douglas Bredford,” I told him.

“So am I. He owes me for a twelve-dollar tab.”

“Any idea where I can find him?”

The bartender nodded toward the empty booth.

“Seven days out of seven, he’s sitting right there,” he said. “More predictable than my granddad’s pocket watch. Maybe he decided to go be miserable someplace else for once.”

“Know where he lives?”

The bartender looked up, wearing his irritation like a medal of honor.

“What am I, the yellow pages? Last I knew, he had a place at the Greenglade Trailer Park.” He pointed. “About four miles up the road, that way, on the left. Only thing but trees for ten miles. You’re blind if you miss it.”

He was right. There was no way we’d have missed the trailer park. Not with the conga line of fire trucks, police cars, and ambulances choking the central drive. Not with the plume of black smoke slowly wafting up into a cloudless blue sky.

I found a spot to squeeze the SUV in and killed the ignition. “Wait here,” Jessie said to April and Kevin. She jumped out with me.

Firefighters rolled their hoses up and took photos of debris, while cops worked the gathering crowd. Locals stood on tiptoes, craning their necks to see the wreckage. The trailer might have been comfortable once, even expensive. Now it was a blackened, crumpled husk of twisted metal, sitting in a pool of mud. The trailers to its left and right sported blackened sides and blown-out windows.

We made a beeline for a bearded man with a notebook, a camera, and a fire marshal’s badge clipped to his belt. I flashed my badge.

“FBI. Is this your scene?”

“For now. Damn, you guys work fast. Who called you out?”

“Nobody,” Jessie said. “We’re here to talk to a confidential informant. I hate to ask, but do you know who owned this trailer?”

He checked his notebook. My heart sank, even though I already knew what he’d say.

“Yep. Douglas Bredford. He’s not your CI, is he?”

“Afraid so. You recover his body?”

He gestured over to a stretcher. A body bag lay out on top, but judging from the bulges in the black vinyl, there wasn’t enough meat to make a Thanksgiving turkey inside.

“There are small parts of
a
body, but if you want positive ID, you’re going to have to wait. I think they’re trying to find enough teeth to run the dental records.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Explosion, but we’re still working on the source. As it stands, from the blast pattern and the smell, I’m thinking meth lab.”

We thanked him and walked back to the car in silence.

A woman stopped us on the far edge of the crowd. Fortysomething, with stringy brown hair and a worn-out Hello Kitty sweater. She clutched a long, tan envelope to her chest like it was made of gold. She didn’t say anything, not right away, but she didn’t move out of our way, either.

“Help you, ma’am?” Jessie asked her.

“I think . . . I think I’m supposed to give this to you.”

She handed Jessie the envelope.

“I didn’t open it,” she said quickly. “He made sure to tell me, over and over again, not to open it.”

“Who did?” I said.

“Dougie.” She shot a glance over her shoulder and leaned in close. “Yesterday he came to me and said . . . he said soon, something
big
might happen. He said I’d know it when I saw it. And he said . . . if it did, I needed to look for two lady FBI agents and give them that envelope. He gave me twenty bucks just to hold on to it for a few days. I thought he was crazy, or just drunk again, but . . . ”

She gestured toward the burned-out trailer. Jessie and I shared a look.

“I’m not in any trouble, am I?” she asked.

“No, ma’am,” I told her. “You did the right thing. Let’s just keep this between us, okay?”

She nodded, backing away slowly, disappearing into the crowd of onlookers. I followed Jessie a few trailers down, slipping around a quiet corner and out of sight. She tore the envelope open and slid the contents into her outstretched hand.

Photographs. Some black-and-white, some in color, even an old Polaroid. The Polaroid was a shot of Douglas Bredford in younger, more sober days, smiling with his arm around a pretty brunette in a sun hat. A scribble in black Sharpie on the back of the shot read, “Paris in New York.”

The next photo showed the same woman. Dead, on a mortician’s table, with a bullet hole between her sculpted eyebrows.

Everyone in the other photos was alive, though there wasn’t any rhyme or reason to them. A tall, dark-skinned man in a beanie walking out of a convenience store, shot from a car half a block away. An intense-looking young woman in a picture clipped from a newspaper, but without the story or its caption. We recognized only a single person, from the very last picture.

Linder, at the back of a group of suited men, striding down the steps of the Capitol Building together. A circle of red ink put a bull’s-eye around his face.

We got back in the SUV. Jessie handed the envelope back to April and Kevin. I brought them up to speed while they leafed through the pictures.

“Okay,” Jessie said, “as of now, we’ve got a little side project.”

“Maybe . . . ” Kevin said, “maybe we should just take these to Linder? I mean, his photograph is in here. He could be in danger.”

Jessie turned around in the passenger seat and stared at him over the headrest.

“I will slap the taste right out of your mouth,” she told him.

“What Jessie means is,” I said, “somebody just put a bomb in Douglas Bredford’s trailer, not long after he dropped a name that triggered government back-channel chatter all over the country. There’s no way that’s a coincidence.”

“It’s a hot potato,” April said, “and his dying act was to drop it square in our laps. Lovely.”

“Until we know exactly how Linder is involved, and what Cold Spectrum
is
, nobody says a word to him,” Jessie said.

April flipped through the pictures, one after the other, like a handful of puzzle pieces that just wouldn’t fit.

“It appears,” she said, “we’ve just become a conspiracy
inside
a conspiracy. Welcome aboard, Agent Black. Look on the bright side: at least you’ll never be bored.”

FORTY-FIVE

“
Never bored” was an understatement. The ink on our report to Linder hadn’t even dried before we got the next call to action. Vigilant had only so many field teams—three, Jessie believed, besides us—and there was plenty of work to go around, largely thanks to our jaunt to Detroit. Dr. Victoria Carnes was still on the run, and while Buck Wheeler had died in the plane crash, we still had his brothel in Los Angeles to follow up on. Then there was the case Jessie’s team had been pulled away from, the one where they lost a member. That, Jessie told me in private, was the top priority no matter
where
Linder officially sent us next.

It’s like Bredford said,
I thought.
Take one monster down, more flood in. And there are always more monsters.

But we did take one down, at least. Edwin Kite was in hell, where he belonged, and Talbot Cove could finally slumber in peace. Hard not to feel good about that.

I requested a couple of days off, made a brief stop in Chicago, and then I flew home. To Long Island Sound. The taxi dropped me off at the curb outside my mother’s house. She opened the door as I walked up the steps, my battered overnight suitcase rolling behind me.

She didn’t say a word. She just searched in my eyes for an answer. She looked as exhausted as I felt, the kind of exhaustion that comes from too little sleep and too many unanswered questions.

“She’s alive,” I said, and my mother pulled me into her arms.

She put on a kettle of hot cocoa, and I told her my story, told her Angie’s story. And she reached across the dining room table and squeezed my hand, and we cried for what we’d lost and we cried for what we’d found, and it was all right.

It was all right.

The closet in my old bedroom was for storage now, piled high with boxes and bags, things we’d taken when we’d moved from Talbot Cove. Baby clothes, a broken-down crib, my father’s old uniforms. Things we never needed but couldn’t throw away. Not until now. We cleaned it all out together, filling garbage bags with the detritus of the past and carrying it outside.

The job done, I gently shut the empty closet’s door.

Then I cleaned off the dresser by the door and set out a single decoration: the little cylinder of clay that Halima had made for me when I’d visited her on my way home. My fingers lightly played across its surface, stroking the beacon to life.

In an empty wall socket down near the floor, I plugged in a night-light. It glowed, cool and blue, when I clicked it on. I stood back up, and my mother stood beside me.

“For you, Angie,” I said to the closet door. “For when you’re ready to come home. We’ll always leave a light on. We promise.”

Douglas Bredford was right, and he was wrong.

There were always more monsters.

There was always more hope, too.