Harmony Black (2 page)

TWO

“
Her name is Helen Gunderson,” Linder said, nodding at the woman in the photo. Her face twisted in mad loathing as she clutched the bundled infant in her arms. The picture was grainy, but I could still make out the tears of blood weeping from her eyes.

“That’s not Helen Gunderson,” I whispered. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, couldn’t take my eyes from the photograph. I was drowning on dry land. Lungs burning, muscles clenched.

“You know that, and I know that, but the real Helen is sitting in a jail cell right now. She’s being charged in the abduction of her own child. Considering the ‘evidence’ from the nanny cam, she
will
be prosecuted for it—along with a murder charge, if we can’t recover the infant.”

“Where did it happen?”

“Talbot Cove, Michigan,” he said. “Less than a mile from—”

I locked eyes with him. “How many?”

“Just one victim. So far.”

“There will be others.”

He nodded. “I know. And soon. Clock’s ticking. You’re the only operative alive who’s had personal contact with H. E. 17.”

I took a deep breath. Unclenched my hands from the arms of my chair. Straightened my back.

“Call it what it is, Linder,” I said, shutting the folder and sliding it toward him. “It’s the fucking Bogeyman.”

I was six years old.

It’s funny. I can remember everything about that night, except why I’d gotten out of bed in the first place. I padded out of my room in my footie pajamas, the shag-carpeted hallway seeming to stretch for a thousand miles in the dark. A tiny night-light cast the striped wallpaper in a warm, soft glow.

There was another glow, too, seeping out from a crack in the doorway up ahead. My sister’s bedroom.

I heard whispering as I crept closer. A sibilant, singsong lullaby, but I couldn’t make out any of the words. The door creaked, just a little, as I pushed it open and peeked inside.

My mother stood over Angie’s crib, head bowed, cradling my baby sister in her arms. The dangling mobile over the crib turned slowly, casting strange, long shadows across the nursery walls. As I walked closer, I heard heavy footsteps coming down the hall behind me.
Dad,
I thought.
Angie woke everybody up again.
She’d been sick for a few days, sick enough for at least one frantic late-night drive to the ER.

“Mom?” I said. “Can I hold her?”

The light caught my mother’s face as she turned toward me. She’d been crying, I thought at first. Then, taking a step closer, I realized they weren’t tears. Her eyes were leaking blood. Two little trickles of crimson, dripping down her sallow cheeks.

“You, too,” she whispered, her voice a hoarse rasp as she held her hand out to me. “You come, too. Come to Mama.”

“Harmony?” said the sleepy voice behind me. “Are you awa—”

The voice stopped dead. I slowly turned around. My mother stood in the bedroom doorway, her face a mask of frozen horror as she stared at the impostor clutching her infant daughter.

Linder said something. Jolted from my memories, I had to ask him to repeat himself.

“You won’t be going in alone,” he repeated, sliding a sheaf of papers from his briefcase. “Like I said, there’s a team on the ground already. This is a kidnapping—a federal crime, which gives us the perfect excuse to involve FBI assets.”

“Not me, though,” I said. “I’m still attached to the Seattle field office. I was able to follow the Carmichael case to Vegas only because it started on my home turf.”

Linder rapped his knuckles on the paperwork.

“Not anymore. As of one hour ago, you’ve been reassigned to CIRG. The Critical Incident Response Group gives tactical and intelligence support wherever and whenever it’s needed, which means I can drop you right into the hot zone. Officially, you report to SAC Walburgh of the Crisis Management Unit.”

“And this Walburgh is a friendly?” I asked.

“She doesn’t exist. You can’t get friendlier than that.”

“I’ve always worked alone before,” I said.

Linder shook his head. “I’m not taking any chances. This thing’s been dormant for thirty years. We miss our shot, it could be another thirty before it comes back again. I’m putting our best team on it, cell designation Circus. You’re there to provide personal insight and occult support. They . . . recently lost a key member, so you’ll be filling a gap.”

“Circus?” I arched an eyebrow at him.

He shrugged. “They get results. Pack up and roll out: a plane ticket’s waiting for you at JFK. I’ll send the itinerary to your phone.”

He locked his briefcase and stood to go.

“Keep me in the loop,” he said. Then he was gone, walking out the door and leaving me alone with the past.

My whole body felt numb, but I pushed myself out of the chair and trudged upstairs to the guest room. Vacation was over. I traded my sandals for polished black shoes; my T-shirt and jeans for a crisp white blouse, black suit jacket and slacks, and a black necktie.

My mother waited for me down in the parlor. She sat in the gloom beside a drawn window shade, staring at nothing at all. One hand idly stroked the fat, purring Maine coon in her lap, but her attention was a million miles away.

“You know,” I said, standing at the edge of the room.

“Grizabella,” she said, nodding at the cat. “She hears everything.”

“I don’t want you to get your hopes up. Even if I can stop this thing, it doesn’t mean we’ll get Angie back. There might not . . . be anything to
get
back.”

“But you’ll try.”

“I’ll try,” I told her.

I went back upstairs and packed my rolling suitcase, the home I’d been living out of for longer than I cared to remember. I was still paying rent on a shoe-box apartment in Seattle, but at this point it was just a place to keep my extra stuff. The packing went quickly, almost mindlessly, the preflight checklists a drill hammered into me by repetition. Toothpaste, toothbrush, hairbrush, check.

“Take this with you,” my mother said from the doorway. She held out a tiny worn-out teddy bear with tan fur and stitched eyes, just a little taller than a baseball. I frowned at it. It looked familiar.

“You don’t remember,” she said. “He used to be yours. He chased away bad dreams, you used to say. The day we brought your little sister home from the hospital, you decided she should have someone to watch over her while she slept. He was . . . in her crib that night.”

I took the bear and slipped it into my suitcase.

She pulled me into a hug, her breath hot against my shoulder.

“Your father would be so proud of you right now,” she whispered.

“I do my best,” I said, “but I can always do better.”

She smiled sadly as she pulled away, holding me at arm’s length, looking me over.

“That’s what he used to say, too. All right. Get out there, Special Agent Black. Give ’em hell.”

One last hug and I was gone, bound for another plane and another nightmare.

T
wo hours in the air—half of it with a kid drum-kicking the back of my seat—and I touched down at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. From there it was just a half-hour taxi ride to 477 Michigan Avenue. I spent most of the trip with my phone in my face, memorizing the details Linder sent me.

The Patrick V. McNamara Federal Building rose up from the Detroit skyline like a clenched fist of concrete. I waited in line at the security checkpoint just inside the front doors. Eventually I made it to the front desk, flashed my badge and credentials, then took an elevator up to the FBI offices on 26, where I had to do it all over again.

I almost cracked a smile. If I squinted a little and didn’t look out the window, I could imagine I was back at my old field office in Seattle. Same slate-gray cloth cubicles, same rows of identical government-issue computers and desk phones, same information security flyer taped up over the same water cooler.

Once they’d checked my bona fides, the receptionist printed off a visitor’s badge and passed it through a hot laminator before handing it over to me.

“Here you go, and”—she paused, glancing down at a visitor’s log—“Special Agent Temple and her consultants are already here. They’re waiting in conference room two—just go right up this hall, take a left at the end, and it’s the first door you’ll see.”

Consultants?
I hadn’t been expecting that, but the way my day had gone so far, I shouldn’t have been surprised about anything. I snapped the visitor’s badge to a lanyard and put it on, bracing myself as I walked up the hallway. I came to the conference-room door and gave what I hoped sounded like a confident knock.

It opened a few inches. The woman on the other side was wiry, with deep-brown skin and black hair pulled tight in a frizzy bun. What struck me, though, were her eyes: they were too blue to be real, almost turquoise.

“
You
aren’t an extra-large pepperoni pizza,” she said.

“Uh, no. No, I’m not.”

“Then you must be the witch we ordered. C’mon in!”

She shut the door behind me, grabbed my hand, and gave it a pump. “Jessie Temple.”

“Harmony Black.”

“We know. Linder told us you were coming. You were running that Enclave Resort operation in Vegas, right? Heard they had to scoop Lauren Carmichael off the sidewalk with a spatula. Your work? Very flashy.”

“Not entirely,” I said, wincing. “It’s a long story.”

“And we don’t have time for it,” said an older woman in a wheelchair sitting at the far end of an oval conference table. Her aged hands rested regally on the varnished beech wood, flanked by a cup of coffee and a pad of paper filled with neat, prim handwriting.

“True,” Jessie said. “Harmony, this is Dr. April Cassidy. Auntie April was one of the original BAU pioneers—”

“Behavioral Science Investigative Support Unit, at the time,” April said, a faint Irish accent lilting on the edges of her words. “Let’s be thankful for brevity, hmm?”

“She pretty much has an encyclopedic understanding of freaks, monsters, fiends, and politicians.”

“Dr. Cassidy,” I said, the name ringing a four-alarm bell. “I’ve read your work! I studied your PhD dissertation when I was at Quantico. It was brilliant, years ahead of its time.”

“Thank you, dear, and please, call me April.” She shot a steely look at Jessie. “
Not
Auntie April. I regrettably left the Bureau quite some time ago—taking an ax to the lower vertebrae tends to limit your prospects for career advancement. I’ve been in private practice ever since, but Jessie was kind enough to bring me on as a consultant.”

“Last but not least,” Jessie said, walking around the table, “meet Kevin Finn, which is not his original name.”

The teenager on the other side of the table, a string bean in a World of Warcraft T-shirt, looked up from his laptop and raised his hand in greeting. “Hey.”

“Not his original name?” I asked.

Jessie clamped her hand on Kevin’s shoulder. “At the tender age of seventeen, Mr. Finn learned a valuable lesson: if you’re going to hack into a stranger’s bank account, make sure it doesn’t belong to a high-ranking member of the Gambino family.”

“I ended up in WitSec,” Kevin said, looking sheepish. “Jessie pulled me out and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I mean, it was either join her team or work in a doughnut shop in Albuquerque for the rest of my life.”