The Harbinger PI Box Set

by Adam J. Wright

  A picture that looked like it had been taken from a high school yearbook appeared on the screen. It showed a dark-haired young woman smiling at the camera. The reporter’s voice said, “Leah Carlyle is already being dubbed a Final Girl by the media, just like Mallory Bronson, the only survivor of the Bloody Summer Night Massacre five years ago. Whether tonight’s atrocity was carried out by the same person, a man who referred to himself only as Mister Scary, remains to be seen.”

  I hit the mute button and said to Mallory, “What the hell?”

  “He’s done it again,” she said. “He’s created another final girl.”

  9

  I woke up the following morning with a hangover. The brightness of the morning sun beating through the window made me squint and hold my hand up to shield my eyes. It was half past nine. Felicity would be at the office already but she hadn’t called me to wake me.

  I sat up in bed and the movement sent spikes of pain through my skull. How the hell had I ended up with a hangover when I hadn’t had all that much to drink?

  Walking groggily into the bathroom, I got Tylenol from the cabinet and washed down two pills with water from the sink tap. I caught a reflection of myself in the mirrored cabinet door. I looked like shit.

  I took a hot shower while I waited for the Tylenol to kick in and then dressed slowly, trying not to move my throbbing head too much, in a black T-shirt and blue jeans. It wasn’t until I got downstairs that I remembered I was working with Sheriff Cantrell today. Great. That was all I needed.

  When I got downstairs and threw out the pizza box and beer bottles, I realized that I’d had more to drink than I’d thought.

  Mallory and I had watched the news for a while and tried to guess what it might mean that Mister Scary had duplicated the Bloody Summer Night Massacre and created a second final girl. We couldn’t come up with any answers that made sense but when Mallory hung up, she sounded a little brighter.

  I think talking about it had been good for her and now she had picked up Mister Scary’s trail again. Maybe this new killing would give her a clue that would lead her to him. I’d told her to call or visit anytime and we’d ended the call with our friendship on a firmer footing than it had been when she’d left here the other night.

  After the conversation with Mallory, I’d had a couple more beers and watched the news a while longer, then had a couple more beers and thought about the kiss I’d shared with Felicity, then finally watched old episodes of Castle and had a couple more beers until I was too tired to keep my eyes open and I staggered up to bed.

  My hangover didn’t seem so implausible any longer.

  I went up to the spare bedroom where I kept magical items and picked out the ones I might need today. A couple of faerie stones, an enchanted dagger, and a couple of potions that might help me find out exactly what happened to Deirdre Summers after she discarded her clothes on the shore of Dearmont Lake.

  I stuffed everything into a black backpack and went downstairs, grabbing a pair of shades from the table by the front door before going out into the bright morning light. The Caprice roared to life when I turned the key and I winced when my head pounded in response.

  I got to the station at quarter past ten and climbed gingerly out of the Caprice. Before I had a chance to cross the parking lot and go inside, I heard the sheriff’s voice. “Harbinger, you’re late.”

  I looked over to where he stood, leaning against his cruiser with a disgusted look on his face as he watched me approach. He was wearing shades too but I guessed it wasn’t because his head was about to explode like mine was.

  “What the hell happened to you?” he asked, looking me up and down.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Nice day, huh?”

  He smiled humorlessly. “You’ve been drinking, Harbinger. Good thing I’m driving. Now get in.” He opened the door and somehow got his considerable bulk through the gap and into the car. It wasn’t that he was obese, although he certainly wasn’t slim, but he had a huge frame that was packed out with muscle and fat like a bear. His uniforms were definitely custom-made and the size on the labels probably said “Grizzly”.

  I got into the passenger seat and put the backpack by my feet. There was a slight odor of sweat and corn chips in the car. Cantrell started the engine and the radio began playing country music. I cracked my window a little and he said, “Don’t do that, we have air.” He dialed it up and a cold blast blew into my face from the vent. At least I couldn’t smell the corn chips anymore; now I could just smell dust.

  As Cantrell pulled out of the parking lot and joined the traffic heading south out of town, I glanced out of the window at the Caprice, wishing I’d agreed to meet the sheriff at the lake and taken my own car. June and Earl’s honeymoon car was way more preferable than being driven around in a police cruiser by a grizzly bear. That put a mental image in my head and I smiled.

  “What are you grinning about?” Cantrell asked gruffly.

  I looked over at him. “Are you the thought police now?”

  “Don’t push it, Harbinger.”

  I turned my attention to the road ahead and the throbbing in my brain.

  “You have a party last night?” he asked.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You sure look like you did.”

  “I’m fine.” I wanted him to stop talking. His voice and the country music coming out of the radio were making my headache worse.

  He was quiet for a couple of seconds but then he ruined it by nodding to the backpack at my feet and asking, “What’s in the bag?’

  “Some things that may help us find out what happened to Deirdre Summers.”

  “Magical stuff?” Despite the fact that he’d seen magically-animated skeletons walking down Main Street, he sounded incredulous.

  “Yeah, that’s what I usually use in my line of work. Preternatural investigators and magical items sort of go together.”

  “Oh, I know all about preternatural investigators,” he said ominously.

  I kept quiet. I didn’t want this conversation to turn into a “preternatural investigators killed my wife” rant.

  But Cantrell was persistent. “You know Sherry Westlake?”

  “I’ve heard the name,” I said, glad that the shades were hiding my eyes. I had no doubt that a seasoned sheriff like Cantrell could spot a lie a mile away.

  “I’m sure you know her,” he said. “She’s in the same line of work as you. Even had the same office. You all work for the same parent company, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Well, I mean that there are preternatural investigators in most towns and cities. Now, I’m sure all those people didn’t just get it in their heads one day to put up a shingle and go vampire hunting. It’s a franchise, right? Like Pizza Hut or McDonalds.”

  He was right but the Society of Shadows was a secret society and I wasn’t about to blow its cover. “If we were a franchise, don’t you think we’d have matching uniforms or something?”

  He chuckled. “Okay, if that’s the way you want to play it, Harbinger, that’s fine by me. I was just making pleasantries and talking to you about the woman who worked in Dearmont before you, that’s all. Thought you might be interested. Unless you know already, of course.”

  “I don’t know Sherry Westlake,” I said truthfully. “I worked in Chicago before I came here. I didn’t know anyone in the area when I arrived.”

  He nodded and pursed his lips, thinking quietly for a minute. “So how did you go from Chicago to here? Sounds like you got your ass kicked over something or other.”

  “Long story,” I said.

  We drove past Earl’s Autos and Cantrell turned off the highway, guiding the cruiser along the road that led to the lake. He was quiet now, for a change. When we got to the parking lot where Felicity and I had sat in the Caprice and gone over the Deirdre Summers case file, Cantrell killed the engine and looked over at me.

  “You definitely know about Sherry Westlake, and I don�
�t just mean you’ve heard her name in conversation somewhere,” he said.

  I frowned at him, glad once again for the protection of the shades. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because you never asked me what happened to her.” He opened his door and got out.

  I followed, cursing my hangover for taking away my common sense. Of course, when Cantrell told me that Westlake worked in my office before me, the natural thing for me to do would be to ask him why she left, what happened to her. The only reason not to ask him would be if I already knew about the church massacre and that Sherry was a suspect.

  Cantrell stood looking out over the water, just as he had done in the photo taken three years ago, just after Deirdre Summers’ disappearance. I wondered how much it rankled him that he hadn’t been able to solve the mystery of the missing woman, particularly as she’d been a local and Cantrell probably saw her family in town every now and then.

  He’d told me that he wanted to put the case to rest for the sake of Deirdre’s daughter Natalie but maybe he also wanted to alleviate some of the guilt he felt at not being able to give the Summers family some closure.

  I knew as well as anyone that sometimes cases remained unsolved. Leads vanished, witnesses died, or demons appeared and ate everyone involved. That was just the way it went and even though I didn’t like John Cantrell, I didn’t think he should blame himself for not solving Deirdre’s disappearance, especially if there was a supernatural element involved. He couldn’t be expected to account for that.

  I, on the other hand, could. “Sheriff, did you bring the original drawings?” I asked him.

  He turned to face me and nodded. “They’re in the trunk.”

  I popped the trunk and found the drawings that Deirdre had pinned to her wall three years ago in a clear plastic folder. I put them into the backpack with the other stuff. “Okay, show me where her clothes were found,” I said.

  He locked the car and pointed to a trail that led from the parking lot into the trees by the lake. “It’s this way.”

  I followed him, slinging the backpack over my shoulder. When we were on the overgrown trail beneath the trees, Cantrell said, “We have no idea why Deirdre came here that night. Her car was found in the parking lot, locked up as if she expected to return to it. That’s one of the reasons that the suicide theory doesn’t sit right with me. If she knew she wasn’t coming back to her car, why lock it?”

  “Maybe just out of habit,” I offered.

  He shrugged his big shoulders. “What do you make of those drawings?”

  “It could be that she saw something at the lake one day and became obsessed with it,” I said. “People who see things they can’t explain sometimes develop an obsession with them. Did she ever mention seeing a monster?”

  “Not as far as I know,” he said. “When we interviewed Natalie, she said her mother had been acting a little strange but she couldn’t explain the drawings on the wall.”

  We walked a little farther and then Cantrell stopped. “Here, this is the place.” He pointed to the water’s edge. “Her clothes were on those rocks there.”

  I stepped off the trail and went down to the edge of the lake. The water was calm, lapping against the rocks rhythmically. There was a smell of fish and weeds in the air.

  I opened the backpack. Cantrell stood watching me from the trail. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  “Find out what really happened here,” I said, removing the potion vials from the pack and putting them on the ground. “If you want to see too, you’re going to need to drink one of these. You’ll also have to look through the hole in this stone.” I held up one of the faerie stones.

  “What the hell kind of mumbo jumbo is this, Harbinger? I’m not drinking anything and I sure as hell am not looking through some damn stone. You trying to make a fool of me?”

  I sighed and went up to him. “I thought you brought me on this case because of my special skills. You said you thought there might be a preternatural cause of death.”

  He nodded. “Yes, I did, but…”

  “If we want to find a preternatural cause, we have to use preternatural means to do so,” I told him. “Why did you invite me along? Did you think I was just going to get out a magnifying glass and look for clues?”

  “No, of course not. But this is weird.”

  “I haven’t even begun yet,” I said.

  He sighed and put his hands on his hips, saying nothing.

  “Do you want to solve this case?” I asked him.

  “You know I do.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not so sure. I thought it was strange that you hired me to work with you, especially after the zombie incident, which you blame me for. I think the Deirdre Summers case might just be a ruse to get closer to me and find out what I know about the subject you’re really interested in: Sherry Westlake.”

  “No, that isn’t right. I want to solve this case for Deirdre’s daughter. Don’t you dare question my motives, Harbinger.”

  “So shall I begin?” I said.

  He nodded, determined to prove to me that he really wanted to solve this case. “Yes, do whatever it is you do.”

  “Are you going to drink the potion or not?”

  He looked unsure about that. “I don’t know. What’s in it and why do I need to drink it?”

  “Just herbs, water, and alcohol.”

  “Alcohol?” He eyed the vial suspiciously.

  I rolled my eyes. “There’s just a little bourbon in it. It’s an old recipe that’s going to let us talk to the trees.”

  He removed his shades and narrowed his eyes at me. “This is crazy.”

  “No, it really isn’t. I’m going to use Deirdre’s drawings to question the trees, kind of like when the police show photos to people on the street and ask, “Have you seen this man?” This is the same thing, except we’re going to ask the trees if they’ve seen this monster.” I held up the drawing of the lake monster.

  “He’s going to question the trees,” Cantrell murmured to himself in disbelief.

  “And the plants,” I said, looking around at the undergrowth. “The ones that were here three years ago, anyway.”

  “This is crazy, Harbinger. You’re crazy. I’m not playing along with this charade of yours.”

  I sighed. “Fine. I’ll do it and I’ll tell you what I see when I come back.”

  He frowned. “Come back from where?”

  “Well, believe it or not, trees and plants don’t speak English. The potion induces a vision state that lets me see what they show me. It’ll be images and sounds, impressions left from when Deirdre was here. As well as the potion, I need a faerie stone to see the images. My magical tattoos aren’t able to handle this.”

  Cantrell stood with his hands on his hips, his face looking up to the sky as if he were asking a higher power how he had managed to get involved in this craziness. After a few seconds, he looked at me with a resigned look in his eyes. “Okay, what do we need to do?”

  “Come and sit over here with me by the water’s edge.” I put Deirdre’s drawings on the ground, placing small rocks on them so they wouldn’t blow away in the summer breeze.

  Cantrell sat down next to me and I handed him a faerie stone. He looked through the hole at the surrounding trees, as if expecting to see something that hadn’t been there before.”

  “It won’t work yet,” I told him. “I need to say a few words and then we need to drink the potions. When I’ve done that, it takes a little time for the visions to begin. Use your left eye to look through the stone.”

  He switched eyes and glanced around.

  “We need to be patient,” I told him. “Trees aren’t exactly in a hurry to go anywhere so they’ll take their time.”

  He shook his head dismissively. “Harbinger, you should be in a psych evaluation ward, not living among sane people.”

  Cantrell was putting on a good show about not believing, but I could sense a lack of confidence in his voice. He was beginning to doubt
his probably long-held belief that there was no reality beyond what you could see and touch in day-to-day life.

  That belief had been eroded slightly by the appearance of the walking dead. What he saw once he took the potion and used the faerie stone was probably going to blow his mind.

  I usually tried to protect skeptics from learning about the preternatural world, but in the case of Sheriff Cantrell, I would make an exception. In his job, knowing that there were more dangers in the world than just humans might save his life someday.

  It would certainly make him a better sheriff because he’d look at every case that came across his desk from more angles, some of them outside the realm of mundane thinking.

  I looked up at the trees and recited a short incantation that my friend Jim Walker had taught me when I’d been working with him in Canada. The words were so old that their origin was unknown but the incantation had been known in the Americas before any white man had ever set foot on the shore.

  “Drink the potion,” I told Cantrell as I popped the cap off my vial and downed the contents. It tasted bitter at first and then warm as the bourbon hit my throat. Cantrell drank his and put the empty vial on the ground.

  He lifted the faerie stone to his eye and peered at the trees like a child who had just received a set of binoculars as a gift and was eager to try them out.

  “Not yet,” I whispered.

  He sighed loudly. “You said we had to look through the stones.”

  “We do, but it isn’t time yet.”

  “So how do we know when it’s time?” His voice had dropped to a whisper to match mine.

  “We’ll know. For now, we wait.”

  The potion was beginning to take effect. My head, which had been pounding, now felt light and warm. The herbs suspended in the bourbon included hallucinogens and they were starting to kick in.