Hope's Peak (Harper and Lane #1)(41)

“Yeah?” he spits into the receiver.

“Lester . . . it’s Ceeli.”

“Feeli?” he asks, frowning.

She’s crying. “He’s coming for you, Lester. Mack knows. He’s coming up there. He knows everythin’. You’ve gotta—”

Lester slams the phone back in its cradle and heads for his bedroom.



Mack stops the car, looks up at the house on the hill. It reminds him of the summer night back when he was a teen, taking Christine Fogelhorn to the Hope’s Peak Cinema to see a midnight screening of Psycho. She worked at the diner and he’d been chatting her up for weeks, working his way toward asking her out. To his surprise she agreed.

They made out during the film, and he only caught glimpses of the movie in between getting his hand up her shirt, but he remembers the house. The weird, twisted way it seemed to jut from the landscape. As if the earth had spewed it out as something unwholesome.

Lester Simmons’s place is like that.

Mack goes to the trunk and retrieves the metal baseball bat he keeps there in case he finds himself in an unfavorable situation. He locks the car, wipes his nose on the back of his hand, and catches a glimpse of his knuckles as he does—the skin broken, fresh blood in the cracks. He wonders how Ceeli’s face looks. He wonders how he’ll explain it away if she calls the cops, and realizes he doesn’t give a shit.

There’s only one thing on his mind. Getting to Lester and giving him a good beating. Maybe smashing his balls so hard with the bat they swell and the doctors have to take them off.

Lester’s old truck is parked out front. He has all sorts of junk covering the backseat, but the front is clear. Mack goes to the house and is about to ring the doorbell when a thought occurs to him: Why announce yourself? Go in the back. Surprise the bastard.

Mack unlatches a gate and edges around the side of the house, holding the bat away from himself so that he can swing it at a moment’s notice. The backyard is a wild, overgrown tangle. There are rusted trash cans to his right, a similarly rusted set of swings to his left.

Must be from when the ugly little freak was a kid.

Ahead of him, the long, dry grass grows haphazardly. Crickets chirp all around him. The back of the yard is uneven; there is an old shed there, half rotten, its door open. Mack approaches it, wondering if Lester is in there. He holds the bat at the ready and peers around the open doorway. The dusty sunlight falls on one side of the shed. The wall in front of him is covered in newspaper clippings pasted to the wood. It has peeled, faded, and rotted away in places. Polaroids tacked to the wood among the clippings show black girls asleep. Mack cocks his head to one side, walking into the shed to get a better look. He pulls one of the Polaroids free. It’s pretty sun faded, but he can make out the girl’s face.

She isn’t asleep. She’s dead.

“What the—”

A creak behind him. Mack spins around. A tall, gangly man stands in the doorway wearing only his shorts. His head is covered in a white sheet. There is a brown leather belt around his neck, holding the sheet tight. The man looks out through two warped eyeholes, every breath sucking the material in and out, in and out.

Mack hesitates.

That’s all it takes.



Why do I feel like a little kid who’s been sent to the principal’s office?

“Okay. Let’s go over this again,” Morelli says, rubbing his temple. The man looks tired, drained. Harper feels guilty piling more pressure on him. “From the top.”

Stu leans forward. At some point, Karen must have smashed him in the face—he has a healthy shiner coming up, making his right eye swell. “Captain, I broke up with Karen, filed for divorce. It was all aboveboard. There was no affair.”

“And you, Jane? You’ve been seeing Raley since then?”

“A while after, yeah,” Harper says. “And we’re not really seeing each other, sir.”

Stu gives her a look that says: Are you kidding me?

Morelli frowns. “Then just what are you two?”

“I don’t know, sir,” Harper says.

“Well, you’d better decide. I can’t have whatever is going on between the pair of you getting brought into this office. Especially now, with—”

Kapersky doesn’t knock on the captain’s door; she just throws it open. “Captain, you need to see this,” she says, bounding over to the television.

“What the hell, Kapersky? We’re in the middle of something here!”

The TV comes on, showing the front of the police station. The reporters are talking to a woman with blonde hair. She is sobbing into the camera, pouring her heart out. It’s Karen.

Harper looks at Stu. He has his head in his hands, as if he’s about to break.

“I don’t believe this!” Morelli yells. Kapersky hurries from the office, closing the door behind her. The captain glares at Stu. “Hold your fucking head up! I knew I should’ve booked that crazy bitch. But out of deference to you, I cut her loose.”

“Sir—”

Morelli groans, pacing back and forth in the narrow space behind his desk. “Shit! This is just what I need. Something else for these bloodsuckers to latch on to.”

Harper looks at the TV, feels her heart sink at the sight of Stu’s ex.

The captain shakes his head wearily, looking all the more as if he has the weight of the world resting upon his shoulders. “This bullshit with your ex can’t be seen to be getting in the way of this investigation. So, as of now, Raley, I don’t want you within shouting distance of this case. I can’t have you in the public eye, not like this. For all intents and purposes, you’re suspended with pay until this has passed. As for you, Harper, I want you to take a few days off. Cool the fuck down. The investigation comes first, Detectives, not your love life.”