Chapter 15
The kid who had snapped up a copy of an album that Harley Glad wanted to buy had been brought in, and considering that he looked about as old as his own daughter was, Chase wondered if they shouldn’t bring a responsible adult along into the interview room.
“Are you kidding me?” said his colleague, Marva Prink. “He’s eighteen, so there’s absolutely no need to bring in his parents. If he even has parents. I mean, I would never allow my kid to listen to this garbage.”
“Oh, so you know this band, do you?” asked Chase. He had to admit he’d never heard of Turbo Heartthrob. Then again, his tastes leaned more toward country and blues than whatever musical genre this German band belonged to. Pop? Metal? EDM? Hard to tell.
“Sure,” said Marva tolerantly. “They’re an electronicore band out of Germany. Pretty popular over there, too.”
“But not your taste?”
“Not my taste,” she said, and made a face as if she had stepped into dog doodoo.
“Okay, let’s do this,” he said with a sigh.
Marva clapped him on the back. “Very soon now, you’ll be sitting in these interviews with Odelia by your side, boss.”
“I hope so,” he said. He couldn’t deny that the thought of his wife going through police academy training made him nervous—not only for her sake, but for his own as well.
He would much rather have had Alec simply hand her a badge and be done with it.
After all, she had learned so much on the job over the past couple of years that he couldn’t see why she needed formal training at all.
It was probably little more than a box-ticking exercise—some administrative requirement that had to be satisfied.
“We all have to go through it,” the chief had said when he brought up the point. “No exceptions.”
His meaning was clear: even though Odelia was his niece, she wouldn’t receive any special favors or privileges. Every officer on his team had graduated from the police academy, and Odelia would be no exception.
“How do you want to do this?” asked Marva, who had stepped in as Chase’s partner when Odelia had proved unavailable.
“No idea,” he confessed. “Mostly, I just like to go with my gut.” He glanced over at the kid, who was seated at the table and looked perfectly at ease. “And my gut tells me that this is going to be a walkover.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure, boss. These Turbo Heartthrob fans are tough. Real tough.”
Turned out that she was right. As he stared at the kid, the kid stared right back at him. No sense of fear at all, or feeling intimidated at being brought there, into a police station interview room.
“So you met Harley Glad at the mall, right?” he asked, figuring that he should start with some softball questions.
“That’s correct, detective,” said the kid, whose name was Arne Barkby, according to the file. “Though I wouldn’t say I met him. More like we had an encounter.”
“You encountered Harley Glad in a music store?”
“I did,” the kid said agreeably.
“Where you proceeded to get into some kind of tussle over a music album? Or CD?”
“It was the special edition of the latest release of the band Turbo Heartthrob,” said the kid.
“Rare edition. Very rare indeed. And since it was the last one in the store, I felt I had to have it. Unfortunately, Harley felt the same way, and so there was some discussion. Until I made it clear that I had gotten there first, and Harley was quick to concede that fact.”
“So you walked out of the store with the CD that Harley wanted to buy,” said Marva. “And how did he feel about that?”
“Sad, I’m guessing,” said Arne. He smiled. “Us fans all wanted this special edition. But only a handful have been made, and of that handful, very few have made it into record stores here in the States. So it was a real coup that I managed to lay my hands on one.”
“Did you see Harley Glad after you met him in the record store?” asked Chase, as he directed a penetrating look at the kid. This was the moment of truth.
“What do you mean?” asked the kid, still smiling politely. He had folded his hands on the table and looked perfectly at ease. He might have been sitting at his kitchen table and not being grilled by two police detectives in connection with a violent crime.
“Just answer the question, Mr. Barkby,” Marva advised.
“No, I didn’t meet Harley Glad after our encounter at the store,” said Arne.
“I had never met him before, and I never met him after. Why? What is this all about?” For the first time, he displayed a sense of curiosity.
“Has Harley made a complaint about me? I was there first, you know. I got that special edition fanbox fair and square. And if he claims otherwise, all you have to do is check the CCTV footage from the store.”
“We have,” Chase assured the kid. He lifted an eyebrow. “So you’re absolutely sure that you didn’t follow Harley Glad back to his hotel?”
“Why would I follow him to his hotel? I was the one who got his hands on the NEONFIEBER Ultra-Limited Overdrive Fanbox of Turbo Heartthrob’s brand-new record-breaking album HERZRASEN,” he stressed, tapping his chest with his finger. “Not him.”
“He bought a guitar,” said Marva.
“Good for him.”
“A very special guitar.”
“Uh-huh.”
“A guitar that used to belong to Daniel Bozek.”
They let that lie there for a moment, and Chase saw the kid’s eyes widen considerably. “Daniel Bozek? As in…”
“Yes, Mr. Barkby. The Daniel Bozek.”
The kid’s lips had formed a perfect O.
Looked like he hadn’t seen that one coming.
“Look, we know that you’re one of Turbo Heartthrob’s biggest fans,” said Chase.
“And that you’ve been to every single one of their concerts.
You own all of their records, in the regular but also the special and the deluxe edition.
You have even been onstage with them, and have taken their VIP backstage tours.
So we know that the opportunity to lay your hands on Daniel Bozek’s guitar must have appealed to you a lot. ”
“It sure does appeal to me,” said the kid, being quite frank about it. “I didn’t even know that the guitar was available.”
“It wasn’t,” said Marva. “The seller reached out to Harley Glad personally. It was never announced publicly that the guitar was for sale.”
“Which is why we’re wondering how you found out about it,” said Chase as he leaned forward, fixing the kid with what he hoped was an intimidating look.
“I didn’t,” said the kid quickly. He looked a lot less at ease now. “I’m only finding out now.”
“So you didn’t go looking for Harley Glad at his hotel?” asked Marva, leaning in and fixing the kid with the same piercing look. He was getting the full detective treatment now—a double whammy.
“No, of course not. Like I said, I had absolutely no reason to go after Harley. Not after I had managed to lay my hands on that special edition.”
“You already owned this special edition,” Marva pointed out.
“We have searched your apartment,” Chase confirmed when the kid shot them a look of consternation. The kid’s mom had given them some grief, but in the end had been convinced by the search warrant that she shouldn’t bar the police officers’ access to her son’s room.
What they had found was a veritable Valhalla of all things Turbo Heartthrob. The kid’s room was like a shrine to the German band, with posters on the walls, special editions in a glass display cabinet, and plenty of signed copies of multi-colored vinyl editions.
Almost as if Chase was being transported back to his childhood years, when vinyl was still a thing, and so were CDs. It sure was fascinating to see that even the younger set could be enticed to purchase physical copies of their favorite music and not just stream it.
“It’s not so unusual for a fan to buy two copies of the same item,” said Arne defensively. “I mean, when the opportunity presents itself, of course I will try to snap up the extra item. I can always sell it later if I want to. Or keep it. Just in case.”
“In this case, you didn’t keep it, though,” Chase pointed out.
“We didn’t find any sign of this special edition you snapped up before Harley Glad could get his hands on it,” said Marva. “Not in your room or anywhere else in the house.”
“We found the original,” said Chase. “The one your mother said you bought a couple of weeks ago, when the new album came out. But not the one you bought this morning.”
“And we know that you don’t have it on your person either,” said Marva.
“So where is it?”
“Did you lose it when you encountered Harley in his room, where you tussled with him over the guitar that he had just acquired?”
“And when he didn’t want to give it to you, you decided to kill him and steal it.”
The words had a powerful effect on the young man. His jaw dropped, and his eyes went wide as saucers. “Kill him? You mean…”
Chase nodded. “Harley Glad was killed in his room, and the guitar that he had just bought was taken.”
“No, but…” The kid raised a hand to his perfectly coiffed hair.
Chase recognized the style as belonging to one of the band’s singers.
Franco Dungeon, who performed the so-called unclean vocals, traditionally wore his hair with a distinctive blond fringe swept across his forehead, and Arne had copied the look exactly.
“We haven’t found the guitar, though,” said Chase, loath as he was to admit it. “Where did you hide it, Arne?”
“Yeah, did you give it to a friend after you fled the scene of the murder?” asked Marva.
“Or stash it somewhere?” asked Chase.
“Look, I didn’t kill anyone, all right?” said the kid, whose eyes were ping-ponging between his two interrogators. “I didn’t even know about the guitar.”
“But if you had, you would have wanted to lay your hands on it, right?” asked Marva. “Considering you have started to practice playing the guitar lately?”
“Your mom told us all about it,” Chase explained when the kid seemed too stunned for speech.
“She told us a great deal of other stuff, too. Like how you sometimes acquire Turbo Heartthrob merchandise and then sell it on to other fans. And how you make a decent living from that. Enough to pay for your frequent trips to Europe to see the band live.”
“Or to engage in meet-and-greets with the members of the band,” Marva added as she tapped the tabletop.
“But I didn’t kill anyone!” said the kid, harping on the same theme. “You have to believe me! I liked Harley.”
“Oh, so you admit now that you did know him?” asked Chase.
Looked like they were making progress. A confession wasn’t too far off, he figured.
“Not in person. I’d seen some of his posts in the band’s fan group and on their Discord, but I’d never spoken to him or exchanged messages with him. I didn’t realize it was him at the store. It was only when you mentioned his name just now that the penny dropped.”
“I think the penny must have dropped a long time before,” said Marva, who made for an excellent interrogator, Chase had to admit. “And that you hated the fact that Harley had gotten his hands on Daniel Bozek’s guitar and not you.”
“You just had to have it,” said Chase. “So much so that you didn’t mind if Harley got hurt in the process.”
“Or killed,” said Marva.
“No!” said the kid, grasping at his blond fringe with both hands. It had been perfectly combed across his brow, kept in place with plenty of hairspray, no doubt, but was now starting to show the first signs of getting bent out of shape—just like its youthful owner.
Looked like that confession was in the bag, Chase thought with satisfaction. They’d probably set some kind of record when they nabbed this kid for Harley’s murder. Fastest collar in the history of Hampton Cove PD. Too bad that Odelia wasn’t there to see it.
“Look, I sold the special edition fanbox, all right? In fact, the only reason I got it in the first place is because another fan begged me to get it for her. Said she didn’t want to go to the store herself, since she doesn’t want people to know that she is a fan.
So I agreed to do her a favor and get it myself, then sell it on to her. For a small commission, naturally.”
“Another fan?” asked Chase. “What are you talking about?”
“I met her straight after I saw Harley at the store. So you see, I can’t have killed him! I was busy with this other fan. Handing over the fanbox and getting paid for my services.”
“Who is this other fan?” asked Chase, not happy that the kid had suddenly decided to spring an actual alibi on them. “And when exactly did you meet her?”
“And where?” said Marva.
The kid heaved a sigh. “I’m not sure I should tell you.
She doesn’t want anyone to know she’s a fan.
Says it could damage her standing in the community or something.
She has a public-facing job, and apparently people can’t find out that she loves German electronicore music.
Oh, and she’s old. Like, older than my mom. She could practically be my grandma.”
“A name, Arne,” Chase insisted. “We need a name.”
The kid hesitated, but finally relented. “She won’t like this. Her name is Marge Poole.”