Who the Hell is Harry Black? by Jake Needham

Author:Jake Needham [Needham, Jake]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-11-13T16:00:00+00:00

Tay picked up the flashlight again and played it slowly over the contents of the top shelf.

On the left side was a stack of spiral-bound notebooks with heavy red covers. They looked like the notebooks college students used back in his day to take notes in lectures. Did college students still take notes in lectures, he wondered, or did they just watch everything on YouTube and save the videos on their laptops? If they did still take notes, he doubted anyone had taken them by hand in a spiral notebook in a generation or more. He was pretty sure doing that these days rather than using some kind of electronic device would be considered terminally uncool.

He and Harry Black, however, had grown up in times in which people listened to what they were being told, organized their thoughts about it, and then wrote those thoughts down with a pen. The stack of red-covered notebooks beckoned to him. Whatever Harry Black had recorded in them might be exactly what he needed to understand who Black was and why someone wanted him dead.

Tay put the flashlight on the floor and reached into the safe with both hands to lift out the stack of notebooks. He blew the dust off of them and then handed them to Renny.

“Hold on to these for a minute, would you?”

He reached back onto the shelf and lifted out the only other thing he saw there: an old-fashioned microcassette recorder. He had used one just like it to record interviews back when he first became a detective.

This one was scratched and battered and looked as if it had seen some hard use. He pushed the eject button and looked inside. There was no cassette in it. Why would Black have kept an old microcassette recorder in his safe when it had no cassette in it? And if he had used it to record something, what had he done with the cassettes?

When Tay lifted the little recorder out of the safe, something caught his eye. He picked up the flashlight from the floor, turned it back on, and played the beam over the empty shelf. Where he had picked up the stack of notebooks, he could see a clear print in the dust marking where they had been. And just to the right of that, he saw a second and identical print in the dust on the shelf. Another stack of notebooks had been there once, but at some point, they had been removed.

Had Black taken them out and put them somewhere else? Or had whoever beat them to searching Black’s house somehow gotten into the safe and taken the other stack of notebooks?

Tay doubted that. If they had found the safe and opened it, why would they have so carefully closed it back up, replaced the false panel in the closet, and moved all Black’s clothes back into place in front of the panel? And why would they have taken one stack of notebooks out of the safe and left the other?

No, Tay didn’t believe the earlier searcher had found the safe.

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