Detectives are easy to spot, once you get to know them.
Taking care not to step in the blood, she made her way toward them, sticking to the edges of the road.
She knew both men from previous crime scenes. Detective Ledbetter was short and portly, with thinning hair and a kind smile. The other detective was Larry Blazer. Tall and thin, with dark blond hair going artfully gray, he had cheekbones to die for and eyes as hard as copper pennies.
All the TV reporters had a thing for him, but Harper found him cold and self-aware, in the way of men who are handsome and know how to use that as a weapon.
Absorbed in their work, neither man noticed as she navigated the shadows until she was close enough to eavesdrop.
‘The shooters came up from the Anderson Projects. The victims won’t say how they knew each other, but this wasn’t random,’ the uniformed officer was saying as she walked up. ‘Someone wanted these guys dead.’
He was green. This could even have been his first shooting. His words poured out in an excited rush.
By contrast, Blazer’s questions were delivered at a slow and deliberate pace; trying to communicate calm and hope it was contagious.
‘You say the vics told you the three shooters ran off together. They give any idea where they went?’
The officer shook his head. ‘All he said was, “that way”.’ He pointed roughly towards the building in front of them.
Ledbetter said something Harper couldn’t hear. She took a step closer.
In the dark, she never saw the empty forty-ounce beer bottle in the gutter, but the rattle it made when she kicked it was hard to miss.
She winced.
All the cops looked up. Blazer spotted her first. His gaze narrowed.
‘Careful,’ he said. ‘Press on scene.’
Stepping back, Harper waited warily, hoping Ledbetter would be lead detective on the case.
But it was Blazer who walked towards her.
Crap, she thought.
‘Miss McClain.’ His voice was cool, with an oddly flat intonation. ‘What a surprise to see you standing in the middle of my crime scene. I don’t suppose you’re a witness?’
He was tall, over six-one, and he used that height to intimidate – looming over her. But Harper was five-eight, and she wasn’t easy to impress.
‘Sorry, Detective,’ she said, her tone a cultivated mixture of contrition and respect. ‘There’s no crime tape. I didn’t mean to get in your way.’
‘I see.’ He studied her with distaste. ‘And yet you are standing where no journalist belongs. Shedding DNA all over the place.’
Who was he trying to kid? They weren’t going to collect that kind of evidence at this scene. The cops cared no more for a dead gangbanger than Baxter did.
Harper blinked innocently.
‘I know you’re busy,’ she said, all sweetness, ‘but could you give me a little information for the morning paper so I can get out of your hair? Names of the victims? Number of suspects?’
‘Our investigation has just begun.’ Blazer recited the familiar words in a tone that said he saw right through her. ‘It would be premature to say anything at this time. We’re still identifying the deceased and have not yet notified next of kin. Now, I’m going to have to ask you to step out of the scene immediately.’
Clearly, he wasn’t in a giving mood.
Still, Harper gave it one more try. ‘Detective, is this part of a drug war? Should local residents be concerned?’
Rocking back on his heels, Blazer studied her with an interest she didn’t like.
‘McClain, a few small-time scumbags stepped on the turf of some bigger scumbags and they got a lesson in why that’s a bad idea. Why don’t you put that in your rag?’
She opened her mouth to answer, but he cut her off.
‘It was a rhetorical question. I have no official statement at this time. Now, kindly get the hell out of my scene before I have you arrested.’
Harper knew better than to argue. Holding up her hands in surrender, she backed away.
When she made it back to the ambulance, Miles was leaning against it casually, checking his shots on the camera screen.
‘Blazer’s lead detective, so I’ve got nothing,’ Harper announced glumly. ‘That man hates me like a canker sore.’
Straightening, Miles motioned for her to follow him back towards the Mustang.
‘I shot the lead paramedic’s wedding two months ago,’ he said quietly, when they were a safe distance away. ‘Gave her a cheap deal. She owed me a favor.’
Harper grabbed his arm. ‘You got an ID on our dead guy?’
‘More than that.’ He held up a crumpled piece of paper. ‘I’ve got it all. Melissa had a wonderful honeymoon. She was very chatty today.’
‘You hero.’ Harper mock-punched his arm. ‘What’ve we got?’
Miles squinted to read his own writing.
‘Our dead guy is Levon Williams, nineteen, recent graduate of Savannah South High School – played for the baseball team. Hell of a hitter, I’m told. Also, apparently, an up-and-coming heroin dealer. The two wounded victims are his known associates. Suspects are three black men, slim, two are average height, T-shirt and jeans, one is short and stocky, wearing a bandanna around his neck. All are late teens to early twenties. Suspected members of the East Ward gang.’ He handed Harper the page. ‘It’s all here.’
Harper scanned the paper quickly, seeing nothing that said page one. As soon as they reached the Mustang, she called Baxter to give her the bad news.
‘Damn it,’ the editor said when she’d heard the rundown. ‘Get back here and write it up for page six. It’s better than nothing.’
Miles started the engine as Harper ended the call.
‘Page six?’ he guessed.
Harper folded the paper and put it in her pocket.
‘Buried in the weeds.’
He shrugged. ‘You win some, you lose some.’
Turning the wheel, he began to pull out of the parking space, before braking hard to let a white van creep by. The words ‘COUNTY CORONER’ were emblazoned on the side in sepulcher black.
‘The iceman cometh,’ Miles murmured.
Harper barely looked up. She was scribbling notes for the piece she needed to write when she got back.
When the van passed, Miles turned the car around with neat precision. They’d only gone a short distance, though, when a breathless voice suddenly filled the car.
‘Unit five-six-eight in pursuit of suspects from Broad Street.’
Harper’s pen froze.
Miles lifted his foot from the accelerator.
They both looked at the scanner.
‘Copy unit five-six-eight,’ the dispatcher responded calmly. ‘Please verify: Are these the suspects from the shooting on Broad?’
‘Affirmative.’ The man was panting, his voice shook. He was running.
‘Three males heading south on foot on Thirty-Ninth Street,’ he shouted. ‘Two tall. One short with a bandanna.’
In the background, Harper could hear the dispatcher typing the information into her computer, her fingers quick and light on the keys. It was Sarah tonight on dispatch – she recognized the voice. She was good.
‘All units. Backup required for unit five-six-eight in pursuit of shooting suspects heading south on Thirty-Ninth.’
Sarah’s voice was so unemotional she might have been reading a cake recipe.
Harper turned to Miles. ‘That’s five blocks from here.’
‘Copy that.’ He shifted gears and hit the gas. The Mustang responded, tires squealing. A smile lifted the corners of his mouth as he turned towards Thirty-Ninth.
‘Let’s get ourselves on page one.’
Chapter Three
As they drove through the dark streets to find the suspected killers, Harper stared out the window, tapping her pen impatiently against her notebook. They didn’t have much time. Even if this went smoothly, Baxter would have to delay the last edition.
; Ordinary people might have been thinking about the victim back at the crime scene – his short life ended in a violent instant. But her mind had already moved on. Now, she just needed to know who killed him.
It had always been like this. Murders didn’t bother Harper. They fascinated her.
She knew everything about the mechanics of homicide. She knew what the detectives were doing now, and the coroner’s office. How the victim’s family would be informed, and how they would react when they learned. She knew how the machinery of government would kick into gear and consume the lives of everyone involved.
She knew, not because she wrote about it, but because she had lived it.
When she was twelve years old a murder had destroyed her world. She could trace her career, her life and her obsessive interest in crime back to that single day, fifteen years ago.
Some moments get imprinted on your mind so thoroughly every breath of it stays with you forever. Most of these are bad moments. Harper could walk through every second of the day her mother died any time she wished. She could place those hours in a mental reel and play them like a film. Watch herself, so small and quick, walking home from school. Utterly unaware that life, as she knew it, was already over.
3:35 p.m. – Twelve-year-old Harper shoves open the low metal gate, closing the latch with a silvery clang.
3:36 p.m. – She dashes up the steps – flinging the unlocked door open and closing it behind her with a resounding thud. God, it’s all so bright and warm in her memory; so filled with color. She calls out, ‘Mom, I’m starving.’ No one replies.
3:37 p.m. – She yells up the stairs, ‘Mom?’ She’s not worried yet. Humming to herself, she checks the living room, the dining room.
3:38 p.m. – She steps into the kitchen.
This is where her childhood ends.
There is more color here – not only the yellow of the walls and the tiny vivid jars and bottles of blue and gold and green paint. But red. Red everywhere. Splattered on the walls and counters. Pooling on the floor under her mother’s naked body.
Blood-red filling her memories with horror and leaving behind trauma that will never go away.
In her memory film, time has stopped now. It stays 3:38 for a very long time.
In the next frame she’s running in slow motion to her mother’s side, she’s skidding in the blood, losing her balance. She’s trying to breathe, but it’s as if someone has kicked her in the stomach. Her whole body hurts and there’s no air, no air, as she falls to the floor, blood squelching beneath her skinny knees.
This was the first and only time she was ever afraid to touch her mother. Her trembling hand reaches out to brush the smooth, pale shoulder. She recoils, yanking it back again.
She’s so cold.
Someone is sobbing far away. ‘Mom? Mom?’ And faintly, plaintively, ‘Mommy?’
She knows now it’s her own voice but the her on the memory film isn’t sure. She feels far away from her body.
In the next frame, she is scrambling to her feet – still no air to breathe, and she is gasping for it, but her lungs refuse to work – skidding across the kitchen and hurtling out the side door to Bonnie’s house. But the Larsons moved away after their divorce, and the new neighbors aren’t nice and they’re not home anyway, but she pounds on the door leaving bloody marks on the wood, and the pounding echoes in the emptiness.
She’s weeping so hard her breath begins to come back, forced into her lungs by tears, as she runs back to her house to find the phone. She picks it up only to see it fall from her nerveless, blood-slick fingers. Then she is sobbing and finding it on the floor, taking choking breaths, making herself slow down. She only has to dial three numbers. She can do this. She has to do this.
‘OK,’ she whispers over and over through her tears as she dials, hands shaking so hard the phone vibrates. ‘OK. OK. OK …’
It rings. A distant series of odd, mechanical clicks. A dispatcher answers – and that irrationally calm female voice, so inured to hearing the horrors of the world expressed through the panicked, disembodied voices of witnesses and victims, is a rope she can grasp.
‘This is 911. What is your emergency?’
She is trying to speak but her tears and breathlessness make it almost impossible. Only a confused scattering of words make it from her frightened mind to her lips.
‘Please help,’ she sobs. ‘My mom. Please help.’
‘What’s happened to your mom?’ The woman’s emotion-free voice is stern-friendly. Stern to help her focus. Friendly because she is a child.
Now Harper must say the word. The word she can’t even think. A word so distant from her until this moment in time it had no more bearing on her immediate life than Uzbekistan. Her mind doesn’t want her to say the word. Saying it hurts.
‘My mom … there’s blood … I think … someone killed her.’
It is all she has. She is sobbing inconsolably. The dispatcher’s tone changes.
‘Sweetie,’ she says with utter gentleness that disguises the worry beneath it and the absolute tension of the moment, ‘I need you to take a deep breath and tell me your address, OK? Can you do that? I’m sending help.’
Harper tells her. She doesn’t know then, but she knows now, that as she talks the operator is typing urgent things into her computer, motioning for her supervisor’s attention, setting wheels in motion that will turn and turn through her life for years to come.
Then the operator is asking if she’s safe, and that is the first time it occurs to Harper that someone very dangerous might be in the house with her. Her levels of fear and panic are off the charts now. And the operator is telling her to take the phone outside, and to stand by the curb and to run and scream if anyone scares her.
She does as she’s told, each step wooden and unreal, until she is at the metal gate again with its clanging latch, the phone clutched in one blood-sticky hand.
The dispatcher is saying calming things. ‘They’re coming, honey. They’re three minutes away. Don’t hang up, sweetheart …’
In the distance she hears the urgent wail of sirens and despite everything doesn’t realize they’re coming for her.
When the first police car screeches to a halt, blue lights flashing, she feels even more frightened as the officers climb out of the car with guns in their hands, and run past her into the house.
One of them shouts to her, ‘Stay there.’
She stays.
More police pull up and soon she is surrounded by men and women in official uniforms with guns and mace and Kevlar vests.
‘Are you OK?’ people keep asking her.
But Harper is not OK. Not OK at all.
Then a man, tall, with a deep voice and authoritative air appears at her side. He takes the phone from her hand and hands it to another officer, who places it, strangely, Harper thinks, in a plastic bag.
The man has a weathered face that has seen other children like her, bloodied and frightened. Many of them. There is kindness in his eyes.
‘My name is Sergeant Smith,’ the man tells her in a deep, soothing voice. ‘And I’m not going to let anyone hurt you …’
‘Harper.’
She gave a start, blinking hard.
The car had slowed to a crawl. They were on a dark street, surrounded on all sides by run-down buildings with boarded-up windows.
Miles was looking at her oddly, as if he’d said her name more than once.
‘We’re here,’ he said. ‘Are you OK?’
‘I’m fine.’ Her tone was brusque and she turned away, her eyes sweeping the sidewalk for trouble, out of habit.
She was angry with herself. Why had she been thinking about that stuff? It was ancient history.
Right now, she had a job to do.
‘Have you seen any sign of them?’ she asked, peering into the shadows.
‘Nothing at all.’ He slowed the car to a crawl, squinting at the buildings around them. ‘Looks like we got here before backup did.’
This was
n’t normal. Harper frowned.
‘What’s taking so long?’
Miles shook his head. ‘No idea.’
Thirty-Ninth Street was narrower and much darker than Broad, lined on either side by some of the city’s most notorious public housing projects. Harper had been here many nights before, but she could never remember seeing it so empty. No one hung out on the steps, or gathered on the concrete drives. There were no pit-bull gangs comparing dogs, no crowds of young men jostling on the basketball court.
Miles gave a low whistle.
‘Well, this is unusual.’ He spoke softly, as if they might be heard through the windows.
Harper leaned forward in her seat to look up.
‘Someone shot out the streetlights.’
‘Five-six-eight, what is your situation?’ The dispatcher’s voice crackling out of the police scanner seemed too loud in the heavy silence.
A long moment passed. All the radio chatter had stopped now, as if every cop in the city was waiting for this one crime to play out.
‘This is five-six-eight.’ The officer’s voice was low now, barely above a whisper. ‘Suspects ran into the Anderson Houses. I’ve lost visual. I’m looking for them.’
‘Copy that, five-six-eight,’ the dispatcher said. ‘Be aware, backup is en route.’
Miles pointed to a decrepit cluster of boarded-up, graffiti-covered three-story buildings at the end of the road.
‘Anderson Houses,’ he said. ‘Been closed a few years now. Great place to hide.’
Pulling the car into an empty space at the side of the road, he cut the engine. The quiet that followed felt unnatural.
In sync, Harper and Miles unhooked the scanners from their belts and placed them on the floor of the car.
Miles looked at her, his eyes gleaming in the shadows. ‘This could get messy.’
Harper grinned at him. ‘What’s new?’
Tilting her head at the door, she reached for the handle.
There was no more discussion. They both knew how dangerous it was.
They jumped out of the car in the same moment, closed their doors carefully and edged down the road toward the boarded-up buildings.
The Echo Killing Page 2
