‘You do that,’ Miles said. ‘I’ll poke around a bit, too. See what I can dig up. I’ve got an old girlfriend in the coroner’s office. I’ll give her a call. See if maybe I can get my hands on that forensics report.’
Miles had a lot of old girlfriends in useful places. They often came in very handy.
‘Thank you,’ she told him. ‘That would help.’
‘Well.’ He set down the camera again and met her gaze. ‘I’ve got to say I never imagined any of this, Harper. What you went through when you were a little girl – I can’t believe you never told me.’
‘I guess everyone has secrets.’ Harper picked up her bottle. ‘Some are worse than others.’
Chapter Thirteen
The next day, Harper arrived at the newsroom two hours early. Sunlight streamed through the tall windows overlooking Bay Street, giving the rows of desks an ethereal glow belied by the normal daytime cacophony of fifteen journalists typing a hundred words a minute and talking even faster.
DJ did a double-take when she reached her desk, a large coffee in one hand, her scanner in the other.
‘What are you doing here so early? Did someone die?’ he asked. ‘I mean … again?’
‘Everyone dies, DJ,’ she said, switching on her computer.
He wasn’t to be dissuaded, though.
‘What’s going on? Is it the Whitney case? Did something happen?’
‘Nothing happened,’ she said breezily. ‘I’m doing some digging. For the follow-up. Thought I’d get an early start.’
It was almost true.
After leaving Miles, she couldn’t sleep. She’d spent most of the restless night making notes, formulating a plan. She’d dozed off on the couch shortly before dawn, pen still in her hand, tumbling hard into brief, uneasy dreams of blood and pursuit.
When she woke up, it was late morning – sunlight was pouring through the curtains and Zuzu was curled up behind her knees, purring.
In an instant, she’d been wide awake. She didn’t want to hang around the house all day, waiting for four o’clock to come. She wanted to get to work.
Now she glanced at DJ, as if a thought had occurred to her.
‘Come to think of it, I could use your help again. If you’re not too busy.’
Brightening visibly, he rolled his chair closer to her desk.
‘Absolutely. Whatever you need. Say the word.’
‘You did good work yesterday,’ she told him.
It was true. He’d run all over town gathering information for the piece, and worked fast to get it all together early enough to beat the news channels.
‘Come on. It was nothing,’ he insisted, color rising to his cheeks.
Harper suppressed a smile. The guy had no poker face.
‘It wasn’t nothing,’ she said. ‘Baxter was very impressed, too.’
He lowered his voice so the writers at the desks around them couldn’t hear.
‘Honestly, Harper, today’s paper was the first time any of my friends voluntarily read one of my articles. Crime is definitely where it’s at. Being on the front page – I felt like a rock star.’
‘Well,’ she said. ‘Let’s do it again.’
She flipped over the copy of the newspaper on her desk, pointing at the photo of Marie Whitney. It was the one from the university website, all white teeth, golden skin and shining blonde hair.
‘We need to dig a little deeper. Do you think any of your contacts at the college knew her well enough to be aware of what was going on in her life?’ Harper tapped Whitney’s chin. ‘We need to find out who she was dating. Was there someone new? How had she been acting in the days before her murder? Was she anxious? Scared? All of that could be useful.’
Behind his glasses, DJ’s eyes widened. ‘You’re investigating her?’
Harper had to be careful. She couldn’t overplay this. The last thing she needed was for DJ to get over-excited and tell everyone that he and Harper were investigating a murder.
‘Not really,’ she said blandly. ‘I just want to see if there’s anything to be found. Something we might have missed yesterday. What if it’s really obvious? I don’t want Channel 5 to get it before we do.’
DJ’s face darkened. ‘That douche Josh Leonard is probably all over this. I hate that blow-dried frat boy.’
‘Exactly,’ Harper agreed, although she was pretty sure Josh would never think to ask questions like these. ‘If you’d do the rounds over where she worked, that would really help. Find out if anyone knows anything. But don’t raise attention. We don’t want anyone – even the cops – to know we’re looking into this.’
‘Subterfuge,’ DJ enthused. ‘I like it. I’ll be Woodward. You be Bernstein.’
He was practically bouncing in his chair.
‘Tell you what.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I’ll head over there now, see what I can find out.’
‘That would be great,’ Harper said. ‘Be sure and …’
Her voice trailed off. Across the room, the newspaper’s head editor had emerged from his glass-walled office and was strolling straight towards them.
DJ turned to see what she was looking at.
‘Oh shit,’ he whispered, sinking back into his chair. ‘It’s Dells.’
Paul Dells almost never talked to reporters unless they were being hired or fired. Harper had met him the day she was elevated from intern to full-time reporter, and not again until two years ago, when he’d addressed the entire newsroom to announce the first wave of layoffs.
For the subsequent round of layoffs – the one in which Miles lost his job – Dells hadn’t bothered to make a speech.
And now, he was walking up to her desk. Smiling.
‘Excuse me,’ he said jovially. ‘Aren’t you Harper McClain? I heard a rumor you worked here, but I thought it was a lie.’
Dells had thick dark hair with artful gray streaks. His teeth were blindingly white. He looked perpetually polished and tanned. His suit probably cost more than Harper made in a month.
Still, she had nothing against him personally. Times were tough. No one wanted to pay for newspapers anymore. It wasn’t his fault the world had gone crazy. Besides, he never interfered with her work. That was the best thing about him.
She smiled politely. ‘Hi, Mr Dells. How’s it going?’
The newsroom had gone quiet around them. Harper could feel everyone listening, even as most still stared fixedly at their computer screens.
‘Call me Paul, please.’ His smile widened, making his eyes crinkle appealingly. ‘Everything’s fine, unless your presence here at this hour signals some sort of apocalyptic event, in which case, please tell me now so I can head to the bunker.’
Disguising her bafflement at this sudden charm onslaught, Harper forced a dry chuckle.
‘No need to hide. Getting a start on today’s story.’
Dells held up a copy of the newspaper. Whitney’s beautiful, fine-boned face gazed down at Harper.
‘Well, I won’t keep you. I just wanted to congratulate you on your work. This is a really solid piece. Excellence across the board. You beat every TV station in town.’
‘Thanks.’ Harper flushed, despite herself.
Behind Dells’ shoulder, she saw DJ watching this exchange with open amazement. Quickly, she gestured at him.
‘I couldn’t have done it without DJ’s help, of course.’
DJ grinned like a kid who’d found out he was getting a bike for Christmas.
Dells’ smile swung to take in both of them.
‘You make a great team. We’ll be entering this in awards competitions later this year.’ Dells tapped the corner of the paper on Harper’s desk. ‘Keep up the good work.’
With a parting professional smile, he headed back to his glass office.
Noise levels in the newsroom gradually returned to normal.
DJ stared wonderingly at the editor’s retreating back.
‘I’ve been here a year and a half and he has never noticed me before.’ He turned
to her. ‘Harper, honest to God, I will do anything for you. Do you want me to clean your house? Polish your shoes?’
Harper’s reply came without hesitation.
‘Find out everything you can on Marie Whitney.’
After DJ headed off, more excited than ever to do unassigned work for her, Harper grabbed a notebook and pen and made her way across the newsroom.
When she walked by the editor’s office, she could see Dells through the glass, sitting at a sleek designer desk, talking quietly on the phone. He didn’t look up as she passed.
Right beyond his office, a set of double doors opened onto a long corridor. These were the guts of the newspaper – there was a staffroom back here, which exuded a permanent smell of scorched coffee, as well as offices for the lifestyle writers and the sports guys. From the latter, an unseen TV burbled a steady stream of incomprehensible chatter about baseball.
A door at the end of the hall opened onto a stairwell. Harper turned into it, her footsteps echoing soft scuffs as she climbed to the third floor. At the top, another corridor stretched down past the mysterious offices for sales and marketing, administration and corporate, whatever that was. She’d never had a reason to go into any of them.
Through open office doors, she could hear the buzz of conversation and the sound of a phone ringing insistently.
Midway down the corridor, she pushed open a plain white door. The only thing identifying the room was a small sign reading: ‘Records’.
Everyone at the newspaper called this room ‘the morgue’ and always had. But Harper guessed putting that on a sign would have been distasteful.
The windowless chamber was plain, undecorated, with dingy vanilla walls and rows and rows of dark metal file cabinets arranged by year. It smelled faintly of old paper and ancient ink.
Starting at the row nearest her, she checked the cards on the front of the file cabinets. Those closest were dated seven years ago.
After the newspaper switched computer systems a few years back, it had never got around to entering older editions into the new servers. It had been planned, but then the layoffs happened and the clerks who would have done the work were let go.
For everything up until seven years ago, only paper records remained.
Harper walked slowly down the row – when she reached the end she was ten years in the past.
Turning the corner to the row on the right, she found she’d suddenly gone back twenty years.
Too far.
She backtracked, turning down the row to the left of where she started and working her way through time, until she reached the era she sought, fifteen years ago.
Each file cabinet within the year was arranged by subject, sometimes capriciously cataloged, and Harper moved one drawer at a time, flipping through files labeled for politicians, tornadoes, football games and university expansions, until she found what she was looking for.
McClain, Alicia.
Above the folder, Harper’s hand stilled.
It was disorienting, seeing her mother reduced to another name among thousands in a soulless metal cabinet tucked away in a rarely visited room. Filed by strangers who never knew her. Never saw one of her paintings. Never watched her dance across the kitchen while cooking dinner.
Here, she wasn’t Harper’s mother. Here she was two words. Two words can’t contain a human being. Their smile. Their smell. Two words are nothing more than letters arranged in an order we can recognize.
She felt breathless – sucker-punched.
This was why, in all the years she’d worked for the newspaper, she’d never come up here and looked for these files before.
On some level she’d always known it would feel like this.
Still. She had to do it now.
Shoulders set and resolute, she pulled the thick file out and carried it to a table, and sat down on a cold metal chair.
The air conditioning was set too high for this little room – Harper shivered as she lifted the cover.
Carefully she unfolded the article on top – the newspaper was soft beneath her fingertips.
The picture on the page was of the small, white house she’d grown up in. Seen like this, it was both familiar and incredibly distant – like a house she’d seen on a TV show she used to like.
The headline screamed up at her: Murder in the Afternoon.
‘Catchy,’ Harper murmured, but her voice cracked – she kept staring at the house.
She’d walked up that concrete path to the front steps every day for twelve years. In her memory, she could see herself opening that front gate, carelessly. Pushing up the horseshoe-shaped latch, striding through into her old life.
With effort, she tore her eyes away and began to read.
The article was straightforward – the writing was clear and accurate. Something about it struck Harper and, instinctively, she glanced at the byline: Tom Lane.
‘Of course,’ she whispered.
Lane was the police reporter when Harper first started at the paper as an intern. He’d been in his late fifties then, an old school journalist – working his sources and writing fast. No frills – just the facts. He’d taught her most of what she knew about the crime beat.
Lane never told her he covered her mother’s murder. But of course he had. He’d been at the paper twenty years on her first day. He must have known who she was the moment she was introduced to him. Her name was unusual enough, and it had been a massive story.
Yet he’d never said a word.
Always acerbic, he’d made it clear he was less than thrilled to have her following him around. He had little time for women and no time at all for young women. But she’d been ruthlessly persistent – peppering him with questions until he finally gave in and told her how things worked.
It was Lane who taught her what to look for in a police report, how to work a crime scene and how to keep the cops sweet so they didn’t cut you out, even after you had to write a story that made them look bad.
He cultivated them – constantly building relationships.
The detectives often took their dinner breaks at the Slow and Easy Café on Johnny Mercer Boulevard, so Tom took his dinner breaks there, too. He made himself available, but he also gave them their space, sitting at a table near enough that they could see him, but not so close they felt crowded.
‘Sometimes they want to chat, sometimes they don’t,’ he told Harper one night. ‘If they do, I get information. If they don’t, the place does a hell of a Reuben sandwich, so …’ He shrugged. ‘I still get something out of the deal.’
He had, even after two decades in Savannah, a touch of New York in his accent. He always insisted he’d ended up in Savannah by accident – ‘I took a wrong turn off I-95 on my way to Florida.’
Harper had soon learned that she couldn’t operate the same way Tom did – put a young female reporter in a room of male detectives and you get an altogether different reaction than you do from the presence of a male reporter. She went to the Slow and Easy Café precisely once. A group of detectives sat at their table, craning their necks to look at her, and laughing.
She learned from that.
The lead to the article open in front of her was typical of his straightforward writing style:
A peaceful Savannah neighborhood was shaken today by news that a thirty-five-year-old mother had been stabbed to death in her home, in broad daylight.
Alicia McClain was found dead inside the house by her twelve-year-old daughter upon her return from school, detectives said. According to police, Mrs McClain had been stabbed repeatedly, and bled to death before the ambulance arrived.
Police say there was no sign of burglary or forced entry. A search is now underway for the perpetrators of this crime …
Harper scanned the rest of the article quickly, finding nothing new. She stopped on one quote:
‘A child lost her mother today, in a senseless attack,’ Sergeant Robert Smith said. ‘We are going to find whoever did this and bring them to justice.’<
br />
She could picture him as he’d been back then – quietly furious about what had happened to her. Vengeful as a superhero. It had taken the police a while to track her dad down that day, and Smith had kept an eye on her the whole time. Bringing her food she wouldn’t eat, giving her soft drinks in Styrofoam cups she’d shredded into small, white pieces. He even sent a uniformed officer out to the store to bring back coloring books that were far too young for a twelve-year-old.
When her dad showed up, frantic and red-eyed, to take her home, Harper took those coloring books with her. She’d trusted Smith to handle everything better than her father, who her instincts had told her even then wasn’t all he should be.
Bracing herself, she turned the page.
The next article in the folder was from the following day: ‘Murdered Artist Had Real Talent’. Her mother’s delicate oval face smiled up at Harper from the page.
Even though she’d expected something like this, Harper’s breath caught.
In the picture, her mother sat on the front step of their house, with the sun in her eyes. Her vivid red hair hung loose over her shoulders. She wore an oversized shirt and blue jeans. She looked so young.
Harper couldn’t remember ever seeing that picture before. For a moment she wondered how they’d gotten the image, but she already knew the answer.
Dad must have given it to them.
She knew how it would have worked – she’d done it herself a hundred times. Tom would have called, apologizing profusely for bothering her father in this difficult time. In his kindest voice, he would have explained how they wanted to show Mrs McClain in the best possible light, and did he, by any chance, have a photo he would like them to use?
It was hard to imagine her father actually dealing with this. He’d been so lost in the days after the murder. Trying to comfort her, while processing his own shock and grief.
In truth, neither of them had ever recovered from those first traumatic hours.
There was nothing in the article she didn’t already know. Harper turned the page.
The next article had been published a few days later. The headline was an above-the-fold gotcha: Police Question Husband in Murder of Artist.
The Echo Killing Page 10
