Someone had snapped a picture of her father, ducking into the police station, surrounded by police. He wore a dark suit; his head was down. You could only see the side of his face, unshaven jaw grimly set.
He looked exhausted. And guilty.
Aside from the excited innuendo of the headline, though, the article didn’t actually reveal much – police were holding their cards close to their vest back then. There was only one direct quote.
‘We are keeping all lines of investigation open,’ said Sgt. Robert Smith.
Harper knew much more than Tom Lane about what went on back then. She could have given him a real story.
Police had investigated her father hard. They’d hauled him in for questioning repeatedly. They’d searched their house, turning it upside down. Searched his car. His office. Even though he was, himself, a lawyer, her father had hired the best criminal attorney in the city to represent him.
By then, Harper was living with her grandmother in the rambling farmhouse where her mother grew up. It was in a small town about ten miles outside of Savannah. Everyone had agreed it was the best place for her, under the circumstances – away from the press.
Nobody told her about her father’s arrest.
Her grandmother told her tautly, ‘Your daddy’s helping the police right now, honey. He’ll be back soon.’
But everything about her body language – muscles tight, face carved in worried lines – told Harper otherwise. And she had to know the truth.
So she’d become an adept eavesdropper – crouching outside the living room to listen to adult conversations, ear pressed against the door whenever the phone rang.
This was how she learned her father was a suspect. And later, this was how she learned her grandmother thought he might be guilty.
‘But where was he that afternoon?’ she heard her ask her relatives over glasses of iced tea. ‘And why won’t he tell the police the truth?’
Their replying murmurs indicated none of them understood.
Harper could still remember the empty feeling in her stomach as she listened to the ice tinkling in a glass when someone she couldn’t see took a sip.
‘You don’t believe he did it. That’s not what you’re saying, is it, Mom?’ Her Aunt Celia had sounded aghast.
‘He’s a lawyer,’ her uncle said then, his tone heavy with meaning. ‘If anyone knows how to cover up a crime, it’s a lawyer.’
Her aunt shushed him. ‘You can’t say that. Peter wouldn’t hurt Alicia. Would he?’
No one replied.
Now, in the harshly lit room on the top floor of the newspaper building, Harper let out a long breath and turned another page.
Victim’s Husband in Love Nest During Murder
This article, published a few days after her father was first questioned about a possible role in the crime, was coldly disapproving. Word by word, Lane explained that, while his wife was being viciously stabbed, her husband was with his lover in a small apartment about a mile away.
Harper had never seen the article before, but the whispers from the living room had told her this, and more.
On the day of the murder, her father wasn’t at work – something he didn’t tell the police when they first questioned him. His office thought he was meeting with a client. The client told police he’d never seen him.
This was why it took police so long to find him on the day of the murder – this was why she sat at the police station for two hours.
When police realized there had been no client meeting, they brought her father back in for questioning.
At first, he refused to tell them where he’d been – he was protecting his mistress. This silence was why they’d considered him a suspect – he had no alibi.
In the end, he’d come clean, revealing that he’d spent the afternoon with Jennifer Canon, an attractive paralegal fifteen years his junior, at her apartment.
Lane’s assessment of this was short and stark: ‘Police have verified his account and say that, given this new development, Mr McClain is no longer a lead suspect in the murder, although he may still face charges for filing a false statement.’
Her father never did face those charges. Police were too busy to pursue it. Besides, the DA had gone to law school with him. There would have been a handshake, and then it would have been quietly dropped.
The law forgave him. But Harper never could.
News of the affair ripped the family apart. Her grandmother wouldn’t speak to him at the funeral, which was an icy event conducted in the glare of the media spotlight. TV crews filmed them from a distance as they clustered around the open grave in Bonaventure Cemetery in stony silence, Harper clinging to her grandmother’s hand.
From that point on, Harper’s relationship with her father was irrevocably damaged. She never could get the idea out of her head that he could have been there that day. He could have saved her mother’s life.
It was irrational, of course. If he hadn’t been with Jennifer, he would have been at work – it was a weekday afternoon. Her mother still would have been alone.
But her heart didn’t care for rationality.
When the media lost interest in the case, her father got a place of his own, and she lived with him briefly, but it didn’t last. They argued constantly.
She moved back in with her grandmother a year after the murder.
Her father married Jennifer, the pretty paralegal, relocated to Connecticut, and started over in a town where no one had ever heard of Alicia McClain.
And so it goes.
She turned the page.
The articles were getting smaller. It was no longer a front-page story. Many were only references: a violent robbery on a nearby street was ‘believed unconnected to the murder of Alicia McClain …’ A stabbing elsewhere in town was, ‘… not at all like the McClain case’. And so forth.
There was one, though, a few months after the murder, in which the police attempted to explain why there were no leads in the high-profile case after all that time. Harper scanned it, seeing all the usual non-information sentences police liked to pull out when they were stuck: ‘Still digging … Working hard … Difficult case …’
She could see right through it. The case had gone cold. There were no new leads. After that, it dropped out of the paper altogether.
Harper opened the last article – from page ten, a year after the murder. It was short – there was no picture. The headline, McClain Case Remains Unsolved, was as true today as it was then.
Mostly it was a rehash with a few defensive comments from investigators. Then, near the end, one last quote from Smith:
‘The key issue at this point is the sheer lack of evidence. No one saw anything. No one heard anything. The killer left us nothing. It’s like Alicia McClain was killed by a ghost.’
Harper tapped that line with her fingertip.
A ghost, she thought. Or a professional.
Chapter Fourteen
In murder cases, there are two ways things tend to go – either everything happens very quickly and the killer’s locked up in twenty-four hours, or the process slows to a crawl.
After that first rush of information, by Saturday it appeared the Whitney case was grinding to a halt.
The police gave Harper nothing new – Blazer refused her calls and Smith was nowhere to be found. The signs were everywhere that the investigation was losing steam – the scanner offered no new investigations at the yellow house. Nobody was taken in for questioning and police announced no suspects.
The case was growing cold.
Harper’s own investigation was moving equally slowly. DJ had found nothing on his first foray at the university – all the staff were at a memorial service for Whitney that afternoon, so there was nobody to speak to.
‘I’ll try again on Monday,’ he promised Harper as he left.
Baxter had saved a chunk of Sunday’s page one for the Whitney story. It’s hard to fill a front-page slot with a story saying ‘No new information’, but
Harper did what she could.
The editor was not impressed.
‘This isn’t new, Harper,’ she’d called across the empty newsroom Saturday night. ‘It’s a reminder of everything we knew already. You might as well say, “Read Friday’s paper for the latest news”.’
‘I’m trying,’ Harper told her. ‘But if the police don’t have anything, what can I do?’
Baxter wasn’t sympathetic.
‘Do the impossible, Harper,’ she told her. ‘Or the next time Dells walks across the newsroom it won’t be to kiss your ass.’
By the time Harper pulled up outside Smith’s modern, colonial-style house on Sunday afternoon, she was determined to get him to tell her more about the case.
His house was on the southern edge of the city, in the kind of upscale new development where the front gate bears a made-up name like ‘Westchester’ in a lavish swirling font.
A long drive curved up to his ostentatious front door, flanked by topiary boxwoods the size and shape of bowling balls.
When he’d moved here from the more modest house where he and his family had lived for a decade, Harper had teased him mercilessly.
‘Your valet didn’t open the door,’ she liked to say. ‘You should fire him.’
‘I am my own valet,’ Smith would reply wearily. ‘But if I had a valet, my first order to him would be to refuse to let you in when you’re being silly.’
‘You know you love me,’ Harper would reply, breezing past him.
Today, though, it was Pat who opened the door.
‘Harper!’ she exclaimed, pulling her into a warm hug. She smelled of some honeyed perfume. ‘Right on time. Come in. Come in.’
Smith’s wife was nearly as tall as him but twice as angular, with a broad, appealing smile and bright blue eyes beneath short, practical brown hair. As she walked briskly across the ceramic tile floor she kept up a constant line of cheerful chatter, her voice echoing in the oversized, vaulted entrance hall.
‘It’s been too long. Where have you been keeping yourself? How’s Bonnie?’
‘I’ve been really busy with work,’ Harper told her. ‘There’ve been a few big stories. Oh, and Bonnie is fine.’
‘She still teaching at the art school?’
‘Mm-hmm.’
The closer they drew to the kitchen, the more the rich cooking smells made Harper’s mouth water. Pat’s cooking was legendary.
‘I’ve made chicken and dumplings with mashed potatoes and collard greens,’ Pat told her. ‘And the early peaches are out of this world, so there’s peach cobbler for dessert. It’ll be ready in a few minutes. The boys are all in the living room. Why don’t you go say hello, and I’ll bring you a glass of iced tea.’
The living room, like the rest of the house, was spacious, with four deep leather sofas arranged around a big central coffee table. Everything faced a wide-screen TV which, at the moment, showed a pitcher, spitting on a baseball.
The walls held mostly modest prints of landscape views in heavy masculine frames. Near the door, though, there was a picture of a younger Smith, shaking hands with the governor, smiling broadly as he accepted a medal for valor.
The image was hung to the right of the real thing who, clad in khakis and a neat, white polo shirt, lounged on a sofa, the newspaper in one hand, reading glasses perched on his nose. His two sons, Kyle and Scott, sat across from each other, staring at their phones.
‘Hi, guys.’ Pushing Scott’s baseball hat down over his face, Harper dropped onto the sofa next to him. ‘Stop with all the chitchat, will you? It’s exhausting.’
‘Doggone it, Harper,’ Scott complained, straightening his hat. He was thirteen – all long legs, freckles and early pimples.
At fifteen, Kyle was more self-confident than his brother. He glanced up from his phone to wave, then returned his attention to the device.
‘Who’s he talking to?’ Harper asked, nudging Scott with her shoulder.
‘His girlfriend,’ Scott told her, in a tone that conveyed ridicule and disbelief.
‘Shut up,’ Kyle said mildly.
‘Every time I mention her,’ Scott stage-whispered, ‘he says that.’
‘What’s wrong with her? Is she ugly?’ Harper stretched out her legs, propping her feet on the coffee table.
‘She is not ugly,’ Kyle said.
Snickering, Scott typed something into his phone and held it up for Harper to read. It said, ‘YES SHE IS.’
They exchanged grins.
Smith folded his paper placidly. ‘Boys, get along.’
‘Here you go, Harper.’ Pat appeared from the kitchen, holding a glass of iced tea with a sprig of mint floating cool and fresh on the top.
Taking the glass from her, Harper said, ‘Can I help at all? None of these lazy guys are offering.’
‘I’d help,’ Scott insisted. ‘But she says I get in the way.’
‘Thank you, Harper.’ Pat rested a hand lightly on her shoulder. ‘It’s all under control.’
The first time Harper ever had dinner with the Smiths was a few months after her mother’s murder. Smith had called her grandmother and asked if the two of them would like to come over.
It was an awkward evening – the unsolved murder cast a looming shadow over every conversation. Back then, Pat was heavily pregnant with Kyle. She saved the night by asking Harper’s grandmother for baby advice and the two were soon chatting away.
Over time, Harper would learn how like her that was – Pat was a born southern diplomat, calmly diverting tricky conversations, seamlessly stopping squabbles.
Later, while Pat and Harper’s grandmother talked softly in the kitchen over cups of coffee, Harper had remained in the living room where Smith had been reading a file from work. He’d put the paperwork aside to quiz her with gentle persistence about school and her life.
‘It’s fine,’ she told him, because she didn’t know how to say that school didn’t seem to matter to her anymore, and that each day was like swimming through glue to a razor-covered shore.
Smith had missed nothing, though.
‘Anyone gives you any trouble, you come to me,’ he told her gruffly. ‘And maybe you should come over more often. Pat’s worried about you, and I don’t like her being worried.’
Over the course of the year, she started spending more time with the Smith family. After Kyle was born, she was invited frequently, ostensibly to help Smith watch the baby while Pat ran errands.
Later, she would see these reasons for her visits were contrived so Smith could keep watch over her, make sure she was surviving. Back then, though, it was just nice to feel like she was part of a family again.
By the time Scott came along, Harper was old enough to babysit. After that, she spent frequent evenings looking out for the two boys when Smith and Pat went out to police functions.
Even now, although her work at the newspaper had created some necessary distance between her and Smith, she still came over once a month or so, to catch up.
‘So.’ Smith removed his reading glasses. ‘I saw your article.’
Instantly alert, Harper glanced at him in surprise. Was he about to open the Whitney conversation himself?
‘Uh-oh.’ Looking up from his phone, Kyle grinned. ‘Did she piss you off, Dad?’
‘Of course not.’ Smith propped his feet up on the ottoman. ‘And don’t say “piss” in front of a lady.’
‘She’s not a lady,’ Scott reminded him with an eye-roll. ‘She’s Harper.’
‘That fact aside,’ Smith growled. ‘A lady is what Harper is. As I was saying …’ He rattled the paper. ‘Your piece on the shooting last night was excellent.’
Harper bit back her disappointment. The shooting last night had been nothing special – page-ten filler.
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘That scene was messy, wasn’t it? You wouldn’t think a .22 would make him bleed so much. I thought six people had died when I walked up.’
‘A .22 can do a lot of damage,’ Smith assured her. ‘Frankly,
if you know where to aim, you can kill a man with a credit card.’
‘Where, Dad?’ Putting down his phone, Scott scooted to the edge of the sofa. ‘Where do you hit him?’
Harper shot Smith a look but he didn’t notice, warming to his subject.
‘There is an artery here,’ he said, pointing to the side of his neck, ‘and another here,’ pointing to his inner thigh. ‘Hit either of those with anything remotely sharp and the best doctor in the world can’t save you. You’ll bleed out in minutes.’
‘Wow,’ Scott breathed, wide-eyed with fascination. Even Kyle looked up from his phone. ‘Have you seen people die like that?’
‘Well …’ Smith began modestly, but he didn’t get a chance to finish.
‘Robert.’ Pat’s disapproving voice came from the doorway. ‘This is not appropriate conversation.’
Smith’s brow furrowed. ‘I think it’s perfectly reasonable if the boy wants to learn about human anatomy and criminology.’
Pat dried her hands too hard on a tea towel.
‘He is thirteen, Robert. Why can’t you argue about politics like normal people?’
‘I don’t like politics,’ Scott informed her.
His mother sighed.
‘Well. Lunch is served.’ She headed towards the dining room, her espadrilles swishing. ‘And blood is banned from the table.’
After the meal, Smith helped Pat with the dishes, while Harper and the boys played basketball outside. She’d always been able to hold her own with them, but these days Kyle was taller than her, and faster.
When he shot his third clean jump shot, catching nothing but net, Harper sagged back against the garage wall.
‘When,’ she wheezed, sweat pouring down her face, ‘did you get so good?’
‘I’m on the JV team.’ A cocky grin lit up his face. He dribbled the ball from hand to hand. ‘First squad.’
‘Crap.’ Waving for the two boys to continue, Harper backed away from the makeshift court. ‘You guys do this. I need to go have a nice quiet heart attack.’
When she walked back into the house, the air conditioning chilled the perspiration on her back, sending goosebumps down her spine.
The Echo Killing Page 11
