‘Harpelicious!’ Shoving the sketchpad to one side, she jumped up and ran over to hug her, bracelets giving an ashram jangle with every step. She smelled of the cool, lemony perfume she always wore. ‘You look amazing.’
‘Do I?’
‘Definitely.’ Back in her seat, Bonnie squinted at her suspiciously across the table. ‘Something’s different about you. You look lush. What have you been up to?’
‘Working a big case,’ Harper said, sipping her coffee. ‘And having sex with a cop. The usual.’
Bonnie set her cup of green tea down with a thud.
‘No. Way.’
‘Way.’
‘Wait, wait, wait.’ Bonnie leaned forward so eagerly the end of her braid narrowly missed landing in her cup. ‘Is it the one from the other night? The one you told me about?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘Holy shit, Harper. I didn’t think you’d really do it!’ Bonnie exclaimed, so loudly a bearded hipster at the next table stared at them. She lowered her voice. ‘Tell me everything right this minute. Was it good? Do you love him? Can I be your maid of honor?’
Harper made a face at her. ‘It was good. But it was once, OK?’
Bonnie was not to be deterred.
‘Tell me about him. Would I like him? Is he pretty?’
Harper thought of the way Luke looked leaning against the car in the dark last night.
‘Yeah,’ she conceded. ‘He’s pretty.’
‘Pretty cops are the best kind.’ Under the table, Bonnie tapped her leg with her toe. ‘Could he get me out of parking tickets? I’ve got so many parking tickets and I’m a good person, Harper …’
‘He works undercover,’ Harper cut her off. ‘If you’re ever held hostage by a drug gang, he can help. Otherwise, not so much.’
‘Undercover?’ Bonnie sounded impressed. ‘Is he broken by all he’s seen, Harper? Do you need to pick up the pieces and make his life worth living again?’
‘Stop it.’ Harper shot her a warning look. ‘Be nice or I won’t tell you anything.’
‘I withdraw the question.’ Bonnie took a demure sip of tea. ‘At least tell me his name.’
Harper lowered her voice. ‘His name’s Luke Walker.’
Bonnie choked.
‘Luke Walker,’ she sputtered, ‘is the most cop name I’ve ever heard in my life.’
She deepened her voice. ‘Ma’am, I’m Officer Luke Walker. I’m here to fix your refrigerator …’
Harper didn’t laugh. Normally, she would enjoy joking about a guy with Bonnie.
Luke was different.
Spotting this, Bonnie stopped. Her smile faded.
‘Hold on,’ she said softly. ‘You really like this one, don’t you?’
Harper never could hide anything from her.
‘It’s a bad scene, Bonnie,’ she said. ‘I’ve known Luke for years. I think maybe I always had a thing for him that I wouldn’t admit to myself. Now … I don’t know how it’s going to work.’
‘Now that you got his pants off,’ Bonnie filled in the blanks, ‘you’re afraid you won’t be friends anymore.’
‘Something like that,’ Harper conceded. ‘Also, like I said the other night, cops aren’t allowed to have relationships with journalists.’
‘Come on, sweetie,’ Bonnie said. ‘We’re talking about you. No one can tell you who to date. Your boss can’t pick your boyfriend. Even in modern America.’
‘But there are rules, Bonnie,’ Harper said.
Her anxiety about the situation made her tone more harsh than she intended, and she held up her hands apologetically.
‘Sorry, I don’t mean to growl at you.’
But Bonnie waved that away.
‘Harper, it seems to me you have to make a decision.’ She grew serious. ‘You can say it’s not worth the risk. Or, if you really like him, you say to hell with the rules. And take your chances.’
She tilted her head. Her eyes were vivid blue in the bright sunlight.
‘Do you really like him?’
Harper held her gaze.
‘I really like him.’
Bonnie shrugged. ‘Then, to hell with the rules, Harper.’
Harper thought of how it had felt lying with her head on Luke’s chest, his hand stroking her hair.
‘Yeah,’ she said, as much to herself as Bonnie. ‘To hell with them.’
Chapter Twenty-two
‘How old is Blazer?’ Harper glanced at Miles. ‘Late forties?’
‘Something like that.’
He was behind the wheel of the Mustang. She was in her Camaro. They’d parked their cars nose to tail, so their open driver’s side windows faced each other.
It was after midnight and they were in an empty parking lot at the edge of downtown. It was surrounded by hedges – impossible to see from the street. They’d often met here under other circumstances, to discuss work, gossip, or just hang out when adrenaline made sleep impossible.
But tonight there was no small talk. No jokes.
True to his promise, Miles called as soon as he got back in town. He’d obviously had a long day – he looked tired.
When Harper told him what she’d found in her mother’s archive file, he’d gone quiet, replying in short sentences, eyes on some unidentifiable point in the distance.
‘So, when he was thirty-two or thirty-three, he worked my mother’s case,’ Harper said. ‘Then, fifteen years later, he dates a woman who happens to end up murdered under identical circumstances. Miles,’ she implored him, ‘this is no coincidence. You can see that, right?’
He rubbed his eyes hard.
‘All I see is you haven’t got proof of anything. You’ve got a cop’s name on an old piece of paper. That’s a little bit of nothing.’
His tone was cutting.
‘But if it was him …’ Harper argued.
‘It’s too early for if,’ he cut her off. ‘We get into if, we’re going to lose how and why. Not to mention why not. And there are a thousand members of the why not family.’
He shifted in the car so he was facing her – his expression was deadly serious.
‘Harper, you have to be careful here. I don’t know Blazer well but I know enough about him to know he’s a ruthless son of a bitch. He’s got a career plan and he’s been courting the deputy chief for the last five years. He’s ambitious as hell and, if you threaten him, he has the means to take you out of the picture.’
The truth in that sentence sent ice into Harper’s veins.
‘Well, what am I supposed to do?’ she asked helplessly. ‘We both know this case smells bad. But how do I prove it?’
Miles considered this for a moment. In the distance, a freight train whistle blew, low and mournful.
‘Seems to me, you’re going about this all wrong,’ he said finally. ‘You’ve chosen an outcome you want and you’re trying to build the facts to match it. You’ve created your truth and now you’re trying to twist everything to prove you’re right.’
Harper’s cheeks flushed at the injustice of this, but she let him talk.
‘You’ve got to stop that. You need to treat this like any other story you investigate,’ he continued. ‘You’ve proven Blazer was involved in both cases. There is a connection. Now you’ve got to find the rest.’
He made it sound so easy. It wasn’t easy.
‘I’m trying,’ Harper said, her voice rising. ‘But I don’t know where to look. I’m at a dead end.’
Miles shook his head.
‘Think about it, Harper – if Blazer was the killer, he had to know your mother. They had to have had a relationship. You’re looking for the same things the police look for – opportunity, motive and means. We know he had the means. He’s a cop. Cops know how to kill. But what about opportunity and motive? Why would he want to kill your mother? What on earth would he stand to gain from that? Could he do it? What was going on that day in his life? Those are the puzzle pieces you haven’t found yet.’
He rubbed a tired hand
across his jaw.
‘Work on motive first. Almost no one kills without it. Find out if he had any connection to your mother. Did he know your family? You remember seeing him around when you were a kid?’
‘No.’ Her reply was emphatic.
‘Then maybe he knew your parents in some other way. Your dad still living?’
Harper nodded.
‘Well, give him a call. See if he remembers Blazer. Track down some of your mother’s friends, show them Blazer’s picture. See if any of them remember him. Parents have lives kids don’t know about. Maybe your parents met him through work.’
Some of Harper’s despair seeped away. This was practical advice. Things she could really do.
‘OK,’ she said, nodding slowly.
‘But I’m telling you this now, Harper.’ Miles’ voice turned cool. ‘You find nothing? You’ve got to let this go. You cannot Captain Ahab this thing forever, you hear me? A vendetta will eat you alive. It won’t be Blazer you destroy. You’ll destroy yourself.’
Harper turned away biting her lip hard. She didn’t want to argue with Miles – he was the only person she had to talk to about this.
But he hadn’t been Camille Whitney once, the way she had, and then seen her standing there years later, like a mirror of her own past.
He didn’t understand what this was like.
That intransigence must have shown in her posture, though, because Miles gave a weary sigh.
‘Do what you have to, Harper. I’ll help if I can. Now, I need to get some sleep. It must’ve been a hundred and ten degrees out there today and golfers don’t like shade.’
He started the Mustang’s engine. The powerful rumble echoed off the concrete around them.
He had to raise his voice to be heard above it as he issued parting words of advice.
‘If you’re really going after a cop, you need to treat this case like your own mother was a stranger. Dig into her life. If you can prove Blazer was in her life as well as Whitney’s, then you’ve got something to take to Smith. Right this minute, you haven’t got a thing.’
Miles’ words followed Harper home that night, and stayed with her over the next few days. Much as she hated to admit it, there was a lot of truth in what he’d said.
After years spent assiduously avoiding her own past, she now had no choice but to immerse herself in it.
Worst of all, she needed to call her father.
She hadn’t spoken to him since Christmas, and that was the way she liked it. So she’d put off that call as long as possible.
With Billy’s help, she dragged boxes of family papers and memorabilia out of the attic and spread them out on the living room floor. There weren’t very many – eight, altogether. But it made her uncomfortable seeing them sitting there. Like rectangular time bombs.
‘Whatcha looking for, darlin’?’ Billy asked, surveying the dusty boxes doubtfully.
The thick Louisiana accent he’d never lost coated his words in aural velvet.
‘I’m researching my family history,’ she told him. ‘Looking for old pictures. The usual thing.’
‘I never do that,’ he told her, hands in the pockets of his paint-stained jeans. ‘My mama kept pictures hangin’ on the wall. Spent mosta my life tryin’ to get away from all them dead people.’
Harper gazed at the stack of boxes.
‘I keep my dead people in here,’ she said.
When the landlord had gone, she tore the tape off the first box and dug through it, unsure of precisely what to expect.
After her mother’s murder, they’d never lived in their old house again. Harper’s father had packed up their belongings a few months later, and put the house on the market.
When he moved up north, everything belonging to Harper’s mother had been sent to her grandmother. After her grandmother died a few years ago and her house was sold, Harper inherited what remained of those boxes.
She’d put them in the attic without opening them. And there they had stayed. She had no idea what lay inside.
The first box turned out to contain old letters, report cards, school papers (B- ‘Harper needs to work on her attention to detail …’), and photographs.
After some indecisiveness, she divided the items up into separate stacks – letters, bills, photos, junk.
She could mostly eliminate the letters, which were largely notes she and Bonnie wrote to each other at school, letters when one or the other of them was at camp, long missives from when they briefly went into a diary craze and wrote every single thought down by hand for posterity and exchanged them.
I think Brad likes me, Bonnie had written eighteen years ago, her handwriting sprawling and florid, between margins where she’d drawn elaborate rows of school desks, with tiny students sitting in them. He smiled at me six times today. SIX. Even when I kicked his ankle in PE, he smiled at me. I don’t like him.
Snorting a laugh, Harper put the page aside to give to Bonnie later.
It was funny how little she remembered of her own childhood. It felt like she was reading someone else’s letters. Snooping into someone else’s life.
Pulling out another envelope, Harper paused. A gold and white daisy had been painted next to her name. At the sight of her mother’s familiar handwriting, each letter perfectly curled, her breath hitched.
I’m glad you’re having fun at camp, her mother had written. But I miss painting together in the afternoons. And I look forward to the time when we can go back to normal …
She’d written that less than a year before someone stabbed her to death.
Harper held the paper to her nose, but there was none of her mother’s scent on it. Nothing of her spirit.
Folding the letter carefully, Harper tucked it back in the envelope.
The rest of the box contained nothing except forgotten memories – an award Harper won at school, a dried-out pen from Atlanta, a North of the Border sticker.
When she reached the bottom, Harper breathed a sigh of relief and refilled the box, shoving it aside.
One down. Seven to go.
Bracing herself, she tore open the next box.
This one contained more of her mother’s things. There was no order to it – it looked like her father had thrown everything in without looking. Old paintbrushes, a flyer for a restaurant, a pair of well-worn winter gloves, an alabaster jewelry box, electric bills and phone bills.
Harper dug through the chaos until she came across a small leather address book.
Hurriedly, she flipped through it to the Bs, but there was no Blazer.
Most of the names were familiar – aunts and cousins, old friends and neighbors. There were a few she didn’t recognize, though, and she set the book aside to do more research later.
At the dusty bottom of the box, along with a broken gold necklace and a box of matches, she found a stack of personal letters.
Most were nothing – short gossipy notes from relatives.
The last letter was in a thick cream envelope bearing her mother’s name. As soon as Harper picked it up she recognized her father’s handwriting. There was no return address, and the postmark was dated two months before her mother’s death.
Cautiously, she unfolded the handwritten page. The ink was coal black. It appeared to have been written quickly, every word a slash-mark of anger.
There was no affectionate salutation, merely ‘Alicia’.
As Harper read it, her lips parted in shock.
I won’t let you get away with this, the letter began.
Your accusations show you’ve become hysterical. You accuse me of affairs without any proof at all. I’m BUSY, Alicia. I’ve got to support our family, and god knows your art doesn’t bring in anything. How dare you accuse me of cheating on you? How dare you threaten my relationship with our child? It’s not like you’re pure as the driven snow. If you don’t stop this, I swear you will pay. You always have been a selfish bitch. Grow up. Jealousy doesn’t become you.
It was signed with a ‘P’, for
Peter. Written with such force his pen had gone through the paper.
Harper read it through twice, gripping the letter tightly.
So, her mother had known about her father’s affair. And she’d called him on it.
It was so like her father to want to respond in writing – always the lawyer. But the heated tone and fiery language – that was out of character. He prided himself on staying calm and defeating every opponent with infuriating logic. This time, though, he’d lost it.
How dare you threaten my relationship with my child …
Had her mother threatened to leave him and take Harper with her?
She kept coming back to the most threatening line: I swear you will pay.
Rocking back on her heels, she stared at the letter in her hand.
Was this proof that her father had motive?
His alibi had come from his girlfriend. She could have lied. The only proof they’d produced that he’d been with her that afternoon was a receipt, dated around the time of the murder, from a gas station near her apartment.
Wouldn’t it have been easy for him to get home from the suburbs, kill his wife and then slip back out again without being seen?
The thought turned her stomach.
She’d always accepted her father’s innocence – the police had gone after him so hard, she’d assumed if there was anything to find, they’d have found it. Her anger at him had come from the cheating – not from any suspicion that he might actually be guilty.
But this letter indicated she didn’t know anything about her parents’ relationship. And she was starting to doubt the police.
Even though it blew a hole through her theory that the same person committed both murders – after all, he hadn’t lived in Savannah in more than a decade – she couldn’t ignore this.
She had to add her father to her list of suspects. Right under Blazer.
Chapter Twenty-three
The next day, she took her mother’s address book to work. Whenever there was a lull, she went through it, calling her mother’s contacts, looking for connection to Larry Blazer. After finding that letter, it seemed more urgent than ever to establish some thread from the detective to her mother’s life.
The Echo Killing Page 19