In the end, that day was so busy Harper had little time to worry about the apartment. After hanging up the phone with Billy, she was getting dressed when Miles called her cell phone.
“There’s a ten-car pileup on I-95,” he told her, cheerfully. “Bring your dancing shoes.”
Still shoving her arms into her top, she grabbed her notebook and keys and dashed out the door so quickly she almost forgot her promise to reset the alarm code.
Swearing under her breath, she went through the steps, punching the buttons hard as she reset it to Bonnie’s birth date.
As she ran down the front steps into the steamy morning air, she hoped to hell she’d remember she’d done it when she came home that night.
When she arrived on the accident scene twenty minutes later, the interstate was closed. She didn’t know the highway patrol officers at all, and she had to argue her way past the cop guarding the access lane.
When he got tired of looking at her press pass and listening to her complaints, he waved her on with a bored twitch of his wrist.
“Try to stay out of the way,” he grumbled as she put the gearshift into drive.
Beyond him, I-95 was uncannily silent on the southbound side.
“Where’s the wreck?” she asked.
He gestured into the hazy distance.
“Head that way. You can’t miss it.”
Once she drove past him, she had the entirety of one of the nation’s major arteries all to herself. Five empty lanes surrounded her. It was ghostly, and far too quiet.
She found herself driving below the speed limit—something about the emptiness made her hackles rise. Freeways are made to be busy. This was a wasteland.
She knew she was getting close to the wreck when she spotted abandoned cars in the distance. Some had been left with their doors open. Beyond them, perhaps a hundred yards ahead, blue lights swirled, and a small crowd had gathered.
Three TV news trucks had already arrived, their satellite dishes raised to the sky.
She parked the Camaro behind them, and struck out on foot.
The drivers of the abandoned cars were clustered at the edge of the scene. Their faces wore the dazed, worried looks of people whose lives had intersected dramatically with that day’s news.
Beyond them, blackened pieces of an unidentifiable vehicle smoldered, scattered across the interstate as if hurled there by a giant, angry child. Ambulances were parked everywhere, emergency lights spinning silently.
Harper slipped past the crowd and followed the bits of car before finding the rest of the accident, cars tangled together into a confusing, still-smoldering mass, surrounded by police and ambulances beneath the huge, late-summer sun.
Miles was right in the middle of it, standing next to Josh Leonard, the reporter from Channel 5 News. He was pointing at something next to the tangled mass.
Only when Harper reached them did she see the beer can. There was another lying nearby. And more in the distance.
“At this hour?” she said. “It’s not even eleven o’clock.”
Miles’s face was somber.
“Three dead,” he told her quietly. “Six injured. Cops think one of the drivers was drunk.”
Josh didn’t make any of his usual jokes.
“It’s a bloodbath,” he told her. “They think it was a stag party.”
“Oh, man.” Harper pulled her phone from her pocket. “I’ll let the paper know. Where are they taking the injured?”
“I’m not sure.” Miles pointed at an ambulance nearby. “Ask Toby.”
Looking over where he indicated, she saw paramedic Toby Jennings, his white-blond hair rumpled, his face serious as he connected an IV tube to a bag suspended above a bloodied man on a stretcher.
Harper made her way toward him.
As the stretcher was loaded onto one of the ambulances, Toby raked his fingers through his hair and looked around for more to do.
“Hey, Toby,” Harper called, waving.
Glancing up, he gave a distracted half smile, and lifted his hand.
“Hey,” he said, as she approached. “You got a ticket to this show as well? I thought this place was supposed to be exclusive.”
“The bouncer knows me,” she said.
He gave her a quick hug.
Hugging was new for them. Ever since he’d been the paramedic on call the night she was shot, he’d “taken a new interest in your survival,” as he liked to put it.
“How’s it going?” Harper asked.
“Oh, you know.” He looked back as he spoke, assessing the remaining two victims, who were both surrounded by other paramedics. “Another day, another disaster. Keeps the bills paid.”
Harper lowered her voice. “Is it true one of the drivers had been drinking?”
His condemning nod said everything.
“They were driving back from Jacksonville after an all-night stag party,” he said, quietly. “I’m told the groom was in a different car that didn’t wreck, which makes him one lucky son of a bitch, because nobody walked out of this in good shape.”
Harper shook her head. “When will people learn?”
“Never, is what I’m thinking,” Toby said. He gestured at her shoulder. “What about you? Still predicting the weather with that thing?”
Harper’s hand rose toward her scar. “It’s good. Only hurts when I tell a lie.”
He grinned. “Well, that’s going to be a nightmare for you at the paper. I mean, all you journalists do is make things up, or so I’m told.”
She kicked him lightly, and he grabbed his shin.
“Toby!” The voice came from one of the ambulances. “Load up.”
Toby gave her an apologetic smile. “Duty calls.”
“Oh hey,” she said, as he headed to join the others. “Where are you taking them?”
“Savannah Memorial.” He jumped into the back of the nearest ambulance and turned to face her. “Come over! We’ve got cake.”
By the time she’d gathered enough information from the scene, and then driven to the hospital and back to the newsroom to write up her story, it was afternoon and she hadn’t had a chance to even think about the Scott case.
She had just hit Send on her piece when DJ spun his chair around and rolled himself closer to her desk.
“How do you always know when I’m finishing something?” she asked him, suspiciously.
“Intuition.” He tapped his forehead. “I saw you guys caught yourselves a live one. Baxter said it was a slaughterhouse out there.”
“Yeah,” she said. “If you were thinking of driving down to Florida this afternoon, I’d put it off until tomorrow. The interstate’s a nightmare.”
“Harper.” Emma Baxter stormed across the newsroom toward them.
DJ flinched.
“Why does she do that?” he whispered, returning hurriedly to his own desk.
“I got the pictures from the crash scene,” Baxter said. “Our front page is ninety percent death thanks to you.”
“Anytime,” Harper said.
“What’s the latest on Wilson Shepherd? They charge him yet?”
Harper shook her head. “All the press flack will say is, ‘No comment at this time.’”
Baxter glared. “What the hell is taking so long?”
“Good question.”
Remembering what Blazer had let slip last night, Harper leaned forward.
“I heard a rumor the gun he had on him when they arrested him wasn’t the murder weapon. If they had other forensic evidence connecting him to the crime, they’d have charged him this morning. But they didn’t do that, either.”
Baxter held her gaze as the pieces fell into place.
“Shit,” she said. “They’ve got the wrong guy.”
Harper held up a cautioning hand.
“Maybe. Or maybe they messed up the evidence collection. Or maybe it’s something else.”
Baxter tapped a short, blunt fingernail against the edge of Harper’s desk, thinking it through.
“They’ve already held him more than twenty-four hours, so they must have applied for an extension, but if they haven’t got evidence, they’ll have to let him go soon,” she mused. “Then we go back to the possibility that this was a random murder.”
“That’s true. But the only person who thinks Shepherd’s innocent is Naomi’s dad,” Harper said.
“Oh yeah?” Baxter said. “What’s his theory, then?”
With no new information, Harper had kept Jerrod’s theories to herself until now. But if Wilson wasn’t the shooter, she decided, it was time to share.
“He says Naomi had a thing with some other guy at law school. Said she acted like she was scared of him. But you’re not going to like who it is.”
Baxter’s brows drew together.
“What do you mean I’m not going to like it? Who is it?”
“He says it’s Randall Anderson’s son, Peyton.”
“Oh, Christ on a bike.” Baxter gave her a look of fierce disbelief. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Look, I know what you’re thinking. But I’m wondering if Anderson wasn’t involved in some way,” Harper said. “Maybe Naomi cheated on Shepherd with Anderson, and Shepherd wanted revenge. Or maybe Anderson liked her and she didn’t like him back and it all got ugly.”
“Oh, terrific,” the editor groused. “I’ll hand in my notice now before Anderson sues us and shuts us down completely.”
“I’ll do it quietly,” Harper promised. “But I think I have to make some calls.”
As she spoke, her cell phone began to ring.
Baxter talked over it. “I’ll talk to Dells, but bear this in mind, McClain. That man loves a lawsuit. If you piss off Randall Anderson, I can’t save you,” she said. “No one can.”
She stormed back to her desk as Harper picked up her phone. Bonnie’s name was on the screen.
“Hey, Bonnie,” she said absently, her eyes fixed on Baxter’s receding figure. The editor had walked past her own desk and was now knocking on head editor Paul Dells’s office door.
“Harper. Can you talk?”
Bonnie sounded serious—her voice was low, as if she didn’t want to be overheard.
“Always,” Harper said. “What’s wrong?”
“Fitz asked all the staff to come to the Library for a meeting,” Bonnie whispered. “I’m there now. He says there’s going to be a memorial service at the bar, tonight, for Naomi. I thought you’d want to come.”
“Absolutely. What time?”
“Eight o’clock,” Bonnie said.
Harper heard raised voices in the background. It sounded ugly.
“Is something wrong?” she asked. “What’s going on over there?”
“The police are here, talking to Fitz. They’re asking him a lot of questions and he’s losing it.” Bonnie’s voice grew so low she had to struggle to hear her.
“Harper, it’s so weird. It’s almost like they think he had something to do with the murder.”