The next morning, Harper steered into the crowded parking lot behind the newspaper building, black Ray-Bans protecting her eyes. A slight thudding behind her temples was the only remnant of the night before.
It was less than she deserved, as far as she was concerned.
After the bar closed for the night, Bonnie drove her home. Harper hadn’t admitted to her that she didn’t feel safe walking home. But Bonnie was now obsessed with the break-ins and insisted on accompanying her anyway, so no confessions were needed.
While Harper made up a bed for her on one of the gray sofas, Bonnie lectured her about security.
“Until the cops figure out who this guy is, you’re not safe here,” she said. “You shouldn’t stay here by yourself at all.”
“I’m fine,” Harper had assured her. “I have perfectly good security.”
“That’s ridiculous. If this guy lets himself in while you’re asleep, what will you do?”
It was late, Harper was tired. That was the only explanation she could come up with for what happened next.
Busy spreading the duvet, she talked without thinking. “I don’t know. Listen to him, maybe. Smith thinks there’s something he wants to tell me. I need to stay here long enough to find out what that is.”
“Did you say Smith?”
Harper’s breath caught.
“Lieutenant Smith?” Bonnie stared at her. “You’ve seen him?”
Caught in the glare of Bonnie’s horrified gaze, Harper sat down on the bed she’d just made.
A long silence fell.
“I talk to him,” she confessed finally. “Now and then.”
Bonnie searched her face as if she’d find clues there to her sudden insanity.
“You talk to Smith? Where? How?”
“I drive out to Reidsville Prison,” Harper told her. “And we talk.”
Bonnie lowered herself onto the couch next to her. She looked stunned.
“How long has this been going on? How often do you see him?”
“Since the start.” Unable to bear the bewilderment in Bonnie’s face, Harper looked down to where her hands worried the corner of the comforter. “I go out there every few months.”
It took Bonnie a second to absorb that.
“What do you talk about?”
“My mom’s case. The burglary. Smith thinks they might be connected, somehow. We’re trying to figure out how.”
There was a long pause.
“How is he?” Bonnie asked.
Harper hadn’t anticipated this question, but then, maybe she should have. After all, Smith had known Bonnie as long as he’d known her. He’d driven the two of them to roller-skating rinks when they were thirteen and picked them up after football games in high school.
Bonnie had always viewed him as sort of a kindly uncle who also happened to be a cop. Until he’d killed a woman.
After that, she had excised him from her vocabulary—rarely, if ever, mentioning him. It was as if she’d removed him from her memory altogether.
Now, though, she sat looking at Harper with an expression of such deep sadness it tore Harper’s heart.
“He’s grayer. Older.” She thought about how the lieutenant had looked when he walked into the visiting room a few days ago. “And he’s harder. It’s like prison’s absorbing parts of him that we knew and turning him into an inmate.”
Bonnie’s face closed. “I think he did that to himself when he killed someone.”
“I do, too.” Harper turned to Bonnie, appealing for her to understand. “But Bon, the Smith we knew—he’s still in there. He still thinks like a cop when he talks to me.”
She waited for Bonnie to reply, but she just sat there, her brow creased with thought.
“I’m sorry, Harper, I’m trying to process this,” she said, at last. “Why didn’t you tell me all this before? Why hide it?”
Harper exhaled.
“I didn’t tell anyone. I couldn’t. I knew it would hurt you. But I’ve been thinking and I have to keep seeing him. If I’m ever going to solve my mom’s murder, I need his help. Is that … Does that sound crazy?”
Bonnie’s eyes searched her face. Then she let out a breath.
“No, it doesn’t sound crazy.”
Putting her arm around Harper’s shoulders, she pulled her closer and pressed a light kiss on her hair.
“I understand, Harper,” she said. “I just worry about you.”
“I’m careful.” Harper leaned into her, breathing in her familiar scent of lemony perfume, and the faint but not unpleasant hint of oil paint that always clung to her hair and skin.
“Be more careful,” Bonnie said.
Harper smiled. “I have three locks.”
They both laughed, and the tension was broken.
That night, to her own surprise, Harper slept dreamlessly for the first time in days.
And as she parked in the lot behind the paper she felt calmer—more focused. As if telling Bonnie the truth had lifted some of the load she’d been carrying lately.
She was determined not to get sidetracked now. She was so close to knowing the truth about what had happened to Naomi Scott. She owed it to the dead girl not to get distracted.
When she reached the newsroom, Baxter wasn’t at her desk. The door to Dells’s office was closed. Through the glass wall, scarred by the long crack Randall Anderson had made, she saw that he was on the phone.
She started to back away, but, spotting her, he motioned for her to come in.
Harper slipped inside, seating herself in one of the sleek leather-and-chrome chairs facing his desk.
“I know what you’re saying,” Dells said into the phone, “but that’s the last thing I want to hear. Let’s look at cheaper suppliers first. We’re bleeding paper at this point.”
Glancing down, Harper noticed that the files open on his desk showed charts and spreadsheets, filled with incomprehensible numbers. Some he’d circled with looping swooshes of his pen. They were pretty big figures.
“Take a look,” he told whoever he was talking to, “and get back to me. Thanks, Tom.”
Squinting, Harper tried to get a better look at the numbers, but Dells closed the folder.
“Quit peeking.” He shook his finger at her.
“You know what I do for a living, right?” she asked.
“I pay you to investigate other people, McClain.” But he sounded amused. “Let’s keep it that way. Speaking of that…”
He motioned for her to speak.
“A lot has happened.” Harper leaned forward eagerly. “First, I interviewed the two women Anderson stalked and they told me everything.”
Talking too fast in her adrenaline rush, she told him what she’d learned.
When she finished, he shook his head in disbelief.
“Dammit, what is wrong with the cops? This can’t be a coincidence. Stalkers kill. He’s made threats. How can they say this is unrelated?”
“It all comes back to his alibi,” Harper said.
“Good point.” Dells leaned forward, resting his elbows on his desk. “Where are we at with the alibi? What’s your detective got to say?”
“That’s what I’m doing today,” she said, with confidence she didn’t feel. “It’s just taking a little time to get the cops to talk.”
In truth, she didn’t know where that information would come from. Nobody on the police force was talking.
Dells gave her a warning look.
“Get on that,” he said. “We can’t do much else until we know what he’s told them, and why they believe him. This is the biggest missing piece in the puzzle.”
“I promise I’ll have it today.”
“You better.” His face darkened. “Everyone’s breathing down our necks on this one.”
Harper hesitated before broaching the subject.
“Has Anderson done anything yet? Filed a lawsuit?”
“As far as I know he hasn’t taken legal action.” Dells gave her a dark smile. “But I’m told he had lunch with MaryAnne Charlton yesterday.”
“Shit,” Harper breathed.
“Exactly,” Dells said.
MaryAnne Charlton was the head of the paper’s board of directors—and the heir of the family that had owned the newspaper company for more than sixty years.
Harper had seen her now and then when she’d made state visits to the newsroom—she was an old-school Southern belle, with a penchant for Chanel suits and oversized necklaces.
If she was meeting with Anderson, then he’d gone straight to the top.
It was impossible to tell if this situation made Dells anxious. He affected a permanent air of calm distance. Some of that had broken down as they worked on the story together, but not enough that she really had any clue what he was thinking.
Still, one thing she knew for certain was that Charlton could fire both of them in an instant.
“Has she called you?” Harper pressed him. “Said anything?”
“Not yet.” His response was succinct. And his expression indicated that he’d said all he intended to.
An awkward silence fell.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” Harper said, after a moment. “I finally got hold of Jim Fitzgerald.”
“Good,” Dells said. “What’d you learn?”
“He’s a broken man whose business is going under because the cops won’t take him off the suspect list,” Harper said. “If he killed anyone I’ll eat my computer.”
Dells slapped a hand on his desk so hard his pen jumped.
“There’s a story. That’s what you take to your detective. That’s how you get her to talk. While she’s failing to solve this crime, there are real-life ramifications happening for all the people they haven’t cleared. Their mistakes have a cost.”
When he talked about the police, his expression grew predatory.
“Don’t hold your punches. Tell her all we know. Make her defend her case to you. Tell her we’re gunning for them.” He rocked forward in his chair. “When can you get me a first draft?”
“Tomorrow, maybe?” Harper suggested, cautiously.
“Tomorrow, definitely,” Dells corrected her. “We need to get something together no later than tomorrow’s deadline. Something publishable and legal and devastating and right.”
He looked at her with those ice-blue eyes.
“If that doesn’t happen, we’re going to be in trouble, you and me. And I don’t like the look of the jury.”