The quiet following the gunfire had weight to it. Harper could feel it pressing down on her as she lay flat on the ground, one arm flung across Scott’s back, as if that narrow length of flesh and bone could somehow protect him.
Her ears were ringing. The harsh rasp of her own breathing seemed too loud.
With her face pressed to the rough tarmac, she could smell dirt and oil, and the sweat of her own fear.
Cautiously she raised her head to see Richards. He’d fallen a few feet away, and now lay on his back, hands clutching his chest. His breathing made a sickening gurgling sound that made her stomach churn.
Scott turned his head to look at her—his eyes gleamed in the dark through the blood on his skin.
“Are you hurt?” she asked, searching his face for wounds.
“Not my blood.” He was breathing hard.
In shock, she thought.
“Was that Anderson?” he asked. “He tried to kill us.”
“Shh,” Harper hissed.
She cocked her head, still trying to locate the shooter. But she could hear nothing.
They stayed still for a minute, listening to the terrible sound Richards was making. Then Scott had had enough.
“I’ve got to get to him,” he told her.
Harper didn’t want him to move—if Anderson was out there, any motion could give him a target—but Richards sounded bad.
“Stay low,” she told him. “I’ll get help.”
Raising himself on his elbows, Scott crept toward the wounded cabdriver. Harper pulled her phone from her pocket, shielding the screen light with one hand as she dialed 911. She slid on her belly over toward Richards as the call went through.
“It’s bad,” Scott said.
Richards was struggling to breathe. The bullet had hit him in the ribs. His neat, plaid shirt was soaked in blood.
Harper didn’t know much, but she knew the chest was a bad place to get shot.
“Put both hands on the wound,” she instructed Scott. “Press firmly. I’m calling an ambulance.”
Raising herself up, she peered to where Anderson had stood earlier. The parking lot entrance was empty now. But those high hedges would make a great hiding place. He could be watching them and she’d never know.
When a crisp female voice spoke in her ear, she flinched.
“911. What’s your emergency?”
“This is Harper McClain,” she whispered urgently. “I need police and an ambulance in the parking lot behind 369 Congress. A man’s been shot. Warn responding officers: The shooter may still be in the area. We are hunkered down.”
The dispatcher’s tone changed instantly. “I’m sending them now. You okay, Harper?”
In the background, Harper could hear her typing. Her voice was familiar. Was it Sharon? Or Dorothy?
“I’m not hit.” Harper was still whispering, although surely if Anderson were nearby he’d have made himself known by now. “But the victim—he’s in bad shape. It’s a nine-millimeter to the chest. Looks like hollow-point.”
“Is he breathing?” the dispatcher asked.
“Yes.” Harper looked to where Scott was bent over Richards’s body, hands glossy with blood as he pressed against the wound. “But it doesn’t sound right.”
“Apply pressure to the wound. Keep him flat. Ambulance is en route.”
Harper could hear sirens in the distance.
“Find Detective Daltrey,” she said. “Tell her the shooter was Peyton Anderson.”
“Help me, Harper,” Scott pleaded, his face contorting. “I think he’s dying.”
“I’ve got to go.” Dropping the phone, Harper crawled back to him. Richards’s eyes were half closed. His breathing had weakened.
“We’ve got to do something to stop the bleeding. Do you have anything we can use?” she asked Scott, urgently. “A towel? A T-shirt?”
“Hang on,” he said.
Jumping to his feet, he ran to his cab, heedless of his own safety. She heard him yank open a door as she pressed her hands against the wound where Scott had been trying to hold back the flow. Richards’s blood was hot against her skin. It seemed impossible to stop—an irresistible, tidal flow.
Scott dropped to his knees across from her, a towel in his hand.
“It’s not very clean,” he told her, apologetically.
“It will have to do.” Moving fast, she rolled up the cloth into a tight ball and pressed it against the hole in Scott’s chest as the first police car roared into the parking lot, its siren screaming.
Squinting into the blinding lights, Harper held up a bloody hand.
“Over here!”
She heard the thud of boots against the pavement as the two officers ran toward her.
The following minutes were a blur of paramedics and police taking over the crime scene. Police questioned her and Scott. They explained what had happened, but the whole time they were watching as EMTs swarmed around the wounded man.
Harper saw Toby among them, but there was no chance to speak to him as he attached Richards to machines, pumping fresh oxygen into him, and, finally, lifting him onto an ambulance and spiriting him away.
Then Daltrey appeared, climbing out of a dark four-door sedan in her neat black pantsuit, eyes sweeping the scene.
“McClain,” she barked as she walked up to them. “You better be sure about this.”
Harper held out her bloodied hands. “I can only tell you what I saw.”
The detective turned to Scott. “Mr. Scott, did you see the same thing as McClain, here?”
He nodded fervently. “The Anderson boy—he shot Elton Richards right in the chest. He was turning the gun on me when Miss McClain knocked me down so hard I nearly lost my teeth.” He looked at McClain. “I forgot to thank you for that. I think I’d be dead if it wasn’t for you.”
Harper didn’t want his thanks. She wanted Anderson in jail.
“I’m sorry you had to go through this,” she said, giving Daltrey a hard look.
As the shock dissipated, the realization that a man who had suffered so much already had just watched a friend nearly die for no reason at all filled her with a sudden righteous fury.
Her tone accusing, she asked the detective, “Have you located him? Are you going to arrest him?”
“We’re doing our best, McClain. But we need to talk to both of you.” Gesturing for a nearby uniformed cop to come over, she pointed at Harper and Scott. “Bag both their hands. Get them to the station.”
Glancing back at the two of them, she said, “I’ll meet you as soon as I can. The officers will take care of you.”
When the patrol car pulled up at police headquarters a few minutes later, Harper waited impatiently to be let out.
The backseat was hard, and smelled of old urine and sweat. Her hands, still covered in blood, had begun to perspire inside their plastic cases, and she clenched and opened them repeatedly.
Over her objection, she and Jerrod had been placed in separate cars. This, she knew, was so they couldn’t compare details on the way to the station. They’d be kept in separate rooms until they could be interviewed.
She hoped he wasn’t too shaken up.
The cop driving took his time getting out, putting his equipment in place, and then finally rising from his seat. He was a big guy—the car rose with him.
He shuffled in her direction, utility belt jangling. It seemed to take a year for him to open the door.
Harper swung her feet out, breathing in the fresh air, gratefully.
When they walked into police headquarters, Dwayne’s head snapped up.
“Harper!” He ran out from behind the desk. “I heard about the shooting. All the dispatchers are talking about it. Are you hurt?”
“I’m doing better than the guy who got hit,” she told him. Her voice was gruff, but she gave him a grateful look.
“You’ve got blood all over you.” He swung a fierce look at the silent mountain of a cop escorting her. “You take care of her, you hear me, Carl?”
“I’m going to do a GSR, and then she can get cleaned up,” Carl replied, sounding offended. “I’m not abusing her, Dwayne.”
He and Dwayne kept sniping at each other, but Harper tuned out.
A GSR—a gunshot-residue test.
Those tests were done to prove if someone had recently fired a gun. Normally, they were done on suspects.
“Why?” she asked abruptly, interrupting Carl’s unconvincing defense.
They both turned to look at her.
“Why do you need to do a gunshot-residue test?”
A brief silence fell.
“Daltrey asked for it,” Carl told her, as if that explained everything.
“She probably wants to exclude you from the suspect list.” Dwayne’s tone was soothing. “It’s normal for witnesses.”
It made sense. But it still felt like an accusation.
And as Carl led her across the lobby and through the security door, she began to shiver.
An hour later, Harper sat alone in a windowless room, staring at herself in a two-way mirror and clutching a cardboard cup of terrible coffee.
The test had been quick and painless, and after that, she’d finally been allowed to wash off the blood. In the bathroom, she’d discovered Richards’s blood wasn’t only on her hands, but on her clothes and face, even in her hair.
She’d done the best she could with scalding-hot water, government-issued soap, and cheap paper towels.
Since then, she’d been sitting here, alone with her thoughts, in a room like a cell. She’d had plenty of time to figure out how it all went down. How Anderson happened to be in that parking lot, with a gun in his hand.
Plenty of time to blame herself.
When the door swung open without warning, she twitched.
Daltrey bustled in, holding a notepad and a bottle of water, which she set on the table at Harper’s elbow.
“Thought you might be thirsty. The coffee’s undrinkable. You ready to get started?”
She pulled out the chair across the table and sat down, flipping open her notebook.
The flurry of activity after the long minutes of quiet was discombobulating. It took Harper a second to find her voice.
“Any word on Richards?”
“Last time I checked he was still alive,” Daltrey said curtly. “Just.”
Pulling a remote control out of her pocket, she turned on a video camera mounted to the ceiling in the corner, its lens directed at the two of them.
“Okay. Detective Julie Daltrey interviewing Harper McClain.” She rattled this off, looking at her notebook the whole time. “Let’s start at the beginning. What were you doing in the parking lot off Congress Street at midnight, tonight?”
Too tired for long explanations, Harper kept it short.
“I went to meet Jerrod Scott.”
“Why did you meet him in a parking lot in the middle of the night?” Daltrey studied her, a fine line between her eyebrows. “Would it have killed you to meet in a bar?”
“It wasn’t a date.” Harper’s tone was dry.
“What was it then?” Daltrey challenged her. “Why did Scott want to meet you in a parking lot at midnight? And why is a man lying half dead on an operating table now, McClain?”
It was time to tell her everything. Harper knew this. The police had been her next stop, anyway. She just hoped Daltrey was ready to listen.
“He said he had information for me,” Harper said. “About the murder of his daughter.”
Daltrey’s eyebrows rose. “Why did he come to you? Last time I checked, I’m the one investigating that murder.”
Harper didn’t take the bait. Two people were dead. There was no time left for games.
“He knows I’ve been working on a story about the murder. He thinks the police are on the wrong track. He told me he had some information I needed to know.”
“So, you went to the parking lot at 369 Congress Street to meet Jerrod Scott to investigate my case.”
“Detective,” she said, meeting her eyes, “I didn’t think you’d believe a word either of us had to say until we could answer every question you might have. Now, I think I have all the answers you need.”
She waited for Daltrey to make a sarcastic remark.
Instead, the detective opened her notebook.
“I’ll hear your story in a minute. First, walk me through the shooting. Start from your arrival at the parking lot. What happened?”
Aware that her story would be compared to Scott’s line by line, Harper told her about pulling into the quiet lot. Seeing Richards and Scott standing next to their cars, waiting.
“Richards drives a Liberty cab. He told me he picked up a man at Savannah Memorial the night of Naomi’s murder,” she said. “He described him as tall and slim, with straight brown hair. He said his left arm was wrapped in bandages from his elbow to his fingers. I showed him a picture of Peyton Anderson and he positively identified him.” She paused. “And then Anderson shot him.”
“We’ll get back to what Richards told you in a second.” Daltrey’s voice was steady, as if there was nothing new or surprising in what Harper had to say. “Describe the shooting to me.”
Harper thought of the moment the quiet was shattered with a sound like a bomb.
“We were finished,” she said, slowly. “We were ready to say good-bye. Richards had agreed to come talk to you. I was going to call you when I got home to arrange for him to tell you his story. That was when it happened.” She kept her eyes on Daltrey, who never changed expression. “None of us saw him coming. We just heard the shot.”
She paused, remembering the confusion, and the sudden realization of what had happened. But all she said was, “Richards went down fast.”
“You didn’t see Anderson fire?” Daltrey asked.
Harper shook her head. “I looked up, and he was standing in the entranceway, pointing a gun at Scott. I grabbed Scott, and we got down before he fired again.”
“How many times did he fire?” Daltrey asked.
“Twice,” Harper said. “The first shot hit Richards. The other missed.”
“And you’re certain the shooter was Peyton Anderson?”
“I’m positive.” She shuddered at the memory. “He smiled at me.”
Daltrey’s brow creased. “He smiled…?”
Before she could finish the question, someone knocked on the door to the interview room.
Frowning, Daltrey turned off the recorder and stood up.
The door opened, and Luke looked in at them. His eyes met Harper’s, and her stomach tightened. Some part of her—which would not learn—longed to throw itself into his arms. But then his eyes shifted swiftly to Daltrey.
“Can I talk to you a second?” he asked the detective.
“Yep.” Daltrey walked out of the room, carrying her notebook and the remote. Before they closed the door, Harper heard Luke say, “I thought you’d want to know…”
As she waited, she stared down into her coffee, as if it held the answers she sought. Daltrey had given her so little information—she had no idea whether the detective believed her or not.
She’d been in this room too long. Her mind kept whirling from Anderson to Scott to Richards to Luke and back to the beginning in an obsessive loop.
Glancing up, she caught a sudden glimpse of her own reflection in the mirror. Her hair was out of control, and her top was bloodstained. Her forehead was creased in a frown she didn’t know she was making.
With no windows, no clocks, and no phone, she didn’t know how much time passed before the door opened and Daltrey bustled back in.
“Okay, then. Where were we?” the detective asked, setting the notebook back down on the table, and seating herself in the metal chair.
But by then, Harper had had enough of this.
“What’s going on?” she asked, sharply. “Have you located Anderson? Why are we sitting in here when we could be out looking for him?”
Daltrey looked at her, her expression shadowed.
“Elton Richards died on the operating table ten minutes ago.” Her voice was flat.
Harper dropped her head. She thought of the kindly bear of a man in a checked shirt, so worried he might have been an inadvertent player in Scott’s tragedy.
“Oh, hell,” she whispered.
“This is now a murder investigation.” Daltrey’s voice was measured. “And if your identification of the killer is solid, then it’s a double murder. So we have to follow the rules here, McClain. We put one step wrong in this thing, you know what his daddy will do with us.”
There was no way for Harper to argue with that.
“We’re going to have to go over this again and again, until I am convinced that I know everything you know,” Daltrey said. “It’s time to tell me everything.”
Harper raised her eyes to Daltrey’s.
“Anderson threatened me,” she said. “Two days ago. I think he’s been following me. That must be how he knew where I was tonight—who I was meeting. He followed me there. He’s probably been following me for days. Maybe ever since I wrote that story about him.”
Daltrey’s breath hissed between her teeth.
“Ah, dammit, Harper,” she said, reproachfully. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“I didn’t think it mattered.” Unable to take that piercing look any longer, Harper dropped her gaze. “I never thought he’d target anyone but me.”
There was a pause.
“You know, Harper,” Daltrey said, with unexpected gentleness, “at some point you’re going to realize you’re not responsible for every person who gets hurt in this town.”
Harper didn’t know what to say to that.
After a second, the detective picked up the remote and turned the recorder back on.
“Detective Julie Daltrey is back in the room,” she told the device. “Let’s resume.”
Then, in that methodical voice she saved for anything that might be used in court as evidence, she said, “Tell me about Peyton Anderson.”