It was the last thing Harper heard before Hunter closed the door.
8
When Harper walked into the Savannah police headquarters later that afternoon, the first thing she noticed was that it was colder inside than it was outside. Darlene, the daytime desk officer, wore a coat over her dark blue uniform.
“What’s going on?” Harper asked, looking up at the air vents. “It’s freezing.”
Darlene gave her a gloomy look. “The air conditioner’s blowing instead of the heating and nobody can get it to turn off. Thank God it’s Friday, is all I can say. I can’t wait to get out of this crazy place.”
Without waiting to be asked, she slid a binder containing the day’s crime reports across the desk. “Supposed to work in a snowstorm, I guess,” she grumbled.
Harper, her mind still on the Xavier Rayne story, flipped disinterestedly through the pages. Burglary, burglary, burglary, larceny, assault, burglary. Nothing newsworthy except a minor stabbing.
Finishing in record time, she handed the binder back across. “I wanted to grab the lieutenant for a second. Is he in?”
Instead of answering, Darlene leaned one elbow on the counter. “You and the lieutenant are getting to be regular friends now.” She lifted one eyebrow suggestively.
“Oh, come on. The man hates me like a burning sensation in his nether regions,” Harper said, horrified. “I just need to consult with him about a story.”
“Maybe.” Darlene, who loved gossip more than air, didn’t reach for the phone. “Seems to me y’all are getting along better than you used to at least. It’s nice. That’s all.”
“Darlene.” Harper gave her a stern look.
“I’m calling him.” Smiling, the desk officer picked up the receiver and dialed three numbers. When Blazer answered, she used her sweetest voice. “Lieutenant, Harper McClain would like to speak with you. Can I send her back? Thank you.” As she hung up, she gave Harper a pleased look. “He says come on back. Didn’t even ask what you wanted.”
Ignoring the insinuation, Harper crossed to the security door leading to the back offices. Darlene hit the button that unlocked the door with a shrill warning buzz.
Beyond the door the narrow hallway was busy with officers, detectives, dispatchers, and support staff. Harper weaved through them, nodding to familiar faces. She knew this building even better than the newspaper offices. In some ways she’d grown up here.
After her mother was murdered, when Harper was twelve, the detective on the case had taken her under his wing. Somehow he’d known there was no one else to pick up the pieces of her life and he’d stepped into that role as if it were a perfectly natural thing for a homicide detective to do.
She’d stayed close with Lieutenant Robert Smith all her life—even after she became a reporter and found herself at odds with him from time to time. They’d made it work.
But that all fell apart eighteen months ago when Smith murdered a woman he’d been having an affair with. He was now serving life in prison. For months after his arrest, she’d found these halls unwelcoming and foreign. Gradually, though, she was beginning to feel at home again in the long corridors and small, windowless offices. The faint smell of dust and bleach that seemed to permeate the brick comforted her the way baking cookies might make an ordinary person feel happy.
Lieutenant Larry Blazer, though, had never been part of that feeling for her. He hadn’t approved of Smith’s decision to become so close to her, and he’d never trusted her as a reporter. They grated on each other’s nerves. Still, Darlene wasn’t wrong. Lately, Harper was figuring out how to work with him now that he was head of the homicide unit. And he was learning to trust her, just a little bit.
His office was the last on the hallway. Harper tapped her knuckles against the frosted window where his name was painted in glossy black.
“Enter.” He fired the word like a gunshot.
When she walked in, the lieutenant sat at the blond-wood table that acted as his desk, a laptop open in front of him. He was not a bad-looking man, if you liked the chilly, Nordic type. Tall and thin, he had high cheekbones, graying blond hair, and narrow blue eyes that missed nothing.
The office, which she would always think of as Smith’s, was large and sparsely furnished. Two chrome-and-black leather chairs faced his desk, above which a poster-sized street map of Savannah had been fixed to the wall. Red pins marked the site of every murder in the last twelve months. Harper knew without counting that there would be around forty of them. It had been a bad year.
Blazer peered at her over the top of a pair of reading glasses. “You can have five minutes. I’ve got a budget meeting this afternoon and God himself couldn’t get me out of it.”
Harper got straight to the point. “I’m covering this missing-person case out at Tybee. Are you guys working on it yet? He’s been gone a day and a half and I’m not sure the local cops have it under control.”
“The Tybee Police Department is professional and highly rated,” Blazer said, coolly.
“They found his guitar on the beach and gave it back to his housemates without printing it,” she told him.
There was a pause before he said, “Get out your notebook.”
Smiling, Harper pulled out a pen.
“I received a call this morning from the island’s chief of police. He asked us to take the lead. A Savannah detective team has been assigned to the case as of today.”
Harper looked up at him in surprise. Nobody at Tybee PD had whispered a word about that. “Does that mean you’re treating this as a potential homicide?”
“We’re treating it like a missing-person investigation, McClain,” he said. “We don’t know where he is. We intend to find him. There’s not much else I can tell you.”
“Tybee PD thinks he went swimming and got caught in a riptide,” she said. “But it seems strange to me that he’d swim in February. The water’s freezing.”
“Nothing musicians do surprise me.” His tone was dry.
“I wouldn’t put my toe in that water,” she said.
“That is irrelevant to my case.”
He obviously wasn’t going to give her any more to work with. Harper slid her pen back into her pocket as she asked, “Who’s lead detective?”
Only she would have noticed the infinitesimal hesitation before he replied. “Julie Daltrey and Luke Walker have this one.”
She didn’t react. Still, he fixed her with a look. “Don’t you go bothering Luke for information.”
“I won’t bug them any more than I bug you,” she said.
“In that case, God help them.” With a glance at his watch, he stood up. “I’ve got to get going or they’ll decide we can live without heat all winter.” He headed for the door, motioning for her to follow him into the crowded hallway. “Look, McClain, go slow on this. Don’t write a murder where there isn’t one. Give us time to do our jobs.”
Leaving that as his good-bye, he ran up the stairs, back stiff, laptop clutched firmly in one hand.
After he’d gone, Harper lingered in the hallway, pretending to check her cell phone. Really, she was watching the clock on the screen. She waited four minutes, until she was certain Blazer must be in his meeting; then she ran up the same stairs he’d taken and down a long hallway at the top.