“Loved your story this morning,” he said. “Couldn’t have written it better myself.”
Harper fixed him with a look. “Did you steal it line for line again?”
“Only the best parts. You’re a little wordy.” His smile widened, revealing nicotine-stained teeth. “So, you finally saw through Cara’s act.”
His approval made her skin crawl.
“I just wrote what I was told by the police and the coroner.” Motioning for Bonnie to follow, she shoved past him, trying to get away, but he trotted beside them.
“Stuart must have blown a gasket when he read the front page,” he said.
Harper wheeled on him. “None of this is any of your business. Why don’t you just go back to LA and leave us in peace?”
Bonnie looked back and forth between them, a puzzled frown creasing her forehead as Graff stepped closer. His worn gray jacket looked rumpled, and he didn’t smell all that clean. “You think you’re so pure,” he said, a jagged edge of malice in his voice. “You think you’re a real journalist and I’m a hack. But you’re wrong. We’re the same. We’re both reporters. It’s just that you’re old journalism. I’m the new wave.”
Harper glared at him. “God help us, then.”
He didn’t back down. “I’ve been doing my research. Your newspaper’s in trouble. Been laying people off. Newspapers like yours don’t stand a chance. The world is changing.” He snapped his fingers in front of her face. “People want their news fast and they want it exciting. Paper’s what they read in school. They want news on their phone. And they want it updated all the time. You can’t do that. Not with your big office building downtown. Your bloated staff. Advertising department. Sports department. You look down on me but someday you’ll be coming to me for a job,” he told her, with satisfaction. “I guarantee it.”
“Not as long as any other job in the world exists.” Harper said it through gritted teeth.
He wasn’t convinced. “You’ll wipe tables for a living when you could write?”
“I won’t ever work with con artists like you.” Motioning for Bonnie to follow, she turned on her heel and strode away. She could hear him laughing but she didn’t look back.
“Who was that guy?” Bonnie sputtered. “He’s repellent.”
“Some tabloid reporter,” Harper said, contemptuously. “Nobody.”
But Graff’s words stung more than she cared to admit. He wasn’t wrong about the piece she’d written. It was completely legal but it wasn’t fair. There wasn’t any real evidence that Cara had anything to do with a murder. She’d written it because she had the information, and because Baxter needed a compelling front page to keep the newspaper’s owner happy.
She didn’t like what this case was doing to her. Why didn’t the police just solve the damn thing?
Then she could focus on finding the man who killed her mother.
* * *
Bonnie went home a short while later to prepare for the classes she would teach the next day. Harper had the day off, and spent most of it looking for more information about Martin Dowell. Still, she could find nothing in any newspaper about him being released from prison. And little that she didn’t know already about his long list of crimes.
Late that afternoon, Luke texted:
SP tell me they’re monitoring Dowell. Ankle bracelet; limited freedom.
Harper knew “SP” would be the state police. This information should have made her feel better, but for some reason, the worried feeling in her chest didn’t lift.
After a second, she texted back:
Is he in Atlanta?
His response was instant:
Don’t know. No one’s talking.
She frowned, turning the phone over in her hand. There were very few circumstances in which police would protect an ex-con in that way. None of them made sense in this case, except one.
She typed:
Is he cooperating with them? Is he a witness?
There was a long pause before he replied:
Can’t be. He’s too dirty. He’s tainted.
Normally, she’d have agreed with him. But she’d been thinking about this all day and nothing else made sense.
I hope you’re right,
she wrote back.
I’ve got a bad feeling about this.
His reply came shortly:
Yeah. I don’t feel too good about it either.
She wanted to ask more. To find out what he thought, based on his old days working undercover. For a brief moment she considered calling him, but then put the phone down again. After all, he hadn’t called her. That might mean he was with his girlfriend right now.
The thought was a needle jab to her chest.
She didn’t have any right to be jealous. After all, she was the one who’d told him she didn’t want to try a relationship again.
So why did she feel left behind?
In an attempt to distract herself, she made food she couldn’t eat. Poured a glass of wine and didn’t drink it. Through it all, her mind kept going back to Martin Dowell, and wondering what he’d offered the police in return for his freedom.
Just after eleven o’clock, her phone finally rang, but it wasn’t Luke, calling to throw ideas around.
It was her father.
“I got your message.” His voice was clipped, distant. “That was a surprise.”
“Yeah, well.” Harper lowered herself onto the sofa and made her tone as cold as his. “Sorry to bother you. I won’t keep you long. There’s just something I need to ask you.”
“This rarely goes well,” he said dryly.
“I want to ask you about a man named Martin Dowell.”
Her father was two thousand miles away but Harper could swear she felt him stop breathing.
All he said, though, was, “I’m not sure I know that name.”
How could she have reached this age without knowing what a good liar her father was?
“That’s funny, because you were his lawyer for years.” Her voice dripped sarcasm. “I would have thought you’d remember. You look so cozy in the pictures.”
After an infinitesimal pause, he said, “Harper, what is this about? Get to the point. My family needs me.”
Harper flinched. When she spoke again, her voice was ablaze with fury. “This is about whether or not you lied to the police when they interviewed you after Mom died. This is about whether or not you are complicit in her murder. There is no statute of limitations on conspiracy to commit murder in the state of Georgia, as I imagine you know. Or on obstruction of justice in a homicide case. That’s what this is about. Now tell me about Martin Dowell. Did he kill my mother?”
“Don’t go down this rabbit hole, Harper,” her father began, but she cut him off.
“Don’t you dare give me advice. You give me answers, or there’ll be police knocking on your door with a warrant within forty-eight hours—and you know I can make that happen. Worse, I can make sure everyone knows it happened. So, I suggest you answer my questions right now. After all, your family needs you.”
In the silence that followed, she could hear his uneven breathing.
“What do you want to know?” His tone had changed. He sounded tired now. Tired and scared.