newspaper’s offices were in a century-old, rambling four-story building that took up half a city block on Bay Street, close enough to the slow-moving Savannah River to smell its green river scent and to hear the giant engines of the massive container ships rumble as they rolled slowly out to sea. The neon words ‘DAILY NEWS’ glowed red from a rooftop sign that must have been one of the last things the sailors saw before the great Atlantic Ocean opened before them.
Down the street, the ornate city hall’s gilded dome gleamed, even at this hour, and through a break in the buildings, Harper could see the cobblestone lanes leading down to the water’s edge.
She’d never lived anywhere except Savannah, so it had been a very long time since she’d paid much attention to its landmarks and antebellum architecture. To her, like the verdant town squares and endless monuments to ill-fated Civil War generals, it was all just there.
She didn’t spare any of it a glance now as she waited, one leg jiggling impatiently. Her scanner crackled on her hip. Ambulances were being called out. Backup was being sent.
‘Come on, Miles,’ she whispered, turning her wrist to see her watch.
It was quiet enough for her to hear the faint wail of sirens in the distance, as a gleaming black Mustang rounded the corner and roared straight towards her, headlights blinding. It stopped in front of her, the motor revving.
Harper yanked the door open and leapt in.
‘Let’s go,’ she said, strapping on her seatbelt.
The tires spun as they sped off.
Inside, the Mustang was alive with voices. Miles had one scanner on his belt, one mounted within the dash where there might otherwise have been a radio, and a third hooked up behind the gear shift. Each was set to a different channel – one monitored the main police frequency, another was set to a side channel the cops used for chitchat. The third monitored ambulance and fire.
It was like walking into a small, crowded room where twenty people were all talking at once. Harper was used to it, but it always took her a second to make sense of the cacophony.
‘What’ve we got?’ she asked, frowning.
‘Nothing new.’ He kept his eyes on the road. ‘Ambulance en route. Waiting for an update.’
Photographer Miles Jackson was tall and lean, with dark skin and neat, short-cropped hair. He’d been a staff photographer until a few years ago, when all the photographers were let go. Since then, he’d been freelance, doing whatever paid the most. He could be found shooting a wedding on a Saturday afternoon and a murder later that same night.
If it pays it plays, he was fond of saying.
He had a cool sardonic smile and liked driving fast. He was doing about twice the speed limit as they roared around the corner onto Oglethorpe Avenue, sending the car fishtailing.
Swearing under his breath, Miles wrestled the wheel.
‘Doesn’t this thing go any faster?’ Harper deadpanned, hanging on to the handle above the door.
‘Very funny,’ Miles said through gritted teeth. But he quickly regained control.
As they raced past Forsyth Park, where a huge marble fountain poured a hoopskirt-shaped arc of water into a stone pool, she cocked her head, listening to the scanner.
‘They know where the shooters went?’ she asked.
Miles shook his head. ‘Lost them in the projects.’
As he spoke, the scanner for the police chitchat channel lit up. A grave-deep voice growled, ‘This is one-four. Unit three-niner-seven, what are we dealing with here?’
Miles and Harper exchanged a look. Fourteen was the code number used by Lieutenant Robert Smith, head of the homicide division.
Miles turned down the other scanners.
‘Lieutenant, we’ve got one fatality, two going to hospital,’ the officer on the scene responded. Excitement sent his voice up an octave. He talked so fast Harper got a contact high from his adrenaline. ‘Gang-banger party. Three shooters, all MIA.’
Not waiting to hear the rest, Harper pulled out her phone. Baxter answered on the first ring.
‘It’s murder,’ Harper said without preamble. ‘But it could be gang-on-gang.’
‘Damn.’ She could hear the editor tapping her silver pen on the desk. Taptaptaptap. ‘Call me as soon as you know more.’
The line went dead.
Shoving her phone in her pocket, Harper leaned back in her seat.
‘If the dead guy’s a banger, the story goes inside.’
‘Well then, we’d best hope our victim is an innocent housewife,’ Miles observed as they turned onto Broad Street.
Eyes on the road ahead, Harper nodded. ‘We can dream.’
On early maps of Savannah, the city is a perfectly symmetrical grid of straight lines, OCD neat, with Broad Street forming the eastern border. In all directions, everything outside that grid is dark green emptiness, its contents identified with the words ‘Old Rice Fields’ in the nineteenth-century cartographer’s precise handwriting.
Today, that orderly grid remains largely unchanged, save for the rice fields, which are long gone, replaced by unlovely sprawl. Broad Street forms a speedy direct line between gorgeous, picture-postcard old Savannah and the parts where Harper and Miles spent most of their working nights.
As they headed west, the grand old houses fronted by trees draped in the gray lace of Spanish moss gradually disappeared, replaced by peeling paint, overgrown yards and cheap metal fences.
No leafy squares broke up the dense housing in this neighborhood. No fountains poured beneath oak trees. Instead, battered apartment buildings stacked people on top of each other in cramped and ugly conditions fronted by broken sidewalks and illuminated by the garish signs marking out fast-food chains and discount shops.
Out here, the streets were busy – drug dealers did good business at this hour.
Miles’ hands were steady on the wheel, but his eyes – scanning the buildings around them – were alert.
He was older than Harper – in his forties. Photography was his second career. Years ago, back in Memphis, he’d had another, very different life.
‘I was an office guy,’ he’d told her once as he took his camera carefully to pieces. ‘Pushing paper. Made good money. Had the big house, the pretty wife, the whole nine yards. But it wasn’t for me.’
He’d always loved taking pictures and he knew he had an eye. One day, he signed up for a photography course. Just, he said, for something to do.
‘After that, I had the itch.’
As far as she could tell, within a year of taking that course, he’d quit his job, left his wife, and started over.
He’d visited Savannah for
