The Echo Killing: A gripping debut crime thriller you won’t be able to put down!. Christi Daugherty
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 a business convention and it always stayed with him, he said. The slow way of life. The silky, sweet beauty of the place. The long curve of the river.
He said it felt like a fairytale. So he came here, to live the dream.
They’d both started at the newspaper the same year. Harper as an intern. Miles as night-shift photographer.
Even after seven years, he still saw the city with a stranger’s eyes. He loved the homey cafés and the waitresses who called him ‘sweetie’. He liked driving out to Tybee Island at sunset, or sitting on River Street, watching the ships pass by.
Harper couldn’t remember the last time she’d done any of that. She’d spent all her life in Savannah. To her, this was simply home.
Ahead, swirling blue lights lit up the street like a deadly disco.
‘Here we go,’ Miles muttered, hitting the brakes.
Peering into the glare, Harper counted four patrol cars and at least three unmarked units.
An ambulance rumbled up behind them, its siren blaring, and Miles pulled to the side to let it pass.
‘Better leave the car here,’ he decided, killing the engine.
Harper glanced at her watch: 11:12. She had eighteen minutes to let Baxter know if she had to hold the front page.
Her heart began to race in that familiar way.
She had a thing for murder. Some people called it an obsession. But she had her reasons. Reasons she didn’t like to talk about much.
Miles gathered his equipment from the trunk, but Harper couldn’t wait.
‘Meet you down there.’
Leaping from the car, she took off, notebook in one hand, pen in the other, running toward the flashing lights.
On the street, the warm, humid air smelled of exhaust and something else – something metallic and hard to define. Like fear.
In the dark, the flashing lights were blinding. It wasn’t until Harper got beyond the police cars that she saw the body in the road.
If people get shot while they’re running, they fall hard. Legs at unnatural angles, hands above their heads, clothes fluttering around them – for all the world as if they’ve tumbled from the sky.
This guy had been running when he was shot.
Pulling out her notebook, Harper jotted down what she