The Echo Killing: A gripping debut crime thriller you won’t be able to put down!

Harper scanned the paper quickly, seeing nothing that said page one. As soon as they reached the Mustang, she called Baxter to give her the bad news.

‘Damn it,’ the editor said when she’d heard the rundown. ‘Get back here and write it up for page six. It’s better than nothing.’

Miles started the engine as Harper ended the call.

‘Page six?’ he guessed.

Harper folded the paper and put it in her pocket.

‘Buried in the weeds.’

He shrugged. ‘You win some, you lose some.’

Turning the wheel, he began to pull out of the parking space, before braking hard to let a white van creep by. The words ‘COUNTY CORONER’ were emblazoned on the side in sepulcher black.

‘The iceman cometh,’ Miles murmured.

Harper barely looked up. She was scribbling notes for the piece she needed to write when she got back.

When the van passed, Miles turned the car around with neat precision. They’d only gone a short distance, though, when a breathless voice suddenly filled the car.

‘Unit five-six-eight in pursuit of suspects from Broad Street.’

Harper’s pen froze.

Miles lifted his foot from the accelerator.

They both looked at the scanner.

‘Copy unit five-six-eight,’ the dispatcher responded calmly. ‘Please verify: Are these the suspects from the shooting on Broad?’

‘Affirmative.’ The man was panting, his voice shook. He was running.

‘Three males heading south on foot on Thirty-Ninth Street,’ he shouted. ‘Two tall. One short with a bandanna.’

In the background, Harper could hear the dispatcher typing the information into her computer, her fingers quick and light on the keys. It was Sarah tonight on dispatch – she recognized the voice. She was good.

‘All units. Backup required for unit five-six-eight in pursuit of shooting suspects heading south on Thirty-Ninth.’

Sarah’s voice was so unemotional she might have been reading a cake recipe.

Harper turned to Miles. ‘That’s five blocks from here.’

‘Copy that.’ He shifted gears and hit the gas. The Mustang responded, tires squealing. A smile lifted the corners of his mouth as he turned towards Thirty-Ninth.

‘Let’s get ourselves on page one.’

Chapter Three

As they drove through the dark streets to find the suspected killers, Harper stared out the window, tapping her pen impatiently against her notebook. They didn’t have much time. Even if this went smoothly, Baxter would have to delay the last edition.

Ordinary people might have been thinking about the victim back at the crime scene – his short life ended in a violent instant. But her mind had already moved on. Now, she just needed to know who killed him.

It had always been like this. Murders didn’t bother Harper. They fascinated her.

She knew everything about the mechanics of homicide. She knew what the detectives were doing now, and the coroner’s office. How the victim’s family would be informed, and how they would react when they learned. She knew how the machinery of government would kick into gear and consume the lives of everyone involved.

She knew, not because she wrote about it, but because she had lived it.

When she was twelve years old a murder had destroyed her world. She could trace her career, her life and her obsessive interest in crime back to that single day, fifteen years ago.

Some moments get imprinted on your mind so thoroughly every breath of it stays with you forever. Most of these are bad moments. Harper could walk through every second of the day her mother died any time she wished. She could place those hours in a mental reel and play them like a film. Watch herself, so small and quick, walking home from school. Utterly unaware that life, as she knew it, was already over.

3:35 p.m. – Twelve-year-old Harper shoves open the low metal gate, closing the latch with a silvery clang.

3:36 p.m. – She dashes up the steps – flinging the unlocked door open and closing it behind her with a resounding thud. God, it’s all so bright and warm in her memory; so filled with color. She calls out, ‘Mom, I’m starving.’ No one replies.

3:37 p.m. – She yells up the stairs, ‘Mom?’ She’s not worried yet. Humming to herself, she checks the living room, the dining room.

3:38 p.m. – She steps into the kitchen.

This is where her childhood ends.

There is more color here – not only the yellow of the walls and the tiny vivid jars and bottles of blue and gold and green paint. But red. Red everywhere. Splattered on the walls and counters. Pooling on the floor under her mother’s naked body.

Blood-red filling her memories with horror and leaving behind trauma that will never go away.

In her memory film, time has stopped now. It stays 3:38 for a very long time.

In the next frame she’s running in slow motion to her mother’s side, she’s skidding in the blood, losing her balance. She’s trying to breathe, but it’s as if someone has kicked her in the stomach. Her whole body hurts and there’s no air, no air, as she falls to the floor, blood squelching beneath her skinny knees.

This was the first and only time she was ever afraid to touch her mother. Her trembling hand reaches out to brush the smooth, pale shoulder. She recoils, yanking it back again.

She’s so cold.

Someone is sobbing far away. ‘Mom? Mom?’ And faintly, plaintively, ‘Mommy?’

She knows now it’s her own voice but the her on the memory film isn’t sure. She feels far away from her body.

In the next frame, she is scrambling to her feet – still no air to breathe, and she is gasping for it, but her lungs refuse to work – skidding across the kitchen and hurtling out the side door to Bonnie’s house. But the Larsons moved away after their divorce, and the new neighbors aren’t nice and they’re not home anyway, but she pounds on the door leaving bloody marks on the wood, and the pounding echoes in the emptiness.

She’s weeping so hard her breath begins to come back, forced into her lungs by tears, as she runs back to her house to find the phone. She picks it up only to see it fall from her nerveless, blood-slick fingers. Then she is sobbing and finding it on the floor, taking choking breaths, making herself slow down. She only has to dial three numbers. She can do this. She has to do this.

‘OK,’ she whispers over and over through her tears as she dials, hands shaking so hard the phone vibrates. ‘OK. OK. OK …’

It rings. A distant series of odd, mechanical clicks. A dispatcher answers – and that irrationally calm female voice, so inured to hearing the horrors of the world expressed through the panicked, disembodied voices of witnesses and victims, is a rope she can grasp.

‘This is 911. What is your emergency?’

She is trying to speak but her tears and breathlessness make it almost impossible. Only a confused scattering of words make it from her frightened mind to her lips.

‘Please help,’ she sobs. ‘My mom. Please help.’

‘What’s happened to your mom?’ The woman’s emotion-free voice is stern-friendly. Stern to help her focus. Friendly because she is a child.

Now Harper must say the word. The word she can’t even think. A word so distant from her until this moment in time it had no more bearing on her immediate life than Uzbekistan. Her mind doesn’t want her to say the word. Saying it hurts.

‘My mom … there’s blood … I think … someone killed her.’

It is all she has. She is sobbing inconsolably. The dispatcher’s tone changes.

‘Sweetie,’ she says with utter gentleness that disguises the worry beneath it and the absolute tension of the moment, ‘I need you to take a deep breath and tell me your address, OK? Can you do that? I’m sending help.’

Harper tells her. She doesn’t know then, but she knows now, that as she talks the operator is typing urgent things into her computer, motioning for her supervisor’s attention, setting wheels in motion that will turn and turn through her life for years to come.

Then the operator is asking if she’s safe, and that is the first time it occurs to Harper that someone very dangerous might be in the house with her. Her levels of fear and panic are off the charts now. And the operator is telling her to take the phone outside, and to stand by the curb and to run and scream if anyone scares her.

She does as she’s told, each step wooden and unreal, until she is at the metal gate again with its clanging latch, the phone clutched in one blood-sticky hand.

The dispatcher is saying calming things. ‘They’re coming, honey. They’re three minutes away. Don’t hang up, sweetheart …’

In the distance she hears the urgent wail of sirens and despite everything doesn’t realize they’re coming for her.

When the first police car screeches to a halt, blue lights flashing, she feels even more frightened as the officers climb out of the car with guns in their hands, and run past her into the house.

One of them shouts to her, ‘Stay there.’

She stays.

More police pull up and soon she is surrounded by men and women in official uniforms with guns and mace and Kevlar vests.

‘Are you OK?’ people keep asking her.

But Harper is not OK. Not OK at all.

Then a man, tall, with a deep voice and authoritative air appears at her side. He takes the phone from her hand and hands it to another officer, who places it, strangely, Harper thinks, in a plastic bag.

The man has a weathered face that has seen other children like her, bloodied and frightened. Many of them. There is kindness in his eyes.

‘My name is Sergeant Smith,’ the man tells her in a deep, soothing voice. ‘And I’m not going to let anyone hurt you …’

‘Harper.’

She gave a start, blinking hard.

The car had slowed to a crawl. They were on a dark street, surrounded on all sides by run-down buildings with boarded-up windows.

Miles was looking at her oddly, as if he’d said her name more than once.

‘We’re here,’ he said. ‘Are you OK?’

‘I’m fine.’ Her tone was brusque and she turned away, her eyes sweeping the sidewalk for trouble, out of habit.

She was angry with herself. Why had she been thinking about that stuff? It was ancient history.

Right now, she had a job to do.

‘Have you seen any sign of them?’ she asked, peering into the shadows.

‘Nothing at all.’ He slowed the car to a crawl, squinting at the buildings around them. ‘Looks like we got here before backup did.’

This wasn’t normal. Harper frowned.

‘What’s taking so long?’

Miles shook his head. ‘No idea.’

Thirty-Ninth Street was narrower and much darker than Broad, lined on either side by some of the city’s most notorious public housing projects. Harper had been here many nights before, but she could never remember seeing it so empty. No one hung out on the steps, or gathered on the concrete drives. There were no pit-bull gangs comparing dogs, no crowds of young men jostling on the basketball court.

Miles gave a low whistle.

‘Well, this is unusual.’ He spoke softly, as if they might be heard through the windows.

Harper leaned forward in her seat to look up.

‘Someone shot out the streetlights.’

‘Five-six-eight, what is your situation?’ The dispatcher’s voice crackling out of the police scanner seemed too loud in the heavy silence.

A long moment passed. All the radio chatter had stopped now, as if every cop in the city was waiting for this one crime to play out.

‘This is five-six-eight.’ The officer’s voice was low now, barely above a whisper. ‘Suspects ran into the Anderson Houses. I’ve lost visual. I’m looking for them.’

‘Copy that, five-six-eight,’ the dispatcher said. ‘Be aware, backup is en route.’

Miles pointed to a decrepit cluster of boarded-up, graffiti-covered three-story buildings at the end of the road.

‘Anderson Houses,’ he said. ‘Been closed a few years now. Great place to hide.’

Pulling the car into an empty space at the side of the road, he cut the engine. The quiet that followed felt unnatural.

In sync, Harper and Miles unhooked the scanners from their belts and placed them on the floor of the car.

Miles looked at her, his eyes gleaming in the shadows. ‘This could get messy.’

Harper grinned at him. ‘What’s new?’

Tilting her head at the door, she reached for the handle.

There was no more discussion. They both knew how dangerous it was.

They jumped out of the car in the same moment, closed their doors carefully and edged down the road toward the boarded-up buildings.

Outside, the humidity hung thick in the hot air and the odd hush felt even heavier. Not one person walked down the normally crowded street. Their soft-soled shoes were silent on the pavement as they moved through the darkness. Still, Harper was conscious with every step of a sense of being watched.

The fine hairs on the back of her neck rose.

‘Where is everyone?’ she whispered.

Slowing, Miles scanned the ramshackle buildings around them. They appeared empty. But Harper suspected there were people there, behind every dark pane of glass.

‘Waiting,’ he said grimly.

Across the street, something moved in the shadows.

They both noticed it at the same time but Miles reacted first, grabbing Harper’s arm and pulling her behind a parked car.

They crouched low.

Peering into the darkness, Harper could make out three figures about twenty yards away. Two were tall and thin, one was short and stocky. Hidden behind a tall, abandoned tenement, the three didn’t seem aware they were being watched. They were staring intently in the opposite direction.

Following their line of vision, Harper at first saw nothing. Then she noticed the glow of a flashlight bobbing at the far end of the long, dusty courtyard.

Her heart sped up. It had to be the cop – Five-six-eight.

The killers were two buildings away from him and he was heading the wrong way. He had no idea where they were. But they knew right where he was.

Carefully, she raised herself up above the hood of the dusty parked Toyota, trying to get a better look at what the men were doing. The small one was fussing with something around his neck. It took her a second to realize it was a bandanna.

The three wanted men leaned towards each other, whispering. They seemed to be arguing.

The smallest one said something that silenced the others. Despite his size, it was immediately clear he was the leader of that group.

The other two dropped back as, with one hand, he tugged the bandanna up over his nose and mouth, like a bandit from a western movie.

Reaching behind his back, he pulled a gun from the waistband of his jeans.

Harper’s stomach dropped.

He was going to take the cop out.

In desperation, she looked over her shoulder to the empty street. Where the hell was backup? They should have been here long ago.

But behind them there was only darkness.

A few feet away, Miles had balanced his camera on the very edge of the trunk and was focusing it on the three men. His hands were absolutely steady.

Harper leaned towards him.

‘We have to warn that cop,’ she hissed.

Miles turned far enough to give her an incredulous look.

She couldn’t blame him. She knew as well as anyone reporters at crime scenes were supposed to be nothing but eyes and ears – always observing, never getting involved.

But surely this was different. Someone could die. And there was no one else here to save him.

Before she could make up her mind what to do, the three gunmen stepped out of the shadows.

Harper’s eyes had adjusted to the dark now and she could see them clearly as the one with the bandanna raised his gun, leveling it at the bobbing light in the distance.

The would-be shooter was small – no more than five foot four – and so young. He could easily be a teenager.

But his stance was confident. His hand was steady. There was a kind of eagerness to his posture – he leaned forward onto the balls of his feet, the gun thrust out. As if he couldn’t wait to kill.

The scene took on a haze of unreality. It was too late to call for help. They were too close, anyway.

Next to her, Miles took his first careful shots. There was no loud click – just a muffled shushing sound, instantly lost in the breeze.

He modified his cameras for silence.

Across the road, the gunman spread his legs, bracing himself to fire. The gun glittered silver in his hand.

Every muscle in Harper’s body tightened, preparing for the roar of gunfire. Her hands gripped the trunk of the Toyota in front of her, knuckles gleaming pale.

This couldn’t happen. She couldn’t sit there and watch a man die. She had to do something.

Closing her eyes she drew a sharp breath. Then, before she could talk herself out of it, she shouted into the quiet night.

‘Police. Drop your weapons.’ She paused, trying to think up something else intimidating to say. ‘You’re surrounded.’

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Miles glare at her.

Across the courtyard, the cop’s flashlight swung hurriedly in her direction. It blinked once, then disappeared.

The wanted trio whirled toward her voice. The taller two whipped handguns out of their waistbands and pointed them at the Toyota.

Harper and Miles ducked down below the windows.

Squeezing her eyes shut, Harper listened for any sound. Her heart slammed against her ribs. Her breath came in short, tight gasps. She had definitely not thought this through.

‘Great.’ Crouching next to her, every muscle tense, Miles hissed, ‘What’s next in your plan? Hit them with your pen?’

Harper didn’t have an answer. What was the step after yelling? Yell again?

Where were the real police, for God’s sake?

Cautiously, she raised her head to look at the men through the dirty car windows. All their guns were pointed directly at her.

With a gasp, she dropped back down. Her ribs felt too tight around her lungs – she couldn’t seem to breathe.

If the police didn’t get here soon, she and Miles were both going to die.

Swallowing hard, she tried shouting again.

‘I said drop your weapons, now.’

‘Fuck you, five-o,’ the tallest of the three shouted defiantly.

She heard a series of metallic clicks.

Her heart stopped.

She heard Miles whisper, ‘Oh, hell.’

They threw themselves down flat, hitting the rough concrete as the men fired.

The noise of three powerful guns letting loose was deafening – an almighty cannon roar.

Overhead, the windows of the car shattered.

Her hands covering her head, Harper squeezed her eyes shut as glass showered her.

They were trapped.

Chapter Four

The shooting seemed to go on forever. When it finally stopped, the silence left a hollow feeling in Harper’s chest – a curious emptiness.

Her ears ringing, she reached out blindly for Miles.

He wasn’t there.

‘Miles,’ she whispered urgently, hands flailing in the air.

‘I’m alive,’ he hissed from a few feet away. ‘No thanks to you.’

Blinking dust and glass from her eyes, she saw him, crouched by the trunk of the car.

‘You dead, five-o?’ one of the shooters shouted mockingly.

Before Harper could think of an appropriate reply, a cool voice spoke from behind her right shoulder.

‘I am alive and very pissed off,’ it said. ‘Now drop your weapons or I will unload on you.’

Startled, Harper twisted around. A tall, broad-shouldered man stood directly behind her. He had a 9 mm semi-automatic pistol trained on the three suspects.

Luke Walker.

He wore a black T-shirt and jeans. The badge hooked to his belt gleamed. His gun hand was absolutely steady.

‘You really are surrounded,’ he added, motioning with his free hand.

As if on cue, a line of dark-clad undercover cops poured onto the street. Overhead, a police helicopter thundered across the sky, its blinding spotlight turning the night into cold, white day. Amid the sudden deafening confusion, voices shouted rough commands.

The cavalry had arrived at last.

Caught off guard, the three wanted men were pointing their guns wildly in all directions. But it was too late, and even they knew that.

With slow reluctance, the tallest one dropped his gun. The short one gave him a look of disgust.

But seconds later, as the police shouted commands and threats at him, he did the same.

One by one, they knelt on the ground, putting their hands behind their heads.

As the police swarmed them, Miles left the battered Toyota and ran over to get more shots.

Harper stood cautiously. Her legs were a little shaky.

That had been too close for comfort.

As she turned to face him, Luke holstered his weapon.

‘Harper McClain.’ He didn’t sound happy. ‘Why am I not surprised to see you here?’

‘Because I’m always this intrepid?’ Harper forced a nonchalance she didn’t feel into her voice.

She’d known Luke since she was an intern at the paper and he was a rookie patrol officer. At twenty, he’d been earnest and thoughtful. They’d both grown up in the same neighborhoods and they were the same age. So, when her editor assigned her to do a ride-along with him, it was almost inevitable they’d hit it off.

They’d spent three hours racing from one fairly minor crime to another with the enthusiasm of ingénues. She’d written an excited article about his life as a new cop. They’d been friends ever since.

So she knew him well enough to know he was genuinely pissed off as he strode toward her, boots crunching on broken glass.

‘Intrepid is not the word I’m thinking of,’ he said, a sharp edge to his voice. ‘Dammit, Harper, since when do you perform citizen’s arrests? You could have gotten yourself killed. You know that, right?’

‘What else was I supposed to do?’ she asked. ‘Backup never showed. Those guys were about to shoot Officer Flashlight over there. I had to do something.’

‘You could have waited for us,’ he said, his voice rising. ‘You could have gone to a safe place and called this in. You could have considered your own safety for one minute. You could have done a lot of things, McClain, if you’d just thought it through.’

Harper flushed.

‘I did think it through,’ she insisted. ‘And I decided I wanted everyone to live. Jesus, Luke. Give it a rest, OK?’

She folded her arms tightly across her torso.

His eyes swept her pale face.

‘Are you OK?’ He took a step toward her, his face softening. ‘I was half a block away when they let rip on you guys. I thought …’

His voice trailed off.

‘I’m fine,’ she assured him. ‘They’re crappy shots.’

‘Not that crappy.’

Across the road, the cops were searching the shooters, emptying their pockets onto the dirty pavement. Fat rolls of money, a handful of tiny plastic bags of white powder, a comb, some change.

Harper had begun to piece the night together. Luke worked on the undercover squad – which meant he mostly handled drug-gang cases. She hadn’t seen him in more than a month, which usually meant he was working somewhere deeply unsavory.

‘Luke – did this blow your cover?’ she asked.

She was relieved when he shook his head.

‘I’ve been keeping an eye on these clowns for a few weeks. Had a tip-off they were making a move tonight against a rival group.’ He glanced at her. ‘I’m still not sure how you and Miles got caught in the middle.’

‘We heard the call that the killers had been spotted,’ she explained. ‘Came over to see it go down. We didn’t realize it was going to go down right on top of us.’

She gestured as she spoke, and only then noticed that glass had cut her hand at some point. A small trickle of blood traced across her skin. Harper stared at it.