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

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