The Morning After Read Free

themselves to find out every little piece of information about him and to tell the world what made Detective Pierce Reed tick. As if they had any idea. He picked up the letter and envelope with a handkerchief, then found a plastic bag in his desk drawer. Carefully, he slipped the envelope and note into the bag. “I think it’s nothing, but you never know. Better keep it in case it ends up being evidence.”
    “Evidence of what? That there’s another looney on the loose?”
    “There’s always another looney on the loose. I’ll keep it just in case and then send out a BOLO over the local system and through NCIC, just in case any other department in the country has gotten anything like it.” He turned to his computer, accessed the National Crime Information Center run by the FBI. “Maybe we’ll get lucky,” he said to Morrisette. “In the meantime, I think I’ll take a break and walk over to the cemetery.”
    “You think you’ll find something?”
    “Nah. Not really. But you never know.” He stuffed his arms through the sleeves of his jacket. “As I said, it’s probably just a crank. Someone getting his jollies by making a vague threat against the department.”
    “Not the department. This particular crazy has zeroed in on you.” Sylvie was adjusting her shoulder holster. “I’m coming with you.”
    He didn’t argue. It would have been useless. Sylvie was the kind of cop who followed her instincts and bent the rules—the kind of hardheaded woman who couldn’t be talked out of a decision once she’d made it. He slid the plastic bag into a file drawer.
    They walked outside through a side door and the winter wind slapped Reed hard on the face. The weather, usually mild in December, had a definite bite to it, the product of a cold snap that was roaring down the East Coast and threatening crops as far south as Florida. Morrisette, fighting the stiff breeze, managed to light a cigarette as they walked the few blocks past Columbia Square. Colonial Cemetery, Savannah’s oldest, was the final resting place to over seven hundred victims of the nineteenth century yellow fever epidemic and was the site of far too many duels in centuries past. General Sherman had used this plot of land in the middle of Savannah as a campground during the Civil War, or, as many of the locals referred to it, the War of Northern Aggression. Shade trees, now barren of leaves, seemed to shiver in the wind, and dry leaves skated down the pathways that cut through the ancient gravestones and historic markers where so many people believed demons resided.
    It was all bunk as far as Reed was concerned. And this morning, this burial place seemed as much a park as a graveyard even though dark, thick-bellied clouds scudded overhead.
    Only a few pedestrians wandered through the tombstones and nothing about them looked suspicious. An elderly couple held gloved hands as they read the markers, three teenagers who probably should have been in school smoked and clustered together as they whispered among themselves, and a middle-aged woman bundled in ski cap, parka and wool gloves was walking a scrap of a dog wearing a natty little sweater and pulling on its leash as it tried to sniff every old tombstone. No one seemed to be lurking and watching, no graves appeared disturbed, no cars with tinted windows rolled slowly past.
    “Don’t we have better things to do?” Sylvie asked, struggling to keep her cigarette lit. She drew hard on the filter tip.
    “You’d think.” Still, Reed scanned the dried grass and weathered grave markers. He thought of the cases that he was working on. One was domestic violence, pure and simple. A wife of twenty years finally had decided enough was enough and before suffering another black eye or cracked rib had shot her husband point-blank while he slept. Her attorney was crying self-defense and it was up to Reed to prove otherwise—which wasn’t that hard, but didn’t make him feel good. Another case involved a