“Good,” he said. “What’s important right now is that we find out what happened to Mr. Rayne and we are working on that day and night. We are making no assumptions about what has occurred, and neither should you.”
After they both hung up, Harper sat for a moment, thinking, before leaning forward and tapping DJ on the shoulder.
“DJ, did you say you thought Rayne’s dad was murdered? I can’t find anything about that online.”
He spun around, blinking at her from behind smudged glasses. His dark, wavy hair was even more unruly than usual. “I don’t know for sure. But the album has lines in it that make it sound that way. Hold on a minute.”
Spinning back, he typed something into his computer.
“There’s one line in particular in the song ‘Revolver Road.’” After a second, he half turned so she could see he was looking at lyrics online. He pointed at the screen. “‘I don’t want to go out like my daddy done. Live by the gun, die by the gun…’” He looked up at her. “I mean, maybe he was singing about someone else, but…”
“But it sounds autobiographical.” Harper finished the thought for him. “His girlfriend said he died when Xavier was ten. That would have been fourteen years ago.” She stood up. “I’m going to go see what I can find in the morgue.”
She ran across the empty newsroom, beneath the silently flickering television screens. She passed the cramped little break room and pushed through the double doors into the stairwell. Her footsteps echoed as she hurried up to the next floor. There, a hallway led past a series of offices for marketing, classified ads, and admin.
Harper stopped in front of a plain white door. The sign on the door read RECORDS.
Inside, the windowless room was pitch black. Harper felt the smooth wall for the light switch. When she found it, the harsh fluorescent strips lit up with a buzz, illuminating a small, utilitarian room filled with rows of metal filing cabinets.
Just over a decade ago, the paper had gone fully digital. Every article written was automatically logged and filed on the system. But there’d never been any money to go back and scan in the old articles. Anything before then was stored in here.
All the articles were filed by year and within the year by subject or name in a somewhat haphazard system that depended on whose job it had been to file.
She’d been in here not all that long ago researching her own mother’s murder. The unsolved crime that was at the heart of everything happening to her now. And some part of her drew her to that particular file, filled with terrible memories. At twelve years old, she had been the one to find her mother’s body on the floor, naked and cold, surrounded by blood.
Her father would be the first suspect, but with an alibi provided by his mistress, he would walk free. And nobody else was ever charged. Harper’s own investigations had found little new information, until the phone call last year that told her the murderer was still out there, looking for her.
Today, though, she walked by that filing cabinet, and turned to the first row on the right, making her way to the cabinets dated fourteen years back. Focusing on the crime at hand, she pulled a drawer open with a rattle and flipped through the overstuffed manila folders until she found the “R”s.
“Raccoon.” “Racing.” “Randall.” “Reptiles” …
No “Rayne.”
Just to be sure, she opened another drawer and looked under “M,” for “Murder,” but finding four thick folders with that label, she sighed. It would take an hour to go through it all.
After a moment’s thought, she slid them back into the drawer, and walked farther down the row to drawers marked for the year before that. Fifteen years ago. Again, she searched through the “R”s.
Right in the middle, she found what she was looking for. “Rayne, Michael James.”
She pulled the folder out. Inside, a small stack of articles was carefully folded. She opened the first, the paper soft beneath her fingers. There was a faint scent of dust to it.
Man Killed in Suspected Drug Deal Gone Wrong
By Tom Lane
Two people were injured and one killed in a shoot-out on 19th Street last night.
Twenty-nine-year-old Michael James Rayne was pronounced dead at the scene.
Detectives believed the shooting was drug-related. Bags of crack cocaine were found in Rayne’s pockets, along with a considerable amount of cash.