Page 7 of The Morning After (Savannah 2)

“Third time’s a charm, yeah, yeah. You’re just full of pearls of wisdom today, aren’t you?”

“Always.” Trina’s phone rang and she rolled her eyes as Nikki’s computer screen flipped crazily.

“This damned thing,” Nikki growled. “I thought Kevin was going to fix it.” Kevin Deeter was the editor’s nephew, a part-time student and full-time electronic whiz whose sole job at the Sentinel was to keep all the electronics working. A loner who told weird jokes, he kept mostly to himself. Which was a blessing. She frantically punched the escape key, then rebooted and the computer came back to life.

“Kevin was by earlier.”

“Did he do anything to the computer?”

“Sorry. I was busy. Didn’t notice.”

“Great,” Nikki mumbled testily. She didn’t really like Kevin, but tolerated him for his computer skills. It certainly wasn’t for his sense of humor. “I swear, he messes up more than he fixes. Damn.”

Trina gave a quick shake of her head, a warning that Nikki caught. From the corner of her eye Nikki spied Kevin lurking by the coatrack, earphones plugged into his cassette recorder. He probably hadn’t heard her and even if he did, he needed to know that he was supposed to fix things, not make them worse. And what was with the earphones? If Tom Fink caught anyone else tuned into headphones while on the job, that employee would be out on his ass.

“I’m going to tell him to leave my equipment alone unless I’m here,” Nikki vowed.

“Sure you are.” Trina’s phone jangled for the third time. “Duty calls.” Sliding her desk chair into the booth, she answered, “Savannah Sentinel, Human Interest. This is Trina.”

Nikki rolled her chair closer to her computer monitor. She’d been surfing the Internet, getting as much information as was available on the Jane Doe who had been found tethered to heavy barbells at the bottom of the river. Scuba divers had found her remains and the police had been called in. Detective Pierce Reed was in charge of the investigation. As usual, he had “no comment” about the case and no amount of calling on her part had even gotten her connected to the reclusive investigator.

She clicked on a picture of Reed. He looked as if he might have done time as the Marlboro man. Tall and rangy, with a craggy but handsome face and eyes that didn’t miss much. She’d discovered that he was single and had told herself it was necessary to know as much as she could about him, including his marital status.

She’d also found out that he had worked for the Savannah Police Department once before, over twelve years ago and only for a short while, before he’d moved to the West Coast and joined the San Francisco Police Department where he’d eventually become an investigator.

From there on his past was a little murky, but from what she could piece together she figured that Reed had landed himself in some kind of hot water. Major trouble. A woman had been killed while he’d had her apartment under surveillance. From what Nikki could discern, Reed had seen the murder, hadn’t been able to save the woman’s life, nor ever capture the killer. Reed had been reprimanded, though not stripped of his badge. Nonetheless, he’d resigned and shortly thereafter, he’d returned to Savannah.

The rest, as they say, was history. Capped in the form of the Montgomery murders.

While the strains of some easy listening music filtered through the speakers set high overhead in this warehouse-turned-office building, she tapped a pencil on her desk and scowled at the image of Pierce Reed, a photograph taken thirteen years earlier when he’d still been a fresh-faced cop in Savannah. In his late twenties, but still serious, he nearly glared into the camera. She wondered what drove the man. Why uproot himself and move to California, only to return here over a decade later? Why not marry? Why no children?

She’d love to do a story on Reed and was working on an angle to sell to her editor. Something along the lines of the man behind the myth, a personal look into one of Savannah’s finest…

Her phone jangled and she cut off speculation about the elusive detective.

“Savannah Sentinel,” she said automatically, her attention focused on the caller. “Nikki Gillette.”

“Hi, Nikki, this is Dr. Francis with the Savannah School Board. You called earlier?”

“Yes, I did,” Nikki said quickly as she visualized the woman—tall, imposing, never a hair out of place, an African-American woman who had made good and at forty-two held a major position of authority in her hometown. “Thanks for calling. I’d like to interview you on the recent budget cuts,” Nikki said and clicked over to her notes on the computer while holding the receiver between her shoulder and ear. “There’re rumors that some of the smaller neighborhood elementary schools are going to be closed.”

“Temporari

ly. And we prefer to call it merging. Taking two or three schools and blending them together for everyone’s benefit. We maximize our talent that way, the students are exposed to a lot of different teachers with innovative ideas, their educational experience is broadened.”

“Even if they’re bused out of their neighborhoods, mainly the poorer neighborhoods, and shuttled across town?”

“So that they ultimately benefit,” Dr. Francis cut in with her smooth, dulcet voice. A native Savannahian, her accent was subtle and refined. She’d been a poor girl who had worked her way through the school system here, who had found scholarships, grants and work study programs to propel her through undergraduate school and a doctoral program while her single mother held down two menial jobs and raised a total of six kids. Dr. Francis was the epitome of the American dream, a philanthropist, never married, with no children, but a woman with foresight who actually seemed to care about all of the kids in Savannah. So why did Nikki have the feeling that she’d somehow sold out? Dr. Francis rambled on and on about serving the needs of the students and the community and Nikki took notes, reminding herself not to be so cynical. Maybe the woman really believed the garbage she was peddling. And maybe it’s not garbage. Just because they’re closing down a school you attended years ago, doesn’t make it necessarily bad.

Nikki clicked her pen and listened, agreed to meet with Dr. Francis later in the week and hung up thinking that the story wasn’t exactly Pulitzer Prize material, not even Nikki’s particular cup of tea, but it might have merit and was certainly newsworthy in its own way. No, it wouldn’t spark a byline in a bigger newspaper, wouldn’t propel Nikki Gillette to a job at the New York Times, or Chicago Tribune, or San Francisco Herald, but it would help pay the bills for the month and maybe she’d learn something.

Maybe.

In the meantime she wouldn’t give up on the Jane Doe pulled from the river, nor would she put her story on Detective Pierce Reed on the back burner. Nope, there was something there, something newsworthy. She could feel it. She just had to find out what it was. To do that, she needed to interview Reed, somehow get close to him.

Which was about as likely as cozying up to a porcupine. The man was bristly, grumpy and sometimes just damned rude. Which was probably why she couldn’t just drop her idea about a piece on him. He was a challenge. And Nikki Gillette had never backed down from one. Never. Not the daughter of the Honorable Ron Gillette.

Somehow, some way, Nikki would ferret out everything there was to know about Detective Pierce Reed. Maybe she’d come up dry, with nothing of interest. Maybe Reed was about as interesting as a dirty gym sock. She smiled. No way. In her gut, she sensed there was a story around the elusive cop. She’d just have to uncover it, no matter how many layers deep Reed had covered it.

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