If he’d been less of a good man to begin with, or even if he were more of a monster now, the war’s effects on him might have been less tragic. But Harper Stowe III had been a sweet kid going into the Afghanistan meat grinder, and that’s what he was coming out of it, all his war wounds aside. Underneath his pain and insomnia and the fog a host of prescription meds kept him in (when he found the discipline to take them)—Ambien, Percodan, Effexor—he was his father’s son, the one who still smiled at the sound of laughing children and held doors open for women, who said “Thank you” and “You’re welcome” and spoke as if the whole world were a library. You could see that man clearly when the clouds of his condition parted, but the shame of it was, that parting was too infrequent for most to notice.
What people noticed instead was a moody young black man who walked with a slight limp and grimaced just taking a deep breath, whose eyes lay dead in their sockets one minute, then flashed white with outrage the next. This was the Harper Stowe III who now stood accused of murder.
He was charged with killing a forty-one-year-old white woman named Darlene Evans, his employer at an Empire Auto Parts store in the heart of downtown Los Angeles. Evans had been shot to death in the back room of her shop one morning before dawn three weeks ago, hours after firing Stowe for cause. He’d been late getting in the previous day, an offense he was prone to commit, and Evans had had enough. Eric Woods, a friend and co-worker of Stowe’s who witnessed their encounter, said Evans met Stowe at the door and proceeded to dress him down, unfazed to hear he’d been thrown off an MTA bus on his way to work for, according to the report the driver would file later, “creating a disturbance.” Enraged by his employer’s indifference to this excuse, Stowe became verbally abusive himself and was summarily terminated. Only after threatening Evans’s life at least twice did he leave the premises, Woods said.
The next morning, less than twenty-four hours later, the shop’s manager arrived to discover Evans’s lifeless body and the gun that killed her: a .38 Taurus semiautomatic, Stowe’s fingerprints all over its stock.
Now, Kelly DeCharme—and, by extension, Gunner, the investigator she’d hired to assist her—had the unenviable task of countering what police and LA prosecutors viewed as an open-and-shut case against Harper Stowe III. No witnesses to the crime had yet been found, and a faulty in-store security system had somehow failed to record it, but everything short of a confession seemed to point to Stowe being Darlene Evans’s killer. This included Stowe’s own memory, which he claimed could neither account for his whereabouts at the time of Evans’s death nor how his fingerprints could have ended up all over the handgun she was shot with.
In fact, according to Stowe, the combination of being tossed from the city bus and losing his job in the span of two hours had reduced the remainder of that day and part of the next to a drug- and alcohol-fueled haze, one that appeared to come and go inside his head like whispers on the wind. Kelly was looking to Gunner to put the pieces of Stowe’s tortured memory together just long enough to find an alibi that might save him, but Gunner had been at it for eleven days now and still had nothing to show for his efforts.
He was hoping that was finally about to change.
One of the few things Kelly’s client claimed to know for certain was that he’d spent the night prior to Darlene Evans’s murder at the home of Tyrecee Abbott, his nineteen-year-old on-again, off-again girlfriend of the last eight months. Abbott, whom Stowe liked to call Ty, had confirmed this was true in the course of the brief telephone conversations Gunner had managed to elicit from her, but the girl hadn’t offered up much more aid to her boyfriend’s cause than that. Trying to pin her down for a face-to-face, Gunner had been playing phone tag with Abbott for days, and he was finally all done. What she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—grant him out of the goodness of her heart, he had decided he was just going to have to force upon her.
“What you want Tyrecee for?”
“I’d just like to talk to her for a minute. Regarding her friend Harper Stowe.”
“She didn’t have nothin’ to do with him killin’ that woman.”
“I’m sure she didn’t. In fact, I don’t think Harper had anything to do with it, either.”
Tyrecee Abbott’s mother stood in the doorway to their Panorama City apartment, measuring Gunner with the unabashed distrust of a jaded parole officer. She was a big woman with unruly brown hair and glassy eyes, dressed either for bed or a trip to the nearest Walmart, and if Gunner had been of a mind to try and bull his way past her into her apartment, it would have likely cost him the loss of a limb.
“You got a warrant?”
“No. I’m not a cop.” He gave no thought to mentioning that a cop wouldn’t have needed a warrant just to talk to her daughter, even if he’d been one. “I’m a private investigator. I’m working for Harper’s lawyer and I think Ty can help us with his defense.”
“How’s she gonna do that?”
Before Gunner could answer, somebody behind the woman said, “Momma, who you talking to?”
Tyrecee Abbott stepped into view alongside her mother. Gunner had never seen the girl before, but he’d recognized the voice; her particular brand of pouty sensuality was hard to forget.
“Who’s this?” She regarded Gunner as if he were an unmarked package someone had dumped on their doorstep.
“Nobody you need to talk to. Go back inside.” Her mother tried to guide her back into the apartment.
“Aaron Gunner. The investigator working for Harper’s attorney,” he said. “We spoke over the phone a few days ago.”
Holding her ground in the doorway, Tyrecee said, “So? I already told you all I know.” She tore her mother’s hand from her arm and, with a glare, dared her to lay it upon her again. Her mother huffed, disgusted, and with a final glance in Gunner’s direction, left the two of them to do what they would to each other.
“I’m just following up,” Gunner said. “In case you might have forgotten something.”
“Like what?”
She looked like a “Real Housewife of” dressed down for a day off. Gunner wondered if the department store bling and makeup ever left her body, even for sleep.
“Like what time Harper left here the morning after he got fired.”
Stowe had said he couldn’t recall when he’d left, or where he’d gone afterward.
“I don’t know when he left. He was gone when I woke up.”
“And what time was that?”
“What?”
“When you woke up.” Gunner took a wild guess without stating it openly: 10 a.m.
“I don’t know. ’Bout 10:30, something like that.” “And he was already gone?”
“Yeah.”
“How about your mother? Maybe she was awake when he left?”
“Momma?” She glanced over her shoulder, checking for witnesses, and chuckled. “She wasn’t