From just about any point in downtown Savannah, you could see the Eugene Talmadge Memorial Bridge. That was especially true at night, when its well-lighted struts dominated the northern skyline of the city. Tonight, it was even more visible. At its crest, the flashing colored lights of several emergency vehicles had it lit up like the Fourth of July.

“Forensics is already here. Good,” DeeDee said, noticing their van. She brought the car to a halt and opened her door.

Duncan reached across the console and stopped her from getting out. “What did you mean by ‘now this’?”

She stuck out her hand, palm up. “I’m betting a hot fudge sundae against an egg white omelet that our dead Meyer Napoli is somehow connected to our dead Gary Ray Trotter.”

Duncan looked down at her open palm then reluctantly slapped it.

She was out of the car like a shot.

His confession would have to wait.

Meyer Napoli didn’t look as dapper in death as he had in life.

Vain as he was, Napoli would have hated making such a bad-looking corpse. His olive complexion had faded to the color of biscuit dough. It looked even paler in the flash of the crime scene photographer’s camera.

“Bled quarts on the inside, I bet,” Worley remarked around his toothpick and stepped aside to give Duncan and DeeDee a better view into the car, which was parked on the shoulder of the inbound lane.

Napoli was in the driver’s seat. His chin was resting on his chest; he had died gazing at the bullet hole in his upper abdomen and possibly wondering how a wound that small could wreak such havoc.

His hands were lying in his lap, palms up. They’d provided a reservoir for the blood that had trickled from the fatal wound. Perhaps he’d tried to contain the internal hemorrhage by pressing on the bullet hole, until he’d become resigned to the inevitable.

“Bullet must’ve passed through several organs,” Worley told them. “Bursting them like water balloons. He bled out.”

“Is that what Dothan said?”

“He hasn’t got here yet,” Worley replied, “but I’ve seen enough men gut shot to know what it looks like.”

“Did you find a weapon?”

“Not yet.”

“Have you looked?”

Worley removed his toothpick and sneered at DeeDee. “No, Detective Bowen. I’m a damn rookie. Would never occur to me to look for a weapon at a shooting.”

Duncan jumped in before they got into one of their verbal skirmishes. “No weapon rules out suicide.”

“Correct. Besides, this asshole was too conceited to off himself. But I’m guessing he may have been shot with his own pistol. He always carried a Taurus twenty-five in an ankle holster, with a bullet in the chamber.”

“Trusting guy,” DeeDee said.

“He bragged about it. One time I personally saw him pull up his pants leg and show it off.” Worley bent down and raised the cuff of Napoli ’s left trouser leg with the tip of a ballpoint pen. A holster was strapped to his ankle with Velcro. It was empty.

“Shell casing?” Duncan asked.

“No sign of one yet. And I’ve looked,” he added for DeeDee’s benefit. “Along with forensics. They checked under the car seat. Nothing.”

DeeDee said, “Time of death?”

“ Dothan will have to nail that. But the blood isn’t quite congealed, so I’m guessing not too long ago. Besides, it couldn’t have been too long because he would have been discovered sooner.”

“Crazy that he was shot here on the bridge,” Duncan said. “It’s brighter than a shopping mall on this damn thing. Anybody passing would have witnessed the shooting.”

“Struck me as strange, too,” Worley said. “I guess it was a crime of passion. Unplanned. The act of a moment. This time of morning, traffic’s light. Whoever plugged him got lucky. Shot him then boogied outta here before the next car came along.

“Of course, anybody driving past could have thought he was just broken down or something. He’s sitting up. No blood visible. It was actually a highway patrolman who found him. He stopped to tell him to get his car moving.” Signs were posted at regular intervals prohibiting standing, stopping, or parking on the bridge.

“You questioned the patrolman?”

Worley nodded. “He said, ‘What you see is what you get.’ ”

“Was the car door closed?”

“It was. Patrolman did a cursory check of the area after calling it in. No one else was around or near the car, he said. He didn’t see anything, and he didn’t touch anything except to open the door and he used a hankie to protect prints.”

Duncan looked at the corpse and noted something else. “Have you ever seen Napoli with a hair out of place?”

“Yeah, looks like there might have been a tussle,” Worley said. “He used that goo, you know, that kept every hair on his head plastered down.”

Napoli ’s hair was still greasy, but it looked like it had been hit by a hurricane-force wind. His necktie was askew. And yet he was sitting perfectly straight behind the wheel, both feet near the pedals.

Worley, never known for his sensitivity, said around a chuckle, “He’d hate having his picture taken looking like this, wouldn’t he?”

“Any other signs of a struggle?” Duncan asked.

“Heel marks over there by the railing. Might or might not be his. We won’t know until we can get his shoes off and compare, but Baker and his crew have roped off the scuff marks to check later, just in case.”

Duncan wasn’t fond of heights. He didn’t get nauseous and dizzy like someone with severe acrophobia, but he kept to the inside lane when driving over high bridges and overpasses, and he never went out of his way to hang suspended or to peer into deep gorges.

But he walked toward the wall of the bridge now, where forensics had placed orange traffic cones and yellow crime scene tape to form a perimeter around an area about fifteen feet square. Avoiding that, he stepped to the wall and looked down at the Savannah River two hundred feet below.

The tide was out, so the river was flowing toward the ocean. At high tide, it flowed in the opposite direction, something that puzzled tourists and newcomers until the phenomenon was explained to them. At the tidal mouth of the river, fresh water mixed with sea-water to form an estuary. The direction of the river current was dependent upon the tide. Because of all the crosscurrents, this stretch of the river, which was used as the shipping channel, was treacherous.

Duncan walked back to the others. “Attempted carjacking?” There had been a rash of them in the city. Often either the victim or the thief wound up dead.

“Here on the bridge where a pedestrian would be immediately suspect?”

“DeeDee’s right, Dunk,” Worley said, “this is something else. This isn’t even Napoli ’s car.” He grinned and shifted his toothpick to the other side of his mouth. “That’s why I called y’all. This car is registered to Cato Laird.”