“Chief Taylor called me,” Gerard was saying, speaking to his subordinates in an undertone. “Ordered me to personally oversee this investigation, which takes precedence over everything else we’re working right now. Give the judge anything he wants, he said. Taylor wants everybody sharp on this. Understand?”

“Excuse me,” DeeDee said. “Is Mrs. Laird considered a victim?”

“Until we know otherwise.” Gerard left them then to rejoin the judge.

“So our investigation just got political,” Worley muttered. “Fucking fabulous.”

Dothan Brooks walked up to them, wheezing. “Can I have him?”

Duncan left the ME with DeeDee and Worley to discuss transporting Napoli ’s corpse to the morgue. Slowly he walked back to the cones that sealed off the heel marks on the roadway and squatted down to study them more closely. They might turn out not to be Elise’s heel marks at all, but interrupted tire tracks or someone else’s heel marks. Any number of things could have made those black smudges on the pavement of a highly trafficked bridge that merged with several major boulevards of downtown Savannah on one end, and with South Carolina state highway 17 on the other.

He looked back at the car, gauging it to be about fifteen feet away from the marks. The sandal had been found at the wall, still farther away. All were within the narrow shoulder of the roadway. Duncan stood up and retraced his footsteps to the car, searching the pavement carefully.

“What’re you looking for?” Worley asked, noticing him.

“Blood.”

“He was shot in the car.”

“Maybe. Or maybe he was shot during a struggle, over there where the scuff marks are. He staggered back, managed to get into the driver’s seat and close the door.”

“Thinking maybe he could drive himself away.”

“He could have been gushing blood on the inside, but there was only a trickle on the outside,” Duncan said. “He didn’t drip any, especially if he was clutching the wound, as the smears on his hands and shirt indicate.”

“He could also have been shot right where we found him behind the steering wheel of Mrs. Laird’s car.”

“Dammit!” Duncan said, acknowledging that what Worley said was true. “What was a slug like Meyer Napoli doing behind the steering wheel of Mrs. Laird’s car?”

“Beats me,” Worley said.

The ambulance had been motioned forward. The driver wove it between squad cars that had the inbound lanes of the bridge temporarily blocked to traffic, which at this time of morning was light. Worley wandered back to where DeeDee was conversing with Dothan Brooks.

Left alone, Duncan returned to the area blocked off by the traffic cones and cautiously peered over the nearby wall of the bridge. He didn’t look at the flowing river this time, however, but at the bridge itself.

Spanning two thousand feet, it had been built to replace a drawbridge that had become inefficient in handling the traffic on the river as Savannah ’s importance as a seaport increased.

Duncan had driven across the bridge a thousand times, but because of his aversion to heights and suspension, he’d kept his eyes on the road. He’d never studied the structure of the bridge. He’d certainly never been this up-close and personal with its awe-inspiring construction and massive proportions.

He leaned as far over the wall as he dared and studied the infrastructure. As he was mentally gauging the height of the nearest tower, which supported the struts, he noticed a descending metal ladder that connected to a piece of machinery-he didn’t even know what to call it-on the underside of the bridge. And on the floor of that thingamajig, he spotted something fluttering, something that didn’t belong.

He jogged toward the tower, keeping his eyes trained on the spot, hoping that what had captured his attention wouldn’t disappear before he could determine exactly what it was. When he was directly above it, he leaned over the wall and looked down onto the mechanism below.

What he’d seen was a piece of cloth. Light-colored, soft-looking, out of place on this brutally masculine structure of iron and steel and concrete.

Napoli ’s body was being transferred from the car to a gurney. Worley and DeeDee had been cleared by forensics to investigate the interior of the car. They were busy with that. Gerard was catching an earful of abuse from Judge Laird, who was punctuating his tirade with jabs of his index finger.

“Why are your detectives concentrating on what happened to Napoli?” Duncan heard him say. “They need to be searching for my wife.”

Duncan returned to his study of the piece of machinery attached to the underside of the bridge and to the ladder that connected it to the level on which he was standing. Trying to stave off the dizziness assailing him, he switched his focus to the giant tanker gliding beneath the bridge on its way out to sea. However, the movement of the vessel only made his vertigo worse.

Nevertheless, he threw his leg over the wall, stepped onto the small platform at the top of the ladder, and started down. The metal rungs were enclosed by bars that formed a small cylindrical cage, but those bars were widely spaced and he wasn’t sure they would hold him if he was to slip and fall backward against them.

He was about halfway down when he heard Gerard exclaim, “Dunk! What the hell are you doing?”

He glanced up. A mistake. He was blinded by the lights on the top of the tower, shining down on the bridge. In the direction of Gerard’s voice, he shouted up, “There’s something down here.”

“Are you crazy?”

That from DeeDee, practically screeching.

“Probably,” he said under his breath.

“Get back up here!”

Ignoring her, he continued down. Thankfully he had put on sneakers when he’d quickly dressed. Their rubber soles gave him a better grip than dress shoes would have. He had pulled on a pair of latex gloves as soon as he and DeeDee had arrived at the scene. Inside them his hands were wet with nervous perspiration. He didn’t dare look down at the swift current of the river, now churning in the wake of the tanker.

“Bill?” he called up. “Do you know anything about this thing under here?”

“The carrier?”

“I guess.”

“There are three of them. One for each section of the bridge. They connect to tracks on each side of it. They roll along the underside of the bridge so workers have access to the navigational lights. They can do maintenance, conduct inspections. Like that.”

“So no one except maintenance workers would come down here, right?”

“And damn fools!” he heard DeeDee shout.

Maintenance workers didn’t wear clothes made of soft fabric that could flutter when there was no wind and only a negligible breeze.

He risked glancing down and was relieved to see that he had only three more rungs to go. He took them with relative speed and stepped onto the carrier. Solidly built, it was an impressive example of ingenuity and engineering, but he was glad that someone else had the job of working on it. To him, it seemed a hell of a long way to the other side of the bridge. And beyond that, empty air. He didn’t want to think of the nothingness directly beneath him.

Instead he stayed focused on the area immediately surrounding him. The fixtures lighting the bridge from its underside were as bright and eyeball-searing as suns. He tried to avoid looking directly into them as he went down on his haunches. The piece of fabric was snagged on a bolt that secured the ladder to the floor of the carrier.

One edge of the printed material was hemmed. The other had obviously been ripped from a garment…which in this case was the skirt Elise had been wearing that night.

Pinching the fabric between two gloved fingers, he carefully worked it free from the metal on which it had become snagged, then placed it in a brown paper evidence bag. Slowly, he stood up and returned the bag to his pocket.