Prologue

Front Street, Savannah, Georgia
July 4, 1952

Fireworks on the Savannah River: a star-burst of vermillion, gold and blue cascaded through the inky night, the colors drifting to oblivion on the breeze that came off the midnight water. The crowd gathered on the cobblestone walk along the banks sighed, and sighed again as three more rockets went off in quick succession, showering glitter with careless exuberance. Here and there along the cobblestone street, a scatter of bonfires thrust a fierce orange glow against the shadows.

One of the fires was moving.

Lt. Edgar O’Malley, shoulders resting against the warehouse wall, hands shoved into his trouser pockets, pushed his hat a little further back on his head and narrowed his eyes. He was off duty, after a sleepless twenty-four stretch on the Haydee Quinn murder. So what he was seeing wasn’t real. It was a fragment of nightmare, borne of fatigue. An hallucination. There was a pint of rye in the inside pocket of his suit coat; as he reached for it, the screams started: Just one, at first, the startled shriek of a horrified woman; then a shout; then the confused clamor of a terrified horde of people.

The blazing fire moved on. The flames billowed up from the handcart; some part of O’Malley’s mind registered it as a baler wagon, maybe from the Cotton Exchange up on Bay Street. And he knew the man who pushed it. The cart bumped awkwardly along the cobbled street, the wheels groaning over the uneven bricks. The youngster behind it cried out a long continuous mourning keen, a wail of grief, his head thrown back, and his mouth wide open to the dark sky above. Alexander Bulloch. Haydee’s lover. A briefly-considered suspect in Haydee’s death, until Bagger Norris confessed and the case was done.

The stench from the cart was overwhelming: A roasted stink of flesh corrupted by flame. The iron wheels groaned, skidded, and the cart tipped over, throwing flaming logs across the stones. A blackened human form hung halfway from the cart. The flames hadn’t yet consumed the hair, which stirred in the wind as if lifted by a loving hand. Black as a crow’s wing, black as a starless night, no longer scented with gardenias, but the scent of burning. Haydee’s hair. Haydee herself hung from the cart, the violet eyes now sockets in her grinning skull, the creamy skin now flaked into ash.

O’Malley turned and ran up the iron steps, as if pursued by the corpse itself.