I chewed and thought. "Somebody quiet. If they hadn't had to open that door with the chimes on it, they could have slipped out without me even knowing they were there."

I shuddered. "Or bashed me over the head with the same piece of pipe they used on Jackson Poole."

"You know it was a piece of pipe?"

I shrugged. "I don't know it, no. Guess I just a.s.sumed."

"No sense of whether it was a man or a woman?"

"I didn't see anybody," I repeated. "The whole street was like a ghost town. It was like the storm sucked everybody down a sewer or something."

"What about Wuvvy?" Bucky asked. "When was the last time you saw her tonight?"

I'd been thinking about that. "I saw her after she came back in the bar and started mouthing off about how she'd gotten the money and wouldn't have to give up the store after all. I have no idea what time that was."

"You saw her leave the bar?" Bucky asked.

"Didn't you? She went out with a woman."

"What woman?" Bucky demanded.

"I never saw her before. She was white, probably middle-aged, conservatively dressed. Didn't look like Little Five Points material, that's for sure. I only saw her for an instant. Then she went out the back door with Wuvvy. I don't remember seeing her come back inside."

Bucky was scribbling away in his notebook. "Gimme a better description of the woman, Callahan."

I licked chocolate frosting off my fingers. "Mmm. Brown hair, sort of turned under, decent figure, medium height. Conservatively cut red business suit. Not knock-down gorgeous, but quietly attractive."

"Not the type you'd normally see with somebody like Wuvvy," he concluded.

"How do I know? It's not like I knew Wuvvy all that well. I knew her from YoYos, is all."

"s.h.i.t," I said, suddenly noticing the clock on the dashboard of the car. It was nearly five A.M.

"Can you give me a ride home?" I asked. "I'll answer all the questions you want later, but I gotta go now. My mother is probably awake by now and out of her mind with worry. Not to mention that Rufus took off last night, and I have no idea where he is right now."

"You lost your boyfriend's dog? In the middle of a tornado?"

"Just take me home, okay? I should have gone home after I found that body, but no, I had to be Miss Good Citizen and hang around and wait for you guys."

He got out of the car and went over to one of the detectives, who was watching while the crime-scene guys sprayed fingerprint goop all over the front door at YoYos.

"Can't wait to see the list of latents they lift off that door," Bucky said. "It'll be a who's who of Little Five Points lowlifes."

"Your print's probably on that door," I pointed out. "Mine, too."

"There's exceptions to every rule," Bucky said.

As we pulled away from the curb I saw headlights in the rearview mirror. I turned around to see who the new arrival was. It was Hap's green army surplus jeep. He pulled the jeep up over the curb and onto the sidewalk, then went around to the pa.s.senger side and helped Miranda hop down. Their faces were pale, hair mussed like they'd been awakened from a sound sleep. Hap put an arm around Miranda's shoulder and scowled as the detective who'd been supervising the fingerprinting strolled over to have a chat.

Hap caught sight of me in Bucky's car and gave a halfhearted wave.

"You called them down here in the middle of the night?" I gave Bucky a questioning look.

"You know the drill, Garrity," he said.

6.

Rufus was lying across the kitchen doorstep when I got home, his muzzle on his paws, his big brown eyes accusing.

"Don't give me that look," I told him. "You're the one who ran away from home." He jumped up and planted a pair of muddy paws on my chest, then licked my chin.

"Okay," I told him. "I won't tell if you won't."

Edna must have had a bigger snootful of Jack Daniel's than I knew. She was still snoring blissfully away on the den sofa. Weren't mothers supposed to intuitively know when their children were in danger? Right now, mine didn't even know she had a child.

I stepped out of my filthy clothes, pulled on one of Mac's old football jerseys, and climbed into bed, surrounding myself with my biggest, squishiest pillows. I thought wistfully of how nice it would be to snuggle up to the warm curve of Mac's backside. And I said a little prayer that wherever Mac was, he was safe and warm-and sleeping alone.

I might have slept all day the next day. Instead, I was flung into consciousness by a high-pitched mechanical droning that seemed to echo off my bedroom walls. At first I thought I'd been dreaming of the dentist's office. Then it came. AAAAHH-AAAHHH-AHHHH-BOOM! The loud splinter of wood that followed seemed to come from right outside my window.

I jumped out of bed and ran over to the window. Three men in hard hats, work boots, and yellow rain slickers were attacking a gangly fallen pine with the biggest chainsaws I'd ever seen. Their slickers had writing on the back. Georgia Power. Wouldn't you know it? The one day the sons of b.i.t.c.hes from the electric company choose to get efficient, they have to do it when I'm trying to sleep.

Edna came into the room and handed me a cup of coffee. "We've got sixteen trees down out there," she said, shaking her head.

I sipped the coffee. "How'd you manage coffee?"

"I've still got my old drip percolator from when I got married," she said proudly. "I knew there was a reason to keep that thing."

"Not bad," I admitted. "Thank G.o.d for gas stoves. Did the Georgia Power guys say anything about when we'll actually have electricity again?"

"They're just a tree crew," Edna said. "There's a bunch of linemen working up the street, but they couldn't tell me nothing. Phone's still out, too. Haven't seen a Southern Bell truck."

She opened my closet door, got out my bathrobe, and tossed it onto the bed. "You got company. Bucky Deavers is here. He wouldn't tell me what he wants. Is he still single?"

"I know what he wants," I said. "And yes, he's single. You want me to set you up?"

"Smarta.s.s."

Bucky was sitting at the kitchen table, the sports section spread out in front of him, drinking coffee and chatting on his little black flip-phone. He hung up as soon as I walked in. He was still wearing the clothes he'd been in at YoYos, not the Jackie Kennedy getup, but jeans and a Gold's Gym sweatshirt.

I spit on my finger and rubbed at a dark smudge under his eye. "You always wanna take your mascara off with cold cream before going to bed at night," I advised him. "Otherwise it makes your eyelashes fall out."

He pushed my hand away and started scrubbing at his face with a paper napkin. "Great. That means Major Mackey saw me with makeup. So much for any hopes of a promotion."

"It was your night off," I said. "What you do on your own time is none of his business."

Bucky made a face at me. We both knew Lloyd Mackey, the head of the Atlanta Police Department's criminal investigation division, thought everything his cops did, on or off duty, was his business.

"I thought you'd be interested," Bucky said. "They're doing the autopsy on Jackson Poole this morning, but the medical examiner already told me it looks like the cause of death was a blunt object blow to the skull. A no-brainer, you might say."

Edna poked her head around the kitchen doorway. "Anybody need anything?"

"You might as well come in here and listen instead of hanging around out there eavesdropping," I said. "I was going to tell you, but I didn't have time. Last night, after you went to sleep, Rufus ran off and I went out looking for him. I found a body instead. A guy named Jackson Poole. n.o.body you know, but it was in YoYos, that little store right next door to the Yacht Club."

I looked at Bucky. "Has anybody talked to Wuvvy?"

"You mean Virginia Lee Mincey?"

"That's her real name? I never heard anybody call her anything but Wuvvy."

"Who's Wuvvy?" Edna demanded. "Is that the person who was killed?"

"No," I said patiently. "That's the woman who owns the store where I found the body. The dead guy's name was Jackson Poole. I never knew Wuvvy was really somebody named Virginia Lee."

"That's the name on the lease for the store," Bucky said. "We're still checking to see if that's her legal name. And no, we haven't talked to her."

"Virginia Lee," I repeated. "I never would have seen Wuvvy as a Virginia Lee. Such an old-fashioned name. What about Hap or Miranda? When did they last see Poole?"

Bucky shrugged. "They say he left right before they announced they were closing the Yacht Club. He wanted to go next door to his new property, make sure everything was secure, try to find some boards to put in the windows. Everything was crazy, they say they didn't even check on him before they left for home. Hap says they cleared everybody out around midnight, locked the place up, and headed for home. They live just around the corner on Elizabeth Street and they've got a lot of trees in the yard, so they were anxious to get home and try to board it up as best they could."

He opened a file folder and pushed some sheets of paper toward me. "I typed up your statement from my notes. You wanna read over that, see if you remember anything else?"

"All right," I said. Bucky's typing, spelling, and punctuation were all egregious, but his memory was close to flawless. He'd put it all down just the way I'd told it to him.

"This is all I know," I said, pushing the papers away. "What about the locks on the door at YoYos? Can you tell whether there was forced entry? Whoever slipped out that front door must have known it wasn't locked."

Bucky drained his coffee cup, then set it on the tabletop. "Both front and back doors had the h.e.l.l beat out of them. But hey, she'd had multiple break-ins. The computers are all still down, but I talked to somebody over in Zone Five, he says he knows of at least three burglaries at YoYos in the past year."

"All of them unsolved," I guessed.

He nodded. "Neighborhood needs cleaning up."

"And now there's been a murder right around the corner from our house," Edna said. "I knew it would come to this. I'm just surprised it wasn't some old lady, murdered in her bed by one of these b.u.ms always wandering the street. Wait till the commandos hear about this."

"Ma," I protested. "They're not b.u.ms. They're homeless people."

The subject of homelessness was a touchy one for us. After the incident with the gardenia bush, Edna had spent the fall mobilizing her troops. She'd formed a group called the Candler Park Concerned Citizens' Organization, whose sole purpose was to keep the street people off our streets and out of our shrubbery.

It was a cause whose time had come. Besieged with what seemed like an endless stream of aggressively stoned, drunk, or psychotic homeless types, people in Atlanta who lived or worked where the homeless congregated had started to fight back.

In our neighborhood, the Candler Commandos, as the group quickly came to be called, was already a political force to be reckoned with.

In the fall, the Atlanta City Council had pa.s.sed an anti-panhandler ordinance that made it a crime to panhandle, sleep, urinate, or defecate in a public place. Advocates for the poor called it a blatant attempt to criminalize poverty, but others said it was the only way to take back the city and make it livable for everybody.

In the meantime, Edna and her commandos called the cops whenever they spotted anybody in the neighborhood who even looked like he might want to take a leak outside.

"Someday you'll thank me for helping make this a safe place to live," Edna said, pushing away Rufus, who was trying to put his head in her lap.

"Someday you and your cronies will be ashamed of yourselves for putting people in jail just because they're poor," I countered.

"Here we go again," Edna said, throwing her hands in the air. "She's talking about Shirley," she told Bucky. "The crazy one with the filthy red hair and the rouged cheeks. She hangs out around Little Five Points Pharmacy."

"Last week, one of Edna's commandos called the cops on Shirley just because she spat on the sidewalk. I was coming out of the drugstore when they arrested her. They hauled her away kicking and screaming and cursing. Quite a show."

"I know Shirley," Bucky said. "Crazy old bag lady."

"Good riddance," Edna said smugly. "That woman's a d.a.m.n nuisance. She stopped me and demanded that I give her a cigarette the other day, and when I said no, she called me an old b.i.t.c.h and spat on me. I could get a disease, for G.o.d's sake."

"She's mentally ill," I said sharply. "She needs help."

"She won't take any help," Edna retorted. "If she was hungry, she could go to the Methodist church up on Ponce de Leon and they'd feed her. If she wanted a place to sleep, there's a shelter. But the pharmacist in the drugstore said Shirley won't go. She just hangs around there because she doesn't want anybody telling her what to do. In the meantime, she shoplifts candy and cigarettes, sneaks into the bathrooms and makes a big stinky mess, and hangs around outside screaming and cursing, scaring off customers. What would you do if you owned that drugstore, Little Miss Bleeding Heart?"

"I wouldn't throw her in jail," I said. "Besides, I doubt that it was Shirley or any other homeless person who killed Jackson Poole."

"b.u.ms," Bucky said decisively. "Winos, sc.u.mbags-a rose by any other name would stink just as bad. Your mother's right, Garrity. They're taking over this neighborhood. Ruining the place."

"See?" Edna said. She left off the I-told-you-so part. Fortunately for her.

I followed Bucky out to the front door, to try to get a word in private. "What about a motive, Bucky? What do you know about Jackson Poole? What was he doing before he decided to start a microbrewery in Little Five Points?"

"I know he's dead," Bucky said, holding up a finger on his left hand. "I know he had Wuvvy, I mean, Virginia Lee Mincey, evicted, not just from her business, but her home." He held up a second finger. "I know Virginia Lee Mincey had motive and opportunity, and I have witnesses who heard her make threats against him." Now he had three fingers raised. "And I know that n.o.body's seen Virginia Lee Mincey since about eleven P.M. last night."

He smirked. "Not bad for a white boy."

"Except that the last thing I heard Wuvvy say last night was that she'd gotten the money to pay her back rent," I pointed out. "She was waving a check around. Somebody had bailed her out."

"Or so she said," Bucky said. "Hap and Miranda didn't notice the woman you saw leaving with Wuvvy. Besides, it would have been too late. I talked to the leasing agent first thing this morning. Wuvvy was three months in arrears on her rent. They told her a month ago that somebody else had leased her s.p.a.ce. No matter what, she had to get out. She might have acted like it was a big surprise, but the leasing agent says that was Wuvvy's little head game. Acting like she didn't know what was going on. Cla.s.sic case of denial. h.e.l.l, she says Poole had contractors in and out of there for the past two weeks, getting bids on construction for the brewpub. She'd had a month to find a new place to live, but she just kept acting like it wouldn't happen. When it did, she flipped out. Picked up a pipe and killed the dude."

Bucky opened the front door. We both stared out at the tree that took up three-quarters of the doorway.

"I forgot about the tree," I said. It seemed bigger now than it had the night before.

"Denial," Bucky said. "Lot of it going around these days."

7.

Bad storms flush out snakes, rodents, bugs, and disaster junkies. We had our share of them all after the Halloween tornado, but the disaster junkies were by far the biggest nuisance.