by GA McKevett
It was all she could do not to run into the bedroom and lay a big smooch on him.
“Listen, I have it from your big sister that Tammy’s very interested. So what if your dad couldn’t keep his damned zipper closed . . . so what if your old lady’s the town drunk . . . that’s got nothing to do with you. You’re a good kid. So’s Tammy. You two deserve to be happy. Go for it!”
In the silence that followed, Savannah’s conscience got the better of her and she continued on up the stairs, walking heavy so as to be heard.
She entered the bedroom and saw Dirk sitting on the bed, the phone to his ear. He was wearing his shirt, boxers, and black socks.
Ordinarily, that wasn’t a look that set her heart to pitter-pattering. But after what she’d just heard, she could have thrown him back onto the bed and ravished him—had he not been talking to her little brother.
He looked up, gave her a wink, and said, “Your big sis just walked in the room. I can ask her the mystery question now, if you want.” A pause. “Okay, hold on.”
Dirk held the phone away and said, “Your brother wants me to tell you that they didn’t have the color you wanted. So, do you want blue or beige?”
Savannah thought for a moment. “Blue.”
“Blue,” he said into the phone. “Is that all? Okay. You think about what I said, all right? Bye.”
He hung up the phone and tossed it onto the nightstand. “What’s gonna be blue?”
“None of your business.”
“You Reids got some sort of secret? Something’s going on behind my back?”
“Behind your back, over your head, up our sleeves—you name it.” She sat down on the edge of the bed beside him. “From what I heard coming up the stairs, it sounded like you were playing Cupid.”
He laughed and held out his arms to her. “I was certainly trying. Wanna roll around in the hay with Cupid, the god of love?”
“More than life itself. But you and I have more important things to do, boy.”
“What could possibly be more important than sex on a honeymoon?”
“Hank Jordan’s prints were on the Jeep’s door.”
“Lemme grab my pants!”
Chapter 22
This time, when Savannah and Dirk marched into the Santa Tesla police station, they didn’t even bother with the formalities of stopping at the front desk and waiting to be invited in.
As they hurried by Kenny Bates II, he shouted out, “Hey! You hold on a minute! You can’t go back there!”
He came out from behind the desk and stood in front of them.
“No. You don’t want to do that,” Dirk said.
“If it’s the chief you want to see, I-I have to call her on the phone f-first,” he stammered.
Savannah stepped up to him, nose to nose, and said, “Move, or I swear I’ll hurt you.”
Something in her eye must have told him that she meant it, because he moved out of her way and returned to his desk.
They could hear him phoning someone, but they were already at the chief’s office door, so the alert did little good.
Dirk knocked once; then, without waiting for an invitation, he opened the door.
Chief La Cross was jumping up from her chair as Savannah entered after him. “Stop right there! How dare you barge into my office like that!” She reached for the phone on her desk and punched a number. “Get in here right now. I have two people who—”
Dirk reached over, took the phone from her, and hung it up. “You don’t want to do that,” he said. “Believe me.”
“Unless,” Savannah added, “you want them to walk in here in the middle of you telling us why you lied to us and covered up for Hank Jordan. Maybe they want to hear why their chief would give an ex-con a fake alibi for a murder.”
Two large, young cops barged into the room. Savannah recognized them as the two who had been milling about the beach at the murder scene.
But before they could grab Savannah or Dirk, Chief La Cross said, “Never mind, Franklin. It’s okay, Rhodes. I’ve got it under control. You can leave. Close the door behind you.”
As soon as the patrolmen were gone and the door shut, Savannah walked over to one of the chairs beside La Cross’s desk and sat down. Dirk did the same in the chair on the other side.
“You might as well take off your coat and stay awhile.” Savannah tossed her purse onto the desk. “We got plenty to talk about.”
“Actually, Chief,” Dirk said, “it’s you who’s gonna be doin’ the talkin’. Why did you say Hank Jordan was here at the station all morning on Sunday, when Amelia Northrop was killed, when you—and now we—know he wasn’t?”
Savannah looked from Dirk to the chief and was impressed with how convincing his accusation was. Of course, they didn’t know any of this for certain. But if you were going to accuse a chief of police of conspiring to murder, you didn’t do it timidly.
And Dirk’s bluff worked.
La Cross sat down abruptly in her chair and began to shake like a palm tree in a Pacific typhoon. She looked like she was going to burst into tears at any moment.
“Why did you lie for him, Charlotte?” Savannah asked, her voice much gentler than Dirk’s.
She often played “good cop” to his “bad.”
“Because he asked me to” was the unexpected reply. “And because I was in love with him.”
Savannah looked over at Dirk and saw that he was taken aback by this, too. They had both been expecting a denial.
Charlotte and that nasty dimwit, Hank? Really?
The only word that came to Savannah’s mind was “yuck.”
“Yuck,” Dirk said.
There it was. Great minds did think alike.
“You were in love with ol’ Hank Jordan?” Savannah asked. “Well, I wouldn’t have guessed that, but I reckon you must’ve seen something in him that I didn’t.”
Chief La Cross looked at her, stunned. Then she turned to Dirk. “What are you talking about? Hank Jordan? I wasn’t in love with that slimeball. I was talking about William.”
Savannah’s brain pulled the emergency brake, skidded to a stop, and did a U-turn. “What? You just said . . . Oh . . . it was William who asked you to cover for Hank? To give him an alibi?”
La Cross nodded as tears started to roll down her cheeks.
“How did he talk you into doing something as stupid as that?” Dirk asked with his usual tact.
“He said Hank was innocent, that he had nothing to do with Amelia’s death. William said Hank was with him that morning, and they were doing something that had to do with the casino.”
“Like what?” Savannah asked.
“He said he couldn’t tell me, that it was confidential and it might put me in a compromising situation if I knew. But he assured me it was all legal and honest.”
“And you believed him?”
La Cross began to cry in earnest. It was a sad, ugly sight as she wept bitterly. Harsh, wracking sobs shook her entire body. “Yes, I believed him about a lot of things,” she said, choking on her own tears. “I was crazy about him. He told me he felt the same way about me.”
Savannah reached into her purse and pulled out a handful of tissues. She handed them to Charlotte, who blew her nose violently into them, then handed them back to Savannah.
She stared at the wad of sodden tissues in her palm for a moment; then she spotted a trash can nearby and quickly deposited them there.
So much for showing compassion to a fellow human being, she thought.
“He was just using me to get his damned casino. He needed some obstacles removed, and as police chief, I could do it. But now that the road’s clear for him, he’s dumping me.”
It occurred to Savannah that as Charlotte La Cross sat there at her desk, sobbing her face off over a guy, Santa Tesla’s chief of police looked a bit like a distraught teenager who had just lost her first love.
The thought also crossed Savannah’s mind that William Northrop might have, indeed, been the first serious
love affair Charlotte had ever experienced. Dirk had suggested that she wasn’t an attractive woman by any measure, but, more important, she had a cold, standoffish personality that probably didn’t attract a lot of people—friends or lovers.
“Let me get this straight,” Dirk said. “Northrop told you that he and Hank knew each other. And that they were together doing some sort of casino stuff on Sunday morning when Amelia was killed?”
“Yes, that’s right. But now you’re telling me that he wasn’t? That he was doing something else?” Charlotte wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands. “What did you find out? Well, Ms. Reid? What was he doing?”
Savannah shot a sideways glance at Dirk. He had that frozen-as-an-ice-cream-cone look on his face. A look she’d seen plenty of times before. It meant he had nothing and wasn’t going to be any help. She was on her own with this one.
“Um . . . actually . . .” Her own brain went Popsicle on her, too. “Honestly, we don’t know for sure what he was doing that morning. But we did uncover a piece of evidence that would probably represent possible cause, so you could bring him in and question him about it.”
Chief La Cross stared at Savannah long and hard. Finally she said, “What?”
“Hank Jordan may be the dude who shot at you,” Dirk blurted out. “Those prints you lifted off the league’s old black Jeep, some of them were his.”
The chief looked dumbfounded. “They were?”
“Yes,” Savannah told her. “And Dr. Glenn told us the vehicle was stolen for twenty-four hours, then returned.”
“The twenty-four-hour period that both you and William were fired on,” Dirk added.
“But I don’t understand. William was very nearly killed by those shots. Why would he ask me to provide an alibi for someone who tried to murder him?”
“I don’t know,” Savannah replied, “but I have an idea. Why don’t we go pick up Hank Jordan and drag his mangy, sorry butt in here and ask him real nice. . . .”
“If that doesn’t work,” Dirk added, “I’ll ask him.”
Savannah chuckled and said to La Cross, “And he’s not so nice.”
La Cross shot Dirk a long, scathing look. “Believe me,” she said, “I never thought he was.”
As they gathered their things and prepared to leave La Cross’s office, both Savannah and Dirk reached down and subconsciously checked the weapons in their shoulder holsters beneath their jackets.
“You two won’t be needing those,” La Cross said as she pulled her own from a drawer and began to strap it on.
“I beg your pardon,” Savannah said. “This man should be considered armed and dangerous. We won’t be going after him without our weapons.”
“You won’t be going at all.” La Cross’s dark eyes went totally black. “This guy shot at me. He’s mine.”
“Hey! You wouldn’t even know about him if it wasn’t for us,” Dirk snapped back. “We’re coming along.”
The chief stepped out into the hallway, stopped, and turned back to them. Her chin was elevated several notches, and her hands were on her hips. “You are welcome to wait here at the station house,” she said. “Either in the coffee room or a jail cell. Your pick.”
Savannah realized they had met their match. Chief La Cross wasn’t going to budge on this one. And Savannah realized that if someone had put a bullet in one of her front yard’s trees, while aiming at her head, she’d feel the same way.
“Is the coffee any good?” she asked.
“No. But feel free to make a fresh pot.”
With that, La Cross spun on her heel, executing a precision about-face that would have made a U.S. Marine jealous, and marched away.
“Battle-axe,” Dirk muttered under his breath.
Savannah nodded. “Yeah. But you have to kinda like her . . . a little bit.”
“No, I don’t.”
Chapter 23
Savannah and Dirk disposed of a pot-and-a-half of coffee and six donuts between them as they waited for Chief La Cross and her team to return with the prisoner.
Waiting . . . without any nature to soothe the anxiety. It was almost more than Savannah could bear.
As her pulse raced, her blood pressure soared, and her anxiety level broke record highs, it never occurred to her to attribute her physical woes to caffeine or sugar intake. No, of course not. It was all La Cross’s fault.
“We could have nabbed him, stuck him in a sweatbox, and squeezed a confession outta him four times by now,” she said as she paced back and forth in front of Dirk, who was sitting in one of the coffee room’s stylish and comfortable plastic lawn chairs.
“Yes, we coulda,” he agreed. But not with anywhere near the amount of frustration and angst she was experiencing.
Years ago, she had noticed that in the face of small, daily irritations, Dirk came unhinged. If the woman ahead of him in line at the grocery store had too many coupons, his life simply wasn’t worth living. He would threaten to do great bodily harm to anyone who cut him off in traffic, went twenty miles per hour in a forty zone, or gave him a cheeseburger instead of a hamburger.
But when it mattered—really mattered—he was the quiet in the storm. The guy who couldn’t wait three seconds for an Internet page to load on a computer was a great guy to have around when waiting for biopsy results or a life-and-death verdict to be handed down.
“It’ll be okay,” he said, now as always. “Don’t fret. It’ll all work out.”
“ ‘Fret’? ‘Fret’? Is that what you call this? I ‘fret’ when a jug of milk in the icebox goes bad. I’m worried sick here. What if we did all this for nothing, and they let him slip through their fingers?”
“They’ll get him, Van. Sit down and have another donut.”
“You saw how they’ve handled everything else about this case,” Savannah exploded, letting out all the rage and frustration that had been building over the past few days. “They were tripping all over each other there at the beach. For all of her throwing her weight around, the chief didn’t come up with a single lead on her own. I swear that’s why she was following us. It wasn’t to see if we’d committed any crimes. It was to see if we came up with anything, because she doesn’t know how to conduct a case on her own. They’re a bunch of bumbling idiots around here. This department is a joke. And La Cross is—”
“Not laughing.”
Savannah spun around and saw Chief La Cross filling the doorway of the break room, directly behind her. The look on her face told Savannah that she had heard every word. At least . . . all the worst ones.
“We bumbling fools just brought in the prisoner,” La Cross continued dryly. “If you two would like to watch the interrogation, follow me.”
Savannah gulped. “Yeah, uh . . . thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
As Chief La Cross turned and strode down the hallway, Dirk and Savannah fell into step behind her. Dirk nudged Savannah and whispered, “See? What’d I tell you? Things just couldn’t be better.”
As they watched the game of cat and mouse being played between Hank Jordan and Chief La Cross—with the chief playing the role of mouse—Dirk’s initial optimism was fading, and Savannah’s worst fears were being confirmed.
Things were going badly. Very badly, indeed.
Jordan hadn’t demanded a public defender yet. But that was about the only thing that had gone right so far.
He and La Cross sat across from each other, eyeball to eyeball—so to speak—at a small table in the interview room, which Savannah suspected at times might double as a closet.
She and Dirk sat behind La Cross in one corner, watching. Savannah was mentally imagining the blood as it figuratively rolled from their badly bitten tongues, down their chins, and dripped onto their shirtfronts.
This was agony to watch. And it seriously made Savannah wonder how Charlotte La Cross had ever attained her office.
“Are you really going to stick to that stupid story,” La Cross was asking him, “about how you just put your hands
on that Jeep when you were walking down the sidewalk that day?”
Hank Jordan was leaning back on the rear two legs of his chair. His hands were behind his head, where he was toying with his greasy gray ponytail.
“Yep,” he said. “I was walking down the sidewalk there in front of Coconut Jane’s Tavern and that old Jeep was parked there. The window was down and I saw one of those big nets, the kind you use to catch animals or butterflies or whatever. I was just wondering what it was. So I leaned in and looked. That must be how my prints got on the door.”
Savannah groaned internally. La Cross had tipped her hand far too soon by telling him about the prints and then compounding her error by letting him know where they had been lifted.
But the worst mistake she was making was . . . telling her suspect the truth. Every single word the chief had uttered since they’d entered the room was the gospel truth. And both Savannah and Dirk knew you never got anywhere in an interrogation by sticking to the actual facts of the case.
Long ago, Savannah had learned that if there wasn’t at least a whiff of pants burning in an interrogation room, you probably weren’t making a lot of progress as an interrogator.
She pulled out her phone discreetly and texted Tammy: La Cross personal cell #?
She put the phone on vibrate and waited. Less than two minutes later, Tammy texted back the number. Savannah grinned. The kid was fantastic. Savannah sent her a virtual “hug” and composed another message—this time to Chief La Cross.
Step out for a few. Give Dirk a chance.
She heard the chief’s phone chime and saw her glance down at it.
Don’t blow it. Don’t turn around, Savannah thought. Surely, you have at least one sneaky bone in your body. Use it now.
Chief La Cross sat still for several moments, thinking, saying nothing.
Just when Savannah thought it was a lost cause, La Cross stood, stretched, and turned to Dirk. “I’m going to go get myself a water. I’ll be back in a minute. Can you keep an eye on this one for me?”
