And he did. She saw the two cars take a sharp and abrupt turn left down a side street. And like lemmings following each other, the crowd shifted and moved in unison, going after them.
Savannah hurried through the station, racing to the back door, and arrived there just as Dirk and three uniformed cops escorted Tiffany, Bunny, and her mother inside.
All three ladies had looked better. Apparently, they had been plucked from their beds and hustled into the radio cars because they were all wearing pajamas and no makeup and their normally perfect hairdos were askew.
“Come on, come on, come on,” Dirk was telling them. “We have to get you inside and safe. You don’t want those media nuts to get their hands on you. Move along now!”
Savannah knew the reason for Dirk’s haste, and it had nothing to do with the paparazzi crowd out front. He was keeping their minds on other things for as long as possible to forestall the moment when he would hear those most unwelcome words, “I wanna talk to my lawyer!”
Fortunately, all three females looked too stunned to be thinking straight yet.
“Here,” he was telling them, “just go in there, Tiffany, and you, Bunny, into that room there, and Mrs. Greenaway, if you could just wait for me in—”
“No!” Bunny wailed. “I want my mother! I want my mom to come in here with me!”
“Sure, sure, no problem. I’d be happy to do that for you,” Dirk said, all sunshine and cooperation . . . for the moment. “Just go in there, and I’ll be right with you.”
“Are we in any kind of trouble?” Mrs. Greenaway said, trying to smooth her tousled hair.
“You? Naw, not at all,” Dirk said. “There’s just been some new developments in Daisy’s and Mr. Dante’s cases, and you ladies would want to know all about that, right?”
Bunny glanced around her, uneasy. “Uh, yeah, I guess.”
Then she and her mother went into their appointed room.
Dirk motioned for Savannah to follow him, and they hurried into the interrogation room where he had stashed Tiffany.
She was pacing the tiny room, and the moment they entered, she yelled, “You can’t question me! My attorney said that I didn’t have to say another word to you ever again if I don’t want to. And I don’t want to, so there!”
“I’m not here to question you, Ms. Dante,” Dirk said far too calmly, far too politely. “I don’t need to hear another word from you ever again. I know all I need to know about you. I’m placing you under arrest for the false imprisonment of Daisy O’Neil. And after a few more conversations with the prosecutor, I may even be able to add kidnapping and attempted murder to the list of charges. So there!”
Tiffany gasped, and the sound was like air escaping an overinflated balloon. She staggered back and sat abruptly down on a folding chair. “False imprisonment? What is that?”
Savannah stepped forward and leaned over her. “It’s putting a human being into a hot metal cage and then leaving her there with no food and no water and—”
“Oh, that!” She looked instantly relieved. “That wasn’t imprisonment. That was an intervention. Daisy is so-o-o fat! Have you seen her lately? She has totally blimped out. We just did that for her own good. I explained that to her. She didn’t need food. She could just live off her fat for, like, a year at least. And then she’d look a lot better!”
Savannah fought the urge to slap her off the chair and onto the floor. “When we found that poor girl a few hours ago, she was nearly dead from dehydration. She’s in the hospital now in intensive care.”
“Oh, ple-e-ease. We left her some water. And I couldn’t go back. My dad had been murdered! I was busy.”
Dirk stepped forward, and for a moment, Savannah was afraid he really would hit her. “I don’t have time to mess with you right now,” he told her. “But you are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent...”
Savannah turned and walked out of the room, her stomach tightening into a hard, bitter ball in her belly. Still, after all these years, she couldn’t get over the way human beings could rationalize the most vicious acts.
It simply boggled her mind.
Dirk came out a few moments later and asked a female uniformed cop in the hallway to keep an eye on Tiffany. “Don’t let her out of your sight,” he said. “She’s under arrest.”
“Really?” the cop asked.
“Yeah.”
“Cool!”
Dirk turned to Savannah. “You know,” he said, “we don’t have enough to actually nail this Bunny kid for killing Dante. I know she did, and you do, too, but we’ve got squat. The fake passport, some lipstick, and maybe some DNA when it eventually comes back from the lab—that’s not enough.”
“She threatened to kill him several times in front of Daisy and Kiki.”
“Still not enough.”
“There’s a diary stashed in her room that may have some good stuff in it.”
“But for right now, we’ve got nothing.”
Savannah raised one eyebrow and grinned. “Yeah, but she doesn’t know how nothing the nothing is that we’ve got.”
“What?”
“Exactly. Watch this.”
“Let me tell you what we already know, Bunny,” Savannah said as she leaned across the table that separated her and Dirk from Bunny and the girl’s mother. “Not the stuff we think or the stuff we’re just guessing about... but the stuff that we absolutely, positively know.”
“Okay,” Bunny said, flipping her hair back over her shoulder in a very Tiffanyesque move. “Go right ahead. You tell me what you know about me, lady detective.”
“No,” Mrs. Greenaway interrupted. “I think we should have a lawyer here before anybody says anything.”
Savannah felt Dirk tense beside her. The L word during an interrogation was the last thing any cop wanted to hear.
“Sure, Mrs. Greenaway,” he said. “If you think your daughter has done something illegal, you probably should get an attorney. Although, of course, as soon as you start calling around, it’s out of our hands. We won’t be able to keep a lid on this. Thanks to your daughter’s notoriety, the whole town, the world will know about it in fifteen minutes.”
“I don’t need an attorney, Mom,” Bunny said with a classic sixteen-year-old eye roll. “They have nothing on me because I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Oh, yes, you did.” Savannah fixed her with her best blue laser stare. “You absolutely did. And we have all the proof we need to convict you.”
“Oh yeah? Of what?”
“Of the false imprisonment of Daisy O’Neil, for starters. That’s a biggy, a felony, Miss Bunny. And you and Tiffany are both going to do some serious prison time for that.”
“I’m a minor!”
“Yes, but that’s a major crime, and the prosecutor is sure that he can try you as an adult. You’re known around the world for how very adult your behavior is. I’m sure it wouldn’t be hard for a jury to see you as all grown-up.”
That seemed to take at least one puff of wind out of Bunny’s sails. She sank slightly lower in her folding metal chair.
“And,” Savannah continued, “then there’s the matter of the murder of Andrew Dante.”
“She doesn’t know anything about that!” her mother said.
“She knows everything about that,” Dirk told her. “Your daughter killed Andrew Dante in cold blood.”
Bunny sniffed and shook her head. “That’s just so dumb. I did not, and you can’t prove it.”
“I think we need a lawyer,” Mrs. Greenaway said. “I’m going to call one right now, and—”
“No, Mom, that’s just stupid!” Bunny shouted in her mother’s face. “I don’t need a lawyer. Criminals need lawyers. I’m not a criminal. I didn’t do anything that anybody else wouldn’t have done in the same situation.”
“And what situation is that?” Mrs. Greenaway asked.
When Bunny didn’t respond, Savannah said softly. “She’s pregnant, ma’am. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but
your daughter is pregnant with Andrew Dante’s baby.”
“She is not! Are you?” She turned to her daughter. “Are you?”
“No. They’re lying.”
Savannah shook her head. “No, we aren’t lying. Bunny, you were at the clinic this evening having a consultation about an abortion. Tiffany Dante took you there. She’s pressuring you to go through with it, isn’t she? She doesn’t want to share her father’s fortune with any other siblings. Aren’t you smart enough to know that’s why she’s ‘helping’ you?”
Bunny’s round little face flushed with anger. “I am too smart! I’m smarter than Tiffany will ever be. I don’t want Andrew’s stupid baby. He turned out to be a total creep.”
“Bunny! No!” Her mother began to cry. “You are pregnant? Really?”
“Oh, Mother, catch up, will you? Jeez, you can be so irritating sometimes.”
“Andrew was a creep?” Savannah prompted. “He didn’t treat you right? He wasn’t willing to divorce Robyn and marry you? That’s what you were hoping for. That’s why you got pregnant in the first place.”
Mrs. Greenaway gasped, but Bunny just crossed her arms over her chest and said, “Maybe.”
“Oh, no ‘maybe’ about it,” Savannah continued. “He told you no way on the marriage. And when you realized that you weren’t going to be the new Mrs. Andrew Dante, the mistress of his big mansion with a fat bank account for everything you ever wanted, you killed him.”
“Did not.”
“We know that you did,” Dirk told her. “We know a lot about you, young lady.”
“Like what?”
Savannah glanced at Mrs. Greenaway and then said, “We know that you had sex with Andrew the day he died. We collected DNA from his... body... and compared it to yours. It’s a match.”
Lie number one, Savannah thought. Not that it particularly troubled her soul, but she did like to keep track of such things.
Bunny snickered. “Yeah, right. I watch a lot of those forensic shows on TV. I know all about that stuff. You don’t have my DNA on file. I didn’t give you any samples.”
“We took it off a soda can that you drank from there at the Dantes’. You threw it away, and we dug it out of the garbage. It had your fingerprints and your DNA all over it.”
Lie number two.
Bunny looked a bit less cocky. “You did not.”
“Did too. And we compared the lipstick you left on his genitalia to a tube of yours. It was a match.”
Lie number three.
“Lipstick?” Mrs. Greenaway looked like she might faint at any minute. “On his...oh... no!”
“And,” Savannah continued, on a roll, “we know that it was you who left the note on the refrigerator that was supposedly from Andrew, saying he was on a plane to London. And after Robyn saw the note and threw it away, you dug it out of the garbage before we could find it and disposed of it another way.”
“Nope. I didn’t.”
“Oh, yes,” Savannah said. “And then there’s the clincher. The gun.”
“What about the gun?” Bunny wanted to know.
The girl was far less calm now. In fact, she was breathing so hard and fast that Savannah thought she might hyperventilate at any moment.
“The gun that you stashed under Tiffany’s bed. Nice touch, that. But it had your epithelials on it.”
Lie number four.
“What are those?” Mrs. Greenaway asked cautiously, as though she was afraid to hear the answer.
“Oh, Mother, just shut up.” Bunny looked absolutely miserable, which was fine with Savannah. Better than fine, in fact. Her Halloween was just getting better by the minute. “I know what epithelials are. They’re like cells that come off of your hands when you touch something. They can get DNA out of them.”
“Gee, you could be a CSI tech when you grow up,” Savannah said. “Oh, wait...I forgot... You’re going to be in jail.”
“I don’t see why I should go to jail,” Bunny said. “I really don’t. If people knew how he treated me, they wouldn’t blame me for anything I did to him. He was so rude! I did everything he wanted... even that morning, and then he called me very nasty names and told me he didn’t want me or our baby.”
“So you got the gun and made him go sit in one of the coffins on the patio,” Savannah said. “Was he scared?”
Bunny shrugged. “Yeah, a little. But he kept saying I shouldn’t be stupid, acting like a dumb kid, waving the gun around like that. He sat down in the coffin like I told him to, but he didn’t think I’d really do it. Boy, I’ll bet he was surprised.”
The nasty smile that crossed her young face sent a chill through Savannah. She had seen some pretty evil people in her day, but this girl was so young. It usually took a lot longer for a soul to become embittered to that degree.
“Why the wooden stake?” Dirk asked.
“Because he drove a stake through my heart!” she said. “Do you know how it feels to love somebody so much, to do everything they want you to do and then be told to just go away, just get lost?”
Mrs. Greenaway clapped her hands over her face and shook her head back and forth as though she simply couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She kept whispering, “No, no, no, no.”
“Yes, Mother,” Bunny said to her. “I did it, and I’m not ashamed either. If you’ve ever felt like I did, you’ll know exactly why I killed him. That’s why no jury will convict me of murder. If there’s even one woman on there who’s been through what I have, she’ll understand and vote not guilty. And that’s all it will take for me to get away with it.”
Savannah sighed. “Oh, Bunny. We’ve all been through what you went through. We’ve all loved and lost. The difference is we didn’t murder our former lovers. We might have felt like it, but we didn’t pull a gun on him, make him sit in a coffin, put a bullet through his heart, and then drive a stake through it for good measure. You blew it, kiddo, bigtime.”
“Well, he deserved it. And I’m not sorry, and I’m not ashamed.”
“That’s too bad,” Savannah said softly. “ ’Cause you really oughta be... for your own sake, if for no one else’s. You really ought to be ashamed.”
Chapter 22
Savannah looked around her backyard at her guests who were having a good time, eating her food, soaking in a bit of Southern hospitality, Southern California style. Daisy and her mother were hanging out by the barbecue grill, getting to know Ryan and John. Tammy and Gran were sitting on a swinging bench seat that Dirk had suspended from a tree branch in honor of Gran’s visit. She always missed her porch swing when she came to visit.
And Dirk was lying on the grass, his Dodgers cap over his face, hands folded on his belly.
He looked a little like Andrew Dante had in his coffin, but Savannah decided not to mention that to him. The case was finally closed, and it hadn’t been a particularly pleasant experience. Everyone present was all too happy it was over.
Two days ago, the prosecutor had announced that he would, indeed, be trying both Tiffy and Bunny as adults, and the media was going wild. It was the lead story on every television and radio news broadcast and on the front page of every newspaper and tabloid in the country.
But here in Savannah’s backyard, among her various flower gardens, with barbecue smoke and lively, friendly conversation floating on the breeze, all was well, calm, serene.
She walked over to Gran and Tammy and sat down on a chair beside their swing. “What are you two hens clucking about over here?” Savannah asked them.
They looked at each other, guilty grins on their faces. “Uh, well,” Gran said. “I was just telling Tammy that I talked to Martha on the phone this morning, and it seems she’s come into a bit of a...um... inheritance of sorts.”
Savannah raised one eyebrow. Gran’s best friend, Martha, was Gran’s age—in her eighties. “Oh? Did her grandmother finally pass away unexpectedly and leave her a chunk of money?”
“Something like that,” Gran replied coyly. “I think she’s goi
ng to replace that old blunderbuss of a car of hers and get herself a brand new Cadillac!”
“Ah, how nice for her. And how about you, Granny Reid?” Savannah said. “Are you going to be coming into any unexplained money in the near future?”
“I can’t really say,” was the sly answer. “But I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if the next time you come visit me, I have some new windows in my little house. Those old ones get stuck all the time, and I dang near suffocate in the summertime.”
“Well, won’t that be nice for you and Martha.” Savannah laughed and shook her head. “Are you two hungry yet?” she asked.
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