“Whoa, whoa! Hold on there. What threats of physical violence?”
Tiffany stammered and sputtered for a moment, then flipped her hair back over her shoulder and said, “Well, you know, the seat belt thing.”
Savannah laughed at her. “Oh, right. I did threaten to physically restrain you with a seat belt in a moving vehicle. I’ll probably get the needle for that one.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have insulted me like that. My dad is going to sue your asses off the minute he gets back from London, or maybe even before. Nobody treats me the way you two did today and gets away with it. You just wait and see what happens to you!”
Tiffany turned on her friend, who was still sitting at the table, crying, her hands over her eyes. “And what were you telling her just now? You’re just a filthy, ungrateful, rotten liar. That’s what you are! If you were telling her lies about me, my dad’s going to sue you, too. After all I’ve done for you, and you turn on me! You’re going to get it, too.”
Kiki didn’t reply but continued to sob uncontrollably.
“Yeah, yeah, we’ll see what horrible fate befalls those who dare to ruffle your feathers,” Savannah said.
Her flippancy enraged Tiffany that much more. “I’m calling the cops. That’s all there is to it,” she said, spinning around and stomping back toward the kitchen.
But Robyn was standing in the doorway, blocking her. “They have my permission to be here,” she said softly but firmly. “I invited them in.”
Tiffany exploded. “Oh, you did, huh? Well, that just figures! My dad leaves, and what do you do? You—”
“Act like the mistress of my own home. Yes. I did.” Robyn locked eyes with her stepdaughter, and it occurred to Savannah that maybe Robyn Dante wasn’t the meek little mouse she appeared to be at first glance.
“And you,” Robyn continued, “will settle down and answer this woman’s questions about your missing friend or—”
“I will not! She—”
“Or leave this room. Now. Which is it going to be?” Robyn stepped to the left, clearing the doorway should Tiffany decide to make an exit.
But before Tiffany could make her move, they heard a scream—a loud, terrible scream—coming from near the pool.
And then another and another and another.
“Oh my God!” Robyn said. “What is that?”
Even Tiffany froze in her tirade.
Kiki stopped crying and jumped to her feet.
Savannah ran for the door that led to the patio, flung it open, and raced outside.
She had heard screams like that before. Quite a few times, in fact. And she knew a shriek like that meant one of two things: either somebody was dead, or someone was about to be.
Automatically, her hand went to her Beretta, but she didn’t pull the weapon. She scanned the scene, trying to take in everything at once.
The kidney-shaped swimming pool, dyed blood-red like the fountain, was in front of her. The pool lights shining through the red liquid gave the whole scene a sinister, surreal crimson glow.
And surrounding the pool on all sides were more grotesque displays, like the ones in the front yard and the rest of the house: bodies, monsters, coffins, and assorted torture devices.
But the only moving figure was the one on the opposite side of the pool.
It was Bunny.
Dressed in a bright pink halter top and shorts, she was jumping up and down—indeed, like a rabbit—waving her arms wildly, and screaming, screaming screaming.
Savannah ran around the pool, weaving her way through the gore, until she reached the distraught girl.
She grabbed her by the upper arms and turned her to face her. “What is it?” she said. “Bunny! Stop it. What’s wrong?”
The girl kept flailing her arms and shrieking hysterically. “Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!”
Savannah was aware of the others behind her. Of Robyn asking what was wrong. But she had her hands full with the unhinged teenager.
She shook her hard, then put her hands on either side of Bunny’s face to force her to look at her. “Bunny! Calm down, sugar! Settle down! Stop! Stop screaming!”
The girl focused for a moment and seemed to hear her. She was shaking violently.
“What is it?” Savannah asked, forcing her voice to be soft and soothing, even though she felt like shaking the girl’s teeth out. “What’s wrong, darlin’? Tell me what’s the matter.”
Finally, Bunny turned and pointed to a nearby display of vampire gore. Two coffins, laid side by side, held male and female vampires. Dressed in traditional Gothic finery, the Dracula wannabe and his bride were lying in not so sweet repose, hands folded demurely, fangs sufficiently bloodied. And of course, the obligatory stakes driven into the centers of their chests.
Savannah wondered why this exhibit would strike such terror in Bunny’s heart when all around, there were far more gruesome displays.
“Okay,” Savannah said, thinking briefly that maybe being in these sordid surroundings had unbalanced the girl’s mind. “What’s the big deal about them? They’re—”
“Real! It’s not fake! It’s real!”
“What?”
“It’s not fake. It’s a real body!”
As Savannah ran to the coffins and knelt beside them, she had time for a hundred thoughts to race through her mind. But uppermost, hope that Bunny was wrong and these were dummies like all the rest. And wrestling with that hope, fear that they had found their missing Daisy.
She knelt beside the coffin and looked at the female form inside. It was a woman in a black leather corset, laced in the front with burgundy ties, and a long black velvet skirt.
Her black hair was divided neatly in the middle and flowed down past her waist.
Savannah studied her features carefully. Her face was gaunt, pinched, with sunken cheeks, and she had a pronounced widow’s peak.
“This isn’t Daisy,” she said as relief, mingled with confusion washed through her, making her knees weak.
She looked at the “wound,” the deep hole in the chest through which the wooden stake had been thrust. Reaching out, she touched the darkened area next to the wood, then looked at her fingertip. Nothing. It was dried paint. “This is a dummy,” she told them.
“No! Not that one!” Bunny cried. “It’s him!” She pointed to the male in the adjacent coffin.
But Savannah was already looking at the male figure, her heart in her throat.
Even in this dim light, she could see the difference in this body and the female’s. The features were far finer, more realistic. The hair was real, not a phony wig. The hands, the fingers, and the nails were all too beautifully detailed to be fake.
As before, she dabbed her finger into the dark area around the stake, and this time, she felt the telltale wetness. Blood. The real thing.
Savannah knew what she was looking at, but her mind refused to take it in. She didn’t want to believe that the big, handsome blond man in the coffin was Dante. But it was.
Whether she wanted to admit it or not, Andrew Dante was lying there beside his own swimming pool in a coffin—with a wooden stake through his heart.
She had seen some pretty bizarre stuff in her years in law enforcement, but this was the strangest yet.
Someone gasped behind her. She turned to see that Robyn had also realized the grim truth. The woman cried out and clapped her hands over her mouth.
“What’s going on?” Tiffany said as she elbowed the stunned Robyn aside and pushed past her to get closer.
Savannah reached for her to prevent her from seeing what would undoubtedly scar her soul forever. “No, honey, don’t,” she told her, trying to turn her away.
But Tiffany would not be deterred. “Get out of my way. I want to see it. I—oh my God! Daddy?”
She fell to her knees beside the coffin, leaned over, and put her hands on the corpse’s face. “Daddy! Daddy!” she screamed, shaking him as though to wake him.
Again, Savannah reached for her, but the
girl fell forward, collapsing face-first into the coffin.
Savannah grabbed her and lifted her up and away from her father’s body. She tried to sit her down on the ground a few feet away, but Tiffany folded like a card table with lousy leg supports.
It wasn’t until Savannah laid her down and stretched her out that she realized Tiffany was unconscious. She had fainted dead away.
But not as dead as Daddy.
She glanced over at the stake that was sticking up at least a foot and a half out of his chest.
Nope, they didn’t need a doctor to pronounce Andrew Dante or a coroner to determine the cause or manner of death.
Death by impalement.
And highly suspicious, to say the very least.
Chapter 12
“Everybody move back,” Savannah said. “I’m sorry, but you can’t be here. We can’t be this close to the bo…I mean, him. Come on. Come with me back into the house, please.”
She turned to Kiki and Bunny, who seemed the least distraught at the moment, and asked them, “Would you two please help Mrs. Dante into the house? I’ll get Tiffany.”
They did as she asked, and Savannah helped the recently revived Tiffany to her feet. “Come on, sugar. There’s nothing we can do for him now. Let’s just get you and your mom…er…your stepmom into the house.”
Once inside, she convinced them all to go into the living room and sit down. She coaxed Tiffany and Robyn to lie on the sofas.
After running to the kitchen for glasses of water and distributing them, she raced upstairs.
“Dirk!” she shouted as she hurried along the upstairs hallway. “Dirk! Get out here, boy! Dirk!”
He stuck his head out of a bedroom door. “Why? Is she coming?”
“What?”
Then she realized he meant Tiffany. He was rummaging through her room and thought that Savannah was there to warn him.
“Get down here,” she told him. “We’ve got a body.”
“A body? Oh, damn.”
She could tell by the stricken look on his face that he thought she meant Daisy. “No, not her,” she told him. “You’re not going to believe this, but it’s Dante, Andrew Dante is lying down there by the pool with a wooden stake through his heart.”
He stared at her blankly, then shook his head and said, “I don’t believe that.”
“I told you you wouldn’t. You have to see this! It’s bizarre!”
“A stake?”
“Through his heart. He’s dressed up like Dracula, lying there dead as a doornail, a wooden spike sticking out of his chest.”
“Holy crap!”
As they raced down the broad spiral staircase together, Dirk said, “I thought he was supposed to be in London.”
“Me, too. Or at least on the way there.”
Savannah paused at the bottom of the stairs and lowered her voice so that no one in the living room could hear her. “By the way, did you find anything up there in her bedroom?”
“Not really,” he said, “but I wasn’t exactly looking for wooden stakes or a bloody hammer.”
“No garlands of garlic or giant crucifix, either, I suppose,” she added as she rushed him through the kitchen and out the back door.
“Sick joke,” he said.
She looked at the pool with its red blood, the coffins, bodies, and occasional tombstone. “Graveyard humor,” she said. “It’s sorta like gallows humor.”
“What is this?” he asked, looking around. “Hell’s waiting room?”
“No kidding. And wait till you see the body. Whoever did it dressed him in this weird Goth vampire getup and put him into a coffin and everything. Now that’s sick.”
She took him around the pool to Dante’s resting place, which from this moment on, would be considered a crime scene.
As he bent over the body, studying it, he said, “It’s so damned dark out here. We’re going to have to light this up bigtime.”
“Dr. Liu’s CSI crew will have plenty of lights. Or we could just tell the paparazzi in the front yard about this, and they’ll be all over it with floodlights.”
“God forbid!” He shuddered. “Can you even imagine what a disaster that would be? In fact, when I call for the coroner, I’ll ask for some backup to do crowd control out there.”
He looked at the rugged stake protruding from Dante’s chest and shook his head. “This is so ugly,” he said. “And the press is going to eat it up. What a mess.”
“Oh, this is going to be huge. Tiffany Dante’s Daddy Mega bucks dead, Dracula style. Film at eleven.”
Dirk shook his head and wiped a hand across his face. “And the most depressing part of it all, at least for me…”
She knew what he was going to say, so she said it for him. “All this…and we still haven’t found Daisy.”
He nodded wearily. “She could be lying out there somewhere with one of these—”
“Don’t say it.”
He looked up at her and gave her a sweet, understanding look. “It could be true, Van,” he told her, “no matter what I say.”
“Still, don’t say it.”
I don’t want to hear it, she thought. Daisy’s been missing too long. Much too long.
Together, she and Dirk had recovered many, many kids. Most had wandered away from home, away from playgrounds, away from their moms in shopping malls and grocery stores.
But out of all those kids, none had been missing this long and been found alive. Not a single one.
That was something else she didn’t want to think about. Because if she did, she’d crumble inside.
And broken, crumbled people weren’t worth a damn at anything. Especially at finding missing kids.
“All right, listen up,” Dirk told the crowd gathered in the foyer: patrolmen, crime scene investigation technicians, coroner’s assistants, and the county coroner, Dr. Jennifer Liu herself. “You’ve got literally hundreds of cameras and microphones out there, everything from your everyday paparazzi to CNN and the BBC. And this will spin totally out of control if we don’t keep a lid on it. Anybody who asks you anything, your reply will be ‘No comment.’ If I hear that even one of you has breathed a word of anything to anybody, you’ll answer to me personally for it. No phone calls to your wives or boyfriends. Mouths shut about this one! Got it?”
Some mumbled, “Yes,” and others, “Okay.” A few just gave a perfunctory nod.
“And,” he added, dropping the drill sergeant tone, “I’m going to thank you all for what will undoubtedly be a long and trying night. You’re the best. And I appreciate your efforts on this case.”
Savannah would have leaned over and given him a kiss on the cheek for being unusually gracious, but of course, he would have died on the spot and never forgiven her.
There was nothing Dirk hated more than being caught in the act of being a nice guy.
Fortunately, it didn’t happen often enough to be a problem.
Dirk continued to dispense his orders—instructions to the patrolmen about how he wanted the crowd outside contained, along with admonitions to the forensic collection team that since they didn’t know exactly where Andrew Dante had been murdered, the entire enormous estate was their crime scene.
Once the troops were dispersed and immersed in their own duties, Dirk turned to Savannah, shook his head, and said, “Man, oh man, Van. Where to even start with this one! The dude was supposed to be on his way to London, and he’s out back, dead? What the hell’s going on in this house?”
“Well,” she said thoughtfully, “I’d start with the two women of the house and then go from there. I’ll help you out. I’ll take one of them.”
“Thanks.” He brightened considerably. “You take Tiff—”
“In your dreams, sugar. You take Tiffany. I’ll take Robyn.”
His smile disappeared. “I thought you said you were going to help me out.”
“You wanna do them both while I go home and put my feet up and have a nice cup of hot chocolate and visit with my granny?”
He grumbled something under his breath, the swear words encoded just enough to convey his annoyance without getting himself slapped.
Together, they returned to the living room where Robyn and the three girls were still as they had left them.
Tiffany was sitting, curled into a ball around a cushion. Her face was pressed into the pillow, and she was crying.
Bunny and Kiki sat close to each other on a love seat. Kiki had her arm around Bunny’s shoulders and was whispering to her in low, comforting tones. Robyn stood near a window, looking out, her arms crossed. She was shivering.
Savannah scooped up a silk fringed throw from one of the chairs, walked over to her, and draped it around her shoulders.
A quick glance out the window revealed what Robyn had been staring at. The window overlooked the pool…and her dead husband’s body.
“I’m so sorry,” Savannah told her.
Robyn’s face was strangely blank as she turned to Savannah and said a simple, “Thank you.”
She didn’t seem as distraught as most recently widowed women Savannah had dealt with over the years. Savannah decided to give her the benefit of the doubt, at least for now, and chalk it up to shock.
Glancing over her shoulder at Dirk, Savannah saw that he was down on one knee beside Tiffany, his hand on her arm, and he was speaking to her softly.
Yeah, yeah, big, bad dude, she thought, sending him a little love. Dirk could be rude and obnoxious, but he always came through in a pinch.
Sometimes, it had to be a really tight pinch, but…
She turned back to Robyn. “I’m sorry to have to intrude at a time like this,” she said to her, “But I really do need to talk to you for a while. Is there someplace private we can go?”
“What?” Robyn shook her head slightly and seemed to come back to full consciousness. “Oh, sure. Um…let’s go into the library. We can shut the door and…”
“That’s fine. Thank you.”
Robyn looked once more out the window, a long, strange look. Then she glided across the room—the gracious queen of her castle—and led Savannah through the foyer and down the hall to the library.
Poisoned Tarts Page 15
