Wicked Craving

by G. A. McKevett

  Dirk scowled and walked past her into the house. “I don’t ‘throw’ mothers-to-be anywhere. But there’s a good chance you might get your butt nicely, gently, politely escorted to jail.”

  “You’re not going to find anything in this house that’ll prove that I killed anybody, because I didn’t!” She tossed a plastic dump truck and a doll off the end of the sofa and plopped herself down on it. Then she grabbed a handful of tissues from the end table next to her and blew her nose loudly.

  “We’re not here just because we don’t like the color of your eyes or the cut of your hair,” Savannah told her. “We know all about your little shopping spree at Three Brothers Hardware.”

  “What shopping spree? I haven’t shopped for anything for ages. I haven’t even had enough money to buy maternity clothes. Not that I need them yet.”

  She placed her hand on her only slightly enlarged tummy and patted it.

  Savannah had to agree with her there. She still had a lovely figure and didn’t mind showing it off with the tight, black sweater dress she was wearing. Savannah thought about the fact that this woman was seeing weight loss specialists to lose all those “excess pounds,” and for a moment, she felt sorry for her.

  So many women—naturally buoyant, joyful spirits—were crushed under society’s pressure to remain as thin as preadolescent girls.

  She thought of Gertrude Burns’s harsh words to her daughter, and she felt an added surge of sympathy for the woman on the sofa. But then she remembered Wellman’s crushed and mangled face…and all vestiges of sympathy disappeared.

  Walking over to the coffee table, where a black leather purse lay, she said, “So, how much do you want to bet me, Karen, that inside this purse I’m going to find a debit card that ends with the numbers three-one-three-seven?”

  Karen stopped crying instantly, like a toggle switch had been thrown. Fear and anger replaced the frantic, victim look.

  “How do you know my debit card number?”

  “You’d be surprised what we know about you.” Savannah picked up the purse.

  Karen leaned over and tried to snatch it out of her hand. “You can’t go through my purse!”

  “Darlin’, that warrant says we can go through your panties drawer if we’ve got a notion to do it. So, you just sit back there on the couch and chill out. ’Cause it’s gonna happen whether you like it or not.”

  Savannah handed the purse to Dirk. Officially, he was the one with the warrant. But she didn’t feel the need to fill Karen Burns in on the particulars of search-and-seizure law.

  It took Dirk less than thirty seconds to have the debit card in his hand. An unnaturally cheerful look on his face, he held it up for all to see. “Three-one-three-seven. And, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we would like to present the prosecution’s exhibit number one.”

  Two hours later, Dirk was less cheerful.

  So was Savannah.

  They were sweaty and tired and depressed, having scoured the premises thoroughly without finding anything other than the debit card.

  Less than ten minutes into their task, Dirk had declared the property “a friggen dump.” And coming from a guy who lived in a rusted-out trailer with milk crates and rickety TV trays for furniture, that was quite an indictment.

  They paused for a break in the kitchen, after searching every cereal box and potato chip bag in hopes of finding Rodeo Drive jewelry.

  Going through the trash, looking for a Three Brothers Hardware bag or receipt, had been the worst. Dumpster diving was Savannah’s least favorite part of any search.

  “As fun as this is,” she told Dirk while they washed their hands at the kitchen sink, using plenty of soap and hot water, “I’m starting to think we might as well give up the ghost. I don’t think we’re going to come up with anything else.”

  “I’m afraid you’re right.” He looked around for something to wipe his hands on. When he picked up the corner of a dishtowel and saw crusty strands of dried spaghetti with red sauce stuck to it, he tossed it back onto the counter and used his shirttail instead.

  They heard the sound of a car’s engine, and the rattling clanking of the garage door opening. A moment later, a shrill, too-familiar voice drifted into the kitchen.

  “Get your asses out of this car right now or you won’t be getting any candy. I mean it. You touch your sister again, I swear I’ll slug you!”

  “Gertrude’s home,” Dirk said to Savannah.

  “Oh, goodie gumdrop. I knew we should’ve left ten minutes ago.”

  The door leading from the kitchen to the garage opened, and children poured through. Little ones with round, rosy faces and a couple of elementary school–aged boys streamed in, carrying assorted toys and snacks.

  Gertrude followed, a baby in one arm, two bags of groceries in the other. “You wanna get in here and help me, you lazy sack of—” she screamed, choking on her words when she saw Savannah and Dirk in her kitchen.

  “What the hell are you doing in my house…again?” she shouted.

  Dirk gave her a nasty look, but he reached over and took the bags from her. Setting them on the kitchen counter, he said, “We have a search warrant for your property, Mrs. Burns. In fact, we’ve just finished a rather thorough search and were about to leave. But now that you’ve been thoughtful enough to pull your car into the garage, it’s officially on the premises and subject to be searched as well.”

  “Mighty thoughtful of you,” Savannah murmured as she reached out and stroked the soft curls of the munchkin nearest her.

  “You’re not looking in my car for anything,” Gertrude said, puffing herself up into an impressive amount of woman, glaring at them through her bright red frames.

  “Your car is getting searched,” Savannah told her. “Your daughter is under suspicion for killing Robert Wellman, maybe even Maria, too. So, we’re leaving no rock unturned.”

  “My daughter? Suspicion of killing…? What?” she sputtered. She whirled around and stomped into the living room.

  Savannah and Dirk could hear her screaming at Karen, even as they went into the garage.

  “What the hell have you done now, you stupid, fat cow? It’s not enough that you get yourself knocked up by a married man…you’ve got to go and kill somebody, too!”

  Ten minutes later, Savannah and Dirk walked back into the house to find Gertrude and Karen still arguing in the living room. Karen was half-sitting, half-lying on one end of the couch, curled into a fetal position, sobbing hysterically. Gertrude sat on the other end, arms crossed over her chest. Savannah could practically see the smoke curling out of her ears.

  The baby lay on the sofa between them. It was crying, too.

  Just one big happy family.

  Instinctively, Savannah walked to the sofa, leaned over the wailing Karen, and picked up the crying baby.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Gertrude snapped.

  “Comforting this child,” Savannah said. “Since nobody else is.”

  “Well, we’ve got a thing or two on our minds around here, what with you two talking about arresting my daughter for murder!”

  “Oh, we’re going to do more than talk about it,” Dirk said. He held up two brown evidence bags. “We just found a plastic sack stuffed under the driver’s seat of her car with Three Brothers Hardware printed on it. And inside, guess what we found? A receipt for a screwdriver, a hammer, a crowbar, and a pair of workman’s gloves.”

  He waited for that information to sink in.

  It did. Karen curled into a tighter ball and shrieked even louder. Gertrude’s face turned from red to purple.

  “And…oh, yeah…” he continued, “…did I mention that we found the bloody gloves under the driver’s seat next to the bag?”

  “Y’all oughta take out the trash more often,” Savannah said as she cuddled the baby expertly against her chest. “‘Neatness is next to godliness,’ as Gran says, and it gets rid of incriminating evidence, too.”

  Dirk set the brown bags on the coffee ta
ble, then reached behind him and pulled a pair of handcuffs from his belt. “Karen Burns, you’re under arrest for the murder of Robert Wellman…er…Bobby Martini. You have the right to remain silent….”

  Savannah and Dirk had to practically carry their suspect to his car. Her legs were too wobbly to support her…or at least, she gave that impression as she stumbled along, with one of her captors lifting her under each arm.

  “I don’t want to have my baby in jail!” she screeched, sounding a lot like her mother.

  “Maybe you should have thought about your baby when you were smashing its father on the head with a crowbar,” Savannah told her. “You made mincemeat out of that man, Karen. You can’t do that and just go on living your life like nothing happened.”

  “And I’m gonna get you for killing Gina Martini, too,” Dirk said. “I haven’t figured out how yet, but I will.”

  “Who’s…who’s Gina Martini?”

  Savannah sighed, feeling troubled, uneasy about something, even though an arrest had just been made. “I just wish we’d been able to find that jewelry,” she said.

  “What jewelry? Who’s Gina? I don’t know what you people are talking about!” Karen screamed as Dirk opened the back door of the Buick.

  Savannah watched as Dirk seated her inside and secured her seat belt. She watched, and she wrestled with a feeling that something was wrong.

  Over the years, she had seen countless people arrested…most of them guilty, some of them innocent.

  The innocent had a certain air of disbelief about them, as though they simply couldn’t comprehend what was happening to them. The guilty usually put up a fuss initially, then displayed a sullen resignation to the whole process.

  Karen was a study in incredulity. She was in a state of terrified shock.

  “What’s the matter?” Dirk asked Savannah as he closed the door.

  “She didn’t do it.”

  “What do you mean she didn’t do it? I’ve got her card, the receipt and bag in her car. The bloody gloves!”

  But Savannah wasn’t listening to him. She was already headed back to the house.

  She walked across the street, past the pile of discarded toys on the curb, and up the sidewalk. When she reached the front door, she didn’t bother to knock, just walked on in.

  She strode past a startled Gertrude, who was in the middle of doling out sweets to the children.

  She walked straight through the house to a bedroom she had already checked before…one of the kids’ rooms.

  Once inside, she hurried over to the unmade bed with the Spiderman sheets and picked up the ragged teddy bear with the blue ribbon around its neck.

  “There you are,” she said, looking into his faded eyes.

  “What are you doing with my bear?” asked a small, timid voice behind her.

  She turned and saw a little boy standing there, his eyes wide with concern.

  Squeezing the stuffed animal, she could feel the hard lumps just under the fur of its belly…right near the center seam where it was sewn.

  “I’m going to have to take your bear to the toy doctor,” she told the child. “He ate something he really shouldn’t have. But I promise you I’ll bring him back to you.”

  “Double-dog promise?” the boy asked.

  “Triple-dog promise.”

  With the bear’s owner’s blessing, Savannah carried teddy back into the living room. When Gertrude saw the toy in her hand, her face fell.

  “What are you doing with that?”

  “You know,” Savannah told her. “You know exactly what’s inside this bear because you put it there. It’s a diamond and sapphire necklace. And judging from the lumps on his butt, I’d say there’s a pair of earrings in there, too. The ones you snatched off a dead”—she glanced around and saw several young faces watching intently—“that you removed from a deceased female…a corpse.”

  “I did not.”

  “You did. That’s why you threw such a hissy fit the other day when Karen pitched it into the garbage.”

  Gertrude didn’t reply, just glared at her through her red rims.

  “And not only that,” Savannah continued, “but you were perfectly willing to let your daughter, your pregnant daughter, be arrested for something you did.”

  “She did it! It was all her. She put that stuff inside that bear and sewed it back up! It was her!”

  “No, she didn’t. But I’m going to enjoy telling the jury what a peach of a mother you are, accusing her to me like that.”

  Dirk came charging through the front door, a confused and worried look on his face.

  “What are you doing?” he asked Savannah. “I don’t have a cage in the Buick. I had to handcuff her to the door handle so that I could follow you in here to see what…What’s going on?”

  “The jewels are inside this bear,” Savannah told him. “And Gertrude here put them there. She also killed Wellman. When the lab gets around to dusting that bag, it’ll be her prints they find on it, not Karen’s. And if that’s not enough, you’ll find her DNA inside those gloves. I’m sure her hands were sweating something fierce when she was killing Wellman. Beating somebody to death is mighty hard work.”

  Dirk was flabbergasted, Gertrude morose.

  “I didn’t steal that stuff off her dead body,” she said in a strangely flat, monotone voice. “They were laying on her dressing table in her bedroom. She’d already taken them off.”

  Neither Dirk nor Savannah spoke. They just held their breath and listened.

  “I found them after…after we had our fight there in the yard and she fell. I went through the house because I wanted to see what he lived like. How we were going to be living after…once she was dead and he married Karen. And that’s when I saw them laying there. She was dead anyway. I wouldn’t rob a dead body.”

  “Well, at least you’ve got your standards,” Savannah muttered.

  “But you’d beat a man to death with a crowbar,” Dirk added. “Set him up to bend over and look at his tire, and then smash him in the head…over and over.”

  “He lied to my daughter.” Gertrude gave a casual shrug. “He said he was married and he wasn’t. He said he loved her and he didn’t. He said he’d set her and me and all of us up somewhere and pay all our bills. I was really looking forward to that.”

  “I’ll bet you were,” Savannah said.

  “A nice big house for all these kids. Somebody to help me take care of them. It was going to be great. But then he backed out. Told her all he’d do is pay for the abortion. He let us down. Disappointed us. He shouldn’t have done that.”

  Dirk nodded. “Apparently not.”

  Savannah looked around the room at the wide-eyed little ones and wondered what was going to become of them.

  She remembered every moment of that day, so many years ago, when she and her siblings had been removed from her mother’s care and placed with Granny Reid.

  That had been the beginning of Savannah’s childhood. Before that, she had never been allowed to be a child.

  Her heart ached for Gertrude Burns’s grandchildren.

  Not everyone was blessed to have a Granny Reid.

  Chapter 24

  The sun was setting as Dirk drove Savannah homeward. Again, they had taken their favorite route along the foothills and were enjoying the sweet, citrus smells of the orange and lemon groves enhanced by the evening dew.

  “I wonder how that Karen gal is going to function now, on her own, without her mother to take care of her,” Dirk said.

  “She’s getting to learn some long-overdue life lessons,” Savannah agreed. “No doubt about that. It’s a shame. ’Cause when a body puts off the learning, the lessons get a lot tougher. And her pregnant—that makes it way harder. Life’s not going to be easy for either of those women for a long time.”

  “Do you think Karen knew her mother had done it?” Dirk asked.

  “She might have suspected. I don’t know for sure. I really don’t think Karen was in on it. I could tell she
really was in love with Wellman. I don’t see the appeal, personally, but there’s no accounting for taste.”

  “Or a lack of it.”

  They drove along in silence for a while, both enjoying the break from all the stressful activities of the past few days.

  If there was anything better than having a case to work on, it was having one wrapped up.

  “I think this is a first for me,” Dirk said. “Instead of the wrath of a woman scorned it was a prospective mother-in-law scorned.”

  Savannah nodded. “I think Dr. Bonnie Saperstein was right about how some women think a man is going to change their lives forever, make them whole and happy. Then when that fantasy gets snatched away, they’ll do anything to get it back.”

  “She’s a nasty, rotten old broad. That’s for sure. You gotta wonder if she was always that way. Like was she just born mean?”

  Savannah gazed into the darkening orchards around her, breathed in the fragrant air that was streaming through the car window. “No,” she said. “I can’t believe that. But I do look at those little kids, growing up in a house where that sort of crap goes on…how do they really have a chance to learn anything different?”

  Her cell phone buzzed, and she looked to see who it was. “Brian Mahoney?” she said. “Why the heck would that tally-whacker be calling me?”

  She didn’t sound particularly friendly when she answered, “Yes?”

  “Sa…Sa…Savannah?” The woman on the other end was crying so hard that she could hardly speak.

  “Lydia?”

  “Yes. It’s me. You said I could call you if…”

  “Of course. What’s going on? Where are you?”

  “I’m down at the gate, the one that leads into Spirit Hills.”

  “And what’s happening?”

  “He hurt me again. Pretty bad. I couldn’t take it. I grabbed his cell phone and snuck out the back way and ran.”

  “Good for you, girl!”

  “Can you help me?”

  “Damn tootin’! You hang tight and we’ll be there in five minutes. And if you see Brian, you hide…behind a bush somewhere if you need to.”