Cereal Killer

by G. A. McKevett

  “Hm-m-m....”

  When they reached the Buick, Dirk was still scheming, joyfully plotting the demises of Charlotte Murray and Kevin Connor—a very happy boy.

  But for the moment, Savannah had forgotten all about the investigation. She was too busy wondering at the odds of her getting kissed—and kissed very well, indeed—by her two favorite guys in one week.

  Gran's right, she thought. Wonders never cease.

  Chapter

  22

  “Where’s my sister?” Savannah asked Tammy when she walked into her living room and didn’t see Marietta attached to the telephone.

  “Upstairs taking a bath,” Tammy replied as she shuffled a pile of papers on the desk.

  “How’s she doing?” Savannah was afraid to ask, but even if the news was bad, it was best to be informed. “She’s singing.”

  “The blues?”

  “No. She’s actually really cheerful. And I’m pretty sure that I heard her packing in the guest room earlier.” Savannah held her breath, barely daring to hope. “Really? Don’t mess with my head, girl. I’m much too fragile right now.”

  “Really. And I thought I overheard her phoning the airline earlier. I think she’s Georgia bound.”

  “And happy about it?”

  As though to answer her question, a voice drifted downward from the upstairs bathroom. It was Sister Mari, in fine form.

  “‘I ne-e-ever got over those blue eyes. I se-e-ee them e-e-everywhere,’ ” she wailed, murdering the old Johnny Cash ballad. Splash, splash. ‘“I mi-i-is those arms that held me... when a-l-l-l the love was the-e-ere!’ ”

  Savannah tried to mentally assemble the puzzle that was her sister and, as usual, couldn’t quite put the pieces together. “How can she be this happy about going home?” she asked Tammy. “I was threatening to lock her out the other night, and you should have seen the hissy fit she threw. And now...”

  “‘I wo-o-onder if he’s sor-r-ry, for le-e-eaving what we’d begun,’ ” continued the concert upstairs.

  Savannah shook her head. “Go figure. I’m going to eat some lunch, fuel up. I have a feeling it’s gonna be a long afternoon.”

  By the time Marietta had finished her bath and countless verses of her song, Savannah and Tammy had eaten their lunch, and Savannah had filled Tammy in on all the newest developments.

  “He’s gone out to Murray’s house to pick her up if she’s there,” Savannah told her. “And I think I’ll buzz over to Charlotte’s brother’s place and do some plain, old-fashioned surveillance.”

  A cloud of jasmine-scented perfume arrived in the kitchen a few seconds before Marietta appeared, wrapped in a red chiffon robe over a black lace teddy. Her carefully poofed hair and meticulously applied makeup hadn’t been disturbed during the long bath.

  And, as well as smelling like the cosmetic counter of a drugstore, she was beaming from ear to ear.

  “Good afternoon!” she said, giving Savannah the full radiance of her smile. “How are you this fine, fine day?”

  “O-o-okay,” Savannah replied suspiciously. “Boy, aren’t We chipper.”

  “Chipper? My cup of joy is just plain boiling over!”

  Savannah glanced down at the teddy’s built-in pushup bra and the abundance of cleavage swelling above it. “I can see that,” she said. “Both cups, in fact. What’s up... besides your boobs?”

  “I’m going home! This evening!”

  “And that’s good news?” Savannah asked.

  “It’s the best! I’m going home to my own true love. I was on the wrong road, but now I’ve seen the light.”

  “You have?”

  Tammy cleared her throat. “Would you like me to leave? I have some work that I can—”

  “No, stay if you wanna,” Marietta said. “I’ve gotta run upstairs and finish packing.”

  “But... but what about What’s-His-Nose... the chat-room guy?” Savannah asked.

  “Oh, he turned out to be such a mistake. What a loser!” Marietta waved one hand, displaying bright red, dragonlady nails with white glitter hearts. “But it’s worked out for good in the end. You see, when my darlin’ back home found out that I’d come out here to California in search of what he couldn’t give me, he called and proclaimed his love to me again.”

  “Again? Your darlin’ back home?” Alarm bells jangled Savannah’s nerves. ‘You don’t mean—”

  “Yes, my sweet Lester. He’s finally come to his senses, and he says if I’ll just come back home, he’ll leave that worthless Lucille. He’s done some soul searching, and he says he’s actually getting to the point where he can start to think about dumping her once and for all.”

  “Oh, Mari, I don’t think—”

  “He just didn’t know what he had with me till he heard I was gone, you know. He called and said that the thought of me being here with another man was just too much for him to bear. It was driving him plum crazy.”

  “Wouldn’t take much,” Savannah muttered under her breath. “Lester’s always been a little short on smarts where his women are concerned.”

  “Now don’t you even start with me, Miss Savannah Smarty-Pants. You don’t know squat about the deep, dark matters of the heart. And you don’t know what I should or shouldn’t do because you ain’t me!”

  Savannah stood and scooped up her dishes from the table. “You’re absolutely right, Marietta. I’m not you. Excuse me for a minute. I have to go find that tube of Super Glue. I’m going to apply it to my mouth like it was lip gloss. That way I’ll refrain from telling you how stupid I think it is for you to go back home and take up again with a married man... a man whose wife already tried to blow you up with a shotgun.” She stopped, clapped her hands over her mouth, and said, “Oops. Too late.”

  She tossed her dishes into the sink and went upstairs to the bathroom. She needed to brush her teeth. She needed to wash her face. She needed to dunk her head under water three times and bring it up twice.

  But the moment she stepped into the bathroom, she nearly fainted. It had to be over a hundred degrees in there and as humid as a Mississippi swamp in July. The only thing missing was the mosquitoes.

  “Good Lord, Mari,” she mumbled. “Were you taking yourself a tub bath or a steam bath? A body can’t hardly breathe in here.”

  It didn’t take her long to see the cause of the problem; Marietta had turned on the overhead heat lamp and had neglected to turn it off when she’d left the room.

  Savannah quickly switched it off, grumbling under her breath about the electric bill that she probably wouldn’t be able to pay. Not even when the bright red alarmist notice came in the mail—the one with all the bold print, exclamation marks, and evil threats.

  Needing a quick fix of energy and a feeling of renewal after her latest Marietta encounter, she filled the sink with cool water, pulled her hair back with a headband, and bent over. Splashing the refreshing water on her tired eyes felt great, in spite of the fact that the room was still too hot and humid to breathe.

  She picked a white hand towel out of the wicker basket on the back of her toilet tank and dried her face with it. Looking down at the towel in her hands, she remembered the soft, plush, spa-quality towels in Caitlin Connor’s bathroom and thought how nice they would feel in comparison to this nearly worn-out rag. Maybe she would treat herself to some one of these days when—

  Suddenly, she dropped the towel onto the sink edge and whirled around. She stared up at the heat lamp in the ceiling for a long moment. Then she turned and ran out of the bathroom and into her bedroom.

  She grabbed the phone on her nightstand and dialed Dirk.

  He answered after five rings. “Yeah?”

  “I know how they killed Cait,” she said.

  She had expected him to be at least mildly enthused after hearing her announcement. But she had forgotten she was talking to Dirk.

  ‘Yeah, well, good for you,” he said. “I went by Charlotte Murray’s house, and she was gone. Her neighbor was working in the yard, and he
said he saw Charlotte run into the house for a few minutes, then leave with a couple of suitcases about five minutes before I got there.”

  “That stinks,” she said, “but I know how Connor did it, he—”

  “Connor lawyered up is what he did. I brought him in just now and got all of ten words out of him before he clammed up and called that Marvin Klein dude to represent him. Klein was here in a flash, and I had to let Connor go.”

  “Hmm, sorry to hear that; Klein’s tough, but—”

  “So I’m back at square one. I hate this friggin’ job. Did I ever tell you that?”

  “Yeah, you mention it at least twice a week.” She took a deep breath, determined to keep talking this time no matter what. “Cait called Kevin at the hospital and told him she had made herself sick from working out and starving herself. He recognized the symptoms of heatstroke and sneaked out of the hospital. By the time he got home, she was probably already in bad shape, weak, maybe disoriented and confused—those are symptoms of heatstroke. She might have even been unconscious.” She paused to catch another breath. “Go on,” he said. “I’m with you.”

  “So, all he had to do was drag her into the bathroom—that’s why her arms were up, also her hair, and her clothes bunched up on her body—and turn on the heat lamps. If I remember, there were two or three of them in die ceiling, over by the shower stall.”

  “Yeah, I think there were. And those things can really heat up a place fast.”

  “Tell me about it. You can’t breathe in my bathroom right now.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Anyway, all he had to do was leave her in there with the door closed. Maybe he waited a while outside the room, and when she didn’t come out, he knew he was home free.”

  She could practically hear Dirk’s mental wheels purring on the other end. “And when he got home,” Dirk said, thinking aloud, “he could have just turned off the lights, let the room cool down a little, and called 911.”

  “You got it.”

  “Then how about Kameeka? If he’s so smart, why did he just bash her in the head the old-fashioned way?”

  “Maybe he didn’t have time to think of anything better.”

  “And Tesla Montoya?”

  Tesla. Even the thought caused Savannah’s heart to ache. “We don’t know yet that she’s dead.”

  “She’s been missing for three days,” he said softly.

  “I know,” Savannah replied, a catch in her voice. “Believe me, I’ve been counting.”

  Savannah sat in her Mustang, half a block down from James Oates’s house, watching, waiting, hoping that Nurse Charlotte Murray would make her brother’s house one of her stops now that she was officially on the run.

  Detective McMurtry had been dispatched to Charlotte’s house, should she happen to return, and Dirk was serving a search warrant on Kevin Connor’s beach house. He had sent another detective from the station to serve the one on Murray’s hospital locker. Tammy was posted in front of Tesla’s place, just in case somebody suspicious decided to visit once more. It wouldn’t be the first time a killer returned to the scene of the crime.

  Maybe, between all of their efforts, they could come up with something that would lead them to Tesla. At least, that was the plan.

  As she sat there in her car, the windows rolled down, she breathed in the fresh, sun-warmed summer air and wondered if Tesla was still alive... if she could still breathe, and hear the birds sing, and feel the sun on her face.

  She also found herself wondering what Charlotte Murray would look like, beyond the description that Dirk had given her: about five-two, petite, dark brown hair, blue eyes, swarthy complexion.

  But other than the driver’s license stats, Savannah couldn’t help being confused by the idea of a nurse who took life as well as saved it. Savannah had always had a hard time getting her mind around the idea of a woman committing murder, let alone a professional health-care giver. For Savannah, who thought that the healing arts were the most important calling on earth, it was unthinkable.

  She truly hoped that Charlotte would make an appearance while she had the place under surveillance. More than anything, she really wanted to talk to the woman, to find out who, why, when, and, most importantly, where Tesla was.

  Sitting there, watching the house, she didn’t know what she would say if Murray did show, but she figured she’d think of something when the time came.

  She didn’t have long to wait... or to think of any brilliant strategy. Because she had only been sitting there for twenty minutes—a relatively short time by surveillance standards—when she saw an older Honda pull up in front of the house.

  It approached slowly, as though the driver was being cautious, then came to a stop at the curb across the street. No one got out for what seemed like forever and a day to Savannah. Then, the door opened and a woman answering Dirk’s description exited the vehicle.

  She was carrying a large tote under her arm that appeared to be empty. Small, trim, with short dark hair, wearing surgical greens and a white sweater, she hurried across the street to Oates’s house, unlocked the door, and went inside.

  Savannah sat there a few minutes, allowing her to get involved in whatever she was doing inside the house.

  Then she reached into the back floorboard of her car and rummaged around until she found an empty paper bag that had contained her latest order of Avon.

  Opening her glove box, she pulled out a flashlight, a small package of tissues, and a couple of cassette tapes, and she popped them into the bag.

  Avon sack in hand, she got out of the car and walked the half block to the house.

  After ringing the doorbell, she waited and, as she had expected, no one answered. She could easily imagine the nerve-rattled Charlotte inside, quaking in her nurse’s shoes.

  “Hello?” she called out cheerfully. “Avon. Mrs. Winter-bourne, it’s me, your Avon lady. I have your skin softener and your bath gels.”

  No one answered. She didn’t hear a sound from inside the house. But she could instinctively feel the other woman just on the opposite side of the door.

  “Come on, Mrs. Winterbourne. I know you’re home. You’re always home at this time of day.” She rang the bell several more times in rapid succession and pounded with the brass door knocker. “You might as well answer, because I’m not going away until you answer this door.”

  Finally, the door opened just a crack. She could see that the woman inside had put on the chain. One eye peeped out at her, wide and frightened.

  “Go away,” she said. “You’ve got the wrong house. My brother lives here, not somebody named Winterbourne.”

  Savannah smiled and glanced down at the bag in her hand. “Then maybe this is his order.” She looked inside the sack. “Yes, now that I take another look, it’s some men’s shaving lotion and cologne. Is your brother named Jim?”

  ‘Yes, but he isn’t here right now, and you should leave,” she said, starting to shut the door.

  Quickly, Savannah shoved her foot in the crack, preventing her from closing it all the way. “You have to talk to me, Charlotte,” she said. “I can save your life, but not if you don’t talk to me... right now.”

  The eye that was peeping through the opening widened, then filled with tears. “Who are you really?” she said.

  “My name is Savannah Reid,” she told her.

  “And you don’t sell Avon.”

  “No, I don’t. I’m sorry I lied to you, but I had to get you to open the door for me.”

  “Are you a police officer?”

  “No. I’m a private detective. I’m not here to arrest you. I’m here to help you.” Savannah’s eyes pleaded with the nurse’s. And her voice was as soft as peach skin when she added, “Charlotte, if you’ve ever believed anybody and trusted anyone in your life, girl, you’d better trust me now and open up this door.”

  “But I can’t.” Charlotte began to sob. “I can’t talk to anybody. I have problems. Terrible problems.”

  �
��I know what you mean. So do I. We’re both just a couple of women in an awful situation. Let me inside, and we’ll talk. We can help each other. I promise you.” Savannah waited, not daring to breathe as the tortured woman weighed her options.

  “I don’t think anybody can help me now,” Charlotte said. “I think it’s all gone too far. It’s over. There’s no way that this can have a happy ending.”

  “You’re right about that,” Savannah said. “But maybe if we put our heads together, we can think of something we can do to keep it from getting any worse than it already is. Charlotte, let me inside. Let’s talk.”

  “Move your foot,” she said at long last.

  Savannah was afraid that if she moved her foot, she would get the door slammed in her face. But she couldn’t stand there like that all day. So she did as she had been asked.

  The door closed.

  But then she heard the chain jangling on the other side. And it opened.

  Nurse Charlotte Murray was standing there, tears streaming down her face. “Come on in,” she said. “I don’t think I really deserve anybody’s help at this point. But if you’re willing to give it, I’ll take any I can get.”

  “Smart lady,” Savannah said, hurrying inside. “Let’s make a pot of coffee, if Jim’s got some, and we’ll have us a good, long, heart-to-heart. Believe me, I just became your new best friend.”

  Chapter

  23

  “I never thought I’d wind up in a situation like this,” Charlotte said as she cupped her hands around the coffee mug as though drawing strength from its warmth. “I just fell in love with a married man and then... got stupid.”

  Savannah thought of Marietta. At that very minute she was hurrying back to Georgia to be with a man who was considering leaving his wife and kids to be with her... again.

  “Yeah, there seems to be a lot of that ‘stupid’ stuff going around these days. Maybe it’s an airborne virus.”