A Body To Die For

by G. A. McKevett

  Tammy nodded, her eyes wide. “It’s the bottom half. And she’s facedown…at the moment.”

  “At the moment? Oh, Lord. I have neighbors and low fences. What is she thinking?”

  Chapter 16

  Savannah got up from the couch and hurried to the back door. When she flung it open, she saw her sister, the picture of contentment, lying on her back, soaking in the rays. She could have been posing for a Southern California Tourism poster. Except that she was topless.

  “Marietta! What is the matter with you, girl!”

  She bounded down the porch and over to the chaise, where Marietta was stirring from her nap.

  “What? What’s the matter?”

  “You know blamed well what’s the matter.” Savannah grabbed a towel off a nearby chaise and tossed it over her. “Are you trying to get yourself arrested?”

  “It’s not illegal. I know. I called the police station and asked them.”

  “You what?”

  Marietta looked smug as she grinned up at her older sister. “I called them ten minutes ago and asked them if it was legal to sunbathe topless in the privacy of your own backyard.”

  “You didn’t!”

  “I sure as shootin’ did. And the guy that answered, he beat around the bush awhile and then he said it ain’t exactly illegal, as long as nobody can see. And then, just to be sure, he asked me where I lived…well, where you live actually…because he said that if somebody called to complain, he’d tell them that he’d already given me the okay on it.”

  “And you believed that? Holy crap, Marietta. You don’t have the sense God gave a rock. I’m gonna have a dozen of San Carmelita’s finest over here on my property, any minute now, checking you out. You nitwitted numbskull. Put your top back on.”

  Pouting, Marietta reached for the string bikini top that was lying by her feet and slipped it on. “I have to tell you, Savannah, you haven’t been a particularly gracious hostess since I got here. I came here to relax and get away from it all and—”

  “Hooey. You came here to get away from Vidalia. She just called me, bawling like a cat stuck in a briar patch. What’s this about you screwing Butch?”

  “I didn’t touch Butch. I ain’t that hard up and never will be.”

  “Then how come Vi thinks you did? She says Butch confessed to it.”

  “Well, sure he did. She was goin’ at him with kitchen utensils. You’ve seen the way she gets. He would’ve confessed to being Jack the Ripper to get her off him.”

  Savannah sank onto a nearby chaise. “Well, something must of set her off. What was it?”

  “He patted me on my butt. That’s all it was. One teeny little butt pat, which, by the way, was an accident, and Vidalia’s all in an uproar about it.”

  “How does a guy accidentally pat a butt?”

  “He thought it was Vidalia’s butt.”

  “He mistook your hind end for Vidalia’s?”

  “That’s what he claims, and I believe him. He was sitting on the floor, hooking up their new DVD player, and I walked by wearing the same kind of jeans that Vidalia wears. He reached up and gave my fanny a pat, thinking it was hers. Vi saw it, and all hell broke loose. She’s been on the warpath ever since.”

  “So, you two were never actually…intimate?”

  “Shoot, no. What do you think I am? Butch is an idiot. He’s way too skinny and has bad skin and black grease under his fingernails. I wouldn’t have him on a hot dog bun with mustard.”

  “Plus he’s married to your sister, your pregnant sister. And the father of her twins. Both sets of twins.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. That, too.”

  Savannah stood and said, “I’m going to go in now and take a long-overdue, much-needed bubble bath. You, Miss Exhibitionist, keep your clothes on. All of them. And stay out of trouble till I get out. I’ll take you over to the beach later…where you also have to wear all of your clothes. This is Southern California, not Las Vegas.”

  She was heading up the walk to her back door when she saw a young cop looking sharp in his crisp patrolman’s uniform, coming around the side of the house. He had a goofy grin on his face. She recognized him as a rookie she had met at the last SCPD barbecue that Dirk had dragged her to.

  “Get the hell outta here, Gilmore!” she yelled at him. “There’s nothing to see here. Nothing at all! Go!”

  He disappeared so quickly that she couldn’t help but snicker.

  She went on into the house and nearly ran headlong into Dirk, who was standing in her kitchen.

  “You’re welcome to the coffee and cinnamon buns,” she said, “but if you get between me and that bathtub, you’re gonna get hurt.”

  She brushed on by him, nabbing a second roll off the plate as she went.

  “You’re going to eat food in the bathroom?” Dirk called after her. “Gross.”

  “What makes you think this roll is going to live long enough for me to get to the bathroom?”

  Upstairs, she licked the frosting off her fingers before opening the bathroom door and considered Dirk’s words.

  Maybe food in the bathroom was disgusting, but in her opinion, you hadn’t lived until you had soaked in a bubble bath by candlelight, while sipping brandy and eating Godiva dark chocolate truffles.

  But she just couldn’t picture Dirk doing that. If he were going to eat in the john, he’d be more of a bologna sandwich and potato chips in the shower kind of guy. And she could understand his reluctance to go there; that would be gross.

  “Are you sure she’s going to be there?” Savannah asked Dirk as they headed for the little desert town of Yucca Mountain. It was over a three-hour drive, even with Dirk’s heavy foot, and Savannah wasn’t sure if she was happy or not to be making such a long drive for one simple interview.

  “Yeah, I called her and told her we were coming. She said she’d be home.”

  “And you took her word for it?”

  “No, I asked the sheriff there to park down the block from her house and watch it.”

  “He was willing to do that?”

  “Yeah. What else is there to do in Yucca Mountain? It’s not like they’re gonna suffer some crime wave there this afternoon to occupy his time.”

  “True. But somebody might run the one red light.”

  He reached for a plastic bag on the dash and shook out a cinnamon stick. As he stuck it into his mouth, Savannah resisted the urge to snicker. The guy was trying. He hadn’t smoked in months, and she had to give him major credit for holding out this long. She was sure it was the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life, and she wasn’t going to make fun of him, even if he did look a bit weird with a cinnamon stick poking out of his face.

  Someday she might go on some sort of diet and she would need his support, so…

  Yeah, like that’s gonna happen, she thought. Been there, done that. Suffered and gained it back.

  No, life was too short to deny yourself the basic pleasures of life. Like food.

  Once traffic had thinned, and they were headed into the Mojave Desert, Savannah leaned back in her seat and gazed out the window at the strange, otherworldly landscape.

  The cracked dirt crust was dotted with soft, colorful desert flowers, marigolds, poppies, primrose and larkspur, that grew alongside prickly pear and beavertail cacti, and the ever-present yucca.

  Occasional trees, like the pinyon pine and the beautiful Joshua tree, provided a bit of shade here and there for any snakes, lizards, jackrabbits or wood rats who needed a break from the midday sun.

  “Tammy was sure pleased with herself over that photo thing,” Dirk said, interrupting her communion with nature.

  “She was moderately proud of her accomplishment.”

  “Are you kidding? You’d think she’d discovered fire or invented the wheel. I think I’m going to have that photo blown up into a poster and framed. I’ll give it to her for Christmas.”

  “The scary thing is, she’d probably like it. She’d cry and jump up and down and say, ‘Thank you,
oh, thank you, Dirk-o,’ and hug and kiss you.”

  “Yeah, it’s a lousy idea. Forget I mentioned it.” He took a long drag on the cinnamon stick. “What did Ryan and John have to say about the case when you talked to them about it last night?”

  “I don’t remember a lot of it,” she admitted. “John asked me about the car’s GPS tracking system. I told him it had been disabled. That’s what Caitlin said, right?”

  “Yeah. We can probably still track the car’s movements, but it’s going to take a while to get the records from the company.”

  “They thought the poultry droppings and feather were interesting. They asked about Bill’s cell phone, whether you’d found it, any calls of interest.”

  “No, we haven’t found that. It wasn’t in the car.”

  “At his house, maybe?”

  “No, I called Clarissa, and she said she’s sure it’s not there, that he always had it with him. It wasn’t on the body. But we already got the record from his carrier. Most of the calls are pretty run-of-the-mill. Calls to the car dealership where he bought the Jaguar, calls home, some to the country club, to some of Clarissa’s business people.”

  “Pretty standard stuff.”

  “Yeah, but there was one that was interesting. It was a cell phone number, and when we traced it, we got an old lady who said her phone was missing. She was upset because her son gave it to her, and it was one of those fancy Sendai phones that does everything but feed you. It cost him a pretty penny.”

  “Did she have any idea where she’d lost it?”

  “No. And we ran down the short list of people she’d been in contact with, and nobody jumped out as somebody who’d steal it from her.”

  “Give me the number, and I’ll tell Tammy to see if she can hack into its records. Doesn’t always work, but it’s worth a try.”

  He rattled off the number to her, and it just happened to end with the digits “666.”

  “That’s a creepy one,” she said as she wrote it down in her notebook. “Gran would be weirded out if the phone company tried to assign her a demon number like that. She wouldn’t stand for it.”

  “I’m sure she wouldn’t. Gran takes all that stuff pretty seriously. I’ve been calling this number every few hours, just to see if maybe somebody will pick up. You never know.”

  “Can’t hurt.”

  “So, uh, what else did Ryan and John have to say?”

  Savannah grinned to herself. For someone who had taken a long time to get to know Ryan and John, Dirk had learned to respect their input about any investigation.

  Time and experience had bred respect, and Savannah was happy about that. She liked it when her friends all got along. It made Halloween parties, Easter egg—dying “eggs-travaganzas,” and Christmas caroling a lot easier.

  She stuck her notebook and pen back into her purse. “Ryan asked about the owner’s manual,” she said. “He pointed out that most people keep those in the glove compartment.”

  “Yeah, I’d already thought about that. Ramon told me they found it under the driver’s seat.”

  “Unbloodied?”

  “Clean as a whistle. It was out of its leather folder.”

  “Bill, or somebody, was looking at it. Maybe finding out how to disable the GPS?”

  “That’s what I figured. I had Caitlin dust the whole book. The only page that had a print on it was the page about the guidance system. It mentioned how to turn it off.”

  “Whose was it?”

  “It was too smeared to tell.”

  “Dangnation. But if it was clean, it couldn’t have been the object that blocked the blood spatter in the glove compartment. I’d think that means it had already been removed before the shooting.”

  “It was probably Jardin who took it out and disabled the GPS. I guess he didn’t want anybody to know where he was going. And he had to read the manual because he wasn’t used to the new car yet.”

  “Would you want people to know where you were every minute if you had one wife, two girlfriends, and a guy like Pinky after you?”

  “Good point.”

  “How was Pinky, by the way? What’s he like?”

  “He’s a hardcore dirtbag. And I found out why he was named Pinky.”

  “Large diamond ring on his little finger?”

  “No, this was in jail, remember? He has an enormous pink birthmark across his forehead.”

  “No way! Good grief, can you imagine the insensitivity of parents who would saddle an innocent baby child with a name like that? Reminds me of the woman in McGill who married a guy named Harold Duck. She had this little boy, and she named him—”

  “No, don’t tell me. She didn’t.”

  “She did. She said she’d always wanted a son named Donald. Can you imagine what recess was like for that poor kid? Or boot camp? He became a marine later.”

  “Don’t tell me any more. I can’t stand it.”

  “Then tell me about Pinky.”

  “He admitted that maybe Jardin owed him money. But he swore he had nothing to do with the murder.”

  “Does he have an alibi?”

  “Says he was in bed with some gal, who vouched for him. I talked to her this morning. I think she’s scared of him, so I don’t know whether I believe her or not.”

  “So is Sharona. She was shaking like she was standing naked in a snowstorm when I was interviewing her. I felt sorry for her. I called her before we left the house. She sounded better, but we need to get this case closed so that she can go back home.”

  “Pinky’s in jail now. What’s she worried about?”

  “His crew.”

  Dirk nodded. “Can’t say that I blame her. His boys are very bad characters. If they’ve got some reason to hurt her, she’d better worry.”

  Savannah thought that over as they continued on toward Yucca Mountain, the tiny town in the middle of nowhere. She considered how it would feel to be deeply, terribly afraid, to have a gang of “very bad characters” after you who were perfectly willing to kill you because you knew too much about them and what they’d done.

  She thought of Sharona and how vulnerable and injured she seemed, sitting in the Mustang, trembling and crying about her lost love and lost dreams.

  “I think I’ll call Sharona again,” she said, “before we get to Rachel’s. Just to touch base. See how she is.”

  “You’re a good person, Van,” Dirk told her, giving her a pat on the knee.

  “Naw, I’m just a bossy big sister. If you don’t believe me, ask Marietta or Vidalia.”

  He shook his head. “That’ll be the day, when I ask those two bimbos for their opinion on anything, let alone on you.”

  They passed a sign that read YUCCA MOUNTAIN—15 MILES.

  Savannah took her cell phone out of her purse and punched in some numbers. “Hello, Sugar, it’s Savannah again. How’s it going? Anything new? No? Yes, I know it’s boring just sitting around there, twiddling your thumbs. Hey, I’ve got an idea. That television there has a good cable service. Order yourself a couple of movies.”

  She glanced over at Dirk and added, “Yeah, sure. Detective Coulter says he’ll pay for them. It’ll be his pleasure….”

  Chapter 17

  The first thing Savannah noticed when they pulled into Rachel Morris’s driveway was how tiny the house was. “Cracker box” was the term she had heard down South, used to describe a home that was barely large enough for one person, let alone a woman and her teenaged son.

  The lots on the street were all narrow, too, with the houses jammed together. As Granny Reid would have said, “Them places was so close together, if you’d stuck your dust mop out the window to shake it, it would’ve been in your neighbor’s front room.”

  A sagging chain-link fence surrounded the property and a BEWARE OF DOG sign was posted on the gate. A dilapidated doghouse of Great Dane proportions indicated that a very large canine had once called this yard home. And a strip of the lawn next to the fence was worn bare. Apparently, the dog had taken his
job seriously and patrolled regularly.

  “You think she’s got a dog?” Dirk said, looking at the sign with a sick expression on his face.

  He hadn’t been the same since that Doberman had taken a bite out of his rump a few years back. Ever since then, he had sworn off dogs and proclaimed himself a cat lover, whether it was the manly man thing or not.

  “I don’t think so,” Savannah said. “There aren’t any food or water dishes by that doghouse, and the big chain tied to the tree is rusty.”

  She reached over and slapped him on the back. “Don’t worry, buddy. If it’s a mean, ol’ Dobie, I’ll give him a serious talkin’-to, and you’ll be okay.”

  “Shut up.”

  They got out of the car and ventured through the gate. The door opened as they walked up the cracked and buckled sidewalk, and the woman standing in the doorway was the one they had seen earlier through Clarissa’s window.

  Dressed in a black tunic and black slacks, her red hair cropped short, her figure full, Rachel Morris looked quite different from her sister in all ways, except one. She wore the same angry, defensive expression on her face.

  She also looked deeply worried and grief-stricken…maybe even more than the widow herself.

  “I’m Detective Sergeant Dirk Coulter,” Dirk said as he walked up to her and put out his hand. “And this is Savannah Reid. She’s also investigating this case.”

  “And you know who I am,” Rachel replied with a distinctively nasal twang to her voice that identified her as being from one of the five boroughs of New York City. Rachel opened the door wider and waved them inside. “I guess you might as well come in.”

  “Thank you,” Dirk said, not sounding particularly thankful for the less-than-warm invitation.

  When Savannah entered the miniscule living room, it took a while for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. Dark sheets were hung over the windows in lieu of curtains. Cardboard boxes lined two walls, stacked five feet high.

  The only furniture was a shabby sofa that looked like an angry kitty had used it for a scratching post for a very long time.

  But the other thing she noticed, far more telling than the boxes and lack of furnishings, was the pile of books. One entire wall was lined with cheap shelves made of cement blocks and crude wooden planks. And on those boards were piled books, books, and more books.