A Body To Die For

by G. A. McKevett

  Tanner gulped. “Okay. Maybe I was.”

  “No maybe to it. You were there,” Dirk said. “And you’d better tell us all about it, because right now we’re wondering what you had to do with Bill Jardin being murdered.”

  “Me? I didn’t do anything!”

  “Then you’d better start telling us all the stuff that you supposedly didn’t do. Fast.”

  Tanner turned to Savannah with a “rescue me” look in his eyes.

  “It’s okay,” she told him. “Just tell us what you did and what you saw when you were there.”

  The boy took a deep breath and plunged in. “I took a cab there. It dropped me off there on the main road, and I walked down to the house. I just wanted to see what it was like. To see where he lived, you know?”

  “Bill Jardin?” she asked.

  “Yeah. If he was going to be my new dad, I wanted to see what his place was like. Also, I was kind of worried, because my mom and me had been waiting for him to call and he hadn’t.”

  “You guys were all supposed to be heading off to Las Vegas together, right?” Savannah said.

  “Yeah. He’d promised that he’d leave Clarissa lots of times, but this time we thought he really meant it. My mom told him that he’d better go through with it and not back out, like he had before. She told him she’d give him twenty-four hours to tell his wife about us, and if he didn’t, she would. And she really meant it, so I thought that time he’d finally do the right thing.”

  “It sounds to me,” Dirk said, “like you were going out there for more reasons than just to check out the estate. Sounds like maybe you were curious to see why Bill hadn’t called you and your mom. Maybe you wanted to make sure he was going to do the right thing by your mother this time.”

  When Tanner didn’t reply, just stared down at his hands that were lying on his thighs, Savannah had a sinking feeling.

  For all practical purposes, this kid had no father. If he had liked Bill Jardin, he’d have been looking forward to having a dad, being a traditional family of three. It also occurred to her that, if Bill changed his mind again that night, Rachel Morris wouldn’t have been the only one feeling rejected.

  “What happened when you got there, to Rancho Rodriguez,” Savannah asked him. “Tell us everything.”

  “I walked up the road, and through that gate, the one with the bell over it.”

  “How did you get through the first gate?” Dirk asked. “The big one there by the main road?”

  “I climbed over it.”

  “It helps to be young,” Savannah muttered to Dirk when he looked skeptical. Then, to Tanner, she said, “Go on. You went through the bell gate and…?”

  “They’ve got a big yard inside the wall there,” he said, “with lots of trees and plants and junk.”

  “Yes, I know. We’ve been there,” Savannah said. “Go ahead.”

  “It was dark and the lights were on inside the house. And…well…okay…I sneaked up to one of the windows and peeked in.”

  “All right. No big deal. We’re not worried about you doing that,” Savannah told him. “What did you see?”

  “I saw their living room. And Clarissa and Bill were yelling at each other, and Clarissa was crying.”

  “Could you hear what they were saying?” Dirk asked.

  “Sure. Especially her, ’cause she was the loudest. Bill must have told her about my mom and how she’d given him twenty-four hours to tell her about us, because Clarissa yelled, ‘You never would have told me if she hadn’t made you. You…’ Well, she called him a really bad name and slapped him.”

  “She slapped him?” Dirk said.

  “Really hard, a couple of times. He just stood there and took it. I guess he figured he deserved it.”

  “What else?” Savannah asked.

  Again, Tanner’s eyes welled up with tears. “I don’t want to get my mom in trouble.”

  “She’s not in trouble,” Dirk told him. “What else?”

  “Clarissa asked Bill if he’d known all along that the person they were paying money to was my mom. He said, ‘No,’ but she didn’t believe him. She said he and my mom had been a team from the very beginning, ripping her off, blackmailing her. She accused him of sleeping with my mom for years.”

  Softly, Savannah asked him, “And how long has it been, Tanner? Did Bill know all along that your mom was threatening Clarissa and taking money from her?”

  “No. Not at first. But then one night, my mom sent me up to take the bag of money out of the garbage can in a park, and Bill saw me. A few months later, Clarissa sent him to New York to tell my mom that they knew it was her writing the letters and to knock it off. That’s when he and my mom started, you know. That’s when they fell in love.”

  “So,” Dirk said, “you saw Clarissa slap Bill and you heard them arguing, and what else?”

  “She was all mad about some big amount of money that she’d given him. She said he gave it to my mom, that they were in on it together. She acted like my mom had demanded an extra big amount of money, even more than usual, and that Clarissa had given it to Bill to give to her. And since Clarissa found out that they were…you know…in love, she wanted her money back. She even threatened to kill him.”

  “She did?” Savannah felt her heart take an extra beat. “What did she say, her exact words?”

  “She said, ‘I should kill you for this, Bill. You screw my sister and the two of you rip me off for a small fortune. I really should kill you.’ Then he…”

  The boy’s voice broke, and he started to sob hard, his shoulders heaving.

  Savannah reached over and put her hand on his knee. “It’s okay, Tanner. You’re doing really good. You’re okay. What happened then?”

  “He told her that he didn’t really love my mom, that she didn’t mean anything to him. He said he’d just been stringing her along because he really needed the money. She said, ‘For what? Your damned gambling debts?’ and he said, ‘Yes. They’re going to kill me, Clarissa. I owe a lot of money to guys who really hurt you if you don’t pay them in time.’”

  He blew his nose loudly into the tissues, then continued, “Clarissa told him, ‘Then you should have found some way to get it other than through my sister.’ And then he apologized. He apologized and told her again that my mother had never meant anything to him.”

  Savannah’s heart broke for the kid. She didn’t need Rebecca’s master’s degree in psychology to know that Tanner felt that rejection as keenly, or even more so, than his mother may have.

  Savannah’s own father had abandoned his family over and over again. So she was no stranger to the kind of pain the teenager was feeling.

  She also knew the depth of anger that pain engendered.

  “What happened then?” she asked him, afraid of where this might be leading.

  Tanner wiped his eyes. “Clarissa told him that he had to call my mom and tell her that he was never going to see her again. To tell her that she wanted that last payment back and there wasn’t going to be any more money. He had to tell her to stay the hell away from them. She told him to do it right then.”

  “Did he?” Dirk asked.

  “Yeah. She handed him a phone, and he did it. I heard him tell my mom it was all over, that it had all been a big mistake and that they couldn’t see each other again, and that they’d have to give Clarissa back that last payment.”

  “And what happened after he talked to your mom?”

  “I don’t know. That’s when I left.”

  “How did you leave?” Dirk asked. “You didn’t have a car or a cab.”

  “I walked.”

  “You walked all the way back to town?”

  Tanner nodded. “Yeah, it took me most of the night, but I did.” He lifted up his foot and slipped off his sandal. On his heel was a large, ugly blister. “I’ve got another one like it on this one,” he said, holding up the other one. “But it felt good to walk. I needed to think, you know, about stuff.”

  Savannah, Dirk, and Rebec
ca looked at each other as they digested all they’d just heard. Tanner put his sandal back on, blew his nose once more, and then tossed the tissue into a wastepaper can next to Rebecca’s desk.

  “You did the right thing, Tanner,” Savannah said, “telling us this. We appreciate it.”

  “Okay. What’s next?” the boy wanted to know.

  “We’ll take it from here.” Savannah sat back in her chair and took her first deep breath in ten minutes. “Your mom is going to be here in a few hours, so you just hang here with Ms. Shipton until—”

  “What? No, I don’t want to see my mom. If I haven’t done anything illegal, can’t I just go?”

  “No, you can’t,” Dirk told him. “You’re a minor, and you’ve been missing for days. Your mom wants you back, and we have to return you to her.”

  “Why don’t you want to see your mom, Tanner?” Savannah asked. “Why didn’t you go back to the motel that night? Why did you run?”

  A look of deep hurt, mixed with intense anger, swept over the kid’s face, and Savannah didn’t think it was solely because of Bill Jardin’s abandonment.

  “I just don’t want to see her, and that’s all I’m going to say about that,” he told her. “I’m done talking now.”

  And the way he crossed his arms over his chest and the jut of his chin assured Savannah that he meant what he said. She’d seen that look of male determination on her brothers’ faces, not to mention Dirk’s many times before.

  He was done talking.

  And they had gotten everything out of Tanner Morris they were going to get. At least for now.

  “That was certainly enlightening,” Savannah said to Dirk as they walked out of juvenile hall.

  “You think so? Then enlighten me,” Dirk replied. “I’m more confused than ever. Who the hell shot Jardin? His wife, who said she ought to kill him?”

  “And by the way, I agree with her on that one.”

  “Me, too. Or the girlfriend, who had high hopes of taking over her sister’s husband and at least half of her lifestyle and got those hopes dashed by a phone call?”

  “That phone call must have been pretty hard to hear. As a hot-blooded woman myself, I think I might’ve snapped if I’d gotten a call like that, under those circumstances.”

  “You figure both Clarissa and Rachel had good reasons to kill him?”

  “There’s never a truly good reason to commit murder, but that said—”

  “And here, ladies and gentlemen, is her real opinion…”

  “If a husband of mine did what that peckerhead did, I’d have shot him between the eyes, removed the parts of his anatomy that I found most offensive, buried his body and miscellaneous parts in the backyard, and planted a potato patch on top of him. And every time I had a big ol’ baked potato with my bloody, rare steak, I’d think of him and grin real big.”

  Dirk shot her a look of alarm. “Damn girl, remind me never to piss you off.”

  “Just don’t ever marry me, promise to be faithful, and then fool around with somebody else.”

  He gave her a playful grin and said, “I’ll certainly file that away for future consideration.”

  As they reached the Buick, he said, “Do you think we should have another talk with Clarissa? Maybe lay some of this newfound knowledge on her and see how she reacts?”

  “Okay. But I want to be back here in two hours when Rachel arrives to pick up Tanner.”

  “Yeah? Why?”

  “Because it’s bothering me a lot, the fact that he doesn’t want to see his mom. I want to know why.”

  “That bugs me, too.”

  Dirk’s cell phone began to jangle. Irritated, he dug it out of his jacket pocket, flipped it open, and said, “Yeah?” He listened a moment, then said, “Actually, I was on my way somewhere.” He glanced over at Savannah. “Can I send Savannah instead? Okay. Bye.”

  “Send me? Can you send me? Like send me to get the office coffee and doughnuts? Send me to get your laundry or buy your mistress a black lace teddy? Who do you think you are?”

  He looked totally confused. “What? I don’t have a mistress.”

  She sighed and rolled her eyes.

  “Besides,” he said, “it was that Caitlin chick at the lab. She’s got something she wants us to see.”

  “Well, hell’s bells, boy. Why didn’t you say so? Get me home so I can pick up my car and hightail it over there. Shake a leg. Time’s a ’wastin.’”

  At the lab, Savannah didn’t have to hunt for Caitlin or finagle a way into the Vehicle Examination Bay. Caitlin was waiting for her outside the garage door when she arrived.

  Or at least, she thought Caitlin was waiting for her. But as it turned out, the lab tech had simply sneaked outside to have a smoke.

  “I’m going to quit one of these days,” she said, stubbing the cigarette out on the ground as Savannah walked up to her.

  “At least you’ve got Southern California weather to smoke by,” Savannah told her. “Folks in Montana and North Dakota must have it rough when they have to go outside to grab a drag on a cold winter’s day.”

  “I can imagine. That’d be enough to make you quit.”

  Savannah grinned and together they said, “Naw.”

  “Whatcha got for me?” Savannah said, following Caitlin back into the garage.

  “It may be nothing, but I had a feeling I should point it out to you, just in case.”

  As they walked over to the Jaguar, which by now was practically covered with dark fingerprint dust, Savannah said “I heard you found a print inside the car’s manual. On the page that tells how to disable the GPS.”

  “Yes, and I did my best to get a clean lift. But there was just the one, and it was really smeared. No way to get any sort of comparison from it.”

  She took Savannah over to a brightly lit workbench that was covered with white paper. Quite a lot of items were spread across it: an empty suitcase, numerous changes of men’s clothes and toiletries, a tennis racket bag, some expensive tennis shoes, a towel and a plastic container of balls, and a Yankees baseball cap.

  Caitlin handed Savannah a pair of gloves, and donned some herself. Then she picked up the cap. “The rest of this stuff is pretty mundane,” she said, “but this is what I wanted to show you.”

  She held it out to Savannah. “I just assumed,” she said, “that it was Bill Jardin’s cap, since it was his car, thrown in there with his athletic gear. But then I happened to look inside it, and…”

  Pointing inside the cap, she said, “There were three short red hairs. Two of them were on the outside of the band and one underneath the band.”

  Savannah felt her adrenaline rising. “Oh, really?”

  “Yes. Do any of your suspects have short, red hair?”

  Savannah nodded. “Yes, I’m sorry to say they do.”

  “They?”

  “Two of them.”

  She thought of Rachel’s short, straight crop and Tanner’s curly mop and she felt sick to her stomach. For the kid’s sake, she didn’t want to go down that mental road with either destination.

  “I’ve got one of them over here under the microscope. Want to see?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  Caitlin led her to the other end of the bench, where a microscope was set up with the hair in position.

  Savannah looked through the lens and saw what could have been considered neither straight nor curly. Just a short hair with maybe a slight wave to it. It had a root attached to one end and the other end was bluntly cut, not worn to a point.

  There was something else about it, too.

  “I’m not too up on hair analysis and all that,” Savannah said, “but has this hair been dyed?”

  “Yes, I’d say so,” Caitlin agreed. “It appears to have a sort of coating on it and the hair cuticles are lifted, like they are when they’re color processed.”

  Savannah felt a tiny bit of relief. She couldn’t imagine Tanner Morris dying his hair. Some teenagers might have colored their hair black, green, pink, or
blue. But probably not copper penny red.

  Middle-aged women, on the other hand…

  She walked back to the bench and picked up the cap again. Looking closely at the inside, she saw a faint, reddish tint on the white inner band. “I dyed my hair red once,” she told Caitlin, “a long, long time ago. And for a few days afterward, the red kept wearing off on everything. I got it on my pillow, on one of my favorite white nightgowns. This sort of a reddish-orange stain. Just like this.” She pointed to the band.

  Caitlin looked at it and nodded. “That’s what it looks like to me, too. We can have it analyzed to be sure.”

  “If you would, please.”

  “It’ll be a few days though, before we get the results. They’re backed up a bit there in the lab.”

  “That’s okay,” Savannah said, her face grim as she thought about racing back to the juvenile hall. She was going to be there when Rachel Morris came to pick up her son. No doubt about it now.

  “You get the results as soon as you can,” she said. “And maybe by then, we’ll have this case closed.”

  Chapter 22

  As Savannah was leaving the lab, she called Dirk and told him about the baseball cap, the hairs, and the dye stain. He found it as interesting as she did and said he’d meet her at the juvenile facility.

  Once they had both arrived, they decided to sit in the parking lot and nab Rachel Morris before she even went in. Savannah insisted that they wait in her Mustang, claiming that she had spent as much time in his landfill of a vehicle as she could stand for one week.

  “Did you get a chance to talk to Clarissa?” she asked, once they had settled in and were munching on some candy bars and sipping sodas.

  “Yeah, I was there when you called and told me about the lab.”

  “How’d that go?”

  “Once I leaned on her, she pretty much confirmed everything the Morris kid told us. Bill did confess to her that night, told her about the affair, the blackmail, and Rachel’s twenty-four-hour ultimatum. She said he called Rachel in front of her and told her it was over. She also told me that she had just paid him a ‘shitload’ of money right before he told her about him and Rachel. But when she insisted that he give it back, he said it had already been given to the bookies he owed.”