Killer Reunion

by G. A. McKevett

  Books by G.A. McKevett

  Just Desserts

  Bitter Sweets

  Killer Calories

  Cooked Goose

  Sugar and Spite

  Sour Grapes

  Peaches and Screams

  Death By Chocolate

  Cereal Killer

  Murder a’ la Mode

  Corpse Suzette

  Fat Free and Fatal

  Poisoned Tarts

  A Body to Die For

  Wicked Craving

  A Decadent Way to Die

  Buried in Buttercream

  Killer Honeymoon

  Killer Physique

  Killer Gourmet

  Killer Reunion

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  G.A. MCKEVETT

  Killer REUNION

  A SAVANNAH REID MYSTERY

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Copyright Page

  This book is dedicated to librarians everywhere, who daily instill and nurture the love of reading in others. Bless you.

  A special thank-you to Leslie Connell for her many years of service to Moonlight Magnolia Enterprises. Her work, her loyalty, and her friendship are greatly appreciated. What a lovely lady.

  I also wish to thank all the fans who write to me, sharing their thoughts and offering endless encouragement. Your stories touch my heart, and I enjoy your letters more than you know. I can be reached at:

  sonja@sonjamassie.com

  and

  facebook.com/gwendolynnarden.mckevett

  Chapter 1

  Staring across the table at her dearly beloved, relatively new husband, Savannah Reid wondered if any man in the history of the world had been bludgeoned to death at the kitchen breakfast table because he read his newspaper too loudly.

  If not, Dirk was in danger of becoming the first.

  Would they list him in The Guinness Book of World Records?

  Would Madame Tussaud build a special display in the Chamber of Horrors at her wax museum, dedicated to the unfortunate victim and his dastardly wife?

  Savannah could just envision it now: the wax version of Dirk slumped forward onto the table, his face buried in his oversized bowl of cornflakes, the San Carmelita Star spread in front of him, taking up far more than his reasonable half of the table. Standing slightly behind and looming over him would be the figure of Savannah herself—her flannel Minnie Mouse pajamas spattered with blood, a broken coffee mug in her hand—wearing the maniacal grin of a woman who had finally, utterly, irrevocably snapped.

  “Whatcha thinkin’ about?”

  “What?” Jerked from her morbid and far too pleasant reverie, Savannah realized that he was speaking to her.

  “I asked you what you were thinking about just now.” He reached down, grabbed the right lower corner of the newspaper page, and with the amount of energy commonly expended to hurl a discus seventy meters or more, he heaved it to the left. The deafening racket, created by what should have been such a simple movement, set Savannah’s teeth on edge and caused her to grip her Beauty and the Beast mug so tightly that the Beast grimaced. She braced herself for what would inevitably come next.

  No sooner had the leaf settled into place than Stage Two of Page Turning commenced—the dreaded Smoothing of the Paper.

  The love of her life and current source of great torment began to slap the recently turned sheet with his open palm. Moving from corner to corner in a clockwise motion, he pounded each area repeatedly and thoroughly. That accomplished, he attacked the center of the page, smacking, smoothing, and flattening with all the vim and vigor of an arachnophobe who feared his morning paper was infested with a horde of black widow spiders.

  “So, what were you thinking about?” he asked again, leaving the paper for a moment and assaulting his cereal.

  “Why do you ask?” She watched him raise an impossibly large spoonful of flakes to his mouth and shovel it in.

  He gave her a sweet, loving smile, enhanced by the flakes dangling from his lower lip and the milk oozing from the right corner of his mouth. “I was just wondering, because you look so happy, so contented.”

  She shrugged and batted her eyelashes in her most demure Southern belle fashion. “Why, just a little daydream,” she drawled.

  “About?”

  “Madame Tussaud.”

  He looked puzzled for a moment, then dropped his spoon into his bowl. The clang of metal hitting metal sounded like Quasimodo and the bells of Notre Dame announcing the top of the hour. But it was a necessary evil. After he had broken two of her favorite china bowls, Savannah had restricted him to using an indestructible graniteware bowl—the dark blue, white-speckled kind that cowboys used around their campfires. Or so she’d assured him. She had given the bowl to him for his birthday and had told him it was a vintage collectible that had actually been used on the set of Bonanza.

  Yes, she was learning that successful matrimony required a certain degree of ingenuity, bolstered by an occasional whopper of a soul-blackening lie.

  “Madame Tooth-So?” He quirked one eyebrow as he searched his memory banks for the reference, then nodded knowingly. “Oh, yeah. I remember her. She was that gal we busted who was running the cathouse on Lester Street. The mayor was playin’ footsie with a couple of her gals when we rousted the place.”

  Savannah laughed, wax museum horrors momentarily forgotten, as the memory took her back to the “good old days” when she and Dirk had both been cops, partners even. Dirk was still with the San Carmelita Police Department, but she and they had long since parted ways.

  But that didn’t stop her from wallowing in the memories.

  “Yes,” she said. “As I recall, he was tickling more than their feet when we charged through the door of that bedroom.”

  “And remember the look on the captain’s face when he saw you hauling his mayorship in . . . cuffed and wearing nothing but his boxers?”

  Savannah groaned. “That had to be one of the bigger nails in my law-enforcement coffin.”

  Sharing a companionable laugh, they were, once again, on common ground. Domestic tranquility had been restored.

  Dirk stood, picked up his bowl and spoon, and carried them to the sink. As he rinsed them and placed them into the dishwasher, Savannah congratulated herself on the minor improvement in his behavior. Who said a wife couldn’t change her husband if she only nagged loudly and frequently enough?

  “Wanna ride along and keep me company today?” he asked as he pitched the abused but gloriously spider-free newspaper into the recycle bin.

  Another uptick on the Civility Meter.

  She eyed him suspiciously. “Won’t this be your fifth day staking out that strip-joint dive there in Twin Oaks?”

  He shot her a guilty look. �
��Yeah. So?”

  How typical of him to invite her along when his assignment was as exciting as watching a snail marathon. “I’d best stick around here and pack for the trip.” She sighed, thinking about her upcoming journey back in time. Back home to the tiny rural town of McGill, Georgia, where she had been born and reared, not to mention teased and tormented.

  A chance to reconnect with her past at a joyous event called a high school class reunion. Woo-hoo. She could hardly wait.

  But then, she would also be celebrating Granny Reid’s birthday. And that would make the effort all worthwhile.

  Or mostly worthwhile.

  Dirk donned a self-satisfied smirk and said, “Rather than leave it to the last minute, I packed last night.”

  “Big whoop-de-do. Underdrawers and your spare toothbrush. You fellas have it easy.”

  “And you gals take way too much junk and expect us guys to lug it for you.”

  She thought of all the clothes spread across her bed upstairs, next to her still empty suitcase. Yes, he had her there. In an attempt to wear something that showed off her overly generous bustline without accenting her overly abundant butt line, she would be dragging half of her closet to McGill and back.

  Okay . . . he would be.

  Bless his little pea-pickin’ heart.

  She stood and carried her own bowl to the sink. Once she’d rinsed it and placed it into the dishwasher, she turned and slipped her arms around his waist. Hugging him tightly against her, she closed her eyes and breathed in the delicious smell of him: freshly applied deodorant, shave lotion, and the faint unique scent of his skin. He smelled like protection, companionship, and strength. But mostly, he smelled like love.

  Reluctantly, she released him, and as he walked away to gather up his essentials—cell phone, notebook, badge, and weapon—she did a quick mental tally of how long it would reasonably be until she laid eyes on him again.

  If the stakeout was a bust, eight and a half hours. If he actually nailed some dude or dudette dealing meth out of the so-called “gentlemen’s” club, it would be ten or twelve, at least, by the time he had them snuggly situated behind bars and had completed all the paperwork.

  “Be careful, darlin’,” she said as he headed for the back door.

  “I always am.”

  She thought of what a usual shift entailed in the world of Detective Sergeant Dirk Coulter. The safest thing he did all day was merge into rush-hour traffic on the 101 freeway with an apple fritter in one hand and a mucho grande coffee in the other. “Yeah, well, be more careful than that.”

  He gave her a grin that warmed every part of her body, and said, “Love ya.” Then he sailed out the door and slammed it, rattling the dishes in the cupboards and sending her cats running for cover.

  “You better love me, boy,” she replied as she turned back to the sink and the half-washed coffeepot. “After all I put up with offa you, you’d better be plumb nuts about me.”

  “You okay, babe?”

  Dirk reached over and placed his hand on top of Savannah’s. She was hanging on to the armrest of the airline seat as tightly as she usually gripped the lap bar of a triple-loop roller coaster.

  True, she wasn’t crazy about landings, but she usually didn’t mind them this much. She seldom broke out in a cold sweat and felt the overwhelming need to shriek, “We’re all going to die! We’re all going to die!” as the plane banked, then straightened and descended, lining up with the runway.

  Below she could see Atlanta, Georgia, spread before her, remarkably greener than the beige desert landscape she had left behind in Southern California.

  She liked green. She loved the smell of the Georgia pines and the peach orchards. Hearing the soft, sweet drawls, so like her own, did her heart good.

  Then there was the less health-conscious regional cuisine. It probably did her heart far less good, but it certainly nourished her spirit, and that alone was worth the trip.

  She was looking forward to fewer kale chips and bean sprout wraps and more pecan pie à la mode and peach cobbler.

  There was a lot she loved about Georgia and Georgians. So, ordinarily, she didn’t mind a homecoming.

  She had been back a few times in the past twenty years and didn’t recall experiencing quite so much dread at the prospect of being returned to the bosom of her native soil.

  “It ain’t the soil’s bosom I’m worried about,” she muttered. “It’s the natives.”

  “What?” Dirk gave her a quizzical look, the one he wore when she spoke her thoughts aloud without any explanatory preamble.

  “Nothing. I’ll be okay,” she told him with a sigh as the wheels hit the tarmac and the plane bounced along, as though happy to be on land once more. “Everything will be fine and dandy . . . just as soon as I see Granny.”

  Indeed, all was right with Savannah’s world the moment Dirk drove the rented car off the two-lane rural highway and down the narrow dirt road leading to her grandmother’s house. The mere sight of that tiny shotgun shack lifted her mood and brought peace to her soul in a way that no luxury estate on earth could have done.

  It wasn’t so much the run-down structure, with its peeling paint, sagging front porch, and missing tar-paper roof tiles, that warmed Savannah’s heart. It was what this humble piece of property represented. Or, more importantly, whom.

  As children, Savannah and her eight siblings had been removed from their mother’s custody and placed in the care of Granny Reid. Savannah would never forget the night when superheroes dressed in dark blue uniforms, with shining badges pinned to their chests, had scooped her and her brothers and sisters into their strong arms and had delivered them from their dark world of chaos, squalor, neglect, and abuse.

  They have been driven away from their furious, shrieking mother in big, powerful black-and-white cars with magical red and blue flashing lights on their tops. And from the moment those heaven-sent warriors had transported them to this little house at the end of the dirt road, their childhoods—their lives—had changed forever.

  Humble but tasty meals appeared three times a day, with the punctuality of a Marine Corps mess hall. Fresh, clean clothes were available every morning, and a bath with plenty of soap and vigorous scrubbing was required every evening.

  Good manners and bedtime prayers were mandatory. Discipline was consistent and fairly administered, tempered with copious amounts of love in the form of hugs, kisses, encouragement, and sage advice.

  Now, all these years later, although Savannah wasn’t exactly giddy at the prospect of reuniting with her school chums, she considered it worthwhile just to see Granny in her own natural habitat.

  “It’ll be nice to visit with Granny here, in her own house, for a change instead of at our place,” Dirk said.

  Savannah was often taken aback by how frequently and how precisely his thoughts echoed hers. It had been bad enough when they were partners on the force and friends, but now that they were married, it certainly appeared that “two had become one.”

  A little scary, she thought, considering it’s Dirko.

  “I’ll bet that’s what you were thinking, too,” he said. “You ever noticed how often me and you are thinking the same thing?”

  “Knock it off. You’re creeping me out.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Pay no attention to me. I’m just out of sorts, you know, what with the reunion and all.”

  “What are you talking about? It’ll be great! A chance to rub elbows, drink punchless punch, and eat dried-out cake with a bunch of knuckleheads you never wanted to see again for the rest of your life.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s the least of it,” she replied as, once again, she felt tiny drops of sweat appear on her forehead. Perspiration that had nothing to do with the humidity of a Georgia summer.

  Dirk pulled the car up to the front of the house and killed the engine. He reached over and took her hand in his. Giving her fingers a squeeze, he said, “Okay, so that’s the least of it. What’s the most of it?”


  She gulped. “Let’s just say I wasn’t exactly socialite material back then. The clothes I wore, my hairstyle and makeup, or lack thereof, were all hot topics of lunchroom gossip. That and the fact that I never showed up for school functions.”

  “Not even football games?” he asked with a look of shock and horror. “Why the hell not?”

  Savannah gave him a sweet smile; that was her guy, all right. Always the jock. Missing a sporting event, anytime and for any reason, was simply unthinkable.

  But her expression soon turned solemn again as she recalled the long hours spent on Gran’s back porch with the wringer washer. She could still hear the hypnotic rhythm of the machine’s agitator as it sloshed the load back and forth in its tub of hot, soapy water. She could still smell the acrid scent of bleach and strong detergent in the humid summer air.

  She would never forget the anxiety provoked by feeding washed, wet clothes through the powerful wringer as she tried to keep her hand from slipping between the hard rollers, which would have surely crushed her fingers.

  Then there were the endless afternoons and weekends spent in the backyard, where baskets overflowed with cold, wet laundry, and miles of heavy-laden clotheslines sagged with clothes flapping in the breeze.

  “I didn’t have time to hang out with the other kids,” she said, “because I was too busy hanging their clothes out to dry. And then for extra fun, on weekends we scrubbed their houses.” She chuckled wryly and shrugged. “Gran and I had a lot of mouths to feed, and, Lord, how those younguns could eat.”

  Dirk lifted her hand and pressed a kiss to her fingers. A look of sadness and a hint of repressed anger crossed his face as he said, “I’m sorry, sweetheart, that you had to work so hard, and you were just a kid.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mind the work,” she replied. “ ‘Hard work never killed nobody,’ as Gran frequently told us. What I minded was the other kids—a certain group of girls in particular—never letting me forget that I was beneath them.”