Finally, she turned to Tammy and said, “Exactly what was Geoffrey Faraday convicted of? What part did he play in this mess?”
“He owned the crappy house where the women were being held captive. Once in a while he’d pop over there to, well—”
“Get his mustache waxed?” Granny said.
“Something like that,” Tammy said. “He was convicted and given five years. He served a little over three before they let him out.”
“Three years for a crime like that?” Savannah shook her head. “That’s what I mean. He probably would’ve gotten a longer sentence for writing bad checks.”
Savannah thought of Brooklynn Marsh and how she’d seemed more upset that Lucinda had died than Geoffrey. “I think I need to have a private talk with that guy’s fiancée. From the little she said when Dirk and I informed them, I got the idea she might have a more sensitive conscience than ol’ Geoff.”
“Wouldn’t take much,” Granny said. “I reckon even the majority of scallywags behind prison bars right now would draw the line at slavery. They got mothers and sisters and wives. How’d they feel if they was treated like that?”
“If only society itself would draw the line,” Savannah said. She sighed and pushed her half-eaten bowl of beans away.
It was one of those rare occasions when she lost her appetite in the presence of Granny’s fine cooking.
Chapter 13
Eager to tell Dirk what Tammy had found out about Geoffrey, Savannah tracked him down at the Faraday estate.
She arrived to find one of the crime scene unit’s vans parked in the driveway, the mansion’s front door wide open, and CSU techs trudging in and out, carrying brown paper bags filled, no doubt, with evidence. Or at least what they hoped would prove to be meaningful.
They looked disgruntled, and Savannah could easily guess why. On a day like that, with such a difficult scene to process, she figured they were reconsidering their decisions to pursue forensic investigation as a career.
There were certainly plenty of days when she doubted her own choice and wished she had followed her childhood dream, married Little Joe Cartwright, and become a cowgirl.
But then, of course, if she had married Little Joe and lived on the Ponderosa, she would’ve missed being Detective Sergeant Dirk Coulter’s wife.
As she walked through the front door of the mansion, she could hear her husband’s deep, booming voice in the distance as he instructed his team, a true alpha male, using his manly-man authority to impart his extensive knowledge of all things concerning law enforcement.
“Come on, people! What the hell’s going on here? Get the lead outta your boxers! This ain’t no Sunday picnic for any of us, ya know!”
Yes, she thought, that’s my man, all right. Tactful and kind, strong but gentle, a truly inspiring leader.
“I ain’t got all day to hang around here and babysit you guys,” he continued. “For now, just bag up all this crap and haul it back to the lab. Eileen can help you test it there.”
For a moment Savannah imagined the look on Eileen Bradley’s face when her crew returned to the laboratory with two hundred bags of garbage that Dirk wanted dusted for fingerprints. Eileen hated Dirk only slightly more than Dr. Jennifer Liu did. For the same reason. Like every other detective working on a case, Dirk wanted results from the morgue and the lab ten minutes before the crime had been committed. Unlike other detectives, he wasn’t the least bit shy about making his expectations known, loudly and in no uncertain terms.
Fortunately for Dirk, both women could be bribed with homemade baked goods containing chocolate, and he had a wife who didn’t mind providing the goodies and delivering them with a smile.
Lucky him.
On a good day, Savannah didn’t mind either. It kept her in the action, which she’d missed since parting ways with the SCPD.
Once again, Savannah found her way through the hoard tunnel, fighting her claustrophobia as she did so. At one point she met one of the male techs in a tight spot. He was a large fellow, both tall and wide, and his arms were filled with evidence bags.
Savannah broke what appeared to be a hopeless impasse by climbing onto a pile of clothing. When her hand brushed something furry in the heap, she instantly decided that it was some luxury item of clothing made of fur.
It was either that or scream bloody murder, like a hysterical woman who had lost her wits, in front of and within earshot of the entire CSU team. She never would’ve lived it down.
Having a vivid and easily manipulated imagination could be a blessing, she decided, once the man had moved past, and she had scrambled down from the clothing pile. As she hurried away she could swear that she saw the garments she had just touched move a bit.
It’s just that fur stole settling back into place, she told herself, as a shiver ran down her back.
Or, at least, she hoped it was a shiver.
Yeah, yeah. That fur stole’s just getting comfortable again, said the anti-Pollyanna realist in her head—the gal who could be a sarcastic bitch when she wanted to be. Be sure to use a ton of bleach and a steel wool scrubber on that hand, first chance you get.
As she worked her way across the enormous room toward the far wall and the area where the body had been found, Savannah heard the occasional curse and a few yelps of terror and discomfort from the CSU team members who were trying to maneuver through the maze.
“Guess they found some fur stoles, too,” she muttered. “God knows how many of them are scattered among this junk.”
Finally, she saw the opening in the mess and the area where Lucinda’s body had been. Dirk was there with a couple of the techs.
Instead of surgical gloves, they were wearing substantial leather work gloves to protect their hands.
They even had dust masks over their mouths and noses.
That was a first for her tough guy hubby. Although he would deign to wear the mandatory surgical gloves when handling things at a crime scene, she had never seen him put on a mask before.
She could certainly understand him wearing it. After her close encounter with whatever that fuzzy thing had been in the clothing pile, she’d vowed that, if she came in here again, it would be wearing a full head-to-toe hazmat suit.
Dirk was picking up handfuls of the debris that had been a makeshift “bed” for Lucinda’s body and shoving the garbage into large, grocery-store-sized paper bags. He looked absolutely miserable, as did the others doing the same job around him.
“How much of this are we going to take, Sarge?” asked the young female squatting next to him. She looked around, her eyes wide with wonder and alarm. “There’s just gotta be an end to it . . . at some point.”
“Keep goin’ till we get everything that woulda been under the body. Once you guys have processed that back at the lab, if you find something useful, good. If not, you’ll be back here, bagging up more.”
The tech groaned like a teenager who’d been asked to wax the family car and clean out the garage on her first day of summer vacation.
“Yeah,” Dirk told her, “think about that when you’re mowin’ through this crap back at the lab. Don’t miss nothin’!”
Out of the corner of his eye, Dirk saw movement behind him. He turned and barked, “Yeah? What?”
She knew the exact moment he recognized her, because his eyes softened in an instant.
That was a common occurrence. No matter how bad his day might be going, Dirk’s mood always seemed to improve when his wife appeared.
Savannah loved that.
“Oh. Hi, Van,” he said. “I thought you were one of these knuckleheads.”
He waved a hand in the direction of the two closest techs and, once again, she marveled at how her husband managed to consistently endear himself to those around him.
The miracle was that no one had bumped him off some night in a dark alley. She was pretty sure that, if she had ever worked under him, she might have done so. Fortunately for her, Dirk was a far better husband than boss.
H
e stood up, groaning as he did so, and placed his gloved hand on his lower back. She could only imagine how long he had been in that position, squatting on that dirty floor, scavenging through the garbage.
But she had come prepared. She knew what it took to coax her husband out of a cranky mood and onto the sunny side of the street.
Unfortunately, it would violate several laws to do that sort of thing at a crime scene, so she had brought food instead—his second greatest passion in life.
She leaned close to him and whispered in his ear, “There’s a double chili cheeseburger and a large fry waiting for you in my car out front, if you can manage to tear yourself away from this fascinating place.”
He ripped off the mask, revealing the dazzling smile of a true glutton. “Coffee?”
“The giant thermos full.”
“I adore you, woman,” he said, seeming not to mind one bit if his underlings heard.
They did. Savannah heard them snicker and saw them exchange some seriously dramatic eyerolls.
They should be so lucky, she thought, as she and Dirk found their way out of the mess and into the sunlight. How many people could buy unadulterated adoration—for the price of a burger and fries?
* * *
Later, when the food and half of the coffee were only a fond and distant memory, Savannah said something to Dirk that caused his mood to plummet once again.
“What if she wasn’t killed there in the spot where we found the body?”
He stared at her for a long time without answering. Finally, he said, “You know, if I want to get depressed again, I could just walk back into that garbage dump of a house. I don’t need you to do it for me by saying something like that.”
“Sorry. But it’s true. You guys could be combing through that area, bagging up all that junk, and you don’t even know for sure that’s where the deed was done.”
He groaned and rubbed his eyes. She had no doubt they were burning from the lack of sleep and the dust he had been sorting through. “I guess she coulda been killed somewhere else in the house and then dragged or carried to where we found her, like a secondary dump site in a regular murder.”
“We should probably consider it.”
“But why? What makes you think the killer did that?”
Savannah took a deep breath and tried to think of the simplest way to make her point. He was tired. She had discovered that tired men—and women for that matter—had problems understanding what was being said to them. Especially when what they were hearing might mean even more work for them.
“Because,” she said, “the place where she was lying, it didn’t look like a bed of any kind. Even people who live in the worst of hoards usually have a mattress or a chair or a pile of bedclothes, or at least one blanket, where they tend to sleep. Something resembling a bed. There was nothing like that under her or anywhere in that area. It was just junk and garbage and the body.”
“Okay. What makes you so sure she was murdered in the bedroom—or wherever she sleeps?”
“Dr. Liu said she believes Lucinda was given a sedative.”
“Yeah, I remember. No defensive wounds and all that.”
“Exactly. When would you be most likely to give someone a sedative?” she asked.
He nodded thoughtfully. “When they’re going to sleep.”
“Right. When they’re retiring for the night or getting ready to take a nap.”
“But either way, they’d probably be in their bed—or whatever passes for a bed.”
“I should think so.”
“But what would be the point in killing somebody in one place of a house and then dumping their body in another room?” he asked.
“I don’t know for sure, but I’d think for the same reason as any killer uses a secondary location to dump the body.”
“To keep us from investigating the actual murder scene.”
“Yes. Because they’re afraid we’ll find something there that points to them.”
Dirk slugged back the rest of the coffee in one gulp, then screwed the top back on the thermos. “Okay,” he said. “Time to go back inside. First order of business, we find Lucinda’s bedroom.”
“Even if it’s the dining room or the bathroom.”
“What?”
“You know what I mean. Mary should be able to tell us.”
They got out of the Mustang and, as they were walking up to the mansion’s front door, they encountered a CSU tech coming out, her arms laden with evidence bags.
She gave Dirk a dirty look over the top of her mask as they passed.
He nudged Savannah in the ribs and said, “If I go missing, don’t stop searching until you find me. I’ll be somewhere in the heap.”
“Why? You afraid it’s going to collapse on top of you?”
“Yeah, about thirty seconds after I tell this team that we’ve been baggin’ up all that stinkin’ garbage—I mean, valuable evidence—from the wrong place.”
Chapter 14
When Savannah and Dirk entered the mansion, they realized that, other than the foyer and the tunnel that led into the ballroom, they had no idea how the mansion was laid out.
“Mary said her apartment is in the back of the house,” Savannah reminded him. “If we just work our way toward the rear . . .”
“Yeah, easier said than done. We need a map of all the tunnels, where they lead, and how to get out of them in an emergency.”
“A GPS would be nice.”
“Or Mary’s cell phone number, so we could just call her and ask her to come get us.”
They gave each other a look that was mixed with humor and disgust.
“We’re pathetic,” Savannah said. “Two seasoned detectives who can’t find their way from one end of a house to another.”
He nodded and took her hand. “You’re right. This is ridiculous. Come on.”
They looked around and found what appeared to be a path leading in the opposite direction from the ballroom.
As he headed that way, he squeezed her hand and said, “If we get stuck and starve to death, at least we’ll die together, and my last meal was a pretty good one.”
She chuckled. Leave it to Dirk to worry about food at a time like this, or at any time for that matter.
“Or,” she said, “if we get attacked and eaten by a fur stole.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
The new tunnel, narrow as it was, did appear to be leading somewhere that they hadn’t been before. They passed through a graceful archway trimmed with decorative tiles in shades of tangerine, bright yellow, and cobalt blue.
On either side of the arch were sconces made of delicate metal filigree and stained glass of the same brilliant colors.
“What a shame,” she said, “that this house is so badly neglected. It must’ve been glorious in its day.”
“Yeah, weren’t we all?” he grumbled.
“Seriously. Tammy told me that she did a little research on the mansion itself, after she dug up that dirt on Geoffrey. Super famous movie stars, rich folks, and even hard-core gangsters partied here back in the twenties, thirties, and forties. Serious partying, too. All sorts of illegal stuff.”
“Was our victim part of that scene?”
“In the forties, she was. She bought it in the fifties, when her career started to slow down, and she didn’t need to spend as much time in Hollywood.”
Savannah paused for a moment and looked around at the items stacked on either side of them in this new area.
“Apparently, at one time, Lucinda was big on decorating for the holidays,” she said, pointing out the boxes of Christmas ornaments and tinsel stacked on top of other boxes and containers with labels that read, “Easter” and “Halloween.”
A lot of it appeared to be cheap junk, but Savannah saw a miniature train and snow-covered village with animated additions like a carousel and townsfolk skating on a frozen lake. She imagined what it must have been like when this magnificent house was fully decked out for
the holidays. Decorated by someone who, obviously, enjoyed celebrating life and its special occasions.
“How,” she asked, “does someone get from setting up beautiful little villages at Christmas time to . . . this?” She waved her arm wide, indicating the hoard.
Dirk looked around, thought it over for a moment, and said, “A little bit at a time, I guess. It probably sneaks up on you, and you don’t notice until it’s too late. Nobody in their right mind would just wake up one day in a clean, neat house and decide they wanted to live like this instead. It has to be some kind of illness that causes it.”
“I agree. It must be miserable, living with the disorder like that. Most people can hide their problems for a long time. Things like alcohol and drug addiction, gambling, infidelities, obsessive-compulsive disorders—those can be hidden for years. But the only way to hide all this is to never invite anyone to your home. To lock yourself in your own prison of mess and disorder in total isolation.”
Dirk nodded. “True, and if those closest to you find out, they probably just tell you that you’re being stupid or lazy or whatever, living like that.”
Savannah remembered Geoffrey Faraday’s impeccable grooming. Apparently, appearances were very important to him. “Can you even imagine the conversations that must’ve passed between prissy Geoffrey and his great-grandmother? They were probably brutal. He didn’t strike me as a nice guy who would pull his punches in an argument.”
“Or any other kind of fight, for that matter.” Dirk gave a nasty little chuckle. “You know, before I became a married man and a bit more civilized, I would’ve looked for a reason to clean that guy’s clock. Especially once I found out about the human-trafficking crap. He’s probably good at bullying weaker, disenfranchised people. I’d like to teach him what it’s like to tangle with somebody stronger than him for a change.”
“Before this is all over, you might get your chance. Though I’m not recommending that, of course.”
“No, of course not.” He gave her an evil little grin. “Don’t worry. I’ll make sure I’m not in uniform at the time.”
And the Killer Is . . . Page 12
