So, the redhead has a name, Savannah thought. She also wondered, if Patrice had been Carolyn’s assistant, why this was the first time Savannah had seen her, other than the day before when she had been fleeing the party.
Savannah extended her hand as Carolyn told Patrice, “This is Savannah. She’s been bringing her gorgeous black cats here since they were kittens. She’s Brody’s mom.”
“Hello, Ms. Greyson,” Patrice said, shaking Savannah’s hand. “Brody’s such a cute kid. Bright, too.”
“My last name is Reid, and Brody is my foster son. But thank you. We think he’s a pretty smart cookie, too.”
With the simple introduction made, an awkward silence settled over the three of them, and Savannah got the distinct impression that her lukewarm welcome inside the clinic was over.
“I should go—” she began.
“I understand!” Carolyn replied far too eagerly. She hid her enthusiasm behind what she, no doubt, hoped was a nonchalant semi-smile and added, “I mean, if you need to leave, I don’t want to keep you.”
Savannah thought of the old Southern phrase, “Here’s your hat; what’s your hurry?”
Savannah turned toward the door, then said, “If you’d like to stay with us again tonight, you’re more than welcome. Just give me a call or drop me a text.”
“She’ll be staying with me,” Patrice inserted with such authority and certainty, that Savannah was a bit taken aback.
Carolyn looked surprised. “I am?” she asked Patrice. When the redhead nodded, Carolyn smiled and ducked her head. “Oh. I didn’t expect, I mean, thank you.”
Patrice slipped her arm around Carolyn’s waist and gave her a sideways squeeze. “No problem. You’re with me . . . for as long as you want.”
Savannah mumbled a good-bye, and when a response wasn’t immediately forthcoming from either woman, she turned and walked back to the door.
As she left the building and returned to the Mustang, Savannah thought about how eager she was to tell Dirk about this strange development.
But her enthusiasm faltered when she ran the story through her own head, considering how she would describe the past five minutes.
“I took Carolyn to the clinic, went inside even though I got the idea she didn’t want me to, and met a friend of hers who hugged her a bit too hard and long in front of a waiting room full of clients.”
She could just hear him now saying, “So what?”
She had to agree. For all the uneasiness she felt deep in her gut, she couldn’t explain why.
Flutters of intuition aside, her little trip to the clinic hadn’t exactly been a lead story news event.
No sooner had Savannah climbed back into the Mustang and started the engine than she heard her car’s phone ding. It was a frenetic, fast, and frenzied tone that reminded her of her husband when he was being impatient.
Dirk handled the biggies in life with unexpected grace and calm. If you’d just had an accident in your vehicle or were waiting for the results of a biopsy, he was your man.
On the other hand, if he was stuck in a grocery line with two items in his hand and someone buying lottery tickets in front of him, life for him was hardly worth living.
“Yes, Detective Sergeant Coulter,” she said in her most officious voice. “Whatcha got for me?”
Normally, that would have garnered her a suggestive response. One that, uttered with his deepest, “bedroom” voice, would have given her a major case of the quivers.
But instead she heard only a one-word response. “Murder.”
“For sure?” she asked.
“Yeah. Liu just called me. I’m on my way to the morgue now. Wanna meet me over there?”
Again, it was no time for phone flirtations. Funny how the word murder brought thoughts of romance to a screeching halt. Homicide was a definite mood killer.
“Sure! I’m only a couple of blocks away. I’ll meet you in the parking lot.”
She heard him hang up. No good-bye.
Dirk was in “detective” mode, and Savannah knew he would live there until he arrested the killer. As would she.
Everything took a back seat to murder. Not just romance.
Chapter 17
When Savannah pulled into the county morgue’s parking lot, she looked for a shady spot. Since she wasn’t expecting Dirk to arrive for several minutes, she had a fantasy that involved her sitting in a quiet place, under a leafy tree, communing with nature, and eating the candy bar in her purse.
She hadn’t received “fortification” for a couple of hours. As a result, she was in desperate need of the life-sustaining nutrients that existed in chocolate and nowhere else on Earth.
She had no doubt whatsoever that a fairly regular intake of chocolate, administered several times daily, had kept her alive for years. Heaven only knew how many deadly diseases she had avoided with that miracle food.
It had to be true.
Nothing that tasted as heavenly as chocolate could possibly be bad for you.
Even if it was, she figured the stress of giving it up would do her more physical harm than the substance itself. So, why risk it?
She had just reached inside her purse and was about to draw out the beautiful bar in all of its foil-wrapped glory, when a voice—the nasal tone of which curled her toenails—exploded in her left ear.
“Savannah! Sweetheart! Wow! Fancy meeting you here!”
She jumped. Shoved the bar back into her purse and began to roll up her window as fast as she could. Then she locked the doors, reminding herself that her Beretta was next to that candy bar, should the need arise.
With Officer Kenny Bates in close proximity, a gal couldn’t be too careful.
“Hey, whatcha doin’?” He rapped hard on her window with his knuckles. “Don’t act like that, gal, shuttin’ me out thadda way,” he complained. “You’ll hurt my feelings.”
“I’ll hurt more than your feelings if you don’t get away from my car!” she shouted back.
From where she sat, all she could see was his belly, thankfully, mostly covered by his uniform, pressed against her window.
She knew it was him, not only from his twangy, outrageously loud voice, but from the gaps in his too-small shirt, where the two sides didn’t quite meet tightly enough to keep his thick belly hair from poking out between the buttons.
To her horror, instead of backing away as instructed, he shoved his girth against the Mustang, causing it to rock from side to side.
The thought of him even being near her precious, red pony was enough to enrage her, let alone for him to be rubbing his disgusting self against the car’s waxed-to-perfection door and meticulously polished window.
Usually, at any given time, even someone who wasn’t a detective could read the “clues” on the front of Kenny’s shirt and divine what he’d eaten for the past few days.
She had known hardworking chefs who had less food on the front of their aprons at the end of a five-course dinner service than Kenny wore almost every day on his uniform.
“If you get that nacho junk that you called last night’s ‘dinner’ on my car, boy, I will murder you. Badly. Painfully. You won’t see it coming, and you’ll never get over it, I swear.”
She heard him laugh loudly, like it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.
Not exactly the reaction she’d been hoping for while trying to instill terror in the teeth-suckin’ yayhoo.
Unwilling to be held hostage in her own vehicle, but quite sure she could never push the door open hard enough to dislodge him, she decided to get out on the passenger side.
This involved lifting herself over the console and very nearly bringing her girlie parts to grief on the shift. Yet another reason to despise Kenneth Bates with every atom of her being.
“Come on, Savannah. Just a hug. One nice, lo-o-ng hug! It’s been ages since I seen you. You hardly ever come around anymore, and when you finally do, you’re usually with him and he makes a big squawk about it if I try anything.”
He belly-bump
ed the car a few more times, enraging her even further, as she frantically searched her mind for what sort of disinfectant she would have to use to kill the Kenny Cooties he was depositing on her driver’s door.
She opened her purse and the first thing she saw was her Beretta. Time slowed for her as she heard Kenny yell, “Come on, baby! They’ve got cameras all over inside the building now. Out here like this—this is our big chance!”
For half a second, her fingertip stroked the barrel, and she entertained a short, evil fantasy that involved inserting a bullet into Kenny’s right buttock.
But she quickly banished the thought.
Not because Kenny didn’t deserve a sore backside. But because she chose to live in a civilized society where one didn’t shoot one’s fellow man simply because he “had it comin’.”
Instead, she reached for her “other” weapon, her pepper spray, and jumped out of the Mustang.
Leaning across the roof of the car, she pointed it straight at Kenny’s somewhat startled face and said, “Step away from the vehicle, Bates. Do it! Now!”
“What’s that? Bug spray?”
For a fleeting moment, she pictured him as a six-foot-tall, 350-pound cockroach in an ill-fitted, soiled uniform, wearing a slightly askew toupee and a leer on his ugly mug.
Yes, he was every woman’s dream. At least, inside Kenny Bates’s demented imagination, where every woman was swooning with desire for him.
Especially Savannah. Lucky her.
“You aren’t gonna spray me, girl,” he said with a wink. “You and me, we got chemistry. I know you can feel it . . . felt it the moment we laid eyes on each other.”
“The only chemistry you’re going to feel, Bates, is the capsaicin in this spray if you don’t turn around and walk back into that building.”
“You don’t mean that. You’re just tryin’ to be a good wife, faithful and all that. I understand. But what he don’t know won’t hurt him.”
“Won’t hurt you, you mean.”
“You wouldn’t tell him if I just got me one little kiss. He’s already beat me up once. You wouldn’t wanna see that mess again.”
She shrugged and smiled. “Actually, I rather enjoyed it. As I recall, he only hit you once. A single upper cut and you hit the floor. Hard. Out like a light bulb run over by an eighteen-wheeler’s tires. It was a first-round K.O.”
When her words didn’t have the desired effect of causing him to crumple into a quivering wad of fear and remorse, she added, “Just for the record, I don’t need my husband to protect me from the likes of you. As I recall, I beat the puddin’ out of you one time with your own porn magazine. The one you were shoving under my nose and telling me to look at, ’cause the gal in the centerfold looked like me. Remember that?”
He instantly sobered. “Of course I do. I’d just gotten that magazine. Hadn’t even read it yet, and you beat me with it until it was in pieces.”
“Aww, don’t grieve its passing. It died for a good cause. Who would’ve thought that stabbing somebody with the end of a rolled-up magazine could cause that much pain, that many bruises, eh?”
He grumbled some obscenities under his breath and looked less happy than he had a minute ago. Thankfully, the memory of that humiliating experience seemed to have dampened his ardor a bit, as she had intended it to. After all, he had suffered months of teasing from his fellow officers as the security video of Savannah’s retaliatory attack had circulated among the SCPD personnel and eventually even gone viral on various social media sites.
“I forgave you for that,” he said, half whimpering. “I decided not to let that one little fit you threw come between us and—”
“There is no ‘us,’ Kenny. There’s never been an ‘us’ and there won’t be.”
“Why not?”
“So many reasons. So many, they plumb boggle the mind.”
“Name one.”
“I loathe you.”
“Why? I’ve only been nice to you.”
“You’ve invited me over to your apartment one hundred times, while describing in detail the kind of sex you’re expecting us to have.”
“Yeah. Okay. I’m an optimist.”
“You’re a pervert, who’s humping my car like a demented ferret and about to get sprayed.”
He moved away from the door, and she dared to think he might be complying. But then he started to make his way around the hood, and she realized he was coming toward her, not retreating as she’d hoped.
Just as Savannah was thinking she might have to follow through with her threat, she saw, in her peripheral vision, Dirk’s Buick pulling into the parking lot.
She knew what was coming next.
From the instant look of fear in his eyes, she knew Kenny did, too.
“I wasn’t doin’ nothin’!” he told her. “Nothin’ but talkin’ to you, so he better not—”
“Maybe you should hightail it into the building, pronto. If there’s anything worse than getting sprayed, it’s having that spray get into brand-new, open wounds. That stings worse than tomato juice on a paper cut.”
But her warning was too late.
Dirk had spotted his wife aiming a pepper spray canister at the morgue’s receptionist/resident sleaze. He gunned the Buick, shot across the lot, and brought it to a smoking stop only a few feet away.
He jumped out of the car, and in seconds had grabbed a handful of the back of Kenny’s collar. “You better tell me right now, Bates,” he said, “why my wife’s about to spray your ass?”
“I have no idea,” Kenny croaked. “She’s got a temper. But I don’t have to tell you that.”
Dirk turned to Savannah, and as he reached behind his back for his cuffs, he asked her. “Well, what’d he do? What’s the charge?”
She watched as her husband cuffed her tormentor, and she struggled, not sure how to phrase her complaint. To her knowledge there was no cop 10-code for “belly bumping a car in a lascivious manner with an indignant woman inside.”
“No charge,” she finally said. “He was just being his rude, obnoxious self. But I had it under control.”
“You sure?” Dirk asked. “If you were mad enough to spray him, he must’ve been doing somethin’.”
Savannah thought of how both she and Dirk had been warned to never lay hands on Officer Kenny Bates again. The only reason they hadn’t been charged before was because she had threatened the city with a sexual harassment case against both Bates and the town.
“Let ’im go,” she told Dirk. “He ain’t worth it.”
Dirk uncuffed him, stared at him, nose-to-nose for several long moments, then gave him an unceremonious push toward the building.
Bates wasted no time making use of his avenue of escape.
As he scurried away, Dirk walked over to Savannah and put his arm around her shoulders. Pulling her close to his side, he said, “What exactly did he do?”
“He asked for a hug and a kiss. His usual.”
“Dirty rotten rat fink.”
“But the worst thing was . . . he banged his stomach against my door and window.”
“Like in a sexual way?”
“Sorta. It did seem, I don’t know, dirty, I guess.” She sighed. “But then, Kenny Bates could read a pancake house menu and make it sound like the script for a porn flick.”
“Yeah. Some guys are just ‘gifted’ that way.” He reached for her hand and squeezed it. “One of these days I’m going to catch that guy actually breaking the law and then . . .”
“You’ll put him away for life?”
“Yeah. For jaywalkin’.”
Chapter 18
When Savannah and Dirk entered the dull, square, gray building that housed the county’s morgue, no one was manning the front, reception counter. Normally, Bates would be sitting there behind his desk, eating, playing video games, or looking at pornography. But blissfully, he was absent, and Savannah was grateful. One Kenny Bates encounter per year was about all she could stand.
They knew the drill and
walked up to the counter to sign the visitors’ list. Dirk scribbled his customary, illegible scrawl. But Savannah followed her usual habit of using a pseudonym. She had never written her real name on Kenny’s stupid list, and in all the years she had entered this dreary place, she had never been questioned for her noncompliance.
Today’s nom de plume was: K.B. Ura Maggot.
As they walked down the gray hall with its worn and torn linoleum and flickering fluorescent lights overhead, heading toward Dr. Jennifer Liu’s autopsy suite, Savannah’s curiosity got the best of her.
“Did she actually call you and tell you it was murder even before she’d finished the autopsy?” she asked him.
He looked moderately uncomfortable and shrugged. “Naw. I called and asked her if she was done yet.”
“She was still in the middle of it?”
“Yeah, and so she told me in no uncertain terms.”
Savannah laughed. Dr. Jennifer Liu, the county’s first female medical examiner, wasn’t known for being patient, overly polite, or tolerant.
“She just loves it when you interrupt her work by nudging her to go faster.”
“She mighta mentioned that, too, in passing. Eh, who cares? She hates me anyway, and I wanted to know now, not next month, when she’s good and ready to tell me.”
“Dr. Liu is fast and efficient, and no matter how much you aggravate her, she’d never hold back information that you needed.”
“Yeah, I guess. She did tell me she’s sure it’s a homicide and to come on over if I wanted. As long as I brought you.”
“Does she know I don’t have any freshly baked, macadamia-chocolate-chip cookies with me?”
“No way. I may be dumb, but I ain’t stupid. You think she’s so efficient and all that because she wants to help solve crimes, support the cause of Truth, and the American Way. But I’m tellin’ you, her motivation is the cookies and chocolate stuff you bring her.”
Savannah thought of the candy bar in her purse that she hadn’t yet eaten. She was hungry, but if push came to shove and Dr. Jen demanded a treat quid pro quo, Savannah would reluctantly sacrifice the sweet treat on the altar of Justice.
They reached the large, swinging double doors that led into the clinical, austere rooms where Dr. Liu spent much of her workday, exploring human bodies for clues to their untimely deaths.
A Few Drops of Bitters Page 12