And sure enough, less than a minute later, an even paler than usual Bleak stumbled out with Dr. Liu right behind him.
Savannah had once seen a hound that had tangled with a bear and lost who had more dignity than her brother-in-law displayed at that moment.
“You okay, bro?” she said, trying to interject an adequate amount of pseudo-sympathy into her tone.
He simply moaned, walked over to the wall, put his back against it and slid down to the floor. Dr. Liu shoved a plastic bag into his hand and said, “Just in case.”
Then she turned to Savannah. “I’ll return to my autopsy in a moment. May I see you in my office? Before you take these two home and put them to bed, I have something I think you’d like to see.”
“Sure.” Savannah looked down at Bleak. “You just sit there and hold that wall up there, son. It was looking a mite shaky a minute ago. I’ll be back directly.”
She followed Dr. Liu down the hall and into her office.
As the ME peeled off her gloves and tossed them into a trash can, she snickered and said, “I never even got to lay a hand on the body in there. I barely had him unzipped before they got a good look, a good snootful and bang. Your sister was outta there, and that brother-in-law of yours was on the floor. Pansies.”
“I wouldn’t ordinarily do that to anybody, but those two have been asking for it right and left. Dirk showed up at my place, stinking to high heaven, and I just couldn’t resist.”
“I can understand that. Believe me, in my line of work, I run into groupies all the time. They make me sick. It’s kind of fun to return the favor.”
She reached into her smock pocket and pulled out two pairs of gloves. Handing one pair to Savannah, she said, “Here, put these on.” Then she donned a fresh pair herself.
She walked over to a cabinet, unlocked it, and took out a manila evidence envelope. “I found this on Cameron Field,” she said. “It was in the pants pocket of his sweats. I was saving it to show to Dirk, but since you’re here, I thought I’d let you have a look at it.”
Savannah took the envelope from her and opened it.
Inside the larger envelope was a smaller, beige one, the size that might normally contain a thank-you note or casual party invitation. It appeared to be high-quality linen paper.
“Look inside,” Dr. Liu said. “And tell me what you think.”
Savannah opened it and found several items. Two were snapshots. The third was a note card that matched the envelope.
When she turned over the first photo and looked at it, her stomach tightened. It was a picture of Dona’s gardener, James Morgan, a candid shot of him working in the yard. He didn’t appear to know that his picture was being taken.
Flipping the second picture over, Savannah wasn’t sure if she recognized the pretty blond woman who was getting out of a car in front of the Papalardo house. But she was about the size and general description of Dona, and didn’t appear to be posing or aware she was being photographed either.
“Is this Kim Dylan?” she asked.
“Yes.” Dr. Liu’s eyes were dark, her face grim.
Savannah’s hand began to shake as she opened the note card and looked inside. On it was scrawled some lines, some circles and squares and an X on one side.
“It’s a map,” she said.
“That’s what I thought, too.”
“It’s a map of the Papalardo property and the trails around it. The X marks the spot where we’re pretty sure Field was standing when he took his shots. You have a clear view of both the front-and backyards from there.”
“I figured.”
Savannah looked each item over again thoroughly, then carefully slipped them back into the small envelope. She took a deep breath. “This is major,” she said.
“Yes, it is. We’ll get all of that over to the lab and see if they can pick up any prints on it, other than his, that is.”
“DNA off the seal, too.”
It was when Savannah was putting the smaller envelope back into the larger one that she smelled something. And the odor sent a series of rapid-fire memory synapses through her brain cells.
“Holy shit,” she whispered. “No, it can’t be.” Her legs turned to jelly beneath her, and she felt like she couldn’t breathe. Then a hot surge of anger went through her and the weak feeling disappeared, replaced by pure rage.
“What? Savannah, what is it? What’s wrong?” Dr. Liu asked.
But Savannah didn’t hear her.
She threw the envelope onto the doctor’s desk, turned and headed for the emergency entrance at the far end of the hall.
It wasn’t until she was several miles away that she remembered her sister and Bleak back at the morgue.
She took her phone out of her purse and dialed Tammy.
“Moonlight Magnolia Detective Agency,” was Tammy’s standard salutation.
“I need you to do something,” she said.
“Sure, what?”
“Go to the morgue and pick up Jessie and what’s-his-name. Give them a ride back to the house. Okay?”
“Yeah, sure. Savannah, you sound funny. Are you all right?”
“No. I’m not. I’m not all right at all. I’ve never been so mad in all my livin’ life!”
“At Jessie and Bleak?”
Savannah shook her head. “No. Sugar, just do me that favor, okay? I’ll call you later.”
Without waiting for an answer, she hung up and tossed the phone onto the passenger seat.
She knew that in a minute, two at the most, it would ring again. That’s how long it would take Tammy to call Dirk and tattle on her, tell him that something was up with Savannah again.
But this time she wasn’t going to answer it.
This time…she was going to take care of business herself, her own way.
This was one pound of flesh that she wasn’t going to share with anybody. Not even Dirk.
Chapter 27
S avannah was sitting at Dona Papalardo’s desk in the movie star’s library when Dona got home from yet another interview. Juanita had happily allowed her in, though she had given Savannah several wary looks as she ushered her into the library and presented her with a glass of iced tea.
Frequently, Savannah found it difficult to hide her feelings. And today it was impossible.
“Oh, Savannah,” Dona said when she walked from the foyer into the library, slipping off her gloves and removing her hat. “I didn’t know you were going to be here. What an unexpected, but lovely, surprise!”
Savannah looked into those famous green eyes and didn’t see any sort of real pleasure or happiness at seeing her. In fact, Dona looked quite the opposite. She looked suspicious and worried.
And Savannah could easily guess why.
“What are you doing there?” Dona asked, pointing to the two telephones and the piece of paper on the desk in front of Savannah. “I thought you’d have been happy to get out of here and never come back…your job here being finished and all.”
“Oh, I was. I was delighted to never come back here again.” Savannah’s eyes narrowed and turned very cold. “But then…I got to thinking.”
“Oh, what about?” Dona dropped her gloves, hat, and purse onto an accent table and walked over to the desk.
“Phone calls.”
“Phone calls?”
“Yeah.”
“Whose phone calls?”
“Oh, mine, Dirk’s, yours…Cameron Field’s.”
Yes, Dona Papalardo was feeling very tense, quite worried. And even her abilities as an award-winning actress couldn’t hide that. “Why would you do that? And why are you sitting at my desk? Considering that your work is finished here, that’s taking liberties, don’t you think?”
“I think,” Savannah said, her voice as cold as her eyes, “that me sitting behind your desk, taking liberties, is the least of your concerns right now.”
“What are you talking about? Phone calls, my…concerns?”
Savannah held up an older model, cordless
phone. “Recognize this?” she said.
Dona looked at it, thought for a minute. Then shook her head. “No, not really. Why? Am I supposed to?”
“You own it,” she said. “It’s your phone. But I doubt you use it very often. In fact, I suspect that you didn’t even know it existed.”
Dona crossed her arms over her chest and lifted her chin a notch. “What are you talking about?”
But the level of fear in those green eyes told Savannah that Dona knew very well the point that Savannah was making.
“It was in your utility room,” Savannah said. “You don’t spend a lot of time in there, washing, drying, and ironing clothes, do you? I’ll bet you didn’t even know there was a phone in there.”
The color left Dona’s face, and she sank onto a chair next to the desk.
“That’s right,” Savannah said. “You missed one. When you went around the house, room by room, clearing all the numbers off the caller-ID histories from the phones, you forgot this one.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“Sure you do. Although, you weren’t as smart as you thought you were—besides missing this phone, I mean. The phone companies have records now of every call that’s coming and going, and the police can get them like that.” She snapped her fingers. “So, you went to a lot of trouble for nothing.”
“I told you, I don’t know what you’re talking about! Are you accusing me of something?”
“Oh, Dona, I haven’t even begun to accuse you.” She picked up the other phone and showed it to the frightened woman. “This is my cell phone,” she told her. Then she tapped the pen she had been using on the paper in front of her. “I’ve made a little list here of some calls I received. And I’ve compared them against some calls that you received. And guess what I found?”
Dona said nothing, just stared at her with haunted eyes.
“Uh…like this one here.” Savannah pointed to one of the entries she’d written. “This is a call that I received from Dirk the day your gardener was shot. Only a couple of minutes after. In fact, I was holding him and he was dying right there in your flower bed when Dirk called me.”
Savannah pointed to a number and time directly across the page from that entry. “And here…why…lookie here. You received a call four minutes before that. And guess what? The caller ID on this utility-room phone says that it was from a ‘Field, C.’”
“He was threatening me. It was one of those threatening, obscene calls that he’d been making regularly to me.”
“And you didn’t bother to mention this to me or the police?”
She shrugged. “I guess it slipped my mind.”
“Yeah, right.” Savannah pointed to her list again. “And what else do we have here? Oh, yes, Tammy called me to tell me that there was an intruder here in your house. And on this phone…” She held up the old telephone. “…it shows that you got a call two minutes before that, again from your old buddy, ‘Field, C.’”
“Another threatening call, saying that he was going to hurt me.” Tears sprang to her eyes. “Savannah, I don’t understand why you’re doing this, what you’re accusing me of. You saw him there in my bedroom; he was going to kill me. But you saved my life and now you’re…I don’t know what this is all about.”
“You know damned well what you did, Dona. You hired that son of a bitch to murder Kim and Jack. I’ve seen the pictures you gave him to identify the targets, and the map you drew for him, showing him the lay of your land here and the best place for him to stand when he killed them. The pictures, the map, they were found on his body at the morgue.”
Savannah reached into the top desk drawer and pulled out a box of beige, linen note cards. “And you were stupid enough to use cards from a box right here in your own desk.”
“But how…how did you know…why would you think it was me who…?”
“The envelope reeks of your perfume, Dona. You know, your special blend of perfume that you get whenever you’re in Paris. Your own personal, distinctive fragrance that anybody can smell a mile off.”
Savannah tossed the pen and phone onto the desk, stood and walked around to stand beside the woman. Her fists were clenched at her sides, her body shaking with fury.
“You set them up to be murdered—Kim and Jack. And now you’re going to tell me why.”
“No, I mean, I didn’t. I didn’t do anything wrong, and you’re way out of line to be coming here and—”
Dona started to get up from the chair, but Savannah shoved her back down. She leaned over her and placed both hands on the back of her chair, effectively pinning her.
“Why, Dona?” she demanded. “Why have them killed? What did they do to you that was so bad that you’d have them shot down, executed right here on your own land like that?”
Dona lost all composure and dropped all pretenses as she covered her face with her hands and began to sob. “You don’t know! You don’t know what kind of people they were. What they did to me!”
Savannah stood up, releasing her. She lowered her voice and assumed her pseudo–best-buddy tone that she used to convince a suspect they were among friends. “So tell me, Dona. Make me understand. I want to understand.”
Dona seemed to take heart. Hesitantly, she stood and walked behind the desk. She opened a drawer and pulled out the stack of tabloid cutouts that Tammy had discovered earlier. She threw them onto the top of the desk. “Those!” she said. “They are responsible for those!”
“How?”
“She spied on me. And so did he. They came here and asked me for jobs, and I hired them. I had no idea that the only reason why they were here was to snoop around and find out anything they could about my private life and report it to those lowlife scums who print that garbage. They knew each other and pretended not to. They were lovers; they lived together! But here, no-o-o, just faithful servants who were going about their jobs, doing good work for me.”
Savannah nodded and smiled sympathetically. “They betrayed you. You gave them a job, paid them money every week, and in return, they deceived you.”
“They didn’t just take my money.” Dona began to cry even harder. “Kim made me believe that she was my friend. She helped me through the hardest time of my life, right after the surgery—stood by me like a sister. And all the time, she was feeding these vultures the most intimate details of my life.”
She collapsed onto the chair behind the desk and grabbed handfuls of the articles, crumpling them in her fists. She held them out for Savannah to see. “Do you know what some of these say?” she shouted. “Do you know what she told them about me?”
“I can imagine.”
“No! No, you can’t. She…she—” The actress choked on the words several times before she could get them out. “She told them about how, after the surgery, I…I…soiled myself, and my sheets, and my bedcovers. I was sick! I nearly died! I couldn’t help myself. But she told them that, and they printed it! The whole world read about how Dona Papalardo, the once beautiful, glamorous movie star, couldn’t even control her bowels! How do you think that made me feel? How would that make anybody feel?”
She threw the papers as hard as she could, but they only fluttered like a dirty snowstorm around her. Covering her face with her hands, she sobbed hysterically. “I’m only human. And when people publicly humiliate you, say terrible things about you behind your back like that, print things like that, it hurts.”
“I’m sure it does,” Savannah said, looking at the pile of papers with their sensational and cruel headlines. “I’m sure it was excruciating. And if I’d been you, I’m sure I would have wanted to kill them, too. But you don’t do it, Dona. You scream at them, you fire them, maybe even sue their asses off, but you don’t hire an assassin to kill them! How can you do something like that, watch them die a horrible, bloody death like that, and still live with yourself?”
Dona dropped her hands from her face and stopped crying. Her face went hard, cold, expressionless. “I wasn’t intending to l
ive with myself,” she said. “I was going to die, too.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“I hired Field to do three murders: Kim’s, Jack’s, and mine.”
It was Savannah’s turn to be shocked. “Yours? You wanted him to kill you, too?”
“Yes, that was the plan all along. For him to kill them, then me.”
“But why?”
She shrugged and suddenly looked very tired, much older than her years. “I didn’t want to go on living like this. In constant pain, unable to do something as simple as eat the food my body needs to survive without being miserable. Ever since the surgery I’ve been miserable, depressed, alienating everyone I love. I thought I had nothing to live for.”
“So why not just take some sleeping pills? Why hire a hit man to take three lives?”
Dona gave a sad, dry chuckle. She picked up a handful of the papers and shook them in Savannah’s face. “Because I wanted these bastards to have something worth printing. They want sensational? I’ll give them sensational. How’s this for an article? The Grim Reaper Strikes Three Times, and this time it’s the famous actress herself who is dead. Just as she is poised on the brink of a great comeback, Dona Papalardo is murdered in her posh California coast mansion. Police suspect that her killer is the same murderer who shot and killed two of her staff, in botched attempts to get to her before.”
Savannah nodded. “Pretty sensational. It would have been the lead story on the evening news.”
Dona smiled. “Ah, yes, a tragic murder mystery that would go unsolved, year after year. Reality-crime shows about it, lots of speculation, conspiracy theories. That would have been my legacy. Not this crap.”
“So, what happened? Why did you hire me if you wanted to get killed anyway?”
“I needed a witness to everything, an outsider, someone to tell the world what had happened. Someone besides a member of my staff.”
Savannah thought of the horrible things she had “witnessed” on Dona’s behalf. “Gee, thanks for the memories,” she said. “But once Field was in the house, why did you call Tammy for help? Why did you have her call me? You had to know I might ‘save’ you from him. And if you wanted to die…?”
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