Robyn took Savannah to the kitchen where Savannah poured and served Robyn the promised shot of the expensive Scotch. And even though Savannah knew that her teetotaler grandmother would never approve, she had seen how the well-timed alcoholic beverage could calm down a distraught person . . . and occasionally, loosen a suspect’s tongue.
Not that Robyn Dante was any higher on Savannah’s suspect list than anybody else. But like Dirk, she always kept the spouse, the former spouse, or any love interest high on that list.
At the moment, Savannah had her solidly in the number two slot, right beneath her stepdaughter. Not that she had any particular evidence against Tiffany. But in any investigation, Savannah had her favorite, the one she hoped against hope was the perpetrator. And it was usually the person she disliked most as a human being.
It was so much easier to bust and send away someone you didn’t like. In fact, she had found it to be one of life’s most satisfying pleasures . . . along with dark chocolate and fine brandy.
In fact, she promised herself a square of a good 90% cacao bar and a snifter of a nice VSOP Cognac if she ever got to go home again and put her feet up. And, of course, if Gran was sound asleep in the guest room.
She kept reminding herself of that treat, holding the chocolate and brandy out in front of her mind’s eye as she stood in the Dantes’ kitchen and transferred every piece of trash, bit by bit, from their compactor to another garbage pail.
The latex gloves she was wearing helped to make the job a little less queasy. But the fact that someone had eaten salmon and some sort of chocolate mousse for dinner and thrown the leftovers into the trash didn’t help at all.
Halfway through, she decided to pass on the chocolate once she was home.
“You say the note was written on yellow paper?” she asked for the third time. She was examining everything from lipstick-smeared napkins to used and wadded tissues, but she wanted to be sure.
“Yes,” Robyn said. “Pale yellow with a large D watermark on it.”
Robyn was far less distressed and more than a little tipsy, having downed the Scotch in only a couple of gulps and then consumed half of another just as quickly. But she strolled on unsteady feet over to the opposite side of the room, pulled open a cabinet drawer, and took out a tablet.
She plopped it down on the island where Savannah was working and pointed to it with the studied deliberation of someone who was totally soused.
“There,” she said. “It was written on a sheet of that. It’s the house stationery. We all write our notes on that.”
“Okay. Thanks.” Savannah held up a coffee-sprinkled, salmon-enhanced banana peel. “It helps to know for sure what I’m looking for. Although I’m beginning to have my doubts that it’s in here. When was the last time this thing was emptied?”
“Oh, the housekeeper takes it out at least once a day. Although today was her day off, so I guess the trash was taken out yesterday.”
Savannah had reached the bottom of the barrel, so to speak, and had decided that she might never eat again. Now would be the perfect time to start that diet she’d been threatening to go on for the past twenty years.
“Are you absolutely sure that you put it in here?” Savannah asked as she removed the last item, an empty yogurt container, and tossed it into the nearby garbage can.
“Yes, I’m sure,” Robyn said after giving it much consideration. “I’m absolutely sure. I took it off the refrigerator, read it, and then threw it in there. Yes. Positive.”
Her eyes were glazed, her speech slurred, but Savannah didn’t doubt her honesty. At this stage of intoxication, she wouldn’t have been capable of fabrication.
“And what time was that?”
Again, it took Robyn a few extra seconds to get the brain cells popping. “Um...it was when I came home from the spa. Let’s see. About five forty-five or six.”
“So, when was the last time you saw Andrew?”
“This afternoon when I left for the spa. It must have been a little after one. My facial was at one-thirty, so . . . yes. About one or one-fifteen.”
“What spa was this?”
“Euro-Spa in Twin Oaks.”
That would easy enough to verify. So far, Suspect Numero Dos had an excellent alibi.
But where was this note she claimed to have found? And why wasn’t it where she said she’d put it?
One of the crime scene techs passed by, and Savannah called out to her. “Melinda, would you please dust the outside of this compactor for latents?”
“Sure.” The tech hurried over with her kit and set about searching for fingerprints. Even though Savannah was no longer on the police force, she had made a lot of friends there, and many of them were still furious that she had been unfairly terminated all those years ago.
“We miss you, Savannah,” the woman said as she expertly swirled her brush. “It’s just not the same, having to deal with Dirk and no Savannah around to dilute the acid, if you know what I mean.”
“He’s not so bad,” she replied with a snicker, “if you box him upside the ears every Friday night and keep him in line.”
“You’re the only one who’s ever been able to do that and survive. He’ll take it from you, not from the rest of us.”
“Dirk’s crusty, but inside, he’s a marshmallow.”
At that moment, Dirk’s bass voice roared through the house. “Come on, people! We’ve got a lot of ground to cover here, and I don’t want it to take all friggen night! Let’s move!”
Melinda shot Savannah a look. “Oh yeah?” she said. “A real sweetie pie, that Dirk Coulter.”
“You just have to get to know him.”
“No, thanks. Not into rude dudes.”
Dirk paused as he passed the kitchen door, looked in, and saw Savannah taking off her rubber gloves. “Dr. Liu,” he said gruffly, “is getting ready to bag the body. You wanna watch her do it or keep playing with your garbage there?”
“You wanna watch your tone or become a suspicious smell in an attic?” Savannah tossed back. He looked moderately surprised for a moment, then gave her a big grin and a wink and continued on his way. “See there,” she said to Melinda. “Coulter’s not so bad. You just have to smack him around once in a while.”
***
After helping Robyn Dante to her bedroom and tucking her into her four-poster bed, Savannah went back downstairs to watch the official bagging of the body.
When she stepped out the back door and onto the patio area, she was struck with how very different everything looked fully illuminated. The spooky, surreal red glow from the pool was lost in the harsh luminance from the CSI floodlights. Mounted on six-foot-tall telescoping poles, the portable units cast a bright, shadow-filled light over the whole scene, revealing the stark reality of the crime that had been committed.
Under the unforgiving white lights, the fake corpses looked fake, the faux blood and gore looked faux. And the very real body of Andrew Dante in his strange resting place looked depressingly real.
Savannah walked over to the area around the body that had been cordoned off with yellow tape in a ten- or twelve-foot circle around the coffin. She stopped at the tape and waited for Dirk and Dr. Jennifer Liu to look up from their task and acknowledge her.
Dr. Liu saw her first. The Asian beauty smiled the moment she spotted her, rose, and hurried over to embrace her as well as she could, considering she was wearing bloody gloves. “Savannah,” she said, “so good to see you.”
“You, too, Dr. Jen.”
Savannah glanced down at the sequined miniskirt that stuck out only a couple of inches below the coroner’s white lab smock. And below that were black fishnet stockings and a serious pair of black stilettos with four-inch heels.
“Caught you out partying, did they?” Savannah asked with a grin.
“Don’t they always?”
“Either you party a lot or they have lousy timing.”
Dr. Liu smiled a naughty, mischievous little smirk. “Or maybe a bit of both.” She nodded toward the bod
y. “You want to see?”
“I already saw, but sure. Let’s have another look now that we have lighting.”
Savannah ducked under the tape and walked over to the coffin and its unfortunate occupant. Dirk was squatting next to it, also wearing gloves. He was gingerly lifting the fabric that covered the body’s blood-soaked chest with two fingers and looking beneath it.
“Get a load of this,” he told them.
Both women hurried over to him and knelt on either side of the coffin, Savannah next to Dirk.
“What is it?” she asked.
“These clothes . . . the vampire getup,” he said. “He’s not actually wearing it. The stuff’s lying on him.”
“What?” Savannah looked closer.
Dirk lifted the edge of the burgundy velvet vest that covered Dante’s midriff area. “These weird Dracula clothes. Somebody must have laid them on top of the body. Look. Here are his regular clothes underneath.”
Sure enough. Beneath the costume was a simple, pale blue polo shirt. Under the black pants was a pair of jeans. And he had a pair of Nikes on his feet that were covered by a small piece of black velvet.
“That’s weird,” Dr. Liu said as she bent over and began to peel the fabric back herself. “Charles,” she called out to one of the photographers, who was standing nearby taking pictures of the pool area. “Come here, and get some shots of this.”
The young man walked over to them and stepped inside the perimeter tape.
He shuddered when he saw the body. “Wow,” he said. “That’s a pretty grisly one. Rough way to go.”
Dr. Liu crooked her finger, beckoning him. Reluctantly, he came closer.
“Zoom in tight on this,” she said as she pulled the vest and white shirt away from the blue polo shirt.
After he had taken several shots, she pulled it further away, and he took more.
Then she laid it back down. “I’ll wait till I get him home to take it off. I don’t want to lose anything in the way of hair or fiber that might be on it.” She looked around them at the palms, which were dancing in the night breeze. “It’s a bit too windy out here tonight for my taste. Something good could blow away.”
Dirk didn’t reply. He had stood and was staring down at the body, looking perplexed.
“What is it?” Savannah asked him.
“I’m still wondering . . . He’s a big guy. Bigger than me. And he was in great shape, too. How do you figure he stood still for somebody to ram that thing into his chest? Anybody who would come at me with something like that, I’d go crazy on them. Why didn’t he?”
Savannah knelt and looked at the body’s hands. “Good point. No defense wounds that I can see. Not a single skinned knuckle, not even a tiny cut.” She turned it over in her mind for a moment or two, then said, “Postmortem, maybe?”
“Maybe,” Dirk said, nodding. “Which would mean that the stake may not even be our murder weapon.”
Dr. Liu had finished directing the photographer and was instructing some of her assistants to lay out the body bag next to the coffin. But she was eavesdropping on their conversation.
“That would make sense,” she said. “That wound just doesn’t look right to me.”
“Well, no, a gruesome wound like that, what’s right about it?”
Savannah looked down at the sticky red gore in the middle of the victim’s chest.
“Oh, it’s gross all right,” the doctor agreed. “But what I mean is, the wound itself, at least what I can see of it here in this lighting with the body still dressed, it doesn’t look right to me. The edges around the wound are very ragged. I’m thinking the stake might have been inserted postmortem. And I’m not totally convinced he was killed here. He may have been, but...”
“What do you mean?” Dirk asked her. “You don’t think he was killed here?”
“I don’t know, and I won’t until I get him on my table. But I have my doubts.”
Dirk and Savannah watched as the coroner and her team unfolded a white sheet and laid it on top of the open, unzipped body bag. Then the four of them lifted the corpse from the coffin and laid it onto the sheet.
Dr. Liu filled out an evidence label and scribbled pertinent information on a toe tag, as well. She removed Dante’s tennis shoe and slipped the tag onto his toe.
Savannah smiled—it was a pleasure watching her high level of professionalism. Some coroners waited until the body was in the morgue to put on the toe tag. But years ago, Dr. Liu’s predecessor had temporarily mixed up a couple of bodies in the morgue. And since that was one of the main reasons he had lost his job and Dr. Liu had gotten hers, the good doctor was particularly cautious about that sort of thing.
The two men and two women were out of breath by the time they had the body moved, properly bundled in the sheet, and placed into the body transport bag.
Dirk turned to Savannah and said, “If this guy wasn’t killed here and somebody moved him—”
“It must have been more than one person who moved him,” she finished for him.
“No kidding,” Dr. Liu said, smoothing her long black hair back and retying it with a silk scarf. “He’s a handful. Several hands full.”
“Dr. Liu,” one of the techs said, “what are we going to do about that?”
He had zipped the bag as far closed as he could, but the stake sticking out of the chest prevented him from closing it all the way.
“Yes, that’s a bit of a problem,” she said. “I don’t want to remove that until I get him on the autopsy table. I want to properly examine and document the angle and all that.”
“You can’t take that out the front door with a crowd of paparazzi waiting,” Dirk said. “Can you imagine? They’d go crazy!”
Dr. Liu gave him a withering look. “I’m ten steps ahead of you, Detective, as usual. But my concerns are more legal than media-oriented. This is a homicide—I can’t leave that body bag unsealed.”
Dirk returned the nasty, condescending look. “Well, in spite of you grossly insulting me, as usual, I’m going to help you out. And then, when you see what a brilliant solution I have to your problem, you can apologize to me properly.”
With a cocky strut, he walked away from them, around the pool, and back into the house.
“Apologize? To him?” Dr. Liu said with a chuckle.
“Oh, yes. And properly,” Savannah added.
“O-o-okay.” She shook her head. “That’ll be the day, when Coulter rises to brilliant.”
“Hey, he can surprise you. Dirk’s not just a pretty face, you know.”
While Dirk was gone on his mysterious errand, the coroner’s team brought in a gurney and placed it beside the body bag. After carefully lifting the bag and its strange burden onto the gurney, they raised the stretcher to waist level.
By then, Dirk had returned with his treasures—a roll of duct tape and a white plastic garbage bag.
“Voila!” he said, presenting both items.
“Voilà?” Dr. Liu said. “I don’t see a voilà in front of me. No ‘There you are!’ in sight.”
“Do I have to do everything myself?” Dirk said with the sigh of the well-practiced martyr.
“Apparently so,” Savannah told him.
With much flourish and a style that was lacking in polish but rich in drama, Dirk tented the garbage bag over the stake, tore off a long piece of the tape, and began to seal the edges around the garbage bag onto the transport bag.
A few minutes later, his creation was finished. A true example of functional art.
He pulled a permanent marker from his pocket, handed it to Dr. Liu, and said, “There! Sign it, your signature running over the seam, and then . . . you may offer me your apology and see if I will accept it.”
Dr. Liu stared at him for a long time. And Savannah held her breath.
Of all the many qualities, the myriad virtues that made up Dr. Liu’s character, humility wasn’t among them. Jennifer Liu was highly intelligent, successful, strong, and beautiful. She didn’t really have a
lot to be humble about. So she didn’t bother.
She stepped up to Dirk, and in her four-inch heels, she was eye to eye with him. And when she leaned forward, they were literally nose to nose.
“You, Detective Sergeant Dirk Coulter, are, indeed, brilliant,” she said with only a modicum of sarcasm. “You are a man among men, a prince among thieves, a diamond among the rough, a tribute to your gender. I bow before your austere magnificence and pay homage to your—”
“All right, enough.” Dirk stepped back and crossed his arms over his broad chest. “Is there an apology in there somewhere, or are you just trying to bore me to death with all this crap so that you won’t have to admit that I’m smarter than you?”
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