Murder à la Mode

by G. A. McKevett

  Like stealing.

  She had swiped a candle from the dining hall and brought it up to her room to complete her ritual. The small votive sat on a saucer on the edge of the tub, the only light in the room.

  The suds glistened iridescent on her body and for a moment, there in the candlelight, the ugly realities of the world disappeared and she was nothing more than a woman enjoying her own beauty and sensuality.

  Until her cell phone rang.

  She had brought the phone and her gun into the bathroom with her and laid both on a stack of towels near the tub. With all that had happened, she had been reluctant to leave either behind.

  Now she wished she had. She really, really wished she had.

  If she’d only left the phone in the other room, she wouldn’t have to kill whoever had called and interrupted her bubble bath.

  “Dirk, this had better not be you,” she said when the caller I.D. showed only “Private Number” on its display. “I told you I wanted to be left alone for a while.”

  “It ain’t Dirk; it’s me,” said a female voice with a much thicker Southern accent than even her own. “You were supposed to call me. Gran said you would, and I’ve been waiting here by the phone for ages. Where have you been?”

  “Digging a woman out from under a pile of rocks and trying to solve a murder,” Savannah replied, settling back into the bath with the phone to her ear and resignation in her heart. If she knew her sister Vidalia, and she did—all too well—the bubbles would be long gone by the time this conversation was over.

  Vidalia could gripe for ages.

  “Yeah, right,” Vidalia said. “You’d think you could come up with a better story than that one.”

  “Sorry, it was the best I could do in a pinch. What’s shakin’, sugar?”

  “Me. I’m so big I jiggle all over when I walk.”

  “You’re pregnant, sweetie. You’ve been pregnant twice before and you know this always happens. You’ll lose the weight after the baby’s born, what with nursing and all. You did before.”

  “Even my ankles are fat!”

  “That isn’t fat. You can’t have fat ankles. That’s water, darlin’.”

  “I can’t stand this anymore. I’m tired of being pregnant. I want to back out of the whole deal.”

  “You’ve only got six weeks to go, and then all this will be a thing of the past. You’ll have skinny ankles again. I promise. I’ll buy you a pretty ankle bracelet for a baby gift. Lord knows, after two sets of twins, you’ve got baby clothes aplenty.”

  “I think Butch is in love with another woman.”

  Savannah pictured her brother-in-law, his head stuck under the hood of a car, grease up to his elbows, his only hobbies automobile repair, watching baseball from his recliner at home, and deer hunting. None were performed in particularly female-rich environs.

  Besides, Butch—like most males who were involved with the Reid sisters—had a deep and abiding fear of his woman.

  “I really doubt it, Vi. Butch is a good guy. And he wants to keep his genitals. It’s probably just your imagination.”

  “He’s been hanging out in a strip club.”

  “What?”

  Savannah had expected anything but that. A strip club? Their tiny, rural hometown of McGill, Georgia, was only three blocks long. They considered themselves lucky to have a video store—three shelves of rentals on the back wall of Penny’s Grocery & Drug Store.

  There wasn’t a proper, or improper, strip club within a two-hundred-mile radius of McGill.

  “What are you talking about, girl?” she said. “Those hormones of yours have made you plumb crazy! What strip club?”

  “Well…they’ve got these new uniforms out at the Chat-n-Chew Café. And they might as well be strippers. Their hind ends are hangin’ out from under those short skirts of theirs and their T-shirts have always been too tight. Anyways, Butch has developed this sudden craving for their double-chili cheeseburgers. He’s just gotta have one for lunch a couple times a week. He always has been an ass man. Don’t tell me you didn’t notice that about him.”

  Savannah rolled her eyes. “No, Vi, I can’t say as I have noticed that, but if you say so. He’s your husband. Maybe you oughta bend over a little more when you serve him his TV dinner of an evening. Give him a little thrill.”

  “No way! I’m never bending over in front of that man again for as long as I live. He…he…” Sniffle, sniffle. “He made a very rude remark about my backside. One that I’ll never forgive him for.”

  “Oh, yeah. Gran told me about the ‘not enough sunshine’ crack he made. Not cool, but he was probably just teasing you. He loves your butt.”

  More sniffles. “How do you know?”

  “Because you have four children already and another one on the way. Your ankles are swollen, you’re crying all the time, you’re accusing the man of going to a strip club just because he wants a cheeseburger for lunch, and he still comes home after work every day. He’s a man in love with you. Butt and all. Believe me.”

  “Are you saying that Butch is some sort of saint for putting up with me?”

  Savannah sank lower into her tub, feeling older than Granny Reid. Much older. “No-o-o, Vi,” she said in the least-exasperated voice that she could muster. “I would never suggest such a thing to you, and certainly not when you’re pregnant. I’m just telling you that you’ve got a good husband and a good life. If I were you, I’d just wallow in that for a while and not worry about the waitresses at Chat-n-Chew or the size of your butt. Life’s good, Vi. Really, really good! Enjoy it.”

  “Really?”

  “Really, sweetie. You’re beautiful and so, so loved. Put your feet up, have yourself a cold drink, relax and make your baby.”

  “Thanks, Van. I love you.”

  “I love you, too, darlin’. Take it easy.”

  “Okay. Bye.”

  Savannah punched the “Off” button and said, “Lordy, lordy, lordy…will those young’uns ever get raised?”

  She laid the phone on the towels, silently daring it to ring again. Then she turned back to her bubbles—both of them. The rest were all gone.

  The candle flame sizzled, flickered, and died, leaving her in total darkness.

  “Well,” she said with a sigh. “Now ain’t that just ducky.”

  Savannah picked up her travel clock from the nightstand and pushed the button on the top. The light came on, the blue-green display showing 2:39 AM.

  So much for dropping right off and getting a full night’s sleep, she thought.

  For the fourteenth time she fluffed her pillow, smoothed the sheets beside her and tugged her nightgown back down around her legs.

  It had been a while since she had gone this long without sleep, and she was positively punchy.

  The faces of her suspects floated before her, each with their own agenda…an agenda that might translate into a motive for murder.

  And even more haunting were the victims. Tess’s sightless eyes staring at nothing, her skull crushed. Carisa with eyes closed and her limbs twisted into terrible angles, and inside, deadly bleeding.

  Okay, she told herself, going down the mental list again, Alex and Roxy had a motive for getting rid of Tess, but why try to kill Carisa?

  Leila had the best reason to attack Carisa—in order to get back into the game—but she couldn’t have been sure that would happen, and most people would have to be fairly certain they’d get what they wanted before they would actually kill somebody. And…why would she kill Tess?

  She had to believe that one person had committed both crimes. What would be the odds that two murderers would both decide to strike in virtually the same time and place? The coincidence was far too great to really be considered.

  Besides, it was disturbing enough to think that one killer was wandering around, walking and talking with decent folks, acting like a regular human being. It boggled the mind to think that two might be out there.

  Without knowing the killer’s identity and motives,
no one at Blackmoor Castle could really consider themselves safe.

  And not only was Savannah concerned for her own safety, but she took it personally when people got hurt, or worse, on her watch. She wasn’t sure how she had failed Carisa, but she felt she had somehow. If she’d only seen something, heard something, put some pieces together that still eluded her, Carisa would be in her bedroom right now, scheming up ways to cheat in the next competition, as she should be. Instead Carisa was fighting for her life in a hospital, having her spleen removed.

  Savannah hated whoever it was who had done this. How could anyone feel such a high degree of entitlement that they could rationalize killing another human being? Was there any more evil and selfish act than murder, taking absolutely everything from someone, even their very life?

  That was why she loved catching them and putting them away where they couldn’t hurt another innocent person. It was fun to nail a burglar, an embezzler, even a shoplifter. But catching someone who stole life itself—that was what she lived for.

  And now she was trying to sleep in the very house where a murder had been done, most likely by someone she had seen and spoken to that very day. It was almost more than she could stand.

  She sat up, threw back the covers, and got out of bed. Walking over to the window, she could feel the cool wooden floor under her bare feet, and the sensation was somehow soothing in the otherwise hot and stuffy room.

  Sliding the window up, she felt a cool breeze sweep inside. She closed her eyes and let the night wind smooth her hair back from her face, caressing her skin. It made her feel clean, refreshed, her spirit less soiled by recent events.

  Glancing down at the courtyard, she saw a shadow, a figure walking from the stable to the keep. The person passed beneath a lantern and she could see his face well enough to recognize him.

  It was Dirk.

  He was still on duty. With virtually no sleep the night before, he was still going, as obsessed as she was. This compulsion to grab the bad guys was one of the ties that had bound them together as friends.

  That and a fanatical love of junk food.

  She reached for her cell phone and punched in his number. Then she watched as he stopped in mid-stride in the center of the courtyard and pulled his phone from his pocket.

  “What?” he barked—his usual gracious, chatty self.

  “Look up and wave ‘hi.’”

  “To who?”

  “To me, numbskull.”

  He looked up, scanned the front of the building, and stopped when he saw her waving to him from the third floor window.

  Reluctantly, he waved back. Dirk wasn’t comfortable with public displays of affection.

  “What are you doing up?” he said with unconvincing gruffness. “You’re supposed to be getting some rest.”

  “I can’t sleep. You?”

  “Me either.”

  “Whatcha doin’?”

  “Thought I’d go down to that cellar again, check it out. See if I missed anything.”

  “Want company?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “I’m in my nightgown, and I’m not getting dressed again for anybody…not until sunup anyway.”

  Even in the semi-darkness, she could see him grin from ear to ear. “All the better,” he said. “I’ll meet you downstairs.”

  Chapter

  12

  “I don’t like this stupid castle of yours,” Dirk said as they descended the stairs into the cellar. “It’s spooky and creepy, and this dungeon thing down here particularly sucks.”

  “Ah-h-h, ye have such a way with words, lad,” she said. “Are ye sure yer not an Irish bard?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. And it isn’t my castle. I don’t like it any more than you do. At least you don’t have to sleep here.”

  “If I did, I’d be sleeping with a rosary on my chest and a string of garlic around my neck.”

  “But you aren’t Catholic, and you don’t like garlic.”

  “Well, I’m gonna start liking it and get real religious if I have to come down here in this torture chamber many more times.”

  Savannah looked around the so-called dungeon and decided he had a point. The large, rust-encrusted chains hanging from the wall, some of them with strange manacles, and other devices that looked a bit like bear traps, had obviously been placed there with the intention of giving the area a sinister atmosphere. And the decorator had been highly successful. All it needed was an iron maiden and a rack for stretching prisoners on to complete the ambiance.

  “I know what you mean,” she said. “This cellar reminds me of that S&M club we raided in West Hollywood.”

  Once again her eyes scanned the assorted devices on the walls for anything resembling Dr. Liu’s description of the murder weapon. She knew it was pointless, having searched it at least ten times before, but she couldn’t resist looking. Finding the murder weapon was paramount in any homicide investigation. You could learn so much about a killer by examining the tools of his trade.

  “It’s not there,” Dirk told her, following her line of vision.

  “I know,” she said. “But I can’t help looking.”

  “You’d think they’d just use something that’s here, with all the choices,” he said.

  “Maybe they did. And then they didn’t put it back where it belongs. And you know what that tells us about the murderer…?”

  He just gave her a blank look.

  She smiled. “The killer’s a man.”

  “Very funny. And this from a woman who lost her keys and had to call me at three in the morning to come jimmy her bathroom window open so she could get into her own house.”

  She stopped smiling and lifted her chin a notch. “Be that as it may. Shall we continue?”

  “By all means. After you, Madame.”

  For several minutes they both walked around the room, saying nothing, studying the various markers and the scribbles on the floor left by the C.S.I. techs.

  Savannah knew Dirk had memorized the layout as well as she had, but it never hurt to go over it once more. Or twenty more times. Whatever it took until you found something that you had overlooked.

  She knelt beside one of the four plastic markers that had been set on the floor to designate where blood drops had been found. The four markers were in a relatively straight line from the freezer on the far side of the room to the center. The two that were nearest the freezer door were the closest together, only a foot apart.

  “These four drops were low velocity,” she said, more to herself than to Dirk who had heard it all before from the C.S.I. team. “Probably dripped from the weapon.”

  “Or maybe the killer was bleeding, if he got injured during the attack,” Dirk suggested.

  “That’s usually when the attacker is using a knife,” she replied. “His hand gets slippery from the blood and slides down onto the blade. And besides, Tess had no defensive wounds. He came up behind her and whacked her before she even knew he was there. Otherwise, she would have turned to face him and been struck from the front.”

  “Unless she knew who was behind her, trusted him, maybe even talked to him and then turned her back on him.”

  “Maybe, but if the weapon was as large and heavy as the wound indicated, she would have probably gotten suspicious if they’d approached her with it.”

  Dirk nodded. “He probably snuck up on her when she was reaching for the ice cream. And, I want you to notice that I’m tolerating your calling the killer a ‘him’ like you always do until you find out it’s a broad, even though it’s blatantly sexist.”

  She gave him a sweet smile. “Oh yeah, we all know how often ‘broads’ kill men, compared to the other way around.”

  “It happens. And you’d better hope that this time it’s a chick, because otherwise there’s a one-in-four chance it was your boyfriend. More like fifty-fifty, because I don’t think it was either that hippie cameraman or the pansy microphone dude.”

  “It’s not fifty-fifty w
hen one of the two male suspects is the husband. Odds are wa-a-ay in favor of her old man. They don’t call it home-icide for nothing.”

  He opened the freezer door, turned on the light and looked around. “I gotta admit, I think it’s Jarvis, too. What with you overhearing that conversation between him and the blond airhead, that’s enough to convince me it was him. But that’s not nearly enough to charge him. We really need the murder weapon.”

  “That’s just the beginning of what we need. Especially now that we’ve got two victims. Have you heard anything new on Carisa’s condition?”

  “She’s out of surgery. Still touch and go. Doctor said that even if she lives one of her legs is never going to be the same.”

  Savannah flashed back on the sight of the woman’s horribly twisted leg and felt a little queasy, and more than a little angry at the person who was responsible.

  “I don’t think he was waiting for her here in the freezer,” Dirk said, “for several reasons.”

  “The first being that he would have frozen his tushy off?”

  “In no time. And besides, the inside of this thing isn’t all that big. I don’t think anybody could have hidden well enough that she wouldn’t have seen them the instant she walked in and turned on the light.”

  “And if she’d seen them, she would have been attacked from the front, not the back.”

  “Right.”

  “So, either the killer followed her down here from upstairs, or was waiting for her.” She walked over to a door halfway down the wall to her right. “My guess is that they were hiding in here.”

  Opening the door, she revealed a well-stocked wine cellar. “I already checked in here, and so did the C.S.I. team. We didn’t find a thing except these dusty bottles.”

  “Neither did I,” Dirk said. “The floor’s clean and no footprints. No clear prints on the door handle or jamb. And it’s pretty obvious that nobody’s messed with the bottles because they’re all evenly dusty.”

  Savannah bent over and looked once again at each shelf where bottles of merlot, chardonnay, cabernet, zinfandel, and other exotic wines she had never even seen lay, side by side. She would have to bring Ryan and John down here. As connoisseurs, they would truly appreciate the vast selection.