Chapter
“N
o, no... I didn’t hurt
anyone,” the mummy on the bed protested as Dirk took a pair of handcuffs from
his pocket and attached one cuff to her right arm.
Savannah could see the
puncture mark and some bruising from an IV in the crook of her elbow. “Be
careful with her, Dirk,” she warned. “She’s just had surgery. We may have to
arrange for a Medevac to get her back home. She doesn’t look like she’s
ferryworthy to me.”
“Don’t worry,” he said.
“We’ll treat her a lot better than she treated old Sergio, rat that he was.”
Savannah shook her head as
she studied what she could see of the woman’s face. Her eyes were black and
blue and swollen nearly to slits. Apparently she had just undergone some major
work. “I guess you were hoping to have your face changed so much that no one would
ever recognize you, huh, Suzette?”
She just groaned in
response.
“And,” Savannah continued,
“did you even consider your sister, Clare? She told me you weren’t dead, but
just hiding out somewhere.”
Glancing over at the
window, Savannah saw that there was a magnificent view of the lighthouse from
the master suite. “She also told me you love the lighthouse. I guess you
thought you had it set up pretty nice here, with your view and your new face.
Too bad it had to cost someone else his whole life for you to have it.”
A buzzing sound made all
four of them jump a bit, until Dirk took out his cell phone and answered it.
“Yeah, Coulter here.”
He looked a bit surprised.
“Yes, hi there. I didn’t think I’d hear from you.”
He mouthed the word,
“Elizabeth,” to Savannah, then continued. “Actually, we found the house after
all. Yes, we’re good. And I’m in the process of arresting Ms. Baker even as we
speak.”
He listened intently for a
long time, then said, “Oh, really? That’s very interesting. Yes, I understand
now why you were reluctant to say anything last night, but thank you for
reconsidering and calling. Sure. No problem. I’ll check it out and call you
back later.”
When he snapped his phone
closed, Savannah could tell something was up, just from the look on his face.
“What is it?” she asked.
“What did she want?”
Dirk reached over and
locked the other cuff around the bedpost. Then he said to his prisoner, “Ms.
Elizabeth Fortunato just told me something very interesting about you. She says
I should check your pool house. Do you think I should do that, Suzette? Should
I see what I can find in your pool house?”
Savannah was confused, but
all ears. “What’s in the pool house?”
Dirk gave her a strange
look. He, too, looked confused, but excited.
“Elizabeth says that she
and that kid who takes care of her office helped Suzette here move a
particularly heavy box into the pool house. She says it had a weird, bad smell
to it. That Suzette here told her it was books that had suffered some water
damage. But Elizabeth says she opened the trunk of her car today and it still
stinks.”
“Oh, really?” Savannah’s
own brain gears were spinning. “The smell was that bad, huh?”
“Yeah, and in light of what
we told her at the bar last night, she was thinking that maybe she might get in
trouble if she admitted she’d helped move such a... stinky, heavy box. So she
slept on it and this morning, she decided she’d better tell us about it.”
“Well, there’s only one
thing to do,” Savannah said, her heart pounding in her throat. “Let’s go check
out that box of smelly books.”
They were still at least
fifty feet from the pool house when Savannah got her first whiff and nearly
gagged.
“Oh, Lord,” she said,
“there’s only one thing in the world that smells like that.”
“Yeah, a DB,” Dirk said,
wrinkling his nose. “My favorite call.” Savannah agreed. If there was anything
in the world that cops hated to hear on their car radio it was the term
“DB”—dead body—or just as bad, “suspicious smell.”
In all her years on the
job, Savannah had seen and heard plenty of things that made her old before her
time, things that scarred her soul and kept her awake at night. But there was
only one thing that made her barf.
And she was smelling it
now.
The stench of death.
“You go in,” she said,
holding her sweater over the lower half of her face. “You know I can’t take it.
I’ll hurl. I always do, and that makes things so much worse.”
“Pansy.”
She raised her hands in the
air. “I admit it. I have no pride in this respect. None at all. I’m a total
wuss.”
“Sissy girl.”
“I am. That’s me. Prissy
Pants, that’s me. You go in and I’ll owe you.”
He shook his head, stood at
the door of the pool house, and opened it. Then he took a deep, deep breath...
and shuddered from head to toe.
Dr. Liu had told her long
ago, “Here’s how you handle the smell, Savannah: just take a big deep gulp of
it, fill up your head and your lungs. It’s such a shock to the system, you
won’t smell anything else for hours.”
Yeah, right,
she thought.
Maybe it
works for Dr. Liu and Dirk, but I’d rather bite a skunk in the ass and suffer
the consequences.
“What is it? Do you see the
box?” she asked.
He was frozen in the
doorway, staring, his mouth hanging open.
“Well?” she asked, inching
forward, her curiosity getting the best of her. “What do you see?”
“Oh, my god,” he said.
“Weird. This is so creepy! Van, come here! You gotta see this.”
She might be squeamish
about smelling dead bodies, but Savannah’s primary character attribute was
nosiness. It overrode absolutely everything else in her system.
She held one hand over her
mouth and with the other hand pinched her nose together. Then she ran over to
the door and looked inside.
The interior was dim, lit
only by one small window. But the late morning sunlight was shining in enough
to illuminate the macabre scene.
A woman sat on a folding
chair, pulled up to a card table. Across the tabletop was spread a game of
solitaire. She held a stack of cards in her hands.
“What the hell?” Savannah
said, forgetting all about the stench.
The woman was dead.
No doubt about it.
She was tied to the chair
with yellow nylon rope and was sagging limply against her bindings. Her flat,
milky eyeballs stared sightlessly at the opposite wall.
She was wearing a white
physician’s smock and her platinum blonde hair was nicely coifed on one side,
and stuck to the other side of her head with a mass of black, matted gore that
Savannah knew was the result of a terrible head wound.
On her smock pocket was a
small, black, plastic name tag.
Savannah read it aloud.
“Suzette Du Bois, M.D.”
She and Dirk stared at each
other for a long time. Finally, he said, “So, if this is Suzette... who do I
have handcuffed in there?”
They ran back to the house
and rushed into the master bedroom, where the maid was offering the lady on the
bed a glass of water with a drinking straw. The woman pushed the water away,
spilling it across the bed.
At her feet, Sammy the
poodle whined and licked the water off his paw.
“Who are you?” Dirk
shouted, jostling her shoulder. “Devon? Clare Du Bois?”
“No, go away,” the woman
mumbled with swollen, bandaged lips. “Get out!”
Savannah looked down at the
woman’s hands. She was clutching the bedspread, digging her nails into the
fabric. Her long, bright red fingernails.
Savannah had seen those
fingernails before... swirling a drink.
“Myrna,” she said. “Myrna,
it’s you.”
The woman on the bed began
to sob; it was a horrible, high-pitched shriek, like a hurt animal caught in a
trap.
The maid backed into the
corner of the room, pulled her apron up over her head, and began to softly cry.
Dirk looked at Savannah in
surprise. “How do you...? Is it her?”
Savannah nodded. “It’s
Myrna,” she said. “The body in the pool house is Suzette. She killed her.”
“But why?” Dirk said. “For
the money?”
Savannah thought back on
the grisly scene that had been staged in the pool house. “I don’t think so,”
she said. “You wanted her to be alone, too, didn’t you, Myrna?”
The woman stopped shrieking
and nodded her head ever so slightly.
“Suzette fixed your
ex-boyfriend up really good, didn’t she,” Savannah said. “So good that he left
you, found himself a younger woman with his new, younger-looking face that you
paid for.”
Again, Myrna nodded.
Savannah continued. “She’s
playing solitaire out there in your pool house. And you’re here, in a fancy
house, with all her money and Sergio’s, too. And under those bandages you’ve
got a new face, a new life... or so you thought.”
Myrna nodded, still crying,
still clutching the bedclothes. “There’s just one problem, Myrna,” Savannah
told her, “you can’t create a nice, new life for yourself by robbing two other
people of theirs.”
“Yeah,” Dirk said,
uncuffing the bedpost and placing it on her other wrist. “Lady, you just bought
yourself one shitload of really nasty karma.”
Chapter
“I
’m never going to look at
that island the same way again,” Savannah said as she gazed out across the
water at Santa Tesla Island, where it appeared to be floating on the horizon
atop a cloud of haze.
“I just wish we’d been
there with you,” Abby said as she bit into one of Savannah’s chicken salad
sandwiches and helped herself to a handful of potato chips. “I would have given
anything to sleep in a hotel right under that lighthouse. To have its beam
shining right inside your room! That must have been a wonderful experience.”
Savannah cast a quick
warning glance toward Dirk, but he pretended not to hear as he stretched out on
his back on the beach towel and adjusted the bill of his baseball cap to shield
his eyes from the sun.
“It was okay,” she said.
“Maybe we can take you over there for a day trip before you go back home to New
York.”
“Count me out on that one,”
Dirk grumbled. “I’ve had all of that stinking island I can stand. You couldn’t
pay me to go back there again.”
Savannah laughed. “He’s
just irked because nobody over there was all that impressed with his gold
shield.”
“I shoulda showed ’em my
big gun,” he said with a smirk. “That would have put the fear of Dirk in them.”
“Yeah, yeah, we all live in
terror of the Almighty Dirko.” Tammy picked up a slice of fresh mango and
squirted him with it.
“Myrna Cooper was pretty
scared of him,” Savannah said. “She was a babbling idiot on the way home in
that medical helicopter. Told Dirk everything he wanted to know and then some.”
“Okay...” Tammy nudged him
with her foot. “Why did she dye her hair blond and take the name Norma Jean
Baker? She isn’t a big Marilyn fan, is she?”
Dirk groaned and rolled
over on his side to face them. He looked terribly put out to have to answer all
these questions. But Savannah knew better; Dirk was never happier than when he
could complain about something. He was loving every minute of it.
“No, she’s not all that
into Marilyn,” he said. “But she figured if we were on her trail, it would be
better for us to think she was Suzette. Then, she could supposedly shake us if
she needed to and start up again somewhere else, and we’d never know it was her
we were chasing. So she wore a blond wig her first few trips to the island.
Then the day before we caught up with her, right before her surgery, she
colored it permanently.”
“But she’s so much older
than Suzette,” Abigail added. “How could she hope to pass for her?”
“She did a pretty good job
of it,” Savannah told her. “She wore large sunglasses and scarves and depended
on her big cleavage to keep the boys’ eyes off her face. It worked. The guys on
the catamaran thought she was a lot younger.”
“How exactly and where did
she kill Suzette?” Abby wanted to know.
Savannah cringed,
remembering Myrna’s cold-blooded description of the murder. “Suzette used to
take Sammy for a walk in some woods near her house, first thing, every day when
she got home from work. Myrna knew the route well, from taking him for walks
herself. She hid herself and her car among the trees and waited for Suzette to
come along. Then she ran up behind her, smashed her in the head with a big
rock, and dragged her body into her trunk.”
“Primitive,” Abby said.
Savannah nodded. “Very, but
effective.”
“So, Myrna was the one who
installed the spyware on Sergio’s computer?” Tammy asked.
Savannah shook her head.
“Actually, Myrna claims that Suzette put it in there to spy on Sergio’s e-mails
and see if he was chasing other women. But Suzette told Myrna about it, and
Myrna used the software to get his bank account number and password. That’s how
she was able to steal the money out of his account and put it into one of
hers.”
“But the password
rosarita
?”
Tammy asked. “Wasn’t that a reference to the place where Suzette caught Sergio
with Devon?” Savannah stretched out on the towel beside Dirk and kicked off her
shoes. “Myrna overheard the big fight between Devon and Suzette that day after
Suzette found them at the Rosarita Hotel,” Savannah said, wriggling her toes
into the cool, damp sand. “Again, she made choices based on misleading us into
thinking it was Suzette we were after.”
“And...” Abigail said,
“...Myrna was the one who put the botulism solution into Sergio’s syringe. But
why kill
him
?”
“Because,” Savannah told
her, “she was worried when she heard he had hired me, a private detective, to
find his money for him. She figured he might stop at nothing to get it back. If
he kept looking, he might have realized it was her that had stolen his money,
not Suzette. She decided it would be safer just to have him dead, too.”
“And it was all because she
was mad at them for fixing her boyfriend up with a new face and him leaving her
for another woman?” Abby shook her head. “If I’d been her, I would have just
knocked off the ungrateful, two-timing boyfriend, not them.”
“It wasn’t just that,”
Savannah said. “She had worked for Suzette and Sergio for years and resented
them the whole time. She was addicted to the surgeries and procedures and was
constantly paying off one or the other with her paychecks. She was living below
the poverty level because of it, with no way out.”
“But that was her fault,
not theirs,” Abby argued.
“Like that has anything to
do with whether people commit murder or not,” Dirk said. “These days, people
blow other folks away just because they look at them cross-eyed on the
freeway.”
“And it wasn’t just
revenge,” Savannah continued. “With that kind of money, Myrna figured she’d
have a whole new life, all the money she’d ever want for new procedures to keep
her looking good, a great house, leisure time to lay out on the beach and
attract young studs who don’t mind being supported by a rich older woman. She
had it all planned out.”
Abigail shook her head.
“She must have been a bit off her rocker, though, saving Suzette’s body,
setting it up like that in her pool house. That’s just gross and sick.”
“You think?” Tammy laughed.
“You should see what Savannah’s got in
her
garage.”
“What? What have you got?”
“Nothing,” Savannah told
her. “Your cousin is pulling your leg.”
“Really?”
“Probably.”
“You Californians are
weird,” Abby said, “I’m going back to New York City where it’s safe.”
“Not just yet.” Savannah
gave her a smile and a wink. “Now that we’ve got this case wrapped up, it’s
time for you and me to go have ourselves some fun.”
“Just you two?” Tammy
asked, pouting just a little.
“Yeap, just us two.”
“Where?” Abby wanted to
know. “Where are you taking me?”
“Someplace special. You’ll
see.”
“Does it have anything to
do with murders or stinky dead bodies playing solitaire alone in pool houses.”
“No,” Dirk said from under
his baseball cap. “Savannah only does that fun stuff with
me
!”
“Yes, because you’re so-o-o
special.” Savannah poked him in the ribs.
He grabbed her and held her
in a headlock until she nabbed a bit of his midriff and pinched it hard enough
to make him howl.
“See what I put up with,”
Tammy told Abigail, shaking her head. “We’re just a big dysfunctional family
around here. And, would you believe, those two are the
parents
?”
Abby grinned. “Looks pretty
good to me. I think I’ll visit more often.”