Just Desserts (22 page)

Fiona’s face registered nothing but pure defensiveness and anger. “I didn’t kill Jonathan. I don’t know who did. That’s all I’m going to tell you.” She rose on unsteady legs and walked to the door. “I’d like you to leave now, if you don’t mind. I have a lot of packing to do ... unless I’m under some sort of order not to leave town.”

“Not from me,” Savannah said, thinking that if the officer assigned to this case didn’t get out here and at least interview Fiona O’Neal, he might lose a valuable lead.

Not that she gave a damn, Savannah decided as she walked out of the dark, stale apartment and into the fresh air and sunshine. To hell with the department. It wasn’t like they were going to conduct an honest investigation of the matter anyway.

At this poiint, why should she care?

Like Fiona, Savannah had held a dream very dear to her heart for years. Nothing so grandiose as a Top-Forty singer, or a jiggling, giggling go-go dancer. Those dreams had been as brief as her adolescent love affairs. In her heart Savannah had only wanted to be a cop. A good cop who helped decent people and nailed the bad ones. A simple dream, but it was all she had.

She knew how Fiona felt, having that dream die unexpectedly, in a split second, and being helpless to resuscitate it.

But unlike Fiona she didn’t intend to run away. She was determined to stay right where she was and hold her ground. Until her heart found another dream to pursue.

How strange, Savannah thought as she walked into the office of the recently departed Jonathan Winston; even after the body was gone that eerie feeling remained in a room where someone had been murdered. She was extremely aware of it: that weird sense that the room wasn’t empty, as a room should be when no one was in it. That inexplicable feeling that you weren’t alone, even though your eyes and ears said you were. The natural peace of the place was gone, and an unsettling sort of agitation seemed to radiate from the very walls.

Long ago she had decided that this was what people meant when they believed a house was “haunted.” Unlike her more metaphysical friends, however, she didn’t believe the actual person was still there, doing the haunting. Instead, she theorized that the structure served as a kind of battery. Somehow it absorbed the energy of those extremely strong emotions emitted by a person who realized they were about to die in an unnatural, violent way.

Usually Savannah avoided going into a place like that alone. Especially alone and at night. But she didn’t want to run into the newly appointed investigator on the case, since, legally, she no longer had any right to trespass on a murder scene. She hoped that, since it was after midnight, he was home watching TV in bed or snoring.

Fortunately, she still had a key to the back door, given to her by the janitor. Bloss hadn’t asked her to return any of the things she had taken with her regarding the investigation. She supposed that if Bloss and the chief were intending to sweep it under the carpet, they wouldn’t be particularly concerned about collecting potential evidence.

Dr. Jennifer Liu had been in the office with her lab crew. Squares of the carpet had been removed, as well as swatches of fabric from Jonathan’s desk chair, which was covered with blood. The splattered portion of wall had also been excised, revealing the inner studs, insulation, and wiring. Fingerprinting dust covered everything—white on the dark surfaces, black on the light. Dr. Jennifer was thorough.

Being extremely careful not to disturb anything, Savannah crept over to the file cabinets. She pulled a pair of surgical gloves from her pocket and put them on before she tried to open the first drawer. All the drawers on the left side of the cabinet were locked, and a search of the contents of his desk revealed no keys. If Dr. Liu or the detective in charge had examined the files’ contents, they had made certain that no one else would. Or, she surmised, the investigation might be so stalled that no one had even gotten that far.

Fortunately, the drawers on the right opened freely. Inside, Savannah found what she had been looking for: the company’s ledgers. She wanted to compare the figures she would find there with Jonathan’s personal accounts, which she still had at home.

Still feeling as though someone were watching over her shoulder, she decided to take the ledgers into another part of the building to study them. She would have loved to have taken them home with her, but she was pressing her luck already just by invading a cordoned area as a civilian. There was no point in poking her head
all
the way into that noose.

In what appeared to be a sewing room she sat at one of the long tables that was covered with cloth patterns, fabric remnants, sketches, and half-constructed garments. Apparently Jonathan had been working on a swimsuit line when the process had come to an abrupt halt. On a rack, which ran the length of one wall, hung dozens of exotic bikinis made of leopard and tiger prints, gold and silver spandex, and scandalously sheer laces.

Nice,
she thought,
if you’re a size three.
She hadn’t bought a bikini since exceeding size nine.
Oh, well, they never make the tops large enough for a
real
woman anyway.

Pulling her notebook and pen from her tote bag, she opened the first ledger and began to take notes. Unfortunately, she had never been much of an accountant, so she didn’t understand everything she was looking at. But a couple of things were clear even to her untrained eye.

Jonathan’s company hadn’t done well at all in the beginning. She figured it was Beverly’s money that had kept him afloat during those early days, because the records indicated heavy losses ... too heavy for most individuals to bear.

Suddenly there had been a large influx of funds that didn’t appear to come from the meager company profits. A private investor, perhaps? She couldn’t be sure; there was no notation to indicate where the money had come from.

Then, the past year, business seemed to have gone through the roof. The rise in orders had been phenomenal. Apparently Jonathan had come up with some fantastic designs, or at least some highly successful marketing strategies.

Now she knew how he could afford to make all those enormous withdrawals.

However, two weeks before his death the company’s assets had shown a substantial drop, coinciding with the largest of his transactions. He had pulled enough funds out to cripple even a healthy business.

Savannah chewed her bottom lip thoughtfully as she scribbled the details in her notebook.

Maybe what Fiona had said was true. Perhaps Jonathan was cashing out to run away with her. Skipping town with all the loot was certainly more financially lucrative than sticking around and having to split everything fifty-fifty with the old-ball-and-chain in divorce court.

As she was making her last notations, Savannah felt a cold draft, as though someone had opened a door or window nearby. But she decided that was silly. Glancing at her watch, she saw it was one-thirty
A
.
M
.
, and the place was empty except for her ... and Jonathan Winston’s residual terror, which had seeped into the walls along with his spilled blood.

Even here, in a room on the other side of the building, she could feel it: that distinct feeling of another presence, the acute sensation of being watched.

She snapped the notebook closed. It was time to call it a night and get the hell out of this place.

As she gathered the ledgers and her belongings and stood to leave, a figure caught the corner of her eye, a human figure. She spun around, her heart in her throat, her hand on the Beretta under her sweater.

But just as she was about to pull the gun, she realized that the figure was nothing more than a mannequin, wearing a skimpy gold lame rhinestone-studded bikini.

“Atta girl, Annie Oakley,” she chided herself, “you almost shot a dummy. Better go home while you still have most of the cards in your mental deck.”

A second later something crashed down on the back of her head with so much force that she saw, more than felt, the pain. It exploded through her body with a shower of fiery lights, bursting across the velvet blackness of her mind.

Savannah had only one cognitive thought after she hit the floor, where she lay, paralyzed from shock and pain:
Gee, they’re right! You really
do
see stars!

Then every one of the blazing meteors fell, burning itself out on the way down, and all that remained were the soft black heavens.

“
Y
ou son of a bitch!” Savannah yelled, reaching up and grabbing the man standing over her by the front of his shirt. With all her strength she pulled him down onto the floor beside her, then rolled on top of him. One well-placed karate punch to the chest and she could feel and hear his breath leave him in a whoosh.

But there was another one, right behind her. He grabbed for her, trying to pin her arms behind her back.

“Let go of me, you bastard!”

Instinctively she used whatever method of defense was at hand and threw herself backward, knocking him off balance, then rammed the back of her head into his groin.

Both she and he let out screams of pain as the blow connected—he, because she had squashed his gonads, and she because her head was already throbbing from the whack she had taken.

“Savannah!” The guy beneath her struggled to throw her weight off him, but she gripped him tightly with her knees and prepared to give him another punch. “Damn it, Savannah, it’s me, Mike Famon. Will you get the hell off me ... please.”

“Mike?” Slowly his features began to come into view: the slightly crooked nose, the cleft in the chin, the bushy eyebrows, the patrolman’s blue uniform. “Mike Famon?”

She shook her head to clear it, then decided to never do that again. The pain was nauseating.

Reaching around to the base of her skull, she gently felt the swelling that seemed impossibly large.

“Why?” she groaned. “Why did you guys hit me on the back of the head?”

Slowly she turned to see Jake sitting on the floor behind her, his hands cupped over his crotch, his face green. Although his eyes were slightly bugged and infinitely alert, he didn’t seem to be breathing.

Again, she inquired, “Why? You damned near knocked my fool head off! What the hell did you do that for?”

Mike twisted sharply to the side and rolled her off him. She hit the floor with a thud that sent lightning bolts of pain through her head.

“Damn it, Savannah,” Mike said as he sat up and unbuttoned his shirt, checking the karate-chopped area for damage. A dark bruise was already beginning to swell. “We didn’t hit you. What are you talking about?”

“But ... but ... ?”

She looked around at the now-familiar sewing paraphernalia, the tables, the swimsuits hanging on the wall rack, the sunlight coming through the windows.

The sunlight?

“What ... ? Oh, God, I’m so confused. What’s going on?” she said, burying her face in her hands.

Jake seemed to be slowly recovering; at least he was moving, sort of. He scooted, crablike, over to the nearest wall and rested his back against it. He still didn’t appear to be breathing very often.

“We’re as confused as you are,” Mike said, wincing as he massaged his bruised rib cage. “All I know is that we were walking our regular beat and saw the back door open, so we came in to check things out. You were lying there on the floor, groaning, moaning, rolling around and holding your head. When we tried to help you out you went ballistic on us. Goddamn, where did you learn to do that judo shit? Are you a black belt or what?”

“When I was on a beat in Hollywood. And it’s karate, not judo.”

“Oh, great. I feel so much better now.” He turned to Jake. “You gonna live, buddy?”

Feebly, Jake nodded.

“You gonna be able to service your old lady? ’Cause if you’re not up to it, I can ...”

Jake’s color improved instantly, from sick green to an angry red, but he still hadn’t recovered his gift of speech.

Slowly the facts began to sink into Savannah’s battered brain, along with a semitruckload of guilt.

“I’m sorry, guys. Somebody gave me a whopper of a whop upside the head ... last night, I guess. I must have been unconscious for hours and didn’t realize time had passed. I thought you were the ones who hit me. Gosh, I’m really sorry.”

“You ... you ... should be,” Jake croaked as he found his voice and a smattering of composure. “Shit, you really got me good.”

“If it’s any consolation, it hurt me as much as it did you,” she said, gently palpating the platypus egg on the back of her head.

“I ... I sincerely ... doubt that,” he replied.

“What were you doing in here last night?” Mike asked as he rose to his feet and helped Savannah to stand.

She could tell by the reproachful look in his eyes that he knew she was off limits.

“I had to check out some things, Mike,” she said, glancing over at the table where she had been working. “Some ledgers ... which are gone now ... along with my notebook.”

“You aren’t really supposed to cross the line,” Mike said in a half-apologetic tone. “Captain Bloss told us you’d probably sneak in here. He told us to bust you if you did.”

“Then I guess you’d better get on with it,” she said, turning around and offering him her wrists for cuffing. “Because if you don’t do it now, I’m going to walk out that door and head for the nearest hospital. I think I’d better get an X ray or two and see if anything’s cracked.”

Instead of cuffing her he slapped her on the back. She gasped at the pain. “We’re not going to run you in, Savannah; what do you take us for, anyway? We’re not gonna, are we, Jake?”

Jake shook his head.

“See there,” Mike continued. “He won’t even charge you with assaulting a police officer, huh, Jake?”

Again, he shook his head.

Savannah felt a bit of relief wash through her system, but it certainly wasn’t enough to dull the pain in her head.

“Community General, here I come,” she muttered as she leaned over and gingerly picked up her tote bag from the floor.