A Decadent Way to Die (13 page)

“It’s Blanca,” Savannah told her.

“Oh, no!”

“And Vern.”

“
Vern?
It can’t be! Blanca and
Vern
?” Her body sagged, and for a moment, Savannah thought she might faint. “Blanca would never go into a hot tub with Vern.”

Dirk sniffed. “I don’t wanna argue with you, ma’am, but it looks like she did more than just take a tub with him.”

Emma took one tentative step toward the bodies. “Are they … Are they both dead?”

“Yes, I’m sorry,” Ryan told her.

“Are you sure?”

“We’re sure, darlin’,” Savannah said. “Ryan here pulled them out of the water and tried to resuscitate them. They were already gone.”

“This is going to just kill my grandmother,” Emma said, starting to cry. “Because of Blanca. Not because of Vern.”

Savannah looked over at the gigolo’s body and thought of all the things she’d heard about him in the past twenty-four hours.

“It’s a cryin’ shame about Blanca,” Savannah agreed, “a young woman paying an awfully high price for her foolishness. But call it a hunch … I don’t think anybody’s gonna get all that tore up about ol’ Vern.”

Chapter 12

S
avannah hadn’t even poured her first cup of morning coffee when there was a knock at the kitchen door. She opened it to a sunbeam of a gal who looked a lot like her assistant … only much happier than the last time she had seen her.

“Tamitha, get your butt in here,” she said, throwing the door wide and pulling her inside. “You’re a sight for sore eyes, girlie.”

And she was a sight.

With her long, silky blond hair, sun-kissed skin, and athletic, runner’s form, Tammy was a lovely girl on any day. But today she seemed her buoyant, vibrant self as she bounced into the house, all smiles.

“Want a cup of coffee?” Savannah asked her.

“You know I don’t drink that poison, and you shouldn’t either.” Tammy hurried to the refrigerator and opened it. “Got any wheatgrass juice?”

Yes
, Savannah thought,
our Tammy’s back and as annoying as ever.

“Oh, sure,” she said, shuffling in her fluffy slippers to the coffee pot. “I keep the wheatgrass juice right there in the door … next to the cabbage nectar and essence of broccoli. Help yourself.”

Tammy grabbed a bottle of apple juice and peered at the label. “Is this organic?”

“Are you a pain in the ass?” Savannah grinned at her. “You’re chipper as a chipmunk this morning … even more than usual. What’s up?”

“‘Who’s out’ is more like it.”

“Oh?”

“I broke up with Chad last night. Gave him his walking papers, sent him packing.”

It was all Savannah could do not to dance a wild backwoods Georgia jig right there in her Beauty and the Beast pajamas and fuzzy house slippers. But, instead, she pasted a totally false look of heartfelt concern on her face and said with all due gravity, “I’m so sorry it didn’t work out.”

Tammy snorted. “Oh, you are not. I saw the way you looked at him when you met him the other day. You hated him.”

“That’s true. I hated him.”

“Dirko, too.”

“Dirk loathed him.”

“And that’s enough for me. If you two don’t like him, he’s out.”

Savannah paused, the half-and-half carton in her hand. “Don’t tell me you got rid of him because Dirk and I didn’t approve of him. I mean, it had to be your decision and—”

“Pleeezzz. I love you two and trust your opinions of people. But I broke it off with him because I overheard a dirty message some bimbo had left on his answering machine. We’d agreed to be exclusive, and he was messing around on me.”

“Then he’s lucky he’s alive.”

“Exactly.”

Savannah poured a generous portion of the half-and-half into her coffee. There was nothing quite like a good cup of cream with your coffee to get the day started. Except, of course, hearing that your girlfriend had dumped her jerk boyfriend.

Life was worth living after all.

The phone rang, and Tammy rushed to answer it.

“Moonlight Magnolia Detective Agency,” she breathed. “Oh, it’s you. Just a minute.” She passed the phone to Savannah. “It’s Pee-Pee Brain,” she whispered.

“You really have to stop calling him that,” Savannah told her. “It’s just so … immature … so juvenile.”

“Poopy Pants.”

“That’s so much better.” Savannah walked into the living room and over to the windowsill, where Diamante and Cleopatra were sitting on their kitty perch, catching their morning rays.

“What did the ding-a-ling just call me?” Dirk wanted to know on the other end.

“Nothing. She was telling me that she dumped Turkey Butt.”

“Awesome! I take back everything I ever said about her. She’s got two brain cells to rub together after all.”

Savannah sighed and sipped her coffee. “Granny Reid would not approve. If she were here, we’d all be gnawing on bars of Ivory soap.”

“Have you had your coffee yet?” he wanted to know.

“Just started it. Why?”

“Dr. Liu called. She’s finished with the autopsies.”

“You’re kidding! Already?”

“Yeah. She stayed up all night. Says this is the most interesting case she’s ever had. Never seen anything like it. She wants to show me what she found.”

“Okay. Are you on your way to the morgue?”

“Soon as I get one cup in me. Wanna meet me there?”

“You bringing the donuts?”

“Uh … yeah, I guess.”

“Make mine maple bars. See ya in twenty.”

There was nothing whatsoever cozy or inviting about the county morgue. And Savannah thoroughly hated the place.

Though not as austere as the industrial complex where the forensic lab was housed, the plain stucco building was equally generic and dreary in its own way. Cutbacks in county funds had taken its toll on the place, which hadn’t been painted or re-roofed since the Carter administration … and even back in Jimmy’s heyday, the county had used cheap paint.

Utility, not style, continued to be the primary concern of the local officials. Whether the national economy was booming or taking a dive off the end of the pier, the politicians holding the county’s purse strings squeezed every nickel.

So, the morgue remained in need of a paint job, and the flower beds in front of the building remained empty, year after year.

But then
, Savannah mused as she drove up to it,
maybe a morgue shouldn’t be overly festive.
Not a lot of happy things happened inside its walls.

And as Savannah parked her car and walked up to the front door, she recalled that some of the least happy occasions in her memory had occurred right inside that door, at the desk of Officer Kenny Bates.

Kenny had once been madly in lust with Savannah, though why, she had never been able to figure out.

Everyone, with the possible exception of Kenny, knew that she despised him. She had never given him any reason to think he had a strawberry ice cream cone’s chance in hell with her. But the more she abused him and made poignant suggestions about painful ways that he could exit this world, the more he adored her. For years, she had been unable to walk through those doors without receiving some lovely invitation to either watch X-rated movies at his rancid apartment or hit the sheets of the local no-tell motel with him.

Until the centerfold incident.

Since the day, not long ago, when she had beaten him half to death with his own rolled-up porn magazine, he had gone from perverted to pouting.

“Show me an ugly centerfold and tell me she reminds you of me,” Savannah muttered as she walked through the front door. “It’s a wonder you still have breath in your body.”

When she entered the reception area, and Bates looked up from his desk, he didn’t appear to be all that grateful to be among the living. In fact, he looked downright disgruntled to see her.

He grumbled under his breath as he managed to dislodge his girth from behind the desk, where his breakfast of sausage and egg burritos and a giant chocolate milk shake was spread.

As he trudged over to the counter and shoved a clipboard at her, Savannah caught the strong and most unpleasant odor of onions and sausage, mixed with an overpowering dose of his cheap cologne. She attempted to breathe through her ears until she could exit his personal space.

She glanced down and saw that Dirk had signed in only three minutes before her. Good. She’d rather not have to wait for him here in Hell’s Antechamber.

She signed in as “U. McMee Sik,” and shoved the clipboard back at him. As usual, he didn’t look at it what she’d written but returned to his desk, sat down, and buried his face in his burrito.

She headed toward the hallway that led to the coroner’s office. But as she left the room, she couldn’t help saying over her shoulder, “Hey, Bates … read any good
magazines
lately?”

When she was halfway down the hall, she could still hear him cursing her. Although, considering he had a mouthful of burrito, his ranting was pretty garbled.

She didn’t need to understand every word to catch his drift. And she didn’t stop giggling until she was at the end of the hallway and standing in front of the swinging double doors of the autopsy suite.

The sight of those doors always sobered her in an instant.

While the work inside those rooms was sacred, because it was a search for truth, it was sad work. And Savannah didn’t envy people who had to do it, day in and day out.

However, when she pushed one of the doors open a few inches and peeked inside, the woman standing next to Dirk, beside the long, stainless steel table, looked anything but unhappy.

In fact, Dr. Jennifer Liu looked far more cheerful than Savannah had ever seen her. Wearing surgical greens and disposable paper booties over her shoes, her long, glossy black hair tucked into a scrub cap, Dr. Jen wasn’t her usual hotsy-totsy self. Outside the autopsy suite she was far more likely to be wearing a black leather miniskirt and stilettos. But in this room, the county’s first female coroner was all business.

And today, apparently, business was good … or at least, interesting.

“There she is,” the doctor said as she looked up and saw Savannah at the door. “Come on in, Savannah. You arrived just in time.”

Dirk seemed excited, too. “Yeah. She was just starting to tell me what she found here.”

“Here” was the body of Vern Oldham, stretched out on the autopsy table.

It occurred to Savannah, as always, that the deceased always looked so vulnerable, lying on Dr. Liu’s table. Death reduced them to nothing more than what they had been at birth.

When expounding about the follies of materialism, Granny had often said, “Naked we enter the world, and naked we leave.”

Savannah thought about Vern’s expensive watches and diamonds and suits.

What good did they do him now, when all he was wearing was Dr. Liu’s stitched vee incision across his chest and down his abdomen?

“Whatcha got?” Savannah asked as she walked over to stand next to Dirk. Not too close to the body, for fear of contaminating the evidence—and getting yelled at by the meticulous doctor—but close enough to see whatever she was about to show them.

“I was just telling Dirk that there was no sign of trauma of any kind on either body.”

The doctor pointed to a gurney that had been wheeled against the far wall of the room. On it was a body bag, zipped closed. “I finished her earlier.”

Savannah felt a wave of sadness, thinking about the pretty young woman whose life had been wasted. But she pushed the feeling down and concentrated on what Dr. Liu was saying.

“Not a scratch or a bruise on either of them,” she continued. “Her internal exam showed no disease. His … some lung and liver damage, due to lifestyle, no doubt. But no natural cause of death.”

“Did they drown?” Savannah asked.

“She had some water in her lungs. Not a lot, as you’d expect if drowning was the sole cause of death. His lungs were clear.”

“Any idea on time of death?” Savannah said.

Dr. Liu shook her head. “As you know, TOD is hard to establish under the best of circumstances. But here you’ve got bodies that were in hot water, we don’t even know how hot, for how long. My best guess would be eight, nine o’clock in the evening. But don’t hold me to it.”

“Then what do you think killed them?” Dirk wanted to know.

Dr. Liu walked over to a stainless steel tray and picked up a large magnifying glass. “Of course,” she said, “anytime someone dies in a tub of water and there’s no sign of trauma, we suspect accidental drowning. But we’ve ruled that out.”

“Heat stroke maybe?” Dirk said. “Hot tub and alcohol can be a deadly combination.”

“But not both of them at the same time,” Savannah added.

Dr. Liu switched on the light on the magnifying glass. “Yes, that’s an unlikely coincidence. Besides, if they’d suffered heat stroke, they probably would have lost consciousness and drowned. Drowning would have been the actual cause of death.”

She motioned them closer. “And if you have victims in a tub, whose lungs are mostly clear of water, you have to suspect electrocution.”

“Electrocution? I saw an electrician one time who died that way,” Dirk said. “He had burn marks.”

“Yes, but when a victim is in water, marks aren’t always present,” Dr. Liu told him. “At least, not ones you can see with the naked eye. But look at this….”

She held the magnifying glass over the body’s chest, an area near his armpit. Dirk and Savannah leaned down and first one, then the other, peered through the glass.

“I don’t see anything,” Dirk said.

“Me either,” Savannah added. “What exactly are we looking for?”