Cereal Killer (20 page)

“And...?” Dirk said.

“And I saw somebody’s arm reaching out of the side door. He grabbed her and pulled her inside. Then the door slammed closed, and the van took off.”

“Where did he take her?”

Tumblety shrugged, not meeting Dirk’s eyes. “I dunno.”

“You know. You followed them, and you know.”

“Okay, I followed the van for a little ways. It went down Johnson to the freeway. Traffic was heavy and I lost them on the 101.”

“Going which direction?”

“North.”

“How far north did you follow them?”

“Just a mile or two. I lost them about even with the Hinze Boulevard exit.”

Dirk let out a long breath, as though he, too, had been holding it. “And did you happen to get the license number of this van?”

“Huh? Naw. Didn’t think of that.”

Dirk muttered something, then said, “Okay. How about a description?”

“I told you, I didn’t see the guy.”

“I know. I mean the van. What color was it?”

“Oh. It was an old white panel body with a rack on top.”

Savannah felt her bubble deflate a little. White vans were a dime a dozen. And of course, that was assuming that Ronald Tumblety wasn’t lying through his scraggly teeth. That he hadn’t kidnapped poor Tesla himself.

His story didn’t exactly wash, considering the trashed house and the blood on her sofa, which suggested that she had met with foul play inside her own home—not at a coffee shop on Johnson Avenue.

And apparently, the same thing had occurred to Dirk, because he was saying to his unhappy guest, “I’ll tell you what, my friend. You stay here and make yourself at home for the night, while I check out your story. And you better be telling me the truth, man, or you’re gonna find out what it’s like to be on my bad side.” “The night? The night? You’re gonna put me in jail?”

“It’s more like a holding cell. Consider it a room upgrade from that van of yours.”

Five minutes later, Dirk and Savannah met in the parking lot behind the station.

“Got him all tucked in snug as a bug?” she asked him as she laced her arm through his and they walked to the Buick together.

“More like a cockroach in a garbage can.”

“So... are we off to the coffee shop on Johnson?”

“You betcha. And if there ain’t a black Mitsubishi sit-tin’ empty in that parking lot, this guy and me are gonna go a couple o’ rounds.”

“Yeah, yeah... I love it when you talk tough. But when it comes right down to it, how many perp asses do you reckon you’ve actually whupped?”

He gave her a sideways look and a grin. “Not enough, darlin’,” he said, doing a pretty fair impression of her Southern accent. “Not even
near
enough.”

Chapter

14

T
he intersection of Johnson Avenue and Charles Street had once been home to a couple of service stations, an empty, weed-choked lot, and a dilapidated shack that sported a sign advertising tarot and palm readings by Madame Wanda.

But in the past three years, the area had become gentrified, and the four corners were now occupied by a swimsuit boutique, an art gallery, a bookstore, and the ubiquitous coffee shop, all nicely landscaped with palm trees and flower boxes overflowing with bright-faced marigolds.

Each shop had a mini-parking lot in front of it, which provided a dozen spots per establishment And during business hours, those spots were usually full of townsfolk, not to mention scores of Los Angeles tourists, seeking respite from the city heat and smog at the coast beaches.

But at two in the morning, the intersection was dark, deserted and silent. And the moment that Savannah and Dirk rounded the corner, they instantly spotted the black Mitsubishi, sitting alone in one of the spaces in front of the coffee shop.

“Tarnation,” Savannah said.

“Yeah, no kidding,” Dirk replied as he pulled into the lot and parked a few spaces away from the empty car. “I was hoping his story was a load of b.s., and I could hold him for something more than just violating an order of protection.”

“Let’s check this out and maybe we’ll find something good.”

“Naw, we’re not gonna find squat. You wait and see.”

“Well, aren’t we just a beam of sunshine and light.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

As they got out of the Buick and walked toward the Mitsubishi, Dirk reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out another pair of latex gloves. As Savannah watched him slip them on, it occurred to her that the good old days, when you could just push evidence around with a pencil or pick up it by holding one corner, were gone forever. Nowadays, the focus of defense lawyers was on the cops and whether they had “contaminated” evidence by mishandling it, breathing on it, or even being in its vicinity. Unlike the defendants, investigating officers were considered grossly incompetent until proven not guilty.

A perpetrator could murder someone in front of fifty witnesses, while a TV camera crew filmed the whole thing, and even if the killer confessed, the defense attorney would want to know if the cops had used gloves when processing the scene.

Savannah loved defense attorneys—even more than she loved root canals and Pap smears.

When she and Dirk reached the car, the first thing they noticed was that the driver’s door was ajar.

Dirk squatted beside the door and studied the handle. “Looks like she left in a hurry.”

“Just like ol’ Tumblety Numb-Nuts said,” Savannah replied.

“Yeah, yeah. He’s probably the one who grabbed her, no matter what he said. Dollars to doughnuts it was his rotten old van she got pulled into, not some mysterious white one.”

“That old blue van... the one with the two flat tires... the one with three-foot-high weeds growing around it... weeds that haven’t been disturbed for—”

“Eh... don’t interrupt me when I’m talkin’.”

“Don’t confuse me with the facts, is more like it.”

“Whatever.”

“Give me some of those gloves of yours. I’m all out,” she told him as she peered through the windows of the car, trying to get a better look at a bundle lying on the back seat.

He shoved a pair into her hand with a grunt and mumbled something that sounded like, “Get... own friggin’... gloves....”

“Oh, please. Like you pay for these yourself. You’re just being pissy because you thought you had your case solved and now—”

“Now nothing! It could still be him.”

“Could be. It could have also gone down exactly like he said.”

Savannah tried the handle on the rear passenger door. “Whoever got her, she wasn’t exactly expecting to get nabbed. She was driving around with her doors unlocked. Not a good idea in this day and age, whether you’ve got a stalker or not.”

“Eh, some women just don’t have any—”

“Watch it, boy. Don’t aggravate me.”

He opened the rear door on his side and together they examined the items that lay on the back seat and the floorboard.

“What’s that?” he asked as she opened a large tote and looked inside.

“It’s her model’s kit,” Savannah said. “She was carrying it at the shoot.”

“You mean like a tool kit?”

“Pretty much the same, except with mascara instead of a flathead screwdriver.” She rifled through the contents. “Her address book is in here,” she said, “and her cell phone.”

“Here’s her pocketbook,” Dirk said, lifting a leather bag from the floorboard behind the driver’s seat. “If that ain’t a sign of kidnapping, nothing is.”

“That’s for sure. Women won’t leave a burning plane without their purses.” Savannah looked over the seat into the front of the car. “No signs of violence, though,” she added.

‘Yeah, famous last words. Isn’t that what you said back at her apartment just before you found the blood on the sofa?”

“And speaking of... what did Dr. Liu say about the blood? Is it hers?”

“It’s A-negative. That’s as far as she got. We put a call in to that Dr. Pappas guy to see what her type is. If his office doesn’t get back to us by noon, I’m gonna go over there and rattle that nurse’s cage.”

Savannah recalled the receptionist’s less-than-warm-and-fuzzy demeanor and grinned. The thought of anybody rattling
her
cage—or any other part of her for that matter—struck Savannah as an entertaining prospect.

“If you have to do that, take me with you,” she told him. “I want to watch.”

Dirk stepped back from the car and closed the door.

“I’ll get the CSU over here to process this thing,” he said. “Maybe they can find something else.”

“Although,” Savannah added, “if Tumblety’s telling the truth and the guy just grabbed her and yanked her into his van, there probably won’t be any perpetrator prints.”

“That’s a big if, if you ask me. It’s probably got his mitt prints all over it and who knows what else.”

Savannah closed her door and walked around the back of the car to stand beside him. “You really want it to be Tumblety, don’t you?”

“Sure I do. I’ve never liked dicky-wavers; you know that. Besides, if it’s him, I’ve got him and he won’t be hurting anybody else. Not to mention that I can sew this case up. Don’t you hope it’s him?”

“He’s pretty mangy, all right. Society would probably be better off without him....”

Her words faded as she knelt beside the driver’s side of the car and squinted at something just behind the front tire. “Have you got your penlight with you?” she asked him.

He handed her the miniature flashlight, and she shined the beam at the object that had caught her eye. She started to reach for it, then withdrew her hand. “What is it?” he asked.

“A set of keys,” she replied. “We’d better leave them there. The CSU will want to mark the spot and take a picture.”

“She probably dropped them when Tumblety grabbed her,” Dirk said as he took the flashlight from her and looked at the keys himself.

“Or when the guy
that Tumblety saw
grabbed her.”

As they left the car and walked back to Dirk’s Buick, he used his cell phone to call the Crime Scene Unit. Savannah tuned him out as he gave them the specifics, her mind returning to Tesla Montoya’s apartment.

When he was finished with the call, he gave her a curious, searching look. “What is it?” he asked. “What’re you thinking?”

“I’m just wondering... if Tesla was taken from this parking lot... why was her place such a mess and why was there blood on the couch?”

Dirk shrugged. “I dunno. Unless they grabbed her here, then took her home.”

“Exactly what I was thinking. He snatched her here, then took her back to her place. Why?”

They stared at each other for a long moment. Finally Dirk said, “When we figure that out, maybe we’ll know what happened to her.”

Savannah thought of the beautiful model with her large, childlike eyes and sad, sweet smile. She thought of Cait Connor’s lifeless body on the bathroom floor, and Kameeka Wills lying on the side of the road. “I’m not sure I even
want
to know what’s happened to Tesla,” she said. Dirk gave a heavy sigh. “I hear you.”

By the time Savannah finally returned home, it was past three in the morning. She had long passed the state of just being tired and was—as Granny Reid would say—“running on raw nerves.”

She crept into the hallway and, being careful not to wake her sister upstairs, quietly put away her purse and gun. But when she glanced toward the living room, she saw a sickly green light glowing—the computer screen again.

Not foolish enough to make the same mistake twice in twenty-four hours, she decided to ignore the call of sisterly duty and sneak upstairs without asking Marietta the fatal question: “How are you?”

But she had only taken two steps up the stairs when she heard a plaintive, “Is that you, Savannah?”

The question was followed by a loud sniff that could only mean one thing—Marietta was still suffering from romantic woes.

Oh, goody,
she thought as she walked back down the stairs and into the living room.

“So, you’re at it again,” she said, trying to keep her tone light but concerned, cheerful but compassionate, involved but objective.
What a drag.

Sitting at the computer, no lights on in the room other than that emitted by the screen, Marietta was a sorry sight. Her eyes were swollen into tight, puffy slits, her nose bright red, and she was shivering slightly in her black lace nightgown.

“You wouldn’t believe what he’s saying about me in the chat room,” she said, pointing to the screen. “He’s turning all my roomies against me, telling lies about what happened between us last night.”

Savannah walked over to the sofa and picked up a soft chenille afghan that Gran had knitted for her last winter. Draping it around her sister’s shoulders, she gave her a few pats on the back.