Cereal Killer (21 page)

“Go to bed, Mari,” she said. “It’s the middle of the night, and you’ve had a full last couple of days.” “Today’s been the worst day of my life.”

Without even trying, Savannah could remember dozens of Marietta’s previous “worst days.” But she decided it wasn’t the time to mention that Marietta had at least one of the worst days of her life every six months or so.

“You’ll feel better tomorrow, when you’re rested. I’ll make you a big breakfast in the morning with grits and biscuits.”

“Real biscuits? Not those canned things?”

“Real ones with butter and peach preserves.”

A smile replaced the forlorn look on Marietta’s face, and Savannah wondered, as she had many times, at the power of good food to lift the sagging spirits of the Reid family females.

“You go upstairs, crawl into that soft feather bed of mine, and get a good, long night’s sleep. Tomorrow morning, with a mug of my strong, chicory-flavored coffee in your hand, you’ll be a new woman.”

Marietta nodded woodenly, typed a few more words into the computer, then closed it down.

As she rose from the chair and made her way toward the foot of the stairs, she said, ‘You know, Savannah... I’ve learned something from this horrible experience, this degradation and humiliation.”

Savannah didn’t really want to know, but the laws of Southern gentility demanded that she ask. “What have you learned, Mari?”

“Men suck. Romance sucks.”

Savannah could see it now: a greeting card embellished with roses, lilacs, and lace... with those golden words embossed across the front.

“Don’t you think so, too, Savannah?” Marietta said, her foot on the first step, her eyes haunted.

“Well, I can see why you’d say that, but...”

“No, really. You know I’m right. There’s no such thing as finding your One True Love. Don’t you agree?” Savannah shrugged. “Some men suck, Marietta. But not all—not by a long shot. A lot of them are really good people at heart. But it’s true that romance hurts when it ends... or never really gets going in the first place.”

“And there’s no such thing as a soul mate.”

Passing her arm around Marietta’s waist, she coaxed her up the stairs. “I’m not sure about that soul mate stuff. I think if a person works hard to be a good mate— and their partner does the same—sometimes they can touch on a really deep, spiritual level. Probably not every hour of every day, but...”

“I
want
it every minute of every hour of every day. I want to be everything to my man.” She sniffed and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I want to be his whole world.”

“I know you do, Marietta. But men have lives, too, you know. They have other things they like to do besides gaze into your eyes and tell you how wonderful you are. Sometimes they might want to do a guy thing that doesn’t involve you—like watch sports on TV, or putter in the garage, or take a nap. You might have to settle for a deep, soulful connection once a week, say on a Friday night... after dinner and before sex... for five or ten minutes. From what I hear, that’s about as good as it gets.”

Half an hour later, Savannah lay in bed, staring up at the dark ceiling, listening to her sister snoring in the next room. Thankfully, even drama queens had to take a break once in a while and rest up for the next day’s calamities.

On the other hand, self-employed private detectives didn’t always have that luxury.

No doubt about it, she would be as grouchy as Dirk tomorrow as a result of this sleep deprivation. But every time she closed her eyes, she saw a white van pulling next to a black Mitsubishi, an arm reaching out, and Tesla Montoya being yanked inside.

And then...

It was the “and then” part that was keeping Savannah awake.

What did he... or maybe even she... do to Tesla then? Where did he take her and why?

Would they find her body somewhere, like the other two? Or could she still be alive?

Savannah would have felt far more hopeful if it hadn’t been for that large blood spot on the sofa. Blood at a crime scene never boded well for a missing person.

But if the blood was Tesla’s, and she had been attacked in her apartment, why did the assault happen there, rather than inside the van or at another location?

Why would her kidnapper take her home?

If his intention was to hurt or kill her, why did that have to happen at the apartment, rather than someplace less dangerous for the kidnapper?

Why not just take her up into the hills, where any evidence—like blood on a sofa—would be less obvious to investigators?

She lay there, studying the pattern on the ceiling cast by the street lamp shining through her lace curtains, her mind racing on an endless loop.

It wasn’t until a quarter to five that she figured it out.

She reached for the phone on her nightstand and pushed the “memory” button to dial Dirk.

When he answered, he sounded as wide awake as she was. “Yeah?”

One of the nice things about Dirk was that you didn’t have to waste time with niceties like “hello” or “how are you?”

“After he grabbed her,” she said, “he took her back to the apartment.”

“Do you think? Duh.”

“Eh, bite me.” She sat up in bed and turned on her reading lamp. “And the reason he took her there was...?”

“I’m workin’ on that.”

“To get something. She had something at the apartment that he wanted badly enough to risk being seen by somebody when he took her there.”

“Something, like what?”

“Maybe something that would incriminate him in killing Caitlin and Kameeka?”

Dirk thought that one over. “Maybe. Or maybe this theory of yours is just plain stupid. You know how you get when you’re thinking about a case in the middle of the night like this.”

She had to admit that he had a point there. The results of these late-night mental exercises of hers ranged from truly brilliant to dumber-than-dirt dumb. And she never really knew which they were until she could re-examine them in the morning light.

“Go to sleep, Van,” he said, his deep voice tinged with a sweetness that might have fulfilled even Marietta’s requirements for intimacy. “Let it go for tonight. We’ll work on it again tomorrow.”

“It’s already tomorrow.”

“Then we’ll tackle it after noon. Sleep tight, honey.”

“You, too.”

Click.

So... Dirk wasn’t one for flowery hellos or goodbyes. But once in a while, they had a soulful connection.

A once-in-a-while soul mate... whose boxers you didn’t have to launder....

As Savannah drifted off to sleep, she realized that, for her, it was enough.

Chapter

15

“B
oy, I thought you were never going to get up!”was the greeting Savannah received when she trudged downstairs a few minutes before noon.

Marietta was sitting on the sofa, a cup of coffee in her hand, the telephone in the other. She didn’t appear to actually be talking on it, so Savannah figured she must be waiting for a call. Still.

“Where’s that great breakfast that you promised me last night?” Marietta continued. “My stomach thinks my throat’s cut.”

“Don’t start with me, Marietta,” she growled as she walked past her and into the kitchen. “Not before I’ve had at least one cup of coffee.”

“No, really!” Marietta hopped up from the sofa and followed her. “I’m starving here, and it’s almost lunchtime!”

“Well, did it occur to you to maybe make something for yourself?”

“I don’t cook.”

“I know. But even a bowl of cereal would have taken the edge off that hunger. You do pour milk, don’t you?”

Marietta’s lower lip protruded. “Corn flakes are a bit of a letdown when you’ve got your taste buds set for biscuits and peach preserves.”

“Mari, go back into the living room and give me a chance to work up a pulse and some brain-wave activity. Okay?” She glanced down at the phone in her hand. “Why don’t you call your boys and see how they’re doing? They probably miss their mom.”

Marietta gave her a blank look, as though she were speaking in a foreign tongue. “What? They’re teenagers. They miss their mamma like they’d miss a big ol’ briar on the seat of their breeches. Lord knows what kind of trouble they’ve gotten themselves into.”

“All the more reason to check on them, don’t you reckon?”

Marietta shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so. You do have call waiting, don’t you? I mean, if he was to call, it would beep or something and...”

“It’ll beep. And you can look on the Caller ID and see if it’s him.”

“Good.”

As Savannah set about making a full lumberjack breakfast for her sister, she tried not to think about her nephews, Steve and Paulie, whom Marietta had left to fend for themselves back in Georgia. With Granny Reid half a mile away, not to mention all the aunts and uncles in town, they were sure to be well cared for. But this wasn’t the first time that Marietta had demonstrated her lack of concern about them. When it came to a tug-of-war between Marietta’s boys and the men in her life, the boys always ended up on their faces in the middle, having lost again.

As she rolled and cut the biscuits, she could hear Marietta’s two-minute call to Georgia, and the probing questions she asked. “How’s the weather? You aren’t making a mess outta the house, are you?” And the advice: “Put a Band-Aid on it, for Pete’s sake. I don’t know. Ask Gran when you drop off your laundry. Well, take it over there! I don’t want to come home to a heap of dirty clothes!”

A few minutes of silence in the living room told Savannah that the call was over, and she expected Marietta to come in and complain that the food wasn’t on the table yet.

But then she heard a new conversation begin: “Hello.

I need to speak to a Mr. Bill Donaldson. He works there in your accounting department, right? My name? Marietta Jane Reid. Of course it’s important. It’s extremely important. Yes, I can hold... for a little while.”

Savannah paused, the box of grits in her hand. Maybe she could slip just a little arsenic in there. Surely she had some arsenic somewhere in her spice cabinet.

“What do you mean, he’s away from his desk? Is he really, or did he just tell you to tell me that?”

How much do you suppose it would take?
Savannah asked herself.
A teaspoon, a heaping tablespoon?

“Well, I don’t believe you, not for one minute. I think he’s sitting right there with his teeth in his mouth, probably listening to this call on some extension line. I know how these things work.”

Hmmm, not a smidgen of arsenic in the cupboard when you need it. I’ve got lots of oregano, I wonder... is oregano toxic in large doses? How much oregano would it take to kill a stupid sister and would she notice it in the grits?

“Well, let me tell you a thing or two about that man you work with. You might think you know him, but the truth is, he ain’t fit to spit and what’s more...”

As Savannah was walking into the Plaza Del Oro Tower on her way up to Leah Freed’s suite of offices, Dirk called her on her cell phone.

“I’m just leaving Montoya’s apartment,” he told her. “Anything?”

“Nothing new. And if the kidnapper was looking for something—like in your latest middle-of-the-night theory—he must have found it, ’cause I couldn’t find anything worth kidnapping or killing anybody over.”

“I could have been wrong.”

“You? Never.”

She chuckled. “But say it like you mean it.”

“Never. What are
you
up to?”

“The tenth floor in a minute or two,” she said. “I’m over here in the Plaza Del Oro seeing Leah Freed. She called while I was eating breakfast and demanded to know what I had for her.”

“Don’t tell her anything good.”

“She’s paying me. Remember?”

“Just remember that she could be mixed up in this, too.”

“Dirk... not being a complete moron, I won’t jeopardize your case in the course of making a living for myself.”

“Okay, okay. Do you wanna go with me over to that Dr. Pappas’s office in a little while? Looks like I’m gonna have to lean on them to get Montoya’s blood type.”

“You’re just afraid of that nurse, and you want backup.”

“So? You want to go along or not?”

“Sure. I’ll meet you over there in his parking lot in a hour.”

By the time she had finished the conversation with him, she was standing in the hallway outside Leah’s offices.

She dreaded this meeting, hated the thought of telling Leah Freed that she wasn’t cut out to be the next shooting star on the plus-fashion horizon. If Leah wanted her to continue to investigate, fine, but this ridiculous subterfuge had to end.

Steeling herself, she entered the offices and was quickly directed to a small room in the rear of the suite.

Leah Freed sat in front of a backlit table, peering at some photo slides with a strange-looking gadget that looked to Savannah like a cross between a magnifying glass and a jeweler’s loupe.