Killer Honeymoon (23 page)

S
avannah and Dirk disposed of a pot-and-a-half of coffee and six donuts between them as they waited for Chief La Cross and her team to return with the prisoner.

Waiting . . . without any nature to soothe the anxiety. It was almost more than Savannah could bear.

As her pulse raced, her blood pressure soared, and her anxiety level broke record highs, it never occurred to her to attribute her physical woes to caffeine or sugar intake. No, of course not. It was all La Cross’s fault.

“We could have nabbed him, stuck him in a sweatbox, and squeezed a confession outta him four times by now,” she said as she paced back and forth in front of Dirk, who was sitting in one of the coffee room’s stylish and comfortable plastic lawn chairs.

“Yes, we coulda,” he agreed. But not with anywhere near the amount of frustration and angst she was experiencing.

Years ago, she had noticed that in the face of small, daily irritations, Dirk came unhinged. If the woman ahead of him in line at the grocery store had too many coupons, his life simply wasn’t worth living. He would threaten to do great bodily harm to anyone who cut him off in traffic, went twenty miles per hour in a forty zone, or gave him a cheeseburger instead of a hamburger.

But when it mattered—really mattered—he was the quiet in the storm. The guy who couldn’t wait three seconds for an Internet page to load on a computer was a great guy to have around when waiting for biopsy results or a life-and-death verdict to be handed down.

“It’ll be okay,” he said, now as always. “Don’t fret. It’ll all work out.”

“ ‘Fret’? ‘Fret’? Is that what you call this? I ‘fret’ when a jug of milk in the icebox goes bad. I’m worried sick here. What if we did all this for nothing, and they let him slip through their fingers?”

“They’ll get him, Van. Sit down and have another donut.”

“You saw how they’ve handled everything else about this case,” Savannah exploded, letting out all the rage and frustration that had been building over the past few days. “They were tripping all over each other there at the beach. For all of her throwing her weight around, the chief didn’t come up with a single lead on her own. I swear that’s why she was following us. It wasn’t to see if we’d committed any crimes. It was to see if we came up with anything, because she doesn’t know how to conduct a case on her own. They’re a bunch of bumbling idiots around here. This department is a joke. And La Cross is—”

“Not laughing.”

Savannah spun around and saw Chief La Cross filling the doorway of the break room, directly behind her. The look on her face told Savannah that she had heard every word. At least . . . all the worst ones.

“We bumbling fools just brought in the prisoner,” La Cross continued dryly. “If you two would like to watch the interrogation, follow me.”

Savannah gulped. “Yeah, uh . . . thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

As Chief La Cross turned and strode down the hallway, Dirk and Savannah fell into step behind her. Dirk nudged Savannah and whispered, “See? What’d I tell you? Things just couldn’t be better.”

 

As they watched the game of cat and mouse being played between Hank Jordan and Chief La Cross—with the chief playing the role of mouse—Dirk’s initial optimism was fading, and Savannah’s worst fears were being confirmed.

Things were going badly. Very badly, indeed.

Jordan hadn’t demanded a public defender yet. But that was about the only thing that had gone right so far.

He and La Cross sat across from each other, eyeball to eyeball—so to speak—at a small table in the interview room, which Savannah suspected at times might double as a closet.

She and Dirk sat behind La Cross in one corner, watching. Savannah was mentally imagining the blood as it figuratively rolled from their badly bitten tongues, down their chins, and dripped onto their shirtfronts.

This was agony to watch. And it seriously made Savannah wonder how Charlotte La Cross had ever attained her office.

“Are you really going to stick to that stupid story,” La Cross was asking him, “about how you just put your hands on that Jeep when you were walking down the sidewalk that day?”

Hank Jordan was leaning back on the rear two legs of his chair. His hands were behind his head, where he was toying with his greasy gray ponytail.

“Yep,” he said. “I was walking down the sidewalk there in front of Coconut Jane’s Tavern and that old Jeep was parked there. The window was down and I saw one of those big nets, the kind you use to catch animals or butterflies or whatever. I was just wondering what it was. So I leaned in and looked. That must be how my prints got on the door.”

Savannah groaned internally. La Cross had tipped her hand far too soon by telling him about the prints and then compounding her error by letting him know where they had been lifted.

But the worst mistake she was making was . . . telling her suspect the truth. Every single word the chief had uttered since they’d entered the room was the gospel truth. And both Savannah and Dirk knew you never got anywhere in an interrogation by sticking to the actual facts of the case.

Long ago, Savannah had learned that if there wasn’t at least a whiff of pants burning in an interrogation room, you probably weren’t making a lot of progress as an interrogator.

She pulled out her phone discreetly and texted Tammy:
La Cross personal cell #?

She put the phone on vibrate and waited. Less than two minutes later, Tammy texted back the number. Savannah grinned. The kid was fantastic. Savannah sent her a virtual “hug” and composed another message—this time to Chief La Cross.

She heard the chief’s phone chime and saw her glance down at it.

Don’t blow it. Don’t turn around,
Savannah thought.
Surely, you have at least one sneaky bone in your body. Use it now.

Chief La Cross sat still for several moments, thinking, saying nothing.

Just when Savannah thought it was a lost cause, La Cross stood, stretched, and turned to Dirk. “I’m going to go get myself a water. I’ll be back in a minute. Can you keep an eye on this one for me?”

Dirk grinned. “Oh, yeah.
No
problem. I’d be glad to keep both eyes on him.”

The instant La Cross went out the door and closed it behind her, Dirk was on his feet. He walked over to the chair where she had been sitting, turned it around, and straddled the back.

“Now this is more like it,” he said to Hank, who didn’t seem to approve of this change in circumstances. “You’ve heard of the good cop/bad cop routine, Hank, my man? Well, the chief there—she was the good cop. Catch my drift?”

Hank stopped fooling around with his ponytail and squirmed in his seat. He reached for the pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket; then he seemed to think better of it and started drumming his fingers on his thighs instead.

“Yeah, so what?” he said, trying to sound tough.

Savannah thought he would have sounded a lot badder if his voice hadn’t been quavering.

“You go beatin’ around the bush with me, the way you were with her the past forty-five minutes, and I’ll show you ‘what,’ ” Dirk told him.

“You gonna . . . like . . . hurt me or somethin’?” Hank tried to smirk, but his upper lip quivered and the effect was sadly compromised.

“Well, let’s see now,” Dirk said, leaning over the table toward him. “I work out at the gym three hours a day.”

Lie number one,
Savannah thought.

“And I run four miles every evening.”

“And I box at a club in South Central LA every weekend.”

Wow! Monster lie number three!
Savannah was impressed. Ol’ Dirk was on a roll.

“And you,” Dirk continued, “wipe off sinks and toilets with a dirty rag, and in your spare time, you throw bedspreads on the ground. So, who do you reckon would come out on top if we decided to tussle in here?”

Hank reached for the cigarette pack again. This time, he pulled it half out of his pocket; then he shoved it back in with a highly agitated look on his face.

Savannah had to admire his fortitude. If ever there was a time to break your New Year’s resolution to quit smoking, this would be it. Most smokers in an interrogation hot seat would have had smoke rolling out of practically every orifice of their body by now.

“I told that chief gal how my prints got on that Jeep, and that’s all I’ve got to say to you, too.”

“Yeah, but we both know that’s a crock, so let’s get real. We’re burnin’ daylight here, and we’ve gotta get past the ‘I didn’t do it’ BS and on to the ‘why I did it’ part.”

Behind her crossed leg, Savannah had been composing another text. She pushed the button to “send.”

Dirk’s phone jingled. He pulled it out of his pocket and looked at it. “Oh,” he said. “I think this is what we’ve been waiting for.”

Hank looked worried as Dirk opened the text and read it aloud: “ ‘Suspect Jordan’s DNA recovered from steering wheel and inside driver handle of Jeep—Moonlight Magnolia Laboratories, McGill, Georgia.’ ”

Dirk smiled at Hank. “ ‘Suspect Jordan.’ Now, buddy, we both know that’s you. And DNA. You can’t get any better than that.”

“When I was . . . um . . . leaning in the window looking, I mighta touched the steering wheel and that handle.”

Dirk slammed his fist down on the table, and Hank jumped like he’d been shot with Granny’s Taser prongs in his backside.

“Don’t you even start with that, boy!” Dirk shouted at him. “You killed that pretty young TV reporter and you’re going away for first-degree murder. You better start telling me why, or you’re looking at the death penalty here.”

Lie number four,
Savannah thought. No special circumstances had been proven yet.

However, the lie seemed to work even better on Hank than on most folks. Savannah wondered if, perhaps, he had a needle phobia. His face turned a distinct shade of white as he grabbed for the cigarettes in his pocket, started to tear into the pack, then caught himself and quickly shoved them back into his pocket.

But not quickly enough.

Savannah had caught a glimpse of something odd. It was a ring of clear adhesive tape around the top—the kind she used to wrap birthday and Christmas presents.

What smoker tapes his cigarette pack closed?
she wondered. And what smoker could resist taking a good, long drag, when being threatened with capital punishment?

Slowly she rose and walked over to the table.

“Excuse me, gentlemen,” she said, standing close to Hank. “But I was just wondering, Mr. Jordan, would you mind? I really need a smoke. Can you spare one?”

For a second, Dirk looked at her like she had lost her mind. Then she saw him glance away and quickly don his poker face. Of course, he didn’t know what she was up to, but he knew enough to go with the flow.

“I . . . um . . . I”—Hank looked like a rat caught in a trap—“I . . . I’m trying to quit,” he offered lamely, his hand resting protectively over the pack in his pocket.

“And I think that’s plumb admirable. I do,” she crooned. “But I’m dyin’ here, so if you don’t mind. Just one.”

Suddenly Dirk was as interested in the mysterious pack as she was. He reached over, brushed Hank’s hand away, and tapped it with his fingertip.

“You don’t wanna give the lady a cigarette, huh, Hank, my man?” he said. “That’s downright ungentlemanly of you.”

At that moment, La Cross opened the door and walked back into the room.

Dirk said to her, “Did you search this fella good before you brought him in?”

La Cross’s feathers ruffled. “Of course we did. We’d never bring a prisoner in without making sure they’re weapon-free.”

“How about contraband-free?” Savannah asked.

“What are you talking about?” La Cross responded.

“He’s got something there in his cigarette pack that he’s guarding like I’d guard a box of Godiva truffles,” Savannah told her. “I think you’d best be finding out what it is.”

“You can’t search my . . . You can’t search nothin’ of mine without no search warrant!” Hank said, clamping both hands over his shirt pocket with all the drama of a bad Shakespearean actor who’d just been run through with a fake sword onstage.

“Of course I can,” La Cross told him as she walked over, placed her hands on his shoulders, and squeezed—hard.

“
Ow!
That hurts.”

“So put that cigarette pack on the table and it’ll stop hurting,” she told him.

Reluctantly, with a hangdog look on his face, he did as he was told.

Savannah snatched up the pack. A second later, she had it unwrapped.

The thing was stuffed with wads of toilet paper, instead of the drugs she’d expected. Some pot maybe? A few bindles of meth perhaps?

She pulled out one bit of tissue after the other and tossed them onto the table. Dirk and La Cross watched her, confusion mixed with expectation on their faces. Hank looked like he wanted to fall through a crack in the floor and never crawl out again.

Finally, Savannah got to the bottom of the pack; all that remained was a small ball of tissue.

When she took it out, she could feel something hard and round wrapped inside.

“Well, now,” she said. “What have we here?”

Even before she got it completely unwrapped, she knew what it was by the feel and the shape of it.

It was a magnificent engagement ring. The center stone alone was at least two carats of glistening princess-cut diamond.

“Just lookie here! As pretty a little bauble as I’ve ever laid eyes on,” Savannah said, holding it up to the light and turning it this way and that, watching it sparkle.

She stuck it under Hank’s nose. “It appears our friend Hank was getting ready to pop the question to some lucky lady.”