Killer Reunion (24 page)

No doubt about it. Amy Jameson's Barbies had been the best dressed in town.

Searching her childhood friend's sad eyes, she said, “Yes, I did need a change of scenery. It's true. And maybe you do, too. Fortunately, it's never too late to chase a dream. Never.”

She reached into her pocket and pulled out one of her cards. “If you ever want to ‘get out,' as you call it, give me a call. I know people who know people in the Los Angeles fashion industry. We'll see what we can do.”

Laying the card on the desk, she added, “But don't discount the value of being a librarian in McGill, Georgia. Because to my way of thinking . . . what you do here . . . it's a darned near sacred calling.”

H
alf an hour after Savannah left the library, the eager members of the Moonlight Magnolia Detective Agency, working and honorary alike, were assembled in the parking lot of the McGill High School.

Near the fence.

In the area that, once the sun went down, was destined to be the darkest.

“Listen up, everybody. We've got a lot to do and only a few more hours of daylight to do it in,” Savannah told Tammy, Waycross, Granny, and Alma. She had already briefed Dirk on the drive to the school. “This may or may not be the actual crime scene,” she told them. “But it's the last place where someone saw our victim in close proximity to our main suspect.”

“There wasn't a lot of time between when they were last seen here,” Dirk added, “and when Savannah heard that splash at the lake. Less than an hour. So there might have been time for them to meet up again somewhere else. But it's not likely. It might have happened right here.”

“At least where she got bonked with the high heel,” Gran said. “And Lord knows, at a high school reunion, there's an abundance of those around.”

“Among other things, we're looking for one high heel in particular,” Savannah told them. “If it's here, it shouldn't be too hard to spot. It's hot pink, with rhinestones and sequins on it.”

“But we're not just looking for the weapon,” Tammy said. “We're looking for anything at all that seems out of the ordinary.”

“Like what?” Alma asked, all excited to be included in the search.

“You won't know till you see it,” Dirk told her. “Let's get looking.”

It took only twelve minutes for them to make their first find.

“Over here!” Alma called out as she dropped to her hands and knees and stared at something on the pavement.

They all ran over to inspect her discovery.

Savannah knelt on one knee beside her younger sister and saw something glittering among the rocks and dirt on the asphalt. More than one something. Sequins. Two hot pink ones and four purple ones lay close together. They were muddied and somewhat faded, but there was no mistaking what they were.

“That's important, isn't it?” Alma asked. “I mean, sequins fall off of dresses all the time. But you wouldn't think they'd fall off together, from two different dresses at the same time.”

“You sure wouldn't,” Savannah said. “Not unless there was some sort of tussle going on.” She patted Alma on the back. “Good work, girlie! You earned an extra scoop of ice cream on your cone for sure!”

Tammy appeared with a bright blue index card folded in half, forming a small tent. “This is the closest thing I could find to evidence markers there at Granny's,” she said, placing it beside the sequins. “Hopefully, the wind won't blow it away.”

They continued to examine the immediate area surrounding the sequins, and it was Waycross who made the next find.

“More pink,” he said, pointing to the pavement, where tiny bits of fabric appeared to be ground into the rough surface.

“We've seen this sort of thing before,” Savannah told Dirk. “Remember when we processed that awful motorcycle accident? That guy went flying off his bike and skidded on the road. There were little bits of his denim jacket embedded in the rocks like that. There was a lot more of it, mind you, but it looked like that.”

Dirk nodded thoughtfully. “I remember. And it looks like somebody skidded along here, too.”

“Maybe somebody's shoe?” Tammy said. “Like if Lisa fell down and the side of her shoe slid along the asphalt.”

“Or maybe she was pushed down,” Waycross suggested, “or the two women got to wrestlin' around after they hit the ground? That would account for the sparkly things coming off both of their dresses.”

Tammy placed another marker by the tiny fabric bits.

Savannah stood for a moment, looking at the school, looking over the lot, trying to imagine what it had been like for Lisa, standing there, watching the action at the school.

But Lisa had been in the lot several minutes before the altercation. Why hadn't she left?

What was she doing all that time out here by herself?

“Tammy!” Savannah said. “Get me Lisa Riggs's phone number.”

“Why, Van?” Dirk asked. “What's up?”

“If you were Lisa, why wouldn't you just drive away, like you'd told others you were going to do?” she asked. “What would you be doing out here all by yourself in the dark?”

All three of the youngest members of the search team answered in unison, “I'd be checking my phone.”

“That's right. That's what everybody does these days when they've got a spare minute. Even if they don't make a call, they check their messages. What if she was about to get in her car, checked her phone, and had a chat or sent a text or two. Then she heard my, um, lively discussion with Jeanette and watched that for a while.”

“That sounds likely, sugar,” Gran said, “but what's that got to do with anything?”

“When I talked to Lisa there in her florist shop, she got mad at me and called Tom to come arrest me. She was wearing an apron with big pockets on it to work on her flowers there in the back. When she went to call him, she reached into her pocket, like it was an automatic action. But then, to make the call, she walked all the way to the other side of the store and used a landline phone on the counter.”

“She's lost her phone!” Tammy shouted. “Otherwise, she'd have used it!”

“Most likely, she was reaching for it there in her apron, like she always did,” Waycross said, “but she'd forgot it wasn't there.”

Savannah grinned. “Bingo. So, Tammy, get me her cell phone number, would you?”

Tammy's tablet appeared, screens were scrolled, and a moment later, the number was given.

The group stood, silent and breathless, as Savannah made the call.

At first, the call didn't seem to go through. So she tried again. And once more.

Then they heard a faint chiming coming from somewhere in the weeds around the base of the fence. En masse, they rushed toward the sound.

Savannah saw it first. A smartphone well hidden in the underbrush. “Don't touch it!” she said as she reached into her pocket and pulled out a pair of surgical gloves. “Anybody got a pen?” she asked.

As she was putting on the gloves, Dirk produced a ballpoint.

“Take a picture of that,” she told Tammy, pointing to the phone.

Tammy did so, her pretty face flushed from the joy only a forensic photographer who had read too many Nancy Drew books could know.

Then Savannah carefully laid Dirk's pen alongside the phone, marking its exact position.

“Okay,” she said, carefully lifting the cell from the weeds. “What I'm doing now is an absolutely no-no.”

“Not as bad as breaking and entering a nursing home winder in the dead o' night,” Gran said with an evil snicker.

“No, definitely not as bad as that. So what you're witnessing right now didn't happen. Even if they beat you with telephone books to get you to confess, it did
not
happen.” Savannah quickly accessed the phone's call log and said, “There are the three calls I made. Half a dozen calls in a row Sunday morning from Frank Riggs's cell.”

“They were probably out here looking for it themselves,” Dirk said. “Good thing they didn't find it.”

“Very good thing,” Savannah said. “We've got some extremely interesting text messages here, sent back and forth between Lisa and Frank right after she walked away from us and headed back here.”

“Let us see!” Dirk peered over her shoulder, trying to read the small print.

Gran added, “Yeah, we wanna read 'em, too!”

“Come on! We helped you find the phone!” Tammy complained.

“Okay, okay,” Savannah said. “But as soon as you read them, we have to call Tom and tell him we found something for him in the weeds. Whatever you do, don't spill the beans that you know what's on it.”

“Of course not!” Tammy said. “We're highly trained agents who never,
ever
spill our secrets!”

“And ole Tom won't finagle it out of us, either,” Waycross said proudly. “'Cause if all else fails, and he ties us to the rack, there's always—”

In unison, they shouted, “Cyanide capsules!”

 

In the course of their careers, Savannah, Dirk, and the Moonlight Magnolia entourage had endured their share of Dumpster dives in the never-ending quest for evidence. They had sifted through garbage from private homes, grocery stores, restaurants, medical facilities, paint shops, and Savannah's personal favorite—pet stores.

But they had never enjoyed a search as much as the one conducted late that afternoon, after Sheriff Stafford had studied their evidence at the parking lot, and once they had watched him and his deputies search for the offending hot pink, rhinestone-enhanced high heel—aka the murder weapon—in the Riggs's residential garbage.

Having come up high and dry at the home, they, the sheriff, and his deputies had decided to search the waste bin behind Frank Riggs's workplace, a butcher shop called Fancy Meating You.

As at the residential search, the gang didn't need to lift a finger. In fact, they had been expressly forbidden to do so. While Tom, Jesse, and Martin crawled among discarded entrails, slabs of fat, bones, gristle, and other unidentifiable gore, Savannah and her friends sat on a nearby curb, watched, offered bits of unsolicited advice, and drank Dr Peppers.

“I hate seeing you boys slave away like that,” Savannah called over to Tom as he rose from the heap to catch a breath of slightly less foul air and then sank into the pit once again.

She had no doubt that he had begun the day as a handsome man. But he was now in desperate need of a shower and all new clothing.

Not just clean clothing
, she told herself, sniffling a giggle,
but an entire new uniform
. She was pretty sure he was well greased in pork fat all the way to his underdrawers.

In years past, she had seen Tom in a far better mood, though not as good as the one Dirk was in at the moment.

“Don't give up now, Sheriff Tom,” Dirk hollered. “You've almost reached the bottom. You know the rule. The evidence is always in the last place you look.”

Tom popped up and fixed him with a deadly glare over the top edge of the Dumpster. “We had better find a pink high heel in here with blood on it.
Human
blood and some brain tissue, too,” he said, tossing out something that looked like a massive congealed pork liver. “Or that wife of yours is gonna be in more trouble than she knows what to do with.”

“I offered to help you,” Savannah said most sympathetically. “We all offered to help, but
no
. You boys wanted to do it all by yourselves, so—”

“Shut up,” Tom snapped, bobbing down for more. “And, Jesse, if you toss one more handful of that crap over here on my boots, I swear I'll draw my weapon, shoot ya dead, and tell God ya died.”

“Yes, sir. I mean, no, sir,” Jesse replied, wiping his forehead with his bloody hand.

Savannah had seen less gruesome faces in slice-and-dice horror movies. They looked like escapees from a zombie flick.

Another twenty minutes passed, and even Savannah was starting to worry a bit. What if she
was
wrong, after all? What if her instincts about Lisa's reactions were off? What if there was an innocent explanation for everything they'd found at the parking lot, including the seemingly incriminating text messages on Lisa's lost phone?

If Tom wallowed in gore for an hour in the hot summer sun, only to come up empty-handed, there would be hell to pay.

She wasn't sure what price hell was going for these days, but she was pretty sure she couldn't afford it.

To her dismay, Tom crawled out of the Dumpster and wiped his hands on his ruined khaki slacks. “There's nothing in there, gal,” he said. “I'm starting to think you and your buddies here have enjoyed watchin' us look for that nothin'
way
too much.”

Savannah switched into defense mode. “Now, don't go gettin' all huffy with me, Thomas Stafford. When you saw that stuff on the pavement and read those texts, you were just as excited as we were.”

“Yeah, but what am I supposed to do with any of it if I don't have a murder weapon that can be traced back to her?
Nothin'.
That's what it's worth. Not a piddlin'—”

“Sheriff!” Jesse yelled. “Lookie! Lookie what I found!”

The deputy held the hot pink, rhinestone-studded pump aloft with all the gruesome aplomb of Attila the Hun lifting the head of a decapitated foe.

The Moonlight Magnolia crew sprang to their feet and danced a jig, and no one more energetically than Granny.

Savannah walked over to the bin to look at the shoe. She had no doubt whatsoever that it was the one worn by Lisa Riggs the night of the reunion.

“We've got to send that off to a lab right away and get it tested,” she said. “As soon as the results are back . . .”

“That might be how y'all do it in California,” Tom said. “But we got our own way of handlin' things around here.” He turned to Martin and Jesse. “I'm fixin' to go home and grab a shower. You two fetch the Riggses and drag their asses to the station.”

Jesse and Martin looked down at their own soiled uniforms.

“But . . . but... ,” Martin said.

“I mean now! Make tracks!”

“Yes, sir!” Martin jerked to attention.