Cooked Goose

Looks Like We Got Us a Homicide….

Savannah and Dirk had taken only a few steps into the living room when they saw the carnage: the sofa overturned onto its back, the glass coffee table shattered, the television knocked off its shelf and lying on the floor with its screen broken, a mirror on the wall cracked and books and knickknacks scattered everywhere.

But those things didn’t bother them nearly so much as the blood. Lots of it. Splashed across the wall, puddled on the beige carpet, smeared on furniture. It was everywhere.

“Oh, man, this is bad,” Savannah muttered, shaking her head.

“Really bad,” Dirk replied, his voice husky. “I’ll check the bedroom.

“I’ll get the bath.”

They met a minute later in the hallway.

“Nothing?” Savannah asked. She could tell by his face that he hadn’t discovered a corpse. Thankfully, neither had she.

“Nobody,” he said. “But there’s more blood in there.”

“In the bath, too. Looks like somebody tried to wash up. You’d better call it in.”

Dirk holstered his weapon, —took his cell phone from his inside coat pocket, and punched some numbers. His face looked so gray that Savannah wondered briefly how long it had been since he’d had a physical. This line of work was tough on anyone, let alone an aging detective who subsisted on donuts, pizza, and beer.

“Coulter here,” he said into the phone. “I’m at Titus Dunn’s house. He’s not here, but the place is trashed, and there’s blood everywhere.”

As he talked, Savannah continued to search the room that had, until recently, been the cozy living room of a cop who liked to garden and loved his girlfriend and barbecued ribs. Now it was a crime scene.

Maybe even worse.

“Hey, Dirk,” she said, interrupting his call. “There’s a bullet hole here in the wall behind the front door, and blood spray on the paneling.”

He hurried over to examine the neat round hole and the not-so-neat pattern of spattered blood, signifying that a human body had sprung a major leak in that immediate vicinity. “Damn. You’d better send Dr. Liu and some CSI techs. I’m afraid we’ve got a homicide scene here.”

G.A. McKevett

A woman is fortunate if, sometime during her life, she finds that one precious friend—another woman who celebrates the good times with her and offers strong, quiet comfort through the not-so-good.

A woman is especially fortunate if that friend is her daughter.

This book is dedicated to you,

 
Gwendolynn

for making me the luckiest mom in the world.

CHAPTER ONE

4:38 p.m.—December 10

“This is just too cool! I can’t believe I’m getting paid to shop!”

Savannah Reid stood inside the cramped cubicle, generously called a fitting room, and watched while her friend and fellow private detective, Tammy Hart, wriggled into a size zero pair of jeans. Being overly voluptuous—at least, according to the latest fashion trends—it was all Savannah could do not to urp the double chili-cheeseburger and triple thick chocolate malt she had consumed for lunch.

Jealousy was an ugly emotion.

“You aren’t getting paid to shop. You don’t get to keep any of the goodies,” she grumbled as Tammy admired her own teeny-tiny butt in the mirror. “You’re getting paid to catch a rapist ... which we aren’t likely to do in the ladies’ dressing room, since his M.O. is to nab his victims in the parking lot.”

Tammy’s enthusiasm for life was only briefly dampened. Bottom lip protruding, she slid out of the jeans and dumped them on the floor. Savannah tried not to notice that the younger, slimmer, disgustingly cellulite-free woman was “not quite” dressed in a purple paisley G-string.

“Have you ever tried wearing a thong?” Tammy asked brightly, pulling on a pair of leggings.

Savannah scowled and shook her head. “Nope. Can’t say that I have.”

In the mirror Savannah saw two women who couldn’t have been more different: an abundantly dimensioned brunette and a blonde with sadly diminishing assets. That was the way Savannah chose to classify them. Savannah was determined to embrace and adore her flesh—all of it—out of sheer rebellion toward an anorexic society that tried to make her feel less than gorgeous because she was a few pounds over what their charts said she should weigh.
 

Okay, more than a few.

Screw ’em.

That was her motto, and she lived by it.

“Oh, Savannah, you should try wearing thongs. They’re wo-o-onderfully comfortable.”

“Thanks for the tip, but the idea of butt floss doesn’t appeal to me.” Savannah picked up the jeans and began to fold them while Tammy slipped into her blouse.

“No, really,” Tammy continued, undaunted by Savannah’s lack of enthusiasm for the subject. “They make your rear look so cute and—”

“They make
your
rear look cute, Tam. Buttocks the size of mine should not be allowed to flap freely in the breeze. It constitutes a public hazard.”

She shoved the jeans and Tammy’s purse at her. “Are we about ready to go, or what?”

“Sure. Let’s boogie out to the parking lot.”

Tammy “boogied” everywhere. And she never—well, almost never—took offense. Long ago, Savannah had decided those were Tammy’s two most endearing qualities. And her most infuriating ones. Sometimes Savannah genuinely wanted to offend this perky, effervescent assistant of hers. But no matter how dark the insult, Tammy Hart continued to shine. With her golden California tan, glossy blond hair, and Miss U.S.A. personality, the girl was the quintessential sunbeam that sometimes required UV protectant shades.

Rarely, but once in a while, Savannah hated “perky.” Especially when she was dead tired, like today. This gig was “wearing her to a frazzle” as her Georgian grandma would say.

“Did you buy enough loot to look like a serious shopper when you’re walking through the parking lot?” Savannah asked.

“Yeah, if I get these jeans, too. They fit really great, don’t you think?”

Savannah searched Tammy’s face for some sign that she was operating in reality mode. No indication was immediately visible.

“Tammy, it doesn’t matter if the jeans fit or not. As soon as we catch this guy, the job’s over, and we have to return all this stuff to the mall. That’s why I told you to be sure and save all your receipts. We’re undercover here, trying to catch a rapist. It’s fake shopping. Got it?”

Tammy sighed and pulled back the cubicle’s curtain. “Of course I understand, Savannah. Do you think I’m a bimbo, or what?”

Following her out of the dressing room, Savannah chose her words carefully. “No. I don’t think you’re a bimbo. But I think that maybe
you
think you are, because sometimes you…well…you sorta act like one.”

Tammy stopped abruptly and Savannah nearly crashed into the back of her. “What kind of psycho-babble is that?”

“See. That’s what I mean. A real bimbo wouldn’t use the term psycho-babble.”

“Gee, thanks. I guess.”

At the door they were stopped by the fitting room attendant, a bleary-eyed, middle-aged woman who appeared to be suffering from Holiday Overtime Meltdown Syndrome.

“Here you go.” Tammy shoved three shirts and a dress in the attendant’s direction along with the red, plastic tag bearing the number 5. “I’m keeping the jeans.”

The woman took the unwanted garments from Tammy and tossed them onto a heap behind her counter. “Merry Christmas,” she muttered in the same tone of voice usually reserved for bidding someone a speedy bon voyage to Hades.

Savannah was about to return the blessing, when a male voice began to speak—from the vicinity of Tammy’s chest.

“What are you gals doing in there?” The words were gruff and static-fried. “You two are buying out the whole damned store while I’m roasting my chestnuts out here in the parking lot.”

“Oh, my God! What was that?” The attendant’s eyes bugged as though she had just witnessed irrefutable evidence of demon possession. Several plastic tags that she had been holding fluttered to the floor. “Did your…your bra just say something?”

“Naw,” Savannah told her in a lazy, Dixie drawl, “it’s just her right boob. Sometimes it has political arguments with the other one about being too far left.”

Tammy snickered, but the attendant gave Savannah the same animated look of a stale fish market trout.

“Cute,” Tammy whispered to Savannah as they walked away from the woman without further explanation. “But I don’t think she got your joke.”

“Nope. Sailed over her head like an origami airplane. But she did have a point. Why are we hearing Dirk? He’s only supposed to come through on the earpiece.”

Ducking behind a rack of coats, Tammy pulled back her shirt lapel and exposed the tiny communication unit taped to her breast. “Dirk’s police department reject equipment is fritzing out again. Big surprise there.”

“It’s not my equipment’s fault,” said the voice that sounded like it was broadcasting from a pan of sizzling bacon. “It’s the ding-a-ling that’s using it. You probably pulled the earpiece out when you were trying on all those clothes.” Tammy traced the thin wire from the plug in her ear, beneath her hair and to the disconnected jack in her bra.

“He’s right,” she said. Dropping her voice to a stage whisper, she added, “Did he hear what I said about thongs?”

“Yeah, but he’s half deaf,” Savannah replied. “He probably thought you said songs.”

“I don’t care what songs you’re singing in there,” Dirk returned. “Get out here so you can get almost mugged, raped, abducted, or whatever. I ain’t got all day, you know.”

Tammy reached down and put her hand over the microphone. “I know he’s your best friend, but that guy really gets on my nerves sometimes.”

Savannah chuckled and guided Tammy toward the checkout stand. “He gets on everybody’s nerves sometimes. Let’s buy those jeans and get outta here. He sounds like he’s about at the end of his three-inch patience tether. Besides, we’ve got a rapist who’s not exactly spreading holiday cheer. And nabbing his mangy butt would really make my day.”

* * *

4:47 P.M.

Savannah and Tammy parted ways at the south end of the mall, near Burger Bonanza, with Savannah heading for the back parking lot, while Tammy and her carefully chosen purchases took the front.

They had been “mock shopping” all day, but now that the sun had set, Savannah insisted on patrolling the back where fewer shoppers, thick shrubbery and reduced lighting increased the likelihood of an attempted nabbing by the rapist. Tammy had made only a feeble objection. This gig was her first true decoy assignment and she, as well as Savannah, knew her limitations.

The moment Savannah opened the back door and stepped into the late afternoon winter darkness outside, she thought for half a second it was snowing. Then she caught a whiff of smoke and knew the flakes falling from the California December sky were ashes, the result of an out-of-control brush fire on the hill. From where she stood she could see, several miles away, the eerie, blood-red line of glowing flames that lit the dark horizon on the east side of town. Like some sort of grotesque, luminous serpent, it wriggled its path up the black hill, consuming a decade’s growth of sage, marguerites, and miscellaneous scrub brush.