Wicked Craving (3 page)

She expected him to squirm and maybe even blush a little as, one by one, every cop on the scene turned to watch them. All were wide-eyed, and a couple had their mouths hanging open. But instead, he laughed, a big, hearty, deep-throated laugh that—on a day when she wasn't mad at him about something—she had to admit was pretty darned sexy.

“I know what you're trying to do,” he whispered as they walked toward the front of the house. “You're trying to ruin my reputation as a hard ass.”

“Don't you worry, darlin',” she said. “These boys know you, through and through. They'll always think of you as an ass.”

“Gee. Thanks.” He thought it over for a moment. “But a
hard
ass?”

She shrugged. “Eh.”

 

When Dirk led her into the Wellman mansion, Savannah stepped three feet into the foyer and stood quietly for a moment as she looked around her and reevaluated her Life-contentment Level.

“Okay,” she said. “Never mind.”

“What?” Dirk asked.

“I've reconsidered. I
do
want to be rich when I grow up. This is awesome.”

Here, too, everything was painted a stark white, but the beveled glass in the double doors and sidelights cast rainbow prisms around the walls, giving the massive entry life and color. Some giant palms grew from a red mahogany vase in the center of the room, a container that was at least five feet tall.

Savannah decided that she needed a five-foot vase in the middle of her living room. What a conversation piece that would be!

The vaulted ceiling soared three stories high. And to the right, a graceful, floating staircase with clear, Lucite treads, wound upward, looking like an immense DNA molecule.

And straight ahead, Savannah could see through the house and its floor-to-ceiling windows to the ocean.

With the afternoon sunlight glittering on the water and the rows of lacy white foam lining up to wash ashore, the Pacific was a living postcard, advertising the glory of sunny Southern California.

The house had been designed to create a sense of being one with that grandeur.

“I love this,” she told Dirk. “You'd feel like a mermaid, living here.”

He gave the house a dismissive wave and grunted. “Too big,” he said. “Too much to clean.”

She shot him a sideways look. “Oh, right. It would just plum wear you to a frazzle, scrubbing this place the way you do that trailer of yours…once every year or two.”

He grinned. “Whether it needs it or not.”

When they walked into the living room, Savannah saw more mahogany vases filled with palms, and cubist leather furniture in white, black, and red—but no occupants.

“Where's the family?” she asked.

“It's just the husband. He wanted to go upstairs and make some phone calls. I told him he could.”

“How did he seem?”

Dirk shrugged. “Shaking like a cold, wet dog. Seemed more scared than sad.”

“He did it. Woman gets murdered…you look at the intimate partner.”

“You always say that.”

“And I'm usually right.”

He opened his mouth to reply, then closed it.

Savannah chuckled. Dirk wasn't one to argue when he knew he couldn't win, and the statistics were on her side.

“Through here,” he said as he led her to a set of glass doors that opened onto a patio area.

When they walked outside, the smell of the salt air and the warmth of the sunlight washed over her. Normally, Savannah would have closed her eyes, at least for a moment, and soaked in the healing peace of it all. But today, in this place, the peace had been broken. Even the sea's essential tranquility couldn't counteract the sense that something nearby was terribly wrong.

“She's down there,” he said, pointing to a set of stone stairs that started at the cliff's edge and descended to the beach.

Savannah headed down the steps, taking her time, because they were fairly steep, and there was no handrail. Dirk followed close behind.

She could feel him tensing, but she knew better than to say anything. Dirk had a pronounced fear of heights. Even a stepladder presented a challenge to his phobic psyche. These stairs had to be a nightmare for him.

“This cliff's gotta be seventy feet high,” he said, sounding slightly breathless.

She thought it was probably more like forty or fifty, but she could understand why it seemed a lot higher to him. And she was relieved for him when they finally reached the bottom and stepped onto the sand.

She looked to her left and braced herself, as she always did at times like these. The Grim Reaper's handiwork was seldom pretty and always unsettling, even when the passing was the result of natural causes. But a death under unnatural circumstances was the most unsettling of all. And something told her that Mrs. Wellman probably didn't suffer a stroke or heart attack and tumble down the cliff.

Instinctively Savannah knew that, at the very least, this was a tragic accident. Maybe worse.

But, looking northward, she saw nothing but the beach, more cliffs, and more luxury homes stretching into the misty distance.

“Over here,” Dirk said, heading toward the right and a rocky area, where the sea washed among the stones and receded, leaving tide pools filled with anemones and seaweed.

Savannah took a moment to reach down and roll up the hems of her linen slacks. Her loafers would be soaked, but her pants didn't have to be.

She also paused to note the tracks in the sand where she stood. One set of prints, made by bare feet, led from the water's edge toward the rocks. Another matching set headed from the rocks back to the beach. She wasn't surprised to see that the return prints were deeper and not as cleanly defined. It looked like their maker had been running.

The other two sets, stretching from the stairs to the stones, she would recognize anywhere. They were Dirk's running sneakers.

He did more sneaking than running in them, but they had a distinctive tread that she had seen many times at crime scenes throughout the years.

“I see you've been down here a couple of times, already,” she said as she caught up to him.

“Yeah.” He glanced back at the sand, at his prints. “If I ever commit any sort of felony, I'll have to buy some new shoes, or you'll nail me.”

He stretched out his hand to her, to help her balance as she stepped onto the rocks.

“Naw,” she said, grabbing his hand. “I'd give you a pass.”

“You would not.”

“That would depend on whether you cut me in on the deal or not.”

“Interesting that you assume it'd have to do with money. What if it was a crime of passion?”

“Oh, please. What…ripping off a donut shop?”

He looked genuinely sad. “Don't talk about food.” He pointed toward a particularly large rock. “She's over there. Behind that one.”

They walked in that direction, and Savannah could smell the body before she saw it.

While decomposition might be a perfectly natural and altogether necessary function of nature, Savannah didn't have to even pretend to like it. And it was the memory of the stench, rather than the visuals, that haunted her when she thought back over the bodies she had viewed.

She couldn't help being just a bit relieved when she saw that Dirk had covered the corpse with a yellow tarp. It was nice to see a bit at a time, as you chose to, rather than getting hit with the whole effect at once.

She walked up to the tarp and pulled back one corner to find she was looking at a leg, and a foot wearing a jeweled, designer high heel with an ankle strap. Flipping the tarp back a bit more, she saw the dead woman was wearing its mate on the other foot.

Glancing at the imposing cliff above them, Savannah said, “Wow, that long fall and she managed to keep both shoes on.”

“How do you know for sure that she fell off the cliff?”

“Her shoes have four-inch heels. It would have been really hard to walk down those stairs wearing them. Besides, they cost a fortune, even for her budget. No woman wears her best heels to the beach to get all gritty and wet. She's a beach girl, living here on the water. She would have changed her shoes or come down here barefoot.”

“Hm-m-m…that's what I figured, too.”

Yeah, sure you did
, Savannah thought,
Mr. Expert on Women's High-Fashion Footwear.
But she kept her mouth shut. She had to limit how many times she pissed him off in the course of a day. A pissy Dirk was not a thing of beauty.

“What's the body like?” she asked.

“Actually,” Dirk said, pulling back the rest of the tarp, “she's in pretty good shape, considering she's outside and it's the beach. No crabs yet.”

“Good. I might sleep tonight after all.”

As he uncovered the face, she realized she had spoken too fast. The crabs might not have found the body yet, but the insects had. And while the coroner, Dr. Jennifer Liu, would find the degree and phases of infestation all quite fascinating and helpful in her investigation, Savannah could do without it.

But, as always, she pushed the horror to the back of her mind and switched into an analytical, professional mode.

She squatted beside the body and studied what she could see without touching or moving anything.

Even with the smears of blood on her face, it was obvious the dead woman was wearing heavy evening makeup. And her blonde hair was styled in a formal updo, which was slightly askew, but still in place, thanks to copious amounts of hair spray.

“She's got a head wound,” Savannah said, staring at a nasty gash on the side of her forehead.

“Yeah, I saw that.” He knelt on one knee next to her. “In the temple area like that, it could have been a fatal blow.”

“It's clean, no dirt in it.” She looked up at the cliff that was more sand than rock, and added, “It doesn't really look like a scrape…or like she smacked it coming down. She might have gotten it before she fell.”

“Yeah, that's what I was thinking.”

She resisted the urge to give him a smack of his own. “Did you notice that the sun's shining today, too?” she asked.

“What?”

She sighed. “Never mind.”

He uncovered the rest of the body, revealing a beautiful, full-length evening gown made of black, shantung silk. A thousand hand-sewn beads accented the front and the waistband.

The woman would have blended in nicely on the red carpet at the Academy Awards.

“Wow,” Savannah said. “She was dressed…uh…fit to kill.”

“Yeah, the husband said they went to a charity ball last night.”

“There's just one thing.”

“What's that?”

“She isn't wearing any jewelry. No earrings. A woman doesn't dress up like that and go out without even a pair of earrings in her pierced ears.”

“Okay, if you say so. Maybe it was a robbery.”

“We'll have to ask the husband about the jewelry. What time does he say they left the party?”

“He said they came home separately. She had a headache and left early, around nine thirty. He stayed until nearly midnight.”

“How did she get home?”

“She drove their car. He took a cab.”

“And was she here when he got home?”

“No. He says the car was here, but he couldn't find her in the house or the yard.”

“When did he report her missing?”

“He didn't. A jogger on the beach found her about noon today and called it in.”

Savannah glanced over at the barefoot prints leading from the water to the body, then back in the direction they came.

“And you were the first to respond?”

“Yeah. And it's a good thing, too, or those morons up there would have come down here and trampled all over the scene.”

“Oh, come on. Not all of those handsome young patrolmen are dummies.”

He bristled.

So she said, “You've taught them how to respect a crime scene.”

He unbristled.

Grinning, she added, “By yelling obscenities, verbally abusing them, and threatening them with great bodily harm.”

He snorted. “Somebody's gotta do it.”

Dirk's cell phone rang. He dug it out of his jacket pocket and answered it in his usual gracious, loquacious manner. “Yeah, what?”

She considered nominating him for poet laureate.

“All right. Come through the house to the backyard and down the stairs. We're with the body here on the beach.”

He hung up. “Dr. Liu,” he explained. “They're here.”

Savannah looked down at the body on the rocks and felt a little sense of relief, as she always did, that the coroner and Crime Scene Unit had arrived to take over.

No matter how many times she did it, dealing with a corpse at the scene was always difficult. It was the hardest part of any investigation. Except for one other thing.

She took a deep, steadying breath. “You think the husband's finished with his phone calls?”

“Whether he is or not, I gotta talk to him again,” Dirk said, his face reflecting the dread she felt.

Because, the only thing worse than dealing with the remains of a person who had passed on…was dealing with the loved ones who had been left behind.

A
s Savannah and Dirk left the beach and started to climb the stone steps, Savannah looked up and saw a beautiful Asian woman descending the stairs. Her long, glossy black hair spilled around her shoulders, and the snug, black miniskirt she was wearing seemed strangely at odds with her boxy, white, lab coat.

She had exquisitely shaped, long legs, and she was wearing what appeared to be stainless steel, four-inch-high stilettos.

“Okay, I stand corrected,” Savannah said over her shoulder to Dirk. “You
can
walk down these stairs wearing super-high heels.”

But when she glanced backward, she saw that Dirk had barely heard what she'd said. He was transfixed on the sight above him, and she couldn't summon even an ounce of indignation about his ill-mannered ogling.

Dr. Jennifer Liu, San Carmelita's first female coroner, was simply stunning.

“Hey, Dr. Jen,” Savannah greeted her as they met halfway up the stairs. “You're lookin' perky today.”

“Hi, Savannah,” Dr. Liu returned warmly. “Haven't seen you lately. You haven't dropped by with a box of Godivas in a long time.”

Savannah chuckled. It was true. More than once, when she was anxious to get autopsy results, she had taken a box of truffles to the morgue under the pretext of “PMS bonding.”

Dr. Liu was far too sharp to believe that the offerings were anything more than an excuse to drop by and finagle information before the coroner's report was complete. But she was also smart enough not to admit she was being bribed.

Savannah would do anything to learn the official cause and manner of death three hours before the murder was even committed. And if five pounds of chocolate enabled her to make a pest out of herself and get the jump on a case, she wasn't above it.

Besides, Dr. Liu usually shared the goodies, and that was endearing.

“Sergeant Coulter,” the coroner said, giving Dirk a cursory nod.

Dirk was as much of a nuisance at the morgue as Savannah, even worse. And he never brought chocolate, so he was low on Dr. Liu's list of favorite people.

They never brought out the best in each other.

“The DB's down there,” Dirk told her, pointing down the stairs and to the right. “You need me to go with you and help you find it?”

She gave him a withering look. “I can find one stray blond hair on a brunette victim or a single carpet fiber and match it to a killer's car trunk. I think I can find a dead woman on a beach.”

“Then she's all yours,” Dirk said, brushing by her and continuing on up the stairs.

He passed a couple of young men, also wearing white lab coats with the coroner's seal printed on the pockets, who were on their way down. He grunted a half greeting to them as he hurried by. They nearly fell off the steps trying to get out of his way.

“Mr. Sunshine and Light,” Dr. Liu grumbled as she watched him go. “I don't know how you stand him.”

“Ah, Dirk's all right,” Savannah said, thinking that, sometimes, it felt like she spent her life trying to convince people that Dirk really
was
a good person. After all, any guy who liked dogs, cats, and Elvis couldn't be all bad. “You just have to get to know him,” she added for good measure.

“No, thanks.” Dr. Liu gave Savannah a smile. “Putting up with him, that's
your
job. And mine is waiting on the beach, so…I'll see you later.”

“How long you figure it'll take you to process her?” Savannah asked as Dr. Liu continued down the stairs.

“We're a little backed up. I should be done with the autopsy by tomorrow around lunch time.” When she reached the bottom step, she leaned over and took her high heels off.

Too bad Dirk had missed it, Savannah thought. He was a major hiney man.

“So, if you'll be done by noon,” Savannah said, “I'll show up at ten…and bring chocolates?”

“Exactly.” Dr. Liu stuffed the stilettos into her bag and stepped onto the sand with bare feet, her toenails painted bright red. “And this time, don't eat any of the raspberry creams. Those are my favorites.”

 

When Savannah reached the top of the stairs, she looked around for Dirk. He was standing at the edge of the yard, where the lawn ended abruptly, giving way to the sharp cliff.

He was staring down at a flower bed that was overflowing with yellow marigolds and orange nasturtiums.

“See something?” she asked as she walked up to stand beside him.

So lost in thought was he that he jumped a little when he noticed her. “What?”

“You're looking at something. What is it?”

“Why doesn't she like me?” he asked, looking a little hurt.

“Why doesn't who…what?”

“Why doesn't Dr. Liu like me? I've always been nice to her.”

“You've never been nice to her. Not once.”

“Never? Ever?” He looked completely flummoxed. “Really?”

“Really. You snap at her. You're surly with her. You demand that she come up with results in the blink of an eye and solve your cases for you. You—”

“So do you.”

“Yeah, but I genuinely like her.”

“So do I.”

“You like her legs.”

“I never noticed her legs.” He grinned broadly. “I'm always too busy looking at her rear.”

Savannah sighed and pointed to the flower bed. “What's here? What were you looking at?”

But before he could even answer, she saw it…the area where the marigolds and nasturtiums were crushed, the soil trampled with numerous footprints.

She stepped closer and squatted, studying the dirt and flowers. “There was a struggle here. And those are fresh,” she said. “The broken plants are barely even withered. And the footprints are clear, nice and deep.”

“Yeah, I'll have to tell Dr. Liu to have her lazy-ass assistants get up here and get some castings of those to—”

Savannah cleared her throat.

“Um…” He donned a saccharine smile. “…I mean, ask the CSU if they would be so kind as to get their lazy butts up here and take some castings of those prints, and then get the results to me whenever they damned well feel like it.”

“Oh, much better.” She rolled her eyes. “It's a beautiful thing—watching personal growth in progress.”

“What?”

“Never mind.” Leaning down, until her face was nearly touching the flowers, she saw something strange sticking out of the loose soil. It was about six inches wide and looked like a gray butterfly's wing.

With one finger she pushed some of the nasturtiums aside and saw that it was attached to a fairy…or rather, a broken fairy statue, about a foot long, that was half-buried in the dirt.

“You'll want to tell the team about this,” she said, pointing it out to him. “That thing looks heavy enough that it might even be your murder weapon.”

He studied it with interest and nodded. “Yeap, that would be a first in my career. ‘Cause of Death: Bludgeoned by a Tinkerbell.'”

She stood up and shook her legs to restore circulation.

Squatting in your forties wasn't what it was in your twenties.

“And, by the way,” she said. “Those are high-heel prints…the little holes there in the dirt.”

“Yeah, I noticed that already.”

“And Mrs. Wellman had dark soil like that on the heels of her shoes.”

“Yeap. Saw it.”

She bit her bottom lip and stared at him long and hard. “And the blood? You also saw the blood stain on her left heel?”

She had him. He glared at her, slack-jawed for several long moments. She watched the mental battle register in his eyes. Lie? Or tell the truth?

Finally, with his best poker face and most even, noncommittal tone, he said, “Blood. Blood on her left heel.”

“Yeap.”

More tense silence.

He broke. “You saw blood on her left heel?”

“Naw.” She turned to walk back toward the house. “I was just messin' with you.”

“I hate you.”

She laughed. “No, you don't. I'm the best friend you've got.”

“And what a sorry commentary
that
is on my social life.”

 

By the time they walked into the house, Dirk had stopped complaining, and Savannah had put aside all thoughts of teasing him.

Few things were more important than tormenting Dirk, but talking to the deceased person's family—who also just happened to be your primary suspect—was one of those things.

Neither of them wanted to have to draw Dr. Wellman out of his bedroom seclusion at a time like this, but it had to be done.

After examining the body and the edge of the cliff, they were both pretty certain that Mrs. Wellman hadn't simply taken one step too many while strolling around her backyard in the dark. She had fought for her life before being pushed to her death.

And that meant they were looking for a killer.

But as they entered the living room, they heard voices. Angry voices. A man's and a woman's.

The two were arguing in an adjoining room, so loudly that Savannah and Dirk could hear everything they were saying.

“I want my money,” the female was saying, “and if I don't get it, I'm going to make a lot of trouble for you.”

“You've already made trouble for me,” he replied. “You're nothing
but
trouble.”

“When am I getting it? When?”

“I can't believe you're hassling me at a time like this.”

“Oh, yeah, you're just heartbroken. I'm sure. Give me a break. Like you give a damn that she's dead. You're probably happy. You probably did it yourself, just to—”

“Shut up! Shut your mouth! You say something like that with the cops right outside my door? What's wrong with you?”

“I'll say a hell of a lot more than that if you don't have my money to me by this time tomorrow. I mean it. If you don't believe me, you just wait and see.”

They heard quick, heavy footsteps as someone stomped through the house, away from them and toward the front door.

Savannah rushed past Dirk, heading for the foyer, trying to step as quietly as possible.

She was just in time to see an extremely thin young woman with lots of curly blonde hair, rush to the front door, jerk it open, and leave the house.

Mostly, Savannah had seen her backside, but she was fairly sure she'd know her if she saw her again. Even in a culture where being stick skinny was the primary measure of a female's worth, this one was exceptionally scrawny. Her tight jeans had displayed thighs that weren't much thicker than Savannah's forearm.

Savannah hurried to the beveled glass sidelight and looked through it to the front yard. The blonde darted back and forth among the patrolmen, making her way to a little blue compact parked on the side of the road.

As she sped away, Savannah caught the first three letters of the license plate. PLW. She pulled a notebook and ballpoint from her jacket pocket and scribbled down the letters.

Replacing the pad and pen, she turned, intending to rejoin Dirk in the living room. But, instead, she found herself face-to-face with the man of the house.

And Dr. Wellman didn't look happy to see her.

He was red haired with a ruddy complexion and a thin, auburn mustache, dressed in a violet polo shirt and sharply creased, beige slacks. His cheeks were brightly flushed, and he was sweating profusely, considering that the house was a comfortable temperature.

That must have been a heck of an argument
, Savannah thought. Or was it all because his wife's dead body had been found at the foot of his cliff?

She thought it over for a moment, then decided that he looked more mad than sad. And that little bit of info she would scribble in her mental notepad, to be considered later.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked her. His eyes were narrowed and intense, but his tone was slightly shaky.

“Her name is Savannah Reid,” said a deep, authoritative voice behind them…without a bit of shakiness. “And she's with me.”

Dirk walked into the room and stood beside Savannah, hands on his hips, his best Clint Eastwood scowl on his face. And it was a pretty good face, because he practiced it regularly in his rearview mirror when he was supposed to be driving—much to Savannah's consternation as his frequent passenger.

She chuckled inwardly. She didn't exactly need his protection from the good doctor in his purple shirt, but she appreciated the thought.

“Did you find…um…the body?” Wellman asked Dirk. “Was it where the jogger said it was?”

“Yes, it was,” Dirk replied.

“And is she…I mean…is it for sure that she's…?”

“Yes.” Dirk softened his tone a bit and added, “I'm sorry.”

Savannah watched closely as something that truly looked like grief flitted across Wellman's face. But it was gone in a heartbeat, replaced by the stony stare that was giving her the creeps.

In some ways, it was more disconcerting, this lack of emotion, than the more common outpouring of sorrow.

“How did she die?” the doctor asked. “Did she fall off the cliff?”

“She definitely fell off the cliff,” Savannah said. “We don't know yet exactly
why
she fell.”

Dirk cleared his throat. “Doctor, the last time you saw your wife, was she intoxicated?”

Wellman shrugged. “She'd had a glass of wine during dinner. And maybe a couple more between dances.”

“How many people would you say attended the ball last night?” Savannah asked.

“Oh, a hundred. Maybe more.”

“Did your wife spend her time talking to any one person in particular?”

“Not really. She was quite comfortable in social settings. She liked to flit around the room, visiting with first one, then the other. I didn't notice her talking to anybody special…other than me, of course.”

“Of course,” Dirk said.