A Body To Die For (6 page)

Dirk shook his head. “Yeah, right. Goody for him.”

Savannah looked at her watch. 10:15. “It won’t be dawn for hours,” she said. “And there’s no way we’re going to find him until we’ve got some daylight.”

“That’s for sure. We’ll get the crime scene unit out here as soon as it’s light to process that car, the road, and as much of this cliff as they can get to. That’s gonna be great fun for them, processing a scene while hanging from ropes.”

“And of course, we have to go down there to search the river—either rappel down the cliff or have a chopper drop us.”

He didn’t answer, and she knew he was searching his mind for any excuse to get out of doing either of those.

“Your mom could have another emergency appendectomy,” she suggested.

“Naw.” He sighed. “They wouldn’t buy it. She’s already had three in the past five years.”

“That’s gotta be some sort of record.”

“Yeah, especially for a woman who’s been dead twenty years.”

She stifled a giggle. “This time you might have to fake an attack yourself.”

He took another tentative look over the cliff. “Hell, if it comes down to it, I’d rather actually
have
the operation. Anything would be better than going over that cliff on a rope or hanging from a helicopter by a thread.”

Turning away from the guardrail, he shuddered and added, “I hear you don’t really need an appendix.”

“Yeah,” Savannah replied. “They’re just for decoration anyway.”

Savannah had considered going home and grabbing a few hours of sleep before daybreak came and the next step in the search for Bill Jardin would begin. Certainly, it would have been the sensible thing to do.

But she hadn’t considered it seriously. Of all her many virtues—which, of course, included humility—“sensible” wasn’t at the top of the list.

Years ago, she had discovered that she could usually circumvent the biological need to sleep, if she only had enough adrenaline, caffeine, and simple carbs in the form of baked goods or chocolate.

Now, after hours of hanging around the abandoned Jaguar, shooting the breeze with every uniformed cop on the scene, and ignoring the increasingly testy Dirk, she was running low on adrenaline. So, she was delighted to see the hot pink Volkswagen bug pull up to the perimeter edge and a bouncy blonde pop out.

“Tammy!” Savannah shouted, as though greeting a long-lost relative at the airport. Actually, she was happier to see Tammy than she would have been to see any of her Georgia family, with the exception of her beloved Granny Reid.

And one of the reasons for her elation was the bag in her assistant’s hand.

It was a white bag, with “Patty Cake Bakery” printed in red on the side. The much needed nutrition-free simple carbs and caffeine had arrived!

“Dirk! Hey, Dirk, get over here,” Savannah yelled to him.

He was sitting in the front seat of his Buick, his arms crossed over the top of the steering wheel, his head resting on his forearms.

He looked the picture of dejection. But Savannah knew it was more like the epitome of barely repressed terror.

Dawn was breaking, and he still hadn’t come up with a good excuse not to lead his investigation team over the side of that cliff. She was relieved that he didn’t have any cyanide capsules in the Buick’s glove box.

He needed food. Free food.

If that couldn’t cheer him up and take his mind off his troubles, nothing could.

Oh-so-slowly, he raised his head. Just an inch at first. Then, enough to peek at her over his burly forearms.

She tried not to laugh.
Big, bad Dirk, my butt
, she thought. He’d run headlong into a room full of “considered armed and dangerous” perps, Smith & Wesson drawn, a Clint Eastwood scowl on his face. But ask him to climb up a ladder to paint some window trim? Forget about it. He wouldn’t show his face at painting parties, not even for a free keg of beer and all-you-can-eat pepperoni pizza.

She knew. She had tried.

“Come here!” she told him again.

When he didn’t budge, she pointed to Tammy.

He looked that way and when he saw the Patty Cake bag, he came alive, jumping out of the car and hurrying over to them.

Savannah felt a surge of affection toward him. She had often thought that the basis of their long-standing friendship was their mutual love of junk food and artificial stimulants.

But Tammy appeared less happy. By the dim light of the early dawn, Savannah could see a half-smile, half-grimace on her pretty face, and she knew exactly why. Tammy was thrilled to be here, to be part of the action. And the grimace was because…

“You know I
hate
having to buy this crap for you,” she said as she held the sack out to Savannah with two fingers, like a dog walker holding a plastic bag with their Fido’s dumpings inside. “It goes against my principles to even step into an establishment that sells poison like that to human beings and calls it ‘food.’ Who—”

“Smells great in there, though, doesn’t it?” Dirk said, trying to pull the bag out of Savannah’s hand. “I mean, you have to admit the smell of the coffee brewing, along with the fresh-baked muffins and stuff.”

Tammy grinned. “Yeah, okay, it smelled great, but what’s to keep them from selling at least one whole-bran muffin or something with an actual nutrient in it?”

Savannah handed Dirk his usual oversized apple fritter and a cup of black coffee. “I think Patty gets a lot more pigs like Dirk and me in her place than she does intelligent, health-conscious people like you.”

Tammy opened her mouth to retort, then snapped it closed. Why continue to argue when you’ve already won?

She glanced around, taking in all the activity. The van with the Crime Scene Unit’s logo on the side had just arrived. Technicians in their spotless white lab coats, cases in hand, were descending on the Jaguar.

But the county coroner’s van was conspicuously absent.

“No body yet?” she asked.

“No,” Savannah said. “Plenty of biological matter for CSU to process, but no actual DB yet.”

“Are we sure he’s dead?” Tammy asked.

“Oh yeah,” Dirk said. “At least, if the spatter is Jardin’s, it’s a lock he ain’t among the living no more.”

Tammy brightened—far more than was decent under the circumstances. “So, we get to go mountain climbing and look for the body! Cool!”

What a ghoul
, Savannah thought. Maybe she had over-trained the kid. Tammy cried at the thought of chickens losing their lives and being made into nuggets, but finding a human corpse…that was cool stuff?

“Yeah, yeah, mountain climbing. Yippee,” Dirk grumbled. He took a long drink of his coffee and sauntered back to the Buick.

“What’s the matter with him?” Tammy asked.

Savannah bit into a maple bar and closed her eyes to savor it just a moment before answering. She swallowed, opened her eyes and said, “Dirk, heights, remember?”

“Oh, right. He won’t even climb onto a chair to change a lightbulb. I guess he’s not big on rappelling down a cliff.”

“You think?”

“
I’ll
go. I’m into that stuff.”

Savannah smiled, basking in the sunshine energy that her dear friend exuded. Tammy was into anything. Tammy was into life.

Nodding toward the Jaguar, Tammy said, “May I look?”

“Sure. Don’t get in anybody’s way and if anybody says anything to you, tell them you’re Dirk’s kid sister.”

Tammy’s face fell. “You think that would actually score me points? I mean, Dirk hasn’t won any Mr. Congeniality contests in the department.”

“True. Tell them you’re Miss July on this year’s National Law Enforcement Calendar.”

“National Law Enforcement Calendar?”

“Yeah, the one they sell to benefit cops going through divorces because they availed themselves of the free services of sex workers while on the job.”

“What?” Tammy’s eyes widened. “They have a charity fund for
that
?”

“Of course not. Well, not that I know of. But once you say, ‘Miss July,’ their brains will lock up and freeze, so it doesn’t matter what you say after that.”

“Okay.”

Savannah chuckled as Tammy strolled away, looking particularly fetching in her snug red T-shirt, denim shorts, and espadrilles, her long golden hair shining in the early morning light. No, Tammy wouldn’t have any problem getting around this scene or any other scene where the population was predominately male.

As Savannah walked over to the Buick to join Dirk, she heard a familiar sound in the distance—helicopter blades, beating the air, in a distinctive staccato rhythm, rapidly approaching.

“Sounds like our ‘eye in the sky’ has arrived,” she said as she opened the passenger’s door and slid into the car beside him.

“Yes, and please, please, God, let
them
find him,” Dirk said.

“Wouldn’t that be good?” Savannah said. “Then you wouldn’t have to go over the edge on a rope and get all nervous and barf and embarrass yourself in front of everybody? Wouldn’t that be peachy keen?”

Dirk responded with a “drop dead” look.

She took a bite of her maple bar, chewed it, savored it, swallowed, and said, “Too bad nothing good like that ever happens to you.”

“Screw you.”

She laughed.

He slid lower in his seat, and once again, draped his arms across the steering wheel and leaned his head on them.

“Want half of my other maple bar?” she asked, reaching out to snatch him from the gaping jaws of depression.

He was instantly alert, but indignant. “Other? Other maple bar? She got you two? How come she got you
two
maple bars? She only got me
one
lousy fritter.”

“’Cause she likes me best.” She tore the pastry in two and held the half out to him. “Do you want it or not?”

Before he could reach for it, his cell phone rang. It was a ringtone she didn’t recognize, a standard, generic buzz. Very unlike Dirk, who had assigned some kind of a song, usually rock-and-roll, to everyone he knew.

“Coulter,” he barked. “Who’s this?” He dropped his gruffness instantly and became Sunshine and Light. “Oh, right. Hi! How are you today?”

A beloved family member, maybe?
Savannah mused. No, Dirk didn’t have family, beloved or not.

His smile broadened. He was practically dancing in his jeans. “Wow! Fantastic!”

Perhaps someone saying he’d won some lottery money…or better yet, a free trip to a buffet?

“Oh, man, that’s great! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!”

Holy cow!
Savannah thought. He hadn’t been this happy when she’d given him that Harley-Davidson T-shirt eighteen years ago. And she was pretty sure he’d insist on being buried in that ratty shirt.

“Okay. Again, thank you so-o-o much. I owe you one, man. I do. I won’t forget this!”

He punched the “off” button, turned and gave her a big, nanny-nanny-boo-boo-smirk. “So! Good things don’t happen to
me
, huh? Isn’t that what you just said? I could have sworn that was just what you said. I heard you say—”

“Oh, shut up and tell me. What is it? You won a lifetime subscription to the Victoria’s Secret catalog?”

“Better than that.
Way
better than that.”

It
must
be good
, she thought.
Dirk’s nuts about Victoria’s girlies
.

“Spit it out,” she said. “Now.”

He rolled down the Buick’s window, stuck his arm out, and waved wildly to the helicopter as it flew slowly by.

She noticed that the chopper wasn’t a law enforcement copter, as she had expected. It had the call letters of a Los Angeles television station emblazoned on its side. It was a news helicopter.

“It was them,” he told her. “The guys in that chopper. They found him! They spotted the body about a quarter mile from here. They said it’s in the middle of the river, caught on a log. We might even be able to see it from the road if we go down there!”

“Hey, that
is
good news! You don’t have to send out search teams, just a couple of firemen and a CSU investigator or two with a gurney to hoist him up and out of there. Job done.”

“And most important,” he said with a deep sigh, “I don’t have to go over the cliff myself and lead a search team, now that we know where he’s at. I don’t really have to even look over that damned cliff again if I don’t want to. Well, at least not here at Deadman’s Curve.”

“It’s your lucky day, buddy,” she said, slapping him on the shoulder. “You dodged a high caliber bullet on that one, big-time.”

“I know it.” He wiped his hand across his brow. “Believe me, I know it.”

“What’s next?”

“Are you kidding? I’m gonna send a team over that cliff, and then I’m outta here. I’m gonna go buy a lotto ticket, while I’m on a roll!”

D
irk called the County Coroner and told them to meet him on Sulphur Creek Road, about a quarter mile east of Deadman’s Curve. Then, leaving half of the forensic team there with the abandoned Jaguar and the cliff covered with broken brush and cacti, he and everyone else took off for the new location.

Savannah rode with Tammy in the VW, which Savannah affectionately called the Hot Pink Barbie Bug.

“What did you think of Clarissa Jardin?” Tammy wanted to know. “Was she dressed in a black leather jumpsuit and carrying a whip?”

“No,” Savannah replied. “Actually, she was wearing a Victorian nightgown and looked like Gran does when she’s getting ready to climb into bed.”

“No way!”

“I swear.” Savannah crossed her heart. “But she was still rude and catty.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. A major me-e-ow.”

“I knew it. I knew she couldn’t be a nice person.”

Savannah thought it over for a moment. “Actually, I feel a bit bad about the way I spoke to her. I was pretty much in her face.”

“Good. She deserves it. She’s—”

“No, it’s not an issue of whether she deserves it or not. I wasn’t fair to Dirk. I let my loathing of the woman override my professionalism. He really had to rein me in while we were questioning her, and that wasn’t cool. I should apologize to him.”

For a moment, Savannah thought that Tammy was going to lose control of the bug as she took a curve too fast and crossed well over the centerline. Thankfully, there was no oncoming traffic.

“Are you kidding?” Tammy looked positively scandalized. “Apologize to old Dirko?”

“I’m thinking about it. Why? You figure the world will come to an end if I did?”

“It might. I’m just wondering if it’s a good precedent to set. He’s already got such a swelled head. You saying he was right and you were wrong…it might just send him over the edge.”

Savannah searched her soul…for two and a half seconds. “Okay, you’ve got a good point there. Forget it. I’ll talk a little nicer to her next time—make up for it.”

Savannah saw the Buick ahead of them begin to slow down. The television news chopper was hovering off to their left, over the riverbed.

“Dirk’s pulling over,” Tammy said. “I think this is it.”

“Yeah. I’m sure it is. Park right behind him.” Savannah took a deep breath. This wasn’t part of the job she liked. It wasn’t as bad as the worst part—informing the next of kin. But finding the body, even if you’d spent months looking for it, hoping and praying you’d find it, was never easy.

The women got out of the Volkswagen and hurried across the road to the edge. There was a guardrail here, but it was far less substantial than the reinforced one at Deadman’s Curve. And the drop down to the river wasn’t nearly so dramatic. The water burbled wildly, foaming as it rushed over its rocky bed only about thirty feet away from them, and the slope was gradual.

Already, Dirk was at the edge of the road, looking over, and the expression on his face was that of a man who had received a stay of execution from the governor himself.

Then the smile disappeared from his face. And Savannah knew, even before she looked herself, that he had spotted the body.

“Ohmigawd,” Tammy said. “There it is. I see it!”

Savannah saw it, too.

His turquoise polo shirt snagged on a jagged tree limb that was stretched across the river, Bill Jardin lay facedown in the river, the water swirling around him.

His left arm was twisted behind him in a sickening, unnatural angle. The turbulence lifted his right arm, up and down, up and down, and in a perverse way, it looked as though he were waving to someone beneath him on the bottom of the river.

Two firemen with their litter basket and three members of the CSU had already climbed over the railing and were heading down the incline toward the water with Dirk in the lead.

When Savannah joined them at the river’s edge, she thought nothing of rushing right into the water, balancing on the slippery rocks where she could and wading up to her knees in other places. But when she glanced back, she saw Tammy hesitating on the bank, looking down at her new espadrilles. They were the “must have” shoes of the season—or so Tammy had informed Savannah when she’d first worn them—and Tammy had blown two week’s pay on them.

Not that Savannah paid her all that much. But two weeks’ “pittance” was a major expenditure in thrifty Tammy’s economy.

However, a true Nancy Drew sleuth wanna-be could never be stopped by a simple raging river or a pair of hot new shoes. In seconds, Tammy had stripped off the sandals, tied their laces together, and flung them around her neck.

Barefoot, she plunged into the river and quickly caught up with Savannah. “Br-r-r,” she said. “This water is freezing, and you’re going to ruin your loafers.”

“Nah, I shudder to even think what these loafers have stepped in. A little water will do them good.”

But she had to agree that the river was cold. Who would have thought that water, running off the Southern California desert hills, would feel like melted snow? Her toes were already numb.

Just ahead of them, Dirk, a fireman, and a CSU tech had reached the body. The technician had her camera in hand and was snapping pictures, documenting the position of the body before anything was moved or disturbed.

Dirk stood back a few feet, watching her, hands on his hips, scowling, radiating his impatience—that antsy irritability that endeared him to the hearts of all he met, especially his fellow workers.

“You got enough pictures there?” he snapped. “This ain’t no
Sports Illustrated
Swimsuit Edition shoot here, ya know.”

“Back off, Coulter,” the feisty little redhead told him. “Go take five, smoke a cigarette, and chill out. I’ll be done when I’m done.”

Savannah cringed. Apparently, the tech wasn’t aware that Dirk had recently joined the ranks of the nonsmokers. And that hadn’t improved his irritability factor either. In fact, Dirk might be the first guy in history who had actually shortened his life by kicking the habit. As a snippy, sullen, nonsmoker, his odds of dying by homicide had risen considerably.

She and Tammy made their way closer to the body, but stayed well out of the camera’s frame. The other CSU tech and the two firemen also waited for the photographer to finish, busying themselves by pulling on surgical gloves, preparing the litter basket and body bag.

Savannah glanced over the remains of Bill Jardin, forming her first impressions. “He looks fresh,” she told Tammy, “for a guy who’s been missing five days.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” Dirk agreed. “No way this guy’s been dead for that long. He’s fresh as a daisy.”

Savannah, Tammy and the photographer gave him weird looks.

He shrugged. “Well, you know what I mean. Compared to some we’ve found.”

Savannah shuddered to think of some they’d found.

Nature wasn’t particularly kind or pretty in the way she took care of business when life had ended. But she was efficient.

“You about done there?” Dirk asked the photographer. “I’d like to get this body out of here before we freeze our asses off in this cold water…if you don’t mind.”

The tech turned to Savannah. “Your ass frozen?”

“Nope,” she said, “mine’s toasty warm, but I can’t feel anything below my knees.”

Dirk pointed straight up. “And that helicopter is getting some pretty ugly shots of their own that are sure to show up on the LA evening news.”

“I’m done. He’s all yours.” The tech stuck her camera in her smock pocket and gave Dirk a sarcastic grin. “Thank you for your patience. It’s always a joy working with you.”

Dirk mumbled something under his breath that only Savannah, who was standing next to him, could hear. It sounded something like, “Yeah…
mumble, mumble
…and your little dog, Toto, too.”

“What did he say?” Tammy asked her.

Savannah shook her head and cleared her throat. “Nothing. He just went somewhere over a rainbow there for a moment.”

Louder, to Dirk, she said, “Don’t you think we’d better wait for Dr. Liu to get here? She gets mighty perturbed when you go messing with her bodies before she has a chance to even look them over.”

“No. I ain’t waitin’ for no coroner. I’m getting this guy outta here as quick as I can,” Dirk said, glancing up at the chopper overhead. It had dropped even lower, and the cameraman was practically hanging out the window by his toes to get a better shot. “If those dudes up there know who this is…with his wife being a celebrity and all…this is probably being broadcast live, coast-to-coast, right now.”

One of the firemen looked up, ran his fingers through his hair, and smiled broadly for the camera.

“I see your point,” Savannah said.

The male CSU tech was leaning over the body, examining Jardin’s scalp.

“Here’s the entrance wound,” he said, brushing the hair away from an area on the back of the head. “About where you’d figure it to be, considering the spatter in the car.”

“Yeah, well, get him bundled up and out of here and you can look all you want later,” Dirk told them.

As they worked to free Jardin’s torn polo shirt from the jagged limb it was caught on, Savannah noticed a distinctly pink area on his back.

“Look at that,” Tammy said. “Isn’t that lividity?”

Savannah nodded. Yes, it was, indeed, an area of congested blood that had settled beneath the skin soon after death. Within six hours or so after he had died, Jardin had been lying on his back.

But even Tammy knew the color was wrong.

“Isn’t it supposed to be bluish purple, like a bruise?”

“It usually is.”

“Isn’t pink supposed to indicate carbon monoxide poisoning?”

Savannah couldn’t help noticing the self-satisfied smirk on Tammy’s face. The kid had learned a lot about death, dying, and mayhem during her association with the Moonlight Magnolia Detective Agency. But nothing took the place of experience. Years of it.

“It isn’t red enough,” Savannah said.

“What?” Tammy looked like somebody had popped her enormous bubble gum bubble. “What do you mean?”

“Victims of CO poisoning aren’t always red. The two I saw who were…they were a brighter pink than that. I haven’t seen anything like this before.”

Dirk and the two firemen managed to work the polo shirt free, and they flipped the body over.

Savannah prepared herself for the horror of a vicious exit wound. But, surprisingly, it wasn’t as bad as she’d seen. Certainly, the hole in his forehead—just to the left of center—was larger than the small, neat entrance wound to the back of his head, but minimal damage had been done to Bill Jardin’s face.

Clarissa would, no doubt, be able to identify his body.

Savannah winced at the thought, feeling a surge of pity for the woman. Even nasty, condescending, rude people should be spared having to identify one of their loved ones in a city morgue. It was one of those soul-scarring agonies that was difficult even to witness, let alone experience.

Leaning over the body, Dirk studied the face, then turned to Savannah. “That wound looks really clean, for an exit,” he said. “But then, I guess the river washed it clean.”

“Yes, it looks very clean,” she said. “I have serious doubts about how much evidence you’re going to get off it.”

“That’s usually the point of a river dumping. Makes me think that whoever did this knew what they were doing.”

He reached into the right front pocket of the body’s jeans and pulled out a thin black leather wallet. As he removed a California driver’s license and looked at it, he nodded. “Yeap. It’s Jardin all right.”

Glancing up at the hovering chopper and over at the ever-growing crowd on the road, Dirk tucked the wallet back into Jardin’s jeans pocket and motioned to the firemen. “Let’s get him in that basket—quick as we can.”

Savannah looked up at the helicopter that was now nearly on top of them. The downdraft from its rotating blades was kicking up foam in the water around them. The cameraman was leaning even farther out the window than before.

“You’d better hurry,” she told them. “Before that guy up there, Mr. Eye in the Sky, winds up down here in the river next to Bill, and you’ve got two bodies to transport.”

Dirk chuckled. It was the first time Savannah had seen him laugh since he had received the call about a missing person. “Yeah,” he said, “live feed of a camera falling out of a helicopter with the reporter still attached. That’d be real ‘film at eleven’ footage, huh?”

By the time the retrieval team had recovered Bill Jardin’s remains and transported the body from the river, up the embankment, and over the guardrail, they were all pretty breathless. Savannah and Dirk were particularly tired, as they had been awake over twenty-four hours.

Funny, she thought, how missing a night’s sleep is no big deal for a twenty-year-old, but once you pass forty, it ruins your year.

And so could climbing over a guardrail, snagging your already-soggy pants on a rusty screw, looking up, and seeing a reporter sticking a microphone in your face.

“Is that the body of Bill Jardin, the exercise diva’s husband?” asked a perfectly coiffed, overly made-up brunette with a dazzling bleached smile.

“No comment.”

Savannah tried to sidestep her, but hair, makeup, and teeth brightening weren’t the reporter’s only areas of expertise. She was pretty light on her feet, too.

Again, Savannah had a microphone practically up her left nostril.

“We’ve received a report,” the brunette continued, “that William Jardin has gone missing and the body you’ve recovered from the river just now is his. Can you please confirm this?”

Savannah glanced over at the litter basket, which was being loaded into the back of a large, white van with the county coroner’s logo on the side. She also saw a beautiful, tall, Asian woman, wearing a white smock, a miniskirt, and four-inch-high stilettos, getting out of a white station wagon with the same logo on its door.

The fur was about to fly, fast and furious, and Savannah wasn’t going to stand here chatting with a newscaster while it happened.

Besides, she could see at least five other reporters heading their way, like a swarm of hungry mosquitoes. The last thing she wanted was to get swamped and have to fight them off with a flyswatter.