Cereal Killer (5 page)

Momentarily forgetting that she, too, fell into that category, Savannah rose from her chair and crossed the patio to the sliding door. When she opened it, a furry bundle of energy bounded out at her. It was a golden cocker spaniel puppy with enormous eyes and a stub of a tail that wagged its entire body.

“Susie, come back here!” the woman in red shouted, yanking on the red leather leash. “Ba-a-ad dog!”

The pup slunk back to her owner and lay at the woman’s feet, a vanquished spirit... at least for a few seconds.

“May I help you?” Savannah asked.

The woman looked about the same age as Savannah with long straight black hair that fell to a blunt cut below her shoulders. She had a dark tan and, judging from the depth of the crow’s-feet around her eyes, she had gotten it the old-fashioned way—from hours on the beach.

Her suit, though a bit on the bright side, was a smart cut and expensive fabric. Savannah made a quick mental note that her high-heeled Italian sandals probably cost more than her own entire summer wardrobe... not-so-carefully assembled over the past twenty years.

“May I help you?” Savannah asked again, interjecting a note of “What are you doing here?” into her voice.

‘Yes, you can help me. Tell me what the hell’s going on,” the woman demanded, matching Savannah’s aggressive tone note for note.

Before Savannah could open her mouth to reply, Kevin Connor shot up out of his chair and rushed over to the open door.

“I’ll tell you what happened, Leah,” he said, glaring at the woman. “Let
me
be the one to tell you. Cait’s dead. She died. She’s lying upstairs on the bathroom floor.”

The woman gasped and covered her mouth with her hand.

“That’s right!” Kevin shouted at her. “She starved herself and abused herself, trying to lose your stinking thirty pounds, and now she’s dead. Are you happy? Well, are you?”

Savannah couldn’t help feeling sorry for the woman, who had suddenly gone pale beneath her carefully cultivated tan. Even the cocker puppy seemed to sense the distress of the humans around her and whined, gazing up at her mistress with worried eyes.

Taking a step forward, Savannah gently placed herself between them. Whatever this “Leah” had done to incur Kevin Connor’s wrath, she didn’t need to hear such awful news delivered in such a callous manner.

“My name is Savannah Reid,” she said softly. “May I ask who you are and how you know Ms. Connor?”

The woman’s eyes narrowed. “Why do you want to know? Are you a cop?”

“No, a private detective. I sometimes work with Sergeant Coulter, the police detective who’s in charge of this investigation.” Again she gently asked, “And you are...?”

“She’s Leah Freed, Cait’s agent,” Kevin interjected. “She’s the money-grubbing bitch who got Caitlin the rotten gig in the first place and then called her every day, hassling her about how much weight she’d lost. That’s who she is.”

Savannah glanced quickly from Kevin to Leah, expecting her to bristie at being called a bitch and accused of causing her client’s death. But her reaction was minimal. The horror she had initially registered seemed to slip off her face, which was now completely passive as she stared blankly at Kevin Connor.

“We don’t really know anything yet, Kevin,” Savannah told him. “Until the coroner’s report we won’t even know what killed her, let alone who might have been responsible.”

“She’s responsible.” He pointed his finger, shaking it only inches from the agent’s nose. “Her and that damned ad company and the Wentworths. They were willing to let Cait kill herself just to sell cereal!”

“It’s premature to affix blame right now,” Savannah repeated. “Really, Kevin... you’re hurt and upset, and you’re saying things you may regret later.”

“No way,” he said. “I’m just telling the truth, and you know it!” Once more he shoved his finger in Leah’s face; then he turned around and strode across the patio to a gate in the whitewashed, six-foot-high fence that surrounded the pool area.

“I think you should stick around, Kevin,” Savannah called after him. “Detective Coulter will probably need to speak to you and...”

But Kevin Connor already had the gate open and was on his way out. “I’m just going to walk on the beach for a few minutes,” he said, “and when I get back I want
her
off my property.”

He slammed the gate behind him and the sound echoed across the patio. The pup whined again and plastered herself against her mistress’s leg.

Neither woman spoke for a few long, tense moments. Then Savannah quietly said, “He’s distraught.”

“He isn’t the only one,” Leah replied. Now that Kevin had disappeared, her façade began to crumble and tears filled her eyes. “Cait was more than my client; she was my friend. For years. I can’t believe she’s dead.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Savannah told her, thinking of all the times she had uttered those words and how it never got any easier. Being with people in some of the worst moments of their lives had taken a toll on her. Sometimes she felt like forty-something going on ninety.

Sometimes—like when a beautiful, vivacious young woman lay dead upstairs on her bathroom floor—it was hard to remember that the world was a good place to spend your allotted years of life.

A sound from inside the house caught Savannah’s attention, and she looked beyond Leah Freed to see the technicians carrying a gurney up the steps. In a little while, they would be coming back down with Caitlin Connor’s body. And that was a sight that the victim’s agent and longtime friend should be spared.

Besides, Savannah was pretty certain from the look in Kevin Connor’s eyes when he left that he meant it when he said that Leah had better be gone when he returned.

Dirk wouldn’t be too happy about her hanging around a potential crime scene either.

“You really shouldn’t be here, Leah,” she told her. “Did you see the yellow barricade tape outside when you came in?”

Lean glanced uneasily over her shoulder and shook her head. “Ah, not really. I... ah...”

“Or that big handsome police officer who shouldn’t have let you in?”

“Um... well... he was busy with those guys in the white uniforms and a lady who I think might have been the coroner. I told him I was a friend of the family, and he said it was okay for me to come inside.”

She was lying. After what seemed like a million years of being lied to at least fifty times a day by seasoned professional liars, Savannah didn’t need any sort of lie-detector equipment to figure out when she was getting the shuck put on her.

Leah Freed had sneaked in. Pure and simple. And now she was lying through her teeth about it.

Savannah’s cop radar registered a blip on her mental screen. “Why, exactly, did you drop by?” she asked the agent.

“What?”

Stalling for time,
Savannah thought.
When you can't think of anything to say, ask a question.
It was an old trick most often used by wayward husbands. But occasionally women used it, too.

“I said... why are you here? Why did you come by the house?”

“Oh.” She toyed with the pup’s leash several more seconds before answering. “I was just out for a walk with Susie here. I live a few blocks over, and sometimes I take evening walks in this direction. I saw the police cars and...”

“And?”

She shrugged. “And I was wondering if everything was okay, you know, with Cait.”

“Hmm. I see.” Savannah
did
see. She saw the seven hundred dollar, high-heeled Italian sandals on Leah Freed’s meticulously pedicured feet and knew damned well that she hadn’t been out for an evening stroll up and down santly beach streets in those fancy clodhoppers. Not on your life.

“I should probably be going,” Leah said, suddenly eager to disappear. She turned and headed across the dining area toward the living room, practically dragging the pup at the end of the leash.

Savannah followed right behind her, watching to see that she didn’t touch or disturb anything.

At the door, Leah paused and glanced over her shoulder at Savannah. “Are you coming, too?”

“Yes,” Savannah said. “I need to speak to Officer Bosco about letting anyone else inside the house before CSU clears it.”

“Oh.” She cleared her throat and shuffled her feet.

“I wouldn’t be too hard on him. Like I said, he was busy and I sort of insisted, being a close friend of the family and all.”

Savannah gave her a too-sweet smile. “Still,” she said. “I really should have a word with him.”

Leah shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

She opened the front door, bolted through it, and hurried down the sidewalk, stepping over the temporary barricade. Briefly, she tangled the dog’s leash in the yellow tape, and before she could loosen it, the tall, good-looking cop in his smart blue uniform strode from his unit over to her.

“Are you okay?” he asked her as she frantically fumbled with the lead. “I’m sure sorry about your sister,” he added sweetly.

“Ah, yeah. Thanks,” she mumbled as she finally freed the leash. In only two or three seconds, she was scurrying off down the road, a blur of red pantsuit and clicking heels.

Savannah watched, a wry smile on her face, as the woman practically tossed the cocker puppy into a Porsche convertible that was parked half a block away and sped off.

“Evening walk, my hind end,” Savannah muttered.

“I beg your pardon?” Officer Bosco asked.

“Nothing.”

“Too bad about her sister.”

“Yeah, too bad. But she’s not her sister. She lied to ya, Mike.”

Officer Michael Bosco looked like somebody had zapped him with a stun gun. “Really?”

‘Yes, really.” She draped one arm across his broad shoulders, briefly enjoying the closeness to youth and virility, before reminding herself that Officer Mike was about the same age as her baby brother, Macon.

So she ended the moment and slapped him on the

back. “As my Granny Reid would say, Mike, don’t believe nothin’ you hear and only half of what you see, ’cause the rest is nothin’ but bull pucky.”

“Bull
pucky
?” Officer Bosco looked confused. “I thought the rest was bull
shit.
”

“Nope, Mike. It’s bull
pucky:
Granny Reid lives in Georgia, and she’s a fine, upstanding Southern lady.” Savannah sighed and gazed out across the water at the last shimmering bit of setting sun. “Besides that... Gran’s a Baptist.”

“Oh. right.”

Chapter

4

B
y the surreal light of the yellow halogen lamps that illuminated the beachfront streets, Savannah and Dirk watched as Dr. Liu’s white coroner’s wagon pulled away from the glass house, heading for the city morgue. The CSU technicians were packing up their van, and Officer Bosco was removing the yellow tape from around the perimeter of the property.

At least for the moment, the on-scene investigation into the untimely demise of supermodel Cait Connor was completed.

Listening to the waves crashing on the nearby sand and smelling the salty sea air would normally have given j Savannah a peaceful, mellow feeling. But for some reason she felt restless, prickled by a sense of foreboding.

She also felt sad, which she understood, but why she felt uneasy in her own skin, she wasn’t sure.

“You going home?” Dirk asked her.

‘Yes,” she said. “You?”

‘Yeah, I think I got everything I need out of the scene and the husband. I think I’ll head back to the station to write it up.”

‘Just what you wanted on your day off. More paperwork.”

“Yeah, well. What are you gonna do? When I’m done, I think I’ll go get a burger. Wanna come? My treat.”

As much as Savannah wanted to take advantage of the rare offer of a “Dirk treat,” she wasn’t really in the mood for another burger so soon after lunch. Or anything else, for that matter.

Now
that
was a scary thought! The fact that she had lost her appetite was a surefire sign that something was amiss. And, apparently, her subconscious and her stomach knew it.

“Do you think it’ll be natural causes?” Savannah asked, as the taillights of the coroner’s van disappeared around a far corner.

Dirk, too, stared down the now vacant street, his face screwed into a thoughtful grimace. Savannah knew Dirk all too well, and she knew the look. He had that niggling feeling, too, that all wasn’t well in the world.

“Don’t know,” he said. “I guess it could have just been ‘accidental death, due to crazy-ass, starvation dieting.’ ”

“That would be a shame,” Savannah said.

Dirk cut her a heavy, sideways look. “It’d be better than the alternatives.”

Savannah briefly considered the other choices: suicide or homicide.

‘Yes... accidental or natural. That’s what we’ll be hoping for.” She sighed. “Sorry state of affairs when those are your best choices....”