Cereal Killer (9 page)

Kenny Bates nodded, gulped, choked, and then nodded again.

Dirk dropped him so abruptly that he smacked his chin on the counter.

Savannah couldn’t help giggling as they walked away from him and down the hall toward the back of the building. “That’s gonna leave a mark,” she said.

“Eh, numb-nuts like Bates are used to having to explain away suspicious bruises,” he replied. “He had a cast on his arm and a black eye when I was in here last month. Rumor had it that he tangled with some big Samoan chick that came in here to identify her old man’s body.”

“Oh, yes, I heard about her. Didn’t they figure out that she was the one who’d hacked him up with the machete?”

“Yep.”

“So Kenny boy got off easy.”

‘Yeah, but his luck’s bound to run out one of these days.”

“I’d like to be there when it happens.”

Dirk grinned his nastiest grin. “Maybe that could be arranged.”

“One can always dream.”

They rounded the corner and saw that the double swinging doors leading to the autopsy suite were wide open. Savannah was relieved to see that the only activity inside consisted of a janitor who was mopping the floor. The strong disinfectant smell of his cleaning fluid filled the hallway, but the odor of bleach was highly preferable to some of the other things she had smelled in there.

“County Medical Examiner” had never been high on Savannah’s list of things she wanted to be when she grew up. It was one of those jobs she was infinitely thankful that
somebody
did. But being a cop and a private investigator had required her to witness more than a few autopsies.

Viewing was as close to the reality as she ever wanted to get. And she didn’t even like that when she had known the person.

And while she hadn’t actually known Cait Connor personally, she was happy to be spared the experience of seeing her stretched out on Dr. Liu’s stainless steel table.

“She must be done with Connor,” Dirk said, echoing Savannah’s thoughts. “Good. Maybe she’ll have some results for us.”

“She’s probably in her office, doing the report,” Savannah replied as they turned down the hall to their right, heading toward the half dozen offices in that wing of the building.

The door was open to the last office at the end of the hall, and as predicted, they found Dr. Liu sitting at her desk, dictating into a small microphone.

She stopped what she was doing the moment she saw them and motioned them in, a smile on her face.

For years, Dr. Jennifer Liu had been one of Savannah’s favorite people. Tall, slender, and outrageously sexy, she looked more like a lingerie model than a coroner. In her autopsy suite, Jennifer wore her surgical scrubs, a disposable tissue cap over her long black hair, and paper booties over her shoes.

But once she had left the suite, tossed her scrubs into the laundry and the disposables into the biohazard trash can, she looked like she was ready for the local dance club.

She stood, walked around the side of her desk, and embraced Savannah with air kisses to both cheeks.

Out of the corner of her eye, Savannah saw Dirk do a quick once-over, taking in the ME’s black leather miniskirt, red cashmere sweater, and mile-long shapely legs.

Savannah couldn’t blame him. Dr. Liu was an eyeful.

On the other hand, Dr. Jen didn’t give Dirk much more than a curt nod in the way of a greeting.

“You done with Connor?” he asked with an equal lack of social grace.

“Yes, I’m done with Connor,” she replied as she motioned for them to take seats and returned to her own behind her desk. “How many times do I have to tell you that I’ll call you when I’m ready to discuss my findings with you on a case, Coulter?”

“We were in the neighborhood.” Dirk cleared his throat and shuffled his feet. “Savannah here asked me to drop by. She wanted to see you. Huh, Van?”

“Sure.”

Savannah gave Dr. Liu her brightest smile, and Jennifer pretended to buy it. “Well, since you’re here...” She picked up a stack of papers on her desk. Savannah and Dirk sat to attention in their chairs.

“The bottom line is,” Dr. Liu began, “she died of hyperthermia.”

“Hypothermia?” Dirk shook his head in disbelief. “How could that be? It was over eighty degrees yesterday, for Pete’s sake. How do you die from getting too cold in your own house in Southern California on a summer day? It’s not like she fell through the ice, skating in her backyard.”

“Hy-
per
-thermia,” Dr. Liu replied. “Heat stroke. Dehydration. Heat exhaustion.”

“Oh. That’s more like it.”

Savannah felt her heart sink. It was true then. Cait Connor had foolishly killed herself.

What a terrible waste.

“When you spoke to the husband yesterday,” Dr. Liu said, shuffling through her papers, “did he say anything about her being on some sort of crash diet and exercise program?”

Savannah and Dirk answered together, ‘Yes.”

“That’s what I figured.” She slipped on a pair of designer tortoise-rim glasses and read from one of her forms. “Systemic hyperthermia with extreme generalized dilation of capillaries and cerebral edema.”

“English, please,” Dirk said.

“She died of cardiovascular shock and brain swelling. I suspect she hadn’t eaten for days, hadn’t drunk anything for hours, and was exercising like a maniac. I found damage to her dental enamel and her esophagus consistent with bulimia. Why the hell do women torture and destroy themselves like this?”

Savannah was a bit surprised to see the anger in Dr. Liu’s eyes and to hear it in her voice. The ME was usually quite detached and clinical about her findings. Apparently the needless loss of young life affected her, too.

“She was under contract with an ad agency to lose a ridiculous amount of weight in a short time to promote a diet cereal,” Savannah replied.

“And her husband said she’d had problems with bulimia for years,” Dirk added.

“Well, that explains it.” Dr. Liu picked up another paper and glanced over it. “Except for the highly elevated body temperature. From my calculations, she was probably up around a hundred and eight degrees when she died. Usually you only see temperatures like that when people are exercising strenuously in very hot environs. It wasn’t
that
hot yesterday. Where was she doing her workout?”

“There in the house, I guess,” Dirk said. “They’d turned one of the extra bedrooms upstairs into an exercise room.”

“Was there any reason to think it was especially hot in there when she was working out?”

Dirk shook his head. “Not really.”

“The bathroom was unusually hot,” Savannah interjected. “I remember when I knelt beside her and put my hand on the tiles, they felt warm, even through my glove. Normally bathroom tiles would be cool. And the air was hot in there, too.”

“That was because of the skylight,” Dirk said. “Those things look good, but they let a lot of heat in, especially when the sun’s coming straight through them. I wouldn’t have one myself.”

Savannah chuckled. “A skylight in a trailer. I think that’s called a sunroof.”

He shot her a look and grunted. “Anyway.”

“Yes, anyway...” Dr. Liu reached for a stapler and fastened several sheets of paper together before placing them in a green folder on her desk. “Ms. Connor accidentally killed herself with harsh dieting and strenuous exercise. Let it be a lesson to society.”

Savannah and Dirk stood and headed for the door. Dirk murmured a half-hearted, “Thank you.”

As they were leaving, Savannah turned back to the doctor and said, “I always wondered how you do it. Stay slim and trim, that is.”

Dr. Jennifer shrugged and grinned. “I do it the healthy, all-American way,” she said. “I smoke three packs a day.”

Chapter

6

S
avannah and Dirk were only halfway across the station house parking lot on the way to their cars when his cell phone buzzed.

“Coulter,” he barked into it.

Savannah could tell by the scowl on his face as he listened that their plans for an early lunch at their favorite barbecue joint were about to be postponed. Nothing put Dirk into a foul mood and made him growl faster than to have something getting between him and his feeding dish.

“Where?” he said. He listened, then added, “Yeah,” and hung up.

She had always marveled at his economy with words—especially when on the phone to a boss. And even though, after years of hard work, Dirk had risen to the rank of Detective Sergeant First Class, he wasn’t and never would be one of the “suits,” as he called them.

“We got another body,” he told Savannah. “Up on Citrus Road.”

“In the orange groves?” she asked.

“Not this time. It’s layin’ on the side of the road.”

The county’s citrus orchards had long been a favorite site for body dumpings, rapes, and other nefarious activities.
So much for strolling among the lemons and communing with nature,
Savannah had decided long ago after moving to Southern California.

Although she had spent her childhood wandering among the peach and pecan orchards of Georgia, she had abandoned the Nature Girl routine and switched her relaxing, get-in-touch-with-the-inner-spirit walks to the local three-story mall. It was safer and you could stop for a peach milkshake or a butter pecan cone at the Baskin-Robbins.

“Wanna go with me?” Dirk asked as they continued across the parking lot to their cars.

“Nope. Thanks anyway,” she said. “I should get home to Marietta, listen to her rattle on about her Internet sweetie, and try not to gag or laugh at her. She takes offense easily.”

“Some of those Internet romances actually work out,” he said. “I saw a couple on
Oprah
who met that way and—”

“You
watch
Oprah?

He grinned sheepishly. “Dr. Phil was on.”

“Oh, that explains it.” She considered what he’d said for a moment, entertaining the thought that this longdistance cyber-relationship might work out for her sister. She thought it over carefully. Five seconds later, she said, “Naw. It won’t work. Marietta’s got her good points, but she’s a little whacky when it comes to the men in her life.”

“Not the brightest egg in the Easter basket, huh?” Savannah grinned. “Let’s just say that her cornbread ain’t quite baked in the middle.”

“You sure you don’t want to come with me?” he asked with his hand on the Buick’s door handle.

“I really shouldn’t.”

“The body is a young, good-looking fat chick. And before you yell at me, those were the captain’s words, not mine.”

“A good-looking fat chick... dead on the side of the road?”

He nodded. “That’s what the man said. A ‘young’ one.”

A cold, creepy, dirty feeling rolled over Savannah, making her wish she could step into a nice warm shower with a bar of strong antiseptic soap and just wash it away.

She walked around to the passenger side of the Buick and jerked the door open. “Let’s go,” she said.

Even before Savannah and Dirk arrived at the scene on Citrus Road, Savannah had a feeling that she might know the name of this unfortunate as well. Months ago, she had read an article in the local paper about Cait Connor’s close friend, Kameeka Wills, another plus model who had followed Cait’s example and moved from Los Angeles to San Carmelita. Kameeka hadn’t been in the business as long as Cait, but she was a rising star in the fashion world. The African-American beauty with her high, sculpted cheekbones and exquisite copper skin had her own line of plus-sized lingerie fashions at one of the high-end department stores, and her face had graced the cover of
Real Woman
twice in the past year.

The news article had said that she’d bought a house in the foothills above the town. And while the paper hadn’t given her address for security reasons, they had named the specific area, and it was less than half a mile from where Dirk had been told they would find the body.

All in all, Savannah wasn’t holding out a lot of hope for Kameeka Wills, but she decided to keep her suspicions to herself and not share them with Dirk until they saw the body in question.

Citrus Road ran along the top edge of the town and for years had been the divider between land that had been developed and the virgin foothills. Untouched, the hills stretched into the distance above the town, providing a tawny suede backdrop for the glowing white stucco buildings and their red tile roofs.

With its sharp curves, the road presented a bit of a challenge to the locals’ driving abilities, especially on a moonless night or during a storm when boulders or mud sometimes slid off the hills and down onto the pavement. And since joggers enjoyed the rural peace and the scenic views afforded by the road, the occasional accident wasn’t uncommon.

They rounded a curve and were upon the scene before they knew it. Again, yellow tape signaled passersby that something was amiss in society. And if that hadn’t alerted the witnesses, the bright yellow tarp spread over the body on the side of the road would have.