Cooked Goose Read online

  “Slow. Methodical. Careful.” Jennifer looked sad. “Especially when it’s one of our own.”

  On the other side of the room, Savannah could see Cindy Oleksiak, who was also collecting blood samples. Savannah recognized the process as a quick and effective method of typing the specimens.

  “Is all of this Titus’s blood?” she asked Dr. Liu.

  “We’ve tested samples from in here, the bedroom, and the bathroom,” she said. “They’re all the same type: A Negative.”

  “His type?”

  Dr. Liu nodded. “Afraid so. It’s a fairly uncommon type. Of course, we won’t know for sure until we do the DNA tests. That’s going to take a while.”

  “Do you think he was murdered?” ,

  The doctor glanced around and lowered her voice. “Honestly? Yes. I think so. There’s a lot of blood here. And that was a .357 slug that we took out of the paneling. Judging from the blood spray on the wall, it went through a body first. . . . about chest level. It would have done a lot of damage.”

  Savannah digested that information a moment or two before she could speak. “Why do you suppose they removed his body?”

  “Who knows? But there are blood drops leading through the kitchen, out the back door, to the driveway. Like Hansel and Gretel, they left a pretty clear trail.”

  “We saw some of those drops earlier. Dirk said Titus keeps a classic Charger in the garage.”

  “It’s gone. They’ve put out an APB on him and the car.”

  Savannah’s brain searched for a happier, less tragic explanation. “Maybe he was wounded and left on his own, tried to get to a hospital and passed out along the way . . . something like that?”

  “Anything’s possible.” She gave Savannah a cheerless but understanding smile. “To be honest, I’m afraid that’s wishful thinking,” she said. “I doubt someone who had been that badly wounded and had lost that much blood, would still be able to get around on their own, let alone drive an automobile.”

  So much for happily-ever-after endings, Savannah thought. “I suppose you’re right. It’s just that . . . well . . . Titus is a sweetheart and . . .”

  “I know. We’re all pretty fond of him. This is going to be terrible for Christy. She’s so in love with him. I hear they just got engaged last month.”

  “And her mom’s terminally ill. Poor girl. Like they say, ‘When it rains . . . you might as well start building that ark.’ Has anyone told her yet?”

  “Dirk made the call just before he took off for lunch. She can’t leave her mom. Asked him to keep her informed.”

  Savannah glanced around the shattered remains of the room that said so much about what had happened inside those walls, and yet revealed so little. “Did you find anything else that might point a finger at who did this?” she asked.

  Dr. Liu smiled. It was her cocky, almost arrogant, grin that she got when she had something good. She reached into her lab coat pocket and withdrew a small plastic bag that was sealed and labeled. She stuck it under Savannah’s nose. “I thought you’d never ask. Take a look.”

  At first, Savannah thought the doctor had handed her an empty bag. Then she caught her breath. “Wow! Is this what I think it is?”

  Inside the bag were three hairs. Coarse, silver, curly hairs.

  “I won’t know for sure until I get them back to the lab and under a microscope, where I can compare them with the ones taken from the rape victims. But I’m ninety-nine percent sure it’ll be a match.”

  Savannah felt the adrenaline rush to her knees, and they turned to warm gelatin. “Where were they?”

  “On the carpet right there, about three and a half feet from where the victim would have been standing when he was shot.”

  Savannah fingered the bag thoughtfully. “Does Dirk know about this?”

  “Nope. I found them after he’d left,” she said proudly. Looking over Savannah’s shoulder, she peered out the window. “But I’m pretty sure that’s your old partner, pulling in the driveway right now. You can tell him if you want. I’m sure it’ll make his day . . . or ruin it.”

  Savannah hurried out the door and met Dirk on the lawn. He had a McDonalds’ large Coke in his hand, and a sated look on his face. “Hi,” he greeted her. “Did you get the teenybopper’s junk to her?”

  “I left her happy and sassy, lying on the bed, watching soaps. Oh, and she’s discovered the wonders of room service. That kid’s appetite is almost as monstrous as yours and mine. Bloss is going to have to take out a second mortgage just to pay her tab.”

  Dirk snorted. “Good. Serves him right.” He nodded toward the house. “How’s Dr. Liu doin’ in there?”

  “Bad news and good . . . well, at least interesting, news.”

  He frowned. “What’s the bad?” Good ol’ Dirk. He knew how to embrace the dark side of the moon.

  “The blood is most likely Titus’s,” Savannah said, hating how the words tasted in her mouth. “And there’s so much of it that he’s probably dead.”

  Dirk’s face dropped. “That’s about as bad as bad news gets, all right. What’s the good?”

  “Good or bad, depends on how you look at it. But she also found what she thinks are some hairs like the ones from Santa’s beard.”

  “No way! Why would that sonofabitch go after Titus? He likes to rape women, not kill cops.”

  Savannah shrugged. “Maybe Titus saw something at the scene, something the rapist didn’t want him to talk to anyone about.”

  “But Titus already said he didn’t find anything that night, or the next morning either.”

  “Perhaps he saw something but didn’t realize it was significant until later. I don’t know; it’s just a thought.”

  He shook his head and took a long swig of Coke. “Oh, man . . . this is too bizarre. A serial rapist who goes from mall abductions and rapes to kidnapping a police captain’s daughter, to shooting a cop. Just what kind of weird is this?”

  Savannah sighed, feeling old. “The kind of weird . . .” she said, “. . . that keeps you awake at night.”

  11:14 P.M.

  As Savannah stood beside her sofa, looking down at Dirk, sprawled across it, his mouth hanging open and drool oozing down his chin onto one of her best throw pillows, she wondered if the fried liver and onions had been such a good idea, after all.

  He had seemed so discouraged when he had dropped by this evening. Sitting at her kitchen table, a beer in one hand and the other hand buried in a plate of chocolate chip cookies, he had dumped his whole rotten day on her.

  After he had left Titus’s house, he had spent the rest of the afternoon interviewing the previous rape victims, asking them about the star-studded ring. No one remembered it specifically, although two said their attacker might have been wearing something like that.

  Nothing like concrete evidence to make a detective feel warm and fuzzy.

  Dirk had been anything but fuzzy, sitting there at the table, shoving his face full of cookies. Taking pity on him, she had offered to make his favorite dinner: liver, fried with bacon and onions, mashed potatoes and gravy. The guy had real down-in-Dixie taste buds.

  Unfortunately, he had the cholesterol level to match. And seeing his inert form stretched across her sofa, she was afraid that meal might have put him right over the edge.

  But she wasn’t terribly concerned—as long as he was drooling. To the best of her knowledge, corpses didn’t drool. But she’d have to ask Dr. Jennifer sometime, just to make sure.

  When the phone rang, she hurried to answer it, before the racket woke him. He hadn’t had a real night’s sleep since the case had begun, and she hoped the snooze would improve his mental focus . . . and maybe even his grouchy disposition.

  “Hello,” she said softly as she took the cordless phone into the kitchen.

  “Is Coulter there?” the nasal voice on the other end barked at her. This hatred she harbored for Bloss was quickly turning to full-fledged loathing. She could almost feel her hackles rise.

  “Why?” she
replied just as curtly.

  “Because I have to talk to him.”

  “Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t.”

  “Put him on the phone.”

  She stuck her tongue out at the phone. “Say, ‘Pretty please, with sugar on it.’ ”

  “Fuck you, Reid. Get Coulter. It’s important.”

  She grinned. His goat had definitely been gotten. She was finished with the game. “Only because you asked so nicely.”

  She walked into the living room, phone in hand, then thought of something else she wanted to say. “Oh, by the way, I think the way you’re neglecting your daughter is shameful,” she told Bloss, “although it’s perfectly in keeping with your usual lack of sensitivity and complete absence of character.”

  “Shut up about my kid, you dumb bitch.” Ah-ha! She had struck a nerve. Might as well irritate him just a little more while the gettin’ was good.

  “A bitch, maybe,” she said, “but dumb? How would you know? Stupid Head.”

  “Get Coulter!”

  “Pee-Pee Brain.”

  “Now! God damn it, Reid, you’d better . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

  She walked over to the couch and nudged Dirk in the ribs. “Hey, Sleeping Beauty. Bloss is on the phone,” she told him, loud enough that the captain would be sure to hear, “and he’s got his panties in a wad about something.”

  Sure enough. A few more obscenities drifted from the receiver in her hand.

  Dirk looked suspicious. “Did you say something to piss him off?”

  She batted her eyelashes. “Me? Why, of course not. You know how I just adore that man.”

  “Right.” He sat up, ran his fingers through his hair and took the phone. “Coulter here.” He listened. Savannah pretended not to as she rearranged the books and magazines on her coffee table. “Really? When? Where?”

  Whatever it was, he was wide awake now. He made a scribbling gesture in the air and Savannah quickly supplied him with a tablet and pen. He began to write. She looked over his shoulder and read something about rocks and the beach. She had never been able to decipher his chicken scratches.

  “Did they say who they were? What else?” He threw down the pen and reached for his sneakers, which he had kicked off and thrown beneath the sofa. “Okay,” he said, pulling them on. “I’m on my way out there right now.” He gave Savannah a funny look. “No, of course not, Captain. I wouldn’t think of taking Reid with me.”

  When he hung up the phone and reached for his coat, Savannah grabbed hers, too.

  As they rushed out the door, she said, “So, where are we going?”

  “To that big, stone jetty, just north of the pier.”

  She locked the door behind them, then ran to catch up with him as he hustled to his car. “Why?”

  “Because some anonymous caller just phoned the station.”

  “And?”

  He paused for a moment, his hand on the Buick’s door handle. He looked a tad green. “And they said that’s where we can find Titus Dunn’s body.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  December 14—8:16 A.M.

  Dirk sat on the end of the pier, his sneakers dangling over the edge, looking about as miserable as Savannah had ever seen him. She walked out to him and sat next to him, ignoring the fact that she would probably get seagull poop or fish bait remnants on her good linen slacks. Friends didn’t concern themselves with such things at times like this.

  “Don’t jump,” she said, nudging him with her elbow. “It isn’t worth it. The water’s damned cold this time of year.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he mumbled. “I hear that drowning ain’t all that bad.”

  She gazed thoughtfully out at the horizon where the morning sky was clear, cloudless, blue . . . the typical California sky. “I don’t trust information about dying,” she said. “Like, how do they know for sure? The people who have really gone through with it aren’t around to talk about it. The rest of them are guessing.”

  “I suppose Titus knows what it’s like to die.”

  She glanced over her shoulder at the jetty and the stretch of beach between the rock formation and the wooden pier. The area was swarming with cops. Dr. Liu and her team were hovering over the classic Charger they had found, parked in the beachside lot. It had been empty. Thank God.

  Except for a generous amount of blood splatterings, smudges and smears.

  Hordes of spectators lined the yellow tape that marked the perimeter. Some were equipped with cameras, microphones, and pushy attitudes that identified them as media.

  Everybody wanted a piece of the action.

  “We can’t be sure Titus is dead,” she said, trying to believe her own words, “until we find the body.”

  “Where the hell is it? We looked all night.” He waved a hand at the assortment of uniformed cops, plain-clothes cops, off-duty cops. Everyone and their brother was looking for any sign of their fallen comrade. “Dammit; Van,” he said, “half of the force . . . hell, more than half . . . was out here looking all night. And we got zip, zilch.”

  “We’ve got a little more than zip or zilch. There’s the Charger.”

  He cast a depressed look at the car and winced. “So, the blood is probably his, the same as the house. We already knew he was hurt. So, that’s nothin’ new.”

  Savannah marveled at how Dirk could put a negative spin on anything. But this time, he wasn’t without justification.

  “And somebody wiped the car down pretty good when they were through with it,” he continued, “so we don’t have any prints to go on.”

  She was determined to find the proverbial glass half full, or at least not bone dry. “That tells us something,” she offered.

  “What? That his attacker has good housekeeping skills?”

  “Maybe. But mostly, it tells us that Titus was inside the car, bleeding, and whoever shot him must have been with him in the car, probably drove him here, took him out of the car and wiped everything down.”

  “Then where’s his body? If they dumped him here, where the hell’s the corpse?”

  “If it was lying on the jetty rocks, like the caller said, it may have been washed away before we got here. There was a high tide last night.”

  “There’s a happy thought; we may never know what happened to him, let alone who did it.”

  She draped one arm across his broad shoulders. “Buck up, babycakes. It ain’t over yet.”

  She heard footsteps on the pier’s wooden planks, coming toward them. When she turned to see who their visitor might be, some of her depression turned to irritation. Captain Harvey Bloss. Just who she needed to see right now.

  He had shown up a couple of times during the night to annoy the searchers, pretending to be in charge, but getting in the way. Each time, Savannah had ducked out of sight, rather than risk another confrontation. She didn’t want to fight; she was too tired to be feisty.

  “It’s El Capitan Muy Loco. Whoopy-do. Want me to just go ahead and jump?” she asked, pointing to the water that splashed against the barnacle-encrusted pilings below. “Now might be a good time to find out if drowning’s a nice or crummy way to go.”

  “Naw. Stick around. If he gives you any guff, he’ll be the one going for a dip. I’m not in the mood to put up with his b.s. right now.”

  Dirk looked like he might actually welcome a verbal clash. When he was that tired and discouraged, he didn’t always use the best judgment—unlike Savannah who didn’t have to be tired or discouraged to abandon good judgment.

  “Don’t get on Bloss’s bad side,” Savannah warned him. “Believe me, having been there myself, I can vouch for the fact that it’s not a place you want to be.”

  “I thought I told you to stay away from crime scenes, Reid,” Bloss said, dispensing with his usual unpleasantries.

  “What crime scene?” She donned her most irritating pseudo-innocent face for his benefit. “This is a city pier. The only things murdered here are some red snappers and worms.”

 
; “Are you telling me you weren’t running around down there?”

  Dirk stirred, as though about to jump into the conversation, but Savannah squeezed his forearm. “Am I telling you that, Captain? No. I’m not telling you that . . . or anything else, for that matter. As far as I’m concerned, you and I aren’t speaking.”

  “Actually, we are speaking. We have some business to discuss. Privately.”

  He gave Dirk a dismissive nod, which clearly irked the heck out of him. Dirk turned to Savannah. “Van?”

  “Sure. No problem,” Savannah said, looking up and down Bloss’s less-than-impressive physique with contempt. “If push comes to shove, I can take ’im. He’ll be the one going over the edge.”

  Once Dirk was out of earshot, she asked Bloss, “Business? What kind of business?”

  “Actually, it’s more of a favor.” He looked like he was about to choke on his own spit.

  “A favor? You’re going to ask me for a favor? How fun! I get to tell you to go hell in a handbasket! Go ahead, ask. I can’t wait.”

  “I want you to let Margie stay at your house for a few days, until this case is resolved. I’m concerned for her safety, and I think she’d be better off there than the hotel.”

  “Oh.” Her emotional hot air balloon came tumbling to earth. She would do it. She had to. But she wasn’t going to let him off that easily. “So, tell me why I should do anything for you?”

  “Not for me. For Margie.” His patience was on a very short leash and it quickly reached its end. “Don’t bust my balls about this, Reid. Believe me, it’s not my idea. It’s hers. For some reason, which I can’t understand, she likes you. She’s throwing a fit to stay with you.”

  “Tell me the truth about something.”

  “What?” He looked unhappy, uncomfortable. Briefly, she wondered why.

  “Is she in danger? Do you know something I don’t?”

  “She was kidnapped and—”

  “I know. But she got away. Do you have any particular reason to think he might come after her?”