Wicked Craving Read online

  At least three famous actors, one rock star, and a dot-com mogul lived there, along with other assorted celebrities and high-society darlings.

  “Who’s dead?” she asked.

  “Maria Wellman.”

  “That quack, diet-doctor dude’s wife?”

  “Who said he’s a quack?”

  “Anybody who says that all you have to do is listen to his CD one time and the fat will just melt right off you…that’s a quack.”

  There was a long silence on the other end. Then: “Well…he might not be a quack. It might work.”

  “Holy cow, you bought one of his CDs.”

  “Did not.”

  “Did, too. There’s no way you’d sound that disappointed unless you plunked down hard cash for that crap.”

  “You wanna go out to the scene with me? Or do you want to sit there, soaking in your bathtub, and feel superior to everybody else?”

  “Just the people who bought that stupid CD.” She chuckled. “All right. I’ll drive myself, in case I have to leave before you do and go pick up Gran.”

  He told her the address.

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” she said. “I have to get dressed.”

  “Don’t go to all that trouble just for me.”

  She snapped the phone closed.

  “I want to live on Lincoln Ridge,” Savannah muttered to herself as she guided her ‘65 Mustang up the steep, narrow road toward the top of the cliff. “I want a view like this, and a mansion like one of those, and plenty of staff to keep it clean. And I want to lie on a satin chaise lounge in a peignoir and eat bon-bons all the live long day.”

  Although she wasn’t certain whether bon-bons were pieces of chocolate or ice cream, she was pretty sure she wouldn’t mind taking up bon-bon eating as an occupation.

  But then, she reconsidered and decided she liked her own little house and didn’t mind sitting in her comfy chair, wearing a T-shirt and jeans and eating Hershey Kisses, either.

  Life was pretty good, if you decided it was…even without a mansion and bon-bons.

  And when she rounded a curve and saw an array of police cruisers, their lights flashing, parked in front of the Wellmans’ mansion, she decided she didn’t envy everybody in this neighborhood. Not at all. Having eight cop cars and a dozen policemen outside your door was never a good thing.

  As she parked the Mustang and got out, several of the patrolmen gave her nods, waves, and other greetings. Savannah had always been well liked by her fellow law enforcement officers. The San Carmelita PD brass…not so much. Before they had fired her years ago, she’d had a love-hate relationship with them. After the canning, it was pure hate-hate.

  Solving a murder case, exposing the dark, dirty secrets of your town’s top officials, and ruining their lives—it could wreck your career every time.

  As she approached the imposing, contemporary house with its odd, sharp angles and strangely pitched roof, she squinted and wished she were wearing her sunglasses. The exterior of the mansion was a blinding white, reflecting the late afternoon sunlight. And, although many of the homes in this area were surrounded by mature, lush plantings, this house had hardly any foliage to soften its stark appearance.

  Savannah thought of her giant, twin bougainvilleas that framed her doorway—named Bogey and Ilsa—and decided again that, humble as it might be, she did prefer her own home.

  Near the door, she spotted Dirk. He was haranguing a couple of subordinates and, therefore, never looked happier. When he glanced her way, she gave him a finger-waggling wave and a flirty grin, and in return she got a curt nod.

  Dirk wasn’t one to be mushy in front of the guys.

  As he turned his back on them and walked toward her, she saw the poisoned-dart looks they gave him and cringed. She would have been crestfallen to be on the receiving end of those looks.

  Dirk didn’t give a dang. He only needed to hold up two fingers to count the people he deigned to impress. No doubt, Granny Reid would be his pointing finger…Savannah the middle.

  And Savannah considered that most appropriate.

  Glancing at his watch, he said, “Hey, you really did make it in ten.” He looked her up and down with lasciviousness that was minimized due to the close proximity of other “manly men.” “Did you take time to dry off?”

  “Dried off and put on fresh undies. I don’t do that for just anybody, you know.”

  He grinned. Sometimes he couldn’t help himself.

  “Lucky me,” he said. Turning toward the house, he added, “Wanna see the body?”

  Just to irritate him, she laced her arm through his and half-cuddled up to him. Ten pairs of eyes shifted their way and a few of the fellows snickered. “Of course I want to see the body,” she murmured, leaning her head close to his, as though whispering sweet nothings. “You don’t think I rushed over here to see your body, do you?”

  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 ea
rly, 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.