A Body To Die For (22 page)

“No, there haven’t been any arrests made yet. But we’ve come up with some interesting leads.”

“Leads? I’m not paying you for
leads
. I’m paying you for
results
.”

“Leads come first, Mrs. Jardin. Leads, then arrests,” Savannah told her, as gently as she could. “I know you must be very anxious for justice for your son. But these things take a little time. Please be patient with me for just a wee bit longer.”

A call-waiting beep came through, and Savannah looked at the caller ID. The number was Rebecca Shipton’s.

Savannah’s pulse rate rose. “Listen, Ruby, I’ve got another call and it might be important. I’ll call you back this evening there at the hotel, okay? I promise.”

Ruby wasn’t happy to say goodbye, but Savannah had a feeling that Rebecca wouldn’t be calling unless she had a lead on the Morris boy.

“Rebecca!” Savannah said. “Hey, girl! What’s going on?”

“I’m here in my office, looking across the desk at your young man.”

“Really! Oh, that’s fantastic!” Relief flooded through her. At least the kid wasn’t dead. No matter what happened to make him run or whatever he’d done, at least he was alive. “Did he actually say he’s Tanner Morris?” she asked.

“No, he’s being difficult and won’t talk to us. But I’m looking at his picture right here in my hand. There’s no doubt about it at all.”

“Where did you find him? How did you pick him up?”

“We passed the picture around and one of our volunteers saw him hanging out at the bus station downtown. We called the cops, and they picked him up for loitering.”

“We’re on our way over right now. We’ll be there in twenty minutes. Don’t let go of him.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it. See you later.”

Savannah hung up and turned to Dirk, who was eagerly eavesdropping. “Rebecca’s got Tanner Morris.”

“I gathered,” he said. “Alive and well?”

“Well enough to be sitting in her office, refusing to tell her who he is.”

“Hm-m-m. Sounds like your typical pain-in-the-ass teenager.”

Savannah thought of her younger siblings, all of whom had suffered through adolescence, some with more grace than others. “Difficult teenagers,” she grumbled. “Oh goody. My favorite.”

“But he’s alive and kicking,” Dirk said.

“Yes, thank goodness for that.” She remembered some times when they hadn’t had such a happy ending. She still had nightmares about the endings involving kids that hadn’t been happy. “He can be as difficult and surly as he wants,” she said. “I learned from Gran how to handle surly.”

“Does it involve a switch cut from a tree and the back of a woodshed?”

“Precisely.”

“Great. That’s just what the SCPD needs. A child-abuse lawsuit.”

“Naw, I won’t give him a switchin’…just a serious talkin’-to.”

“Oh, no! Anything but that! We men hate the talkin’-to crap. ‘Honey, we need to talk.’ Those words strike terror in the hearts of American men everywhere.”

“Only those who’ve committed dark, wicked deeds.”

“Like leaving the toilet seat up, walking into the house with muddy feet, not listening to every word you women babble at us all day long?”

“Those are the main ones. The toilet seat thing, though, that’s the worst.”

“So I’ve heard. I never understood that. Women act like it’s a mortal sin. We need it up; you need it down. It’s not like one point of view is any more virtuous than the other.”

“Listen up, buddy. Have you ever got up in the middle of the night and gone to the bathroom, thinking you’re going to be able to just shuffle in there, do your business and then come right back to bed, get in, and never quite wake up? Then…you go in, sit down and plop! Your rear end’s sticking in ice-cold water, and believe you me, you’re wide awake and mad as a wet hen. And before you can go to bed, you have to take a shower, maybe even change pajamas. Takes you hours to get back to sleep. All because some lamebrain forgot to put the toilet seat down like he was supposed to, like you asked him to a thousand times before!”

He was silent for a long time. Finally, sounding a little hurt, he said, “I thought we had put that behind us…no pun intended.”

“Some things a woman never truly forgets.”

“You already yelled at me a lot. I said I was sorry, and you said you forgave me.”

“Forgiving’s one thing. Forgetting’s another.”

“Obviously.”

They rode on a long, long time in silence.

“Sheez,” he mumbled, reaching for a cinnamon stick. “Some women. You piss ’em off once and…”

“Watch it.”

W
hen Savannah sat down in Rebecca Shipton’s intake office and looked at the tall, skinny, red-haired kid sitting across from her, she didn’t see a problem child. She saw a scared young man.

He did have the look of a man, being taller than most adults. And even though he was slender, she could see the promise of a full-fledged hunk further down the road.

But for today, Tanner Morris was a teenager in trouble, and he knew it.

“Tanner,” Savannah said as she settled into one of the uncomfortable, folding metal chairs that Rebecca had provided for her and Dirk, “we know who you are. We even have some pretty good ideas about why you might have run from your mom. And we want to help you. But we need you to talk to us.”

“I’ve got nothing to say,” the teenager replied, his arms crossed tightly over his chest. “I want a lawyer.”

A kid who’s smarter than the hardcore criminal we just interviewed
, Savannah thought.
Go figure
.

“You don’t need a friggen lawyer,” Dirk grumbled at him. “You’re not being charged with anything.”

“You have the right to have your guardian present while they question you,” Rebecca said from her seat behind her desk. “If you tell us how to get in touch with your parents, I’ll call them.”

At the mention of parents, a look of fear swept over Tanner’s face. “No, don’t do that,” he said. “I don’t have a dad, and I don’t want my mom here.”

“Your mom, Rachel Morris, that is,” Savannah said.

His big eyes filled with tears. Hanging his head, he started to quietly cry.

As she reached into her purse for tissues, it occurred to Savannah that, lately, everyone she came in contact with burst into tears within minutes. Maybe she should reexamine her interrogation tactics.

“We’ve talked to your mom, Tanner,” she told the boy. “She’s worried sick about you. In fact, I called her just before I got here, and I told her we have you. She’s on her way to get you right now.”

“No!” He jumped up from his chair. “I don’t want to see her. Not now. I can’t!”

Dirk stood and with a firm hand on the kid’s shoulder pushed him back down onto his chair.

“Then you better tell us why you don’t want to see her,” Dirk said. “And you’d better start talking fast. What happened that night?”

“Which night?”

Tanner’s innocent act wasn’t very convincing. Savannah found it both interesting and reassuring that he wasn’t a good liar. Good kids weren’t good liars. Maybe he was a good kid after all.

“You know which night,” Savannah said. “Last Monday night, the night that Bill Jardin was killed.”

Tanner gasped and his fair, freckled skin turned an even lighter shade of pale. “Mr. Jardin was killed? He’s dead?”

“You didn’t know that?” Dirk asked.

“Um, no. Well, not for sure. I was hoping that maybe he wasn’t.”

Savannah gave him her sweetest, most understanding big sister smile and said, “Tanner, I know you’re scared. I think you’re in a really bad situation and you need our help. But we can’t help you unless you tell us exactly what happened that night. We know part of it, but we need to know the rest.”

“For one thing,” Dirk said with far less sisterly understanding than Savannah, “we know that you were at the Jardins’ ranch out there in the country.”

Tanner gulped. “Okay. Maybe I was.”

“No maybe to it. You were there,” Dirk said. “And you’d better tell us all about it, because right now we’re wondering what you had to do with Bill Jardin being murdered.”

“Me? I didn’t do anything!”

“Then you’d better start telling us all the stuff that you supposedly didn’t do. Fast.”

Tanner turned to Savannah with a “rescue me” look in his eyes.

“It’s okay,” she told him. “Just tell us what you did and what you saw when you were there.”

The boy took a deep breath and plunged in. “I took a cab there. It dropped me off there on the main road, and I walked down to the house. I just wanted to see what it was like. To see where he lived, you know?”

“Bill Jardin?” she asked.

“Yeah. If he was going to be my new dad, I wanted to see what his place was like. Also, I was kind of worried, because my mom and me had been waiting for him to call and he hadn’t.”

“You guys were all supposed to be heading off to Las Vegas together, right?” Savannah said.

“Yeah. He’d promised that he’d leave Clarissa lots of times, but this time we thought he really meant it. My mom told him that he’d better go through with it and not back out, like he had before. She told him she’d give him twenty-four hours to tell his wife about us, and if he didn’t, she would. And she really meant it, so I thought that time he’d finally do the right thing.”

“It sounds to me,” Dirk said, “like you were going out there for more reasons than just to check out the estate. Sounds like maybe you were curious to see why Bill hadn’t called you and your mom. Maybe you wanted to make sure he was going to do the right thing by your mother this time.”

When Tanner didn’t reply, just stared down at his hands that were lying on his thighs, Savannah had a sinking feeling.

For all practical purposes, this kid had no father. If he had liked Bill Jardin, he’d have been looking forward to having a dad, being a traditional family of three. It also occurred to her that, if Bill changed his mind again that night, Rachel Morris wouldn’t have been the only one feeling rejected.

“What happened when you got there, to Rancho Rodriguez,” Savannah asked him. “Tell us everything.”

“I walked up the road, and through that gate, the one with the bell over it.”

“How did you get through the first gate?” Dirk asked. “The big one there by the main road?”

“I climbed over it.”

“It helps to be young,” Savannah muttered to Dirk when he looked skeptical. Then, to Tanner, she said, “Go on. You went through the bell gate and…?”

“They’ve got a big yard inside the wall there,” he said, “with lots of trees and plants and junk.”

“Yes, I know. We’ve been there,” Savannah said. “Go ahead.”

“It was dark and the lights were on inside the house. And…well…okay…I sneaked up to one of the windows and peeked in.”

“All right. No big deal. We’re not worried about you doing that,” Savannah told him. “What did you see?”

“I saw their living room. And Clarissa and Bill were yelling at each other, and Clarissa was crying.”

“Could you hear what they were saying?” Dirk asked.

“Sure. Especially her, ’cause she was the loudest. Bill must have told her about my mom and how she’d given him twenty-four hours to tell her about us, because Clarissa yelled, ‘You never would have told me if she hadn’t made you. You…’ Well, she called him a really bad name and slapped him.”

“She slapped him?” Dirk said.

“Really hard, a couple of times. He just stood there and took it. I guess he figured he deserved it.”

“What else?” Savannah asked.

Again, Tanner’s eyes welled up with tears. “I don’t want to get my mom in trouble.”

“She’s not in trouble,” Dirk told him. “What else?”

“Clarissa asked Bill if he’d known all along that the person they were paying money to was my mom. He said, ‘No,’ but she didn’t believe him. She said he and my mom had been a team from the very beginning, ripping her off, blackmailing her. She accused him of sleeping with my mom for years.”

Softly, Savannah asked him, “And how long has it been, Tanner? Did Bill know all along that your mom was threatening Clarissa and taking money from her?”

“No. Not at first. But then one night, my mom sent me up to take the bag of money out of the garbage can in a park, and Bill saw me. A few months later, Clarissa sent him to New York to tell my mom that they knew it was her writing the letters and to knock it off. That’s when he and my mom started, you know. That’s when they fell in love.”

“So,” Dirk said, “you saw Clarissa slap Bill and you heard them arguing, and what else?”

“She was all mad about some big amount of money that she’d given him. She said he gave it to my mom, that they were in on it together. She acted like my mom had demanded an extra big amount of money, even more than usual, and that Clarissa had given it to Bill to give to her. And since Clarissa found out that they were…you know…in love, she wanted her money back. She even threatened to kill him.”

“She did?” Savannah felt her heart take an extra beat. “What did she say, her exact words?”

“She said, ‘I should kill you for this, Bill. You screw my sister and the two of you rip me off for a small fortune. I really should kill you.’ Then he…”

The boy’s voice broke, and he started to sob hard, his shoulders heaving.

Savannah reached over and put her hand on his knee. “It’s okay, Tanner. You’re doing really good. You’re okay. What happened then?”

“He told her that he didn’t really love my mom, that she didn’t mean anything to him. He said he’d just been stringing her along because he really needed the money. She said, ‘For what? Your damned gambling debts?’ and he said, ‘Yes. They’re going to kill me, Clarissa. I owe a lot of money to guys who really hurt you if you don’t pay them in time.’”

He blew his nose loudly into the tissues, then continued, “Clarissa told him, ‘Then you should have found some way to get it other than through my sister.’ And then he apologized. He apologized and told her again that my mother had never meant anything to him.”

Savannah’s heart broke for the kid. She didn’t need Rebecca’s master’s degree in psychology to know that Tanner felt that rejection as keenly, or even more so, than his mother may have.

Savannah’s own father had abandoned his family over and over again. So she was no stranger to the kind of pain the teenager was feeling.

She also knew the depth of anger that pain engendered.

“What happened then?” she asked him, afraid of where this might be leading.

Tanner wiped his eyes. “Clarissa told him that he had to call my mom and tell her that he was never going to see her again. To tell her that she wanted that last payment back and there wasn’t going to be any more money. He had to tell her to stay the hell away from them. She told him to do it right then.”

“Did he?” Dirk asked.

“Yeah. She handed him a phone, and he did it. I heard him tell my mom it was all over, that it had all been a big mistake and that they couldn’t see each other again, and that they’d have to give Clarissa back that last payment.”

“And what happened after he talked to your mom?”

“I don’t know. That’s when I left.”

“How did you leave?” Dirk asked. “You didn’t have a car or a cab.”

“I walked.”

“You walked all the way back to town?”

Tanner nodded. “Yeah, it took me most of the night, but I did.” He lifted up his foot and slipped off his sandal. On his heel was a large, ugly blister. “I’ve got another one like it on this one,” he said, holding up the other one. “But it felt good to walk. I needed to think, you know, about stuff.”

Savannah, Dirk, and Rebecca looked at each other as they digested all they’d just heard. Tanner put his sandal back on, blew his nose once more, and then tossed the tissue into a wastepaper can next to Rebecca’s desk.

“You did the right thing, Tanner,” Savannah said, “telling us this. We appreciate it.”

“Okay. What’s next?” the boy wanted to know.

“We’ll take it from here.” Savannah sat back in her chair and took her first deep breath in ten minutes. “Your mom is going to be here in a few hours, so you just hang here with Ms. Shipton until—”

“What? No, I don’t want to see my mom. If I haven’t done anything illegal, can’t I just go?”

“No, you can’t,” Dirk told him. “You’re a minor, and you’ve been missing for days. Your mom wants you back, and we have to return you to her.”

“Why don’t you want to see your mom, Tanner?” Savannah asked. “Why didn’t you go back to the motel that night? Why did you run?”

A look of deep hurt, mixed with intense anger, swept over the kid’s face, and Savannah didn’t think it was solely because of Bill Jardin’s abandonment.

“I just don’t want to see her, and that’s all I’m going to say about that,” he told her. “I’m done talking now.”

And the way he crossed his arms over his chest and the jut of his chin assured Savannah that he meant what he said. She’d seen that look of male determination on her brothers’ faces, not to mention Dirk’s many times before.

He
was
done talking.

And they had gotten everything out of Tanner Morris they were going to get. At least for now.

“That was certainly enlightening,” Savannah said to Dirk as they walked out of juvenile hall.

“You think so? Then enlighten me,” Dirk replied. “I’m more confused than ever. Who the hell shot Jardin? His wife, who said she ought to kill him?”

“And by the way, I agree with her on that one.”

“Me, too. Or the girlfriend, who had high hopes of taking over her sister’s husband and at least half of her lifestyle and got those hopes dashed by a phone call?”

“That phone call must have been pretty hard to hear. As a hot-blooded woman myself, I think I might’ve snapped if I’d gotten a call like that, under those circumstances.”

“You figure both Clarissa and Rachel had good reasons to kill him?”

“There’s never a truly good reason to commit murder, but that said—”

“And here, ladies and gentlemen, is her real opinion…”

“If a husband of mine did what that peckerhead did, I’d have shot him between the eyes, removed the parts of his anatomy that I found most offensive, buried his body and miscellaneous parts in the backyard, and planted a potato patch on top of him. And every time I had a big ol’ baked potato with my bloody, rare steak, I’d think of him and grin real big.”

Dirk shot her a look of alarm. “Damn girl, remind me never to piss
you
off.”

“Just don’t ever marry me, promise to be faithful, and then fool around with somebody else.”

He gave her a playful grin and said, “I’ll certainly file that away for future consideration.”

As they reached the Buick, he said, “Do you think we should have another talk with Clarissa? Maybe lay some of this newfound knowledge on her and see how she reacts?”