A Body To Die For (24 page)

This is a biggy
, she thought.
One of life’s deepest wounds that leaves a permanent scar. No, he’ll never get over this one
.

O
n her drive to the safe house to give Sharona the news about Rachel’s confession, Savannah couldn’t muster her usual happiness at solving the case. In fact, she couldn’t recall a time she had been less pleased with her own results.

While Rachel may have deserved whatever was coming to her, having taken a human life, Savannah thought of Tanner’s face and any sense of satisfaction evaporated.

Even the orange groves, the sight of the trees filled with snowy blossoms glowing against the shiny dark leaves and the heavenly perfume they created, weren’t enough to lift her spirits.

Some cases just didn’t have happy endings.

So much for “closure.”

At least Sharona will get to go home
, Savannah thought as the little cottage came into view. Dirk had gone to the county jail and personally informed Pinky Moretti about Rachel’s confession. Dirk had pointed out to Pinky that Sharona didn’t have his money, and Pinky and his crew were off the hook for the murder. So there was no reason why Pinky and company would be coming after Sharona.

Savannah was looking forward to this visit, a small bright spot in a dark situation. At least someone would get their life back.

When she drove up to the cottage, she saw Sharona sitting on the ground beside the house, weeding a flower bed. She looked happy and contented with dirt smeared on both knees, all over her shorts and tank top, and a big smudge of it on her nose.

She smiled and waved when she saw Savannah’s car.

“Hey girl!” Savannah said as she climbed out of the Mustang and walked over to her. “Whatcha doin’ there? Communing with Mother Earth?”

Sharona laughed and wiped her forehead, leaving a brown streak there, too.

“I am,” she said. “I noticed that these flower beds needed weeding. It’s good therapy. Sort of symbolic of what I need to do with my life in general, you know?”

“I know exactly what you mean. Sometimes you just have to get in there and figure out what you’re keeping and what you aren’t.”

“And getting rid of the briars and brambles.”

Savannah reached down and picked up a few of the discarded weeds. “Are any of these guys named Aldo?”

Sharona nodded. “He’s already in the trash can over there. He was one of the first to go.”

“Good girl. Sounds like all this country air has cleared your head.”

“More than you know. I’ve already bought a ticket to go back home to Indiana. My sister says I can stay with her for a month or two until I get on my feet.”

“That’s great, Sharona. And I have some more news for you. We’ve solved the case. Rachel Morris, Clarissa’s twin sister, has confessed to killing Bill. Dirk’s talked to Pinky and everything’s settled there. I wouldn’t hang out with those people anymore, if I were you, but I don’t think you have to worry about them now. You can go home to Indiana with a clean slate.”

Sharona took several moments to absorb what she had been told, then she closed her eyes and slowly shook her head. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “Why did she do it? Bill told me about that gal Rachel. He said she took it hard when he broke up with her a few months ago, but…”

“A few months ago?”

“Yeah, he dumped her for me.”

“Oh, okay.” Savannah decided not to tell her that Bill had been two-timing her. What was the point in adding to her burden? Wasn’t it bad enough, just losing a fiancé to murder? She didn’t need to know everything.

“So, when are you going home to Indiana?” Savannah asked her.

“My flight is tonight. I’m taking a redeye.” She stood and brushed the dirt off her hands and knees. “I can’t wait. I haven’t seen my sister’s new baby girl yet. It’s going to feel really good to be home.”

Savannah thought about her own sister, sitting at her house, pouting and waiting to be taken to the beach. She sighed. “Family. What would we do without them?”

“I guess I’d better get busy,” Sharona said. “I’ve got things to do. Let me go grab a quick shower and rinse off this dirt, then you can take me home.”

“Have you got a lot of packing to do?”

“Not that much,” she said with a sad smile. “I travel light.”

They walked into the house, and Savannah settled herself on the sofa with the crossword book and a pencil. “Do you mind if I finish your puzzle here?” she called out to Sharona, who was in the bathroom, getting ready to shower.

When she got no answer, she glanced over the rows and columns, seeing if any of the answers jumped out at her. None did. Sharona had already gotten all the easy ones.

Bored and tired, she laid the book aside, got out her cell phone, and called Dirk.

“Yeah?” he answered with his usual charm.

“Whatcha doin’?”

“I just wasted an hour with that Rachel chick. I was trying to squeeze her to give up the gun, but she’s got an attorney now, and she’s not saying much.”

“You’ve got her written confession. You don’t need the murder weapon, do you?”

“Not really, but it’s a loose end, you know. Like that ‘666’ phone number. I don’t like loose ends.”

The phone on the end table began to ring.

“Somebody’s calling here,” she said. “I’ll talk to you later.”

She hung up and reached for the house phone. “Hello,” she said.

A very cheery female voice on the other end said, “Hi, Sharona. It’s Lucinda from Worldwide Travel. I just wanted you to know that I was able to get those first-class tickets for you and the honeymoon suite there in Casa del Sol was available, so you’re all set.”

“Uh, thanks.”

“I so-o-o-o envy you! You and Aldo are going to just lo-o-ove Cancun! I’d ask you to take me along, but since it’s a honeymoon, I guess you won’t want company.”

“No, I suppose not.” Savannah glanced at the closed bathroom door. She could still hear the shower running. “Um, Lucinda,” she said, her voice low, “I don’t remember for sure…did I already give you my credit card number?”

“What? Boy, you
must
be excited. Don’t you remember we had that whole conversation about you paying cash…about how we don’t usually have that much laying around here at one time, but we’ll take money however we can get it?”

“Oh, right. Duh. I guess I
am
a little scatterbrained right now,” she replied, trying her best to squelch her Southern accent.

“So, we’ll see you soon?”

“Yeah. Soon.”

“We close at five.”

“Gotcha. Thanks a lot.”

Savannah hung up the phone and stood there a moment, her thoughts spinning.

She glanced around the room and spotted Sharona’s purse lying on the carpet at the end of the sofa.

Still listening for the shower, she rushed over to it, and grabbed it up off the floor.

She didn’t even have to look inside. She could feel the heft of it. And she knew all too well what a purse that heavy meant.

She sighed, shook her head, and said to the closed bathroom door, “Ah, Sharona. Damn it, girl, you’re good. I’ll give you that.”

A few minutes later, when Sharona came out of the bathroom, a towel wrapped around her hair and another around her body, Savannah was sitting on the sofa, the crossword book on her lap.

“Boy, I feel better,” Sharona said. “Nothing like a cool shower to perk you up.”

“Yeah, nothing like it,” Savannah replied. “Hope you don’t mind that I’m working on your puzzle here.”

“No, not at all. But I was wondering, is it okay if I take the book along with me on the plane? It’s a long flight.”

“It certainly is. How many hours is it…from here to Indiana?”

Sharona hesitated only a second. “Oh, I’m not sure. Three or four, I guess. And I have a few of your good cookies left over. I think I’ll take them along, too. They don’t feed you now on planes, I’ve heard.”

Savannah fixed her with a level stare that Dirk called, “shooting those blue lasers.” Her voice even and monotone, she said, “Oh, I wouldn’t fret too much. I think they still feed the folks in first class.”

Something flickered in Sharona’s eyes, but it was gone in an instant. She gave a tense little laugh and said, “Yeah, but first class…who can afford that these days?”

“You’d better get dressed,” Savannah said. “You don’t want to miss that flight. I’m sure they’re looking forward to seeing you back home. Your sister and her new baby girl, that is.”

“Right. I’ll just go get dressed.”

She disappeared into the bedroom and then reappeared in record time, wearing jeans and a sexy wrap top in a colorful, tropical print. She was carrying her suitcase. “Okay,” she said. “All set.”

Savannah shielded the cell phone in her hand with the book as she punched the “send” button. Her phone dialed Dirk’s infamous “666” number. A second later, Sharona’s purse, lying on the carpet beside the sofa, began to play a merry tune.

Sharona glanced at it and seemed to freeze in place. A look that Savannah could only describe as “quite worried” crossed her face.

The song played louder and louder, and finally Savannah said, “Aren’t you going to answer that?”

Sharona stared at Savannah, her eyes searching her face. But Savannah was a pretty mean poker player herself, and she had on her best deadpan expression.

“It’s probably just my sister calling again,” Sharona said. “She’s all excited about me coming. I don’t have time to chat with her now.”

“You might oughta check. It could be the airline calling to tell you that your flight’s been cancelled. You know the way they are these days.”

“Yeah…okay.”

Slowly, Sharona walked over and picked her purse up from the floor. Reaching inside, she pulled out her phone. With her hand wrapped around it, she glanced down at the caller ID, and her eyes widened.

She looked up at Savannah. “What…what are you…?”

When she saw that Savannah was holding her own phone up for her to see, she shoved hers back into her purse. “What are you doing?” she asked, sounding a bit unnerved.

“I’m calling a phone number that ends with ‘666.’ Detective Coulter’s been calling it for days, trying to figure out who has the phone now. But nobody’s answered.”

“Okay.” Sharona sat down hard on a nearby chair, her purse clutched to her chest. “And so…what’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that you have the phone that Bill Jardin called the night he died. The best we can figure, within an hour, or thereabouts, of the time he died.”

“So?”

“But you said you never heard from him that night. You were so worried, because it wasn’t like him not to call.”

She shrugged. “I guess I forgot.”

“I’ll bet,” Savannah said, “that if I were to look at that phone of yours, I’d see quite a few interesting calls, both incoming and outgoing. Unless, of course, you’re smart enough to have deleted all the history.”

“What are you saying? Are you accusing me of something?”

“First of all, your phone…it’s stolen. Somebody took it from an elderly woman across town.”

“I didn’t steal this phone. Somebody gave it to me.”

“Aldo?”

When she didn’t reply, Savannah said, “Does Aldo rip off old ladies?”

“No, he certainly does not! He told me that he found it on a table in the library.”

“Yeah, Aldo strikes me as a big reader, one of those intellectual types.”

“He’s not that bad!”

“Not exactly a weed outside in that trash can either, is he?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, and you’re going to make me miss my plane if we just sit here like this.”

Savannah laid her phone on the sofa cushion next to her. “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,” she said. “You’ve got all the time in the world. In fact, I’d say you’ll get thirty, maybe even forty years. Premeditated, first-degree homicide. That’s a hefty sentence.”

Yes, she’s getting the picture now
, Savannah thought as she watched Sharona’s face change from red to a ghastly gray.

Savannah continued, “We thought that Bill called Rachel that night and told her their affair was over. But it was you he called. He was the one who dialed the phone when Clarissa insisted he make the call. How was she to know who he was talking to?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Bill never dumped me. We were in love. We were going to move away together.”

“You can drop that story now, Sharona. That was never the plan for either one of you. Bill was lying to you. He was moving to Vegas, all right, but with another woman. With Rachel.”

Sharona’s eyes flooded with tears. “That’s not true! He loved me.”

“Stop with the waterworks. I’m not buying it this time. You killed him.”

“I did not!”

“You’re the one who called Pinky. You pretended to be Clarissa when you told him that Bill wanted to meet him later than the time they’d agreed on. Then you went to the chicken plant…which you know damned well wasn’t a tree or a flower…and you blew his brains out.”

The tears stopped flowing so abruptly, it was as if Sharona had turned the handle of a faucet.

“I did not,” she said coolly, “and you can’t prove anything anyway. You’re going to charge me with murder based on what? A couple of phone calls?”

“Partly, yes. Your phone carrier’s been a little slow turning the records over to Detective Coulter, but they’ll get around to it pretty soon. And it’ll show that it was you Bill called that night, that you were the one who got dumped.”

“That’s not enough to prove murder. I’m not stupid, you know.”

“Well, the jury’s still out on how stupid you are or aren’t. But I’ll bet that you took your phone with you that night when you went out to the processing plant. And if it was on, the cops can tell by the records that you were in that area.”

“They can not! I mean, if a person doesn’t make or receive any calls, there wouldn’t be a record of where they were.”

“The signal that’s being sent to your phone is beamed from one tower and then another as you go from one area to the next.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is. How do you think your phone always knows what time it is? It’s receiving a signal. And there’s a record of that.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Savannah laughed. “Well, you can believe me or not, missy. Maybe they’ll explain it better at your trial. I never was all that good with techno stuff. Let’s see if you’re any better at explaining how you came into all that ready cash. You know, enough money to fly first class to Cancun and stay in a swanky resort…you and Aldo.”