Killer Gourmet (8 page)

“Because she was much more than his sous-chef. She was
the
chef. The food he served and called his own was made by her. Every bite of it.”

“Really? But how? How could that be?”

Maria gave a dry, bitter chuckle. “Why do you think he went crazy any time someone other than his staff came into his kitchen? It was because he was afraid they would find out his secret. And his secret was: He couldn't cook. He screamed and shouted and strutted around, acting the part of the celebrity chef. He hated Francia because she was everything he claimed to be.”

“And he couldn't fire her, because if he did—”

“—the world would find out that he was a fraud.”

Savannah recalled everything that Ryan and John had said about Francia and how they had nearly hired her as their head chef. She considered how Francia must have felt when that golden opportunity was snatched away by her unscrupulous, abusive boss.

But there was the matter of the alibi.

“I see what you're saying,” Savannah told her. “But your husband claims that Francia and Manuel were with him in the alley around to the side of the building, having a cigarette, when the chef was killed.”

Maria glanced over toward the park, where Carlos and Dirk were finishing their walk and heading back toward the stand.

Savannah saw the young woman's love for her husband in her eyes as she watched him. But there was a sadness there, too.

“My husband is a good man,” she said. “Sometimes he's too good.”

“What do you mean?” Savannah asked.

“He's too loyal. He's a better friend to others than they are to him. And sometimes he gets hurt.” Her eyes searched Savannah's, pleading, looking for reassurances. “Will you try to help him?” she asked. “I've tried to help you all I could. I answered your question. Please don't let my husband get hurt.”

“I'll try, Maria,” Savannah told her. “I'll do my best.”

But even as she spoke the words, Savannah wondered if it was a promise she would be able to keep.

S
avannah supposed that there were more depressing places on God's green earth than the county morgue.

But she couldn't think of one.

In all the years she had been coming to this awful place—probably at least one hundred visits or more—she couldn't remember one time when her mission had been “festive” in nature.

The only times she had ever felt even a smidgen of something akin to joy inside that grim, somber, gray building were when she was walking out of it.

Dr. Liu didn't seem to mind living with the specter of death on a daily basis. But Savannah couldn't help feeling uneasy about being inside a building the very existence of which was to deal with one of life's most inevitable and least pleasant realities.

Then, to make things even worse, there was good old Kenny Bates.

Like the biggest green fly atop a dog pile, Officer Bates manned the reception desk, doing his utmost to offend everyone who walked through the front door.

And he succeeded famously.

He flirted with every female who passed through, and his method of seduction was so crude and overt that Savannah wondered how he could have escaped a sexual harassment charge for so long.

Several years before, he had made the mistake of showing her the centerfold of a porn magazine and commenting at length about how much the model, who was displaying everything but her ovaries, resembled Savannah.

Savannah had cheerfully taken the magazine away from him, rolled it up, and beaten him half to death with it.

Since then his ardor toward her had, thankfully, cooled a bit.

He was even less charming with the males who passed through his front door, as he snapped, snarled, and seized every opportunity to establish his dominance over them. He protected the desk, the sign-in sheet, and its accompanying pen like an ill-tempered guard dog defending a junkyard from midnight marauders.

Savannah had seen homicide detectives more relaxed at a multiple murder scene than Kenny Bates was with his stinkin' clipboard and ballpoint.

That afternoon, as Savannah parked the Mustang in the morgue lot, Dirk reached back to the rear seat and grabbed the container of chocolate chip cookies.

“Don't want to forget these,” he said. “We're at least an hour and a half earlier than she said to come.”

Savannah reached over and snatched the container from his hands. “I baked them,” she said, hugging it to her chest. “I get to be the one who gives them to her.”

“Yeah, yeah, what you mean is, ‘I wanna snag one of those for myself while we're walking up to the door.' ”

He knows me way too well
, she thought as she got out of the car, closed the door, and started across the parking lot toward the front of the building.

Of course, that was exactly what she had in mind. If he hadn't been so snippy about it, she would have offered him one, too.

But she didn't have to offer. No sooner had she raised one corner of the lid than he reached around her and shoved his big hand inside.

“If you're eating one, I am too.”

“Okay,” she told him. “But we probably shouldn't mention to Dr. Liu that she's short two cookies. We don't want to get the visit off to a bad start.”

Long before they reached the front door, the pilfered cookies had been dispatched to confectionary heaven, and all traces of crumbs had been brushed from lips, chins, and the front of Savannah's blouse.

Dirk flicked his lower lip vigorously, then turned to Savannah. “Did I get it all?”

“Yes. Did I?”

He reached over and rubbed a spot of chocolate away from the corner of her mouth. “You're okay now. All evidence destroyed.”

“Not all.” She rummaged around in her purse until she found a pack of breath mints. “Here, have a couple of these. We can't walk in there reeking of chocolate.”

“Good point. It's not easy, you know, being a criminal. You've gotta think of everything. It's so easy to slip up. You overlook one little thing like chocolate breath, and you're busted.”

She laughed and popped a couple of the mints herself. “Does it ever occur to you that you and I are ridiculously afraid of Dr. Liu? I mean, I'm carrying my 9 mm Beretta, and you've got your Smith & Wesson. Call it a hunch, but we could probably take her in a pinch.”

He shook his head vigorously. “No way. That woman has knives and saws and scalpels, and she knows how to dissect the human body in less than five minutes. No way I'd ever mess with her. Plus she wears all that leather. You gotta watch out for gals who wear leather.”

“And here I always thought you liked my leather, undercover hooker miniskirt.”

“I'm nuts about your leather miniskirt. And anytime you wanna put it on for me, I promise I'll watch out for you real good.”

When they reached the entrance, Dirk held open the door, and Savannah preceded him inside.

The moment she stepped over the threshold, she glanced toward the reception desk, looking for Bates. She had to admit that she enjoyed the slideshow of ugly emotions that played on his face every time he laid eyes on her.

Hate. Lust. More hate. And in the end, settling back into unadulterated lust.

Since the moment she had beaten the tar out of him with his own girlie magazine, he had despised her. But he still wanted her. Oh so desperately.

And knowing that made her want to scurry home, grab a gallon of bleach and a box of steel wool pads from under the kitchen sink, head for the bathroom, jump in the tub, and scour herself from head to toe.

Perched on a chair that barely supported his overly robust physique, he sat at a desk positioned behind the reception counter. The instant he heard the door open, he jumped and turned off the computer in front of him.

Dirk chuckled. “Whatcha up to, Bates? Watching naughty videos on the taxpayers' dime, are we?”

“No! I was not! And you can't prove it!”

Dirk turned to Savannah. “Oh, well. Hell, I'm convinced. Aren't you?”

She nodded, a serious look on her face. “Absolutely. The plaintive denial of an innocent man wrongly accused. No doubt about it.”

Her container of cookies clutched tightly to her chest, Savannah attempted to walk past the reception desk, ignoring Bates's precious sign-in sheet. It wasn't that she particularly minded scribbling a name and time on the paper. She just couldn't pass up an opportunity to irk Bates.

One of her life mottos was: Those who are easily offended should merely be offended more often.

Watching an idiot like Bates throw a conniption fit served as entertainment, when nothing better was available.

“Hey! Where do you think you're going? You're not getting past me until you sign that sheet.”

Dirk grabbed the clipboard with its attached ballpoint pen. “Chill out, Bates, my man. You gotta learn to relax a little, hang loose, get a Zen thing goin'. You can't sit around all day, getting your dickey do in a twist over a little thing like a sign-in sheet.”

Savannah nudged Dirk. “Here,” she said. “I'll sign it. We don't want Officer Bates here to get all upset. When he's mad he swells up like a big old toad.” She took the pen from him and shoved the cookies into his hands. “The buttons on the front of his uniform might start popping off, and we could get hit with a deadly projectile. And we can't be havin' that. I'm pretty sure Saint Peter wouldn't let us through the pearly gates if we died that way.”

She scribbled the time on the sign-in sheet. Then, on the corresponding signature line, she wrote, “Ura Wayne Cur” and shoved the clipboard back across the counter at him.

In all the years that she had been signing his sheet, using monikers of a low caliber, he had never noticed. And she couldn't help being mildly disappointed. After all, what was the point of insulting someone if they didn't even realize they'd been dissed?

Leaving Bates to his menial duties and his Internet porn, Savannah and Dirk continued down a long hallway toward the back of the building in the autopsy suite.

“I saw what you wrote on the sheet,” Dirk told her, his eyes twinkling with affection and admiration. “You're a wicked woman, Van, if ever there was one.”

She giggled. “Guilty as charged. But I'd rather be a wicked woman any day than a Wayne Cur.”

They had reached the end of the hallway, and before them stood the oversized, swinging double doors that opened into the morgue's autopsy suite.

As always, Savannah's pulse rate quickened a bit at the thought of passing through those doors. More than once, she had seen things inside Dr. Liu's examination room that had haunted her for a long time afterward.

Some of the worst, most gruesome specters still paid her an unwelcome visit, from time to time, in the middle of a long dark night.

And, of course, there was added anxiety when she and Dirk were showing up at the morgue prematurely and unbidden.

As one of the fastest and most efficient medical examiners in Southern California, Dr. Liu didn't like being pestered. And Detective Sergeant Dirk Coulter was the biggest pest in the SCPD.

Even bearing a bribe of Savannah's best home-baked cookies, there was always a chance that you were taking your life in your hands when nudging Dr. Liu.

Dirk put one big hand on the left door, turned to Savannah, and said, “Ready?”

She nodded. “Get set.”

“Go.” He gave it a push, then stood aside for her to enter first.

This time, she wasn't altogether sure that his primary motivation was chivalry.

One quick glance told Savannah that Dr. Liu was right in the middle of the autopsy. Or more accurately—right in the middle of Chef Baldwin Norwood.

At the sight of a body splayed open, innermost organs exposed, Savannah felt her customary physiological reaction—the urge to deposit her most recently eaten meal in the sink on the other side of the room.

She would have been in good company had she done so. More than one big, tough cop had upchucked in Dr. Liu's sink.

But as always, Savannah flipped the switch from visceral to cerebral. She was here to learn everything she could about the untimely passing of Chef Norwood, not to make a fool of herself by losing her breakfast.

Shooting an annoyed look over the top of her surgical mask in their direction, Dr. Liu said, “Gee, I've been working for a whole half an hour. I wondered what was keeping you.”

“Interviewing witnesses,” Dirk snapped back. “Oh, and we slept for a couple of hours and gobbled down some breakfast. How about you, Doc? You probably got in a full night's sleep, right?”

“Two hours and thirty minutes,” Liu replied dryly. “And my breakfast was four cups of coffee, which I drank in the car on my way here.”

Quickly, Savannah stepped between the two of them and held out the container of cookies. “I come bearing gifts,” she said.

Dr. Liu raised one delicately plucked eyebrow and looked at the offering. “Coming from you, I suppose I don't have to ask if there's chocolate in that box.”

“Chocolate chip cookies. And not white chocolate, either. The real thing.”

“With nuts?”

“Macadamia.”

Dirk grumbled. “Thirty-five bucks worth, or so I just found out. You better like them, or just keep it to yourself.”

The medical examiner fixed him with a long, piercing look, then turned to Savannah. “I see that being married to a good woman like you hasn't improved him much,” she told her. “And I had such high hopes.”

Savannah laughed. “Yeah, me too. But by the time they're in their forties, they're pretty set in their ways.”

Stepping closer to the examination table, Dirk cleared his throat and said, “Are you two gonna hang around, cacklin' like a couple of hens, gossiping about me like I'm not standing right here? Or are we gonna talk about what happened to the chef, here?”

“What you're going to do,” Dr. Liu replied, “is put on some gloves and a mask or step away from my table.” To Savannah, she said, “You too. But first, feed me one of those cookies.”

Savannah glanced down at the blood and gore on the table, then at the organ that the doctor was holding in her gloved hand. She was pretty sure it was a gallbladder. “Really? Now?”

“I told you—I had coffee for breakfast. Black coffee. I could use something with a calorie in it. Okay?”

Savannah gulped. “Sure, Doc. Whatever you say.”

Savannah opened the container, took out a cookie, and broke it into four pieces. She walked over to Dr. Liu, tugged the surgical mask down under her chin, and patiently fed her each bite.

Dr. Jennifer Liu never failed to amaze Savannah. Of course, holding a bloody gallbladder in one's hand was all in a day's work for a medical examiner. But the odors that accompanied an autopsy alone were enough to put Savannah off food for hours. Barbecued short ribs, in particular, could be off the menu for days.

There was just no getting around it—Dr. Liu was “special.” Once the cookie had been consumed, the doc's mask replaced, and Savannah and Dirk properly attired with surgical gloves and masks of their own, the grim business at hand resumed.

“Do we have a cause of death yet?” Savannah asked. “I mean, I feel silly for even asking, considering how many times he got perforated, but . . .”

“That's never a silly question,” the doctor replied in her patient, kindly “teacher” voice, which was much gentler than her surly medical examiner voice. “You'd be surprised how many times the cause of death turns out to be something other than obvious.”