Wicked Craving (16 page)

She looked up at the sky. “Well, it'll be good and dark in about an hour.”

He glanced at his watch. “So, maybe from about seven thirty to about eight thirty?”

“Yeah. About then.”

“I think he's gonna be down at the station house, answering some new questions I've got.”

“You've got new questions?”

“No, but I will have by then.”

Gran had stood up and brushed the sand off her skirt, and she was walking back to them.

“Sh-h-h,” Savannah said. “Here comes Granny. Don't you dare let her get wind of this.”

“Yeah, she'll get pretty mad if she finds out you're planning to do something illegal. She'll try to stop you.”

“Oh, ple-e-ez. You don't know my granny very well. She'll wanna go along.”

“I
'm sure glad you boys were available to join me on this,” Savannah told Ryan as he boosted her over the window ledge and into Robert Wellman/Bobby Martini's utility room.

For one precarious moment, she got her pants pocket caught on the washing machine knob, but then she freed herself and continued on her way.

John had already climbed inside, and Ryan followed close behind her.

“Ow-w-w,” she said, banging her knee on the edge of the dryer. “Remind me next time just to pick the lock like a respectable private investigator.”

“At least this time you didn't climb through the bathroom window and slip in the bathtub,” Ryan reminded her as he lightly jumped from the top of the washer onto the floor.

Agility was such a plus while breaking and entering.

John shone his penlight onto his wrist. “It's now half-seven,” he said. “That gives us an hour to do our dirty work.”

Savannah patted the cell phone she had clipped to her belt. “Dirk'll call us the minute Wellman leaves the station. And it's at least a ten-, fifteen-minute drive. We'll be fine.”

“I'm just glad there aren't any dogs,” John said as he led them from the utility room into the kitchen.

Savannah snickered. “Or cats as vicious as mine?”

“Cleo and Diamante vicious?” Ryan said. “Maybe if you tried to pry their Kitty Vittles out of their mouths.”

“True. Attacking an intruder would involve getting their rumps off their window perch, and that would be too much to ask.”

Leaving the house lights off, they used their penlights to see as they walked around the kitchen, opening a few drawers and cupboards.

Ryan paid special attention to the area near the telephone, thumbing through some envelopes stacked there. “Nothing but bills,” he said.

“Is there a phone bill there?” Savannah asked.

“As a matter of fact, yes. An old one.”

“Get the account number.”

Ryan took a miniature voice recorder from his pocket and read the number into it.

Savannah opened the refrigerator door and peeked inside. “Nothing in here but condiments and beer,” she said. “Wellman and Dirk have more in common than we thought.”

“No voice messages,” John said, checking the machine. “Either he doesn't get a lot of calls or he's deleted them all.”

From the kitchen they went into the dining room, then the living room.

“There's nothing here worth writing home about,” Savannah said. “My front room is more scandalous than this. At least I've got some juicy romance novels on my reading stand.”

“Let's go upstairs and check out the bedrooms.” Ryan headed for the foyer and the staircase.

Savannah followed him. “I've gotta admit that I'm a little afraid to.”

“Why, love?” John asked. “Are you nervous that he'll pop in on us unannounced?”

“No, Dirk's got that covered. I'm afraid I'm going to find out that he and his sister shared a bedroom and then I'm going to have to go home and poke out my mind's eye.”

“It wouldn't do any good,” Ryan said. “You'd still see it. It's a brain thing.”

“True. Thanks.”

At the top of the staircase, a hallway stretched in both directions. Savannah went to the left, the guys to the right.

The moment she opened the first door, her mind was set at ease. She swept the beam from her flashlight around the room, taking in the lavender walls, the canopy bed with its frilly, satin spread, the tables draped with lace-trimmed linen cloths. Delicate, feminine knickknacks covered most of the horizontal surfaces.

She went back to the door and called down the hallway, “Hey, fellas. I found her bedroom. I'm not humming the theme to
Deliverance
in my head anymore.”

“We're so happy for you, darling,” John called back.

“Yeah, we found his room,” Ryan said. “He's a slob, but nothing too sinister looking.”

A few minutes later, they converged in the hallway at the top of the stairs. Even in the dim light, Savannah could see they looked as discouraged as she felt.

“I'm hate to say it, but I think we might have committed a felony for nothing,” she told them.

“You might be right,” Ryan said.

“Although…” John was playing his light along the ceiling. “I'd wager that this house has a sizable attic. We haven't checked the garage yet. Let's do that and see if we can find an access there.”

Savannah checked her watch. “Okay,” she said, “but we'd better shake some fanny. Time's a wastin'!”

 

Once the trio was in the garage, John took less than a minute to find the door on the ceiling. “Brilliant!” he exclaimed as he grabbed the cord that was hanging down and gave it a pull.

The trap door opened, and the stairs unfolded neatly before them.

“Well done, old boy,” Ryan said, slapping him on the back.

Savannah looked up at the pitch black hole in the ceiling and felt a little shudder run over her. “And since you're the one who thought of this,” she said, “it's only fair you should be the first to go up.”

John started up the ladder, but he paused just before sticking his head into the opening. “A chap tends to regret all those slicer-dicer movies he's seen at a moment like this,” he said.

“I doubt there's anybody up there with an axe or a sword, waiting to lop off your head, if that's what you're worried about,” Ryan said.

Still standing at the foot of the ladder, Savannah told him, “Don't worry. If it comes tumbling down, I'll catch it, and save it for you. I'm sure they can sew it back on in the ER.”

“How very witty you two are. So funny I can hardly stand you,” John said as he disappeared into the darkness.

Ryan was the next one to vanish into the black hole.

Savannah didn't mind at all that the rule “ladies first” had been put aside for the moment.

As she climbed the highest stairs and stepped onto the attic floor, she heard John sneezing.

“Bloody hell, it's quite a shambles up here,” he said.

“I guess Wellman doesn't make it up here when he's doing his weekly dusting,” Ryan added.

Savannah saw what they meant when she joined them in the middle of what was, indeed, a very large attic. Because of the contemporary lines of the house, the roof was at odd angles, sloping first one way and then the other…not at all like a traditional attic.

She headed for a nearby area where most of the stored junk was piled.

Ryan was already checking out the dusty collection of furniture that included everything from a sofa with gold and avocado green stripes and a matching love seat, to a dark, Mediterranean-style bedroom suite, circa 1975.

“I can't say much for their former taste in furniture,” he said. “And you have to wonder why they brought all this junk with them when they moved.”

“Let alone dragged it all up here,” John added.

Savannah flipped the lid of a cardboard box open and looked inside. “We've got old bottles of shampoo, half rolls of toilet paper, and used razors. I'd say they may have moved in a hurry and just threw everything in sight into boxes.”

“I tend to agree,” John said. “We have old newspapers here from Las Vegas, dated three years ago.”

Tucked into a far corner, away from the heap and sitting by itself, was an oversized trunk that caught Savannah's attention.

“Hey, boys…lookie, lookie,” she said. “An old trunk.”

“An old trunk in an attic,” Ryan replied. “Cool.”

“It probably has a body in it,” John told them. Then he chuckled. “Sorry. I really must swear off those revolting movies. They're my secret vice.”

“Not so secret anymore.” Savannah dropped to her knees in front of the chest. She handed her flashlight to Ryan, then slowly lifted the lid.

The hinges actually creaked as she opened it. She giggled and said, “How very Nancy Drew/Hardy Boy–ish. Tammy would love this.”

“Why didn't you invite her along?” John asked.

“I never ask her to come when I'm committing a crime. It's a personal standard I have—not contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”

“She's not a kid,” Ryan said. “She's well into her twenties.”

“As far as I'm concerned, she's
my
kid. She'll be my kid when she's seventy.”

Savannah leaned over the edge of the trunk to look inside, and Ryan shone both lights into it.

“What the heck is this stuff?” Savannah said, trying to make sense of the strange shapes she was seeing.

John shed his own light into the depths, and she saw something smooth and crystalline, glowing in the far corner of the box.

“It's a skull,” she said. “A glass skull. Oo-o-o, creepy!”

“And we've got some sort of knife over here.” Ryan pointed to a dagger, resting in a lidless box, lined with red velvet. A black pentagram was carved into the bone handle.

“And a Ouija board,” John said. “Fascinating.”

Savannah picked up a small pouch made of black velvet and loosened its drawstring. Reaching inside, she pulled out several polished stones and a large amethyst crystal.

“What is this stuff?” she said. “Witchcraft paraphernalia?”

“It's a bit theatrical to be the real thing,” John said.

They both gave him strange looks. He added, “Not that I'd know from
personal
experience.”

“Of course not,” Savannah said. “Haven't painted your body blue and danced naked in the moonlight lately?”

“Only in my misspent youth.”

Ryan handed Savannah back her flashlight, then reached down and picked up a small mechanical apparatus of some kind. It looked like a cross between a cell phone and a television remote control.

“What's that?” Savannah asked.

“I think it's an electromagnetic field meter. Looks like it records temperatures, too.”

“And this,” John said, pointing to a long, black tube, “is an infrared, night vision camera.”

“Hey, look at this…a ghost box!” Ryan replaced the meter and grabbed something that resembled a transistor radio.

“A ghost box? What the heck's a ghost box?” Savannah asked, feeling another little chill run through her.

She couldn't help it. She, too, had seen her share of gory movies. And Gran had been known to entertain the kids with a few hair-raising ghost stories in her day, too.

“A ghost box is a modern-day type of séance tool,” Ryan said. “It's a radio that's been modified to continually scan station to station and back again. Some people ask the spirit world questions and then listen to the voices that come through the scanner. They claim to hear answers from the ghosts, who are speaking to them through the box.”

Savannah thought it over for half a second. “That's stupid,” she said. “They're hearing disc jockeys and talk show hosts.”

Ryan laughed. “That's what you and I believe, but there are folks who think otherwise.”

Again, John remained conspicuously silent.

They gave him another look.

“I'm not going to say a word,” he told them. “Look at where we're standing…in a dark attic, staring into a chest full of strange, esoteric objects. I'm not interested in getting on the bad side of any spirits, if that's quite all right with you two.”

“Good point,” Savannah agreed. “You know, Granny's a great believer in ‘haunts,' as she calls them. She won't go near a place if anybody even suggested there might be a ghost in there.”

“I'd rather discuss the subject of ghosts and ‘haunts' later, by the light of the noonday sun,” John told her.

Ryan lifted a large, cobalt blue bottle with a cork stopper and read the label. “Purification water.” He thought for a while, then said, “You guys, this stuff in this chest…it's séance equipment, ghost-hunting tools.”

“You think our lad, Wellman, was a ghost hunter?” John asked.

“More like Bobby Martini was.” Savannah's brain whirred, and she could feel some of the bits and pieces coming together. “He's a scam artist now, selling people something they desperately need, something fake that costs an arm and a leg. I'll bet you that he was one in Vegas, too, again…selling people a fake service, claiming to connect them to their dead loved ones.”

“Or maybe he really was connecting,” John said. “You have to remain open-minded about these things.”

Savannah sniffed. “Believe me, I've spent time with Wellman. There may be deep-minded spiritualists with esoteric knowledge of the great Beyond. But he ain't one of them. He's a bull-shitter who's out to fleece anybody he can.”

She waved an arm around, indicating the general contents of the attic. “And it looks to me like he had to leave town in a hurry.”

“And move to a new area and change his identity,” Ryan added.

“Who was he running from?” Savannah mused. “The law? Bad guys?”

“When people run,” John said, “it's frequently from both.”

Savannah was about to close the lid on Wellman's former activities when she noticed several simple shoe boxes in the bottom of the chest, below some night goggles and a voice recorder.

She reached down and dug one of them out. “So, what's in here?” she said. “Running shoes, like it says on the box, or Dorothy's magic ruby slippers?”

But when she raised the lid, it wasn't red she saw, but green. Lots and lots of green.

“Wow!” she said. “Would you look at this, boys?”

“We're looking! We're looking!” But Ryan was already reaching for the second box.

John pulled out a third.

When all the boxes were open, and the contents revealed, neither Savannah nor the guys could even speak for a few moments.

Finally, Savannah said, “I guess paying off a blackmailer here or there wouldn't present much of a problem to good ol' Dr. Wellman.”