Wicked Craving (9 page)

Something in the young woman's words and demeanor touched Savannah. And, just for a moment, Savannah could feel herself hoping that Roxanne Rosen wasn't the one who killed Maria Wellman, aka Gina Martini.

“Why don't you have a job anymore?” Savannah asked.

Roxanne wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “What?”

“You said you don't have a job anymore. What happened?”

“Yeah.” Dirk leaned across the table, staring at her with that strange look again. “Tell us all about that, Roxie.”

Roxanne tugged at the cuff of her sleeve. “They…Dr. Wellman…he let me go.”

“Why?” Dirk wanted to know.

“I guess they needed to make cuts…not as much business or whatever,” she said.

“And now you're lying to me.” He turned to Savannah. “Tell her how much I love being lied to.”

“He'd rather have a prostate exam and a root canal…at the same time. Don't lie to him. It makes him cranky.”

Roxanne tugged on her cuffs again, then sighed and said, “Okay. Maria was actually the one who fired me. She and I had an argument about…some stuff and…”

“What stuff?” Savannah asked.

“She was always on me about one thing or the other. She was terrified that they weren't going to make every single dollar they possibly could. She watched how much paper I used in the office, how many pens and paper clips I went through. I never met anybody so greedy in all my life.”

“You got fired because of an argument over paper clips?” Dirk said. “Is that what you're trying to tell me?”

“Cranky,” Savannah whispered, nodding toward Dirk. “Very cranky.”

“It started over printer ink. I printed out some invitations to my nephew's birthday party on the office printer, and she got all in a tizzy over it. It was as we were closing the office for the day. She followed me out to the parking lot and…well…it kinda escalated there.”

Ah
, Savannah thought.
This is what the road crew saw…Dirk's big news.

Dirk gave Roxanne a nasty little grin. “I know what happened in the parking lot. So you'd better tell me your side of it and not leave anything out.”

Roxanne looked like she was about to be sick. But Savannah could see the resignation in her eyes as she started to speak. She had a certain look of relief that came from deciding to tell the truth. “Like I said, it started with the business about me using the office's ink and paper. Ten whole sheets! But I'd had a really bad day with some patients yelling at me, telling me they wanted their money back because the CDs were a big rip-off. And I just sort of snapped.”

“Is that when you hit her?” Dirk said.

“No, there wasn't anything physical. It was just a verbal thing.” Again, she pulled nervously at the edge of her shirt cuff.

Dirk reached across the table and grabbed her around the wrist. “Then you won't mind if I roll up your sleeve and look at your arm, right?”

When she didn't reply, he unbuttoned her cuff and pushed the material up her arm.

Four long, parallel scratches lined the inside of her forearm. They were deep, ugly, and red, as though infected.

“Maria Wellman broke her nails on you,” Dirk said. “Several witnesses saw the two of you going at each other, hitting, scratching, and pulling hair, so don't tell me it didn't get physical.”

Roxanne hung her head, pulled her sleeve back down and buttoned it.

“So,” Dirk continued, “she yelled at you, and that's when you snapped and tied into her.”

“No! That's when I told her that she had bigger things to worry about than paper and ink. I told her that her husband was screwing every female patient he could get his hands on, and it was a matter of time before they got sued and he lost his license.”

Savannah shot a quick sideways glance at Dirk to see if this was news to him, too. It was. She saw the momentary look of surprise on his face before he squelched it.

“And that's when
she
hit
me
,” Roxanne said.

“She struck you first?” Dirk asked.

“She slapped me across the face, and nobody slaps me and gets away with it.” Roxanne's eyes blazed with anger, and it occurred to Savannah that this girl would, indeed, be capable of killing someone if they pushed her too far.

“And you hit her back,” Savannah said.

“Oh, absolutely. I slugged her. And then she pulled my hair, and I pulled hers…and then we went at it, big time.”

“Where was the doctor all this time?” Dirk asked.

“He was still in the office, I guess. But then he came out and broke us up.”

“Who would you say won the fight?” Savannah couldn't help asking. Being a Southerner, these things mattered greatly.

“I guess I did. She was on the ground, and I was on top of her. He had to pull me off.”

Savannah thought of Stumpy. “Yeap, if you were on top when it ended, you won.”

They all sat in quiet thoughtfulness for a moment. Then Savannah said, “Tell me, Roxanne, that thumping that you gave her there in the parking lot…did you get it all out of your system? Or did you have to go to her house a few days later for some more?”

Roxanne looked at her with her fake turquoise eyes shining with a sincerity that Savannah thought was probably real. You couldn't always tell for sure, but it seemed genuine to her.

“I've only been to the Wellmans' house once,” Roxanne said, “and that was yesterday, after Maria was already dead. I was just trying to get my last paycheck. Needless to say, after I ratted Dr. Wellman out to his wife and then beat her up, he fired me. I think the only reason they didn't press charges against me was because they didn't want it to come out that he fools around with his patients.”

“If she hit you first,” Savannah said, “why didn't you press charges against her or sue them?”

“It was my word against hers. The cops wouldn't have done anything. And as far as suing them, I couldn't pay an attorney. Hell, I do well to afford electricity for my TV and orange juice for my screwdrivers.”

Dirk took his pen and notebook from his pocket. He flipped the pad open. “Listen to me, Roxanne,” he said. “Right now I'm looking at you for this killing.”

“Why me?”

“Are you kidding? You've still got her scratches on your arm and a dozen people saw you sitting on top of her, pounding her into the asphalt. So, if you want to get off the hook for this, you'd better start naming names.”

“Like who?”

“Start with the patients Wellman was banging.”

“Several of them have moved out of the area, but two are still around.”

“Okay, give me those.”

“Who do you want first? The one whose husband said he was going to kill Wellman? He caught her smoking the doctor's cigar. Or the one who was mad that he wasn't leaving his wife to marry her the way he'd promised? She claims she's pregnant with his kid.”

Dirk grinned at Savannah, then clicked his pen and got ready to write. “Oh, either one will do just fine. Let 'er rip.”

A
s Savannah watched the tiny guy struggle to carry the enormous box up the sidewalk to his house, it occurred to her—not for the first time—that perhaps Roxanne Rosen wasn't the best judge of who was large and who was small in this world. She would never recommend that Dirk arrest someone based on one of Roxie's physical descriptions.

“Does that guy look like a ‘brute of an Irishman bricklayer' to you?” she asked Dirk, who was sitting in the driver's seat, watching with her from the curb across the street. “Those are the words she used, right?”

“Hey, don't complain,” he said. “If I'm gonna have a tussle with a guy, I'd rather he be skinny and five foot one any day.”

The guy nearly dropped the box, then did an awkward little dance as he balanced it on one knee and tried to get a better grip.

“He looks more like a Latino jockey than an Irish bricklayer to me,” Savannah said, refusing to give it up. “But that's the address Roxie gave you, I'm sure.” She pointed to the numbers on the house. “Maybe she was yanking our chain and right now she's on her way to Vancouver or Tijuana.”

“She'd better not be!” Dirk jerked the car door open. “If she skips, I'm going after her and dragging her back here, kicking and screaming. And I'll book her for murder one, too, so fast it'll make her big hair and empty head spin. Let's go talk to this bricklaying brute.”

Savannah smiled, got out of the car, and walked along with him across the street. She loved to watch Dirk get in a dither over absolutely nothing. He would go insane over things that hadn't even happened yet but maintain his cool in a genuine crisis. A long wait in a line at the grocery store could destroy his week, but he was a great guy to have around if somebody needed CPR at a bad car crash.

As they approached the man with the box, he turned around to look at them and promptly dropped it on the sidewalk. Savannah heard the sound of breaking glass and cringed. “Uh-oh,” she told Dirk. “If he's got an old lady, he's in trouble.”

“Can I give you a hand with that?” Dirk asked him.

The man glanced toward the house, a look of dread on his face.

“Yeap, there's an old lady,” Savannah whispered.

“No, thanks.” The guy reached down, pulled up the edge of his T-shirt, and wiped the sweat off his face. “Moving bites.”

A little bell chimed in Savannah's head. “Ah,” she said, “are you moving in or out?”

“In. Just bought it last week. I was happy in our apartment, but no…
she
had to have a house.” He gave the box a kick. “But you notice that she's not the one carting all the boxes in and out. And she won't be the one mowing the lawn and weeding the flower beds, either. That's for sure.”

Dirk nodded, agreeing, but not too vigorously, considering Savannah's proximity. “Let me guess,” he said, “you bought this place from a guy named Brian Mahoney, right?”

“Yeah. How did you know?”

“Thankfully, I'm smarter than I look,” Dirk said with a sigh. “Tell me something, buddy…do you have any idea where this Mahoney guy moved to?”

“Oh, yeah! Man, he moved up in the world! He bought a place in Spirit Hills.”

“Do you happen to know where in Spirit Hills?” Savannah asked, thinking that, although the gated, exclusive enclave was small, they couldn't exactly go door-to-door looking for a construction worker who had recently had a windfall.

“Yeah. It's the big, white house with pillars, like in
Gone with the Wind
, on Anacapa Drive. Man, that guy must've won the lottery or something.”

 

“The dude with the box full of broken dishes had a good point,” Savannah said as Dirk flashed his badge to get past the guard of the gated community of Spirit Hills. “I know
I'd
have to win the lottery to live here.”

The sun was setting into the ocean, its coral light staining the sky, as the hills turned twilight purple.

This was Savannah's favorite time of day, and she had to admit, this was one of her favorite parts of town.

They passed one exquisite home after another as they drove deeper into the residential area for the most economically enhanced of San Carmelitans. A Tudor manor sat next to a Romanesque villa, neighbored by a French chateau, each grander than the next.

Those who lived on Lincoln Ridge, next to the Wellmans, might have the best ocean views in town, but these estates, with their expansive acreage, sweeping lawns, guest houses, and horse stables, seemed more like the palaces Savannah had dreamed about as a poor child growing up in McGill.

Although, as an adult, she had witnessed some of the tragedies that occurred even here, in this secluded community. Unfortunately, a gatehouse could guard against only a limited amount of life's woes.

Human drama and suffering knew no financial limitations.

“Still,” she said, “if I have to suffer, I'd rather it be in one of these places.”

“You're talking to yourself again,” he told her.

“No, I'm not. I was talking to you.”

“What you were saying didn't make any sense.”

“That's because you weren't listening when I said the first part.”

“There wasn't any first part. You were talking about the guy with the broken dishes and then the fact that you'd have to win the lottery to live here, and then you skipped to something about suffering. I'm telling you, you were talking to yourself again.”

She thought it over, took a deep breath, and said, “I picked it up from you. Your bad habits are rubbing off on me.”

“I knew it had to be my fault somehow.”

She grinned at him. “Do you realize how much time we'd save if you just accepted that at the beginning of an argument?”

He grinned back. “Did I ever tell you I love the fact that you're a feisty broad?”

“Dirk, nobody but old farts say ‘broad' anymore. And don't use me and the “L” word in the same sentence. Certainly don't use it around Gran. You'll get her all excited.”

“Granny's rooting for me, huh?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's only 'cause she thinks we're fooling around, and she wants me to make an honest man of you.”

“Now there's a thought.”

“No, it's not a thought. Don't think.”

They passed a particularly winsome Tuscan-style villa, and she pointed to it. “Win the lottery and buy me that,” she said. “Then we'll talk.”

“Yeah, right.” He shook his head. “So, you're only interested in rich men?”

“Rich has nothing to do with it. I'm only interested in men with houses big enough that, if they irritate the dickens outta me, I can ‘retire to the west wing' and be rid of 'em for a while.”

“You couldn't give me one of these places, too much grass to mow.”

“Sheez. What's with you guys and grass mowing?”

“It's not that we mind doing it all that much. It's just that we don't wanna
have
to do it on our day off.”

“You never take a day off.”

“Yeah? Well, if I ever do, I don't want to spend it listening to some woman gripe about how I never mow the lawn.”

“Then since you work all the time and don't have a wife or a yard, I guess it's not something that should keep you awake all night, frettin' about it.”

“That's right. The joys of bachelorhood.”

They rounded a curve in the road and she saw it ahead, the antebellum mansion—or at least the Southern California version of a Southern antebellum mansion.

Savannah wasn't terribly impressed, having seen the real thing in Georgia. There were, after all, a few of them that Sherman and the Union army hadn't burned to the ground.

As houses in this area went, this one was a bit less ostentatious, slightly more modest—if, indeed, a house with six Corinthian columns could be considered modest.

In Savannah's part of town, this place would be the shining gem of the neighborhood. But in Spirit Hills, the residents of this home were officially the “poor relations.”

“Your heart's just gotta bleed for them,” she muttered to herself.

“What?”

“Never mind. You're not listening again.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“It's okay.”

They pulled into the driveway and up to the house, where an enormous pickup sat. The vehicle was black with yellow, orange, and red flames streaking down the sides and oversized tires.

And Savannah spotted another disturbing feature. “Hey, buddy,” she said as they walked past it. “Gun rack on the back window.”

“Yeah, I saw that,” he said.

“Of course you did.”

They both reached under their coats and unsnapped the retention strap on their holsters. And as she went through the motion, the thought occurred to Savannah that she'd been doing that a lot more frequently lately.

It was an unsettling thought.

When she had originally bought the weapon and strapped it onto her body, she had sincerely wished that she would never, ever have to use it. Never have to even think about using it.

She hadn't been that lucky.

As they walked up to the door and rang the doorbell, Dirk said, “We'll just keep this nice and friendly. Find out what we can and get going. If we need to come back later with backup, we will.”

Savannah was a little surprised that Dirk would communicate any degree of concern over the interview. He was one of those “manly” men who hated to admit when he was feeling a little shaky about something.

But she had to admit that she did, too. She already didn't like Brian Mahoney, and she hadn't even met the guy yet.

Her opinion of him wasn't improved when she saw him in the flesh, either.

The front door opened and the term “a mountain of a man” flashed through her mind. He seemed to fill the doorframe with his bulk, and it was all muscle. His dingy-white, skintight T-shirt showed off every defined ripple and bulge.

And while, under different circumstances, that might have been a plus in Savannah's book, his face ruined the effect of the perfect body.

His shoulder-length reddish blond hair looked like it hadn't been combed in a month of Sundays, and his long, scraggly beard was equally unkempt.

While he might have an Irish last name, Savannah was pretty sure that some of his ancestors had been the Viking, rape-pillage-and-plunder sort of guys.

His pale blue eyes did a quick scan of both Savannah and Dirk, pausing momentarily on Savannah's bustline. And while Savannah was the first to admit that she had an impressive bosom—one of the advantages of being less-than-fashionably thin—she still held it against a man just a bit if he leered. It was bad manners.

“Who are you?” he asked, his tone brusque.

Dirk already had his badge in hand. He held it up to Mahoney's face. “Detective Sergeant Dirk Coulter,” he barked back. He waved the badge in Savannah's direction. “Savannah Reid. And you are?”

“The owner of this property that you're standing on…without any sort of warrant in your hand.”

“You're Brian Mahoney?”

“Yeah. What do you want?”

Dirk glared at him, dropping all pretence of niceties. “What I want and what I
intend
is to talk to you about the murder of Maria Wellman. Now what do
you
want? To talk to me
here
…on
your
property…or down at
my
station house?”

Mahoney thought about it for several long moments. Then he pulled the door open wider and took a couple of steps backward into the house.

“Wipe your feet good,” he said. “I don't want you messin' up the floors of my new house.”

Savannah made a deliberate show of cleaning the soles of her loafers on the welcome mat as she looked down at Mahoney's feet, at his workman's boots with blobs of paint and lumps of dried cement caked onto them. “No, God knows, we wouldn't want to scuff those tiles of yours,” she told him.

“That's some truck you got out there,” Dirk said. Then, in a far less friendly tone, he added, “Where are the weapons?”

Mahoney pretended to be confused, then said, “Oh, are you referring to the gun rack?”

“Uh-huh.”

Mahoney returned Dirk's pointed stare. “Locked away, safely. All perfectly legal.”

“You carry them around with you in the truck on a regular basis?”

Mahoney shrugged and grinned. “Naw. The rack's more of a political statement.” He turned to Savannah. “And you, sugar, with that sexy Southern drawl of yours…you know all about good ol' boys and their political statements, right?”

Savannah nodded. “Yeap, I've known a lot of good ol' boys in my day. Some of them were the salt of the earth, some just good, and some not worth takin' behind the barn and shootin'.”

“Well, I'm the salt-of-the-earth type myself. So, you don't have to worry about me or anything I've been up to. I'm a law-abiding citizen all the way.”

“Hm-m-m…” Savannah said. “If you're a good ol' boy, where are your manners? You haven't asked us to ‘set a spell' or offered us anything to eat or drink. Where's the hospitality?”

Mahoney's ice blue eyes got even colder. “You're not going to be staying that long.” To Dirk he said, “Say what you've got to say or ask whatever you want to and then be on your way.”

“Okay.” Dirk put his hands on his hips. “Account for your whereabouts the night before last.”

“That's when that bitch got killed, huh?”

“Where were you?”

“Here.”

“Doing what?”

“Watching TV and having a beer.”

Savannah sniffed. “There's been a lot of that going around lately. Were you with anybody who can vouch for you?”

“No. I don't have a lot of company, and I like it that way.”