Poisoned Tarts (19 page)

“Oh, wow,” she said. “And this is the entrance wound. Which means that awful thing on the front…”

“The exit wound,” Dr. Liu added.

“High caliber, too,” Savannah said, thinking out loud. “Neat hole here in the back, a major blowout in the front.” She turned to Dr. Liu. “I can see why you didn't think the wound looked like a stab there at the scene.”

“Yeah, well…before you toot my horn too loudly, I have to admit, I was wrong when I said I doubted he was killed there. Now, I'm pretty sure he was.”

“Oh, really? Why?”

“Roll him back over, Dirk, and I'll show her.”

Dirk did as he was told, and Dr. Liu lifted the vampire costume carefully off the body.

Immediately, Savannah could see the gruesome evidence. A disturbing amount of gore was all over the front of the pants, basically in the victim's lap.

“Mercy,” she said. “That's pretty ugly.”

“Yes, it is.” Dr. Liu pointed to the chest wound. “The bullet entered his back high up between his shoulder blades, went through his heart, and exited right here, slightly below center.”

“So the shooter was slightly higher than he was, aiming downward?”

“I think so,” Dr. Liu said. “I'll know the exact angle by the time I finish the autopsy.”

Dirk got a sick look on his face. “The guy could have even been sitting down when he got hit, like sitting there in that coffin when somebody shot him from the back.”

“That's a pretty grim way to go,” Savannah added. “I wonder if he knew it was coming.”

“He must have figured something was up if he was already sitting in a coffin.” Dirk shuddered. “I mean, you couldn't be too cheerful, sitting in a casket, maybe waiting for somebody to shoot you in the back.”

“He couldn't have known it was coming, not for sure,” Savannah said, “or like you said at the scene, he would have fought like a maniac. Andrew Dante was a big guy, and I'm sure not a shy one, considering all he'd accomplished in his life. You don't get to the level of success he had by being a pushover. I can't imagine he'd go peacefully.”

“Or maybe it was somebody he trusted,” Dr. Liu suggested. “Maybe someone was threatening him with a gun, but it was someone he loved, and he didn't really believe they would hurt him.”

Dirk chuckled—a hard, bitter laugh. “Well, if that was the case, he must have been pretty friggen surprised.”

Savannah groaned. “Hopefully, he wouldn't have lived long enough to be unhappily surprised for long.”

“No,” Dr. Liu said, “it wouldn't have been long at all. He would have bled right out, gone unconscious very quickly.”

“Well, that's good,” Savannah said without enthusiasm. “I guess.”

“It still sucks,” Dirk muttered.

“Yeah. It sure does.”

Savannah pictured it: Andrew Dante sitting in that ridiculous prop casket, someone he may have loved and trusted—at least at one time—threatening him with a gun. Him hoping, believing they'd never actually do it. Then…bang! Surprise!

“Yeah,” she repeated, “that really does stink—a rotten, rotten thing to do. Let's get 'em.”

“T
ry to be a little nicer to Eileen today, would you?” Savannah asked Dirk as they pulled into the forensic lab's parking lot. “No arm twisting, no pushy crap, no name-calling, hair pulling, groin kicking, eyeball gouging…”

He laughed. “Boy, you sure know how to cramp a guy's style.” Giving her a wink, he added, “I'll be good. I'll be sweet. I'll be so nice to Eileen that you'll get jealous.”

“Jealous? Me?”

“Yeah, you.”

She sniffed. “That'll be the day,
you
make
me
jealous.”

As they got out of the car and walked up to the door, Savannah gave it a little more thought and got moderately irked. “I do not get jealous of you, ever. That's just your overinflated ego talking, boy.”

He punched the buzzer button with his thumb. “You do, too. Every time we go to the Patty Cake Donut Shop and I flirt with that little cutie, Sherry, you get pissy.”

“No way!”

“Uh-huh. Not enough to kill your appetite for maple bars, but you do give her dirty looks.”

“I give
you
dirty looks for buttering her up just so that you can get an extra large coffee for the price of a small one. It's about you being cheap, not me being jealous.”

“Yeah, right. I know what I see.”

“See this!”

She started to make a gesture that was definitely not on Granny Reid's list of approved hand signals for Southern ladies. Then she realized they were on camera, the one mounted over the door. And that was another rule: if at all possible, never behave badly on videotape.

The door opened, and a cranky Eileen filled the space. Eileen was a big girl who seemed to expand when her mood turned ugly.

“If you're here about those clothes your victim was wearing,” she told Dirk, hands on hips, “turn around and march right back to your car. We just got them, and I haven't even had time to open the bag.”

Dirk lifted both hands in absolute surrender, a sheepish look on his face that Savannah knew darned well was totally fake, but Eileen might buy it. “Please, Eileen, forgive me for the other day. I've been informed by somebody who knows a lot more about being polite and courteous than I do…” He cut a sideways look at Savannah. “…that I was a jerk to you last time I was in here. And I'm really sorry. Can you find it in your heart to forgive me?”

Eileen gave him a sustained drop-dead look, then shook her head. “Oh, please,” she said, “like I'm going to buy a ton of crap like that. I'm busy here. What do you want?”

Dirk dropped the repentant sinner façade in an instant. “To look at the coffin,” he replied, equally acerbic.

“That's it? You're not going to irritate me at all? You're not going to try to manipulate me into—”

Dirk snapped. “I just want to look at the damned casket, if you don't friggen mind!” he shouted, his face dark red.

Eileen said nothing, just turned abruptly and walked away. But she left the door open behind her, and Savannah and Dirk took that as a yes.

They scurried inside before she could change her mind.

“Smooth,” Savannah whispered to him. “Quite the silken-tongued laddie you are.”

“Oh, back off me, woman. I'm not in the mood.”

She laughed at him. “If I had to wait until you were in the mood, I'd never get to harass you, and life would hardly be worth living.”

He ignored her and looked around the enormous room for his evidence. Eileen had returned to her lab bench in the back. Her assistants were helping her or sitting at computers.

A couple of the techs shot Dirk wary looks, but none offered to help him.

Fortunately, an item as large as a coffin wasn't difficult to find. In the rear of the room near where Eileen was working was a large, long cardboard box that was sealed across the top with evidence tape.

“That's gotta be it,” he said as he walked over to the box and knelt beside it.

Savannah did the same and read the evidence label taped to the top. One of the techs had written on the label, describing the contents as “stage prop coffin-victim found inside.”

Dirk looked over at Eileen, who was peering into a microscope. He opened his mouth to say something to her, but without taking her eye from the scope, she said, “Go on. Open it. Just be sure to sign the chain of possession label.”

Dirk grumbled something that sounded remotely like, “Thanks,” then did as she said. On the top of the box, a large piece of paper had been taped. It bore the same description as the evidence label but also had a number of blank lines below the description where those handling the evidence could write their signatures.

Dirk scribbled “Det. Coulter,” the date, and time. Then he and Savannah both put on rubber gloves, and he used his pocketknife to slit the tape that sealed the top of the box.

Savannah helped him open the flaps, and they found themselves staring down into the black coffin where Andrew Dante had been found.

It was a cheap, plywood box made in the shape of an old-fashioned, toe-pincher style coffin—wide about one-third of the way down, and narrow at the head and feet. The edges were rough and unsanded, and a quick coat of black paint had been slapped on.

For all of its spooky effect in the semidarkness with blood-red lighting, it looked pretty tacky in the bright light of the laboratory.

But even under high-tech illumination, the black background made any blood difficult to see.

“Here. You'll need these.” They looked up to see Eileen holding out two pairs of orange wraparound plastic goggles and a portable light source, which looked like a small black box with a handle, and a lens similar to a flashlight on the front.

“Thanks,” Dirk said, taking the scope from her and one pair of the glasses. He actually sounded grateful this time.

Handing the second pair to Savannah, she called out, “Mike, dim the lights back here.”

A few seconds later, the ceiling lights in the room went down to the level of a romantic restaurant in the evening.

“I assume you're checking for blood spatter,” Eileen said, putting on a pair of goggles.

“Among other things,” Dirk said.

“Like?”

“The bullet that killed our victim.”

Even behind the goggles, Savannah saw Eileen's eyes widen. “Get outta here! No way!”

“Yep,” Savannah told her. “We were just at Dr. Liu's. He was shot through the heart. The old-fashioned way—with a gun.”

“But the wooden stake?”

“Apparently, it was inserted postmortem.” Dirk switched on the light source and directed the beam onto the casket. “Holy crap! Look at that!”

“Wow, talk about lit up! It's Times Square on New Year's Eve in there,” Savannah said as all three stared at the eerie glow inside the coffin.

Tiny fine dots glistened on nearly every square inch of the black wood. But the densest area of illumination was about three-quarters of the way down from the top of the coffin. And it had a strange, almost triangular shape to it, with the apex of the triangle toward the top of the coffin and broadening toward the bottom.

“That's weird,” Eileen said.

“Not really,” Dirk replied. “Dante was shot in the back, exit wound in the front. And Dr. Liu thinks he may have been sitting when he got it.”

Savannah looked down at the triangle and realized that if, in fact, Andrew Dante had been sitting in the coffin, his legs partly spread, and someone shot him from behind…that would account for the triangle of dense blood deposited on the bottom of the coffin. Very simply, the exit wound spray of blood and tissue would have gone between his thighs and legs and onto the casket bottom, leaving this very shape. She noticed that the cleanest area was just above the triangle, where his buttocks would have been.

“That's pretty nasty,” she murmured.

“No kidding.” Even Eileen seemed impressed.

Savannah was only dimly aware that the other lab techs were standing around them, also wearing goggles, staring at the evidence of Andrew Dante's gruesome demise.

Dirk leaned closer, examining the spatter along the inside edges of the coffin. “This confirms the shooting,” he said. “This is definitely high velocity spatter. You don't get this fine mist from a stabbing or bludgeoning.”

Savannah leaned even closer and peered at the bottom of the coffin. Amid the thickest part of the glowing biological gore, she thought she saw a glint. “Can somebody hand me a cotton swab?” she asked.

A moment later, a small, long white box was pressed into her gloved hands. She opened the end of it and shook out the long cotton swab that was inside.

Bending over the coffin, she carefully swabbed away a tiny bit of the blood covering the area where she thought she had seen something.

And there it was.

“A slug,” Savannah said. “That's gotta be our bullet.”

“And hopefully,” Eileen added, “it won't be too badly deformed. Human tissue and wood are fairly yielding as materials go.”

Dirk took the swab from Savannah, reached down, and cleared away more of the debris. “I think I can get this out for you,” he said.

“No pocketknives!” Eileen barked. “You know how I hate it when you cops do that!”

“Hey, I only did it once! You chewed me out for it royal, and I never did it again!”

“I just don't want you using anything hard to dig it out with. It can leave marks and make it harder for us to match—”

“I know, I know.” He held the bullet up between his thumb and finger. “There you go. No pocketknife, no tweezers! Are fingers soft enough for you?”

Eileen held out a small manila envelope. “Just put it in here, and I'll look at it right away for you.”

“What a gal!”

“Unless you piss me off again.”

“What?” He shrugged and looked at Savannah. “What did I say? Man, working with all these chemicals in a room with no windows sure seems to make people cranky.”

“Sh-h-h,” Savannah told him. “Don't you know how to quit when you're ahead?”

But Eileen didn't hear the exchange. She was already examining the bullet under a microscope.

“It's a .45. There's some damage,” she called out to them, “but the rifling is pretty clear, the lands and grooves pronounced enough that if you find a weapon, we'll probably be able to get a comparison.”

“Excellent.” Savannah got up off her knees and tried not to groan at the twinges the movement gave her. No groaning in front of younger people who would then consider you an old fart.

“Okay,” Dirk said, standing. Less vain, he went ahead and groaned. “I guess we need to send a team back out to the Dante estate and have them look for a .45-caliber weapon.”

“You think the shooter was stupid enough to leave it there?” Savannah asked.

He shrugged. “Hey, you can always hope.”

 

“So, how are the alibis checking out?” Savannah asked as she and Dirk headed over to the Dante mansion.

“Robyn Dante was where she said she was,” he replied as he unzipped his bomber jacket and tried to pull it off over his shoulders.

Savannah reached over, peeled it off him, and dumped it on the backseat. “She was at the spa the whole time she said she was?”

“Yep. I dropped by there this morning before I even went to Dr. Liu's. The gal at the desk remembered seeing her. I talked to the guy who massaged her and the chicks who did her face, her nails, and even her toenails. She was getting pampered for hours.”

Savannah sighed and closed her eyes. “Ah-h-h-h…can you even imagine the bliss?”

He snorted. “The day I have to actually pay people to touch me is the day I get a girlfriend who'll do it for free.”

“Always the economist. You know, occasionally, you have to feed a girlfriend and buy her presents.”

“If I were going to buy food for somebody, I'd just get myself a dog.”

She shot him a death ray look. “I can't believe you just said that.”

“I can't believe you didn't know I was teasing. I said it just to get a rise out of you.” He leaned over and put his hand on her knee. “Don't you know that if I'm gonna buy any presents for anybody, it would be for you?”

“But you don't buy me presents, except at Christmas, when you
really
have to.”

He nodded once and smiled. “See what I mean? So you shouldn't take it at all personally.”

“What?”

Fortunately, for his sake, they had arrived back at the Dantes'.

Although there were plenty of paparazzi parked in front of the mansion, the throng had thinned a bit. And they only had to threaten a few reporters with torture to get through the crowd.