Poisoned Tarts (23 page)

“I don't know, man. Average. She was just, like, average. Brown hair, I think. Not cute, not ugly. Kinda young.”

Savannah's breath caught in her throat. “Young?” she asked. “How young?”

Tank shrugged. “Maybe around twenty.”

“A heavy girl? Or skinny?” Dirk wanted to know.

“I don't know. I don't really remember. Just sorta average, I guess.”

“You're not helping me nearly enough here, Tank, my man.” Dirk put a firm hand on the guy's tattooed shoulder, right over a demon whose tongue was lolling out to the end of his chin. “If I'm gonna walk out of this joint and forget I know you, you're going to have to do a lot better than ‘average' and ‘I can't remember.'”

Tank looked like he was about to start crying. It occurred to Savannah that if he did, it would just be too weird. She'd never seen a vampire cry before.

“Seriously, man,” he was saying, “don't you think I'd help you if I could? You think I want to get busted? I'm a two-timer, man. One more, and I'm sent away for good. You gotta believe me.”

Savannah groaned to herself. She hated it when they were telling her the truth…and it wasn't what she wanted and needed to hear.

The Tank was dry, flat on empty.

Dirk knew it, too. He took one of his cards and stuck it into the top of Tank's tank top. “If you think of anything, anything at all—like what Dante might have called this disgustingly average girl—you give me a call. Day or night. You got it?”

“Sure, man. No problem. I will, really.”

“Yeah, right.”

Dirk turned and took Savannah's arm. “Let's get back home. Tank here knows the lay of the land, and he's our best buddy now. He'll be calling us soon.”

He said it with all of the conviction of a thirteen-year-old professing a belief in the tooth fairy.

Once they were back in the car, watching a parade of incredible Hollyweirds march down the street in their outlandish Halloween garb, Savannah said, “You going to do anything about that back there?”

“Do anything? Of course I'm going to do something.” He reached for a cinnamon stick, took a long drag on it, held it, and exhaled with as much relish as if it was a fine Cuban cigar. “I'm going to give the Tank Snake twenty-four hours to call me with something worthwhile. And then I'm gonna drop a dime to Homeland Security.”

“Homeland Security?”

“Hell, yeah. We don't want him selling those BS passports to no damned terrorists, right?”

Savannah thought that one over. “He's not going to give you anything. Why don't you just go ahead and make that call on the way home? I'll dial for you.”

S
avannah and Dirk had driven most of the long way home from Hollywood to San Carmelita when Savannah got a call from an excited Tammy.

“You're never going to guess where we are,” she said.

Savannah knew this game. With Tammy, it could go back and forth for half an hour before the kid gave, and she wasn't in the mood. “Where?”

“Guess.”

“No. Where are you, and who's we?”

“I'm at the library with your granny.”

“That's nice. It's sweet of you to take her for an outing. I'm just sorry that I've been too busy to do it myself.”

“We're not on an outing. We're
sleuthing!”

Ah
, Savannah thought,
if only Miss Nancy Drew knew how nerdy that sounds.

But then, Tammy probably wouldn't care, she decided. Tammy was one of those rare people who was totally accepting of others and of herself—a quality that made her a lovely friend. And truly impossible to embarrass.

“You're sleuthing?” Savannah repeated for Dirk's benefit. He glanced her way and rolled his eyes. “And at the library?”

“Yes, and we have some really cool stuff here. You've got to come see it.”

“Um, we're actually a little busy here, darlin'. We're on our way back to the clinic to relieve John and Ryan. They've been sitting there all afternoon and—”

“No, really, Savannah. This is some interesting stuff here. You have to come and see. Gran's really excited about it…says she's got a ‘feelin'.'”

“Okay. We'll be there in ten.”

Savannah hung up and told Dirk. “We have to make a pit stop at the library before we go to the clinic.”

“You have to go to the bathroom again? I told you not to drink that soda. I'll just pull into a station.”

“No. It has to be the library. Tammy's hot on a trail, she says.”

“Yeah, but it's
Tammy
. She's cute, and she means well, but she's a ding-a-ling.”

“But Gran's with her, and Gran has a feelin' about it.”

Again with the eye roll. “Hey, if the bimbo's excited and Granny Reid has a
feelin',
who am I to argue with that?”

 

When they entered the library ten minutes later, Savannah and Dirk found Tammy busy at one of the library's computers, which had a large pumpkin sitting on top of the monitor. Gran was beside her, perched on the edge of a chair, peering over her shoulder.

A group of children sat in the far corner of the room, wearing fairy princess, ghost, and pirate costumes, listening to a Cinderella read them a story.

It really is Halloween,
Savannah reminded herself.

This wasn't the first time she and Dirk had “lost” a holiday to a frenzied investigation, and she was sure it wouldn't be the last.

The instant Tammy saw them, she jumped up and motioned them over.

“Look! Look at this! You gotta see this!”

Tammy pushed Savannah down onto the chair she had been sitting on and pointed to the computer screen.

Savannah stared at it a while and then said, “Okay. What is it?”

“It's a picture, well, actually…it's a zoom in of a satellite map of the Dante estate,” Tammy told her.

Granny was practically hopping up and down in her seat, too. She shoved some papers into Savannah's hand and said to Tammy, “First, you gotta tell her how we came to be here, what we figured out, and all that.”

“Oh, right!” Tammy grabbed another chair and pulled it over next to Savannah's and snatched the papers out of her hand. “It was your granny here. I was telling her how much fun I've had going through people's computers, trying to get stuff on them or figure out what's going on in their lives. But we couldn't do that with Daisy because her mom said that her computer's been on the fritz for weeks.”

Gran broke in with, “And that's when I told Tammy that in McGill, not everybody and their dog's uncle's cousin can afford a computer. And most folks who want to go online and look stuff up or get e-mails, they go down to the library and do it there for free.”

“And that,” Tammy said, “is when I thought maybe Daisy's been doing that! So I called her mom—hope you don't mind—and asked her, and Pam said, ‘Yes, Daisy's told me several times that she was going to the library to use the computer,' so….”

“So, we came down here, and that nice lady over there…”—Gran pointed to the reference clerk, who was dressed as a green-faced, wart-enhanced witch—“…told us that Daisy had been here. And not only that, but she let us look at the log they keep that shows who went on at what time and on which computer.”

“Then I checked the cookies!” Tammy said.

“And those aren't the kind you eat, either. She just taught me all about computer cookies,” Gran announced proudly. “They're little pieces of information in your computer that show what you've been looking up and when you did it. And boy, it's a good thing your sister Vidalia doesn't know about cookies, or your brother-in-law would be in the doghouse worse than he already is…him and his girlie pictures that he's always looking up and—”

“Gran, I'm sorry to hear that Butch and Vi are still fighting over that stuff, but what do you have here?”

“Yeah,” Dirk said. He had been waiting patiently behind them, but was nearing the end of his leash. “We've gotta get crackin' here or—”

“Okay, okay.” Tammy pointed to the papers in her hand. “I compared the times in the librarian's log to the cookies to see what Daisy was looking at. It took forever, but she was checking out Web sites that have to do with those horrible, sickening things called canned hunts.”

Savannah's stomach contracted. As an ardent animal lover, she had been sick the first time she had heard of the atrocities. And she still felt the same—that hunters who were that cruel and unsportsmanlike deserved to trade places with their so-called prey. Maybe if
they
were chased around inside a fenced-in area by a pack of hounds and drunken fools with guns for half an hour, they'd lose their taste for such activity.

“I didn't know what they were,” Tammy was saying, “but Gran told me, and I about died.”

“I guess I'm the only one here, then, who doesn't know what it is. Anybody want to tell me?” Dirk said.

Granny shuddered. “Some folks have too much money and not enough kindness in their souls. And instead of going out and hunting their game the old-fashioned way—the way my own daddy did in order to put meat on our table—they do it the lazy, cruel way.”

“That's right,” Tammy said. “They put the animal—a bear or a ram or a leopard or even a lion—in this big, enclosed area where they don't have a chance of getting away, and then they shoot them so that they can have a trophy head or whatever to hang on the wall.”

“Enclosed area?” Dirk asked. “Isn't that like shooting fish in a barrel? Where's the sport in that?”

“And the sad thing is…”—Gran shook her head—“…the animal is usually raised for these hunts and fed by people, so they aren't even afraid of human beings. They walk right up and get shot. But the worst part is, since the so-called hunters don't want to mess up the trophy, they shoot them in the hindquarters, and they die a slow, painful death. I'm telling you, it oughta be illegal.”

“It isn't?” Dirk asked.

“Not in most states,” Tammy told him. “And a lot of highly respected zoos that everybody goes to, they sell their surplus animals to these places.”

Savannah shook her head. “It just makes me sick to even think about it. And Daisy was researching all this?”

“Yes, she was. We saw the Humane Society's Web site there and Wildlife Protection. She was checking them all out.”

“She loves big cats,” Savannah said. “Has pictures of them all over her room. It must have been very disturbing to her. But what is this?” she asked, pointing to the screen.

“This,” Tammy said, “is something else she was looking at the day she went missing. You know how you can look up maps on the Internet?”

“Uh, I hear you can,” Savannah admitted. “I don't personally, but…”

“Well, you can. And not only that, but you can get actual aerial views of towns taken by satellites. They're so detailed you can see every tree and bush. That view right there, it's the Dante estate.”

“Where's the house?” Dirk asked, leaning over Savannah's shoulder.

“This is way back behind the house. They own a lot of acreage there—I checked that, too, while I was here,” Tammy said. “And those three square things there”—she put her finger on the screen—“those are cage enclosures…for canned hunts.”

Savannah and Dirk both leaned closer, squinting at the screen.

When she looked closely, she could see that among the trails, trees, and bushes, there were several square shapes that appeared to be man-made structures.

“Okay, I see them,” she said, “but how do you know that's what they are? They could be sheds or—”

“No. I did an Internet search and found a couple of articles about how they used to have those hunts up there. It was a long time ago, before Andrew Dante even bought the property. Some guy from back East owned it and had a house up there. It got torn down when Dante bought the land.”

“I remember the place,” Dirk said. “It was nice but old, and it didn't compare to Dante's mansion. I don't remember anybody living there.”

“Why do you suppose Daisy was researching this stuff?” Savannah said.

“I was wondering that, too,” Tammy replied. “So I called her mom again and asked her if she knew anything about it. She told me that Daisy had been hiking some of the trails there on the Dante's property a week or so ago, and she mentioned finding some old cage things. She'd told her mom she was going to ask Tiffany about them.”

“Does Pam know if she did ask Tiffany or not?” Savannah said.

“No. That's all Daisy told her.”

Savannah sat, staring at the screen, thinking. She didn't like the thoughts that were crossing her mind.

Glancing over her shoulder at Dirk, she could tell from his expression that he was thinking along the same lines.

“You don't suppose…” she said.

He gave her a slight nod.

“But Daisy's supposed to be showing up there at the clinic anytime now,” she argued, more to herself than anyone present.

“Yes,” Dirk said. “She could be fine.”

But something told Savannah that even though Ryan and John were in place, watching, waiting to see a healthy, whole Daisy arrive at the clinic, something wasn't right.

Daisy's a good kid
, Savannah thought.
She and her mother are close. Even if she was pregnant, she wouldn't just vanish into thin air and torture her mom this way.

Savannah didn't know how to even word her next question. And when she found the words, she could hardly speak them. “Are you thinking…imprisonment…or disposal?”

Thoughts of Maggie flooded her mind. The old citrus packing shed.

They had been too late.

Dirk put his hands on her shoulders and squeezed. “I'm thinking,” he said, “that we need to go up there and check those damned cages.”

 

Savannah jumped up from her chair and said, “Yes, right now. Let's get Gran home, and then the three of us have some serious hiking to do.”

Savannah didn't mind the idea of walking a narrow path in the middle of nowhere after sunset. Darkness didn't frighten her. The cries of coyotes in the not so far distance didn't spook her. And she liked to think that all the rattlesnakes were curled snugly in their dens with their little ones, watching TV or eating popcorn and playing Snake Trivial Pursuit, even though she had heard facts to the contrary.

The October night air was cool with a full moon overhead, so the hike didn't even cause her, Dirk, or Tammy to break a sweat.

The coastal foothills of San Carmelita had a romance all their own. Several varieties of sage that grew from one to ten feet high scented the air with a perfume that became even more pronounced after the sun went down and the evening dew settled.

And although the semidesert might have seemed uninhabited at first glance, the thick brush teemed with life. As they walked along, they heard the rustling of rabbits, rodents, squirrels, and birds.

Occasionally, Savannah saw a lizard slither off the path to avoid them. At least, she told herself they were lizards.

Lizards didn't watch television or play games at night.

And under better circumstances, the moonlight bathing everything in a wash of a thousand shades of silver might have soothed her soul.