She felt a prickling feeling that ran along the back of her neck and down her arms, a sensation she’d had many times when approaching the scene of a violent crime.
She was prepared to admit that some of the creepy feeling she was experiencing might have been due to what she had been told about the car’s interior. But many times when approaching an area—even before she knew it was the scene of a crime—she had felt the same instinctive revulsion sweep over her, warning her that all wasn’t well.
And all wasn’t well with the Jaguar. The top was down on the convertible and even in the poor lighting, the gory evidence was obvious.
The blood spray on the passenger’s side of the windshield and the other biological matter on the fine, burled walnut trimmed dash, told the story all too clearly; someone had been murdered in that vehicle.
“Ee-e-ew,” she said, feeling her stomach turn.
“Yeah,” he replied. “At moments like this I wish I’d followed my dream and gone into another line of work.”
“Dream? You had a dream?”
“Well, don’t look so damned surprised.”
“What was it?”
“I’m not telling you.”
She gouged him in the ribs. “Tell me.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“You’ll laugh, and I’m busy.”
He had her there. They were busy. With Bill Jardin’s brains on his dash, there were more important things to attend to.
She flipped a mental switch and went into professional mode.
A young policeman walked by, and she asked to borrow his flashlight. He handed it to her with a flirtatious smile, and as he walked away, it occurred to her that she did miss being a cop, being surrounded by gorgeous, virile and…okay…seriously horny…men all day.
She sighed and mentally flipped that switch again.
Playing the beam of the flashlight over the exterior of the car, she said, “This vehicle hasn’t been sitting here for any five days. It’s dusty and dirty up in these hills, but the outside of this car is as clean as a whistle.” She trailed the light over the seats and doors. “And other than the blood spatter, it’s clean inside, too.”
“Of course it hasn’t been here,” Dirk said, slightly miffed.
She had paid attention to two other males in less than five minutes and that was bound to put him in a huff every time.
“You don’t have to be snippy about it,” she said.
“It’s just obvious. This car cost more than my trailer and—”
“Well, ye-e-eah. More than your whole trailer park.”
“Be that as it may. My point is: A car like this one doesn’t sit abandoned without people noticing and reporting it, or stealing it, or stripping it, or God knows what. I don’t know where it’s been before, but it’s been sitting here only a few hours, I can guarantee you.”
She had to agree with him. While Sulphur Creek Road wasn’t as heavily traveled as your average Southern California freeway, it was the main road connecting San Carmelita with Twin Oaks, a smaller inland community of about three thousand people.
“That’s true,” she said. “A red Jaguar convertible sitting on Deadman’s Curve would have raised a ruckus, even if no one had noticed the bloodstained interior.”
“Lemme borrow that flashlight,” Dirk said.
She handed it to him, and he walked slowly toward the guardrail.
Knowing his fear of heights, Savannah couldn’t help admiring him and snickering just a little, as she watched him tiptoe up to the edge and peek over. Her thing was snakes. His was heights. She freaked out at the sight of an over-grown worm; he couldn’t go more than three rungs up a ladder.
Hey, you couldn’t be a superhero twenty-four hours a day.
She joined him at the railing as he trailed the beam of the flashlight back and forth over the thick sagebrush, cacti, and large craggy rocks that covered the steep cliff.
At the very bottom, far beyond the reach of the simple flashlight, was a river. She could hear it, rushing over its rocky bed and she had seen it before—the day the kids had gone over the cliff and landed in the water, upside down.
That was a day she would never be able to forget.
“Hell of a thing,” Dirk muttered. “This happening here of all places. I thought we were done with this friggen place.”
She reached for his hand and for a moment, her fingers entwined with his. She squeezed them gently. “I know, buddy,” she said. “I was thinking the same thing.”
She released his hand before any of the other cops could see. No point in starting rumors. And policemen gossiped worse than anybody she knew. Probably because they had more exciting tales to tell than the average accountant or store clerk.
“There’s a lot of water down there,” she said, stating the obvious in an attempt to change the subject. “All those rains we’ve had. One storm after the other last week.”
“And that one last night was a doozy,” he replied, playing along.
Yeah, she thought, when all else fails, discuss the weather.
After a few more awkward moments of reminiscing, Savannah said, “If they took his body out of that car and threw it off this cliff…do you think he’d hit the water down there?”
Dirk leaned forward, ever so slightly, and took a quick look. “Yeah. I do. It’s pretty much straight down.” He took a couple of steps back from the guardrail. “I really wish it wasn’t this spot,” he said. “For more reasons than one.”
“I hear you.”
Gently, with her best fake-nonchalant look on her face, she took the flashlight from his hand.
Stepping around him, she moved closer to the railing and shone the light down the cliff.
Unlike him, she was fine with cliffs. As long as those cliffs were certifiably snake-free.
Swinging the light back and forth, she peered into the darkness and saw nothing at the bottom but a black void. However, as she trained the light on the cliff itself, she saw something interesting.
“I think he’s down there,” she said.
Phobia or no phobia, Dirk was instantly alert. He took a few steps, closing the gap between them.
“Why? What do you see?”
“Some broken cactuses, I mean, cacti or whatever. Right down there. See?”
He did see. It was obvious, several large clumps of prickly pear about ten feet down from the edge, broken—their pads torn off or crushed. And all around the smashed cacti was equally damaged sagebrush.
“Something definitely went down through there. Recently,” he said. “Something big.”
“Like a human being,” Savannah added.
“Exactly like a human being. And even if he was alive when he went over that cliff, he sure wouldn’t be by the time he hit the bottom.”
Savannah winced at the very thought. The cliff with its sharp, jagged rocks and nettled vegetation, that terrible drop, and of course the river at the bottom with its rushing water and stone-covered banks and bed.
She glanced back at the luxury car, fouled by its gruesome biological evidence. “I guess the good news