Poisoned Tarts (25 page)

“Daisy,” Savannah said, “how much does Tiffany know about Bunny and her dad?”

“She knows it all. Everything except that Bunny threatened to kill him. Bunny never said anything like that in front of her, just to me and Kiki.”

“She didn't care that her dad and Bunny were having an affair?”

“Oh, she cared some because she's jealous of anybody who gets any kind of attention from her dad. But she hates Robyn, so she didn't care that he was fooling around on his wife.”

“And how did she feel about the pregnancy?”

“Oh, she was furious about that. She loves being her father's only kid. She was all for the abortion, just not the big European trip. She was pressuring Bunny to have one here in town.”

“Does Bunny's mom know any of this?”

“No, nothing. She thinks her little honey Bunny is perfect in every way.”

“And Kiki?”

“Kiki knows all about Bunny and Andrew, too. But she wasn't there when they put me in the cage. I can't believe she would know about that and not tell someone where to find me. She's always been a better friend to me than the other two.”

Savannah didn't have the heart to tell her that she was pretty sure Kiki knew, too. Daisy had suffered enough in the past few days. And she was looking tired, so Savannah decided it was time to end the interview.

Besides, Pam was returning with Gran, and she wanted to give the mother and daughter the healing time they needed together.

“You get well, sweetie,” she said, leaning over and giving her a kiss on the cheek. “When you get out of here and are feeling better, I want you and your mom to come over to my house. I'll cook you a dinner that will knock your flip-flops off!”

Savannah waited as Gran said her brief good-byes, and Pam thanked them both profusely one more time. Then the two of them left the ICU.

Once they were in the hallway, Savannah grabbed her cell phone out of her purse and called Dirk.

“Where are you?” she asked him.

“I just came down off the hill. You're not going to believe how bad that place was. The straw in there was full of rats, and they'd given her this one little pot to—”

“I know,” she said. “I just left the ICU. Daisy's doing a lot better now, and Gran and I got to talk to her. It was Tiffany and Bunny who shut her in there. And it's Bunny who's pregnant…with Andrew Dante's kid.”

“Whoa!”

“Yeah.”

“What do you want to do next?”

“Why don't you nab Tiffany and Bunny and take them to the station for questioning? I'll meet you there.” She glanced down at her watch and smiled. It was ten minutes until eleven. “If you hurry, maybe we can get them in there and squeeze a confession out of them before midnight. That would make this the best Halloween ever!”

S
avannah wasted no time dropping Gran off at home and then hightailing it over to the police station.

Normally, she didn't like hanging around the station. Some years back, she and the San Carmelita Police Department had parted ways with a less than amicable divorce. And even though she was close friends with many of the cops, she still loathed the bosses who had unfairly dismissed her. And she avoided running into them whenever possible.

Fortunately, none of them worked the night shift.

So when she walked through the front door, she was greeted like a long lost family member.

“Savannah!” Officer Marianna Weil shouted from the front desk. “We heard you guys found the O'Neil girl! Good goin'!”

“Thank you,” she said. “Is Dirk here?”

Marianna's bright expression dimmed ever so slightly. “No, but I heard he's on his way. They're bringing that Tiffy Dante gal in with some friend of hers. He called and asked for two radio cars with cages to transport them.”

Savannah laughed. “How appropriate.”

“Hey, what's that?” Marianna stood up, and she and Savannah hurried over to the window. A crowd had appeared out of nowhere—cars, vans pulling up in front of the station and people spilling out of the vehicles, carrying cameras and microphones.

“Looks like we've got a departmental leak,” Marianna said.

For a moment, Savannah flashed back on the moment she had dropped Gran at her house. Had she remembered to warn her not to call her girlfriend Martha Phelps in Georgia? She was pretty sure she'd forgotten to. Oh, well.

“This stuff gets out,” she told Marianna. “You just can't keep a lid on it.”

Within less than two minutes, there wasn't an empty parking space on either side of the street for as far down as they could see. And the yard in front of the station house was filling up, as well.

Officer Weil walked back to her desk and picked up the phone. “Yeah, uh…you may want to send somebody out there for crowd control. Coulter's going to be bringing those bimbos in any minute now, and all hell's gonna break loose.”

No sooner had she hung up than they heard sirens and saw the lights of the squad cars coming down the road.

“Dirk's not stupid,” Savannah said. “And he doesn't give a hoot about headlines or getting his picture in the paper. He'll bring them in the back way.”

And he did. She saw the two cars take a sharp and abrupt turn left down a side street. And like lemmings following each other, the crowd shifted and moved in unison, going after them.

Savannah hurried through the station, racing to the back door, and arrived there just as Dirk and three uniformed cops escorted Tiffany, Bunny, and her mother inside.

All three ladies had looked better. Apparently, they had been plucked from their beds and hustled into the radio cars because they were all wearing pajamas and no makeup and their normally perfect hairdos were askew.

“Come on, come on, come on,” Dirk was telling them. “We have to get you inside and safe. You don't want those media nuts to get their hands on you. Move along now!”

Savannah knew the reason for Dirk's haste, and it had nothing to do with the paparazzi crowd out front. He was keeping their minds on other things for as long as possible to forestall the moment when he would hear those most unwelcome words, “I wanna talk to my lawyer!”

Fortunately, all three females looked too stunned to be thinking straight yet.

“Here,” he was telling them, “just go in there, Tiffany, and you, Bunny, into that room there, and Mrs. Greenaway, if you could just wait for me in—”

“No!” Bunny wailed. “I want my mother! I want my mom to come in here with me!”

“Sure, sure, no problem. I'd be happy to do that for you,” Dirk said, all sunshine and cooperation…for the moment. “Just go in there, and I'll be right with you.”

“Are we in any kind of trouble?” Mrs. Greenaway said, trying to smooth her tousled hair.

“You? Naw, not at all,” Dirk said. “There's just been some new developments in Daisy's and Mr. Dante's cases, and you ladies would want to know all about that, right?”

Bunny glanced around her, uneasy. “Uh, yeah, I guess.”

Then she and her mother went into their appointed room.

Dirk motioned for Savannah to follow him, and they hurried into the interrogation room where he had stashed Tiffany.

She was pacing the tiny room, and the moment they entered, she yelled, “You can't question me! My attorney said that I didn't have to say another word to you
ever again
if I don't want to. And I don't want to, so
there!”

“I'm not here to question you, Ms. Dante,” Dirk said far too calmly, far too politely. “I don't need to hear another word from you ever again. I know all I need to know about you. I'm placing you under arrest for the false imprisonment of Daisy O'Neil. And after a few more conversations with the prosecutor, I may even be able to add kidnapping and attempted murder to the list of charges. So
there!”

Tiffany gasped, and the sound was like air escaping an overinflated balloon. She staggered back and sat abruptly down on a folding chair. “False imprisonment? What is that?”

Savannah stepped forward and leaned over her. “It's putting a human being into a hot metal cage and then leaving her there with no food and no water and—”

“Oh, that!” She looked instantly relieved. “That wasn't imprisonment. That was an intervention. Daisy is so-o-o fat! Have you seen her lately? She has totally blimped out. We just did that for her own good. I explained that to her. She didn't need food. She could just live off her fat for, like, a year at least. And then she'd look a lot better!”

Savannah fought the urge to slap her off the chair and onto the floor. “When we found that poor girl a few hours ago, she was nearly dead from dehydration. She's in the hospital now in intensive care.”

“Oh, ple-e-ease. We left her some water. And I couldn't go back. My dad had been murdered! I was busy.”

Dirk stepped forward, and for a moment, Savannah was afraid he really would hit her. “I don't have time to mess with you right now,” he told her. “But you are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent…”

Savannah turned and walked out of the room, her stomach tightening into a hard, bitter ball in her belly. Still, after all these years, she couldn't get over the way human beings could rationalize the most vicious acts.

It simply boggled her mind.

Dirk came out a few moments later and asked a female uniformed cop in the hallway to keep an eye on Tiffany. “Don't let her out of your sight,” he said. “She's under arrest.”

“Really?” the cop asked.

“Yeah.”

“Cool!”

Dirk turned to Savannah. “You know,” he said, “we don't have enough to actually nail this Bunny kid for killing Dante. I know she did, and you do, too, but we've got squat. The fake passport, some lipstick, and maybe some DNA when it eventually comes back from the lab—that's not enough.”

“She threatened to kill him several times in front of Daisy and Kiki.”

“Still not enough.”

“There's a diary stashed in her room that may have some good stuff in it.”

“But for right now, we've got nothing.”

Savannah raised one eyebrow and grinned. “Yeah, but she doesn't know how nothing the nothing is that we've got.”

“What?”

“Exactly. Watch this.”

 

“Let me tell you what we already know, Bunny,” Savannah said as she leaned across the table that separated her and Dirk from Bunny and the girl's mother. “Not the stuff we
think
or the stuff we're just
guessing
about…but the stuff that we absolutely, positively
know.”

“Okay,” Bunny said, flipping her hair back over her shoulder in a very Tiffanyesque move. “Go right ahead. You tell me what you know about me, lady detective.”

“No,” Mrs. Greenaway interrupted. “I think we should have a lawyer here before anybody says anything.”

Savannah felt Dirk tense beside her. The L word during an interrogation was the last thing any cop wanted to hear.

“Sure, Mrs. Greenaway,” he said. “If you think your daughter has done something illegal, you probably should get an attorney. Although, of course, as soon as you start calling around, it's out of our hands. We won't be able to keep a lid on this. Thanks to your daughter's notoriety, the whole town, the world will know about it in fifteen minutes.”

“I don't need an attorney, Mom,” Bunny said with a classic sixteen-year-old eye roll. “They have nothing on me because I didn't do anything wrong.”

“Oh, yes, you did.” Savannah fixed her with her best blue laser stare. “You absolutely did. And we have all the proof we need to convict you.”

“Oh yeah? Of what?”

“Of the false imprisonment of Daisy O'Neil, for starters. That's a biggy, a felony, Miss Bunny. And you and Tiffany are both going to do some serious prison time for that.”

“I'm a minor!”

“Yes, but that's a
major
crime, and the prosecutor is sure that he can try you as an adult. You're known around the world for how very adult your behavior is. I'm sure it wouldn't be hard for a jury to see you as all grown-up.”

That seemed to take at least one puff of wind out of Bunny's sails. She sank slightly lower in her folding metal chair.

“And,” Savannah continued, “then there's the matter of the murder of Andrew Dante.”

“She doesn't know anything about that!” her mother said.

“She knows everything about that,” Dirk told her. “Your daughter killed Andrew Dante in cold blood.”

Bunny sniffed and shook her head. “That's just so dumb. I did not, and you can't prove it.”

“I think we need a lawyer,” Mrs. Greenaway said. “I'm going to call one right now, and—”

“No, Mom, that's just stupid!” Bunny shouted in her mother's face. “I don't need a lawyer.
Criminals
need lawyers. I'm not a criminal. I didn't do anything that anybody else wouldn't have done in the same situation.”

“And what situation is that?” Mrs. Greenaway asked.

When Bunny didn't respond, Savannah said softly. “She's pregnant, ma'am. I'm sorry to be the one to tell you, but your daughter is pregnant with Andrew Dante's baby.”

“She is not! Are you?” She turned to her daughter.
“Are you?”

“No. They're lying.”

Savannah shook her head. “No, we aren't lying. Bunny, you were at the clinic this evening having a consultation about an abortion. Tiffany Dante took you there. She's pressuring you to go through with it, isn't she? She doesn't want to share her father's fortune with any other siblings. Aren't you smart enough to know that's why she's ‘helping' you?”

Bunny's round little face flushed with anger. “I am too smart! I'm smarter than Tiffany will ever be. I don't want Andrew's stupid baby. He turned out to be a total creep.”

“Bunny! No!” Her mother began to cry. “You are pregnant? Really?”

“Oh, Mother, catch up, will you? Jeez, you can be so irritating sometimes.”

“Andrew was a creep?” Savannah prompted. “He didn't treat you right? He wasn't willing to divorce Robyn and marry you? That's what you were hoping for. That's why you got pregnant in the first place.”

Mrs. Greenaway gasped, but Bunny just crossed her arms over her chest and said, “Maybe.”

“Oh, no ‘maybe' about it,” Savannah continued. “He told you no way on the marriage. And when you realized that you weren't going to be the new Mrs. Andrew Dante, the mistress of his big mansion with a fat bank account for everything you ever wanted, you killed him.”

“Did not.”

“We know that you did,” Dirk told her. “We know a lot about you, young lady.”

“Like what?”

Savannah glanced at Mrs. Greenaway and then said, “We know that you had sex with Andrew the day he died. We collected DNA from his…body…and compared it to yours. It's a match.”

Lie number one, Savannah thought. Not that it particularly troubled her soul, but she did like to keep track of such things.

Bunny snickered. “Yeah, right. I watch a lot of those forensic shows on TV. I know all about that stuff. You don't have my DNA on file. I didn't give you any samples.”

“We took it off a soda can that you drank from there at the Dantes'. You threw it away, and we dug it out of the garbage. It had your fingerprints and your DNA all over it.”