Buried In Buttercream

seen at mealtimes, maybe hung out with his coworkers, stuff like that.”
    “We want every hour of that day accounted for, if at all possible,” Dirk said.
    “I can do that!” she said. “I’ll get the names of his coworkers, and I’ll call them, and I’ll tell them that I’m his little sister and that I’m pregnant, and he was supposed to be my natural childbirth coach, but he didn’t show up for the class like he was supposed to, and I’m just checking to make sure that he really did have to be out of town at a convention, so that I won’t hold it against him for the rest of our lives... .” She stopped to draw a breath. “Stuff like that.”
    Savannah stared at her. “Considering that you’re the most virtuous, totally honest person I’ve ever known, you’re scary good at that.”
    Tammy lifted her chin and tossed her long hair back over her shoulder. “I do what I have to do for ‘the cause.’ It’s not lying if the end justifies the means. You taught me that, Savannah. And how to pick locks. And how to make fake business cards in two minutes. And how to use my feminine wiles to get past male security guards. And—”
    “Okay, okay.” Savannah held up one hand. “As long as I’ve enriched your life in practical ways.”
    But Tammy wasn’t listening anymore.
    Brother Waycross had removed his soaking-wet tee-shirt and hung it on the fence, and now he was vigorously scrubbing bug debris off the Mustang’s headlights. Muscles flexing, straining with every stroke of the cloth.
    And, apparently, at least for the moment, Miss Tammy Hart had other things on her mind.

Chapter 14
    S avannah didn’t like going to jail. Never had. She didn’t like going to county lockup, state prisons, or high-security mental hospitals for the criminally insane.
    They all had bars. And she hated seeing steel bars. They gave her a creepy sense of claustrophobia.
    What would be worse than living in a cage for the rest of your life? Nothing she could think of. And even though she knew that many of the people inside those places had done terrible things to land themselves behind those bars, she couldn’t help feeling bad that they were there.
    At least for the time she was in jail with them. And as long as she didn’t think too much about their crimes or their victims’ miseries.
    But when it came to a guy like Arlo Di Napoli, those feelings of sympathy were hard to scrounge up. Cold, hard, ugly bars notwithstanding.
    Savannah didn’t like batterers. In fact, she had a hard time not bitterly hating them, having seen the damage they did to their partners, their children, society, and even to themselves.
    So much suffering. And all because one person decided it was fine and dandy for them to use violence to get their way, to manipulate those around them into doing whatever they wanted, when they wanted it, the way they wanted it.
    It was a pretty simple, self-serving philosophy: Do what I tell you or I’ll hurt you.
    And she bore the scars of such a mindset on her body and would for the rest of her life.
    No. She didn’t like batterers.
    So, when she and Dirk visited Arlo Di Napoli in the county jail, she was prepared to loathe him on sight. And the sight of him didn’t exactly change her mind.
    Several words sprang to her mind when he walked into the tiny, grim, visiting room, wearing his bright orange prison suit, his dark hair slicked close to his scalp, a weird, wispy little goatee dangling from his chin.
    The words that flashed across her intuition’s radar screen were “slick” and “slimy.”
    He reminded her of the strippers’ pole at Willy’s Rendezvous.
    She remembered what Francie had said about how good he was in bed, and the peanut butter sandwich in her belly did a flip-flop.
    “What’s this about?” Arlo said without preamble as he pulled out a metal chair and sat down at the metal table ... metal handcuffs around his wrists.
    That was another thing about jails that Savannah didn’t like. All the metal. She didn’t know how people could stand to live with all that cold, hard metal.
    But under the circumstances, she was fine with the idea that this was Arlo’s new lifestyle ... and would be for a while.
    “It’s about one of your women, Arlo,” Dirk told him, taking a chair across the table from him.
    Arlo gave him a sarcastic little sneer. “I’m afraid you’re gonna have to be more specific. I got lotsa girlfriends.”
    “Really? I thought this was an all-men’s jail,”