Cereal Killer

what?”
    “Grab me by my ankles and pull me a couple of feet across the floor.”
    Marietta glanced up and down Savannah’s length. “No. You weigh a ton, and I’ll put my back out.”
    Savannah’s nostrils flared ever so slightly as she returned the evaluating look, taking into account the amount of fabric it took to cover Marietta’s fairly ample figure... even with a plunging neckline.
    ‘You’re not exactly skin and bones yourself, Miss Priss. Do it, okay? Just grab my ankles and pull me a few feet.”
    With the expected amount of moaning and groaning, Marietta did as she was asked. Dropping Savannah’s feet back to the floor with a thud, she said, “There. Happy now?”
    “I don’t know. Hand me that mirror again, would j you?”
    Marietta scooped the mirror off the carpet and gave it to her.
    She held it over her face, looked at her hair on one side, then the other. Holding it farther away from her, she scanned her body.
    “That’s what I thought,” she said, rising from the carpet.
    “What? What’s what you thought?” Marietta was looking at her as though she had just peeled a banana and shoved it into her right ear.
    “Thanks,” Savannah told her, a distracted look on her face as she replaced the mirror on the dresser and walked over to the nightstand, where she picked up the phone.
    “No problem. Any time you wanna be dragged around, j just give me a holler and I’ll come a-runnin’. Meanwhile, if you could just keep it down a bit, some of us are trying to get our beauty sleep.”
    When Savannah didn’t reply, Marietta shook her head. “And you say that I’m the one who just fell out of the Dumb Tree and hit ever’ limb on the way down,” she mumbled as she left the bedroom, closing the door behind her.
    Savannah glanced at the clock as she punched in
    Dirk’s number. So what if it was nearly one o’clock in the morning? If the case was keeping her awake, it would be keeping him up, too. Or at least, it should be. And if it wasn’t... she’d change that in a hurry.
     

Chapter
    5
     
    ”I don’t like her clothes,” Savannah told Dirk as she _L settled among the pillows on her bed, the phone cradled under her chin. “And I’m not just talking about the fashion faux pas of wearing an outfit that looks like something you’d bake a turkey in, either.”
    “You don’t like the way her clothes were sorta scrunched up around her armpits and her crotch, right?” he said on the other end.
    Savannah frowned. She hated it when he beat her to the punch. Fortunately, it didn’t happen that often. “Right. Don’t tell me you noticed that at the scene.”
    “Nope. About an hour ago. I was looking at the Polaroids of the bathroom while I was watching the sports. The Dodgers won, by the way.”
    ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dodgers-schmodgers.”
    “Hey!”
    “Sorry.” Some topics were sacred with Dirk. Baseball was one of them. Beer was another.
    “Somebody dragged her around the bathroom,” he said.
    Savannah mulled that one over for a moment. “I think they dragged her into the bathroom.”
    “Why do you say that?”
    “Well, if they didn’t... why was she in the bathroom in the first place?”
    He snorted. “Seeing that man about that horse, draining the dragon, pinching a—”
    “Stop! Enough with the potty euphemisms already. She wasn’t using the bowl.”
    “How do you know?”
    “The toilet seat was up. Check your Polaroids.”
    He was quiet; she could hear him shuffling through his materials.
    Finally he said, “You’re right. I didn’t even notice that”
    “Of course not.” She sighed, wishing she’d had a cream-filled, fudge-frosted cupcake for every time she had yelled at him for leaving her toilet seat up. What could be more refreshing than to get up in the middle of the night for a bathroom visit only to stick your unsuspecting bare bum into a bowl of cold water? It caused one to curse all of man kind .
    “Maybe she was washing her hands,” he suggested. “The sink hadn’t been used since it had been cleaned.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Not a water spot in sight.”
    He groaned. “Something else that only a chick would notice.”
    “Same thing with the bathtub and shower. Hadn’t been used.”
    Dirk thought for a moment. “Maybe she was throwing up. Her husband said she was into that when she was trying to lose weight.”
    “Nope.”
    “Why not?”
    “There were pee-pee sprinkle spots around the rim of the bowl. If she’d intended to