Cereal Killer

shoot. And after you watched the girls, you decided to follow one of them from that location, too. Didn’t you?” Dirk said.
    Savannah held her breath. It was another bluff on Dirk’s part, but she could easily follow his train of thought. This jerk had been watching them at the photo shot, then Tesla Montoya—who had felt threatened enough by this guy to get a restraining order against him—had disappeared within the next few hours. Not a bad bit of logic.
    And from the look on Ronald Dirty-Old-Man Tumblety’s face, she thought Dirk might have hit the bull’s-eye.
    “I didn’t have nothing to do with that!” Tumblety cried. “I wasn’t the one who grabbed her! It wasn’t me!”
    Savannah was pretty sure her heart skipped a couple of beats, then started pounding somewhere up in her throat. She took a step closer and laid her hand on the glass.
    She could tell by the set of Dirk’s jaw that he was holding tight reins on his own emotions.
    He walked around to the other side of the table to face Tumblety. Placing both of his big hands on the table, he leaned toward his suspect.
    “Then let me tell you, buddy,” he said, “if you didn’t grab her, you’d better tell me right now who did, ’cause you’re about five seconds away from getting arrested for kidnapping, assault, and murder.”
    “Murder?” Tumblety looked up at Dirk with shock and genuine horror in his eyes. “She’s dead? He killed her?”
    “He, who?”
    “The guy who grabbed her. I don’t know his name. I saw... I saw...”
    He gulped and wiped the sweat off his forehead with his free hand. “I was following her, okay... like you said. But I didn’t take her. She was driving down Johnson Avenue and stopped at a coffee shop there on the corner of Johnson and Charles Street. When she got out of that little black Mitsubishi of hers, a van pulled up next to her, and its side door opened.”
    “And...?” Dirk said.
    “And I saw somebody’s arm reaching out of the side door. He grabbed her and pulled her inside. Then the door slammed closed, and the van took off.”
    “Where did he take her?”
    Tumblety shrugged, not meeting Dirk’s eyes. “I dunno.”
    “You know. You followed them, and you know.”
    “Okay, I followed the van for a little ways. It went down Johnson to the freeway. Traffic was heavy and I lost them on the 101.”
    “Going which direction?”
    “North.”
    “How far north did you follow them?”
    “Just a mile or two. I lost them about even with the Hinze Boulevard exit.”
    Dirk let out a long breath, as though he, too, had been holding it. “And did you happen to get the license number of this van?”
    “Huh? Naw. Didn’t think of that.”
    Dirk muttered something, then said, “Okay. How about a description?”
    “I told you, I didn’t see the guy.”
    “I know. I mean the van. What color was it?”
    “Oh. It was an old white panel body with a rack on top.”
    Savannah felt her bubble deflate a little. White vans were a dime a dozen. And of course, that was assuming that Ronald Tumblety wasn’t lying through his scraggly teeth. That he hadn’t kidnapped poor Tesla himself.
    His story didn’t exactly wash, considering the trashed house and the blood on her sofa, which suggested that she had met with foul play inside her own home—not at a coffee shop on Johnson Avenue.
    And apparently, the same thing had occurred to Dirk, because he was saying to his unhappy guest, “I’ll tell you what, my friend. You stay here and make yourself at home for the night, while I check out your story. And you better be telling me the truth, man, or you’re gonna find out what it’s like to be on my bad side.” “The night? The night? You’re gonna put me in jail?”
    “It’s more like a holding cell. Consider it a room upgrade from that van of yours.”
     
    Five minutes later, Dirk and Savannah met in the parking lot behind the station.
    “Got him all tucked in snug as a bug?” she asked him as she laced her arm through his and they walked to the Buick together.
    “More like a cockroach in a garbage can.”
    “So... are we off to the coffee shop on Johnson?”
    “You betcha. And if there ain’t a black Mitsubishi sit-tin’ empty in that parking lot, this guy and me are gonna go a couple o’ rounds.”
    “Yeah, yeah... I love it when you talk tough. But when it comes right down to it, how many perp asses do you reckon you’ve actually whupped?”
    He gave her a sideways look and a grin.