Cooked Goose

those things didn’t bother them nearly so much as the blood. Lots of it. Splashed across the wall, puddled on the beige carpet, smeared on furniture. It was everywhere.
    “Oh, shit,” Savannah muttered, shaking her head.
    “This is bad,” Dirk replied, his voice husky. “Oh, man. This is really bad. I’ll check the bedroom.
    “I’ll get the bath.”
    They met a minute later in the hallway.
    “Nothing?” Savannah asked. She could tell by his face that he hadn’t discovered a corpse. Thankfully, neither had she.
    “Nobody,” he said. “But there’s more blood in there.”
    “In the bath, too. Looks like somebody tried to wash up. You’d better call it in.”
    Dirk holstered his Smith and Wesson and took a cell phone from his inside coat pocket. He punched in some numbers. His face looked so gray that Savannah wondered briefly how long it had been since he’d had a physical. This line of work was tough on anyone, let alone an aging detective who subsisted on donuts, pizza, and beer.
    “Coulter here,” he said into the phone. “I’m at Titus Dunn’s house in Two Trees. He’s not here, but the place is trashed and there’s blood everywhere. Looks like he put up a hell of a fight.”
    As he talked, Savannah continued to search the room that had, until recently, been the cozy living room of a cop who liked to garden and loved his girlfriend and barbecued ribs. Now it was a crime scene.
    Maybe even worse.
    “Hey, Dirk,” she said, interrupting his call.
    “Hold on,” he told his party on the other end. “What is
    it, Van?”
    “There’s a bullet hole here in the wall behind the front door, and blood spray on the paneling.”
    He hurried over to examine the neat round hole and the not-so-neat pattern of splattered blood, signifying that a human body had sprung a major leak in that immediate vicinity.
    “Shit,” he said. Then, into the phone, “You’d better send Dr. Liu and a couple of techs. I’m afraid we’ve got a homicide scene here.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

    2:35 P.M.

    S avannah had left the scene to collect Margie’s “stuff” from her house—using the girl’s key rather than pick a police captain’s lock—and deliver it to the perturbed and bored teenager. By the time she returned to Titus Dunn’s cottage in Two Trees, the property had been converted into a miniature city, inhabited by Dr. Jennifer Liu, the county coroner, and her crew of crime technicians.
    Savannah stepped over the yellow tape that was cordoning off the area, and walked up to the first technician she recognized, Eileen Brady. Eileen was on her hands and knees, collecting one of the blood drops from the driveway with a cotton swab. “Hi, Eileen,” she said, trying to blend in and not make it too obvious that she was an average citizen, an authorized person, blithely invading a crime scene. “Is Dirk still around?”
    “He left a few minutes ago to get a bite to eat.” Eileen laughed and shook her head. “Seems nothing ruins that guy’s appetite-
    “How true. I’ve seen him help fish a two-week-old decomposing corpse out of a lake and, half an hour later, eat a quarter-pounder with cheese. Go figure. I see the meat wagon; where’s Dr. Liu?”
    Eileen pointed with her bloody swab. “Inside the house.”
    “Thanks.”
    Savannah strolled on into the house, keeping an eye peeled for Bloss or any other members of the S.C.P.D. brass who hated her.
    There were several.
    She hated them right back.
    Not seeing anyone on her mental hit list, she ventured inside the house, where she saw a beautiful, petite, and ultra-feminine Asian woman, who looked the exact opposite of the funereal coroner stereotype.
    Dr. Jennifer Liu brushed her long, glossy, black hair away from her face with one gloved hand as she rose from where she had been kneeling on the floor. “Hey, Savannah ! How nice to see you. Did you bring me some Godiva chocolates?”
    “Sorry, Dr. Jen, I didn’t know it was that time of month. PMS again?”
    “It’s always that time of the month. You should know that.”
    Long ago, Savannah and Dr. Liu had discovered they were soul sisters, and the common bond between them was a love of chocolate. Usually, when Savannah visited the doctor’s autopsy suite, she was looking for answers, and from the beginning, Dr. Liu had established the price of her bribe—a Snickers bar if it was a mundane inquiry, Godiva if it was something heavy.
    “So,” Savannah said, watching Dr. Liu move from one ruined